Four days later Hope was due to take another bus trip, this time to Charlestown, Massachusetts, the tiny city of one square mile that sits in the shadow of Bunker Hill, seemingly no more than a jump shot away from the Boston Garden and downtown Boston.
It was a brilliant sun-splashed Saturday morning. The night before, Hope had lost at Coventry, in another game they could have won but didn’t, another game where they hadn’t played well. So now their official record was 1-5, and a season that had started out as a disappointment was now close to turning into a disaster. The discontent was everywhere.
The loss had followed two days of desultory practices after the win over Woonsocket, ending any hope that that game was going to miraculously change the season. The first practice had come with the news that Dennis had finally quit, done in by too many personal problems that had weighed him down from the start of the season.
“His choice,” Jonathan Weah said tersely.
But they all knew they were better with Dennis, for on a team where nobody seemed able to make two jump shots in a row, Dennis could. Or at least he had done so the year before. Manny had missed one practice with an excused absence, Nyblom seemed preoccupied with bad school progress reports, and any bump they had gotten with the win in Woonsocket seemed negated by the loss at Coventry. If nothing else, a 1-5 record in January was digging a deep hole, the kind that had the potential to bury a season before it had had a chance to begin.
So the mood in the cramped phys. ed office before the bus to Charlestown showed up was gloomy at best.
“I came into coaching with ideals,” Pedro Correia said, almost forlornly. His jayvee team had been terrible so far, but it was more than that. It was the sense that something important had been irrevocably lost, not just on the basketball court, but in a generation of kids who seemed clueless, cast adrift in a rudderless society whose obstacles the kids were powerless to overcome.
“But it’s all so different now. Because you have to lower your ideals. You have to be flexible in ways you never had to be before.”
“The street gangs are worse than anyone thinks,” said Moors, who worked for years as a guard at the state prison in nearby Cranston. “You see that in the prison system. They come in with their gang bond, which is why they take pictures of all your tattoos when you get into the prison system. Then they become friends with people inside who have shot some of their family members. The whole thing’s unbelievable, just so sad, for so many of them are just kids with no clue. But on the outside they’ve all got guns. And there’s a lot of gunfire in Providence every night. It’s just not all reported.”
But some of it certainly was. It had become all but impossible to pick up the Providence Journal in a given week and not see story of street violence, the type of story that once would have been a rarity. I had lived much of my adult life in Providence and had always found it a very livable, safe city. That had changed, as had the city’s perception. There had been too many news stories in the Providence Journal, too many grisly images on the television news. The city was tougher now, and many of the urban ills were getting more and more difficult to avoid.
A few minutes later the yellow school bus left the parking lot and headed down Olney Street to I-95 and the start of the hourlong ride from Providence to Boston.
I sat on the bus with Quenton Marrow, the thin six-foot-five junior with black-framed glasses who had gotten into the argument in the locker room with Manny after the loss in South Kingstown earlier in the season. There was something different about Marrow. He always dressed well. He was always friendly, open, in ways many of the other kids were not. He also seemed more grounded than many of the others, in that he had no desire to be a professional basketball player, the stereotypical fantasy of so many inner-city kids.
“I want to be an electrician,” he said as the bus drove up the interstate.
He lived on the South Side, across the street from Ben Vezele and close to Wayne Clements and Marquis Young, and had gone to Roger Williams Middle School. He had wanted to attend Classical, the longtime academic jewel of the Providence school system, but didn’t get accepted. So his next choice was Hope, where two of his older sisters had gone, even though most mornings he had to walk, since he lived 2.8 miles from Hope, just two tenths of a mile away from being eligible for free bus passes. And since his father lived in Boston, and his mother recently had been laid off at work, he couldn’t afford to take the bus every day.
He said how, at some level, he regretted the verbal spat with Manny in the locker room after the loss at South Kingstown, but that he had to let his frustration out, that he had kept it bottled up for too long. He wanted the team to do well, and it was all but driving him crazy that Manny hadn’t been acting like a captain.
