“I think we’re the best team in Rhode Island,” said Keith Moors.
He was sitting with Rob Whalen and Jim Black in the cramped coach’s office, where the clock still said 6:32.
“This is how we play every year,” he continued. “We start out lousy, go through all our typical nonsense, and by the end of the year no one wants to play us. That’s how it is every year. Like we get locked in. But we’re a bad matchup for a lot of teams. Manny gets to the rim against anyone. I think Wayne’s locked in now. We’re deeper than last year.”
Whalen nodded his head.
“We’re playing our best at the right time. It’s just like last year.”
In about an hour they would be playing East Providence in the first round of the playoffs, and there was the palpable sense that this was the start of a brand-new season, as if all the old ghosts of the past ten weeks or so had somehow been exorcised. Manny was in great spirits, had been enthusiastic and energetic in practice, as if a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Wayne and the coaches seemed to have had found their separate peace, an unspoken deal in which his obvious uninterest in practice and concern for his knee was overlooked as long as he came to play in the games. It was apparent to everyone that his knee wasn’t anywhere close to 100 percent, but he wanted to play and Hope obviously needed him to play. Delonce and Johnson always were steady, always playing hard. And Ben? He had quietly come into his own; he was more confident, more self-assured on the court, his eighteen-point, fifteen-rebound performance and his late-game heroics against Cranston West vivid examples.
The players wandered in and out of the coach’s room.
“Nyblom, can I get a water?… Nyblom, when you tapin’ my ankles?… Nyblom, when we going upstairs?… Nyblom, where you at?”
On and on it went until Nyblom went to take his pregame shower, and Moors locked the door.
“GO AWAY!” he yelled as someone knocked on the door.
“Where’s Nyblom at?” yelled a voice back.
“He’s in the shower,” Moors yelled back. “Give him a break. Go away. Leave him alone.”
Moors laughed.
“They’re always bitching about Dave. He’s too tough. He yells too much. He’s too demanding. Then he goes in the shower for five minutes and they can’t function. It never changes.”
A half hour later everyone was upstairs in the Health Room in their white “Refuse to Lose” T-shirts over their white uniforms, “A.F.P.” on the sleeves, the team slogan. Wayne wore a black beanie in. Nyblom had already taped a few ankles on a table in the small hallway outside the locker room. On a message board behind him were all the East Providence players and what they wanted to do in the game, alongside all of East Providence’s tendencies. All things he had gone over already.
“Okay, gentlemen,” said Nyblom. “Lose tonight and we go home.”
He paused a beat.
“And do not say a word to the referees. Not one word.”
He paused again, looked out over them.
“They don’t have your depth. They don’t have your speed. They didn’t go deep into the playoffs last year like you did. Intelligence and desire, gentlemen, intelligence and desire. So play smart, and let’s have some fun.”
“No team in the state can beat you,” added Pedro Correia.
He pointed to Johnson Weah.
“We have the best rebounder in the state.”
He pointed to Manny.
“We have the best player in the state.”
He pointed to Wayne.
“We have the best point guard in the state.”
Not that Hope really needed the pep talk. They were up ten at halftime, fifteen with 10:30 to play, and coasted to the finish. And the next afternoon they were back in the same little gym on the second floor trying to prepare for the same La Salle team that had beaten them earlier in the regular season, the game in which Wayne had sat in self-imposed exile at the end of the bench in the last minutes.
“Showtime’s here,” Moors yelled out as Wayne walked in, wearing dark blue warmups and a dark blue hood.
Practice was low key, highlighted at one point by a spirited three-on-three half-court game. Wayne sat in the bleachers. He said his knee was sore, and when he walked onto the court he shuffled along like he was sixty years old and coming off a bad night.
“Showtime’s here,” Moors called out again.
Wayne just stared at him and slowly shook his head.
Moors laughed.
Delonce was at the dentist. Johnson had come late. Everything seemed dialed down, a time out from the pressure. This, too, was part of Nyblom’s coaching style. He had come to learn that a team couldn’t go hard every day late in the season, that there was no reason to leave your game in the gym. So practices were shorter, often more varied. This one had been very loose, unstructured, and for much of the time Nyblom had been downstairs doing the team’s laundry.
Now it ended with everyone sitting at the half-court circle.
“The whole La Salle team was here last night,” he said, standing over the players. “We’re going to get their best shot.”
