The Sixth Man Page 5

  Seventh grade turned into eighth grade and life threw me a wicked curveball. Up until that point, I had gotten pretty used to being one of the best basketball players on the floor. I knew how to at least pretend to be humble, but secretly I thought that most of my success had to do with my talent, my hard work, and my skills. And to an extent it did. But what I didn’t account for was how great a percentage of my early basketball success came from the simple fact that I was taller than everyone else. Turns out that accounted for a lot of it. And the way I found out was that the summer before eighth grade, pretty much every kid on every team we played had had a growth spurt except me.

  I noticed it right away even in scrimmages. Shots I used to be able to get off with ease were now being blocked. My passes were picked off, and I was turning the ball over left and right. The way you see the court accounts for everything you’re able to do out there, and just the few inches’ difference between how the court looked in seventh grade and how it looked in eighth grade completely changed my ability to play the game. What used to be a wide-open field with an endless horizon was now a forest overpopulated with tall bodies and sweaty, waving arms. It messed with my confidence. As the year wore on, my sense of myself as an exceptional athlete slowly faded away. Maybe I had never been that good. Maybe it really was just that I was tall.

  This started to change everything about who I was. My grades began to slip from As and Bs. I was doubting my purpose and losing clarity about where I fit into the scheme of things. It wasn’t that I stopped working on the court. It’s that the work seemed like it wasn’t generating the returns that I was used to seeing. Coach Brewer still had me playing point guard and acting as the de facto leader of the team, but without the ability to score at will, I had to start looking for other ways to contribute.

  In some sense that eighth-grade year was a blessing in disguise. I began to take my first step back from the game. Let’s see, I thought. You have four other guys on the court. Each of them can do at least one thing pretty well. I started watching the other players more closely. I would notice that a particular kid who maybe wasn’t that athletic was nonetheless good at setting screens, and Coach Brewer had taught me that screens didn’t have to be used only to get the ball handler open. They could also be used to free up a shooter. Now that I was less inclined to make my own shot all the time, I started seeing the movement on the floor from a different perspective: This guy likes to stay in the corners, and if I can find him when he’s open, he can maybe knock down a shot. This guy is just learning how to cut. If I can get the ball to him in motion, we can penetrate the defense and make a play. There were moments that season when it almost felt like the game was happening in slower motion. Once my focus was off my defender and how I could beat him, it was like a whole other layer of basketball opened up to me.

  As the year went on, I started to gain a little bit of my confidence back. I still didn’t like the fact that I was no longer the tallest kid on the floor, but I had somewhat gotten used to it by figuring out how to develop other skills. But the biggest thing about the second half of the eighth-grade year was that you had to choose a high school.

  Springfield has two public high schools to pay attention to as far as sports are concerned: Southeast and Lanphier. (Sorry, Springfield High.) And to put it bluntly, Southeast was the black school and Lanphier was the white one. Everyone from my neighborhood, everyone from Franklin Middle school, where I went, was supposed to go to Southeast. It was more than a neighborhood thing. It was a family thing. My mother had played for Southeast back in the early 1980s. My uncle Sam Fields did football and wrestling there and even went on to coach there in his later years. My brother went to Southeast. That was just what my family did.

  I understood all that. But the thing about Lanphier was that was where all the good players went, all the guys I used to read about in the newspaper. Jeff Walker, Leonard Walker (Jeff’s cousin), Victor Chukwudebe—all these guys would go on to Division I schools, and all of them were playing for Lanphier when I was in middle school. I was starting to pay closer attention to these things. I didn’t yet have a real expectation of going pro, but I was serious about basketball and team rankings, and it was clear that Lanphier was the place to be.

  And they were recruiting me—at least, one Lanphier coach was. His name was Pat McGuire. We used to call him Juice. He knew about me because I had gone to all the Lanphier summer basketball camps every year from like third grade to eighth grade. And the whole time, he and all his coaches were pumping me up. “You’re going to be the next one,” they’d say. “We need you at Lanphier.” After an eighth-grade year spent struggling and feeling closer to average than I had ever felt, this was music to my ears. I wanted to go where I was wanted. And even though Lanphier wasn’t my community, it was the school, in my mind, you had to go to if you wanted to be great.

  It was a hard choice, a choice between who people wanted me to be and who I wanted to be. I was supposed to bring pride to Southeast, which had always felt like something of an underdog in Springfield sports. The rivalry between the two schools was not a rivalry at all. Lanphier beat Southeast in almost every sport almost every time. Lanphier had won a state championship. Southeast had never come close. Lanphier had Kevin Gamble and Ed Horton, who had played in the league, not to mention having a ton of Division I college players. Southeast had nothing like that. In some ways it was the classic Springfield dilemma. Do you stay where you are because it’s what everyone else is doing? Or do you go away, disappoint some people you love, and shoot for something bigger?

