The Hustle (9 page)

…

On weekends, we pile into McClain's van. Randy Finley has signed us up to play in the Amateur Athletic Union, a nationwide youth-sports organization. Anyone can form an AAU team, and you can recruit any player you want as long as he is within the age limits. The AAU league is a netherworld of games in dimly lit gyms against players none of us have faced before. McClain and Finley drive us to tournaments around Western Washington—from Bellingham and Mount Vernon up north to Redmond, the suburban home of the Microsoft “campus,” just east of Seattle across Lake Washington.

From the stands, players are numbers and statistics. You identify them by their traits: The short kid with the fade cut into his hair can dribble right or left; the big one who sweats a lot is a tough rebounder; that kid who's hustling after the ball has a deadly jump shot. The game's immersive world, the beautiful geometry, the shifting angles, players jostling for position, the ball floating toward the hoop make it possible to forget that anything exists off the court, outside the moment.

From the bench, where I usually sit with Damian, Myran, and JT, I take in every move my teammates make on the court. I know all their tics as players, but almost nothing about their lives away from the court.

For example, I have no idea that JT, who is sitting next to me and cheering on Tyrell, has been observing Tyrell from a distance since they were little kids. Back then, Tyrell and Donnico, his brother, used to go out with their dad on the playground at Garfield. Tyrell and Donnico shot baskets while their dad grabbed the ball and whipped it back to them. Seeing them out there, JT felt envious of how tight they were, how much fun they were having. He wished he could run onto the court and join them, but it wouldn't have seemed right—it was a father-and-son thing. JT didn't want to intrude.

JT cherishes the few moments of paternal-type guidance he's had out on the playground—he's learned his defense and rebounding skills from Dennis Johnson, the starting point guard for the Seattle SuperSonics when they won the 1979 NBA championship. JT's mom, Sharon, was best friends with Johnson's girlfriend, and the three of them went to games together, young “John-John” sitting on Sharon's lap at courtside. During the week, Sharon was a clerk at Blue Shield. Away from work, she was so fun and pretty that she'd been nicknamed “Hollywood Sharon”—JT found her totally glamorous. Dennis Johnson took a liking to JT and decided to teach him how to play. JT hardly sees his own dad, except at his grandfather's house at holidays. When they do meet, they're polite to each other but nothing more. JT finds substitutes for the father and brothers he is missing through playing on Willie McClain's team. “I loved being able to go over to people's houses to eat dinner, spending the night all the time, doing things with them, like with the McClains,” he says. “They had brothers, and a mother and a father, not a single parent, doing family things, and I'm able to be involved. So I think just growing up I was just looking for a family, looking up to Willie McClain.”

Myran, like JT, has found a refuge on Willie McClain's team. He was seven the last time he saw his dad. They'd been out in the middle of the street, with Myran hiking a football to his father, who then passed it to him. His dad was a charismatic guy who loved to dress sharp. He also sold drugs. Not long after that game on the street, Myran's father went down to Seattle's Chinatown to play cards in a gambling den and was shot dead. In the years since, Myran's mom has been mired in her own struggles, and Myran has spent most of his childhood with his grandma, who works as a nurse. Myran's predilection toward acting out is a trait Willie McClain keeps a close eye on. Of all the players on the team, McClain knows that Myran is the most likely to say something that might cause a problem, and that he's the least likely to know how to handle himself in a new social situation. But the McClains have often had Myran stay over at their house. If anyone needs to be exposed to an opportunity that might broaden his horizons, it's Myran. So McClain decided to take a chance and put him on the team. “Myran, he was just special to me,” he says. “You know things, and you know he needs to be there.”

Damian lives with his mom and younger sister, Toya, and is fiercely protective of both. When his sister gets teased, Damian steps in to defend her. “Damian always took up for me,” Toya says. “I don't recall him ever losing a fight. He would beat up the biggest of big guys.” On the team, Damian, like JT and Myran, finds surrogate father figures in both Willie McClain and Charlie Hampton. Sometimes he goes over to the Hampton house and just studies Charlie—his tone of voice, his bearing, how he interacts with his wife and kids—trying to learn everything he can.

Tyrell, for his part, loves sports. He's brash and seems born for the public eye, shining in the spotlight ever since he began break dancing and pop-locking at church events, which got him showcased on the local cable-access station. With his array of behind-the-back moves, head fakes, and infectious smile, he is the flashiest player on the team.

