The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (35 page)

He asked Janice whether he could say hello to her daughter, but Tabitha was her entire world, and she was not going to let Dawkins meet her until she trusted he was in the relationship for the long haul. She knew he was fabulous with kids, but she still made him wait six months. "I wasn't going to introduce him and then have it not work out between us," Janice says. "It wouldn't have been fair to her."

When he and Tabitha finally formally met, they were instant buddies. After Dawkins and Janice married in 2001—"My final wife, finally got it right," he says—little Tabitha would sneak into their bed at night to snuggle with him. Janice wanted to cry. Dawkins was comfortable with this; he had coached special-needs kids with the Nets, and his daughter Dara had a significant hearing impairment. And it wasn't long until Tabitha had him wrapped around her finger.

She likes ketchup on all her food, so she'd ask him to get the bottle and pour the ketchup for her. He'd rush to do it, of course. She'd then say she needed him to put the portable straw in her juice box. He'd rush to do that, as well. Janice walked in on them one day and told him, "Please stop waiting on her hand and foot. She can do all these things. She's conning you."

He smirked a little smirk and wagged his finger at Tabitha. And from then on, he let her pour her own ketchup.

Darryl Dawkins was getting coachable.

Nine years later, Darryl Dawkins was a family man, an absolute homebody. Nine years later, he and Janice were the parents of a seven-year-old son, Nicholas, and a six-year-old daughter, Alexis—not to mention a flourishing 14-year-old Tabitha.

He'd coached the ValleyDawgs to two USBL titles, in 2001 and 2004, and when the team folded in 2005, he was recruited to do nonprofit work for the NBA. With the Nets, he had always signed autographs until his wrist fell off, so the league asked him to be an "ambassador," doing what he does best: shaking hands, hamming it up, saying, "Yo mama." He couldn't have been more domesticated. Every morning, it was his job to get Tabitha out the door for school. Janice could never rouse her, but he knew all the tricks. He'd say, "I'm goooooing to geeeet youuuu," and Tabitha would swing into motion.

After that, their routine was priceless. Tabitha had a habit of secretly taking Janice's necklaces and earrings to school, or bringing in family photos or a radio. "If Tabitha could pack up her whole bedroom and take it to school, she'd do it," Janice says. So it was Darryl's assignment, each morning, to check her pockets. He'd turn this into a game. He'd pat her down, then she'd pat him down. She'd say, "Stick 'em up." Then he'd take Tabitha to the bus stop.

He also was heavily involved in her Special Olympics events, in which she was something of a prodigy—120 medals in soccer and swimming. When Dawkins would show up at her events, she'd come running up to him shouting, "Daddy!"

"You should see people's faces," Janice says. "I mean, who's going to believe a little white Down's syndrome kid who says Darryl Dawkins is her daddy."

He still would talk periodically with World B. Free and Bobby Jones, and they both were overwhelmed by how this little girl had changed their old friend's life. "Tabitha does not need anyone to have pity on her," Dawkins says. "If you show her love and you be who you are, she can accept that. And through that, it's helped me to mature and grow also."

By 2009, he seemed to have everything—except basketball. He'd help a local AAU team and conduct an occasional clinic, but he didn't have a daily hoops fix. And then, this past summer, while Janice was scanning a careers website, she saw a want ad for a basketball coach.

At a college.

The phone rang at Lehigh Carbon Community College, in the Allentown suburb of Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, and athletic director Jocelyn Beck picked up.

"Hi, this is Darryl Dawkins. I'm interested in being your basketball coach."

"Who is this?"

"Darryl Dawkins."

"Okay, just send me your résumé."

"What do you mean?"

"I need to have a résumé. Thank you."

Beck honestly thought it was a crank phone call, a joke, which was why she rushed him off the line in 14 seconds. Beck, the former women's coach at Lehigh University, was a longtime Sixers fan who remembered Dawkins busting those backboards. To her, he was a legend. Why would he want to coach at L-Tri-C? How did he even know about L-Tri-C?