  It was a hard choice but a clear one. Still, there were people who had trouble with my decision. As word started to spread about the fact that I was bailing on Southeast to go across town, I noticed what I thought might be animosity. Kids would make comments that sounded like jokes but had a little bit of an edge to them. People didn’t hang out with me as much after school, not even my teammates, and my social circle narrowed. I found myself spending more and more time alone during that eighth-grade year. I don’t know if it was jealousy or just straight-up adolescent awkwardness, but everything felt out of whack.

  One day I was walking down the hallway after school, probably headed to the gym to get some shots in before practice started. I passed one of the middle school assistant coaches, a white guy. He and I didn’t have much of a relationship, but we certainly knew each other. Something about him had always rubbed me the wrong way. I tried to nod a quick hello and keep going, but he stopped me.

  “Andre,” he said. “Heard you’re going to Lanphier.” It wasn’t a question but a statement.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “That’s cool,” he said. “You’ll probably end up a loser just like the rest of those guys.”

  Everything inside me stopped. It was hard for me to believe what I had just heard.

  I just mumbled, “Whatever, man,” and kept it moving. I knew he was trying to get to me, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But it angered me. It seemed so wrong for an adult to be actually rooting for you to lose. Walking down the hallway, I could feel his words echoing in my head. Why did he think they were losers? Those high school players were heroes to me. I loved them even more than I did the players we watched on NBA on NBC every Saturday. That’s how serious high school basketball is in Illinois. Professional players were cool, but they were at a distance. Anyone in Springfield could pay four dollars to watch the most exciting games in the state, and when Jeff Walker broke away at full speed and got a dunk that was frozen forever in time on the sports page of the Journal-Register, that was the most amazing thing I could think of. Why couldn’t he see that? Why did he think I was going to be a loser? None of it made sense.

  I kept turning the conversation over in my head, rewinding and replaying the exchange like a song on tape. And the more I thought about it, the more I began to feel like something must be wrong with him. Not with me or with Jeff Walker. This w
as a coach I instinctively never liked anyway, and now I just had confirmation of my feelings. He was an asshole. Plain and simple. Like a lot of white people in Springfield, he didn’t like us. It didn’t matter what we did. We were always going to be losers in his mind. He may have been an adult, but I realized there was absolutely no reason to respect him.

  You can’t have respect for people who haven’t earned it. That’s pretty much the number one way to become a loser. This world is full of people who demand that you live by their rules and try to hate you for not doing that, even though there’s literally nothing in their lives proving that what they’re doing works. It’s crazy. And if you’re not discerning, if you’re not careful with who you take seriously, and who you dismiss, then you’ll spend a lifetime running in circles, trying to please and emulate the wrong people and getting nowhere. I knew I was trying to get somewhere, so some loser assistant coach for sure wasn’t going to stand in my way. Fuck that guy. Now I was definitely going to Lanphier. And I was going to win there too.

  * * *

  —

  I started at point guard freshman year. I was five foot ten already, so I was pretty big to be playing point. But there was a kid on our team, Tony Smith, who was six-one and could play all the positions. He had already hit his growth spurt. I would learn about that soon. But I accepted it. I trusted Coach Thomas and felt that if he thought I had things to learn before being a starter, then I had things to learn. I started knowing how to read defenses and figure out what people’s tendencies were on the floor. I watched how Tony directed traffic and set guys up for shots, feeding them at the perfect spot for them to do their thing.

  When I wasn’t playing basketball, I was on the track team. I’d always had a natural athleticism, but now there was coaching to go along with that. I started to understand my body more and learn which kinds of workouts helped me and which didn’t. I saw that I had a long way to go to increase my speed, agility, and endurance. I competed in the triple jump, but my favorite thing was the high jump. I was fascinated by the precision and achievement of it. It was not subjective, like basketball. It was precise and measured. In track and field you could see your progress with numbers. You could set a target and beat it and then set another one. There was no gray area in track, and I liked that.

  The summer after freshman year, Pat “Juice” McGuire was already coach of the JV team and pretty much came for me right away. He took me on as a kind of project, grooming me to take over the team. I spent much of that summer in the high school gym, working out with Juice and shooting drills. Even though freshman year had been good for my court vision and basketball IQ, my shot was still inconsistent. I had developed this inconsistent release, where sometimes my release point was way up above my head and the next time it’d be down by my chin. It was never the same. Juice kept me in the gym that summer sharpening things up, and I began to feel like I had a purpose again. I would wake up in the morning just loving the fact that I was going to be thinking about basketball all day. I’d have a quick breakfast, maybe play Madden or NBA Live solo around 5:00 am.

  It would already be humid, and I’d get a good sweat on just getting to the facility. Kids would yell out to me as I passed by, ask if I wanted to hoop with them. But I didn’t have time for it. I had something bigger going on. It was my first experience of feeling like a professional, and I loved it. Basketball had become big enough in my life that there were gradations. What you played at the park, that was casual. What you did on a team, that was academic. But those long afternoons spent in the gym, that felt professional. I was a craftsman. I had a craft. My whole days were spent in a laboratory going deep into the minutiae of the game with Juice cheering me on. He used to call me “Franchise.” “Good shot, Franchise.” “Pick it up, Franchise. Move your feet. Arms up, arms up, Franchise!” That made me laugh.

