You never forget the first time you fall in love, the feeling of being swept up into a lofty realm you never knew existed. A world where paths merge in an unexpected journey, and you are made anew, soaring so high you can kiss the moonlight over the mountaintops.
No matter how many other loves you have as time goes on, that memory, that euphoric joy, occupies a special, untouchable place in your heart.
I was a third grader at P.S. 67 in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, when love struck me. The backboard and hoop were at one end of the cafeteria—a large space that doubled as a gym when they pushed the tables against the wall. Fixed on a stanchion, it rose ten feet above the floor… regulation height.
We had other baskets out in the schoolyard. But we could use this one winter or summer, rain or shine. I can see it clearly in my mind’s eye. After eating my lunch, I would go over to it with some of the other kids and try to make shots.
I was eight years old but tall for my age. I was also awkward and swaybacked, with a high waist and backside.
Each day I went to school knowing I’d be mercilessly teased by the class bullies. Even the girls got into the act, calling me Blueberry Hill, after the Fats Domino song, because of my large, wide-browed head. It didn’t help that my mother cut my hair, but with six children, five of us boys, and barely enough money to pay the bills, she couldn’t afford to send us to the barbershop. And it showed.
As shy and nervous as I was at school, those feelings weren’t caused by my young tormentors. I carried a hidden darkness, a secret pain that was both emotional and physical. And it originated at home.
But I didn’t think about those things when I stood beneath the cafeteria’s backboard. Didn’t think about the teasing and feelings of shame.
When the ball was in my hands, I just wanted to make a basket. Nothing else mattered.
Early in my childhood, I’d seen the older boys on the basketball courts at the front and rear of my building. Those teenagers controlled the courts, and there was no room for younger kids unless one of them was empty.
That was hardly ever the case. Basketball was an inner-city game, the one athletic outlet that kids could afford. You didn’t need expensive football or baseball gear to play. You just needed a ball, a blacktop court, and a hoop.
I wanted to compete. But before I could do it, I realized I needed to figure out how to put the ball inside the rim.
It wasn’t easy. I was a big kid, sure. But eight’s still eight. The hoop was a good five feet above me, the ball large and heavy for someone my age. I would heave it up underhanded, mustering all my strength.
I was drawn to that rim, and kept returning with my classmates. One by one, they took turns trying to make a shot. And one by one, they became exasperated. They either couldn’t throw the ball up as high as the hoop or couldn’t get it to go in. After a few tries, they all walked away in discouragement.
I didn’t walk away. Something inside me refused to quit. I was single-mindedly focused on my goal.
How do I shoot the ball into that basket?
How?
I’d always been proficient at math, and I started to approach my objective almost as I would my homework assignments.
Do I aim for the backboard? Or for the center of the rim? Do I need to throw it high?
I finally realized the begin-point was touch. That meant getting a feel for the ball in my hands, then figuring how much upward thrust I needed to cover the height and distance between me and the basket.
This wasn’t conscious, not at first. But on some level, I was developing a studied, analytical approach to the game. It would evolve into a methodology that carried me through high school, college, and my entire professional career.
Driven to make a basket, I kept trying each day after lunch, learning through trial and error, processing it all.
One day, finally, it dropped in.
I jumped with exhilaration. A quiet, reserved kid who was used to keeping his emotions in check, I couldn’t restrain myself.
And that was it. The moment I fell in love with basketball. From that point on, I’d use every chance I got to practice and perfect my shooting. Under the basket, I felt liberated, like a bird freed from its cage.
As I mentioned, it was a different story at home.
EVERYTHING I AM, the good and the bad, traces back to my roots in Brooklyn, and the Walt Whitman Housing Projects where I grew up.
My parents had Southern origins. Thelma Brown King, my mother, was born and raised on Johns Island, a small farming community in Charleston County, South Carolina. My dad, Thomas, was from Rocky Mount on the coast of North Carolina.
Both left their home states during the Great Migration that began with World War One. This was a shift of over six million African Americans from the rural South to the industrialized North, where they resettled in hopes of finding better job opportunities and relief from oppressive segregationist laws.
Mom’s life had been one of simple responsibility to her parents and siblings. After walking home from school, she would cook dinner for her whole family. Not only did she not mind the task, she found it a source of happiness and gratification.
