Classical is the academic star of the Providence public school system and always has been. In 2012 Newsweek called it one of the country’s best high schools. Ninety-five percent of its graduates go on to college. It’s the alma mater of American humorist S. J. Perelman, former U.S. senator John O. Pastore, two former Rhode Island governors, columnist Joe Nocera of the New York Times, and the Times’s movie critic A. O. Scott.
It was founded in 1843, and since 1970 has been at its present location at the border of South Providence and the West End, cut off from downtown by I-95. It’s also a building in the Brutalist tradition, big and tan stone and unappealing, like a state building in a dreary eastern European country.
“It’s no wonder Modernism has gotten such a bad reputation in Rhode Island,” one guide to Providence architecture says.
For Delonce Wright it was practically a home game. He lived in an apartment just a few blocks away, on a side street near a reputed drug house, one of those places the police have raided innumerable times through the years. His father had been away in the military most of his life, and he’s sometimes gone three or four years without seeing him, but he said that didn’t bother him, and “it’s no excuse for me.” He is the oldest of three, and lived in several different places around the city when he was younger. For a while it was Manton Heights, a housing project in the West End, the same one Manny had lived in when he first came to Providence. Later, it was Chad Brown, where Angel Rivera now lived. Delonce was about eight, but even then he knew it was a dangerous place.
“I didn’t go outside much then,” he said, “because there were shootings and stuff. I probably heard twenty gunfights. But it teaches you how to stay safe. To choose wisely. Your friends. People you bring to your house. I have a relative who was in and out of jail, and one serving life for murder. You learn that anything can happen at any time, and you have to be prepared for anything.”
This was said dispassionately, as though he were talking about all the summer camps he’d been to, and the people he met there.
“I think I’m pretty responsible,” he continued, “because I’ve seen the kids who have dropped out of school. They do nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I don’t want to be like them.”
He was a senior, but his educational journey had been complicated. As a young kid he went to the Paul Cuffee School, Providence charter school, sent there by his mother, who went to Hope and then to the University of Rhode Island. In ninth grade he was a day student at St. Andrew’s, a prep school in Barrington, a tony suburb ten miles south of Providence, sent there because one of the people who works at Paul Cuffee is on the board at St. Andrew’s. He was one of only about twenty black kids in the school, and when it didn’t work out at St. Andrew’s he went to Hope because he knew some kids there. So, in a sense, he was a little different from most of his teammates, for he’d been exposed to more, even if he was from the same inner-city neighborhoods.
“I was upset when I was thrown out of St. Andrew’s,” he said. “Hope was big and loud and noisy compared to Paul Cuffee and St. Andrew’s, and it was much easier. I’ve never felt it’s challenging. There have been times in class with the work where I’ve said to myself, ‘I’ve seen this before.’ But I liked the teachers right away. They acted like they cared. But I thought it was too free. You could walk right out the front door and nothing was going to happen to you. It was very different from St. Andrew’s. The classes were bigger and the way they were taught was different too.”
The other main difference was that at Hope was there always seemed to be a handful of kids who distracted the teachers, distracted everybody.
Delonce had played football since he was a little kid, when he was on a team called the North End Raiders. This past summer he went to a football camp at Boston College, where he ran a 4.4 in the forty-yard dash, a time that makes football people look at their stopwatch twice. He was put in a special group after that, and in the fall received some interest from several small-college football schools, Salve Regina in Newport, Rhode Island, being one of them.
“Football changed my life,” he said. “It was my motivation to come to school.”
He had known both Wayne Clements and Malieke Young since he was a young kid at the Sackett Street rec center, where Wayne’s father was the director. He first knew Johnson Weah when they both played for Team Providence before they went to Hope. But he was now closest to Manny. He also knew many of the kids he was playing against, because to him the league was full of “street people,” the inner-city kids he’d competed against in various youth leagues around the city.
“But losing sucks,” he said. “Manny is trying to do too much. He feels pressure. Wayne feels pressure. He could always shoot, but you can see his knee is bothering him. I’ve known him since he’s been ten. He’s always been quiet. I still think we’re as good as anyone. We’ve got a good solid eight players, but against La Salle we had no passion.”
