チャンスをしていることは、彼がこのスポーツイラストレイテッドに出てくるカバーだったにもかかわらず、私はおそらく12時に、そのことを知ったとき、私は彼について、まだ覚えているのが分かっていたことはない。 話がある場合はどのようになるときに競技を削減することができます伝えることができることはない、彼はそれがいいのですが。
彼はレブロンレブロン、神戸、ケビンガーネットも前のことだった。 は、スポーツイラストレイテッドの表紙に上陸着信大学の新入生。 1993年のときにも、 PCやコンピュータのモデムとネットワークアクセスできるようにするにはかなり裕福な中産階級が上には、 Windows 95の前にいた。 これは時間の人々はまだ公の場では、マイケルジャクソンが大好きだったと言うことができる。
もし彼が5年後に生まれていたら、ロペスはトップ5ドラフト高校を選ぶされていると思います。 代わりに、彼は4年間の学校では、宿泊のために祝福された以降の1回戦で、その過程で数百万ドルを失うことを選んだという。 彼は、早すぎると彼のポテンシャルは、誇大広告を果たし大変疲れてやったことがなかった。
伝説では、過去から以下に大きな記事になる人がいたことはないから：
シュートザムーン
スーザンオーリアンで
ニューヨーカー
1993年3月22日
http://www.susanorlean.com/articles/shoot_the_moon.html
白いスーツ姿の男性に従うフェリペロペス氏はどこにでも行く。 サウスブロンクス、モットするのフェリペ生活、 。 彼はライス高等学校は、第百二十四Streetの角とレノックスアベニューには、ハーレムでジュニアされており、彼は学校のバスケットボールチームのためにガードを再生しながら、ライスレイダース。 男性は白いユビキタスされています。 彼らはほとんど一フェリペのゲームやトーナメントの欠場。 彼らは自分の最高のプレーの分の絶対的なリコールしている。 当局は彼の物理的な条件にしている。 彼らは、大きなされ、平底の形で、これはゆるい、絹のような動きをしている彼の手首、彼の足に感心する。 この前、私はライス長官は、すべての秘宝高等学校との間の試合では白い人で座っていた。 私のハーフタイムエンターテイメント二人の間で議論に耳を傾けていた-大学スカウトとは高校のバスケットボールファンは、ウエストチェスター請負業者-フェリペクリスマス休暇かどうか半インチ以上に成長していた。 "私は、 "スカウトは後半開始によると、この子を知っている。 " 50インチ私は何かを逃すとされていません。 " 白い男性は、フェリペその国で最高の高校のバスケットボール選手だと信じている。 マイケルジョーダンは、しばしば、彼を比較すると、ニューヨーク市から登場して以来、カリームアブドゥルジャバーは、最大のバスケットボール選手になると期待されています。 この憶測を提供しています停止、風味の興奮と幸せな予感。 フェリペと一緒に過ごすのが好きだとお考えです続いて、いつかは宝くじに当選する予定だ。
現時点では、フェリペ五六フィートです。 彼は七六フィートを希望します。 彼の靴のサイズ12アール。 彼は大きな背の高い男性と彼の店でズボンを購入している。 彼は髪を続けているため、高彼の耳は小さくて、設定すると、小さなexaggeratedly 、見て近い彼の頭蓋骨にそった。 彼は黒茶色の目と大きな、鮮やかな舌-私はこの唯一のため、時には自分の舌を棒ハード演奏しているときは分かっているし、彼の皮膚は非常に暗いところでは、相手は、ピンクの旗のように見えます。 彼の声はスラリーは、すべて彼の言葉のラウンドエッジしている。 彼はやせとしては、豆の極であり、長くて細い腕と鋭いshins 、輪郭のはっきりした膝をしている。 彼の手巨大されています。 通りを歩いて、彼は高さのために見えますが多くなるが、彼は確かに子供のない馬-は一人の男の人と5年生の果肉を持つ大人のフォーム場所にされているサイズの男の子です時間は13だ。 彼はすべてのアウトラインです：彼はストレッチアウトの平均サイズの人のように見えることはありません-彼はまだインチは、着色されていない巨大な人物のスケッチのようになります。