Her upbringing on the farm was very strict, and that didn’t change after the family’s relocation to New York City. As a teenager, she didn’t smoke or drink, and wasn’t allowed to attend dances. Though it was not something I knew as a child, she’d been subjected to harsh physical discipline from her parents. It was an era that was far less enlightened than the present day, a time when corporal punishment was all too common among black Southern families.
One summer evening in 1949, a few of her school friends urged her to join them at the Savoy Ballroom up on Lenox Avenue. The Savoy was the largest and most popular nightclub in Harlem, with a glittering marquee, a marble stairway, and a sprung mahogany dance floor that would bounce with the rhythms of thousands of dancing feet. There were two bandstands where groups like the Savoy Bearcats and Cab Calloway’s Missourians would hold wild battles of the bands every weekend.
As I heard it from Mom, she was reluctant to accept her girlfriends’ invitation, but finally let herself be convinced. It was a Thursday night—Ladies’ Night at the club—and young women could enter without paying for admission. One of her girlfriends knew an unattached young man named Thomas and wanted to introduce them.
Their first dance was to the jump blues of the Cootie Williams Orchestra. You didn’t see much emotion in my father, but he had a glint in his eyes whenever he remembered that. I can only guess how much he must have enjoyed impressing her with his steps.
I suppose you could say he was Thelma’s opposite number. He loved the night life, loved dancing… and loved to drink. Loved it too much for his own good. But she either did not see his flaws early on or saw enough goodness in him to look past them. Dad was a complex man. In those days, he was outgoing and gregarious, but had an awkward shyness around women. He was respectful and polite while courting Thelma—a perfect gentleman. Seven years her senior, he was more adult than the boys she knew at school. She also admired the fact that he was a hard worker, though he never held a dollar that couldn’t slip through his fingers.
Two years after they met, Thomas and Thelma were married and moved to Brooklyn.
Unfortunately, Dad continued to enjoy his nightlife, and alcohol was a big part of it. His paychecks evaporated before the rent and bills were paid. It must have put tremendous strain on my mother.
In our family, we never discussed anything. Whatever the problem, my father’s way of handling it was always the same:
“Take it to the back room,” he’d say. “Take it to the back room and forget about it.”
As the years went on, that back room became more than a physical space for all of us. It was a dark vault in our minds and hearts. I never gave voice to my fears, my anxieties, or my anguish. I never discussed my troubles with anyone. My coping mechanism was to push them out of sight, seal them off in the vault deep inside me, and forget about them.
Or tell myself I could forget.
When I was born in 1956, the second of six children, we were living in a walk-up row house on Carlton Avenue. My arrival marked a complete transformation for Dad. He stopped drinking and going to clubs, and started diligently attending church. He would even turn his paychecks over to Mom at the end of the week. For that reason, she called me her “Miracle Baby.”
What changed him? Maybe the added responsibility of having another mouth to feed. Because of the total lack of communication at home, I can only guess. But he credited Mom with teaching him to save money and live within his means.
For her part, Mom never attributed his transformation to anything she might have done. I think she was just glad that it happened.
My memories of our first apartment are vague, but I do recall the move to Fort Greene. Dad had put in for a job with the Housing Department and was hired as a superintendent at the Walt Whitman Houses, a cluster of city-owned, low-income developments opposite the north end of Fort Greene Park, and not far from the Brooklyn docks. He said he owed that to Mom, too.
“My First Lady told me, you’d better sign your name on that paper and bring it in,” he said of filling out the employment application. I suppose that if I was my mother’s Miracle Baby, then she was his First Lady.
The new job required him to live at Whitman, so he took a two-bedroom apartment on the twelfth floor of one of the buildings. Our monthly rent was comparable to the other tenants’, and his salary was barely adequate for our growing family. But the apartments were newly renovated, and the position offered my father stability and guaranteed union benefits.
Dad’s work ethic made an indelible impression on me. Watching him go about his daily business taught me respect for consistency and routine, and helped me see the importance of putting in the hours. But it was like observing him through glass. A stoic, reclusive, tightly regimented man, he seemed bound up within himself, as though he dreaded what might happen if he lowered his guard against his old, reckless ways.
His schedule never varied. He would leave for work early, return home at dinnertime, carry his plate into the back bedroom, and eat with the door closed. Alone. While eating, he read his Bible. When he was finished, he changed into a suit and went to church. He attended church seven days a week.
