It was Sunday noon and the Hope players were in a cramped locker room inside Alumni Hall on the Providence College campus, the Catholic school in the north end of the city, which is about a jump shot away from La Salle to the southwest and the Chad Brown housing project to the southeast. The school has been there since 1919, back when it was a small, mostly commuter college that once had been described as a place for “poor Catholic kids” to go. Then, in the late ’50s, with a new gym and a young coach named Joe Mullaney, who later would go on to coach the Lakers, the Friars would come out of nowhere to win the then-prestigious National Invitational Tournament in New York and begin a basketball story that is legendary to this day: two trips to the Final Four, the Big East Conference, a basketball program that has used Alumni Hall as a practice gym for forty years now.
But if the Friars had been playing their games in a downtown arena ever since Richard Nixon was in the White House, Alumni Hall was a clean, refurbished campus gym that could seat nearly three thousand people. To the Hope kids it was the big-time, far away from their small, old gym on the second floor of Hope. It was also an obvious example that their season had now gone uptown, beyond the often insular world of the Rhode Island Interscholastic League, complete with the increased media attention that came with such a stage.
They were about to play Hendricken, the same team they had lost to in the first league game of the season back in early December, the same Hendricken team they hadn’t beaten in six years.
“I think we’re something like 0-9 against them,” Moors said. “Maybe it’s worse than that.”
The day before, there had been a cookout at Nyblom’s house in South Kingstown, the message being that the Hope basketball team was more than just the practice and the games, but something larger, too. While sometimes lost on his players, this message meant that these young men were a part of something, that which had come before and that which would follow, Nyblom always referencing the alumni, even if the alumni too often seemed to consist of a few former players who hung around once in a while. In many ways this was the hardest message to send in a big urban high school that often seemed so removed from everything around it, even its past.
When he spoke to the team, Nyblom really did seem like a contemporary “White Shadow,” walking on the tightrope between tough love and the catcher in the rye, trying to keep his kids from going off the cliff.
“Someone said the KKK lived around here,” Moors went on. “It was hilarious. Johnson and Angel missed the bus in Providence, and Dave’s wife, who was in the city, picked them up and brought them down. She got Johnson downtown in Kennedy Plaza, where the buses are, and then they had to go to Chad Brown to get Angel, and when she finally got onto Branch Avenue she asked, ‘Is it safe now?’ The whole night was great. Video games. A lot of laughing and joking around. Great Team Building.”
Devante Youn was in a dark suit, having just come from church.
As the players finished getting their uniforms on, into the locker room came Providence College basketball coach Ed Cooley, a big, burly black man. He was talking on a cell phone. Then he snapped it shut and stared at the players sitting in front of him.
“I was just talking to the father of one of the top recruits in the country,” Cooley said loudly. “But the hell with him. He can wait. Because we’re family.”
Yes, they were. Not only is Cooley the first African-American coach in Providence College’s long basketball history, he grew up in South Providence and had had a childhood that could have come out of a Dickens novel—eating cereal with water, going to a school in what he calls “bummy clothes” because there was no money, and spending a lot of time as an adolescent living in his friend’s house because his mother couldn’t always take care of him. Cooley was them. Same city. Same neighborhood. Same high school league. Same obstacles. Same dreams. He had parlayed being an All Stater at Central into a year at a New England prep school and a scholarship to Stonehill, a Division II school in southeastern Massachusetts. He had been a high school teacher, before he walked away at twenty-seven years old to become a graduate assistant at the University of Rhode Island, learning the college coaching profession from the ground up, paying his dues for years. All those dues and all those years finally led him back home to this dream job, a high-paid Big East coaching position in his hometown. He was now standing in front of this Hope team as a living example that dreams can indeed come true, if you only do the right thing.
“Go out there and play as hard as you can for as long as you can,” he said in his deep voice.
“One game away from going back to the Ryan Center,” said Moors after Cooley had left the room.
A few minutes later they came out onto the varnished court in their white T-shirts with “Refuse to Lose” in big letters on the front, and “A.F.P.” in blue letters on the right sleeve. There was a large crowd, with a media table at courtside, and TV cameramen and photographers. They wore their dark blue uniforms with gold-and-white trim, Hendricken white uniforms with green-and-gold trim.
But if the setting was different from the first time these two teams had played each other back in early December, and the stakes were certainly different, the first half was remarkable similar. Once again the game was physical, intense. Once again Hope had trouble scoring. Once again it was a slow, half-court game, the kind of game Hope had struggled with all year. Once again Hope found themselves trailing at halftime, down 22-17.
“Fellas, they’re beating you at their game,” Nyblom said when they were back in the small locker room. His voice was soft, his tone comforting. “We can’t beat them at their game. We have to play our game. We have to push the ball and speed the pace up. Hey, we stunk and we’re only chasing five points. But if we keep playing at this pace we’re going to lose.”
“Sixteen minutes to the Ryan Center,” Moors said. “This is your season right here.”
They listened.
