BASKETBALL WAS THE FAVORED SPORT IN MY hometown, and I started playing in sixth grade. Pickup games in the summer were huge, and during Flint’s cold winters, it was also a social thing, as well as a sport you could excel at indoors. In ninth grade I added football and track to become a consistent year-round athlete. I knew, however, I was not good enough at basketball to go pro or even play at the college level. Because there were so many great basketball players in the city who were better than me, I decided football would be my ticket out of Flint. My need to be the best meant that I not only threw myself into practice and did extra drills on my own time, but I also volunteered for everything. No matter what the coaches asked us to do, I was the first person to raise my hand.

Fortunately, during my seventh-grade year, I finally came under the leadership of a man who recognized not only how hard I was pushing myself but also saw something special in me. My football coach, Lee Williams, took an interest in me like no one else ever had, and he became a father figure to me. His encouragement was crucial, arriving at a moment in my life when it was enough to change everything for me going forward.

My father hated sports. He was all about the Army and wanted me to enlist as soon as I graduated from high school. I knew this was one of the only ways to escape Flint, and the only way out that would also earn Big Terry’s respect. But something about this path didn’t sit right with me. It wasn’t what I wanted.

I was an artist, and now I was an athlete. I didn’t know what this meant for my future. But Coach Lee did. After yet another practice when I’d worked as hard as if we’d been playing a championship game, he pulled me aside. My first instinct was always to fear I was in trouble, even though I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong.

“Terry Crews, let me tell you something,” he said. “There’s no way you should not be playing football at a Division One college on a Division One scholarship.”

His voice was so sure and strong it was as if he was giving a speech about me.

“Really?” I said.

“Terry Crews, you’ve got everything,” he said. “There’s nothing you can’t do. I see these other kids doing it at these big schools. You’ve got all those traits right here. I see them. You can do all that.”

“Really?” I said again, too stunned to say anything more.

At first, I couldn’t process what he was telling me. I drank in his praise like a thirsty man. No one had ever encouraged me like that before. It was all I needed.

I always tell everybody: All a kid needs is one good word from someone he believes. It’s not necessary to have anything more than that.

Coach Lee literally changed my life forever. And he was only my coach for three years. After my ninth-grade football season, another coach forced him out, which was devastating for me. But it didn’t really matter by that point. Even after he was gone, I held on to his words forever. He had said I should be playing football on a Division One scholarship, and that was what I was going to do. As far as I could tell, it was going to be the best way to get out of Flint. It was perfect for me. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to be athletic. I wanted to be a superhero. Who’s closer to that than an NFL star? I began to see myself as a football player.

Of course, not everyone else in my life was as supportive of my hopes and dreams, and not all of the experiences I had were so positive. As soon as Marcelle and I were old enough, Big Terry had us working every weekend, and all summer long, shoveling snow in the winter and mowing lawns in the summer. We hated it, but not because we had to work hard. I didn’t mind making an effort when it came to painting, or lifting weights, or doing football drills. I resented the fact that Big Terry dropped us off and left us out there all day. Sometimes we did two or three lawns, and then, even after we were done, we had to wait for him to come pick us up. By the time he finally showed up, our whole Saturday was gone, and I was fuming.

The people we did work for gave our wages to Big Terry, and Marcelle and I never saw any of that money. So we had worked all day for nothing, not one single cent. As far as Big Terry was concerned, this was part of our lesson.

“I’m teaching you what it’s all about,” he said. “This is what it is.”

Well, my takeaway from that was: What’s the use? Why bother working hard if you’re not going to see any benefit from your endeavors? It was clear to me from that moment on: If I was going to be working, I needed to be working at something I enjoyed. I made a promise to myself at a young age that I would always love what I do. Now, that’s a wonderful, noble philosophy to live by, but it got me into some trouble down the line. When you’re coming up in the world, sometimes you’ve got to do things you don’t enjoy. Good luck telling my thirteen-year-old self that, though.

Anytime Marcelle and I did get a little bit of money, we had very different approaches to our finances. If I had five dollars, I went to McDonald’s, and just like that, it was gone. On the other hand, Marcelle squirreled his money away under his mattress. I was a big spender. He was a big saver.

But then, without fail, Big Terry always came into our room at some point and stood there swaying in the doorway, looking back and forth between us.

“You guys got any money?” he asked.

“Nope, I spent mine,” I said.

I looked at Marcelle, waiting to see what he’d do, knowing it would probably be better for him to lie and say he didn’t have any money, either. But he couldn’t lie. Even though it was obvious how badly it was tearing him up, he nodded his head.

“I got some,” Marcelle said.

“Let me see it,” Big Terry said.