Willie Jr. both enjoys and feels pressure in his position as the son of the coach. “I had to earn my spot more than anybody else,” he says. “God forbid, if I would've had no skills, I would've been in trouble.” His role on the court, he realizes, is to help his dad keep order, which means holding his own ego in line. As a point guard, his focus is on distributing the ball and feeding the player with the hot hand. With the integrated team, he feels a responsibility to make sure things go smoothly, that everyone feels part of the group.

Maitland, as the son of the team's organizer, also has a special status. His feelings on that situation are mixed. He has no choice but to play—his dad thinks that sports are a good way for Maitland to make friends and to combat his shyness. But Maitland also feels an innate social awkwardness. He finds it hard to meet the expectations at Lakeside, where it seems like everyone is expected to be perfect. He enjoys being part of the team, but starring on the court means nothing to him. “I'm one of those people who much preferred practice. I don't really have fun in games. I don't thrive on the pressure,” he says. “I tended to like not getting playing time because then I didn't have to worry about anything.”

Sean's dad, the cigar-chewing stockbroker, had encouraged his son to play sports, even signing him up for boxing when he was in first grade. “I hated it,” Sean says. “I remember one of the first boxing practices, we had gloves on and had to pick sparring partners. I picked this dorky kid with big frizzy hair because I thought he'd be easy to fight. He whipped me so bad.”

With his height, basketball was the most natural fit for Sean. “I was never very good, just tall. I'd run around in circles, rebound here or there. I was never aggressive.… But it was always fun, I always liked the people I played with. And you do sports as a kid, right?”

Dino, along with Chris, gets recruited by Randy Finley midway into the AAU season to add height and talent lacking in some of the other white players, such as myself. Dino's parents are both immigrants from Greece. His dad, whose first job in Seattle was as a cafeteria manager at a waterfront hotel on Elliott Bay, runs a twenty-four-hour diner downtown that he owns with his brothers. Dino's mom ferries him to his practices and games. Though Dino already attends a Christian school, his mom hopes he can gain entrance to Lakeside. Dino, who doesn't know anyone from either side, just jumps in and begins to play.

Chris knows that he's enrolling at Lakeside in the fall—his father is a prominent alum, and his older brother and sister are both already at the school. But coming from a competitive family has its pressures, and Chris has found that he can use athletics as an outlet. “A lot of people play sports because they're fun, but for me the significance was that during seventh grade, over an eighteen-month period, I grew something like eight inches,” he says. “I wasn't popular in school. I was kind of fat, and all of a sudden I went to being six-two and skinny. Sports transitioned from being the things that you just did to being my lifeline, my self-esteem.”

For Eric, this team, mixing together his Central Area friends and private school classmates, means both sides of his life are finally coming together. Eric has never thought about why he plays sports. It's just natural. He drops his usual reserve when he plays basketball. It's as if he has a different personality that comes out, one that isn't withdrawn or shy. “I was good at basketball,” he says. “What boy doesn't want to be good at sports? That's the way you could shine and get people to respect you.”

Sports have been inseparable from my family life since birth. In December 1971, my parents went to watch the SuperSonics play basketball against the Portland Trailblazers. The Sonics pulled out a 107–105 victory, courtesy of some last-minute heroics by Lenny Wilkens. A few hours later, a doctor pulled me out, a week before my due date.

By the time I started playing teeball as a five-year-old, I'd noticed that sports could be a useful lubricant in our family machinery. Though my parents seemed to do little else together, both came to my games. My dad coached several of my Little League baseball teams, while my mom sat in the stands and cheered.

Sports are what I do with my dad: skiing and basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring and summer, and football in the fall, when, on weekends, we go to watch the University of Washington Huskies or the Seattle Seahawks. Each game is a flawless gem, and afterward we're able to hold it up to the light and analyze every aspect, from who the coach started at quarterback to the twenty-six-yard run that broke it open in the second half. Everything is easy to dissect; there are no gray areas.

I revel in the feeling of solidarity I get from being on our mixed team, and I hate it when anything intrudes on it. One night after a game, Coach McClain gives me a ride home. My family has just moved into a new house three miles north of the one where I have lived nearly all my life.

The normal chatter in the van dies as I guide McClain through the neighborhood. We ride past a lot of big houses on big lots, built without regard to architectural harmony—mock Tudor next to California stucco next to Rambler. Tyrell, Damian, JT, Myran, and Willie Jr. crowd to stare out the front window. Even Coach McClain seems to be gaping.

We pull up the driveway in front of my house, a large, gray, modernist structure with two gables. It has a basketball hoop and the outline of a key set in front of the three-car garage. Damian asks, “What side do you live on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you live on the right side or the left side?”

