Killer Crossover, page 4
When I took the bus back and forth from school, which took an hour and a half each way and included several transfers (that’s how dedicated I was to attend the right school for my sports career), I’d have to travel through three different gang territories. It got to the point where I had to keep my head on a swivel so that I wouldn’t get knocked out. Somebody might punch you in the dome for no reason, just because they could. My father told me to always be on alert and aware where I was at all times. “You better know what’s going on around you,” he said. It’s strange how that skill transferred to the basketball court later in my life. At the parks, you had to know which gangs were there. The city was just overflowing with drugs and violence, and it was easier to get pulled in then to stay out.
I never wanted to be part of it. I wanted to get out of Chicago, not die on the streets. I recall hearing a story about Isiah Thomas’s mother. She used to sit on her front porch on the west side to keep the gangbangers away from her house. She’d tell them that her children were off limits. Back then, if you gave members an inch, they might literally take over your house. It sounds crazy, but even with your parents right there, they’d come in and start taking over the place as if it was theirs. If you showed weakness, they’d come for you and get you. It got to the point where you had to have people have your back. Thankfully, Dad knew guys who helped with that.
* * *
23 When I’d finished grammar school and I was getting ready to go to high school, my mother and I visited Fenger High School, which also required a two-bus trek from my house. The place, which opened in 1893, is one of the worst schools in the entire country. Back then, there was a lottery for kids and, depending on where you were chosen, that’s just where you went. Lottery makes it sound good, though, and Fenger was far from that. I’d heard it was bad, but when my mother and I visited, I found out just how awful it was. If you’ve ever seen the Morgan Freeman movie Lean on Me, it was like that. When we got there, we walked through the hallways and saw it was entirely fucked up.
You might think I’m lying, but I remember we got just halfway down the hall and saw drugs, gangs, and broken furniture everywhere. There was no control. We got just a few steps and my mother, who’d named me after a biblical figure, said out loud, “Oh Hell no!” We turned around and walked out and back to the bus stop. When we got home, she called the school district, the principal of my grammar school, and my coach, and said, “Tim is NOT going to that school. Y’all figure out what y’all got to do. But he is NOT going there. There is no damn way!” Her plan worked, and I was sent to Carver Area High School.
Today, I hear that Fenger is still terrible. Who knows what would have happened to me if I had been forced to go there. I’m damn sure I wouldn’t have become what I did. So, thank God I got out of it. Carver, though, was no barrel of laughs, either. Not only was it tough at first, but it took me ninety minutes just to get there and another ninety to get home. I thought I must have had the longest commute in the city, but I found out people were taking the bus from the west side of the city out to Carver, 24which was more than two hours. I had to get up at five thirty in the morning and make the 6:25 bus to get there on time.
When I got to high school, I thought I was going to start on the varsity team and be an instant star. But I had another rude awakening. Being a freshman is tough. For me, as a basketball player, I knew I was better than a lot of the guys on the team. The Chicago city courts and parks taught me that. But you have to wait your turn because of seniority. I wasn’t crying about it, but you’d hear some guys yapping about how good they are when you know they’re weak. Hearing them fueled me to bust their asses in practice and get better so that I could have my day. I wanted to be better than them and show them I was.
Though now in high school, I still wasn’t tall, but my handle with the ball was excellent and I could shoot pretty well from outside. I was quick and knew how to lead a team, even as a freshman. But as hard as I worked on the court, I tried to stay humble. As I went through high school, I was lucky to have a lot of people in my corner. One teacher in particular, Ms. Hunter, would say, “Let me get my safety pin out and make sure your head isn’t getting too big, Tim!” She was our gym teacher and one of my favorites.
Freshman year was tough. I was terrified to go to high school at first. New beginnings. New territory. New atmosphere. New people to meet and figure out. There were older people in school whose lives you had no connection to, no experience with. You didn’t know where they came from or what they might do. I had to be alert all over again and keep my head on a swivel. The lives these new people had to go through each and every day—how would they impact yours? I didn’t know who to trust, so I had to rely on the people skills I’d learned in grammar school to get my 25bearings. What made it harder was that the basketball coach put me on varsity right away. While it was what I wanted, in theory, I’m not sure it was what was best for me.
It might have been better if I had played a year on junior varsity for a season to ramp up. The older kids on the team took offense to me being promoted so quickly. They saw me as a threat, even though I was shorter than most of them. So some of them treated me badly, picking fights and promising more. Some just talked to me like I was a dog. I was out there by myself, too. No older brother or sister to teach me the ropes. No one to vouch for me. I was the oldest in the family, so I had to figure it all out quickly. Plus, with the school being far from home, I didn’t have any of my buddies with me to help. As far as the team went, I played in the games, but my minutes were often yanked around. One game I’d start and then the next I wouldn’t play at all.