When he first got to Hope he was surprised by how many fights there were, and by how one kid had recently been arrested for having a weapon in school. He said there had been a lot of fights recently, and just yesterday there had been a fight between two Latino kids. Most of all, though, his experience there had taught him an indelible lesson.
“The stuff that happens at Hope doesn’t happen at Classical,” he said.
The bus was getting closer to Boston when Marrow said that it gave him hope when Barack Obama was elected president, because he saw how happy it made his mother, and it also gave him hope that maybe things could change. The family plan was to leave Providence in the summer of 2014 after he graduated, to go to Virginia, where his mother’s family is from. So he was preparing to go to college there, another example that Quenton was more grounded than most of the other players.
“What do you know about Brown?” I asked, for I knew that so many of the Hope kids, including him, walked by it every day, in their trek down Thayer Street to the bus tunnel that went downtown to Kennedy Plaza, where the buses to the varying parts of the city originated.
“Not much,” he said.
“How about if I told you that it’s one of the most prestigious colleges in the country and there are kids who come from all over the world to go there?”
He looked at me.
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
He looked away for a second, out the window, before turning back to me.
“I’ve heard they have a good cooking school,” he said.
No matter that Marrow was getting Brown confused with Johnson & Wales, a different university in Providence that did have a good cooking school. It was a sad reminder how little these kids knew of so many things the rest of us in Providence took for granted, how disconnected they were. Not only was Brown the seventh oldest college in the country, but its hockey rink and gym were literally less than two hundred yards away from Hope, to the point that you could stand on the corner of Hope and Lloyd Avenue outside the Brown hockey rink and feel as if you could almost touch the high school. So it almost defied belief that so many of these kids were clueless about what it was, and what it represented, even though there were Brown students who came to Hope nearly every afternoon to help tutor Hope kids. It was as though the Brown students and the Hope ones lived in distinct parallel universes within a few hundred yards of each other.
The bus was moving through Boston on this bright winter day, now on the Tobin Bridge, having just passed the Boston Garden, where both the Celtics and the Bruins play.
“Have you ever been to the Garden?’ I asked.
“No,” he said.
Off in the distance, on the other side of the Charles River, was Harvard, visible in all its splendor in the noontime sunshine.
“What’s the most prestigious college in the country?” I asked.
“Harvard?” he asked, the question in his voice.
“You’re right, Quenton,” I said. “Do you know where it is?”
“Not really,” he said.
“It’s right there,” I said, pointing out the window.
“Really,” said Quenton Marrow, with a big smile on his face.
* * *
Charlestown High School sits in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument, complete with its own tortured history, one of the centerpieces of the Boston busing crisis in the early ’70s that was all over the network news at the time, a time of racial unrest in this old city referred to as “the Athens of America,” the city of Lexington and Concord and Paul Revere, this city whose history was intertwined with America’s. It was racial unrest, with all its ugly fury, and it had shocked the country at the time. For this wasn’t some southern backwater; this was Boston, “the city upon a hill,” the city that had featured the country’s first public school as far back as 1865, the city that had spawned the anti-slavery movement, women’s rights, civil disobedience, and the philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism.
If the first battleground in Boston’s racial crisis then was South Boston, a white, ethnic, Irish working-class neighborhood that erupted when black kids from other parts of the city were bused in to achieve racial balance in the schools, as mandated by federal law, Charlestown had been the second battleground. It had begun September 8, 1975, the morning of the first day of the new school year. And making it all the more horrific was that it was happening outside a high school in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument, a 221-foot granite obelisk that had been erected in 1843 to commemorate the Battle of Bunker Hill, the site of the first major battle between the British and the Patriots’ forces in the Revolutionary War. This had been one of the most famous battles of that war, remembered by schoolchildren for one of the most famous lines in American history: “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” Charlestown was also the place that had been represented in the U.S. Congress both by John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and his grandson John F. Kennedy. It was in the northern section of Boston, one square mile of narrow streets, three-deckers, and bars, and now in many ways it’s been gentrified, discovered by the Yuppies, who love its proximity to downtown, its rehabbed old buildings, and its newfound city charm.
Inside the Charlestown High School gym, red championship banners from 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2005 hung on one wall.