Absorbed in religion, he rarely interacted with the family and seemed incapable of showing us any warmth. We didn’t have company more than once a year, didn’t go on family outings, didn’t laugh or smile together. On the rare occasions there was laughter in the apartment, it stopped the moment he walked through the door.
Dad never spoke of his family in North Carolina. We never met any relatives on his side. This made me feel confused and isolated in a way I couldn’t process.
It was only in adulthood that I asked him why he’d severed his relationship with them. All he would say was that he’d grown estranged from them because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. And that the Devil made him do it.
Was he blaming the Devil for his actions or their beliefs?
I’m still not sure. But my view of religion owes much to my dad.
I believe religion is very important. I consider myself a deeply spiritual person. But I also understand that religious views can destroy families as well as bring families together, divide nations or bring nations together. We need to remember that acceptance and understanding are part of all faiths. We need to be tolerant and flexible to accommodate each others’ beliefs.
Dad was inflexible. He had his rules, and everyone obeyed. Every Sunday morning, we would all get into our dress clothes and take the bus over to the Evergreen Baptist Church on Carlton Avenue, near our old walk-up. Once we were home, the kids couldn’t go back outside. We were forbidden from going to the movies or listening to the radio. We weren’t allowed to see our friends. Often, we would gather at a window facing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and play “Colored Cars.”
“Which color you have?”
“Which color you got?”
We’d each pick a color and count the matching cars on the elevated span. The first to count a hundred won the game. It was a way to pass the afternoon and ease our monotony.
Sometimes, I’d wander over to a window on the other side of the apartment and gaze down at the basketball court below. The best players in the neighborhood would gather there. Watching them, I knew that was where I wanted to be.
The only time I heard music in our house was when my father was out at work or church. Then Mom would put her gospel records on the turntable. She loved Mahalia Jackson, Shirley Caesar, and the Blind Boys of Alabama, but James Cleveland was her favorite singer. His deep foghorn voice would boom above the chorus.
Possibly because of Dad’s physical and emotional isolation, Mom seemed to shut down her own feelings—or at least wall them off inside her. She never said she loved me. Not once during my childhood did I receive a hug. It left a void inside me, a desperate, unsatisfied hunger.
I’m convinced she did her best with the emotional and psychological tools available to her. She was a product of her generation and had her hands full just scraping by. Feeding six kids on what little Dad earned as a super was a year-round struggle. In the summer, she toiled over a hot kitchen stove without benefit of an air conditioner. She prepared our meals every day of the week, and her down-home cooking was delicious.
Breakfast on weekends was ham and eggs, with waffles, pancakes, or biscuits whipped up from scratch. Dinner might be fried chicken, or a pot roast served with string beans, collard greens, potato salad, and homemade muffins. I remember hearing the sounds of her cooking from my room—a wooden spoon beating against the side of the mixing bowls, the sizzle of chicken in a greased skillet. The aromas wafting through our apartment intoxicated me.
Mom was always finding ways to stretch the budget. She made her own clothes, ordering the patterns, cutting the fabric, and then sitting for hours at her sewing machine. She purchased the kids’ clothes at secondhand shops, and our sneakers were bargain store irregulars. No shirt or pair of pants was ever thrown away. When one of us outgrew something, it was handed down to a younger sibling. Since there were no funds to spare for a washing machine or the coin laundry, Mom cleaned our clothes by hand on a scrub board and then hung them to dry in our cramped apartment, running a clothesline from room to room. The cold droplets of water would drip on my head at night. Plop, plop.
I doubt Mom ever missed a PTA meeting or parent-teacher conference. She would walk me to school each morning when I attended P.S. 67, stopping a block from its door so I could go the rest of the way by myself. She wanted to teach me independence, but I didn’t want the neighborhood bullies to see her with me. If those predators had thought I was scared of them, I would have become a bigger target.
Weakness didn’t last long in Fort Greene. I would have to learn to fight my own battles. Eventually, I would also fight my brothers’ fights. I was always tougher than the other boys in the family. If somebody messed with one of them, he’d answer to me.