裁判所では、フェリペの体の異常な組織だ。 彼の動きは速いし、液体。 私は彼を水平方向に薄い空気の中を航行している。 高校の選手たちはしばしばラフされ、なかなか前に進まないと、ほとんどフラット足を撃つが、フェリペはエレガントな、軽快なゲームをしている。 彼は、裁判所のエッジの周りをフロートは、ボールとの距離を短距離走スプリング。 彼は、バスケットに向けての動きは、まるでスピードスケート、それから、突然だったに見えますが、彼は空気中で、残ると撮影上昇。 滑らかなシュートは、美しいが、頭のおかしいアーク。 現在、彼は20から6点、 1試合当たり平均9リバウンドを記録し、彼は史上最高のすぐ近くに学校ニューヨーク州の得点を記録している。 彼は偉大な裁判所のビジョン、柔らかい手は、活発な3点シュート、スピードの中、低ボールを取る必要がある。 彼は通常、高速を破るには、最速の男です。 彼はポイントガードのようにボールを扱うことができます、彼は守備、彼の迅速かつ自分の体を制御のためのより大きな選手ビート。 ときは、裁判所に、というわけではないが、彼は歩き方が雑な複雑だ。 彼は故意に、彼の大きさの光を作成し、その恵みを隠すこのように歩いているようだ。
前に私はフェリペに会った、人々は私にかわいい彼を見つけると教えてくれました。 すべて私は彼について知っていた-は、彼は、少年は、彼は1 0代の少年は、彼は6フィートの五十代の少年が大好きな人です-この非常にするのは難しいと考えて作られています、それが真実であることが判明した。 彼は実際に私を知っている人は、甘いです。 彼は世間知らずだと熱心に私たちの時間を一緒に中にいずれかの時点で、私には彼は素晴らしいバスケットボールを好きになるかもしれないが発生しました-には理想的な性格は、バスケットボールのコートで競争力の大きなショットを集めている。 それは彼が好きではないが少し発生する。 しかし彼は世間知らずともしないほど熱心な彼が表示されます。 彼は一度はスノッブしているため、彼を非難することは決してありませんには、人々は彼の男だと思っているにするには、好きだと教えてくれました。 同氏はまた、彼は誰の目にも優しいされるように、誰も彼は信頼できる相手を見つけるのが好きだと認識するでしょう。
フェリペないときは、すべて英語でニューヨークには、ドミニカ共和国、 4年前から移動したが、彼はすぐに彼を盗聴の"クラッシュのボード、 " "を含む特定のフレーズを選んだ" "の地獄から抜け出す塗料" 、 "ああ、私の良さ。 " 今では、快適に英語、豊かなドミニカのアクセントで話す-の単語をクリックして一緒に転落すると、石のようなすりで投げている。 "ああ、私の良さ"彼のお気に入りのフレーズである。 これは彼の慎み深さ、彼のマナー、彼の無邪気さを明らかにするユーティリティ表現であり、彼のいつもの心の状態は、 1つの快適で実直な彼の人生の顕著な自然に驚きです。 私は彼の期待は、彼の心には、 NBAでは、金持ちで有名な選手となりますが、それを使うと、コメントを聞いたことがある彼の宿題を脇に置くして試合になるという事実は、彼は最近、スペインの人々に50万ドルを提供した上ではリーグで、この事実は、既にドミニカ共和国、ドミニカの人は彼の最初のNBA市民になるとしているのでは、独創性に富んだ国家をエクスポートすると、考えられていますし、事実、彼は非常に速く成長している上には、彼一度は自分のズボンを認識することができなかった。 時々彼の状況では、フレーズを使用するにはチームメートや友人よりダイナミックなものと言って傾斜している可能性があります。 One night this winter, I was sitting around at school with Felipe and his teammates, watching a videotape of old Michael Jordan highlights. The tape had been edited for maximum excitement, and most of the boys on the team were responding with more and more baroque constructions of foul language. At one point, Jordan was shown leaping past the Celtics center Robert Parish, and someone said, "Yo, feature that, bro! He’s busting the Chief’s face."
