Hoop Dream (ii)

As members of the Borel Middle School Bobcats, we worked out in a tiny gym with loose buckets and slippery linoleum and butcher-paper posters exhorting us toward conquest. I remember late practices full of wind sprints and tipping drills. One day the coach said, “Okay, gang, let me show you how we’re gonna run picks for Dave.” My friends ran around the court, passing, cutting, and screening for me. All for me. Set-plays for me to shoot from the top of the circle or the left corner—my favorite spots. It felt like the whole world was weaving to protect me, then release me.

That summer, my father had been fired from his job as publicity director for the Jewish Welfare Federation and accepted a much lower-paying job as director of the poverty program of San Mateo County. He sat in a one-room office without air-conditioning and called grocery stores, wanting to know why they didn’t honor food stamps; called restaurants, asking if, as the signs in the windows proclaimed, they were indeed equal opportunity employers. Sometimes, on weekends, he flew to Sacramento or Washington to request more money for his program. Watts rioted; Detroit burned. His constituents worshipped him. He said, “Please. I’m just doing my job.” They called him the Great White Hope and invited him to barbecues, weddings, softball games. At the softball games he outplayed everybody. The salary was $7,500 a year, but he was happy. The ghetto was his.

After school I’d walk across town, leave my books in my father’s office, then go around the block to play basketball with black kids. I developed a double-pump jump shot, which among the eighth graders I went to school with was unheard of. Rather than shooting on the way up, I tucked my knees, hung in the air a second, pinwheeled the ball, then shot on the way down. My white friends hated my new move. It seemed tough, mannered, teenaged, vaguely Negro. The more I shot like this, the more my white friends disliked me, and the more they disliked me, the more I shot like this. At the year-end assembly, I was named “best athlete,” and my father said that when I went up to accept the trophy, I even walked like a jock. At the time, I took this as gentle mockery, although I realize now he meant it as the ultimate accolade.

From kindergarten through eighth grade all I really did was play sports, think about sports, dream about sports. I learned to read by devouring mini-bios of jock stars. I learned math by computing players’ averages (and my own). At 12 I ran the 50-yard dash in six seconds, which caused kids from all over the city to come to my school and race me. During a five-on-five weave drill at a summer basketball camp, the director of the camp, a recently retired professional basketball player, got called over to watch how accurately I could throw passes behind my back; he said he could have used a point guard like me when he was playing, and he bumped me up out of my grade level. I remember once hitting a home run in the bottom of the 12th inning to win a Little League All-Star game, then coming home to lie down in my uniform in the hammock in our backyard, drink lemonade, eat sugar cookies, and measure my accomplishments against the fellows featured in the just-arrived issue of Sports Illustrated. Christ, I remember thinking, how could life possibly get any better than this?

A little too often my father likes to quote the line “Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, / Make me a child again just for to-night!” Here he is, turning backward: “School always excited me. Easy to understand why: I was a pretty good mixer, had few ‘bad’ days. I knew how to read when I entered first grade; my three older brothers, especially Phil, a columnist for the New York Sun, had seen to that. Learning how to spell was a never-ending source of delight and wonderment; it still is. And I did well after school on the running track and the softball diamond. I got a big charge out of competing against—and usually beating—my fellow students. Soon, I had friends who wanted to bask in my reflected glory.”

When he was in his mid-20s, he attended an open tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers and lasted all the way to the final round, when someone named Van Lingle Mungo hit every pitch my father threw—onto Bedford Avenue. Undeniably, I inherited my athletic genes from him. When Natalie assisted on the goal that won her soccer team the city championship, he crowed, “The Shields bloodline!”