Alejandro Danois - The Boys of Dunbar: A Story of Love, Hope, and Basketball

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Copyright 2016 by Alejandro Danois

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition September 2016

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Interior design by Joy OMeara

Jacket design by Michael Nagin

Front jacket photograph: front row, left to right: Darryl OJ Wood, Tyrone Muggsy Bogues, and Mike Brown; back row, left to right: Reggie Truck Lewis, Reggie Russ Williams, and Tim Dawson The Baltimore Sun Media Group

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4516-6697-7

ISBN 978-1-4516-6699-1 (ebook)

For Maia and Laila, thanks for the constant inspiration.

For Mom and Dad, who always believed, supported, and encouraged.

For Ericka, thanks for the music and laughter, for being a wonderful mom to the girls, for your friendship and, through everything, your love and push to do better.

I like to hear of wealth and gold,

And El Doradoes in their glory;

I like for silks and satins bold

To sweep and rustle through a story.

The nightingale is sweet of song;

The rare exotic smells divinely;

And knightly men who stride along,

The role heroic carry finely.

But then, upon the other hand,

Our minds have got a way of running

To things that arent quite so grand,

Which, maybe, we are best in shunning.

For some of us still like to see

The poor man in his dwelling narrow,

The hollyhock, the bumblebee,

The meadow lark, and chirping sparrow.

We like the man who soars and sings

With high and lofty inspiration;

But he who sings of common things

Shall always share our admiration.

Common Things , by Paul Laurence Dunbar

19811982 PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL ROSTER

THE SEEDS OF THIS book took root on the playgrounds of Brooklyn, New York, in the early 1980s. A hoops fanatic, I spent countless mornings, afternoons, and evenings playing against my friends in the tilting, fenced-in concrete courts of the East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Starrett City, Clinton Hill, and Fort Greene neighborhoods.

The steel rims were bent at oblique anglesslowly succumbing to years of violent dunks. The withered paint identifying the half-court, free-throw, and out-of-bounds lines had been rubbed raw by generations of abuse at the heels of rubber-soled sneakers.

In the frigid, early-winter mornings, when exhaling created a mirage of cotton clumps floating out of our mouths, my buddies and I shoveled the snow, ice, and slush that layered the courts to get a game going. On oppressively humid nights, we scattered from our apartments, like roaches at the flick of a light switch, into drenching downpours. The suction created by the wet elements allowed us to palm our favorite orange basketball, bald from years of fights against the unforgiving blacktop.

We stacked nickels earned from returning empty soda cans and purchased sets of tight netting, woven together in the patriotic ensemble of red, white, and blue. The nets dangled from the rims, like diamonds from the earlobes of a stunning woman. Cosmetics aside, the true reward was the sweeter than Kool-Aid sound of a perfect jump shot rippling through the twine before spinning back toward earth. Invariably, the nets would vanish in a day or two.

I imitated the ball-handling wizardry that was coded into the DNA of New York City point guards and dedicated many a solitary session to honing a jump shot that, I was sure, would lead me to Madison Square Garden and a lucrative contract with my New York Knicks.

On a few occasions, I shared the court behind my apartment building with my neighbora teenage man-child who was lustily pursued by the slick recruiters representing this countrys premier institutions of Higher Basketball. He was a star at Brooklyn Technical High School, All-City, and on a direct flight out of the neighborhood, climbing onward and upward toward a shot at the NBA. I would rebound his missed shots, staring with reverence at his sparkling white Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers. I wondered if, one day, I, too, would be blessed with the same massive musculature that he packed onto his 6-foot-8 frame.

In 1983, that neighbor, Lorenzo Charles, would go on to author the most famous ending in NCAA Finals history. He rescued an air ball, propelled from a teammates 30-foot desperation heave that had no discernible hope of touching rim. Somewhere between the Rio Grande and Sandia Mountains, in the games waning moments, the ball floated down through the dry, hot, thin air of The Pit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and landed softly in his outspread mitts. At the apex of his jump, Charles delivered a relatively bland two-handed dunk at the final buzzer that allowed Coach Jim Valvanos North Carolina State Wolfpack to defeat Clyde Drexler, Hakeem Olajuwon, and the heavily favored University of Houston Cougars by a score of 5452 to capture the NCAA title. It was one of the biggest upsets in the history of sports.