Hope’s next game was against Mount Pleasant, another big red fortress of a school that had been built with WPA money in the same era as Hope. It was across the city on the west side, in a residential neighborhood that bordered Triggs, the city-owned public golf course that had been designed by the famed Donald Ross. And it was next to Rhode Island College, too, a mostly commuter school that has been in Providence for half a century. But if Mount Pleasant once had been a middle-class school in a middle-class neighborhood, now it was an inner-city school in a middle-class neighborhood, beset with many of the same problems Hope faced.
Mount Pleasant’s assistant coach had been one of my inspirations to spend a year following Hope through a season. His name is Tom Conner, and I played pickup basketball with him for years. In March 2012 I had done a newspaper column on him, specifically what it’s like to coach an inner-city basketball team year after year.
“People have no idea,” said Conner, a former All State high school player who is white, and has coached high school teams in Providence for nearly two decades. “They have no idea what our kids go through just to play on a team.”
Like Hope, Mount Pleasant had several kids who went to other schools, but played basketball for Mount Pleasant.
“Just getting to the building every day is an accomplishment,” he continued. “So is getting home. Because they come from all over the city. Playing here is a major commitment. They start out with two strikes against them. They get here by themselves. They go home by themselves. The parents are never around; you almost never see them at games. It’s not easy. I have a tremendous amount of respect for these kids.”
I had already come to have the same feelings about the Hope kids, for it hadn’t taken me long to see that it wasn’t easy playing for Hope, for the same reasons Conner had expressed. There wasn’t much student support at games, certainly not like in a suburban school. There was hardly any community support, save for a few older guys who once had played. No one lived close enough to walk home, so all were on two buses afterward. There were no cheerleaders. No pep band. None of the pomp and circumstance we so often associate with high school sports. In all the important ways they did it for the love, and maybe the idea that it had the potential to take them someplace they could never get to without it, the basketball dream that hovers over every high school in the country.
There were rarely any parents at the games, save for Wayne Clements’s father, who came to most of the home games, and Aaron Lynch’s father, who came to a handful. Nor were parents waiting when the bus returned after road games.
One night, after one road game early in the season, I was on my way out of the small parking lot behind the gym when I saw Jeremy Rivera talking on his cell phone at the end of the larger parking lot near Olney Street. It was cold and dark, and he didn’t seem to be to wearing a winter coat. I asked him if he needed a ride.
“Someone was supposed to pick me up, but they’re not answering,” he said.
“No problem,” I said. “Get in.”
He said he was going home, and I knew he lived in the Chad Brown housing project a couple of miles away, over on the western side of the city near Providence College, the same place Angel Rivera lived.
“Are you and Angel really cousins?” I asked, trying to make conversation.
“We’re name cousins,” he said.
A minute later I heard him on his cell phone.
“Yeah, I’m getting a ride,” I heard him say.
He was silent for a couple of beats.
“The book dude.”
* * *
One of the Mount Pleasant players was Titus Kargbo, the younger brother of Manny. He is bigger than Manny, roughly six-foot-three.
“So why isn’t he here at Hope?” I asked Manny in the locker room about an hour before the game.
“I guess he wanted to compete against me,” he said with a shrug.
Oh.
Manny was on earphones, listening to a three-hundred-pound rapper called “Big Pun.” The team was down to thirteen players, in their white home uniforms with the blue-and-gold trim. And, as they had for most games, everyone wore different-colored socks, plus a few had different-colored sneakers—blue, orange, red—as if little statements of individuality.
The gym was packed, complete with six policemen. Three stood on one end of the gym, three on the other; they didn’t represent a menacing show of force, but were a presence nonetheless. As Moors said, this was a “city game.” Wayne Clements was again in the starting lineup, and quickly threw an around-the-back pass on a fast break for a layup, then made a three-pointer, two more quick examples that Hope was better when he was in the game. But in many ways it was a typical inner-city game, rough and physical, with both teams having trouble scoring. Hope led 23-13 at the half, despite having thirteen turnovers and going 1-8 from the foul line.
“BLUE WAVE, BLUE WAVE, BLUE WAVE,” the players chanted, as they huddled up before the second half started, their arms on each other’s shoulders, as they slowly moved back and forth like one large body.
They went on to win 58-48, after being up twenty-one points with a little under eight minutes to play, a good, solid win, building on the game at Charlestown. Manny had scored twenty-six points, and it was as though everything else fed off him, the game getting easier for everyone.
“I’m going to yell at you,” Nyblom said a few minutes later in the Health Room to Clements, “and I’m going to yell at him.”
He pointed to Manny.
“And I’m going to yell at him,” he said, pointing to Johnson Weah, “and you have to be man enough to take it.”
