For Jason, basketball is hope. Whenever he touches the ball, something like the will to live is pulled out of him and put on sparkling display. In the first half of one of our games, Jason dove to the hoop, yelling, “Ah, feed me!” When he didn’t get the ball, he continued running under the basket, circling back to the top of the key, hands outstretched, calling for the rock. I delivered the ball with a crisp chest pass from the left wing, following through with my fingers to make sure it reached his shooting pocket. Jason stepped into the pass and snatched the ball in midair, then pivoted toward the hoop to face his opponent. Staring into his defender’s eyes, Jason dribbled two steps backward, drawing his opponent farther from the hoop. I could tell that he wanted to dance with this man. With the crowd enthralled and Jason and his defender locked in battle, he initiated a flurry of crossover dribbles at his opponent’s feet. The tall and muscular player guarding Jason moved his body to the beat of the ball, keeping his head up and arms outstretched, his legs in constant motion. As I stood on the wing, it seemed that neither player would break the intimacy of their rhythmic intertwine. Then, in the flow of Jason’s final crossover, he hesitated between the beat, throwing his defender off rhythm. Jason swung the ball to his right hand and glided past, leaving the baller in his wake. Jason bolted toward the rim and finished with his left hand over a six-foot-eleven center that had jumped straight up in the air with both hands to block Jason’s shot. Given the hundreds of people in the crowd that day, it was a courageous play by a ballplayer with an indomitable spirit.
Jason is six-foot-four and muscular, twenty-four years old with dark smooth skin and a gleaming bald head. I first noticed him during a pick-up game in one of Boston’s city gyms. He seemed like a crazed man with a basketball, racing around the court. Every time he came down from the sky with a defensive rebound, he bolted down the hardwood, whiplashing his opponents on the way. “Ah, ah!” he yelled when he crossed one of them over. I noticed he had two favorite spots for pull-up jump shots with his right hand: the top of the key and the short corner along the right baseline. The rhythm of his game was frenetic. It sounded like “bop, bop, bop, bopbopbopbop, uh, snap” through the net. In all the games I have watched Jason play since then, very few guys could keep up with him on the court.
The way Jason moved his body intrigued me. I wondered what story was behind his game. While I was completing my graduate studies and Jason was struggling to survive in Boston, we became brothers; so much time on the basketball court together created a bond between us. That bond gave Jason the courage to share his story of hope through hoops.
PICKED ME UP
Grandma’s hands
Picked me up each time I fell
Grandma’s hands
Boy, they really came in handy…
But I don’t have Grandma anymore
If I get to Heaven I’ll look for
Grandma’s hands
—Bill Withers, “Grandma’s Hands”
To understand Jason’s hope through hoops is to appreciate the basketball court as a meeting place infused with his great-grandmother’s spirit. Jason’s mother has been a crack addict since he was born. His father is unavailable. His aunts and uncles are drug addicts and hustlers. His entire family, in fact, is a legacy of poverty, urban decay, and the war on drugs. Recognizing terror in Jason’s future, his great-grandmother cuddled him in her arms when he was a baby before she died. She was a deeply religious woman with a devoted prayer life. She sang to him often:
Are we weak and heavy-laden,
Cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior, still our refuge—
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Do thy friends despise, forsake thee?
Take it to the Lord in prayer!
In His arms He’ll take and shield thee,
Thou wilt find a solace there.1
When she died, Jason had to move in with his crack-addicted mother, but he never forgot his great-grandmother’s song: the Lord would deliver him in His arms and give him solace there. I asked Jason to tell me what his great-grandmother’s words meant to him. She “put something into me” that was “not of this world,” he explained.
She—mind you my great-grandmother, like to this day I think about her. I want to just drop a tear because how that connection that I have with her for those years at the beginning of my life. Those few years of my life it was just so—it’s crazy like you know she always—like I was just meant to be in her arms and she was meant to just give me something. I got something from her. I just don’t know what it is. Whatever I got from my great-grandmother is the reason why I’m on the road where I’m at now. For some reason at my age right now I’m completely aware that you can’t live for the things of the world, and it’s just so crazy ’cause the things that God has put in my life and that I’ve been through for these twenty-four years of my life, it’s like he’s getting me ready for something. You know what I mean, and whatever it was that I got from my great-grandmother I still feel it now when I think about it.
