as well be the dark side of the moon.
THREE
R.C. is dying out there, his nostrils flaring, his breath coming in angry rasps. He muscles down to the low post, just outside the lane, one arm hard against his side, the elbow cocked. He’s glaring at Brooks, who’s looking like a lost ball in the tall grass of three-point land, dribbling, nervous after having been stripped the last two times down the court.
Brooks passes across the key to Tae, who fires the ball back and cuts, a step ahead of the Bentalou defender. Brooks, of course, doesn’t see it. Nor does he see R.C. powering himself into position, using that elbow as a maul. A bounce pass and R.C. will be good for an eight-foot turnaround.
Brooks dribbles twice, then cocks the leather orb against one shoulder.
R.C. can take it no longer. “Ball,” he shouts. “Ball up.”
Instead, Brooks lets go from thirty feet. The ball bricks with a brutal thud against the upper backboard. R.C. is wild-eyed; on the way back down court, he sidles over to Brooks and offers a quick shove.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” Brooks responds.
“You a fuckin’ hawk,” sneers R.C.
“So is you.”
“Oh mah Gawd! You don’t see me throwin’ up shit like that.”
“R.C., your shit is ass-ugly.”
And so it goes. For exactly three minutes in the first quarter, the fledgling Martin Luther Kings had managed to stay with the B-squad of Bentalou’s fourteen-and-under team. For a minute or so, in fact, they were actually leading by a bucket, courtesy of Linwood’s penchant for grabbing offensive boards and then powering up.
Sitting courtside with a small coterie of teenaged girls and younger boys—a rooting gallery for the M.L.K. team—Ella Thompson and Marzell Myers are ecstatic. Win or lose, today marks the rec center’s first foray into organized sports, and for a time at least, the boys seem to be holding together against a Bentalou squad culled from one of West Baltimore’s most established recreation programs. Playing for Bentalou’s teams marks a kid as possessing potential—if not as all-city, then at least as a coachable, teachable soul. Simply put, Herman Jones, who has run Bentalou for years, takes no shit; you obey the rules or you’re gone, your place in the program taken by some other kid who knows how to behave. About half of the Martin Luther Kings had, at one time or another, wandered down the hill to try out for a Herman Jones team. None had lasted.
Six unanswered points and the early M.L.K. lead proves an illusion. R.C. and Brooks keep up their argument; Dewayne is stripped twice after trying to dribble into a crowded lane; Tae beats his man to the baseline, then wastes it on a 360-degree move that leaves him in no position to shoot. By contrast, the Bentalou squad runs a controlled offense, working the ball around a perimeter and down to the low post, where a six-foot-six prodigy unsettles the M.L.K. defense with a lazy, unstoppable turnaround move. Down by ten, Tae calls time.
“Take Brooks out,” demands R.C.
“Fuck you, nigger,” says Brooks.
“We gotta get our shit together,” says Tae.
“You gotta pass the ball,” R.C. pleads.
“I give it away and it don’t come back,” Tae counters.
On the other side of the court, the Bentalou team forms a tight circle and listens intently as Herman Jones critiques their performance, his voice never rising above monotone.
He is a coach, and in every fundamental way, his children are coached. By contrast, the M.L.K squad is under the direction of sixteen-year-old Dontae Bennett, who in his informal capacity as a leader of the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers has assumed control of the basketball team as well. Tae’s responsibilities begin with the lineup, and end with making sure that everyone who made the trip from Fayette Street to the Bentalou gym gets some minutes. As for coaching or playmaking, there really isn’t any point. The M.L.K. players run a street game: on offense, separate games of one-on-one in which each kid panders to the glory of the highlight film playing in his brain; on defense … well, Ella’s boys don’t exactly bother with defense.
Tae is the point guard. Linwood is low post. R.C. and Dewayne are the forwards. Brooks, the smallest kid in the gang, is the other starting guard. Boo, Brian, Manny Man, Dinky, and Randy are working off the bench. As for DeAndre, he’s on the disabled list, trapped in a fifteen-and-under cottage on the Boys Village campus.
“What we gonna do?” asks Dewayne.
R.C. shows his frustration. “Man … What the fuck …”
“Shut up, R.C.,” says Linwood. “Let Tae talk.”
They all turn to Tae, who puts his head down and stares at the gym floor. The buzzer sounds and the Bentalou players drift back onto the floor.
“Shit,” says Tae. “I dunno. Just go beat their ass.”
When they meet again at the half, they’re down eighteen.
“Damn,” says Manny Man. “They fuckin’ us up.”
From the sidelines, Ella takes in the disaster with an optimist’s detachment. True, they’re losing, but then again, the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center was without an athletic team a month ago. Now, in early February, she has ten of the corner’s readiest recruits playing an exhibition game inside the house that Herman Jones built. It’s a fine start, regardless of the score.
She needs a coach, of course. She’d had one for a week, a recovering addict known to all at Fayette and Monroe by the name of House, and Ella, on meeting him, understood just how right and perfect a street name could be. House was a six-foot-four, two-hundred-forty-pound brick structure topped with a wide smile and clean-shaven head. Legs like tree trunks, hands like shovels—when the man went out walking in West Baltimore, suburbanites in miles-away Catonsville got the urge to cross to the other side of the street. House was a presence.
Down at Francis M. Woods, Rose Davis offered Ella the school gymnasium three days a week, but only if she could assure adult supervision for the new rec team. A corner warrior come in from the cold, House seemed the ticket. He wasn’t much of a coach, he told Ella, but he’d go down to the gym with the boys, keep them from foolishness.
A few weeks back, on the day of the first scheduled practice, House showed early and gave Ella some of his story, telling her about the years lost to dope and coke and about the Narcotics Anonymous creed that finally saved him. His heart damaged by recurrent endocarditis, his limbs and torso scarred from a half-dozen shootings and cuttings, House was proud and humble at the same moment. Two years clean, he assured Ella.
The boys drifted in—Tae and DeAndre, R.C. and Manny Man, Dewayne and Dinky, Brooks and Brian—and House took stock.
“This it?” he asked.
“This is the basketball team,” said Ella, delighted.
R.C. grabbed a basketball from Brian’s hands, then pantomimed a power move. “I’m nice,” he assured the new coach. “What can I say? I have skills.”
DeAndre snorted. Standing behind R.C., Tae reached in and stripped the ball free.
“Bitch!” shouted R.C.
“I got skills,” mimicked Brian. “You got used, you mean.”
R.C. jumped on Brian, who covered up, laughing, as R.C. wrestled him against the desk. “I mean, no, I mean you nice, R.C., you nice for real. Stop, boy.”
House laughed nervously. Ella read his mind: “They just need some discipline,” she told him. “You need to be firm.”
He looked doubtful, but promised to meet them down at the gym in a few minutes. “I seen someone up on Mount Street I know,” he explained. “Got to go see if I can talk sense to him.”
On the way out, he stopped to watch some of his players bickering,