He looked out at everyone sitting at the tables in front of him.
“Whatever you have to do academically, gentlemen, is fine,” Nyblom said. “If that means you have to come late to practice because you’re doing extra help, that’s fine. And, gentlemen, if we play the way we can there’s nobody in the state that can beat you. But you have to do it.”
He paused a beat, then another.
“Wayne, you should be listening instead of talking.”
* * *
One cold, sunny afternoon I sat in a Burger King in South Providence, right off I-95. I was there with Yasah Vezele, the older sister of Ben, who had been to a couple of games, one with her mother, an older woman who appeared almost stately. This, in itself, made Yasah Vezele unusual, for very few family members ever went to the games. I also had the growing suspicion that I wasn’t going to be able to get a lot out of Ben. Whether it was shyness, or a certain wariness, he somehow seemed more distant than the others. He was one of the guys, no question about that, for he lived across the street from Quenton Marrow, and very close to Marquis Young and Wayne Clements, had known all three forever. Jim Black had coached his AUU team and had come to believe Ben was much more grounded than his teammates, due to his stable family situation, and that several of his AAU teammates had always seemed to gravitate to Ben because of his family.
Yasah was a decade older, attending graduate school at the University of Rhode Island. She too had been born in Liberia, going through elementary school there. Her father, who had attended college in the United States in Montana, worked for a mining company. He had fathered three girls before he married Yasah and Ben’s mother.
“We went through a lot with the war and all,” she said. “We thought everything was lost.”
She paused.
“We’ve seen horrible things,” she said softly.
Civil war had started in Liberia in the late ’80s, and, in retrospect, it was probably inevitable. The country on the African coast had been founded by freed former American slaves, who replicated many of the same social structures they had known in the United States. But this time they were the royalty, complete with plantation-style houses. That colonization had begun in the 1820s, and in 1847 the new country became the Republic of Liberia. Its capital city, Monrovia, was named for James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, who had been a prominent supporter of the colonization. The descendants of these early colonists, known as Americo-Liberians, became the political, social, and economic leaders of the country for over 130 years, even though they were a minority of the population.
They were called the “Congo People,” and in some ways they lived lavish lifestyles, with big houses, servants, trips to Europe, and vacation homes. The indigenous people were called “Country,” and lived far different lifestyles: much poorer, not well educated, the servant class. But when the revolution came, led by a Liberian army sergeant named Samuel Kanyon Doe, it was brutal, with tens of thousands of civilians being massacred.
These are the broad brush strokes, but they don’t tell the human story. I first became aware of what it felt like to live through that war in 1990, reading a story in the Providence Journal by a young black reporter named Helene Cooper, whom I used to see around the newsroom back then but didn’t know. She would go on to work for both the Washington Post and the New York Times, and to publish a powerful memoir in 2008 about growing up in Liberia called The House at Sugar Beach.
She had written about her initial reluctance to document what she had seen as a child for fear her relatives still in Liberia would be punished, but said that she had come to believe in the power of the written word to get the story out to the world, regardless of the consequences.
“Believing that…,” Cooper wrote, “I wrote about what happened to my family at the hands of Doe’s soldiers. I wrote about how my mother was raped at gunpoint by five drunken soldiers, in a bid to save me from a similar fate, a fate suffered by many of my ninth-grade classmates. I wrote about how my mom, my sister and I were shot at, how my father was wounded, how my uncle was executed on the beach—again by Doe’s drunken soldiers. I wrote, in graphic detail, about exactly what the media was referring to when they use the phrase, ‘Doe took power in a bloody pre-dawn coup.’”
The second Liberian Civil War would begin in 1997 and last six years, ending when President Charles Taylor, who once had been a student at Bentley College in Massachusetts, was eventually charged with war crimes and sent to prison. The two civil wars lasting from 1989 to 2003 killed an estimated 250,000 Liberians and displaced about a million more. The country’s roads, power grid, and other basic structures were destroyed.
When Yasah Vezele was a child in Liberia there were two camps for Liberian refugees, one in Guinea and one in Ghana. Their family was Yasah, her older sister, and her parents, as Ben hadn’t been born yet. Yasah was just a child. At one point her father had to pay some guides to take them out of harm’s way.
“God had his hand on us,” she said.
In December 1995 the family landed at Kennedy Airport in New York City, arriving with the clothes on their backs. They soon made it to Providence, which had become one of the hubs of the Liberian presence in the United States, and began to build a new life in a house in South Providence her parents built. Yasah has always seen it as a good neighborhood, one that had a lot of action in it yet never felt particularly dangerous to her, even if many of her friends no longer lived there. But she was serious about school, and she had come to believe that her schools in the Liberia of her childhood had been better than those in America. She had also come to believe that if someone had come to Hope after the tenth grade in Liberia they would have ended up the valedictorian of their class.