Why?
“I have no clue,” he said. “I don’t think teams beat us as much as we beat ourselves.”
I asked him about Nyblom.
“He tries to help you in every way,” he said. “That gets my respect. And if he weren’t yelling, we wouldn’t be listening.”
That was a telling comment, because in a world full of constant noise, a frenzied world where for many inner-city kids rap music was the soundtrack to their lives, talking in hushed academic tones was almost like asking to be ignored.
A few minutes later the team sat in a large locker room at Classical. Wayne had blow-dried his hair into a retro Afro, the players had done a “BLUE WAVE COMING, we’re coming at you, AH … AH … AH” chant in a circle, and now Nyblom was trying to get them focused as a loud rap song was blasting over a partition that separated the locker rooms. He looked at Wayne.
“You have to be a leader,” he said.
He turned around.
“Coach Moors? You got anything to say?”
“Four-and-six,” Moors said. “That’s all you’ll hear from me. Four-and-six. That’s it.”
* * *
It was a good game. Classical had three talented players, even if they were all smaller than six-foot-one. The best one was Kealen Ives, who had grown up with several of the Hope kids. He was only five-foot eight, but lightning quick, and a very good three-point shooter. You would have thought you were in an inner-city high school, for most of the team, the cheerleaders, and the crowd that sat in bleachers located on one side of the court were nonwhite. One of them was Buster Clements, Wayne’s father.
I had a certain connection with him, as loose as it was. He once had played at St. Andrew’s for Mike Raffa, a childhood friend of mine, and had been one of the first black players at St. Andrew’s. He had been sent there by a man named Emil John, who used to work nights on the sports desk of the Providence Journal and spent his days and weekends as the minister of the Trinity Methodist Church off Broad Street in South Providence. Emil John was a big, quiet man who always wore a dark eye shade at work, and he had gone to Brown, where he had been a basketball teammate of Joe Paterno. One of his many functions at the church was coaching the youth basketball team, and one of his prized players forty years ago had been Buster Clements.
Hope was down three at the half, Nyblom telling them in the locker they were too “geeked up,” and had to “slow down mentally, not physically.” With a little over two minutes to play they were only down two in a seesaw of a game, until Manny was called for an offensive foul with just thirty-eight seconds to play. Classical ended up winning 71-63, and once again Hope had lost a game it could have won.
Moments afterward, the players still on the court, Manny was approached by Bob Walsh, the very successful coach at Rhode Island College, a Division III school located in the northwest corner of Providence behind Mount Pleasant High School. A former assistant at Providence College, Walsh was well known locally for taking undersized inner-city kids, teaching them to play together and to play hard, and routinely turning out teams that surprised people. During the game he had also said that he liked junior Ben Vezele, whose size and potential promised that he, too, might be able to one day play in college somewhere.
But for Manny it was a visible reminder that his senior season was coming to a close, and that the start of real life was just a few short months away.
Or as Nyblom said afterward, “It’s getting late, fellas.”
Once again, no one went back to Hope after the game, for they now were in the part of the city where most of them lived, South Providence and the West End. It was one more consequence of the lack of neighborhood schools in Providence.
It was also just the latest example of a team seeing its season slip away, a team that had lost in the state finals the year before and had only lost two key players since then. The coaches found that so frustrating, this sense that Hope was a team that kept imploding in all the little ways, that their real opponent was themselves.
“This is what happened last year,” Moors said in the gym the next afternoon as several of the kids were starting to drift in for practice. “And we’re better than we were last year. That’s what’s driving us crazy. We’re 4-7 and we don’t believe it. But we had two days of bad practice and we go to La Salle and we’re down twenty. They don’t get it. You play like you practice, and we’ve had like two great practices all year.”
He blew on his hands because the gym was cold again.
Now there were more kids in the gym.
“You guys are so bad you should go practice in the girls’ gym and play Knockout,” Moors yelled out. “That’s what happens when you’re 4-7. You go play Knockout in the gym with the girls.”