That feeling of ultimate purpose never left Jason, despite the anger of not having a father in his life or of constantly moving between government housing projects and foster homes. When Jason and I first met, he was homeless, unable to live in the apartment where his mother smoked drugs. While I taught an adjunct course in ethics at Roxbury Community College to support my graduate work, Jason and I worked it out so that he could make a few dollars and stay warm by watching my son in my heated car. One cold winter morning he barely made it to the car after spending the whole night outside. My wife and I struggled for several weeks to find him an apartment and a job. Even then, basketball and hope kept him from giving up. “I know I’m going through this for a reason,” he told me, “so that one day I can use basketball to tell my story and to lift the spirits of people who are suffering.”
When they were adolescents, Jason told his cousin that he had just seen his cousin’s mother buy crack cocaine. Shame and denial washed over his cousin’s face and the revelation caused an unspoken pain between the two boys. As Jason explained to me, however, it was more than just pain. It felt evil, as if a spiritual force had insinuated itself within his family, holding them hostage to the demons of the inner city. During our conversations before and after games, Jason would tell me, “Onaje, it’s not my mother who is treating me so bad. I know something has a hold on her. I know it!” Eventually, Jason internalized those demons in terms of his own anger, frustration, and depression. As he explained, there were demons in the family.
Me and my cousins we grew up watching how can I say the generation above us dealing with a lot of demons individually, mostly all the same and at a young age we would find ourselves subdued to a certain perspective of life. Me and my cousins being of the same age, around the same age some of them find themselves—you know just because you’re around—when you’re around something a lot you become that and they found themselves joining in terms of getting angry fast and not knowing what to do. Confusion, depression at a young age, that’s where it all starts in adolescence. For instance with my cousin, the one that I told you that was stabbed eleven times, he introduced me to basketball and a lot of his pain was my pain because he was more of a role model to me. To see him go through that it’s like just a certain feeling of how I seen how real life was right there and I remember telling him that—he didn’t want to believe it. I remember at first telling him that my aunt, his mother, that yo man, somebody just sold her drugs. He looked at me like what? ‘Get out of here’…The feeling of dealing with my personal issues with, you know how my mother treated me because of drugs because my mother also do drugs too still to this day and battling her demons…Them growing up in Boston at a young age they had me at a young age. Losing family members they all have demons that hopped on their back at a young age you know ’cause back in the eighties, the eighties was tough.
In the midst of his dread, Jason sought out a spiritual refuge on the basketball court. For some reason, the asphalt gave him access to the original feelings of innocence and purpose he first felt in his great-grandmother’s arms. The basketball court served as a maternal substitute, an enduring presence of God’s love: “On that court I was by myself and unconsciously I would leave my house with my mother yelling at me. My counselor was that and I would talk to that, to the hoop, to the ball, to the sky…. That was God’s way of showing me his love.”
Jason explained that on the basketball court he felt safe enough to express his pain. Sometimes his eyes were so red from crying on the court that when he returned home from playing ball his family thought he had smoked marijuana. He poured his heart out on the asphalt.
I love my family as a whole. In a way their life I felt was mine, and that pain that they gave me by the hating…it got to the point where I needed…Subliminally basketball ended up becoming something that I projected all my stress from ’cause it was the only thing that just cleared my mind from everything that was going on in the world, when I’m on that court, and it all started at a young age…. It took me a while to realize it obviously ’cause the devil put enemies in strange places, and I love my mother to death but he was working on my mom since the beginning. That was what honestly really got me started into just going to the court unconsciously. I would go to the court and eat [“eat” is a slang word that means, in this case, to feed on life or the vital source of life]. I’m telling you dawg. I will go to the court and I eat, come back, my eyes are red. You think that I’m like—I’m just getting high off of basketball. I come home and she’s like yeah, you smoking weed ’cause you leaving the crib already cause she’s making you mad and you come back, but yeah like it—and the thing is I did that unconsciously.
Jason survived his early childhood years and the family curse, in part, by releasing his pain through basketball. Hoops became the center of his personality and gave him a sense of purpose. It also offered him something like a divine calling—a special alternative to the usual pathways to prison and death that his friends were on.
I didn’t really realize that that was my gift, one of my gifts that’s given from God at that age and from that point on, from middle school and that whole high school whatever my objective was to be something more. I have something to do. I’m in school enjoying it. People appreciate me as a person all around than just African American, typically oppressed. So you know I’m looking back at that and just that whole transition from being the suckiest player to then becoming that guy, but those people that was trying to belittle me and be condescending was the butt suckers at the end of it all. When I look at it it’s just like I’ve seen within myself what basketball meant. Basketball showed me how when you believe in something, basketball literally just mapped it out in terms of how can I say it, like when you believe in something in terms of proving yourself that you can reach a certain level, that’s what basketball did at a young age.
