The Sixth Man Read online

  She walked into the office and didn’t even make eye contact with me. That’s when I should have known something was about to go very wrong for me. Instead she turned to the principal and simply said, “You got something?”

  Something like what? I wondered.

  And that’s when the paddle came out.

  My mother beat my ass in the principal’s office that day, and I will never, as long as I live, forget it. Disrespect, insubordination, acting out at school? Of all places?! This was everything she needed us not to do, and she was going to make that crystal clear.

  When it was over, I cried. I cried all through the morning, cried all through lunch, all through story time and nap time. At recess I cried to my brother.

  “Who did this to you?” he wanted to know. He was ready to fight someone. He and I didn’t always get along, but no matter what was going on between us, both of us were always ready to protect each other from anyone else.

  I could barely get it out. “Mommy did it!” I choked out through tears.

  He just laughed. This was not something he could help me with.

  That was the very last time I remember seriously acting up in school. Some kids get caught hundreds of times and still don’t learn their lesson. I was different. You just had to tell me once. I had better things to do than to be in trouble all the time. It didn’t make sense for me to bring home any issues with grades or behavior from school. I realized pretty quickly that if you pay attention, you can make things go smoothly for yourself. At least that’s the way I saw it.

  Pretty much everything I learned about how to be successful, how to show up for life, how to go for what I want, and how to be prepared came from my mom. She played high school basketball at Southeast, the high school I was supposed to go to. If she’d had the same opportunities that I had, her life might have turned out much differently. But there was really nowhere to go after high school for a female ball player in the 1980s. When I was coming up, we had the Amateur Athletic Union and tournaments and travel teams. We had coaches coming from all over the country and sneaker brands throwing money at our teams, making sure we had the best equipment, the best facilities, as we learned the game. If you’re a boy and you had the talent, it could be developed. There was money behind it. Scouts would find you. Collegiate recruiters would show up at your games. Everyone knew that if you were good, they could make money from you.

  My mom didn’t have any of that. She met my dad, Frank Sr., who had come from Nigeria to work when he was about nineteen. He started off in New York City, then worked in Oklahoma and Texas before finally taking a job in Springfield with the Department of Children, Youth and Families. They fell in love, or something like that. One thing led to another and then here she was. Barely in her twenties in a small town with two boys to feed.

  Still, my brother and I never went without. In fact you could argue that, at least among kids in our section of Springfield, we were almost spoiled. We always had the right clothes for every occasion. Church? We had suits. School? We had button-up shirts and clean, pressed pants. Winter? We had warm coats, hats, and scarves. And starting around sixth grade, I began to have basketball shoes. I remember my first pair of shoes that cost over one hundred dollars. Air Pennys in 1995. Blue and white. (This was before they introduced the Foamposites.) Going to school with those on, I legitimately thought I was about to levitate in the hallway. We were not, by any stretch, a wealthy family. We bought food in bulk from the discount grocery. We understood money to be something of great value—not to be wasted or taken for granted. But even when were at our most ungrateful, we still remembered that we were lucky to always have the lights on, to always have food in our home. We could see that not every kid around us had those things.

  It wasn’t until I was older, however, that I learned about the true sacrifices my mother had made for Frank and me to feel taken care of. One winter, when we were in elementary school, my mother’s old car got stolen. Crack had hit Springfield sometime in the late 1980s, and by the ’90s it was in full swing. Everything got stolen. Cars, radios, bikes, shoes, packages. If it wasn’t nailed down, someone was going to take it. Obviously, buying a new car was not on the table. We were barely a paycheck away from having nothing. Fortunately, my mother’s job at the Springfield Housing Authority was walking distance from where we lived, and so while not having a car was inconvenient, it was not enough to ruin us.

  But then winter came. Temperatures were below freezing every day, often below zero with the windchill. My mother knew that she had to save money for a car, but Frank and I, two rapidly growing, athletic boys, needed coats. There wasn’t enough money for all of us to have coats, so she made sure that we were bundled up and she went without. For an entire winter, she walked to work every day, and home every day, without a winter coat. She never complained to us about it. She never mentioned it. I don’t even remember it happening. It wasn’t until years later that my grandmother and later my stepfather told us the story. To this day, in fact, my mother has never told me herself that she spent an Illinois winter without a coat so that Frank and I could be warm. That’s what I mean about Midwestern people. They get used to it. It is from her that I learned how to simply put my head down and work.

  She cared a lot about manners and behavior, and she instilled that in us. I remember her always saying, “Don’t embarrass me.” If I could sum up almost all her guidance in once sentence, that would be it. We were to always say “please” and “thank you.” We were to treat everyone in our community with respect. And don’t let her find out that you were somewhere acting a fool out of the house. Springfield was a small town. We knew there were families that were wild and families that were respectable, and if Linda Shanklin had anything to say about it, we would be a family that was respectful.