"Busting his fucking face," another one said.
"Busting his goddam big-ass face."
"He’s got it going on. Now Jordan’s going to bust his foul-loving big-ass mama’s-boy dope black ass."
On the tape, Jordan slammed the ball through the hoop and Parish crumpled to the floor. While the other boys were applauding and swearing, Felipe moved closer to the television and then said, admiringly, "Oh, my goodness."
Felipe’s life is unusually well populated. He is very close to his family. He is named Luis Felipe, after his father. His older brother Anthony is one of the managers of the Rice High School team. Anthony is a square-shouldered, avid man of twenty-five who played amateur basketball in the Dominican Republic and in New York until his ankle was badly injured in a car accident. Until last month, when he was laid off, he worked at a Manhattan printshop and had a boss who appreciated basketball and tolerated the time Anthony spent with the team. Anthony is rarely away from Felipe’s side, and when he is there he is usually peppering him with directions and commentary in a hybrid of Spanish and English: "Felipe, mal, muy mal! Como estas you go so aggressive to a lay-up?" A couple of times a month, Anthony makes the rounds of Felipe’s teachers to see if his B average is holding up. "If he’s not doing well, then I go back and let my people know," Anthony says. "It’s nice, it’s beautiful to be a superstar, but if he doesn’t work hard he doesn’t play." Once, Felipe’s father forbade him to travel to a tournament, because he had neglected to wash the dishes. This made Felipe cry, but in hindsight he is philosophical about it. "He was right," he says. "I didn’t do my dishes." Felipe is also close to Lou DeMello, his coach at Rice, and to Dave Jones, his coach with the Gauchos, a basketball organization in the Bronx which he plays for during the summer, and to Louis d’Almeida, the founder of the Gauchos. Felipe says he sometimes gets basketball advice from his mother, Carmen, and from Maura Beattie, a teacher at Rice who tutors him in English. Neither of them plays. "You know what, though?" Felipe says. "They know something." His primary hobby is sleeping, but his other pastime is talking on the phone for hours to his girlfriend, who is an American, a resident of Brooklyn, and a basketball fan.
Sometimes his life seems overpopulated. He has so far received four crates of letters from college coaches and recruiters pitching woo at him. Some make seductive mention of the large seating capacities of their arenas. Basketball-camp directors call regularly, saying that they would like Felipe Lopez to be in attendance. Officials of Puerto Rico’s summer basketball league have requested the honor of his presence this summer. There are corporate marketing executives who would very much like to be his friends. Not everyone crowding into his life wishes him well. There are people who might wittingly or unwittingly mislead him. Felipe has been warned by his father, for example, never to have sex without a condom, because some girls who pretend to like him might really have appraised him as a lucrative paternity suit. Last year, Felipe and another player were invited to appear in a Nintendo television commercial, and the commercial nearly cost them their college athletic eligibility, because no one had warned them that accepting money for a commercial was against NCAA regulations. There are people who are jealous of Felipe. There are coaches whose hearts he has broken, because they’re not at one of the colleges Felipe is interested in — Florida State, Syracuse, St. John’s, Seton Hall, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, UCLA, Indiana, Arizona, Ohio State, and Kansas. There are coaches who put aside all other strategy except Keep Felipe Lopez Away from the Ball. Some opponents will go out of their way to play him hard. There are kids on his own team who have bitter moments about Felipe. And there are contrarians, who would like to get in early on a backlash and look clairvoyant and hype-resistant by declaring him, at only eighteen and only a junior in high school, already overrated. His response to all this is to be nice to everyone. I have never seen him angry, or even peeved, but when he isn’t playing well his entire body droops and he looks completely downcast. It is an alarming sight, because he looks so hollowed out anyway.
