On March 8, two yellow school buses were outside in the parking lot, and Keith Moors stood inside the cramped coach’s office, where the clock on the wall still said 6:32.
“They had a little thing for the players at URI this morning,” he said. “The room was packed. They had principals and athletic directors and players from all the teams there. None of our kids talked. They were all scared to death to talk.
“But I’m nervous. North Kingstown is the one team I didn’t want to see. They’re a good team, big and strong and experienced. They play well together. This is the worst matchup for us.”
One bus was the fan bus, the first time there had been one all season. But there were still no cheerleaders. A few years before, they had started out with twenty-five girl cheerleaders and ended up with six after endless feuds and personality clashes, and the cheerleading program was finally just dropped.
The buses went out of the parking lot and took a left on Hope Street. Most of the players had headsets on. Nyblom went down the aisle passing out candy bars. There would be no food before the game.
“What you do?” Moors asked. “Rob a candy store?”
The bus was soon stuck in traffic, with downtown off to the left and the West End off to the right. It was a dreary, foggy afternoon, with flakes of snow that didn’t stick. The ride took about an hour, as the traffic was heavy going to the southern Rhode Island suburbs, the bus passing through Warwick, East Greenwich, and North Kingstown before heading into South Kingstown and the University of Rhode Island.
The bus drove through the north end of the campus to the Ryan Center, a close-to-eight-thousand-seat arena, and the players went into one of the small locker rooms on the ground floor of the building. Wayne wore a white towel over his head.
“Forty-year-old point guard,” laughed Moors.
The game was an hour away.
Everyone was getting dressed except Wayne, and a song by Drake was all but bouncing off the walls.
“Started from the bottom now we’re here, nigga … Started from the bottom and the whole team fucking here.”
Rap had become the soundtrack to a generation, of course, both the celebration of the street and the commercialization of it.
Wayne put on blue socks, orange sneakers, and a big gray hooded sweatshirt over his blue uniform.
“Hey, Wayne,” Nyblom said as he walked into the locker room. “We put in a waiver so you can play with your hoodie on.”
Wayne took the hoodie off, only to reveal his black-and-gray Raiders hat.
“SSDD,” Nyblom laughed as he turned away. “Same shit, different day.”
The Drake song continued, “Nigga started from the bottom now we’re here.”
“I can’t stand it,” Pedro Correia said to me in the corner of the locker room. “I’m sixty years old. I know what that word meant. I was very angry in my younger years when kids began to use it, and I tried to explain to them what the word meant historically, but so much of that has been lost. They just don’t understand it.”
He looked out over the locker room as the song continued.
“We’ve made a ton of mistakes as a society,” he continued, “but this one can’t be justified. These kids don’t have a clue to what that word meant. The media should be ashamed. They’re selling these kids out.”
He paused, then spoke again, his words marked by pain and regret.
“I try not to overreact. But it burns me inside.”
He paused again, looked away, as if seeing something only he could see, then turned back and looked at the kids in the locker room, kids who reminded him of what he had once been like, a kid of color trying to figure out where he fit in the world, although he knew it was more difficult now, too many families under attack, too many neighborhoods under siege. “But you know what? You can’t not keep rooting for these kids. Because they have so many odds against them.”
* * *
Seven blue-and-white NCAA banners hung from the rafters of the Ryan Center, a large arena with dark blue seats. On this night a couple thousand people filled them, most from North Kingstown, a big suburban school in the neighboring town. It was the same North Kingstown team that had tattooed Hope back in their first home league game of the regular season, a night when Wayne didn’t play and Manny had been held out for the first half because he was being punished. Hope had been in complete disarray, and I had wondered about what I had signed up for, if following the Hope basketball team through a season would be worthwhile. They had come so far from that night of dysfunction and turmoil, when the state tournament seemed about as far away as some distant star in the nighttime sky.
North Kingstown was a good veteran team. This game would test Hope to its limits.
Hope warmed up for about fifteen minutes before coming back to the locker room, where Nyblom stood in the middle of the team.