She told her boss she might have just spoken to Chocolate Thunder, but her boss didn't believe her. "Nobody on campus believed me," she says. Two days later, the résumé arrived. Janice had typed the thing up, and Dawkins's references weren't Billy C or Dr. J; they were local Allentown business leaders. Beck phoned one of the men, who said: "Darryl has only one fault that I can tell you about."

Beck felt a panic attack coming on. In her mind, she had already hired him.

"What's the problem?" she asked.

"His wardrobe. It's like Skittles. He has a lime green suit."

"I can deal with that," she said.

Beck formed a committee and invited Dawkins in for an interview. He barely fit through her door, and his first words were, "Hi, I'm Darryl Dawkins."

"I know."

"So ask me anything."

"Okay. First of all, why? Why do you want this job?"

"Why not?"

"You're hired."

They both burst out laughing, but then the questions grew serious. She asked him what his goals were, and he told her he would stress school first, basketball second. He told her education meant the world to him. His daughter Dara already had earned a degree from Temple University. He'd sent five of his brothers and sisters to college. He told Beck's committee that he valued staying in school—even though he'd never spent a day in college—and that he wanted his players doing good deeds in the community. He said at least he'd been to the college of hard knocks—and that qualified him for the job.

She had to hire him; it was a no-brainer. The school offered him a salary similar to a high school coach's—"By the time he recruits and all that, he's probably making five cents an hour," Beck says—and Dawkins jumped at it. He then took a stroll around campus.

"So this is what college looks like," he thought.

He scheduled a team tryout for the fall, and some of the kids who showed up didn't even go to L-Tri-C.

They had come to see Chocolate Thunder, and when he walked in, characteristically late, all 35 players stopped dribbling and just stared. There wasn't a sound.

After Beck chased out the impostors, Dawkins began to run the kids into the ground. Billy C would've been proud; Dawkins, who used to eat 3 Musketeers bars on the bench, whose mile runs used to be timed on a sundial, had finally seen the light.

When the roster was posted a few days later, some of the players who had failed to make the team wept in the parking lot. These were kids who didn't want to lose their
dreaming years,
and that was the reason Dawkins liked the job so much. He couldn't bear to see them cry. So he told some of the kids who got cut that he probably would hold another tryout midseason.

Most of these players were born in the early 1990s; they were 18 and 19, the same age the coach had been in 1975. But, curiously, they knew his whole story. They'd YouTubed him. They'd watched his old Wheaties commercials; they'd seen the Robinzine dunk. And if they weren't certain how legendary he was, imagine their faces when President Barack Obama visited L-Tri-C for a town meeting in December and bum-rushed their coach.

"Chocolate Thunder!" Obama exclaimed.

"Yessir, Mr. President," Dawkins responded.

At first, his players assumed they'd get to hear some of Dawkins's raps, but they found out fairly early that wasn't happening. The team's leading scorer from the previous season, Jake Waylen, finally mustered the courage to ask, "What's up with Planet Lovetron?" But Dawkins's reply was, "Maybe when you're out of school, I'll tell you."

He wasn't playing around. He wanted the team to push the ball 100 miles an hour, and he figured now wasn't the time to tell them tales of his boom box. He'd run them so hard, he'd put trash receptacles all over the gym in case they lost their lunches. He was a taskmaster. Thirty-five years later, here he was in college, even threatening to take a class or two. Lovetron was unnecessary now. In the old days, Lovetron was his escape from reality; now, he preferred reality.

"Lovetron is temporarily shut down for repairs," he says. "It may be shut down for the duration. I'm on the coaching planet right now."

From the minute the season began in December, Beck kept waiting for a lime green suit that never arrived. Dawkins harangued the refs, ran a tight ship, and realized, when he looked at his starting center, that he had come full circle.

The kid's name was Carlos Pujols, and he was a cutup, just like Dawkins used to be. He hated to run, just like Dawkins, and he had some con in him, just like Dawkins.

"You got to box out," the coach said one day.

"What?"

"You got to box out, man."

"What?"

"You can't hear me?"

"What?"

Dawkins had made a career tuning out his coaches, so he knew what Pujols was doing. "You can't pull anything over on me," he said. "I've seen it all."