And that was exactly where they were the next afternoon, in the little gym next door playing Knockout, along with a couple of girls. In a few hours they would play against Central, another city school, but now they were just high school kids, laughing, horsing around, no coaches, no referees, no uniforms, no fans, no pressure. Kids playing for the pure love of it. All the rest of it would come soon enough.
Downstairs in the coach’s office Jim Black was on Twitter reading a tweet from Central star Jerrelle Washington.
“Going to take care of some personal business at Hope tonight, 6 o’clock,” it said.
Washington, who is very friendly with Delonce Wright, is one of the top players in the state, a quick, athletic guard who spends his summers playing for the famed Boston AAU team BABC, the one that Shaquille Jones once played for. It was founded and is still run by Leo Papile, who often says he’s lived in the belly of the basketball beast for over thirty years now, and who was a longtime scout for the Boston Celtics in addition to shepherding innumerable kids to college basketball.
But it’s not just his involvement with BABC that makes Washington different in the insular world of Rhode Island high school basketball; it’s that he spent a couple of years living in the Los Angeles area, where one of his uncles was Magic Johnson’s driver. Another difference is that rhythm and blues singer Jeffrey Osborne, who grew up in Providence, and for years has sung the National Anthem at Lakers’ games, is also part of his mother’s extended family.
He had a big game against Hope last year in the state finals, and is the main focus in all the pregame discussion among the coaches. Central is another struggling team trying to win enough games to sneak into the playoffs, so this figured to be another close contest. None of Hope’s games was easy, but this one was coming with an additional distraction, for Hope’s winter dance at the casino in Roger Williams Park on the south side of the city was also scheduled for that night. That was why the game was scheduled for six o’clock instead of the usual seven, and why, Nyblom realized, his team’s pregame focus, shaky in the best of times, was not good tonight. Already there was the news that Angel’s father, who lived in Boston, had rented a car for him to use for the dance, and that was the topic of conversation among the players in the locker room, not the upcoming game.
“This is the team that took your state championship away last year,” Nyblom said. “I hope you remember that.”
“You’re 4-7,” Moors added. “I hope you remember that, too.”
“You should be pissed,” piped up Jim Black.
Pissed or not, Hope got off to a good start, everything going well except for Johnson Weah, who appeared to be in a funk minutes after Nyblom took him out.
“Are you ready to play?” Nyblom asked.
Johnson shrugged.
“Are you?” Nyblom said louder.
Johnson nodded.
“I’m not the one sitting,” Nyblom said, the exasperation on his face.
In many ways Johnson Weah was the mystery man, the hardest to read. No big surprise. He had the most tortured back story. The refugee camp in Liberia until he was ten years old. No school until he came to Rhode Island at the same age. His father never in his life. His insecurity about the way he talked. The sense that among all the players he was the one with the most obstacles in his life. Yet there was a drive inside Johnson, one that said that he was going to make his way in this new world or die trying.
By halftime Hope was up twenty, and Nyblom was telling them to step on Central’s throats, then go to the dance and have a good time.
Ah, if only things were that easy. With three and a half minutes left to play, Central was only down seven and Hope was like a prizefighter against the ropes and starting to take a beating and praying for the bell to ring to get him out of the round, looking nothing like the team that had played in the first half. Then Jerrelle Washington got called for a technical foul for saying something to a referee, banged his hand down on the scorer’s table in frustration, got another tech, and was thrown out of the game. Over and out for Central. So now Hope was 5-7 and back in the locker room waiting to go to the dance.
“Can we sit, gentlemen,” Nyblom said as he walked into the room.
He stood in the middle of the room, blue lockers on both sides of him.
“Does anyone feel good about this team? You shouldn’t. After the way we played in the first half this should have been a thirty-point win. But then everyone has to get selfish and start doing their own thing. I can’t coach you if you don’t want to be coached.”
He hesitated, looked at them.
And when he spoke again his voice was soft, almost pleading.
“Please be smart tonight. Please behave. Please be smart.”