It takes me a second to catch on.

“It's just one house,” I say, clutching my gym bag.

“You mean this is just for your family?”

“Yeah, we're the only ones who live here.”

I pull the door open and thank Coach McClain for the ride.

“I'll see you guys at practice,” I say and scurry into the house.

I'm embarrassed. All the gawking undermines the feeling fostered by playing on the team—that we are all equals. I worry that my teammates might not like me after seeing the house. The next day at school, Eric tells me that the guys had joked about my reaction on the way back to the Central Area, saying, “He probably didn't invite us in because he was scared we'd steal everything.”

I begin to protest but stop. What I can't tell Eric is that I never thought of inviting anyone in because, even though we've just moved in, I've already begun to detest the house. Like Lakeside, it has hit at a division between my parents—for my mom, it's a beautiful home that showcases our prosperity; my dad simply seems ashamed of it. Being part of the team is an escape from that strife. The last thing I want to do is invite my teammates into that.

At our next practice, Damian sidles up to me. In a conspiratorial tone he asks, “So, Doug, you're pretty rich, huh?”

“No, I'm not rich,” I say.

“Well, what about your house?”

“I'm not rich,” I explain. “It's my dad's money.”

“What's the difference?”

“Well, just because my dad has money, it doesn't mean I'm rich. It's not the same thing.”

“Yeah, but you're going to get the money someday.”

“It's hard to say. What if he spends it all? What if his company goes out of business?”

Damian shakes his head and laughs.

There is nothing I can really say. I have never seen his house and have no idea how he lives. For the whole season, the black side of the team always makes the commute north. We never visit the Central Area.

Welfare Queens, the Huxtables,
and Unlikely Champions

We play “21” all the time, a game the black guys taught the rest of us. It pits a single player against everyone else. The idea is to grab a rebound, clear the ball outside the key, and then put it though the hoop for two points. How you do that is up to you—you can try to drop an outside shot, or you can drive the basket through the rest of the team. If you score, you get a free throw. Hit the free throw, you get another point and the ball back.

21 is a mad scramble, full of desperate shots and trash talk. Everyone has a different tactic: Eric cuts, dashes, and zigzags through the defense until he can squeeze off a shot; JT lays back and positions for a rebound; I wait for a wayward shot or loose ball and try to put it back in before too many defenders pile up on me; Tyrell tries some between-the-legs dribbles and other moves that look good but don't necessarily work when you have to get by nine other guys. Sometimes Coach McClain jumps into the fray, dribbling down toward the hoop and using his hefty frame to knock us out of the way like bowling pins.

We are playing in Randy Finley's barn. Finley owns six acres of land out in the country about thirty miles north of Seattle. The family's two-story split-level is surrounded by lawn and overlooks a river valley. Several pigs root around in a corral in the yard. Finley has nailed up a hoop in the barn, and the sunlight cuts through the dust that hangs in the air, mixing with the shouts and laughs of the players.

Right now, Maitland has the ball out on the wing. He's used his butt to slam other players out of the way and grab a rebound. A knot of concentration curls on his forehead and his lips purse as he observes the tangle blocking his path to the basket. He dribbles with his right hand and turns and backs toward the hoop before swiveling to fire off a shot.

The ball travels at a flat trajectory, hitting the backboard and bouncing off the rim toward the other side of the court, where Myran grabs it. In a second, JT and Willie Jr. are both all over him, trying to strip the ball. Myran stagger-steps, dribbles right, and falls back while throwing up his shot. It arcs up and drops down to rattle around the rim before falling through. Myran pumps his fist, straightens up, and walks toward the free-throw line. He puts his right hand up and calls, “Ball!”

…

Years later, when my teammates remember the team, the first things that will come to mind are the capping, joking around during the van rides, and the games of 21. The game was something that everyone could play and be a part of, even though the best player almost always won in the end (in our case, Eric took at least half of the games). We each added our own little touches to 21—Myran's outside shot, Tyrell's drives, Maitland's rebounding—so that all of our styles merged into a larger composition. Unlike our real games, where we were subject to the referees and Coach McClain's oversight, you could pull out any crazy move you wanted in 21. Boldness and improvisation were encouraged. All that mattered was getting the ball through the hoop. My outside shot took on the same worth as Tyrell's winding drives to the hoop and Sean's post-up play near the basket. We all had the same goal and our own set of tools for getting there. Everyone was, for the moment, equal to everyone else.