They began to talk, daily. Dawkins found out Pujols worked with at-risk kids after school, kids who'd been arrested for drugs, stealing cars, or fighting. It was like looking in the mirror. Dawkins would stop practice and scold the guards for not rewarding Pujols with the ball when he ran the floor. This was big man sticking up for big man, goofball sticking up for goofball. Tabitha, who watches every practice, loved it.

The more questions Dawkins asked, the more engrossed he became in his players, and he found out most of them worked part-time. Pujols was manager of a company that sold kitchen cutlery. Waylen was a part-time counselor at the YMCA. Another was a construction worker, and another mowed grass. Another waited tables at Ruby Tuesday, and another was a movie usher. Another got to try out again in early January, as Dawkins had promised, and quit his job at Ross Dress For Less when he made the squad.

By late January, the team's record was hovering around .500, and Dawkins invited the guys out to a local diner, to finally give them a glimpse of 1975. He rapped the Robinzine dunk and told them about a phrase he used to use: "Yo mama." The act is still in there. He still calls himself "Charming Chocolate" on his voice mail; he still has his fire-engine red and fuchsia suits in his closet. He still says his birthday is January 11, 12, and 13—because he's so big he needs three days to celebrate.

"He's still Chocolate Thunder at home and with the refs," Janice says. "But he's grown up. We all grow up. He just took a little bit longer. Age, children, stability, it all changes out. It makes you a better person if you allow it, and he embraced it."

Says Fred Carter: "No one would've thought, including myself, that Darryl Dawkins would be a college coach. Darryl was never serious ... that's the picture I had of Darryl in my mind. But all this time, Darryl was absorbing knowledge. He's telling these kids, 'Meet your expectations—because I didn't.' Never saw it coming."

At various times this season, Beck, the players, and the media have asked Dawkins to dunk a ball for them for old times' sake. And that's why, two days after his 53rd birthday, he is standing under an L-Tri-C basket, trying to reopen his relationship with the rim. It's not something he is enthused about. He has that bad back of his and needs to see a chiropractor at least once a week. He hasn't been stretching or working out. So as he eyeballs the basket, he isn't convinced he can rise up there. Is this payback? Is this the rim getting even for Robinzine?

The only people in the gym are Beck, the women's basketball team, and a camera crew. "Anyone know mouth-to-mouth?" he says, laughing. After measuring and strategizing for 10 minutes, Darryl Dawkins finally grunts, jumps—and slams it. The breakaway rim snaps back into place as he walks away.

He doesn't name the dunk. He doesn't need to.

FROM
ESPN.COM

"L
IGHT A CANDLE,
" Dusty Baker says, his lone voice softly skimming the looming silence of the empty church. "I'm sure there's someone out there you want to pray for."

He lights a candle, points the flickering matchstick downward in his large hands, the athlete's hands, dousing it into the cool sand. It is here in the solitude of St. Peter in Chains Cathedral—funded by Ohio Catholics who donated 12 cents per month toward its construction in 1841—where Johnnie B. Baker, born Baptist in California, raised in the traditions of the southern black church, kneels alone among the long pews and nourishes his spirituality.

After several moments of prayer, he rises and walks gingerly toward the altar, marveling at the Greek architecture, the Corinthian columns and stained glass mosaics, comforted, despite its bruises, by the sanctuary and the ritual of the church.

"I come in here before home stands, sometimes a couple of times a week during the season," said Baker. "I pray for my family, for my team, and for Barack Obama, because I've never seen people try to take a president down like this, never seen such anger. I mean, what did he
do
to anybody?"

History surrounds Baker this morning, as it does every morning. He is humbled by its density, energized by its lineage and his place in it. The ghosts are touching him. History is not something that happened to others a long time ago, but alive as the river upon whose banks his team plays. His baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds, the original professional ball club in America, proud but down and dowdy in an era of big money, is on the cusp of a first playoff series since 1995, revived by a man who has won three Manager of the Year Awards but was run out of two big jobs in San Francisco and Chicago, and out of baseball in 2007.