* * *
The playoff game against La Salle was at North Providence High School, an old red-brick building less than a mile away from La Salle and the north end of Providence. It was a neutral court. This was the quarterfinals of the Division I tournament. The opponent was the same La Salle team that easily had beaten Hope in mid-January in the La Salle gym, when Hope had self-destructed with Wayne sulking down at one end of the bench. But there was no question things were different now, with Hope playing better, more as a team than they had been back then. Coventry and Mount Pleasant were playing in the first game while Hope waited downstairs.
Nyblom told them that if they played hard and they played smart and pushed the ball and concentrated on defense they would win the game, and as the team left the locker room all the coaches gave Wayne a pat on the back, for when Wayne played well Hope usually played well.
“Okay, gentlemen, lose tonight and we go home,” he said. “And don’t say one word to the referees. Not one word.”
“Hey, Raymond,” Moors said to Raymond Perez, a small ninth-grader with a great smile who had now become the team manager, as the two left the locker room to go up the stairs that led to the court. “Pull your pants up; you look like a hood from the city.”
Raymond started walking up the stairs as Moors smiled at him.
“Teams don’t want to play us,” Moors said. “We’re a tough matchup for most teams, and I think Wayne’s locked in right now.”
The gym was good for a Rhode Island high school, with bleachers on both sides. Tonight it was packed. There were La Salle cheerleaders in red-and-white uniforms. There was a public address system. There was a sense of importance that had been missing in so many of the regular-season games. And at the half Hope was up 32-24, even though they had been 0-8 from the free-throw line.
“When you get the ball just look for the ugliest shoes on the floor,” Nyblom said, pointing to Wayne’s bright orange sneakers. “That’s what you’re looking for.”
There was no longer any pretense: when the ball was in Wayne Clements’s hands everything was smoother. When the ball was in his hands Hope was a better basketball team, orange sneakers or not.
“Keep getting in their face,” Pedro Correia implored. “You dominate every team in the state defensively.”
The second half was extremely intense, two teams playing for their season to continue, the private Catholic school and the inner-city school, complete with all the stereotypes that come with that distinction. They were two teams that had a little dustup during a fall league game, two teams that didn’t seem to have much use for each other even in the best of times, never mind a playoff game. They also had played in last year’s state tournament, Hope winning. Three of the La Salle players were from Camp Street, to the point of occasionally spending time in the Hope gym. And in the small, interconnected world of Rhode Island high school, everyone either knew each other or were a few degrees of separation away.
So it was no surprise that the game was chippy, many of the fouls hard. No surprise that the gym was loud and the emotion seemed to hang over the players’ heads like fine mist. For there was little difference between the two teams, and the game could go either way.
La Salle played Manny a box and one, making it much more difficult for him to score, while Hope’s tenacious man-to-man defense was making it equally difficult for La Salle. Hope was up four with 6:37 to play, but Wayne had to come out with four fouls, the tension building.
“It’s all about winning and playing Friday night,” Nyblom implored them in a time out.
And win they did, as both Wayne and Eli Lewis made key free throws in the last two minutes and Hope pulled away to win by fourteen.
But the night was just beginning.
* * *
To get to the locker rooms you had to go out the gym, across the lobby, and down some stairs. I was heading toward the stairs, about a minute or two behind the players, when I heard yelling coming from below. By the time I got down the stairs it was chaos—assistant coach Jim Black was bleeding from the mouth, and Arondae Washington, father of La Salle’s Keon Wilson and Mikey Clark, was still trying to get at Black.
“No one’s going to put his hands on my kid,” he yelled.
“Arondae, I was trying to break it up!” Black yelled back.
There was too much confusion, too much milling around, and I had gotten there too late to know what had really happened. A couple of Hope kids were behind Black, and some La Salle kids were behind Arondae Washington, the atmosphere charged up, like kindling just waiting for a match, when Nyblom and Moors came down the stairs and got the Hope players back around the corner and into their locker room.
Inside the locker room the emotion almost seemed to bounce off the walls. It was becoming clear that there had been an altercation between Delonce Wright and Jared Thompson, a white guard from La Salle. What had happened was unclear, at least to me. Johnson Weah had also been involved in something, but that, too, was unclear.
Nyblom was trying to calm the players down, to get them back to the game they had just won and away from what had happened on the stairs, whatever that had been.