  But don’t let that fool you. She had some street in her.

  I remember once when I was in about sixth grade, she had been involved in a long interpersonal conflict with another woman in town. There was a whole history to it, and I’m not going to go into it all because I don’t want to put anyone’s business out there. But let’s just say there was tension between these two women, words had been exchanged for a while, and tempers were hot.

  One Saturday my brother and I were playing basketball down at the recreation center. My mother came to see our game, which she often did. Everything in Springfield was small enough that we could walk alone pretty much anywhere we needed to go, but whenever she could make it, Mom would come down to see us play. This particular day she happened to walk in and find herself, for the first time since the drama had started, face-to-face with this woman she had been beefing with for the past few months.

  Linda Shanklin didn’t say a word. There was no yelling, no threatening, no chest bumping. She just took one look at her, cocked back, and busted this lady dead in the face. Next thing you knew, my mother was on top of her, beating her all the way down until people pulled them apart. This poor lady never stood a chance. It was so crazy to see that as a kid. On the one hand, no one wants to see their mom wilding out. But on the other hand, you kind of felt like, “Damn. My mom’s a G.” It kind of made me and Frank puff out our chests a little bit. It had been made known. We might be well behaved, but our family was nothing to be trifled with. This is how we learned to handle opposition where I grew up. Directly. Head-on. And quickly. I loved my mother. But I definitely had a very healthy fear of crossing her.

  And yet we never, not even for a moment, doubted that she loved us. Not just loved us as children, but truly wanted the best for us. She cared for us, permanently and consistently, no matter how hard it was on her. She made the best of her life by focusing on doing little things, like her job, perfectly. Everyone around town seemed to know her. She worked at the Springfield Housing Authority as a development manager for twenty-two years and excelled at it. She was serious and professional, and she made sure that we were the same, that we read and di
d well in school and knew how to take responsibility for ourselves. At a young age, maybe when I was in third or fourth grade, I was doing my own chores, ironing my own clothes. Every Sunday I would take out my whole array of outfits for the week. I’d line them up. Iron each one. Make sure the creases were perfect, the collars pressed. It was important to me. I wanted to be good because Linda Shanklin wanted me to be good.

  This was, for as long as I can remember, an integral part of how I viewed myself and the world. I just wanted to be good. I didn’t want anyone to be able to say to me that they were better than me. Not at school, not at sports. Not even at picking out and ironing clothes. You might call it an obsession, or maybe something nonsensical, but it was important to me. It drove me in ways subtle and not so subtle.

  With so many kids around, it was inevitable that we would play the dozens. Some people know of it as “your mama” jokes. As in, “Your mama so ugly she threw a boomerang and it refused to come back.” For us, it was like verbal slap-boxing—you sharpen your wit, toughen your skin, and it’s fun to watch. By the time we got around to it, mama jokes were kind of passé. Plus, we were all family, so how could you roast your cousin’s mother if she’s your aunt? Really, what we got into was critical roasts about how a person was dressed, their haircut, their shoes, anything. “Boy, your teeth so nasty three out of four dentists recommend suicide.” It was always funny, but it could get painful real quick. That was the best part about it. It was like watching a balancing act between what was funny and what was cruel. When someone else was getting roasted, it was funny. When you were getting roasted, it was cruel.

  I was one of the youngest kids around, so while everyone else was cracking jokes, I always felt a step behind. I tried to keep up, but I couldn’t. My cousins were more practiced, more lightning-fast in their delivery. Everyone could say something to make the whole crowd bust up. I felt like I understood it but couldn’t do it. It was like watching people fluently speak a language that you’re just learning. And the worst would be when the attention finally turned to me, little Andre trying to lay low in the corner.

  “But what about Andre ears though?” someone would say.

  Damn.

  It was all over after that. I got roasted for my ears, and I got roasted for being tall, and sometimes I got roasted for being the young one, but I could never come back. I was just not built like that. That competitive streak, however, that part of me that wanted to be the best at everything, wouldn’t let me get past that. On the outside I would just kind of quietly take it, laughing along. (“Yes, my ears are so big I could hear this joke before you made it. Ha-ha, very funny, cuzzo.”) But inside I’d be like the count of Monte Cristo, keeping score of every person laughing, and plotting my revenge. I’d wait, patiently, for my opportunity to get back at them. Sometimes it would be trying to take everybody out in one of our family’s frequent competitive Uno tournaments. (To this day, there still is no feeling sweeter than dropping a Wild Draw Four on some older cousin who’s been roasting your haircut for three days.) But more often, it was sports. Something else just happened to me when we got to anything that involved running or quickness or athleticism. I suddenly felt like I was in charge. Even if older or bigger kids could beat me for now, I always knew that it was just a matter of time before I would catch up.

