This segment is dedicated to Nick Lucas. Keep your head up, Brother! AKW
I am at Peter Stuyvesant High School (PSHS), sitting in the office of Coach Elijah Roberts, watching a video tape of a game between the PSHS Senior Boys Basketball Team and St. Mary’s Senior Boys Team, from Fort Greene. The tape is from the 1990-1991 season. A banner year for the PSHS team apparently. The infamous Jimmy Waters plays center position for PSHS. I should be elated, because I finally get sight of a mystery that has been plaguing me for the better part of a year. But I’m not elated. I am bored.
When I’m bored, I tend to jiggle my right leg constantly, a habit that has been an annoyance to my family and friends for years. Once in college, at the end of a disastrous one night stand, the girl I was with kicked me out of the bed because my thrumming right leg prevented her from getting any sleep. On this day, I have a pocket full of subway change in my right pocket. I have somehow drowned out the constant chiming coming from my right hip, but it’s loud enough for Coach Roberts to pause the video tape and comment:
“What is the matter with you?”
Exasperated, I reply: “What’s the matter? I’m watching the so-called ‘greatest basket ball player of all time’ and he keeps losing, that’s what!”
Coach relaxes and says: “Oh that. Relax. Enjoy the video. You’re missing the best part.”
Reluctantly, I acquiesce to his suggestion, musing on the fact that I have met the only coach in the world that referred to losing a game as the “best part”.
Elijah Roberts is sixty-three years old, two short years from retirement. His office is a mess; there is no other word for it. Sort of like Joe Franklin’s office. Almost forty years of accumulated notes, files, charts, graphs and play books, are piled up all around the office, in a filing system only the coach could ever decipher.
He started his career at PSHS in 1968, then assistant coach. He was one of the first ten Black teachers hired after the race riots ripped through New York in the mid to late 1960’s. He has survived much throughout the years, striving to shelter his students from heroin during the 70’s, followed by cocaine and crack in the 80’s, finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel during 90’s as Bed Stuy slowly revived itself. He spent his career either coaching basketball or teaching urban social studies during the off season. He and his dedicated colleagues turned PSHS into the best school in Brooklyn. He is a survivor, a rock, and the embodiment of the PSHS school spirit.
Upon our first meeting, he asked me to call him “Coach Roberts” or just plain “Coach”. He considers that term an honorific, much like how high ranking martial artists revere the term “Sifu”. In Elijah Roberts’s eyes, there is no more honorable profession that turning untrained, uncoordinated young children into a cohesive and unified sports team.
So here we are sitting in his calamitous office, him the Coach, and me somehow regressing from ace freelance writer to one of his fidgety students. I watch as a St. Mary’s player, “Number 5” approaches Jimmy in center court. Number 5 executes a deft feint to the right, shooting a quick crossover dribble underneath Jimmy’s hands, and then driving across the court for an easy lay-up. I’ve seen him do this move about for times already, each time Jimmy falls for the fake.
Except this time.
This time Number 5 is half way to the basket before he realizes that Jimmy has deftly stolen the ball, and executed his own beautiful lay up for two points. I watch, startled and amazed, because Jimmy has stolen the ball with a slight of hand worthy of the canniest street magician.
The ball is back into play. Again Number 5 and Jimmy face off. Number 5 fakes left and then right in quick succession. It’s a well practiced double feint that allows Number 5 to blow past Jimmy, dribbling up to the PSHS basket.
Except there’s no ball in his hands.
Jimmy has again stolen the ball for a lay up. After 20 minutes of losing, PSHS is somehow gaining momentum, within four points of the lead. The St. Mary’s coach changes strategy. Players are replaced and a new person faces off against Jimmy. This new player blows by Jimmy twice and St. Mary’s pulls ahead eight points. Then suddenly they are stopped dead cold. Jimmy is back, stealing balls, grabbing rebounds, shooting from all positions in the key. Every shot is nothing but net. PSHS is ahead by ten points. The PSHS home crowd goes wild.
Needless to say, I have stopped fidgeting.