"Wait till this kid gets a body," Coach DeMello likes to say. During practice, DeMello will sometimes jump up and down in front of Felipe and yell, "Felipe! Make yourself big!" The best insult I ever heard DeMello hurl at Felipe was during a practice one afternoon when Felipe was playing lazily. DeMello strode onto the court, looked up at Felipe, and said acidly, "You’re six-five, but you’re trapping like you’re five-eleven." Anthony Lopez can hardly wait until Felipe gets a body, so sometimes during the off-season he will take him to the steep stairway at the 155th Street subway station, in the Bronx, and make him run up and down the hundred and thirty steps a few times to try to speed the process along. Felipe is less than crazy about this exercise, although he appreciates the advantages that more bulk might give him: "When I first came here, I could tell the guys were looking at me and thinking, Who is this skinny kid? Then they would say, ‘Hey, let’s’ — excuse my language — ‘bust his ass.’ "
Felipe’s body is an unfinished piece of work. It gets people thinking. Tom Konchalski, a basketball scout who follows high schools in the Northeast, suggested recently that if Felipe ever wanted to give up basketball he could be a world-class sprinter. Coach DeMello said to me once that, much as he hated to admit it, he thought Felipe had the perfect pitcher’s body. Felipe’s mother told me that even though Felipe is now a fast-break expert, she thought he should sharpen his ability to penetrate to the basket and go for the big finish — say, a windmill slam dunk. I once asked her whose style of play she wanted Felipe to emulate, and she pointed to a picture of Michael Jordan and said, in Spanish, "If he would eat more, he could be like the man who jumps."
Felipe’s father, who played amateur baseball in the Dominican Republic, thought he saw in his son the outlines of a first baseman, and steered Felipe toward baseball when he was little. But Felipe was hit in the nose by a wild throw, and decided that, in spite of its popularity in the Dominican Republic and the success Dominican ballplayers have had in the United States, baseball was not his game. Maura Beattie, his English tutor, is an excellent tennis player, and one day, just for fun, she took Felipe with her to the courts. She was curious to see if someone with Felipe’s build and abilities could master a racquet sport. He beat her. It was the first time he’d held a tennis racquet in his life. Another time, the two of them went to play miniature golf in Rockaway, and Felipe, who had never held a putter before, made a hole in one. Some of this prowess can be attributed to tremendous physical coordination and the biomechanical advantages of being tall and thin and limber. Felipe Lopez is certainly a born athlete. But he may also be one of those rarer cases — a person who is just born lucky, whose whole life seems an effortless conveyance of dreams, and to whom other people’s dreams adhere. This aura of fortune is so powerful that it is easy to forget that for the time being, and for a while longer, Felipe Lopez is still just an immigrant teenager who lives in a scary neighborhood in the South Bronx and goes to high school in Harlem, where bad things happen every day.
Currently, there are five hundred and eighteen thousand male high-school basketball players in the United States. Of these, only nineteen thousand will end up on college teams — not even four per cent. Less than one per cent will play for Division One colleges — the most competitive. The present NBA roster has three hundred and sixty-seven players, and each year only forty or fifty new players are drafted. What these numbers forebode is disappointment for many high-school basketball players. That disappointment is disproportionate among black teenagers. A recent survey of high-school students by Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society reported that fifty-nine per cent of black teenage athletes thought they would continue to play on a college team, compared with thirty-nine per cent of white teen-agers. Only sixteen per cent of the white athletes expected that they would play for the pros; forty-three per cent of the blacks expected that they would, and nearly half of all the kids said they thought it would be easier for black males to become professional basketball players than to become lawyers or doctors. Scouts have told me that everyone on the Rice team will probably be able to get a free college education by playing basketball, and so far all the players have received recruiting letters from several schools. The scouts have also said that it will require uncommonly hard work for any of the boys on the team other than Felipe to ascend to the NBA
Every so often, scouts’ forecasts are wrong. Some phenomenal high-school players get injured or lazy or fat or drug-addled or bored, or simply level off and then vanish from the sport, and, by the same token, a player of no particular reputation will once in a while emerge from out of nowhere and succeed. That was the case with the NBA all-stars Karl Malone and Charles Barkley, who both played through high school in obscurity; but most other NBA players were standouts starting in their early teens. Most people who follow high-school basketball teams that are filled with kids from poor families and rough neighborhoods encourage the kids to put basketball in perspective, to view it not as a catapult into some fabulous, famous life but as something practical — a way to get out, to get an education, to learn the way around a different, better world. The simple fact that only one in a million people in this country will ever play for the NBA is often pointed out to the kids, but that still doesn’t seem to stop them from dreaming.