Because it was a nonleague game, one that didn’t really affect Hope’s record, the vibe was a little different, as if everything had been turned down a notch. But for a team that was now 1-4 in the league with its season close to imploding, it was all about getting better before it was too late. But this time Nyblom didn’t coach; he sat one row behind the bench as Moors coached. The gesture was Nyblom’s way of not only giving Moors more game coaching experience, but also letting his players hear a different voice. Once again, Hope wore their dark blue road uniforms with the gold trim and “Blue Wave” in white on the front of the jerseys.
Hope showed very little energy in the pregame warmups. It was the afternoon, there were maybe fifty people watching in seven rows of bleachers, and Hope had played the night before. Loud rap music was bouncing off the walls. Charlestown wore blue warmups with red-and-white trim and looked like a real team; they had the kind of size you didn’t see in the Rhode Island Interscholastic League. It figured to be a long afternoon.
Then it happened.
The Manny everyone had been waiting for was on full display as if he suddenly had turned into a mini–Dwyane Wade in the prime of his career. He went through Charlestown. He went around them. He was unstoppable in the open court, finishing at the rim with both hands. He did it over and over, taking the ball inside against bigger guys and scoring over them. And just when it seemed Charlestown was going to survive the blitz, he would do it again. He finished with thirty-six points in a thirty-two-minute game, as Hope held on to win 72-69, by far their best performance of the season.
“That’s the first time we’ve seen Manny all year,” said Pedro Correia afterward.
But as great as he was, he wasn’t the entire story for Hope.
For Wayne Clements finally made his comeback.
He had started the game, and from the beginning it was quickly apparent that he made Hope a better team. A point guard who didn’t play in a constant frenzy, he provided instant stability. Moors called him “the forty-year-old point guard,” and in many ways he was right on target. There was something very old-school about Wayne as a basketball player, as if in a speeded-up frantic basketball world only he stayed under control. He wasn’t extremely quick, and he didn’t have exceptional speed, but he definitely knew how to play, no insignificant thing in a basketball world where too few kids knew how to, even the talented ones. He handled the ball well. He changed speeds. He made the right pass. And he could make open three-pointers, something no one else on the team could do with any regularity. Since the season had started, all the coaches agreed that Wayne Clements would make the team better.
He did.
And coupled with a happy, focused Manny, he helped the team play like the one the coaches thought Hope could be.
“That was fun,” Nyblom said afterward in a joyous locker room. “That’s the way basketball is supposed to be played. No yelling at each other. No talking back to the coaches. No sulking. Playing the right way.”
The game had come at exactly the right time. There had been too much losing, too much discontent, too much frustration. This had been sheer, unadulterated fun, everyone getting into the game. A win, complete with the smiles and the sound of laughter afterward. It spoke to many things, of course, not the least being the resilience of youth. Forgotten was the loss to Coventry the night before. Forgotten was the record. They had won a game and on the bus ride out of Boston in the gathering dusk, all of the realities of the season had been momentarily forgotten. Hadn’t Tolstoy said that all happy families are alike? So are winning basketball teams.
A half hour later the bus was halfway down I-95, on the way back to Providence, the back of the bus full of noise and laughter, when the word that most infuriated Nyblom could be heard.
“ENOUGH,” Nyblom said, getting out of his seat in the front of the bus and staring into the back of it. “I DON’T WANT TO HEAR THAT WORD.”
“You know what the biggest joke is?” yelled Moors to the back of the bus. “We’re still 1-5.”
* * *
The next afternoon I sat in the coffee shop of Old Mountain Lanes in South Kingstown with Nyblom. It is across the street from the recreation complex where his father fell off the back of a truck while attempting to fix one of the basketball hoops and died shortly afterward. Nyblom was twenty-nine at the time and had never imagined his father dying so suddenly.
“It was devastating,” he said.
