The game with Bouclair College was way too soon for comfort. In fact, Curtis felt as if he were walking around campus with a giant ax positioned over his head. He wasn’t ready. And the team? They were about as ready to fight off those angry Hornets as he was ready to be America’s Next Top Model. DeMarcus and June Bug were still benched, and the better players had yet to be cleared to start. If he couldn’t get around this mess, they didn’t have a prayer.
After watching countless tapes and plays from previous games with Bouclair, the one thing Curtis had figured out was that you had to get in and kick butt when the game jumped off. If not, it was a losing battle, and the best a coach could hope to do was help his team avoid what amounted to a scoring massacre. The last thing any team needed was to be so outscored it gave the appearance that they weren’t even in the game. That could work on the team’s psyche and set them up for further losses during the season.
Plus, if it was the last thing Coach Curtis Parker did, he wanted to beat the draws off of Bouclair’s head coach, Sonny Todd Kilpatrick. Curtis and Maurice could not stand that sawed-off white boy from one of those small Mecklenburg County communities not too far from Charlotte. Sonny Todd always bragged when they ran across him at their sections of the NCAA coaches’ meetings that his father, the head supervisor at one of the smaller textile mills in the area, had taught him everything he knew about handling “your boys.”
He said in a voice that twanged like a cheap dulcimer, “My daddy taught me when I was just a little bitty thing how to handle my boys. He said, ‘Son, when your boys don’t wanna work and start getting all fancy on you, picking at those big Afro-American hairstyles, and talking junk about their rights, shut them down with either doing more work or getting so few hours they can forget having enough money to pay their bills and buy some Afro Sheen. Do that and see who will be talking about who ain’t treating them right.’
“You know, I’ve applied that philosophy to my basketball players for the past ten years, and I win. I win and I win and I win. And those boys know better than to complain about a thing. In fact, they betta not if they know what is good for them.”
When Sonny Todd spewed that mess at their bi-annual meeting for coaches working at historically black colleges and universities, Maurice had to drag Curtis out of the conference room to keep him off of that little white man with the wrap-around hair—a big, bald lightbulb-shaped head with the bottom half wrapped around with hair. Here they were at a meeting to talk about grades, SAT scores, retention rates, and getting these players out of undergraduate school before they reached their sixth year of college, and this clown was talking like he was having flashbacks to another time and place when he was a paddy-roller.
There were times when Curtis simply could not stand to look at Sonny Todd’s grinning, Chester Cheetah teethy face. And whenever they encountered each other, he wanted to snatch that white boy and beat him down like he stole something. He hated the way he treated the players on Bouclair’s basketball team.
But even worse, he detested Sonny Todd’s recruitment strategies. Every year he took along some Uncle Tom flunky who desperately wanted a job as an assistant coach, and combed the streets of some of the roughest sections of predominantly black neighborhoods looking for raw talent on the playgrounds, schoolyards, and parking lots with hoops. And he always found brothers who could ball like nobody’s business.
But as good as these players were, there was a problem with those young men. Many of them didn’t have good foundations at home. A lot of them didn’t even have a good amount of home training under their belt. And while Bouclair potentially offered the chance of a lifetime for these players, Sonny Todd did absolutely nothing to provide them with the leadership and guidance they needed to acquire some social skills and polish, and leave Bouclair College with what they allegedly came there for—a college degree.
Sonny Todd had his finger on some young men who had the ability to become movers and shakers in the black community. But he didn’t care about those children, and tossed them aside like two-dollar crack hos when they had run their course and he had no more use for them. Sonny Todd once confided to the only other white head coach at a SNAC school, Coach Dave Whitmore at Tyler University down near Beauford, North Carolina, his true feelings about the players at Bouclair. Sonny Todd said, “Dave, I’ve had enough of all of this criticism and scrutiny from these black guys who think they have the final say on what these boys need. I didn’t go and find those blacks to help them get a good education. I chose my team because I know they can get out there and get that trophy. Every time they give me some lip, I remember that the only thing those wannabe rap stars can do for me is bring that trophy home and put some extra cash in my and the school’s bank account.”