As soon as the second half began Hope sped up the pace. They played defense in a frenzy, with a sense of urgency that had been missing in the first half. With ten minutes left to play they were leading by four. Not that Hendricken was going to go away easily. They had too much pride, too much tradition, and they were too well coached to do that. Hendricken was a team used to playing tournament games, and their players were used to winning them. That was their tradition, and both the coaches and the players seemed to carry it with them like a signboard. They were Hendricken, and they were supposed to win games like this. They were Hendricken, and the green-and-gold banners on their gym walls back in Warwick were proof that they won games like this. So it was no surprise when they fought back and went up by one with seven and a half minutes left to play.
But Wayne countered with a three-pointer, and once again Hope had the lead.
Two and a half minutes later, thanks to another Wayne Clements three-point shot, Hope was leading 46-38. There was a shade over three minutes left to play. Were they going to do it again, come out of the scrap heap like they’d done the year before and get back to the state semifinals at the Ryan Center at the University of Rhode Island?
Not so fast.
A minute later Hendricken had cut the lead to two, and two Hope turnovers later they were up 47-46 with just 1:28 left to play. Was this going to be like the first game of the season, the one at Hendricken, where Hope had lost an ugly scrum of a game the same way, ground down by Hendricken’s gritty defense? Had it all come down to this, all the practices and all the bus rides, a mirror image of the first game of the year?
Hope came down the court, Wayne missed a shot, and Hendricken called a time out with just fifty-eight seconds to play. Alumni Hall was bedlam. This was high school playoff basketball at its best, two teams in the last minute, both fighting to get into the state semifinals at the University of Rhode Island.
Hendricken put the ball in play, obviously trying to run down the shot clock as long as they could without taking a shot. Will Tavares, the Hawks’ leading scorer, was out near half court, trying to milk the clock, all the while being hounded by Delonce Wright. But he held the ball too long, was called for a five-second violation that gave the ball back to Hope.
Hope raced down the court in the pandemonium the gym had become, the clock ticking down, and Ben Vezele took a hurried shot from the corner that missed.
Enter the basketball gods.
The ball bounced into the hands of Wayne Clements, who flicked it off the glass backboard and through the hoop with just thirteen seconds remaining and Hope now leading 48-47.
Hendricken came quickly back down the court, Alumni Hall in an uproar, but a baseline shot from the Hawks’ Ryan Hagerty was blocked out of bounds by Johnson Weah.
There were now 4.5 seconds remaining.
Hendricken took a time out.
They got the ball to senior Kazre Cummings, who shot a quick three-pointer from the top of the circle, and in the ensuing melee it bounced out to Hagerty on the left. He flipped the ball in one motion, and the ball somehow went in, only to be ruled too late, as the buzzer ending the game had already sounded.
Hope was going to the state semifinals.
There was pandemonium on the court, the players jumping around in wild celebration, people cheering, Manny and Delonce posing for pictures, other people hugging the players, all the fruits of victory right there in full display. It all seemed so far from the first league game of the season at Hendricken when they had been so offensively inept, so lost, like a team that had met for the first time outside in the parking lot five minutes before the game started.
“It’s never pretty and it’s never easy,” said Rob Whalen, shaking his head in a big grin. “We just somehow find a way to win.”
Several minutes later, back in the joyous locker room, Nyblom called it a great victory for Hope.
“This was for the teachers, students, alumni, everybody,” he said. “So tomorrow in school thank everyone you see. And you guys on the bench. Cheering. Supporting everyone. You were great. That’s what this is all about. A great team victory.”
If all happy families are alike, as Tolstoy once said, so are all happy teams.
Or as Delonce Wright said, “We went from stealing basketballs to stealing championships. The greatest two years ever.”
* * *
Three days later Nyblom was pushing a broom up the old court in his tan shorts, blue short-sleeve shirt, and white sneakers. It was very hot in the gym, like a sauna.
“Manny, you getting dressed today or not?” he asked, an edge in his voice.
In many ways practice had become little more than filler between the glamour of the games. It was inevitable. There had been so many of them. For here it was the first week of March, the bitter cold seemingly over, the light outside different, the New England gloom that William Faulkner had once called “the iron dark” starting to change. They had been in this gym virtually every afternoon since the last few days of November, and practice held no more surprises. Their roles on the team had long been established. They didn’t need to get in better shape. They were on a great run and they wanted to keep playing big games in front of big crowds, the sooner the better. The last thing they wanted was another practice against the same faces, another afternoon of having to play hard while Nyblom and the other coaches watched them with jewelers’ eyes.
The day before, practice had been light, little more than going through the motions. There had been a camera crew from Cox—a local network that did a lot of sports—which was going to televise the semifinals and finals from the Ryan Center at the University of Rhode Island, and the four senior starters had been put on camera, saying their name and stating that they play for “The Blue Wave,” a little sliver of the big-time right here in this old gym on the second floor of Hope. It had been one of those fantasy moments and the four seniors had had fun with it, especially Manny, who fumbled his one line and laughed. One more reminder that winning changed everything, opened up the world.