“My family really valued education,” Yasah Vezele said. “You were expected to come home with A’s. School was serious business. You were not there to fool around.”
That, too, was a lesson she brought with her from Liberia, where school was something you paid to go to, something important. She had been an excellent student at Hope, and also played softball, basketball, and volleyball, in which she was the MVP for two straight years. She graduated with honors.
“I loved Hope,” she said.
She then went to the University of Rhode Island, part of the school’s Talent Development program, geared to help minority kids in Rhode Island with academic potential. She did very well in college, because for her college was about hard work and taking advantage of opportunities, about education and bettering yourself, all the things she calls her values.
Ben is almost a decade younger, the first boy in the family.
“He is our answered prayer,” she said.
“I had to be in the house at a certain time when I was a kid,” Ben told me one day. “There were rules. And education is respected.”
Left unsaid was that for many of his teammates education was not respected.
Vezele also, in a certain sense, grew up with Hope in ways most of the other kids did not. His sister took him to basketball games when he was seven or eight years old. He was exposed to things as a child that many of his teammates didn’t understand, maybe the most important being the value of education, its potential to change lives. But that came with a certain asterisk, too. For he knew that to get to college he was going to need a scholarship.
“I have to get a scholarship,” he said. “My parents can’t afford to send me to college.”
This is said with no emotion, simply a statement of fact.
* * *
The team was back in the Health Room two nights later, about to play Smithfield, a suburban school in the northwest part of the state. It was a team they were expected to beat, especially after the big win over Mount Pleasant, and Nyblom was pushing the same theme he had repeated since the season began, that if they only could learn to play together and play the right way, to start thinking about the team and not just about themselves, there was no team in the state that could beat them. It had been his mantra. And if the game at Charlestown had been the turning point, the first time this team had looked like the one he had envisioned last summer, he still knew how fragile it all was. One great win against Mount Pleasant didn’t mean that it would automatically transfer over to the game tonight against Smithfield. No two games were the same, and all too often his players’ greatest opponents were themselves.
So when Manny came into the room eating potato chips, as casually as though he were going to take a nap somewhere, Nyblom felt a sense of foreboding.
“Who’s the best shooter in the room?” one kid asked.
“I don’t know,” Manny said, pondering the question. “I’d say me.”
“Who has the most air balls this season?” Moors asked.
“Manny,” several yelled out, and everyone laughed, even Manny.
Winning did that, of course. It softened the rough edges, made everyone get along better. But Nyblom knew the team’s dynamic was more complicated. So minutes later when they went out to warm up in preparation for the game, he didn’t know what to expect.
Neither did Rob Whalen.
“Our body language is terrible,” he said. “If you walked in here you would think someone had died. We just don’t look ready. Wayne’s sitting there with his shoelaces untied. Marquis is miserable because he’s not playing. We just don’t seem ready to play.”
To make matters worse, the gym felt like a sauna. One day cold. One day hot. You never knew. The players huddled together, began their customary pregame chant:
“BLUE WAVE”
“BLUE WAVE”
“BLUE WAVE”
“OOH-AAH.”
“Do you want to play today?” Nyblom asked Wayne Clements. “Because you don’t look like it.”
Clements shrugged.
“I’m all right.”
But the team wasn’t. By halftime they were back in the Health Room and down two.
“This is awful,” Jim Black said softly as we walked into the room together.
Nyblom certainly thought so.
“You let this team, this team that’s much less athletic than you are, beat you to the ball,” he said. “You are three for twelve from the free-throw line. You’ve given them life, and if you don’t come out in the second half and bury them we’re going to be in trouble.”
He hesitated, as if searching for the right words.
“This team is terrible, and this game is unbearable to watch. We need this game. We need this game. We need this game. Period. For if we lose this it’s going to be virtually impossible to get where we’re trying to go.”
The second half was a struggle. Hope finally went up three with a little over nine minutes to play, and eventually ground out a nine-point win that really didn’t seem like a win.
Nyblom apologized to the kids who hadn’t gotten into the game, because it was becoming apparent that he was going to have a problem with Marquis Young, the nephew of Laurence Young, a junior who was not getting any meaningful time. Not only was his older brother Malieke often in the gym, but Marquis Young was a strong personality. And Nyblom knew that nothing had the potential to damage a team’s delicate makeup as much as kids who didn’t play a lot, especially on teams that weren’t winning. This had been a game when he figured he had a chance to get everyone some significant minutes, the kind of game that keeps teams happy, the reward for all the tough practices, a continuation of the trip to Charlestown. But it hadn’t happened, as if the trip to Charlestown and the good feeling of that day had been an aberration and now they were back in the same holding pattern they had been in since practice had first started.