Rapt, I watch the game to its completion in silence. There is a pattern, here, quickly discerned. St. Mary’s changes tactics against PSHS. They collect a trickle of points, and then are shut down stone cold as Jimmy adapts to the new play. And when St. Mary’s starts to double team Jimmy, he throws a no-look pass off to the side, a seemingly wild pass, off to nowhere, almost a desperation move. Out of nowhere PSHS teammate rushes in to pick up the pass and scores. The first few times this happens, you think Jimmy is just plain lucky, a few more times you begin to think he’s psychic. The boy is good, and he’s a generous player. By the end of the game, each team member has averaged at least 25 points. The game ends with PSHS up 108 to 67. The tape ends.
I turn to Coach Roberts, somewhat confused.
“I don’t get it.” I say, more to myself that to Coach.
“What don’t you get?” he asks. There is a knowing, crafty half-smile that brightens up his seamed face.
“I can’t reconcile Jimmy at the beginning of the game, and Jimmy at the end of the game. Was he just ‘playing around’ with St. Mary’s? Y’know, for kicks?”
Coach leaned back into his chair. “I didn’t get it at first either. But to understand it you have to understand Jimmy. Jimmy used to tell me that losing was the best part of the game, and for a coach like me, that took a while to understand.”
“What’s so great about losing?” I asked.
“It’s something Jimmy taught me, and it has stayed with me for the rest of my career. Jimmy was one of those students that come along maybe once, maybe twice in a lifetime. He’s a student that teaches you more that you teach him. Jimmy was never afraid of losing, because he felt that where he learned his best lessons.”
Coach reached behind him and grabbed a framed picture off his bookshelf. It depicted the PSHS Basketball team holding the 1990-1991 City Championship Trophy. I watched silently as his eyes shined gold, and then get that shaking wet look of nostalgia. No tears fell though.
Coach continued: “Jimmy taught us how much you can learn by giving up the first few minutes of the game to the opposing team. He would watch the opposing player and memorize which foot he lead with in a tip off, which side he turned to when he accepted a pass, which hand was favored on a lay up or dunk, which way his head tilted on a free throw, which eye blinked first in a foul. Jimmy would collect that information and file it away in that remarkable brain of his, and without fail, would use it to bury the opposing team under points.”
The Coach mused some more: “He was a good kid, that Jimmy. Straight A’s and the best captain our basketball team ever had. A natural leader, and humble as hell for a high school basketball star. Everybody loved him but Jimmy only had a just few good friends where were his teammates, and only one best friend, Sammy who never played. When he wasn’t hanging out with Sam, he was practicing his game on the park court. The team followed his example at every opportunity. On Saturday nights when most kids were just hanging out on some corner, Jimmy and the team were in the park practicing pick-and-rolls or jump shots until dark. He his ambition was to go to college to play ball and get his teaching degree. He said he wanted to be a coach just like me.”
After a respectful silence, I said: “You taught him all that.” More a statement that a question.
Coach laughed, but without much humor. “Heck no!”
“Then how did he get so disciplined.”
Coach leaned forward and grabbed a pen from a cracked coffee much perched at the corner of his desk. He scribbled a few words on a “Post-It” note.
“Here,” he said, passing me a note. “Go to this address. This person will tell you all you need to know about Jimmy Waters.” Coach picked up the picture, looked at it for a moment and turned his back on me to place the picture back on his bookshelf.
Somehow, I sensed I was dismissed. But I asked one more question.
“What happened to Jimmy, Coach? Did he make it to college?”
“No Mr. Honsou,” Coach Roberts said. “Jimmy ended up where ten percent of African-American males aged 18-29, end up.”
He paused. Sighed.
“Jimmy went to jail.”
The coach said no more.
Moon Over Harlem (William H. Johnson, 1944)
This artist’s depiction of a riot in Harlem tells much about the racial tensions that sometimes erupted in New York over the years. In 1964, a race riot broke out in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem after a white NYPD officer, Thomas Gilligan, was accused of police brutality, and rioting soon spread into Bedford Stuyvesant. This riot resulted in the destruction and looting of many neighborhood businesses, many of which were Jewish-owned. Race riots also followed in 1967 and 1968, as part of the political and racial tensions in the United States of the era, aggravated by continued unemployment, dissatisfaction with civil rights policies, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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