Marcelle went over to his bed and pulled out his money. I’d watched him be disciplined for weeks and weeks, going without the treats I indulged in, until he’d saved a couple hundred dollars. Just like that, Big Terry held the bills in his hand.

“I’ll give it back to you,” Big Terry said.

Marcelle nodded at him, even though we all knew that was a lie. Big Terry never paid him back, and he never stopped taking Marcelle’s money. And so I learned another lesson from Big Terry early on: If you work hard and save your money, somebody is going to come in and take it, so you might as well spend it all.

BY THE TIME I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, I’D HAD ENOUGH. I was getting out, and that was that. With Coach Lee gone, I started looking around for anyone else who might help me in my goals, or at least support my dreams. Things had gotten beyond weird at our old church, and we’d finally convinced Trish to join a new congregation. I had high hopes from the beginning. Our old church had been a whole lot of shouting loud and saying nothing, whereas our new pastor was more of a teacher. I decided I needed to have a meeting with him to talk about my life and my plans for the future. We met in his office one day after school. I got right to the point.

“Pastor Brown, I want to play football,” I said. “I want to be a football player.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “Football, that’s not good. That’s evil.”

“Wait a minute, you play basketball on Friday nights,” I said.

“We play basketball at the church,” he said. “But, in basketball, we’re just trying to get a ball in the hoop. Football, you’re intentionally trying to hurt people.”

I’d spent my whole life trying to be good, except for my one secret habit, which I swore I’d never do again. And now, my pastor was telling me that my ticket out of Flint was evil. I was devastated and collapsed inside. He had no idea that, for me, this conversation meant everything. He just kept shaking his head.

“Yep, basketball is cool,” he said. “Football, I would never recommend that.”

I knew I wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt anybody when I was playing. I was just trying to tackle them. I was just trying to be a good athlete.

That day changed everything for me. I still went to church with Trish and Marcelle, but I was hatching a plan in my mind.

I’ve got to leave, I thought. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to get a new life. There has to be more for me than these true lies I’m hearing.

It was easy enough for me to bide my time at church, but it wasn’t so easy at home. Trish and I didn’t agree on anything, and neither of us was quiet about it.

“You hate me,” she said. “I don’t know what your problem is.”

Well, there was our crazy church, for starters. And then there was the fact that she wouldn’t let me date. Here I was, fourteen, fifteen years old, and of course I had an interest in girls, but she shut it right down.

“No,” she said.

“Why can’t I?” I asked. “Why can’t I just go on a date or something?”

“Because you’re stupid,” she said.

I rolled my eyes at her and that just made her gain steam.

“Yeah, you’re stupid,” she said. “You’re going to get somebody pregnant.”

She was afraid, because she’d gotten pregnant at sixteen, and again at eighteen, before she was ever married. She saw Marcelle and me as little boys still, and she was sure the girls out there were going to take advantage of us and tie us down. She didn’t know that she was a lesson for me of all I didn’t want my life to be.

———

AS THE EIGHTIES PROGRESSED, THE CONDITIONS IN FLINT grew more and more dire, and I became more and more determined to get out by any means necessary. All of the auto plants were closing. People were getting evicted and leaving town. Schools were shutting down. Homes were falling empty and becoming increasingly decrepit. Then the crack epidemic hit. With the drugs came more violence. Every time there was an event in the neighborhood, people got shot. Let me tell you, I lived Roger & Me. Whenever someone asks me about where I grew up, I tell them to watch that movie. That’s exactly what my high school experience was like.

Our school was a magnet school that bussed kids in from all over, so it was 60 percent black, 39 percent white, and 1 percent other minorities. We were located right in the middle of the roughest neighborhood in the city, and gang members and drug dealers often hung around the building, waiting to put any egghead black kid or scared white boy in their rightful place.

Once I was leaving basketball practice when this thug we all knew as Julio took my shoe from my gym bag and ran outside. I chased after him but stopped short, almost needing a diaper, when I saw notorious Flint drug dealer Donald “Juice” Williams and his gang sitting astride their customized Chevrolet Chevettes.

“What you gon’ do?” Julio taunted me.

Knowing I had to maintain a strong appearance, I didn’t show my fear.

“You better give me my shoe back!” I said, trying to sound tough.

“Come get it!” he said, looking to the gang with him, showing that he knew, that I knew, that I didn’t have a chance.

“Give the kid his shoe back,” Juice exclaimed.

So Julio threw it back. It landed about five feet in front of me. I grabbed it and quickly found a ride home, my nerves frayed by thoughts of what almost was.