So now he pointed to Wayne Clements.
“This little mutt, who stunk in the first half, made a big shot and played great in the second half. But, gentlemen, there’s no excuse not to have beaten that team by twenty-five tonight. But my wife’s in the gym and she brought some cookies, so let’s go celebrate.
“But one more thing.
“You have two weeks before the semester ends, and if you have any problem in class, or at home, or with one of your teachers and you need a place to get away for a while, you can come stay with me and we’ll get something worked out. And remember, when you show up late teachers come to me. And when you’re acting silly, Jeremy, they also come to me. All right, let’s come together.”
“ONE, TWO, THREE, HOPE,” they all yelled as they gathered in a circle.
But the next afternoon at practice, once again, it was like starting from scratch. Manny wasn’t there. Delonce Wright had left school sick. Wayne was wearing a yellow practice jersey, while everyone else was in blue-and-white ones, and a sophomore kid from the jayvee team named J.J. was there. Or LBH, as Moors referred to him.
“Lucky to Be Here,” Moors said. “Every year we have one. Just like we have an ‘All World’ every year.”
“You guys can screw up an easy practice,” bellowed Nyblom.
A few minutes later Manny walked in.
“Where you been?” Nyblom asked.
“I had to do something for my aunt.”
Nyblom just shook his head and walked way. But a few minutes later, after witnessing another basketball mini-atrocity, a graphic reminder of why they were 3-5 and staring up from a deep hole if they wanted to make the playoffs, he yelled out, “CAN WE PLEASE PAY ATTENTION?”
“Wayne doesn’t remember any of the three years he’s been here,” muttered Moors. “The teams he’s played against. Any of it.”
But Dennis Wilson is back from whatever hiatus he’s been on, or as Johnson Weah said to Moors, after being asked where Wilson had been, “This is Hope; we have things to do.”
“Hey, Johnson, want some fried goat tomorrow?” Moors shot back, a reference to Johnson’s Liberian childhood.
Johnson laughed.
It was all low key, a reminder that the season was a long, emotional journey. Long ago Nyblom had learned that it can’t be all out, every day. He had also learned that his players’ emotional state was infinitely more important than their physical one.
The next day wasn’t low key.
It was Saturday, January 12, and Hope had another non-league game scheduled, against East Hartford, a Connecticut high school. All the players were there except Jeremy Rivera, a small reserve guard, who rarely played.
“Jeremy’s all done,” Nyblom said with no emotion in his voice. “Angel said he’d rather work.”
Jeremy had also quit last year, but had played in the fall league, asking for another chance. Now he was gone again.
East Hartford was another inner-city team, save for one little white point guard no one from Hope could defend, who played like a pint-sized version of NBA star Steve Nash, darting here, there, and everywhere, even as he played with a long gray shirt underneath his uniform top. It was a decent game, played before a smattering of people, Hope eventually losing 73-60.
Both teams gathered afterward in the cafeteria, a large room in the school’s basement, maybe thirty yards from where the boys’ locker room was. It was an old, drab room with red and white pillars and a big yellow sign on the wall that said, “Show Your Politeness, Respect, Discipline, Excellence.”
There were trays of food, served by Nyblom’s wife, Tammie, and his mother, Audrey; Nyblom not only loved to cook, he spent part of his summers working for a caterer, and often brought meals to his players. But the highlight of the afternoon was an impromptu “rap-off” between the two teams. They stood next to each other in the cafeteria, with one kid from East Hartford rapping, then one from Hope. Rap as theater. Rap as competition. Rap as sport. Rap as verbal shorthand. Rap as one of the lifebloods of these kids’ world; the music that sprang from the same inner-city neighborhoods they were growing up in, the music that not only spoke to their experience of the word, but glorified it, too—the street violence, the misogyny, the attitude, all of it. It’s the music that had long ago defined youth culture, and it was now everywhere, from the halftime shows at the Super Bowl, to its biggest stars being invited to the White House, deeply imbedded in American culture.
The two teams went back and forth, in each other’s faces, more animated than they had been during the game, for this was competition too, and maybe more important because it was theirs and theirs alone. No coaches. No schools. No referees in striped shirts. No adults imposing their rules and regulations, their structure.
Until the final rap.
“I know you’re totally hip to your fade,” one of the Hartford players rapped, his teammates right behind him, the Hope players right in front of him, all the kids energized, “but that one looks like it’s homemade.”
He then fell back into the arms of his cheering teammates, who caught him as though he had just hit a dramatic walk-off home run and they were meeting him at home plate in triumph and about to carry him off in some symbolic chariot, as if Hope had lost both the game and the rap contest, too.