“We are very lucky to be advancing,” Nyblom said. “So give yourself three claps.”
The players clapped three times.
“He got called a ‘spic,’” he said, pointing to Angel Rivera.
“He got called a ‘nigger,’” he said, pointing to Johnson Weah.
“We’ve been called everything tonight,” he said.
He paused.
“And I don’t want anyone texting tonight on what happened. No Facebook. No nothing. Whatever you hear don’t chirp back. Stay off your phone.”
The players started getting their stuff together, putting their clothes over their uniforms.
“Angel, very solid,” Nyblom said. “Johnson, very solid. Manny, very solid. So give yourself three more claps.”
Nyblom paused.
“We’re all going out together,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked Wayne Clements quietly over in a corner of the locker room. “I got there late.”
“I was there,” he said. “I was trying to stop things.”
He laughed.
“It didn’t work out.”
“Where are the ‘Argue, Fight, Pout’ shirts?” Nyblom yelled out. “Make sure we’ve got them.”
“Argue, Fight, Pout” had become both an indictment and unofficial team slogan, as if all the dysfunction and all the drama since the opening day of practice had turned into a team slogan, as bizarre as that sounded.
ARGUE.
FIGHT.
POUT.
This team’s identity.
* * *
But the ramifications of the fight were not over.
The next morning, all the players were in the Hope cafeteria, the cavernous room with red pillars in the middle and tables everywhere. It was vacation week. Sunlight poured into the room from the large windows on the south side of the building. The team sat at four tables, Malieke Young with them.
They were supposed to be writing about the fight, as the school was trying to understand what had happened, but mostly they were laughing and telling war stories from the night before.
“Yo, yo, yo,” Delonce said, laughing. “Wayne was like, ‘They’re fighting? I just got these new braids on.’”
Wayne laughed.
“Jared touched my face during the game,” Delonce said. “And then he pushed me coming down the stairs. That started it. It was me, Johnson, Aaron, and Marquis on the stairs, and La Salle was talking shit. Then he pushed me. If anything, Johnson got jumped, and he was trying to be the peacemaker. But the whole thing was like twenty seconds tops. Now La Salle is saying that we won the game and started the fight. But why would we have started a fight if we had won the game? But it’s in the past. I’m moving on.”
He pointed to the piece of paper in front of him.
“I wrote three sentences. That’s all I know.”
“They were saying on the stairs that they had no respect for us, and I was saying, ‘You lost,’” said Aaron Lynch.
“We beat them in the game. We beat them in the fight. And we still get no respect,” said Malieke Young, as if he couldn’t understand the indignity of it all.
“He pushed me,” Delonce said. “It had been building up since the fall league. Jared had pushed me then and I didn’t understand it. Because I know a lot of those guys and always had been cool with them. But it’s in the past. I’m moving on. We won the game. That’s the best part.”
The atmosphere was loose. They were advancing, and the fight had become just war stories, just yesterday’s news, right?
Not really.
The next morning it was announced by the Rhode Island Interscholastic League that Delonce Wright and Johnson Weah would be suspended for Hope’s next playoff game against Coventry, a team they had lost to early in the season, to be held at the Community College of Rhode Island in Warwick. Hope would get to play another playoff game, only this time without two starters, and to Nyblom it didn’t seem right. For he believed his players, believed that La Salle had started the altercation on the stairs because they were upset at having lost the game, and that the suspensions were just the latest example of his program getting disrespected by the Interscholastic League. Yet he also knew there was no recourse, and that now they had to play the hand they’d been dealt, fair or not.
To him, it had come as no big surprise.
It was no secret that the relationship between him and Tom Mezzanotte, the head of the Interscholastic League, was strained at best. To Nyblom, the league’s favorites were Hendricken and La Salle, the long-standing parochial school powers, the two schools with the most clout, the most success, the two deeply imbedded into the state’s political hierarchy in ways the public schools were not, especially the inner-city ones. That was simply the way it was, the way it always it had been, and to fight against it was like trying to fight City Hall.
* * *
The first game of the night at CCRI in Warwick was between Hendricken and Classical, two teams that had beaten Hope in the regular season, and when Hope went into their small locker room “NO RESPECT” was printed on the blackboard in big letters.
“I can’t find my jersey,” Wayne said.