FROM TENTH GRADE ON, I WANTED OUT OF FLINT SO BADLY that playing football well enough to earn a scholarship became my sole obsession. Trish continued to forbid me to date, but I’d decided I didn’t want a girlfriend anyhow. I didn’t want anything that would tie me down. It was fine to like a girl from afar, but that was it. Nothing was more important to me than my ticket out of town, and I couldn’t lose focus.

Luckily, around the time I lost Coach Lee, I made friends with a kid named Darwin Hall, and he became that one person I needed to help me believe in my dreams. In eighth grade, I’d tried to steal one of his French fries. He hit my hand and then got into a karate pose. Rumor had it he was a really good martial artist, and so I made nice, and we’ve been best friends ever since. That’s how guys meet: a challenge is thrown down, and then with mutual respect, a friendship can grow.

In tenth grade, Darwin transferred from Flint Academy to another high school, but I still went over to his house almost every day. I felt guilty for leaving Marcelle stuck at home, but I was at an age when I needed to carve out my own life for myself. Darwin had five sisters, all much older than him, and his parents mostly left him alone, so we often had his house to ourselves. We spent most of our time in his basement without adult supervision. We were well aware of the possibilities.

“We could be doing all kinds of things,” I said.

“We could be smoking weed,” he said.

“We could be having girls.”

“But we’ve gotta be good if we’re gonna get anywhere.”

And we were. Instead of going wild, we just hung out together, watching movies, listening to music, break dancing, and getting real with each other.

“Let’s talk about what we’re gonna do,” I said. “Let’s talk about the future.”

Darwin was a computer geek, so we talked about that, even though there were times it made my eyes glaze over. And we talked about my two great loves—football and movies—even though neither really interested him. We talked about what we wanted our lives to be like, where we would live, and what kind of women we would marry. Most important, we made a deal that whenever one of us learned something—about girls, or school, or life—we would always tell the other person.

My dad certainly wasn’t teaching me anything. In fact, he was always telling me to do something he’d never explained to me before—like the time he made me change the oil in my mother’s car—and then, when I did it wrong, he got mad at me. That hurt me badly. I didn’t understand how he could expect me to know something I’d never been taught. It seemed more and more like the adults in our lives couldn’t be trusted, and we had to figure out everything for ourselves. We pulled away from our parents and spent most of our time together, looking ahead to a future when we’d be free. Trish was not happy about this.

“You always want to go over to his house,” she said. “You always want to be away from us. What’s your problem?”

“I just, you know, I’m not dating, I’m not doing anything,” I said.

But even the innocent activities we were getting up to were enough to upset Trish. It was no secret that I’ve always loved to dance, and on Saturdays and Sundays, Darwin and I practiced break dancing for, literally, twelve hours straight. We worked out routines and went over them again and again, until we were as perfect and synchronized as we could be.

Now, here’s the thing I really couldn’t understand. Trish loved to see me dance. When we were at family dinners she was always making a big deal about it. I was fooling around in the kitchen, popping in time to the beat in my head, when she pulled me out into the living room, where everyone else was visiting after dinner.

“Ooh, show the family that one move you’re doing,” she said.

Let’s just say I’ve never minded being the center of attention, so when Trish said dance, I danced. I lifted my arms and recreated the move I’d just shown her.

“Aw, that’s so cool,” Trish said.

She smiled at me, and she seemed softer somehow. Even though I knew the answer she’d given me so many times before, I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask again.

“Okay, can I go to the dance, then?”

She wasn’t smiling now.

“No, you’re not allowed to go to dances.”

That just crushed me, after I’d spent so many hours practicing, and she’d even made me dance and complimented me in front of everyone. So that’s how I came to do the worst thing I ever did as a teenager—well, besides my double life.

I told Trish I was staying over at Darwin’s house, which, technically, I was. As soon as I got over there, I put on my gray and red Puma track suit. And he put on his black and red gear. We warmed up a little bit in his basement, and then we snuck out and picked up Carlos, the third member of our dance crew, and went to the dance in my high school’s gym. I know, bad boys, right?

Trish truly had nothing to worry about. Going to these dances wasn’t about girls for me. I hadn’t even slow-danced with a girl at that point. It wasn’t about the hip-hop, either, which of course she couldn’t tolerate one bit. It was about getting on the floor, and finally enjoying the payoff for all of the hard work we’d done in Darwin’s basement, by showing off all of the stuff we could do.

There we were, in the regular high school gym where I played basketball during the week, but with the beat pumping and the lights flashing, it felt like a real hot spot. Well, okay, almost. I looked at Darwin, and he looked at me, and we started doing our thing. Almost instantly, everybody circled up, and they flipped. With my classmates screaming and hollering, the adrenaline hit, and I was in bliss.