By the time Jason was a high school senior, he was the star player on his team and one of the most popular students at school. His troubles at home were masked by the glow of the hoops’ spotlight. Although his college applications were initially denied, eventually a local Division III college scout approached him. He explained how much he appreciated Jason’s talents and invited him to consider enrolling in his school. Jason became the first person in his family to attend college, partly as a result of that meeting: “I remember just being like, I’m going to college. You know what I’m saying? Nobody in my family—I didn’t even know what that was. There was nothing above me to show me what it was. I’m like, I’m going to college.”
Jason’s freshman year in college was the first time he began to realize that forces other than God and personal suffering had played a role in his dream to play basketball. He also became aware of serving the interests of a predominately white college and student body who were simultaneously fascinated and suspicious of his black male body. Women assumed his sexual prowess and treated him like a piece of meat. His white coach viewed him as a prized property, valuable but only insofar as he was able to produce winning results on the basketball court. To the larger university culture, Jason was the stereotype of typically gifted black athlete.
Jason loved the attention and maybe even enjoyed performing the myth of his new status as a freshman: “My freshman year I was basically trying to live out what I thought it was about at first and that was going to school, having fun ’cause it was fun from the jump. Going to school, having fun playing basketball, the girls, partying. It was like yeah, we was runnin’ things. Like yo we be nice!” But the cultural fantasy shaping Jason’s identity came crashing down before the season even began. An observant physical trainer noticed Jason stretching awkwardly on the sidelines. She pulled him aside after practice and suggested an MRI after stiffness in his hips. Jason was torn apart by the results. His hips were severely arthritic, required surgery, and he might not ever play basketball again. Tears rolled down his face:
She sat me down just like a movie, dawg, just like a movie right then and there. Something that I love passionately, that I thought I loved passionately, that I thought I was embracing and it was taken away just like that. She said you can’t, you’re not cleared to play because you have a rare form of arthritis called—I don’t even remember the name of this. Threw it out as soon as I found out I was healed by God I threw it out, but she said you have a rare form of arthritis and your hip joint is fused. If you do not have surgery before the age of twenty-five she said you’re going to have to have a hip replacement, that’s what she said. I sat there and my jaw dropped and I just started crying like a little punk, just like a baby. Just like a baby I started crying. It hit me hard.
Jason wasn’t aware of it at first, but his illness signaled the beginning of a transformation in his self-perception from a stereotypical black athlete to a ballplayer with a more liberated consciousness. In fact, Jason’s surgery stirred up dangerous memories of his past, of that original feeling of ultimate worth he first shared with his great-grandmother.
After the first surgery failed to correct his arthritic condition, Jason’s doctor scheduled a second attempt, fortuitously, on Jason’s great-grandmother’s birthday. Upon waking up in the recovery room after the successful surgery, Jason peered over toward the corner of the room. He noticed two spirits standing there watching him in the shadows against the wall. One, he was sure, was his great-grandmother. She had orchestrated the whole ordeal to awaken him from his cultural slumber. All he could feel and say in that moment as he stared at her apparition was “Thank you, thank you!”
I’m in this room then mom was just sitting there talking and I’m telling you dawg I like want to drop a tear thinking about it. I’m in the room, I’m just saying thank you. I want to fly. I don’t know why I’m saying thank you. Why? Just thank you and I started crying. I just said thank you and I started crying. I remember looking over to the right side of the room. I put this on and I put this on every day that ignites my existence. I see two shadows over there, a tall one and a short one. I didn’t know what the tall one was but I know that short one was my great-grandmother, and I was just saying damn and I was saying thank you. I was just crying, saying thank you. I don’t even know why. I don’t have not a clue why.
This ecstatic moment represented another awakening for Jason, a turning point away from the symbolic cage of race and masculinity toward something “more,” something ineffable: “I took a deep breath and from that I’m like a different—I’m psyched. I don’t know what was put in me after that. Something is just different. It’s like I had a whole different feeling to life. I was aware of something. I didn’t know what it was. It’s kind of a different awareness.”
While in the hospital bed, Jason found the courage to tell his mother about his dream of leaving the ghetto and playing professional basketball. He told her that God had come to him “in broken spirits” in the hospital and given him a new way to use basketball for others. For months, Jason thought about how his relationship with basketball might change. For one, he was committed, as he put it, to “give no man dominion over me,” especially his college basketball coach, whom he had given too much authority. He was now intent on exercising his own spiritual agency on the court despite the indignities he had suffered from his coach and the culture of the university. Jason also decided that he would no longer rely on racial fantasies of his natural athletic talent to accrue status, have sexual conquests, or gain the paternalistic favor of white coaches. He had moved from a false sense of masculinity to a more authentic sense of manhood. Jason was developing his own version of a hoops’ theology of liberation.