It wasn't that way off the court. This was 1986, and there were plenty of contradictory messages flying around. On TV, many of the regular depictions of African Americans were one step removed from Amos & Andy. Blacks were generally cast as friendly but somewhat buffoonish characters with catchphrases, such as J.J. on
Good Times
(“Dy-no-miite!”) and Arnold on
Diff'rent Strokes
(“Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?”). On Thursday nights, though, there was
The Cosby Show
, watched by nearly every kid I knew, where Dr. Huxtable presided over his family, administering heart-to-heart talks in the kitchen and breaking into an occasional Harry Belafonte lip sync.

Early in 1986, rap finally began to break through on MTV—then supplanting radio as the avenue through which pop music gained national exposure—with the release of
Licensed to Ill
by the Beastie Boys, an album that followed in the American tradition of white artists taking a black form and popularizing it. At the same time, Run DMC and Aerosmith put out their version of “Walk This Way,” which both brought credibility back to the washed-up Boston rockers and shot the rappers from Queens into the mainstream. These breached the way for the rest of hip-hop, much of which reflected the music's roots in the housing projects of the Bronx. One day at practice Tyrell spun my head by reciting, “My story is rough, my neighborhood is tough/But I still sport gold, and I'm out to crush.” He gave me an incredulous look when I asked who it was. “LL Cool J,” he said, wincing as if my ignorance had caused him personal pain.

For the white side of the team there was an undeniable allure in hanging with guys from Central Seattle just as hip-hop was on the rise, and it was impossible not to try to pick up on some of the style. Chris learned to break-dance. Sean picked up a Fat Boys album. Every Sunday I listened to a weekly rap show on AM radio—the only place you could hear the music in Seattle in those days—trying and failing to master lines from songs like UTFO's “Roxanne, Roxanne.”

The black players on the team didn't get any street cred from hanging with the white guys, but they did find other things of value. JT quickly adopted Randy Finley as another surrogate father. Damian was fascinated by being around people with wealth. “I'd go home and tell my mom, ‘These people have lots of money!' ” he says. Willie McClain Jr. viewed the whole thing as if it were an after-school special about integration and opportunity. “We'd seen it on TV,” he says. “This was our chance to better ourselves.”

Little differences with larger implications were always there. For example, during weekend tournaments, the favorite place to get lunch was McDonald's. Before we left the gym, guys like Damian and JT would ask Randy Finley for lunch money; they noticed that the white guys were never short. On the way over—it was always “Mickey D's,” never “McDonald's”—the kids from the Central Area made a huge deal out of the coming meal, vigorously debating the relative merits of the Big Mac and the Quarter Pounder. I had never considered the distinctions between the menu choices, or that going to McDonald's could be a rare treat to be savored.

These small fault lines hinted at a deeper class divide. If you turned your television channel away from Bill Cosby and his perfect family, you might happen upon a news report about the spread of crack cocaine. Or you might see some pundits discussing what to do about the problem of “welfare queens.”

The phrase had been popularized by Ronald Reagan, who first used it during his 1976 challenge of Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. On the stump, Reagan cited a “welfare queen” from the South Side of Chicago who had “eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veterans' benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands.” He added, “Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”

It appears that—instead of there actually being an incredibly industrious and motivated welfare cheat—the real story that inspired Reagan was far less interesting. At the time he first began using the welfare queen trope, a Chicago woman named Linda Taylor had made the news after a state senator investigating welfare fraud made sensational charges against her. In the end, she was convicted with using two aliases to fraudulently collect $8,000 of welfare. Reagan or one of his staff possibly picked up the story from newspaper accounts.

The exaggerated anecdote was too good to correct—it touched a nerve in campaign crowds and remained one of Reagan's recurring themes in the coming years. It worked, in part, because the extraordinary post–World War II American economic expansion, which saw the growth of a vast middle class, had ground to a halt in the 1970s. As inflation and unemployment increased, people became worried about their futures. Welfare queens, depicted as poor black women who had babies in order to sponge off the system, were a useful political wedge.

The sociologist Christopher Jencks calls Reagan's 1980 election “the end of an era in American race relations.” He writes, “Between 1964 and 1980 federal officials had argued about the moral legitimacy and practical benefits of helping blacks catch up with whites economically, but few questioned the basic assumption that the government ought to promote this goal one way or another.” That changed with Reagan's ascendancy. Policies such as affirmative action, which aimed to increase the number of African Americans in higher education and white-collar jobs, as well as “social safety net” programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, housing subsidies, and welfare, were called into question. Conservative writers such as economist Thomas Sowell and political scientist Charles Murray argued that these programs were not only ineffective, but they actually encouraged the recipients—i.e., poor black people, though, of course, many more whites received these subsidies than blacks—to become lazy, dependent on handouts, and to have babies out of wedlock. The reasonable conclusion, then, was that such assistance should be terminated.