Fortunately for the eight black coaches in the conference, this white boy was right and had a conscience. Dave Whitmore was so put out with Sonny Todd’s callous attitude toward a group of young men trying to get a shot at life using the best skills they had to offer, he made it a point of sharing that encounter with his SNAC colleagues. He liked the other coaches, had played ball with a few during his college years, and respected the healthy competition that existed between them. He said in his warm, no-nonsense western North Carolina voice, “That is one white boy who makes me wanna snatch his ‘white card’ out of his wallet and stuff it down his throat.”
Coach Whitmore was one of the coaches in the conference who was liked and respected by all. It was ironic that the only white coaches in SNAC were polar opposites. Most of Coach Kilpatrick’s players rolled in and out of Bouclair College at the end of their second season and without a degree. Coach Whitmore, on the other hand, had such good retention and graduation rates that many coaches in SNAC and other small conferences wanted to know his secret. And every time they asked him to share how he did it, all Dave Whitmore said was, “I trust God, I stay on my knees, and I keep a blood covering over the team, and then over every single player. I also make sure that my players pray. You all just don’t understand the power of being right with the Lord, even on the court.”
As much as Curtis liked Dave Whitmore, he didn’t want to hear his mini-sermons on prayer and basketball. If Curtis hadn’t known better, he would have sworn that Dave was sneaking over to Gran Gran’s house to meet with her prayer group. And he became particularly suspicious when Dave said, “What y’all don’t understand is that I answer to a higher authority than you brothers, the university I work for, SNAC, SNAC students, parents, alumni, and the NCAA. There is no way I want to be standing in front of the Lord trying to come up with an explanation as to why I did one of God’s little babies wrong. You all are not my motivation, Jesus is.”
Nobody messed with Dave Whitmore, on or off court. Because as Maurice once put it, “Who in their right mind would have the nerve to mess with a white boy running around talkin’ ’bout he got the Holy Ghost—not the Holy Spirit but the Holy Ghost. Y’all, that’s a dangerous white boy. ’Cause the Devil can’t bamboozle him with some craziness about the merits of being able to claim that your people came over here from Europe on some ships wearing brocade, velvet, leather, suede, and wool in ninety-degree weather.”
But just as the SNAC coaches understood and respected the decision to put Dave Whitmore in one of those coveted Southeastern Negro Athletic Conference head coaching spots, not a one could figure out why Sonny Todd was at Bouclair College. Rumor had it that Sonny Todd had something on Bouclair’s president. The gossip mill alleged that the president had been caught drunk, with a skank in his lap going through his pockets at one of those “boob and booty shacks” off Interstate 95 South going toward the South Carolina border by none other than Sonny Todd Kilpatrick.
If the story was true—and something in Curtis told him that it was—Sonny Todd stopped the attempted robbery, threw the president (who was a small and slender man) over his shoulder, took him back to his hotel, and figured out a good lie to tell the man’s wife. After that, there wasn’t anything Bouclair’s president couldn’t do for Sonny Todd, including hiring him as the new head coach for the basketball team.
There were several glaring problems accompanying this decision, however. First, Bouclair’s Athletic Department had just come up with a short list of three very good candidates for the job. Second, Sonny Todd had been fired without any warning from two previous coaching positions. One of those positions was at a tiny, conservative, all-white college that had never recruited more than six black players in its thirty-year history of having a basketball team.
Those white folk at that school could not stand Sonny Todd Kilpatrick—which was irony at its best, since Sonny Todd shared all the political, social, and cultural likes and dislikes of his colleagues on that campus. As the athletic director wrote in what was supposed to have been a letter of recommendation:
I have never come across an individual who for all practical purposes should have been a perfect fit at our esteemed institution of higher education. A problem that we have experienced on a consistent basis is the ability to recruit and retain faculty willing to live in our town, which is far from everything, except of course the local Wal-Mart. Furthermore, it has been a nightmare trying to find employees we believe would find themselves quite happy here.