But now it was the day before the semifinal game, the start of practice, and the vibe was different. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that after watching Manny take ten minutes or so to put on his sneakers and Wayne sprawled on the last row of the bleachers as if he were passed out on a downtown park bench, and everyone else doing little more than going through the motions, Nyblom put his game face on.
Eventually, they began some calisthenics at the center of the court, Quenton Marrow leading them. It was just the latest example that Quenton possessed innate leadership skills, even if he played sparingly. But the players were not focused, and Nyblom had had enough.
“The last I knew I’m still the coach here and it’s 3:45 and we haven’t done a damn thing yet, so start running.”
They started doing laps around the gym, Quenton the only one taking it seriously, his long strides making him look like the track athlete he was in the spring. None of the four seniors really wanted to be leaders—or, maybe more important, didn’t understand what it meant to be a leader; even now at the end of the season, each was too self-absorbed to do anything more than give lip service to the very idea of leadership. Manny was too moody, even if on the court both his talent and his will to win could seem like leadership. Johnson was too proud to put himself in that kind of role, self-conscious about his language skills, as if at some level he still carried the baggage of his Liberian childhood. Delonce was more of an observer by nature. And Wayne? Wayne was the great enigma, a leader on the court with the ball in his hands, disengaged off it.
Now they were all just part of the pack, jogging around the court’s perimeter. Somehow it seemed symbolic.
“Come on, Manny!” yelled Jim Black. “You should be leading the way.”
Manny continued jogging in the middle of the pack.
“Hey, J.J.!” Black yelled to the sophomore who had been brought up to the varsity now that the junior varsity season was over. “If you’re going to have an attitude, go home. We didn’t need you in the regular season and we don’t need you now.”
Manny continued to jog in the middle of the pack, expressionless, as if lost in some private rhythm.
“Go home, Superstar,” Nyblom yelled, the bite in his voice. “If you’re not going to work, just go home.”
“You’re a dog, and you’re lazy,” Nyblom called out to Eli Lewis. “You could be great, but you’re a dog.”
They kept jogging around the gym until Nyblom brought them to the circle at center court, where they sat down.
“You act like we’ve already won,” he said. “But right now our practice methods suck. So leave the gym. Go out in the hall and wait until I come get you.”
Manny walked over to the bleachers and picked up his cell phone.
“Leave the phone and get out.”
Ten minutes later Nyblom called them back in.
“Gentlemen, nothing in life is a given. You’ve got to earn it. You had something good going on here, but now it’s over.”
He pointed to two boxes on the side of the court.
“There are five pairs of shorts in that box, and there are thirteen pairs of shirts in that box. Coach Moors bought them with his own money. They better be here tomorrow, or we run again tomorrow. That’s your call.”
“Maybe we can actually look like a team,” Moors said.
“And each of you has to shut your mouth,” Nyblom said, pointing to Wayne. “There’s the door. If you don’t like what we’re doing and you want to go home, go.”
Then he pointed at Eli Lewis.
“You haven’t practiced hard all year, Eli, and now you’ve been loafing all day.”
Pedro Correia stood nearby, a disgusted look on his face. “Don’t cry when you lose Friday night,” he said.
They began a full-court defensive drill, but it didn’t take Nyblom long to tell Eli Lewis to go sit down. Then when Eli took his shirt off and threw it on the floor Nyblom told him to leave the gym and start running up and down the long hallway that went from the gym to the front of the school on one side of the courtyard.
“In ten minutes or so I’m going to come out. If I see you running the hallway hard maybe you can come back in. That’s maybe,” Nyblom said loudly to Eli. “But you better be running hard.”
A half hour later the players were back in the circle at half court, sitting down while Nyblom and the other coaches stood in front of them.
“If you all worked as hard as this kid,” he said, pointing to Johnson Weah, “we’d be undefeated. That kid plays defense every day for no glory. He doesn’t ask for anything. He doesn’t expect anything. He doesn’t question anything. He just brings it every day.”
He looked away, then back to his team.
“The games should be easy compared to our practices. Instead we have to put up with bullshit after bullshit.”
He pointed to Eli, shook his head.
“This kid has all the talent in the world, but he’s his own worst enemy.”
He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was softer, the edge gone.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to just have a good practice? If we did that we would roll over teams. The games would be easy. Instead, we loaf and have attitudes. We’re our own worst enemy.”
He again pointed to Eli.
“But this kid has a terrible attitude, and Devante is lazy, and Wayne is the worst kind of dog.”
The players sat silent on the floor.
“These coaches are volunteers,” he continued, motioning toward Moors, Rob Whalen, and Jim Black. “They don’t get paid and they spend all kinds of their own money on you. Do you appreciate it? Do you ever tell them you appreciate it?”
He looked away, the disgust all over his face.
“But you’re still lazy,” he continued, looking back at them. “We blow off practice like it doesn’t count, but we’re only two games away from being the state champions. Why?”
He pointed at Manny.
“Because Mr. Miserable over here can get to the rim better than anyone in the state, and when the lights go on you all come to play. I can’t coach that. Nobody can. You guys do that, and you should be proud of yourselves.”