Eli Lewis threw a jersey at Wayne from across the room.
“East Side Negroes,” Nyblom yelled out.
“Where’s Quenton?” asked Rob Whalen. “Where’s Q?”
“He’s in Virginia,” said Marquis Young.
“What’s he doing in Virginia?”
“Family trip,” Young said.
So now there was no Delonce, no Johnson, and no Quenton, either. Just nine players in their white T-shirts with “Refuse to Lose” on the front that they wore over their dark blue uniform tops. Now they were about to play Coventry in the Division I semifinals.
“We love all you guys,” Nyblom said softly, “and none of this is fair. But we have the talent to win, even without Delonce, Johnson, and Quenton. And we have the leadership to win. So push the ball, and keep pushing it. And if anyone uses the ‘N’ word don’t react. And if anyone says a thing don’t react. We waited all year to start playing, and now we’re playing. And tonight we’re going to play for Delonce and Johnson, who don’t deserve this, and we’re going to play for Quenton, too.”
* * *
There was a good crowd in the big gym, the sense of anticipation building. Classical had beaten Hendricken 45-44 in the first game, so the winner of the Hope-Coventry game would go on to play Classical on Sunday afternoon at Brown in the Division I finals, and be all but assured of a good seed in the state tournament that was to follow. But the pregame dramatics weren’t over yet. In fact, they were just beginning.
As Hope lined up across the court for the National Anthem there were Manny and Aaron Lynch holding up Delonce’s blue jersey with his number 2 on the back, and there were Marquis Young and Eli Lewis doing the same thing with Johnson Weah’s uniform with number 23 on it. It was a dramatic moment, and a symbolic one, too. Ever since practice had started back in early December Nyblom had preached about becoming a team, a fragile little ecosystem even in the best of times. That had always been the message from Nyblom and the other coaches, all those times when Hope was going one step forward and two steps back. And now here they were doing something completely unexpected and improvisational, something that went to the core of what a team was all about, symbolically saying that their two teammates were with them in spirit, if not physically. And as I looked out at them, those four players holding up those two jerseys of their absent teammates, I saw it as their shining moment of the season, regardless of what was going to happen in the game.
Not everyone saw it this way, of course.
It was quickly obvious that the officials of the Interscholastic League didn’t like it. Then again, the league and Nyblom often seemed to be circling each other like wary alley cats. There was too much bad history, too many times when Nyblom—long a powerful voice for the state’s male high school coaches—had clashed with the Interscholastic League. But minutes later, when the game began, Hope moved out to a lead, and then kept it to halftime, up seven as they went back to the small locker room.
“The kid in the ugly-ass orange sneakers is going to lead us,” he said, looking at Wayne. “Just keep looking for those ugly-ass sneakers and keep getting him the ball.”
“Do it for Delonce and Johnson sitting home right now,” Moors said.
With twelve minutes left to play they were up eight, but Wayne had four fouls and was on the bench and Hope was playing with two starters in Manny and Ben and sophomores Angel Rivera and Eli Lewis and senior Aaron Lynch. Could they somehow hang on? Could Angel, Eli, and Aaron, three kids from the bench now in the biggest game of their lives, play up to the moment? Could this ragtag group that really hadn’t played together all year hang on long enough to get Hope to Sunday afternoon against Classical for the Division I title? Did they have enough?
Within a minute they were only up one, Coventry back in the game, and Nyblom called time out.
“Manny, Manny,” he said. “Don’t let up.”
He looked around the huddle.
“Great defense, Eli,” he said.
Nyblom was supportive, encouraging, imploring Manny and Ben to carry them.
The game moved inexorably toward the finish, Hope always up, but unable to pull away. Up five. Up three. Up seven. Until there was just 1:35 left to play and Hope was only up three, and Nyblom was urging his team on, his face flushed. With twenty-six seconds to play Manny made two free throws, the eventual clinchers, as a group in the bleachers chanted out, “Blue Wave, Blue Wave,” and the final score was 65-62.
“They keep trying,” said Jim Black in the jubilant locker room. “But they can’t keep us down.”
Over in the corner of the locker room Wayne had combed out his braids, his hair now a large Afro, circa 1975.
“Look at Frederick Douglass over there,” said Rob Whalen, with a big smile. “But if I ask him who Frederick Douglass was he’ll say, ‘Didn’t he play in the NBA?’”