“Let’s relax and have some fun,” he said. “There’s no reason to be nervous. This is basketball, gentlemen. And keep your mouth shut with the referees. Your job is to play basketball, and just keep doing what you’ve been doing.”
“We can’t lose here two years in a row,” said Delonce Wright. “We didn’t come here for nothing. This is our time.”
The coaches left the room and once again someone played the song by Drake, the new Hope anthem: “Started from the bottom now we’re here, nigga … Started from the bottom and the whole team fucking here.”
Once again they went out of the locker room wearing their white “Refuse to Lose” T-shirts over their uniforms, “A.F.P.” on the sides.
Went out to move one step closer to a state championship.
* * *
After the first few minutes they were leading 14-6, off to a great start. Only a few thousand people were in the arena, but its size and the importance of the game were a different reality from Hope’s little old gym on the second floor, the one that seemed stuck in some gone-forever decade. And unlike the game the two teams had played back at Hope in mid-December, when it was clear from the beginning that the veteran North Kingstown team was far superior, now the two teams seemed evenly matched, a tribute to how far Hope had come. Still, there were stylistic differences. North Kingston wanted to run their half-court offensive sets, basketball out of a textbook, even if the textbook had been upgraded to suit the times. Hope wanted to push the pace, use their athleticism to both pressure North Kingstown and create space where they could get to the rim before North Kingstown had a chance to set up defensively. This was the chess match, the game within the game.
With just under seven minutes left in the half Hope was down 15-14, a snapshot of how the game was going to play out. For, in truth, there was little difference between the two teams, save for their different philosophies. They both played with great intensity. And they both knew that if they lost their season was over, just like that, so they played with a sense of frenetic urgency, too. At the half Hope was down 28-24, once again hurt by the combination of their poor perimeter shooting and their struggles to finish at the rim.
“We took their best punch and we’re only down four,” said Moors as they came into the locker room. “So my halftime speech is real simple: make your layups.”
Nyblom pounded the same theme.
“Right now we’re sloppy and unfocused. We look nervous and we shouldn’t be. We’ve been here before and they haven’t. Look, gentlemen, we stunk and we’re only chasing four.”
He clapped his hands.
“Heart will lead us,” he said, his voice rising. “Hope on three.”
The players came together in a circle in the middle of the room, their hands touching as they held them high over their heads.
“ONE, TWO, THREE, HOPE!” they yelled.
For they still believed. Hadn’t they been in this same situation so many times before? Hadn’t this been the story of their season: getting off to poor starts, falling behind, and having to play catch-up? Hadn’t they always felt as if they were running up a mountain, as if the game had become symbolic of their lives, behind and trying to catch up, always trying to overcome the odds?
They quickly went down seven in the early minutes of the second half. Then Wayne hit two three-point shots to give them a one-point lead. But for all of their passion and all of their energy, they couldn’t hold the lead. North Kingstown kept running an effective offense, while they, in turn, were hurt by the same weaknesses that had been there since the season had started. With 6:10 left to play Hope was again trailing, by ten points, the scoreboard clock counting down the minutes of their season.
But then Manny scored on two drives to the basket, once again showing that he could get to the basket against anyone. So now, with five and a half minutes left in the game, they were only down five. But Johnson had four fouls and time was slipping away, precious seconds disappearing off the clock.
When Ben scored in the lane with 3:40 left Hope was only down three, still breathing, still alive, as if their season suddenly had found one more life. And in the last hectic minutes the tension rose, with a bigger crowd now, as more people had come for the second game of the doubleheader, Hope fighting for its season to continue.
With thirty-three seconds left in the game North Kingstown was leading 56-50 after a Chris Hess layup. They now appeared to be in control. But then Johnson Weah, who rarely ever took a three-point shot, made one with just 12.9 seconds left in the game. North Kingstown’s Hess then missed the front end of a one-and-one free throw. Now there was a shade over eight seconds left, Hope down three and needing a basketball miracle.
They got it.
Manny hit a three-point shot from the left side that tied the game.
Overtime.
Somehow it seemed only fitting.
Once again Hope had survived just when all was lost, as if this game had become a metaphor for their season, finding another life when it seemed as if they were out of them.
