Diversity Writing Contest When Hoop Dreams Die

I offer no fantastic stories of marches or protests or police brutality; those are things I know about only through the flashing pixels of television. I am a white, suburban man. I am Elijah Muhammad’s “Devil,” Huey Newton’s “Whitey,”and everyone’s enemy in the multi-cultural world of the 1990s.

You can read a thousand books to learn about the black experience, listen to a thousand rap tapes to talk the talk, but you can’t have understanding without experience. Mine came gradually one summer on a basketball court at St. John Fisher College in Western New York.

Basketball is a love of mine and the better the competition, the more I love it. The summer basketball league offered at the college in Rochester, N.Y., was a great opportunity for my friends and me, all white, to play against the city’s best.

In this case, the best were all inner-city black. That summer, at least three of them got invites to the vaunted Nike ABCD summer camp, a program reserved for the country’s top 100 players.

John Wallace played that summer, went on to star at Syracuse and last year was a first round draft pick of the New York Knicks.

My friends and I had nothing on these guys as far as ability goes. The first few weeks we saw unparalleled quickness; moves that would put a crick in your neck just by watching. Unfortunately we did a lot of watching.

I noticed it first in an early game. No one in the history of basketball has ever been as wide open as I was that entire game; my shoe prints are still firmly imprinted just outside the three-point line in the right corner.

The man guarding me was one of the three who went to the Nike camp, but he never laid a hand on me. He didn’t have to; I never got the ball. I waved my arms, shouted, even jumped up and down at one point, but nothing.

The entire summer went by that way and I left feeling cheated. I had spent $100 of my own money to play against the best in the city and all I got was a bill.

After the last week of games, I stood outside the gym waiting for my ride home when I noticed one of the elite players standing nearby. He was a marvelous point guard being recruited by Seton Hall and Providence and was generally regarded as one of the top 10 players in the state.

He was also one of the people whose priority seemed to be keeping the ball away from me. Knowing I wouldn’t see him again, I walked up to him and asked what was wrong with my game.

The question startled him and he asked me what I meant. I explained, and he started laughing.

“That’s just the way it is, man,” he replied. And that was it.

A few years later while interning at local television station, I came across a police report and saw that person’s name. He was a suspect in an armed-robbery case and I found out later this was his second or third offense.

I also learned that while I was away at college, this one-time hot recruit failed all the academic standards set by the NCAA, lost his scholarship and was living with his mother next door to a crack house.

The human plight in this world comes with damning consequences, but often enough our human qualities are enough to offset them. Knowing what school that marvelous point guard went to, knowing what area of town he lived in and what kind of home life he had, I realized his plight was more like running a dark, impossible gauntlet.

I’ve long since forgiven him for not passing me the ball. It seems rather trivial, considering what I know now. I understand now that what happened to that gifted man was wrong, though I fear my understanding will never be enough.