It was June 2014, fifteen months after that night in the Ryan Center, and once again Nyblom had to give a eulogy for one of his former players.
This time it was for Derek Knighton, who had died of leukemia. Five years earlier he had been shot in the parking lot of a Providence nightclub, hit by a bullet that had been fired into the car he was in at closing time. Who fired on him? Why was he shot? Was it just a random act of violence in a city that seemed to have more of it all the time? Or was this just one more deadly incident in a long-standing feud between the Browns and the Lassiters and their extended families, which have been at each other’s throats now for decades, a litany of murder and violence in Providence for a quarter of a century, passed down through the generations like some malevolent heirloom?
How did it start?
No one seemed to know anymore.
Knighton, who was part of the Lassiter family, had been an All State player for Hope, described by Nyblom as “a tough kid, someone who came from nothing.” He grew up in the city’s embattled west side, and Nyblom remembers the beds in Knighton’s apartment were on cinder blocks with a piece of plywood over them. He also remembers giving Knighton and his brother a ride home from Hope, and that when they were getting out of the car and a ten-year-old kid went riding by on a bicycle the two boys were so spooked they jumped into nearby bushes.
He was one of the former players who always kept in touch with Nyblom, even if much of his life was in the street.
“I knew he was carrying a gun,” Nyblom said. “He said he needed it.”
He paused.
“He was a real tough, streetwise kid. But every once in a while he would break down and start bawling, say how he wanted to have a mother and father around.”
Hope’s season had been over for six weeks or so when Nyblom heard of Knighton’s death. The season had begun with a certain optimism even if Manny, Wayne, Delonce, and Johnson were gone. Manny was at the University of California at Riverside—shepherded there by Hope’s first-year principal, Tamara Sterling, who knew someone there—even though Manny wasn’t academically eligible to play basketball his first year. He had been around during Christmas break, coming to practice and a couple of games. He had been happy, smiling, as if the pressure and angst he had felt for so much of his senior year had lifted. Delonce was at Dean, a junior college in nearby Franklin, Massachusetts, although for some reason hadn’t played either football or basketball. Still, he came to a few games, visited the locker room, one of the alumni.
Johnson would make an appearance every once in a while too. He attended the Community College of Rhode Island. He was on the basketball team, playing in the same gym where just a few months before two of his teammates had held up his jersey when he had been banned from the playoff game due to the fight at La Salle, back when Hope had been all over the news. Also on that team was Malieke Young, nephew of Laurence Young, another alumnus.
Even Wayne showed up every once in a while.
He had failed to graduate high school, but was making up some credits, the plan being to play the following year at Johnson & Wales, a Providence school that played a Division III basketball schedule. He seemed happier too, as if the pressure he had felt the year before was now gone.
Their occasional presence was a reaffirmation that there really was a Hope basketball family, as dysfunctional as it could sometimes seem. It’s what the coaches had been telling me the year before. For now these four were no different from Mookie and Wook, and “Captain Lou,” and all the others who were part of this big extended family that went back through the decades.
The new alumni.
This is what no one else saw, of course. It didn’t show up in the record book. It wasn’t in the Providence Journal, or on the local television stations. It never got trumpeted. In fact, there were people in his own building, teachers and administrators alike, who had no idea what Nyblom routinely did to push his kids into colleges, who essentially saw him as the big, burly guy who walked around in shorts all day.
And in June 2014 there were two other kids from the team I had followed the year before going off to college, as both Marquis Young and Devante Youn were headed to the University of Rhode Island in the fall, accepted into the school’s Talent Development program, the one designed for promising minority students from the state.
And then there was Ben Vezele.
Two months earlier he was named to the All State team by the Providence Journal, one of the five best high school players in Rhode Island. It had been a disappointing season for Hope, one that had ended just short of making the playoffs, but in many ways Vezele had come into his own. He had grown bigger, now about six-foot-four, more assertive, one step closer to the potential the coaches always saw in him. He had come so far from the year before, was less shy, to the point that on the June morning I was supposed to meet him in the small parking lot behind Hope and couldn’t find him, he yelled out, “Hey, Reynolds, over here,” from a nearby car. He never would have had the confidence to do that the year before.
He had graduated, and in the fall he would be going off to Wilbraham & Monson, a New England prep school that’s been around since 1804, one of those leafy places that speak of old money and privilege, so far from Hope and his South Providence neighborhood.
“A year ago I didn’t even know what a prep school was,” he said.
He was sitting in the front seat of my car and saying how prep school was so important because it was his passport to college. And as he talked about it I thought of my conversation with his sister, Yasah, a few months earlier; how she remembered fleeing Liberia to a refugee camp, how “God had his hand on us,” and how soon after they made their way to Rhode Island and this new life; how Ben had been the first boy after five sisters, and how she had called him “our answered prayer.”
Now he was talking about how important college was to him, looking outside the car window for something only he could see, this inner-city kid on the morning after his high school graduation, this kid who knew all about his family’s tortured history, this family that had seen things no one should ever see.
“My father is getting old, and I’m the only male,” Vezele said softly. “So I have to one day become the leader of my family.”
Vezele’s going to prep school in the fall of 2014 also meant that there now would be seven kids from that team I had followed the season before continuing their education after Hope, an amazing figure for an inner-city high school team in Providence.
It was a testimony to several things, of course, not the least being the constant prodding from Nyblom and the other coaches, the message that there was a bigger world outside of the Hope gym, one that was open to them if they would only do the right things. Hadn’t this been the message in all those after-practice sessions when they would sit at half court, when it so often seemed as if they were going to drown in the dysfunction swirling all around them? Hadn’t this always been Nyblom’s refrain, that the world could open up to them if only they would let it; that the world was full of opportunities and that you didn’t have to be defined by your neighborhood, didn’t have to be defined by other people’s perceptions of you?
In many ways this was Nyblom’s great gift, and it had nothing to do with all the x’s and o’s drawn on blackboards, nothing to do with wins and losses, nothing to do with all the obvious ways coaches are measured.
That, and his unwavering loyalty.
Year after year.
A couple of weeks later, one of the last days of the school year, Nyblom sat in the cramped little coach’s office, the one that looked as if the calendar on the wall said 1958, and the clock still read 6:32. Two kids from the past season’s jayvee team poked their heads into the office, wearing their youth as if it were some kind of merit badge. One looked out from a gray hoodie.
“Yo, Nyblom,” the kid said. “When’s summer league start?”
“I told you,” Nyblom said, exasperated. “Two weeks. How many times I have to say it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the kid said. “But where it at?”
Nyblom turned away and shook his head. Then he laughed.
Another season was about to begin.
In September of 2015, Quenton Marrow was shot three times in what appeared to be a random act of violence, shot while playing a video game in a first floor apartment in his neighborhood of South Providence, the bullets coming through the ceiling from the apartment above. He didn’t know who shot him, and said he’s never been in a gang or been in a dispute with anyone. One bullet pierced his lung and just missed his liver. The second bullet cut his forearm. The third went through his right shoulder and came out his back. He was in Rhode Island Hospital for four days.
He had just graduated from a one-year course at a technical school in Massachusetts. He still wants to one day be an electrician.