This was a potent theme. My father's side of the family, small-business-owning and Italian American, picked up the welfare queen idea, repeating it at holiday dinners when the conversation inevitably turned to what was “wrong with America.” They concluded that whoever wasn't making it was too ready to ask for a handout and just wasn't trying hard enough.

It also dovetailed with our self-image—we were hardworking descendants of immigrants who had pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps. My grandfather had gone from selling newspapers on street corners in downtown Seattle at age seven to opening a service station in the late 1930s. Twenty years later, he bought the coin-operated laundry company that my dad later took over. In 1979, my grandfather was named Washington State Small Businessman of the Year—a newspaper columnist wrote that he was “making the Great American Dream come true not only for himself but also for others.” In the early 1980s, he was one of a group of business owners invited to Washington, D.C., by the Small Business Administration. The trip included a tour of the White House, where Ronald Reagan posed with the group for a photo. When he returned, my grandfather was delighted that an Italian from Garlic Gulch had made it all the way to a meeting with the president. I became a huge Ronald Reagan fan. I loved it when he gave speeches on TV, with his helmet of shiny black hair, head cocked a bit to the side, the knowing smile on his face, and the misty look in his eyes.

My family had good reason to be proud—we had staked a place for ourselves here in this country only a few generations after leaving peasantry in rural Italy. Looking back, the shame of the welfare-queen talk is the way it divided an issue such as poverty into simple categories. It included my family within the boundaries of one side of America—that of right-thinking, hardworking people. Anyone taking welfare fell on the other side of the line. The rhetoric obliterated complexity.

I brought the preconceptions and stereotypes that seeped in through the culture to the basketball court. Had Damian informed me that his mom took public assistance, I would have immediately categorized her in my mind as lazy and not trying hard enough. I had no way of knowing or understanding that his family was working on its own story, as American as my own.

At the same time that my grandfather was getting his service station going in downtown Seattle in the 1940s, Damian's Great-Aunt Geneva was tiring of life in Jeanerette, Louisiana, where shotgun-carrying white men on horseback still patrolled the sugarcane fields where the family worked. When she heard about better opportunities in Spokane, Washington, three hundred miles east of Seattle, she decided to move. She got a job as a domestic servant in a white household and sent word back that life was better in the Northwest. Before long, the whole family, including Damian's grandmother and great-grandmother, another great-aunt, and a great-uncle, came out. Damian's mom, Helen, was born in Spokane in 1954.

In the 1950s and 1960s, blacks made up only a few thousand of Spokane's 180,000 people. Most lived in a part of town called East Central, where they were steered by real estate agents. Though the schools were integrated—there weren't enough blacks around to make segregation economically feasible—the city's lodges and private clubs, the heart of its social hierarchy, were “white only.” As late as the 1950s, there were no black doctors or dentists, or even elevator operators or auto mechanics. Most black men worked as laborers or in custodial positions, though some found jobs at the Kaiser aluminum plant, the area's primary employer. Black women worked mostly either as household servants or in one of the local hospitals. Helen's mom delivered trays of food to patients at Sacred Heart Hospital for thirty-eight years. Helen's dad worked at a shop that made footwear for construction workers, where he did janitorial work and shined boots. “Whenever I went there, I never saw him making shoes, I just saw him cleaning them, for
years
,” Helen says. “He never moved up, my mom never moved up.”

When she was still a little girl, Helen's parents split up. Along with her older brother and sister, she went to live with their grandmother. Although her mom, Aunt Geneva, and grandmother all lived on the same block, the siblings were primarily raised according to Grandma's rules, which tended toward the philosophy of “spare the rod, spoil the child.” An ardent churchgoer, Grandma delivered “whuppings” for any number of offenses, such as whispering in church, arguing with a sibling, or failing to wash a plate right. Helen's older brother reacted by staying away from home. Her older sister stood up to Grandma. Helen suffered in silence. “There was no love or hugs or encouragement. I had no role models, no ambition,” Helen says. “I never once heard the word ‘education.' ” Only in hindsight did Helen realize how poor the family was—many of their meals were based around surplus cheese, peanut butter, or canned meat provided by the government.