In many ways he had enjoyed an idyllic childhood. All four of his grandparents had been alive, and came to his games when he was a kid. His paternal grandparents had owned season tickets to the University of Rhode Island basketball games at Keaney Gym on the nearby University of Rhode Island campus, and they often took him along. He played football, basketball, and baseball as a kid. Later on, he spent summers unloading fishing boats on the nearby docks in Galilee along the southern Rhode Island coast and worked at basketball camps. Most of all, he learned the lesson he’s always carried with him, the lesson that runs through his coaching philosophy: treat people the way you want to be treated and you’ll never have a problem.
He knew early that he wanted to be a phys. ed teacher and a coach, so when the first job opened up in an elementary school in Providence he took it. That eventually led to one at the Roger Williams Middle School in the heart of inner-city South Providence, and two years later to the job as a physical education teacher at Hope.
“All I really knew about Hope then was that it was inner-city, and they were good athletically,” he said.
It was 1989 and Hope housed roughly fifteen hundred kids then, as many as six hundred more students than it has now. There were only four public high schools then in Providence, not the thirteen there are now, including smaller schools and charter schools. And from the beginning he liked Hope. But now it was nearly twenty-five years later and time had not been kind to the school. The heating system was old and needed constant attention. There was a water pipe problem, complete with a sub-basement that was often full of water. Hope was wearing its age. It had been seventy-seven years since Hope opened as a showcase school that was all about the future. To Nyblom, it had long ago become a money pit. Administrators come and go, and so do educational philosophies.
“Many of the kids come in here with reading and writing skills at the sixth- or seventh-grade level,” he said.
He has also seen the racial makeup of Hope change dramatically, going from roughly 60 percent African American when he first arrived to roughly 60 percent Hispanic now. But to Nyblom, it wasn’t just the racial makeup that was different, it was the culture, too. The girls who want to get pregnant. The kids who arrive in need of significant academic help. The kids who can’t sit still in class. It was the fact that most of the fights at Hope are girl fights. That boys put pictures of themselves doing something illegal on Facebook and wonder why they get arrested. It was the fallout from rap culture, in which entertainers who are cultural icons to kids sing about guns and slinging drugs and going to jail. It was the gang signs—the “tags”—that were everywhere, if you knew what you were looking for. In short, it had all the problems that come from a society in crisis.
“Jeremy is a father to be,” Nyblom said.
No wonder he’s not always around, I thought, another kid who has far greater realities to deal with than how much playing time he gets.
“We have six hundred kids who come every day to first lunch in the cafeteria,” Nyblom went on, “and five hundred leave their stuff on the floor. African kids arrive here in this country and they’re very polite. They come here and everything changes.”
And most of all, there were the kids he knew who didn’t make it, for one reason or another. These were the ones that haunted Nyblom, all the little tragedies through the years, the ones he will never forget, the ones in the future he’s always trying to save, right there on his personal scorecard. For he saw many more gangs now than when he started, especially in the past five years. Some members were kids he never would have suspected, good kids dragged in by peer pressure and other reasons, and so much of the conflict was over nothing, this street against another street, lives ruined over an address. He has had kids who were terrified of cops, kids who saw them as the enemy. He has had kids who used terms like “nigga” and “motherfucker” as common speech, a vulgarization of the language that was the result of both rap music and a popular culture that glorifies street culture.
This was his world, and it was one that some of his friends have never understood, always asking him after too many beers, “How can you coach those kids?” It was a world of disconnected phones and changed addresses, kids who always seemed to be moving, as if change were a shadow they could never shake. And it was the guys in the black community who questioned him, like this fuckin’ white guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, what’s he doing coaching Hope? Most of all, it was all the drama that was right there on the scoreboard somewhere, the drama that never seemed to go away. Like the time he ended a season with just seven players, though that was fine with him because those seven did the right things.
It was a world he’d lived in for a long time now.
But he knew he’d paid a price for it, too. He lived in South Kingstown, thirty-five miles south of Providence, with his wife, Tammie, and their two kids, in the same family compound he’d grown up in, and his days were long, leaving the house at six every morning and returning over twelve hours later, as he also coached girls’ soccer in the fall. He had missed many of his own kids’ activities through the years, events he knew he would never get back. But he still loved what he did every day, because it was all he’d ever wanted to do.