Sands Junior High was an awfully tough school, tougher than I could have imagined.
In my last year at P.S. 67, I’d been appointed hallway monitor. I’m not sure if I received the position because I was tall, or because I had high marks for conduct on my report cards. Probably it was a little of both. I felt honored to be chosen and was proud to buckle the white Sam Browne crossbelt over my waist and shoulder.
My job was to stand near the exits and make sure kids didn’t go yelling or running down the corridors at the morning bell, during lunch breaks, and then again when school let out at three o’clock. Sometimes I’d help the younger kids tie their shoes, find their classrooms when they got lost, or escort them to the main office or nurse’s office at a teacher’s request. Those kids listened to me. I was seen as an authority figure. I don’t think I ever had a problem keeping order in the halls.
Sands was like another planet. There was no classroom discipline. The students were unruly and scornful of their teachers. They would throw chairs out the windows, desks out the windows, start fires in the closet, start fires in the trash can while the teacher’s back was turned. It was a hard thing to deal with, but I had no choice.
I’d never gotten into a fight in elementary school. Now I was defending myself every day. If you didn’t stand up to the predators and bullies, they would take everything that belonged to you. I never looked for trouble with them, but wouldn’t run either.
Basketball was my refuge, my one constant, an outlet for everything I felt inside, and that included a tremendous amount of anger. I was angry at my mother for beating me. I was angry over my father’s detachment from the family, angry over my low self-esteem and lack of social skills. And I was angry about having to put up with the bullies.
That pent-up anger fueled my passion and competitive intensity. I didn’t just want to beat my opponents. I wanted to dominate them through sheer force of will. Rage became an asset, my secret weapon on the court.
During my first year of junior high school, I began playing a lot of organized ball. After making the basketball team, I competed against other junior highs throughout the borough. For road games, we wore royal blue satin warm-up jackets with the word SANDS emblazoned in white across the back. On travel days, we would pick them up from a storage room. I took pride in putting mine on before we climbed aboard the school bus for our trips.
Once when I was carrying my jacket downstairs on its hanger, someone sneaked up behind me, split it across the letters with a butcher knife, and took off running. If I’d been wearing the jacket, my back would have been sliced open too.
My neighborhood was in free fall, and I could see it everywhere around me. When I was very young, the street gangs fought with clackers—a toy that was banned because the hard plastic balls could be used to break teeth, noses, and cheekbones. That was dangerous enough. But the gang members were now carrying switchblades and battling over drugs along with their turf… and that was more dangerous.
The plague of heroin addiction had infiltrated my community. In Vietnam, our soldiers faced a conflict they didn’t understand, and an enemy that used bloody guerrilla tactics they were unprepared for. Southeast Asia was where most of the world’s heroin was produced, and the boys that used the drug found it gave them a cheap, easily available means of escape. It also turned them into addicts. When they returned to the poverty of their inner-city communities, they brought along their heroin addictions. And it took those communities down.
You witnessed the impact all around Fort Greene. Once heroin was introduced into the neighborhood, you couldn’t walk near the park at night. It was full of dope fiends. They would approach you from just off the paths and rob you to support their habits.
I was constantly on guard. The basketball courts became more of a safe haven than ever, and I tried to be on them as much as possible.
This still didn’t include Sundays. Dad had not relaxed his edict that the family stay indoors after church. I couldn’t figure out why; it wasn’t as if he would discuss what we’d heard at the sermon so we could better understand its relevance to our lives, or engage in meaningful conversations with us at all. Once we got home, he simply retreated into his bedroom. Yet he was intimidating in his silent remove, making it clear his wishes weren’t open to negotiation. We were forbidden to leave the apartment.
I wanted desperately to play. The courts were jumping on Sundays, and I yearned to participate in weekend tournaments. But none of the kids in my family ever disobeyed or questioned my father. We hardly had the nerve to talk around him. We just sat staring out the windows, counting cars on the highway, or somberly watching the basketball games twelve stories below.
How could I stand up to Dad? With my mother as the disciplinarian, I knew defying him might mean more stinging humiliation under her strap and broom.
I didn’t have any answers. I only knew that sooner or later, I’d have to learn them.
I’m sure that’s what drew me to psychology books. I felt a need to investigate and understand my feelings… to find my place in life… and they seemed a good place to start. I checked them out of the library in stacks and read them under my blankets after bedtime, shining a flashlight on their pages. Those books were my secret, and I didn’t want my brother to know about them. I believed they might tell me why I felt such a bottomless void within myself.
Reading the books, I realized that the basis of psychology, at least the type I was reading about, was analytical thought. In my mind, that was a thread connecting it to basketball. The game, to me, wasn’t about walking on the court and grabbing a ball. It was about the thought that went into the game. Although I couldn’t have articulated it, I came to believe that understanding basketball and understanding psychology were one and the same.
I first read about visualization techniques in the pages of my library books. They said the subconscious mind was unable to distinguish between what was real or imaginary. If you pictured something you wanted to achieve, concentrated on that goal until you could see yourself attaining it—see it as clearly as anything around you—then the subconscious would register it as real. In other words, you could trick your subconscious into thinking you’d already succeeded at the goal.