  He also let me go along with the varsity team on summer tournaments. I couldn’t get enough basketball. This was the academic part. The film study, if you will. I was picking up on little subtleties of the game. I could see the mistakes other coaches were making in their defensive schemes, the way guys would go under a screen when they should have gone over top. I started to notice that there’s really a rhythm to each game, a flow over the progression of the contest that has everything to do with how coaches sub guys in and out, how the bench works, and who can make a final push in a close game.

  With the exception of a little job I had reracking magazines at the library, I spent that entire summer in gyms. Either watching seniors play or working out with Juice, who kept telling me, “Franchise, next year is gonna be our year, Franchise. We’re going to do it next year.” I think he appreciated having me around as much as I appreciated being around him.

  When I walked into school the first day of my sophomore year, a teacher stopped me again. But this time it was for a whole different reason. It was Coach Patton, the coach of the varsity team.

  “Andre?” he said, looking me up and down.

  “Yes? What?”

  “Oh my god—come over here!”

  He took me into his classroom (he was also the chemistry teacher) and led me over to a ruler he had on the wall.

  “Stand against that.” I did.

  “You’re six-four!”

  Oh. This explained why everyone was staring at me in the hallway. I had somehow managed to grow five full inches over the summer. I mean, I knew I was growing. My pants were fitting weird, and at one point that summer I had just barely dunked (my first ever dunk), which felt pretty cool. But I had no idea how serious it was until I saw the look on Coach Patton’s face as he measured me against that wall.

  “You need to come try out for varsity!” was pretty much the next thing out of his mouth.

  So sophomore year saw me playing on both the varsity and the JV teams at the same time. But it didn’t really get to my head. First of all, I barely saw the court on varsity. Maybe if it was garbage time and we were up by, say, 20 points, I’d get in the game. But for the most part, I was a glorified equipment boy sitting at the end of the bench. The good part was that I got to practice and work out with those guys and the game continued to open itself up to me slowly.

  The other reason it didn’t get to my head was because playing varsity as a sophomore was nice, but the real flex was to play as a freshman. That’s when you knew you were a legitimate threat. And on the team I played on, there was only one kid who did that: Rich McBride.

  How can I describe my relationship with Rich McBride? He would become my closest friend during those high school years. Not necessarily because we were so naturally compatible but because we shared one thing in common: an absolute blinding obsession with the game. Rich and I worked out together, read stats together, followed high school rankings from all across the nation together. It seemed like all our time together was spent in a basement somewhere or at my grandmother’s house talking about ball, watching ball, playing 2K. It was a meeting of like minds, and it made both of us better. There was no one else around us as deeply obsessive about the game as we were. Everybody else knew how to turn it off after a while. Rich, up until that point, was the only guy I ever met who was as driven as I was.

  After we were on the court together for a while, it seemed that we could read each other’s mind. I knew where he was going to be at all times. When I played point, I could almost feel him moving behind me. I could deliver the ball to a spot before he even got there. Sometimes before he even knew he was going there.

  When Richie came to Lanphier, he was a big deal. Here’s this six-foot-two freshman guard who’s already on the varsity team. Dudes were going out of their way to dap him up. Girls followed him around the hallways like he was giving out candy.

  Coach Patton set Rich up to be the starting point guard and basically built the team around him. In doing so, he had to sit a couple of seniors who had been playing for a while, and this was a move for which he caught a
lot of flak. Even at the high school level, people in Illinois take basketball very seriously. Parents and other folks in the community were in no way psyched that kids were being forced to sit out their senior year to make room for a superstar freshman. But I can see now what Coach Patton was doing. He knew that team wasn’t really going to win. They were going to sectionals, maybe, but Patton was thinking of it in the long term. He made Rich the focal point so he could prepare him to take over the team. And it made sense. Rich McBride was the future. That year national magazines had him ranked higher than almost any freshman in the country, including this one dude out of Akron, Ohio, named LeBron James.

  That was when I started thinking about the strategy of basketball and about the business of it. Not just about how to build something for today but how to position a project for long-term success. And Rich was impressive to me because, for him, all that doubt went in one ear and out the other. He took the ball as a starting freshman and didn’t back down.

  The other thing I learned that year from Rich was about something called the AAU. I had never heard of it. When we hung out after school, I would hear him talking about some mythical travel team he played for based all the way in Chicago. What was that? How do you play for a team in Chicago when you’re in Springfield? But here was this fourteen-year-old, traveling nationally, playing tournaments in far-flung places like Chicago and Indianapolis. Meanwhile I was still doing games with junior varsity and it was getting ridiculous. Dunking was now commonplace, and all the work I did with Coach over the summer was paying off handsomely. I was scoring like 25 to 30 points a game. It was a little bit of a Wilt Chamberlain situation.