Though my brother Thomas Jr. was the first of us, I felt like the oldest. My mother must have noticed my maturity, because she gave me a lion’s share of household responsibilities. I would accompany her to the butcher shop or supermarket to help push the shopping cart and carry home the groceries. I would sit in the kitchen tearing up the greens as she fixed dinner. She often sent me out to pick up items from the corner store, a white handkerchief pinned inside my pocket, folded carefully around a shopping list and some bills. I never knew what was on the list, or how much money she gave me. I would just pass my little bundle to the shopkeeper, and he’d fill her order from his shelves.
I have many memories of Mom’s labor and sacrifice. She ran the household and was present for us while my father shuttled between his job, his solitary Bible reading, and church.
But there was another side to her, a side few people ever saw.
I’ve already mentioned that my mother’s parents inflicted physical punishment on her. And I have mentioned a secret I carried for much of my life, a hidden pain that went to the innermost part of my soul.
Abusive behavior is part of a terrible cycle, a legacy of victimization perpetuated from generation to generation. Those who are abused have a threefold increased risk of becoming abusers. Before that intergenerational cycle can be broken, its secrets must be pulled from the darkness into the light.
My mother beat me. It’s as simple and difficult to say as that. Throughout my childhood, she would beat me with a strap and kitchen broom.
Sometimes she made me strip out of my clothes and then hit me with the broomstick until my skin was red, swollen, and bruised. I would wonder what provoked her rage. Was it that I’d gotten into a fight defending myself against the bullies? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure what I did to deserve such vicious punishment, or whether her beatings were even connected to anything I’d done.
But I got them. Time after time. I got them.
Standing there confused and vulnerable, just a skinny kid… words can hardly describe my shame and growing resentment toward my mother. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand.
I told myself I hated her. For a great many years, I believed I did.
The beatings hurt like hell. But I didn’t cry. I refused to cry, knowing it would only make her beat me longer and harder.
I didn’t care.
I would not cry.
That’s where my Game Face came from. That’s where the expression I carried onto the court for every game of my life was born. It was a mask, a shield. It allowed me to shut out the hurt, protect myself from the outside world.
I didn’t tell anyone about the beatings. They were my secret. I felt disconnected from everything around me and even in some ways from myself.
As children, we learn a great deal from watching the adults around us. But I saw no significant communication between my parents. No outward displays of affection. No sharing of thoughts and dreams, of pain or happiness.
I didn’t feel love in our household. I had no frame of reference, no outside points of comparison, no way of knowing if my existence was different from that of other kids. I sensed something was missing in my life, but I couldn’t identify what it was. I tried, with the limited understanding of a young boy. But it was akin to looking through a window and finding it too smudged and dirty to see through with any clarity.
In those days, I rarely smiled or laughed. I had no outlet for my emotions or creativity, and no way to channel them. Nowhere.
Except for the basketball court.
IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD, we were surrounded by basketball courts. By the time I reached the fifth and sixth grades, I was on them whenever possible.
We had two courts at the Whitman Houses, right outside my building. Go out the front doors, go out the back doors… different courts, different styles of play. It was amazing. The best players were in the front of the building. Fort Greene had one of the city’s highest juvenile delinquency rates, and the neighborhood gang members loved to play on that court. They were mostly teenagers and some of the toughest kids in Brooklyn. But I gravitated toward watching their games and wanting to measure myself against them. The younger kids on the back court weren’t a fraction as good.
If the older kids were more talented, that’s where I wanted to play. You played against the best, you were going to improve.
I remember a guy named Mike, the leader of the Avenue Kings (the gang name always bothered me), who was one of the top players on the front court. After his games, he went back to his gang fights and turf wars. But that court was like a watering hole. Nobody showed up there looking for trouble. They came to ball.
There was another court right across the street from my building, at Sands Junior High’s schoolyard. Then you had the park on Tillary Street another block away in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. Across from the park, you could play on the three courts at Westinghouse High School. And a mile beyond that was the Boys Club of America.
Then you had the night centers, several of them in walking distance. One was at Sands, where I also learned karate. Another was at P.S. 46, my elementary school when I lived on Carlton Avenue. And if you walked a block to the Farragut Houses, over by the Brooklyn Navy Yard, you had a night center there.
Farragut Center was the most competitive because we played full court games. Armond and Wilburn Hill played on its courts. Armond was about the same age and height as my oldest brother, Thomas Jr. He was an All City high school player and received a basketball scholarship to West Virginia University.