It’s like the coach, Bob Walters, couldn’t make up his mind— he had a lot of players in his ear telling him how he should or shouldn’t be playing me. I didn’t want to upset the team or make anyone dislike me, so I knew I had to keep quiet and just wait my turn. In the end, the whole year was pretty disappointing. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it just didn’t go how I’d thought it would. How I dreamed high school could be. But that’s life. There were a lot of disgruntled feelings. But all I wanted to do was play. What made it worse was my dad was coming to games all drunk and shitty. I had to ignore it, but he was loud, pointing at people and yelling.
I had to shake it off and just push ahead. There was no time to waste. There was a lot of talent on the team but, then again, there was a lot of talent in Chicago. I mean, every high school 26was stacked. We played Mendel Catholic High School, a local powerhouse, during a Thanksgiving game my freshman year and got our asses whooped. We lost to them by about 50 points. That was another growing experience. I knew some of the guys on their team and that summer, they wouldn’t let me live it down. “Yeah, we blew y’all motherfuckers out!” Mendel had guys who were six-nine, six-ten, and seven-feet tall on their front line.
Their guards were six-four or six-five, and I was still just five-ten. It was definitely a learning experience, to say the least. In that year’s state playoffs we lost early, but I knew we’d be back next year, better and ready. Outside of basketball, I didn’t do much of anything. I made friends here and there but I never went on any dates with girls. I just went to school, practice, home, did homework, and went to sleep. I tried to survive. In the summer after my freshman year, I played in tournaments like the John B. McClendon league on the west side, near the University of Chicago, trying to improve. And if I ever lost a game, it stuck with me for days until I could get a win.
Other than that, I mostly stayed around my house and worked on getting better. I played against grown men at South Shore High School near my house. I spent some of the days riding my bike around with my friends, eating fries with barbecue sauce and playing ball at nearby parks. It was all about basketball and all about improving. So when my sophomore year came around, I was ready to take more control of the team. To start making a name for myself. My mind was growing, as was my maturity. In one game late in the year, I blocked another guy’s shot, pinning his stuff on the backboard. We went down the other way and I scored a layup.
After the game, I was with my dad and some guys he hung out with, and we were headed out to get something to eat. I 27turned to one of them and said, “Yeah, man, you see me pin that shot on the glass?” But the old guy stopped me. His name was Moe, and was one of my dad’s best friends. Moe said, “Look, you little bitty motherfucker. You don’t write your story. You let other people write it. Don’t brag on yourself.” That was his way of saying, “Do you want me to get the safety pin?” From then on, I shut up. I didn’t talk about myself or build myself up to other people. That always stuck with me. I’d let anyone but me do it.
We had a good year my sophomore season but I thought we could have been better and advanced in the playoffs if we had more seasoning. So I had a talk with Coach Walters. The team was better, but I knew we had a lot of work to do if we wanted to compete against the city’s top schools. I wanted to prove that anyone I played against simply wasn’t in my league. I told him that if we didn’t start to play better teams in my junior year that I’d leave Carver. I told him that I wanted to show what I could do, and the only way I could do that was if we played in marquee matchups. My old grammar school coach was now the varsity coach at South Shore, and I knew I could transfer there.
I wanted to play Roberson High School, King High School, and Crane High School. Places that everyone knew were great. People thought their point guards were better than me, but I knew they weren’t. Even if we lost, it would make the team better and I could showcase my talent. To his credit, Coach Walters made it happen. Things were looking up. After my sophomore year, even the gangs started to leave me alone. They knew I had talent and that gang life wasn’t for me. “He’s going somewhere,” they’d say. They actually made sure to keep me safe. It was a huge turnaround from even months before.
28 Maybe that gave me confidence because, around this time, I told my dad to stop attending my games if he was going to keep coming drunk. “Dad, I love you,” I said, “but you’re embarrassing me. I’d rather you just not come to the game if you’re going to be fucked up.” That was rough on him. I could see it in his eyes. But it wasn’t something he could fight. My mother had already left him and now he was hearing it from me, that I couldn’t stand to be around him. Dad knew I was good and now he knew he was messing with my future. That wasn’t an easy pill for him to swallow. But he stopped coming by for a while. If he wanted to see his boys, he knew he’d have to change.
* * *
Going into my junior year, Coach Walters set up a good slate of opponents for us. He did the right thing by me. He set up games at neutral sites, as well as at our gym and theirs. I knew what I could do against the city’s top talent but, what’s more, it helped my teammates grow and realize their skill levels. They tested themselves, and it opened up their games, too. My leadership paid off again in that way. All I wanted to do was get better and prove what we could do. In the playoffs that year, we went a little further than in the previous seasons, despite harder competition.
While we still lost in the second round, the following season looked bright. It was also looking good for me on a personal level. In February 1984, near the end of my junior year, I met the woman who’d one day become my wife. Throughout high school, I spent time with a few girls here and there, but nothing serious. That was until I met Yolanda. She was going to another school, and one night I met her by the gym when I was out there 29scouting another player. My dad, sober, drove me to the game and when we arrived snow flurries were falling. But when he and I walked out after, it was coming down like a blizzard.