The concept resonated with me at once—and, again, it was through a link to basketball. I’d used that approach since third grade without naming it. If I imagined myself sinking the ball, actually saw how I would accomplish it, I could do it in reality. In the deepest part of my mind, I’d already done it, and that gave me confidence. There was no fear of failure, no anxiety, nothing to hold me back.
Maybe, I thought, I could apply that same technique to other things. Other goals.
My blanket pulled up over my head, flashlight in hand, I devoured the psychology books, one after another.
I believe it was right around this time that I became friendly with a kid named Arthur, who lived at the Wycoff projects. Arthur always made sure he had a job, and we would often look for work together. I learned a lot from him, including how to go about finding gainful employment. If he was hired, I’d get hired.
Arthur was the best hustle dancer in Brooklyn. He carried a little black book around, and had the best rap conversation for girls. He also studied the dictionary, and consequently built up a large vocabulary. It was one of the things I really admired about him, reminding me of my favorite actor.
You see, other than basketball, the greatest influence of my youth was Sidney Poitier. There weren’t many black movie stars to rank with him back then, and he stood alone and unequaled as a leading man. I saw Poitier as the epitome of success—articulate, dignified, impeccably dressed, and supremely confident. I would sneak out and watch his films despite Dad’s orders, mesmerized by his gait, speech, and poise.
Whenever I watched Sidney Poitier on-screen, I wanted to be like him. He communicated his thoughts and feelings with quiet grace, and emulating him gave me a measure of self-esteem I lacked. He was someone to model myself after.
For me, Poitier exuded power—power in his eloquence; power in his graceful, confident bearing; and power in his respected stature. In an era when Hollywood regularly reinforced and exploited negative stereotypes of African Americans, I’d watch him dominate the screen in one meaningful, nuanced role after another. In Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, he was Detective Virgil Tibbs, fighting Southern racism to find a killer. As John Prentice in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he played a black physician planning to marry a white woman—and did it at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in many states.
To Sir, with Love; The Bedford Incident; They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!… I caught all of Poitier’s movies, whether in the theater or at home on our black-and-white television. I observed his posture, his style of dress, and especially his diction—listening to how he spoke, looking up the words he used, and then trying to use them myself.
I don’t know that I always applied those words in their proper context. But I did grow more comfortable interacting with adults, and that, in turn, gave me confidence at the job interviews I went in for with Arthur.
My first job was Saturdays at a light bulb and fixture factory that was going out of business. Because of my height, and perhaps my ability to express myself, the owners didn’t know or care that I was underage. They needed help packing away the fixtures, bulbs, and other lamp parts, saw a kid who could handle the heavy lifting, and hired me on the spot.
It was hard, grueling work, and the hourly wage was low, but it put a little money in my pocket and gave me some independence. I would keep half my pay and give the rest to my mother, contributing to our household finances and steering clear of bad elements on the street.
But despite gaining some independence, I was barely in my teens and hadn’t yet challenged my father’s dictates. I knew what the church meant to him. I understood it was his refuge from life’s hardships. I only wish he’d been capable of understanding, or caring enough to understand, that basketball meant the same to me.
Still, I played whenever possible, usually at the after-school centers.
One kid I remember from that time was named Stanley. He lived at Whitman Houses and was a pretty good ballplayer. But as far as I was concerned, the best thing about Stanley was his mother’s record collection. She had forty-fives and LPs by all the great black recording artists of that era, records I wasn’t allowed to play at home. It was a fertile period for soul music, with one great after another coming onto the scene. The O’Jays. Diana Ross and the Supremes. James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and Marvin Gaye. The Manhattans. The Delfonics. The Chi-Lites…
Stanley and I would sit in his room playing records for hours. It was music heaven. Or would have been if not for the smell of the chitlins his mom was always fixing in the kitchen. If you’ve never had chitlins—fried pig’s intestines—I’ll only say they smell exactly like you’d expect. I guess you either love them or hate them.
Let’s just say I never touched the chitlins at Stanley’s apartment. But I didn’t go there to eat. I went to listen to the music on the turntable and have fun.
As the days got longer in the spring and summer, I would spend more time in the playgrounds adjacent to my building. Everyone on the courts played three-on-three, half-court ball. That was different from the school tournaments, where you played full-court, five-on-five games. With five men on the squad, utilizing the open court, you ran transition, fast-break basketball, a game of speed and finesse.
Three-on-three was grittier. You operated in a limited space and got up close to your opponents. You played man defense, battled for rebounds, and gave and took hard fouls. You had to be mentally and physically tough.
Three-on-three was tougher than NBA games, because you didn’t have officials stepping in when tempers flared. You couldn’t just hit somebody without repercussions. You either understood your boundaries or learned them the hard way. It took a fortitude some guys didn’t possess.
But the beauty of three-on-three pickup games, if you had that fortitude, was that it raised you to a higher level of competitiveness. In Brooklyn’s playgrounds, the best players stayed on the court. You stayed on if your team won, and stepped aside if they lost. It was survival of the fittest. When you were sidelined, you hoped the next guys coming up would choose you for their team. There was always an open slot for a good player, so if you’d already played and lost, and you were better than somebody else waiting to get into a game, you still had a chance for more basketball that day.