Coach Kilpatrick did not experience any of these problems. We, however, were ridden with the problem of hiring a man that no one could stand to lay eyes on. In fact, our oldest staff member, seventy-six-year-old part-time secretary, Mary Elizabeth Tremonte, once confessed that she wished for the days when she still had cataracts so that she did not have to have a clear view of “that man.” Nobody liked this man. He was a mean, hateful, controlling, dishonest, lying, cheating scumbag.
I regret that I have had to put my professionalism on the shelf while writing this letter. But honestly, there isn’t anything other than what you are reading that I can say about this chap. Oh, yes, there is something else I can say—don’t hire him. I mean it. Do not hire this man. Because if you do hire him, you are a weak and spineless ninny who deserves everything he will do to you, your faculty and staff, and your players.
Unfortunately for Sonny Todd, Curtis knew that this letter was not a rumor or an urban myth concocted for the purposes of creating a chain e-mail to distribute among the man’s many enemies. Neither was this letter fabricated by a vicious and bitter ex-colleague. Curtis had received a copy of the letter from one of his old girlfriends and read it for himself shortly after its introduction to the search committee. He knew the athletic director of that school. While the man was on the tight side, he had integrity and wouldn’t have ever written such a thing unless he had had a horrible experience with Sonny Todd and didn’t want another athletic program to bear the burden of working with this man.
Everybody knew that you didn’t write bad things about people like Sonny Todd. Because he belonged to that group of folk who were mean and vindictive and loved to keep up some mess. But write the letter this gentleman did. And he got away with it, too. Sonny Todd never blinked an eye when confronted by Bouclair’s search committee over the content of the “recommendation.” He did, however, request a private meeting with the president in the presence of every member of that committee. The athletic director for Bouclair College described the committee meeting this way.
“I knew it was the beginning of the end for the basketball team. That trailer-park scum practically commanded the president to meet with him. And what did the president do? That negro upped and followed him like he was a crack ho going to get a hit.”
A few members of the search committee had tried to reason with the president when he came back from his meeting with Sonny Todd, dusted off an ancient bylaw that should have long since been stricken from the books, and announced that they were hiring the man as head coach of the basketball team. The folks in that meeting got hot, somebody jumped up and threatened to kick the president’s narrow behind, and a few threatened to resign. What began as a business meeting deteriorated into a hot ghetto mess with some trailer-park intrigue thrown in for good measure. But nothing mattered. Sonny Todd got the job and that was that.
When interviewed at a televised press conference about this unprecedented and controversial decision, all the president would say was that he wanted to win the conference title and get a shot at a place at the dance during the NCAA tournament. When asked if money was a factor, the president looked at his watch and announced that he was late for another meeting.
And now, thanks to an ill-advised administrative decision, SNAC had a white head coach who openly claimed that minimum wage was too high, accusations of racial profiling had been fabricated by blacks in gangs who were stopped by the police in the midst of committing a crime, the NBA needed to start checking SAT scores before signing on new players, Kobe and Shaq made too much money, and he was sick and tired of the jersey number 23.
Curtis pushed the playbook and the Bible aside. He needed to quit wasting his time, get up, get dressed, and head on over to the campus. If he got in early enough, he might be able to find enough of a peaceful moment to think on a strategy for beating Sonny Todd at his own game.
Regina rolled back over to face him. It was clear that she was now fully rested and game for anything he wanted to put on her. She sat up, making sure that both straps had fallen down around her shoulders.
Curtis paused for a moment and then changed his mind. He didn’t need that this morning—not from this woman. What he needed was to quit wasting his time, get up, get dressed, and go to work.
Regina smiled at him and then gave into a big, wide-mouth yawn. Curtis blinked back the tears from his now-watering eyes. It had been over a month since the girl had extended him an “invite.” But that yawn was as good a wake-up call as ever. He got up, hopped in the shower, dressed, and backed out of his garage without so much as a nod in Regina’s direction.