That God—think about it, that God gave me this talent. He gave me this gift. He gave me the opportunity to be in school, not my coach, not my teachers, not any human being that walks the earth with me, therefore they have no power over me. You get what I’m saying? When I became fully alert of that nothing was stopping me on the campus. I was the man because I am blessed in His name. Before I was the man in a different way but I knew I was the man in a humble, modest, sincere kind way. You feel what I’m saying?
As Jason became more alert to the power dynamics involved in hoops, he realized his own agency. He became determined to surrender freedom to no one but God, both on or off the court:
Something that God has given me, [the coach] he’s telling me not to do this and I’m looking at it like hold on, hold on. I looked up to you as a father, as a father figure. You gave me an opportunity but that was my mistake. Allow no man to have dominion over you. That’s written. That was my mistake. He took that and he abused it because of his bitterness as a person.
Over the next three basketball seasons, Jason struggled to resolve his desire to play ball and his need to defy his coaches’ limitations. This struggle between his old, narrowly defined consciousness, represented by the authority of his coach and the university, and his new, more expansive consciousness, catalyzed by his encounter with his great-grandmother’s spirit in the hospital bed, was so intense that he chose not to play basketball for the college team during the next three years. His coach may have allowed him to return to the team sooner, but Jason could not bring himself to play for a man that devalued him as a human being. Moreover, Jason needed to take time away from his coach in order to relearn his own worth. He found a job and focused on his education. Then one day he met a special woman, a “lady of God” who would eventually help him return to the basketball court.
That summer I met this lady that was a friend of my mother’s and she’s a lady of God, a voice of God you could say, and she thought that she was coming to my house for my mother and it’s like to bless the house. We’ve come to the recollection that she was brought for me and around that time I met her. She told me “you want to play basketball again?” She said “you going to play basketball again.” She said “you also going to find a job.” This woman when she told me that I was like, “for the league?” She was like, “nah, you want to play basketball again?” She said “I don’t see professional,” and for some reason all I needed to hear was her say you’re going to get back on the court even though she didn’t say professional. I said I’m going professional. I just did it and for some reason like the way she said it to me ’cause when she came and said all she could do was stare. She was staring at me. I didn’t know. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what was going on, but this woman she was sent into my life to tell me that message.
Jason later discovered that Dora was of Afro-Caribbean descent and that she could hear messages from two “African West Indian spirits.” Ancestor spirits, this time through Dora, had once again intervened with concern for Jason’s relationship to hoops.
When the summer was over, Jason went to his coach’s office to discuss the upcoming season. He was now a senior, and it would be his final opportunity to play college ball. To his surprise, his coach accepted Jason back on the team, albeit in a reduced role on the bench. But his lowly place on the depth chart didn’t bother Jason as much. This time he wasn’t playing for his coach but for himself. During the season, Jason played an important role in his team’s success. They finished the year with a winning record. There were no signs of the arthritic condition that had kept Jason on the sidelines three years before. He had been “healed by God,” he explained, evidenced by his ability to play above the rim. But, for him, the culmination of his three years of soul-searching occurred in one of the final games of the season.
EVERYTHING CAME OUT IN THE GAME
The night before the game, Jason’s cousin almost died on Roxbury’s streets, stabbed eleven times. A few days before, Jason and his cousin had a huge argument and that was the last time Jason had seen him. Now his cousin could be dead. Jason could hardly sleep that evening after he visited his cousin in the hospital, tears in his eyes. In the morning, he went to class, but up until game time thoughts of his cousin’s near-murder swirled through his mind. “Why? Why are we dying? Why can’t we escape the pain? Why God?” Jason put on his uniform and bent down to tie up his white laces. After taking a deep breath, he tried to gather himself and walked out of the tunnel onto the court surrounded by screaming fans. When the first warmup ball bounced toward his hands, several thoughts went through his mind: his great-grandmother, her everlasting song, mother’s drug addiction, absent father, foster homes, surgery, abusive coach, wounded cousin, all of it.
From the beginning of the game going to shoot around after stretching, listening to music, getting suited and booted I remember going down early and stretching and I remember just having first of all already being mad about how he tried to bench me the first time. All I remember is when I was shooting around it was just like still saying what the heck is going on because I was traumatized by that little bit in terms of how real it is. When this emotion, the type of emotion you have for a loved one despite how you all argue or—because I remember before the last time I spoke to my cousin it was an argument. So he could have died and we would have ended it like that. That was going through my mind while we was throwing around. I just remember this being like—and then as it started coming—like when I started getting into that feeling it started coming back to when we first started playing basketball as a family and how we just talked about Paul Pierce and just going on because I always wanted to be better than him. And he would be yeah, it’s getting real, me and him and his brother and that type of energy from that part of my life with basketball. It was like that love that I have for that part of my life and the love I had for him and then as a whole the pain that we had to deal with as a family. That was the cherry on top and then everything that came to my head about why I was playing basketball came out in the game.