It was no fun standing on the sidelines. I didn’t want to watch other kids play the game I loved. All my self-esteem was tied up in staying on the court as long as possible.
That was where stamina entered the equation. Someone could possess all the qualities of a tremendous player—strength, coordination, timing, shooting ability, passing ability, the ability to rebound in traffic—but without stamina, he would be unable to utilize those attributes to their fullest. On the other hand, if he had more stamina than the other guy, he could outplay him no matter how talented and powerful that guy was. Eventually the guy would tire. His legs became fatigued. He’d be unable to outrun the better-conditioned player and would fall behind when he was chasing him around the court.
Early in my basketball life, I realized that stamina was the great equalizer. Though I didn’t consider myself the most talented player on the court, I made sure I was the most highly conditioned.
I never lifted weights. Not once. To me, you could lift all the weights you wanted, but strength and size didn’t matter unless conditioning was the foundation of your play.
Stamina and endurance can be developed in many ways. The goal for an athlete is to build up your wind and be able to get a second or third wind when you need it. A lot of guys would jog, but I felt jogging didn’t have the right pace for basketball.
You run on the court. You sprint on the court. You don’t jog.
By the seventh and eighth grades, I’d started running circuits around playgrounds, schoolyards, Fort Greene Park, and the streets of my neighborhood. But I was always dodging people and traffic, and that made it hard to run at a fast, uninterrupted clip.
One day I passed a guy on the sidewalk who looked like he’d stepped right out of a weight-lifting magazine. He must have been a boxer or competitive bodybuilder. As he talked about his training with his friend, I overheard him say he ran on the Brooklyn Bridge.
A light bulb blinked on over my head.
Oh wow, I told myself. That’s an idea!
The Brooklyn Bridge was about a ten-minute walk from Whitman. It was even closer to the Farragut Houses where I played ball once in a while. I also played three-on-three in a park opposite the community college a few blocks away from the bridge. Any of those places would be a good starting point, I thought.
But running the Brooklyn Bridge would not be as easy as getting there. With its enormous granite towers and steel cables, the bridge is pure architectural majesty, connecting the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan across the East River. Its main span is 486 meters, which once made it the world’s longest suspension bridge, but its wood-plank pedestrian walkway is even longer. Raised high above traffic in the middle of the bridge, it is slightly over a mile from end to end.
I intended to run it in both directions—a total of two miles—at a full sprint.
To put this in perspective, the two-mile run is an Olympic-level track and field event. I was barely thirteen and knew handling that span would be a challenge. But I felt the secret to accomplishing my goal was in the books I’d been reading under my blanket at night. In visualization, the same technique I used to mentally rehearse my moves on the basketball court.
On my first run, I imagined myself to be a lone African warrior delivering an urgent message to my tribal leader. Surrounded by enemies, running over arid, sunbaked plains. Running with unstoppable persistence through risk of capture or death.
I could not fail. The fate of my tribe hung on my success.
And I succeeded. I ran the Brooklyn Bridge. It quickly became a regular part of my workout routine. Spring, summer, winter, fall, the weather made no difference. I was a warrior on a mission, and nothing would prevent me from accomplishing it.
Whether I started out from Farragut or the community college, I’d take Prospect Street straight under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the entrance ramp, running at a moderate but steady pace. There was a busy thoroughfare just off the ramp, with traffic leaving the expressway to turn onto the bridge or bear farther north, toward the Manhattan Bridge, the cars going one way or another as they moved across the river.
I would keep up my medium speed until I reached the thoroughfare, then jog in place, waiting for a break in traffic so I could cross the street to the ramp. The first few yards of the walk were paved with concrete, a metal rail separating me from the cars. But once I felt the bounce of wood underfoot, I accelerated, not jogging anymore, no longer feeling the shock of my feet pounding on hard concrete.
As the walkway rose above the tops of the vehicles, I was no longer concerned with traffic. I didn’t have to worry about safety. I ran with speed over the planks, thumbs up, a warrior on a mission of great importance. I could not allow myself to tire. I refused to tire or weaken.
Sprinting, one foot after the other, my legs stretched, I paid no attention to the people strolling around me. I hardly noticed anyone else on the planks. Somehow the air always seemed fresh and clean despite the traffic. I could run in a summer heat wave and still feel a breeze. On those days, the baked asphalt sidewalks of Fort Greene seemed very far away.
It was beautiful. The bridge’s sweeping magnificence, the beauty of its long, uninterrupted span extending over the water, the barges heading out past the Statue of Liberty toward the open sea, and the skyscrapers of Manhattan across the river… I ran, taking everything in. When I reached the end of the walkway, I’d turn back toward Brooklyn without pause and start my run all over again.
Thumbs up, always thumbs up.
The bridge was an incredible place to train. Running it gave me a special sense of freedom. But going home was the opposite. Life there continued to be stifling and joyless. I needed something more, needed to expand my horizons, but what I wanted most was still frustratingly out of reach.
My situation had to change. I had to make it change.
That meant rebelling against my father.