Shit, I thought, now I have to get it all off the car. It was a tedious process and one I had to do often in the winter. It wasn’t especially cold, but there was maybe a foot of snow on the car. As I was getting ready to get it off, that’s when I saw her. I did a double take and looked again. “Dad,” I said, brashly, “why don’t you go ahead and get this snow off the car. I’ll be right back. I need to go talk to this girl and get her number.” I surprised even myself. You didn’t tell your father back then to clean the snow off himself—especially my dad. But I knew I had to talk to this girl. I saw her and just said, “Damn!”
She was tall and slender, about 5-foot-8 and light-skinned. When you see somebody like that, everything in your mind screams that they’re the one for you. There is an irrepressible urge to go over and talk to them. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it was on that snowy night. Of course, I didn’t know she was going to be the woman I’d marry and she didn’t know either, but the spark of something good was there. I knew if I didn’t go over and get her number, I might regret it for the rest of my life. It wasn’t exactly the most convenient time with the snow coming down, but fuck it.
I walked up to her, all smooth and shit, and asked her name. “Yolanda Adkins,” she said. I found out she was a year older than me and about to graduate from high school. I told her what I was doing, how I was there with my dad scouting, how I was a ball player. “I just wanted to ask you for your number so I can give you a call,” I said sweetly. When she gave me her digits, I was so hyped! I walked back to the car—you know that strutting 30pimp walk with all the swagger? That was me. I was cheesing from ear to ear. Yeah, I got that number! But then I got back to the car and the snow was still covering the car. My dad hadn’t lifted a finger. There went my big head!
But dad was smiling, like, Yeah, that’s my son. At least he’d put the key in the ignition and warmed the car up. Dad was still the same short-tempered guy, but by now he wasn’t drinking. He wasn’t loud, acting a fool for the time being, pointing at people like you do when you’re drunk. He’d gotten sober after my mother had left him. He took it all hard, but managed to stay clean for a while. Maybe he’d slip up here and there, maybe for a few weeks. But he realized he didn’t like himself all fucked up. So he worked hard to stop for long stretches.
He finally realized he wasn’t okay with his head hurting, with his money gone, with losing his family. Wasn’t cool with the dark road he was walking down. His sobriety would last until I was out of college. After that, he went through another relapse. In the meantime, to stop, he went to treatment centers (he’s still in AA today!). He thought he could beat his addiction, but sometimes it takes multiple efforts. Addiction is a life-long disease and one that people struggle with every day or even every hour. I’m proud of all the times he tried to help himself, and while I don’t forget all the issues we had, I know how to forgive them.
* * *
My path to the NBA wasn’t yet clear while I was in high school. In fact, in my junior year, I wasn’t getting a single college recruitment letter. Not one. Nobody wanted me. No one came to see me, no schools called. Except UTEP and the team’s graduate 31assistant, Rus Bradburd, who was also from the Chicago area (and is now an excellent author), near Lincoln Park. He’d heard about me after a UTEP assistant, Tim Floyd, went to a Nike camp where people were talking me up, even though I wasn’t at the camp (probably because people thought I was too small). On Floyd’s advice, Bradburd tracked me down. He first saw me at playing at South Shore Park.
Rus later said that it looked as if I had eyes in the back of my head and that I was hitting every jumper, despite the wind. He asked around about me and found out I was the city’s best-kept secret. So, late in my junior year season, he met me and told me about Texas at El Paso. As I started researching the place, I saw that Hall of Famer Nate “Tiny” Archibald went there when the school was called Texas Western. I also saw that the school was the first all-Black team to win an NCAA championship. UTEP was also the first school in the south to integrate its sports programs. Coach Walters pushed me to sign early, in part, because of that fact.
The basketball team had beaten the all-white University of Kentucky team, coached by Adolph Rupp, in 1966 (the year I was born). That UTEP squad had Willie Cager and Bobby Joe Hill, and was coached by Don Haskins, who was still there when Rus talked to me about the place. It had a history of small guards like Archibald, Hill, and Luster Goodwin. Nolan Richardson went there, too. It all seemed so perfect, a good fit in every sense of the word. So, early in my senior year, after Don Haskins came up to see me play later in the process, I told Rus that I’d sign with UTEP, and I put my name on the dotted line that fall.
I also liked the team’s schedule, too. In the WAC, I knew I’d see the country. Maybe I could’ve waited, even given my word to 32UTEP and strung them along to see if some other school would recruit me after a great senior year. But I wasn’t like that. They’d shown me love and loyalty when no other school did, and I wanted to do the same. I was grateful to have a chance to play Division-I, as that’s all I’d ever hoped for. All you need is one opportunity, and that’s what Rus Bradburd and Don Haskins did. They took a chance on a smaller guard and gave me a place to make my mark at the next level. They said I’d play as a freshman, too, and that I wouldn’t need to “redshirt” or sit out a year.