Being told that you might be that one person in a million would deform many people’s characters, but it has not made Felipe cynical or overly interested in himself. In fact, his blitheness can be almost unnerving. One evening when we were together, I watched him walk past a drug deal on 125th Street and step off the curb into traffic, and then he whiled away an hour in a fast-food restaurant where several ragged, hostile people repeatedly pestered him for change. He hates getting hurt on the court, but out in the world he is not very careful with himself. When you are around him, you can’t help feeling that he is a boy whose body is a savings account, and it is one that is uninsured. But being around him is also to be transported by his nonchalant confidence about luck — namely, that it happens because it happens, and that it will happen for Felipe, because things are meant to go his way. This winter, he and the Rice Raiders were in Las Vegas playing in a tournament. One evening, a few of them went into a casino and attached themselves to the slot machines. Felipe’s first quarter won him a hundred quarters. Everyone told him to stop while he was ahead, but he continued. "I wanted to play," he says. "I thought, I had nothing before I started, now I have something, so I might as well play. So I put some more quarters in, and — oh, my goodness! — I won twelve hundred more quarters. What can I say?"
At three o’clock one afternoon this winter, I went over to the high school to watch Felipe and the Rice team practice. I hadn’t met Felipe before that afternoon, but I had heard a lot about him from friends who follow high-school basketball. As it happens, Felipe’s reputation often precedes him. Before he moved to this country, he was living in Santiago, in the Dominican Republic. The Lopez family had been leaving the Dominican Republic in installments for thirty years. A grandmother had moved to New York in the sixties, followed by Felipe’s father in 1982, and then, in 1986, by his mother and Anthony. For three years, Felipe stayed in the Dominican Republic with another older brother, Anderson, and his sister, Sayonara. At age eight, he started playing basketball in provincial leagues, sometimes being bumped up to older age groups because he was so good. He already had a following. "I would hear from a lot of Dominicans about how good he was getting," Anthony says now. "It made me curious. When I left him in the Dominican Republic, he was just a little kid who I would boss around. He was my — you know, my delivery guy." When more visas were obtained, in 1989, Felipe and Sayonara moved to New York. Anthony took Felipe to a playground near the family’s apartment and challenged him one-on-one, decided that the rumors were true, and then took him to try out for the Gauchos. Lou d’Almeida says that people were already talking about Felipe by then. Many high-school coaches had intelligence on Felipe by the time he started school. Lou DeMello first saw him in a citywide tournament for junior-high players. Felipe was in the Midget Division. "He looked like a man among boys," DeMello says now. "If I could have, I would have taken him then and started him then on the Rice varsity. I swear to God. At the time, he was in eighth grade."
Rice High School is a small all-boys Catholic school, which was founded in 1938 and is run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers. It is the only Catholic high school still open in Harlem. Currently, it has about four hundred students. Tuition is two thousand dollars a year, which many of the students can afford only with the help of scholarship money from private sponsors, including some basketball fans. At school, students have to wear a tie, real trousers, and real shoes, not sneakers. There is also a prohibition against beepers. The school is in a chunky brick building with a tiny, blind entrance on 124th Street, close to some Chinese luncheonettes, some crack dealers, and some windswept vacant tenements. A lot of unregulated commerce is conducted on the sidewalks nearby, and last year a business dispute in an alley across from the school was resolved with semi-automatic weapons, but the building itself emanates gravity and calm. Inside, it is frayed but sturdy and pleasant. There is an elevator, but it often isn’t working; the gym, which occupies most of the top two floors of the school, is essentially a sixth-floor walkup. The basketball court is only fifty-five feet long instead of the usual ninety-four, and the walls are less than a foot away from the sidelines. It would qualify as regulation-size in Lilliput. Rice has to play its games in a borrowed gym — usually the Gauchos’ facility, in the Bronx.