At the start of the game, when the ball left the referee’s hand, all of Jason’s pain came out on the court. Telling his story in public with his body was cathartic. Suddenly his mind went to another place beyond the crowd:
I got tired a little bit but I told you all I had to do was just breathe. I’m just going to keep playing. This warm feeling just came over me. Like I don’t care. I’m telling you, I didn’t pay attention to who was in the crowd. I didn’t even pay attention to the coach. It was just I was on that floor. I remember just being on that floor and it was just basketball. There was nothing outside of that. I heard but I didn’t even know who it was. I looked over to the bench one time. I was just numb to the surroundings. I was playing, it was a beautiful thing. I was just playing.
Jason jerked his body as he sat in the chair across from me and told me his story. He was back there in the gym, playing. He flicked his wrist, shot the ball and said: “that’s for the pain!” Then a dribbling motion. “That’s for my cousin.” Then a behind the back, cross-over. “That’s for the drugs.” He was narrating his story through hoops.
As the final buzzer drew near, Jason felt an enormous need to thank God for the depth of meaning that he was able to encounter on the court. He exclaimed to me: “there will never, ever be someone like me to touch that court!”
After everything—first of all getting a win ’cause we needed a win. Everything man, God was just showing me. He was just showing me that I will give it to you. I prayed for it. I was crying to Him like a baby crying for his mother. He kept my cousin here. It’s my senior year at college. I mentioned my senior year at college I’m going to start on the basketball team, double, doubles or whatever you want to call it but I just came off the bench. I scored seventeen points and those seventeen points, we won by what, thirteen? So I’m just like—but then looking at that then all that pain, it was like all that pain, that’s everything. I just thought about every emotional hit that I had to deal with my family and peers and life. Right there it was like just saying thank you for letting me stand where I’m standing right now. Thank you for just listening to me. Thank you for getting me through all that pain, all that confusion. Just thank you for all that.
I started crying dawg ’cause looking at that court, looking at everything I’ve been through on that basketball court I put this on everything. There would never, ever be somebody like me to touch that court. I’m just, look I’m standing on this court and it’s like, yo, dawg this is crazy. It’s so crazy like I’m standing right here still doing it. Like I’m doing it right now. I started crying dawg.
The trainer who had diagnosed Jason’s arthritic condition happened to be present at this game. As tears rolled down Jason’s face, he looked over at the bench and noticed her crying. Her recognition filled Jason with joy. Once again, it was a woman, in a male-dominated sport, who affirmed Jason’s true worth as a human being.
I started crying and when that trainer started, when I seen her crying that was honestly one of the best feelings in my life. Somebody—so she was paying attention to somebody else. She truly, deeply understood because she was there with me when I had to come back, and she started crying the same way I started crying.
Jason’s hoop’s ritual generated a sense of hope and his story is a testament to the “lived” religious meanings injured black males may experience during the flow of games. Jason began sobbing as we spoke. In his words, and in the solemn silent space between them, I was transported onto the court with him as he felt past sorrows.
Jason’s story underscores several points regarding urban basketball as a “lived religion.” First, while street basketball may often be concerned with the experiences of black men, it must be connected to the source from which they come—the mothers, grandmothers, and ultimately, the feminine creative energy that is the origin of all life. For Jason, the court is a maternal symbol, a place where he seeks refuge from a hostile world. His story of rebirth through hoops suggests that black male athletes cannot achieve spiritual freedom from the hegemonic forces of culture without realizing the ultimate value of women. Second, his journey through basketball, like those of the vast majority of black men I interviewed, is infused with the presence of ancestor spirits. His is not simply a Christian experience of hoops. Rather, he plays ball at the behest of his great-grandmother’s soul and Afro-West Indian spirits. God may be at the apex of Jason’s hoops theology, but ancestors mediate God’s grace on the court. His religious sensibilities combine Christian and Afro-Caribbean or African sources in which the dead have a continued role among the living and spirit is earthbound and experiential. Finally, I will never forget the moment Jason cried in front of me as he told his story. His vulnerability and trust sealed our relationship. Basketball provided the space for two urban black men to love each other in a way that defied cultural expectations of manliness. Our bond has been a continued source of hope between us ever since.