  Springfield was great because you could always find organized sports to play, no matter how poor you were. Soccer, baseball, football, basketball. They went on all year round at the Boys & Girls Club, and pretty much everybody could afford it. The club was staffed by a bunch of older guys who, while I wouldn’t exactly call them role models, were at least there consistently. You could always go down there after school or on a Saturday and there’d be the same dudes, usually in their late teens and early twenties, organizing games and showing kids the fundamentals of the sport. Sure, some of these guys were characters and hustlers and were almost definitely involved in some stuff out in the streets. But for the most part, all that noise got left outside when they got to the Boys & Girls Club. They were just there for us, and no matter what they did elsewhere, we looked up to them. Those guys were my first coaches, the first men whose standards for playing I tried to live up to. My brother, Frank, is working now to become a referee, maybe even in the NBA, and I have no doubt that this is because both of us were so heavily and positively influenced by city-run sports programs.

  I started playing in little rec league games when I was about eight or nine years old. And I was already good enough to play on Frank’s team, even though he was supposed to be two age groups above me. But that kind of thing fueled me. I needed to show him up in everything. If he had a candy bar, I’d want two. If he got a certain score in a video game, I needed to double it. And the competition went both ways. When kids would pick teams, we’d always make sure we never played on the same team. We had to go against each other. It was always like the game within the game. Off the field or court, our relationship wasn’t combative, but it wasn’t warm either. We were always on edge with each other. We rarely fought for real, but we’d play-fight daily—sneak up to try to catch each other off guard with a quick slap. I loved these kinds of competitions because mostly I could hold my own.

  But things came just as easily to my brother as they did to me. He was at least as athletic as I was, and definitely a better football player. I believe that he could have played in the NFL if he really wanted to. I don’t honestly think I ever surpassed him in terms of natural talent, speed, or strength. He was, in a lot of ways, too smart for his own good. He recognized from an early age that he could pass classes, graduate from school, and basically just float along without ever having to do any real work. I remember arguing about this with him in middle school. “Look,” he said, “why would I bust my ass to get As when I can get Cs and still graduate the same as you with the same diploma? It just doesn’t make any sense.” We saw things so differently at the time, but it’s hard for me to put into words how much I grew to appreciate him. Even when I look back on him he had a method to his madness. A lot of times I thought he was snubbing me because he didn’t want to hang out with me. I would later learn that he didn’t want me to get caught up in bad decisions he was making. When we were older and I was struggling with difficult times in my high school and college careers, he was one of the few people I always knew had my back. And even in high school when we went to rival schools, he would be cheering for me so loud from the stands that his friends would be looking at him crazy. No matter what was going on, I now realize that Frank always had my back.

  When he put it that way about grades, he kind of had a point. But I just couldn’t get with that strategy. For me, the point wasn’t to get it done. The point was to get it done better than everyone else. I didn’t want to be distracted. I didn’t want to mess around and party and get caught up in social things. All I wanted to do was be good and beat everyone. And so almost everything I did revolved around that.

  Those early days in Springfield shaped almost every single part of what makes me who I am. My grandmother taught me about responsibility and respect. My brother taught me competition and aggression, to never let anyone back you down. My rec league coaches taught me how to show up and how to put everything aside to attend to the kids who need you. And my mother. My mother taught me stoicism. Toughness. She taught me love and tenderness. She taught me sacrifice and discipline, and most importantly, she taught me to get the very best out of myself.

  But there was another lesson. There would be times when I would just sit and watch her as she moved through the house, doing dishes or putting away laundry. Maybe she couldn’t even tell my eyes were on her. And I would think about her life. A single mother living in her mother’s attic with two unruly boys. Sacrificing and working an office job and keeping us fed and clothed. And I would look at Springfield as a whole. Our town was full of stories like that, of people who had, through some combination of fate and inertia, ended up with lives they di
dn’t quite choose or wouldn’t have chosen. It was a small place. And once you know the place you’re in is a small place, the next most obvious question is what is the rest of the world like, and why are we all staying here? How can everyone be satisfied with a life built entirely around these long streets with low-slung clapboard houses and empty fields? How can everyone be OK with seeing the same people at the same grocery stores, the same bars, involved in the same drama, in the same streets, doing the same things every day? For some people, I guess that’s fine. They want or need nothing more and they’re happy. And that’s great! But what about those of us who wanted more and could not have it? That’s what really gave me the chills when I thought about it: the idea that you could really want to get out of this town and go into the whole world, and that you somehow still might not make it.

  That’s why my mother made us read the newspaper. She wanted us to know there was more. That’s why she was so ruthless about teaching us work and focus, and communication, and respect. Because she knew that it would take every single drop of effort and sweat, every single good break and perfect behavior, every single paragraph read, and trophy won, and A+ earned, and letter of recommendation written for us to make it out of here and into that world. And even then, it might still be out of our hands.