When we went back to Darwin’s house later in the night, I was on a high.

I loved performing, and I knew I wanted to work in entertainment, once I’d used football to get me out of Flint. I begged Trish to let me dance in the school talent show, but she was not having it. I couldn’t reconcile how big my dreams were with how small she forced my life to be. I racked my brain for a compromise.

“Can I host the talent show, then?” I asked.

She looked at me hard, as if she was trying to search out the sin in this.

“Well, okay,” she said.

I got to host the talent show, and at least that was something. But I couldn’t line up her rules, which seemed so arbitrary to me, with my behavior, which I knew was good overall. Well, except for my one secret, and I was always swearing I was going to give that up forever. So I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about what I saw as the injustice of her rule, given the fact that I had no interest in going out and being the reckless idiot she accused me of wanting to be. This meant that Trish and I fought constantly. I was so sick of living at home by the time I was a teenager, and during my last few years of high school, that our relationship ground to a halt.

Even though I was a varsity athlete who played football and lifted weights—and I mean I’d gotten big by this point—Trish often got physical with me. When she was mad, she slapped Marcelle and me like it was nothing, as if we were still little kids. Usually I didn’t let it get to me. But one time I said something, and she whacked me. Before I could stop myself, I lifted my hand in the air, just as a reflex.

“You raise your hand at me?” she snapped.

There was no way I was really going to hit her, and I was already lowering my hand. But Big Terry happened to come into the room just then.

“Ugh, leave me alone,” I said and started to walk away.

Trish turned from me to Big Terry with a wild look in her eye.

“Terry, he was gonna hit me,” she said. “He was gonna hit me!”

I was already on my way up the stairs, but my father started running after me. He couldn’t reach me on the stair above him, so he tried to kick me. The next thing I knew, he was screaming. I looked back, totally confused. He’d kicked me in the butt, but it hadn’t hurt at all. Well, he’d chipped a bone in his foot. Served him right.

I left Big Terry on the stairs, screaming, and went into my room and shut the door.

Taking my place at what had become my regular spot, I stared out the window into the street. There was nothing to see, really, but at least it was a reminder that there was a whole world out there. I’ve got to get out of here, I thought.

Of course we weren’t allowed to buy any secular music, but I loved rap music, and I had a little boom box. I sat there at the window for hours, recording snippets of whatever songs I could catch on the radio. My favorite song was “Sucker M.C.’s” by Run-DMC, and I often managed to record part of it, but for some reason, I could never catch the entire song on the radio. Even just hearing part of it was something, though. The music, the view of the street outside, I held on to these and whatever other lifelines I could find for myself. It was a hard time.

No matter how wrong I believed my mother to be during those years, I can look back now and see that she was doing the best she could. Even though I wanted to be good, it was far too easy to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in Flint during the eighties. And I really didn’t get that. I was young. If there was a shooting, my mentality was: Yeah, but I didn’t get shot. I’m fine. Trish was trying to keep us from getting hurt. She was trying to keep us from slipping through the cracks like so many other young men around us did. So many guys I knew from that time have gone on to have six kids by six different women, or ended up in jail. Or ended up dead.

Darwin was the only person I felt like I could really talk to, and our long conversations about our future plans were another lifeline for me. But even he didn’t know my darkest secret. Sure, there were times we got a porno tape and watched it, but it was almost like sex ed, just trying to figure out what was what.

“Is this how it goes down?” he asked.

“I guess,” I said. “Is that what I have to do there?”

We craned our necks and studied the screen.

In spite of Trish’s obsessive fear that Marcelle or I would actually be around a girl long enough to get her pregnant, like had happened to her when she was our age, she never educated us about how to prevent this, except to once ask us if we knew how babies were made. I had many questions, but I was way too squeamish to talk about it with her. And while it would have been better to have a conversation about sex with Big Terry, of course he never talked with us about anything.

Sometimes when Darwin and I saw porn, I wanted to come off as a good guy.

“Man, don’t look at that,” I said. “We don’t need that.”

He was cool with this and had no reason to suspect I was watching pornography at other times, so he didn’t know the extent of my obsession. No one did. My secret was safe. But I knew I was doing it. I knew it was wrong. I felt bad. And yet I couldn’t stop. And so my hidden life started to chip away at me, little by little. After I had binged, I clasped my hands over my chest at night, listening to Marcelle sleeping in his bed across the room, and I prayed so hard to be good.

“God forgive me, please, please,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.”

There were times when I abstained for a month, or two months. And then I always slipped. After a while, I figured this was just how my life was going to be, and that it must be normal. Everyone must have a double life like I did.