Could they capitalize on their momentum in overtime? Could they grab this game? Could they save this season, this season that already had been saved so many times before?
But it wasn’t to be.
Wayne had fouled out with two and a half minutes left in the game, so Hope entered the overtime undermanned. They quickly fell behind, so again they were trying to play catch-up, trying to overcome the odds. In the last minute, the seconds clicking off the scoreboard clock, Hope was down 66-61, in a frantic comeback attempt, in search of another little basketball miracle. But Manny’s three-point shot with just eleven seconds left was too little, too late, Hope losing 66-64 in overtime.
Manny had finished with twenty-one points, fifteen in the second half. Wayne had finished with seventeen.
More important, they had finished their high school careers, as had Johnson Weah, Delonce Wright, and Aaron Lynch.
As they came back to the locker room Marquis Young put his arm around Manny, as if supporting him. Manny sat down on a bench and pulled his blue uniform top over his head. The room was silent.
You could hear music outside the door, yelling and screaming. One game had ended, another was about to begin. One dream had ended. Others were still alive.
Jerry Morgan, the former Hope coach, and Ralph Taylor, who went back decades with minority athletes in Providence and now works as a community relations specialist at Hope, came into the room. They went around the room, quietly consoling the players, shaking their hands.
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Taylor said. “Sometimes it’s just the breaks of the game.”
In many ways Taylor was old Providence, had come of age when the city’s minority community had been much smaller, a time when he was just one phone call away from knowing whatever he had to know about anyone.
Nyblom walked into the middle of the room, began speaking in a low voice.
“It hurt last year and it hurts again this year. I was praying that the kids in this locker room that were here last year remembered how we felt then. We talked then about lifting, doing summer stuff. But it didn’t happen. And we should be here again next year if we do the right thing. Pay attention to school. Do the right thing at home. Support each other. But right now, going forward, everyone has to start thinking, school, school, school.”
Silence.
That, and the realization that it was over. All the practices. All the bus rides. All the afternoons after school in the Health Room. All the locker rooms in all the schools they had played at, and all the emotion. It was now suddenly over, already in the past tense, and with that came the knowledge, however unarticulated, that never again would they all be sitting together in the same way. For Manny Kargbo, Wayne Clements, Johnson Weah, and Delonce Wright were all alumni now, whether they realized it or not, no different from Shaq Jones and Shaun Hill, no different from Malieke Young and “Coach Lou,” from Mookie and Wook and Kofo and all the others who still floated in and out of the gym, here one minute, gone the next, as if the Hope gym were still their little life raft in a swirling sea. That was the great unspoken reality, of course, of how fleeting it all is—a season, a high school career, all of it.
“Keep your head up,” said Jerry Morgan, the old coach who had spent so much of his life in locker rooms just like this one. “I’m very proud of you.”
“So am I,” said Pedro Correia, this kind man who perhaps knew Hope and the kids who played at Hope better than anyone else, knew so many of the mountains they had to climb. “I’ve got nothing but praise for you. You overcame a lot of odds.”
And in the end it was Nyblom again, now in the role of trying to lift up his hurting team, this team that had come so close to getting back to the state finals, this team that he had pushed and prodded all season, this team that he had fought with and picked up, too; this team that now owned a piece of his heart, just like all the others he’d coached through the years. These players whom he will continue to help, just as he’s helped so many of the others, letting them hang around the gym during practice, or trying to get them into school somewhere, or just being their advocate, their booster, their friend.
That was the thing too few people understood, all the ones asking him through the years why he kept coaching at Hope, why he kept coaching kids few people wanted to deal with anymore, these kids who when they walked downtown white people crossed the street to avoid, all these dark-skinned kids in their hoodies, the ones society didn’t seem to have a place for anymore. Why did he keep doing it, season after season, year after year, starting at ground zero?
Why?
Now he stood in the center of this small locker room, minutes after the season had ended in overtime, in the cruelest of ways, the dream of winning a state championship in symbolic pieces all around them on the locker room floor.
“We love you guys,” he said, the emotion in his voice. “We love you.”