A standout athlete who went on to play varsity with the Princeton Tigers, Armond later played in the NBA for eight seasons. He then coached at the collegiate level, was hired as an assistant coach for the Atlanta Hawks, and eventually became Doc Rivers’s right-hand man with the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Clippers.
So you could always find a game. And if you didn’t find a game, you could shoot by yourself.
Every day after class was dismissed, I would follow the same routine: Go home, do my homework, eat dinner, and hurry over to the P.S. 67 night center. I was diligent about it. Absolutely nothing would deter me. Homework, dinner, practice at the center.
If I wasn’t at the center, I shot baskets on the courts outside my building. The front courts had half-moon shaped backboards. The rear courts, out the back door, had rectangular backboards. There were no nets, and no lights for playing at night. At Sands and the other school centers, they had standardized rectangular backboards and chain nets.
When you practiced with a half-moon backboard, no net, you became a better shooter and scorer. You didn’t have the board’s wide surface to shoot the ball off. You couldn’t rely on its borders framing your shot or the net as a centerpiece to help with your aim. You needed to concentrate harder to hit the shot, developing a sense of space.
At night, I shot in the moonlight on the outdoor courts. I wouldn’t see anyone out there. I wouldn’t hear anything other than my dribble. I was alone with my ball and the basket, in my own hoops world, moving to the rhythm of an inner music. It was like the words to that old song by the Blackbyrds: “Walking in rhythm, moving in sound.” I didn’t need to see the rim. Whether I was five feet away from it, ten feet, fifteen… after a while, it didn’t matter. I knew where I was, and where it was. I made the ball drop into the rim. And I felt like a scoring king.
In the winter, when nobody was using the courts, I’d find one and scrape the snow off the blacktop with my sneaker, knowing the basket was mine for as long as I wanted. I hardly noticed the bitter cold, the steam puffing from my mouth, or the numbness of my cheeks and fingertips. The ball felt like a rock. But I focused on making my shots amid the knee-high snowdrifts.
I was head over heels in love with the game, burning with the desire to excel. Those courts lured me with their magic. They spoke to me unlike any adult ever did, with a clear, enticing voice, and a message that was unmistakable.
This is where you belong. Between the lines.
When I was on the court, the mental and emotional pain I felt over my home life went away. It was the only place I felt free. A place where my mind, my feelings, my body, and the ball would merge to create something all my own. Something special that couldn’t be touched by the outside world.
Where you belong.
I didn’t need to compete against other kids. Not in the beginning. When you play by yourself, you’re challenging yourself, competing against yourself.
Basketball is a game of experimentation. You channel your personality and creativity into developing an individual style of play, and I was always trying to add new elements to mine. Being analytical even at a young age—I loved math—I thought the game, piecing it together like a puzzle.
The first element of the puzzle was understanding space, distance, and height to make a shot. That part of my development had started under the hoop in P.S. 67’s cafeteria.
But I realized that was only one component of basketball. Rhythm and movement came next for me. It was a logical progression. I’d begun to accurately make my shots. So I asked myself some new questions. How do I move my body, with this ball, from one space to another? As I spin this way, like the great Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, where’s the basket going to be when I come out of the spin?
Experimentation. Creativity. Repetition. They would give me the next puzzle piece.
I practiced spinning and then shooting the ball. I practiced shooting one-handed and shooting off balance. I practiced picking the ball off the ground, turning in one motion, and releasing it without a second’s delay. I practiced shooting with my eyes closed. In the gym, I even practiced shooting while falling down.
I also practiced passing the ball to myself. I couldn’t afford a passing apparatus or other gear, so I made do without it. I’d begun to imagine other players on the court with me. Defenders and teammates. I was establishing set places on the court from which I could shoot with confidence. I began to think of them as King spots, and could see them in my mind. If I could reach those places and execute my shot the way I practiced, nothing the defense did could stop me.
Month by month, my abilities grew. I was physically growing as well, growing faster than most boys my age; my body was getting bigger and stronger. At every stage, I built upon my skills. I was finding more missing pieces of the puzzle, continuing to analyze the game.
I’ve done this. I’ve figured it out. Okay, what’s next?
My goal was to play the boys on the front court. I would learn from them. I would find a way to compete.
I didn’t care that they were older than I was. I didn’t care that they were better.
I would become the best.