At the time Coach DeMello first heard about Felipe Lopez, the Rice Raiders had a win-loss record of eight and thirteen, tattered ten-year-old uniforms, and an inferiority complex. Catholic League basketball in New York City is a particularly bad place for any of these. Since the early eighties, the Catholic schools in New York have had ferocious rivalries, fancy shoes and uniforms from friendly sporting-goods companies, and most of the best players in the city. College teams and the NBA are loaded with New York City Catholic League alumni: Jamal Mashburn, now at Kentucky, attended Cardinal Hayes; the Nets’ Kenny Anderson and the Houston Rockets’ Kenny Smith went to Archbishop Molloy; the Pacers’ Malik Sealy, Syracuse’s Adrian Autry, and North Carolina’s Brian Reese all went to St. Nicholas of Tolentine; the Pistons’ Olden Polynice attended All Hallows; Chris Mullin, of Golden State, went to Xaverian; Mark Jackson, now of the Clippers, went to Bishop Loughlin. Rice had won the city Catholic-school championship in 1966 and proceeded to become steadily undistinguished over the next few decades. Four years ago, Lou DeMello took over as head coach. First, he persuaded Nike — and later Reebok and Converse — to donate shoes and uniforms to the team. Then he started scouting Midget Division players who might have a future at Rice. The Gaucho coaches have a cordial relationship with DeMello and began pointing players like Felipe his way. Last year, the Rice Raiders reached the finals of the city championship. This year, they are ranked in the top twenty high schools nationally — the first time they have been ranked there for twenty-seven years.
Coach DeMello is short and trim, and has bright eyes and a big mustache and an air of uncommon intensity, like someone who is just about to sneeze. His usual attire consists of nylon warmup suits that are very generously sized. The first time I saw him in street clothes, he looked as if someone had let his air out. He speaks with a New York accent, but in fact he was born in Brazil, and played soccer there. His motivational specialty is the crisp reprobation wrapped around a sweet hint of redemptive possibility — stick before carrot. When addressing the team, he is prone to mantra-like repetitions of his maxims, as in "Listen up. Listen up. I want you to go with your body. Go with your body. Go with your body. I want you to keep your foot in the paint. Your foot in the paint. Your foot in the paint. In the paint. And put the ball on the floor. The ball on the floor. On the floor."
This particular afternoon, Coach DeMello was especially hypnotic. The team was getting ready for its first out-of-town tournament of the year, the Charm City/Big Apple Challenge, in Baltimore, which would be played in the Baltimore Arena and televised on a cable channel. The Raiders would be facing Baltimore Southern High School, one of the best teams in the area. When I arrived at the Rice gym, the Raiders had been scrimmaging for an hour. Now, during a break, Coach DeMello was chanting strategy. "You guys are ina funk," he said. Someone dropped the ball, and it made an elastic poing! sound and rolled to the wall. "Gerald, hold the ball," DeMello went on. He clasped his hands behind his back. "Hold the ball. OK You guys are in a funk. You got to get your head in the game. Your head in the game. We’re going up against a serious team in Baltimore. They do a hell of a job on help. A hell of a job. A. Hell. Of. A. Job. We need leaders on the floor. Leaders on the floor. All we want to do is contain. Contain. Contain. So you better hit the boards. Hit the boards. The boards."
Everyone nodded. The Rice Raiders are Felipe, Reggie Freeman, Yves Jean, Gerald Cox, Melvin McKey, Scientific Mapp, Gary Saunders, Gil Eagan, Kojo Lockhart, Rodney Jones, Robert Johnson, and Jamal Livingston. Melvin, the point guard, is usually called Ziggy. Jamal, the center, is known as Stretch. Gerald, who also plays center, is known as G-Money. Scientific, the reserve point guard, is known as Science. All of them are known, familiarly, as B, which is short for "bro," which is short for "brother." During practice, they are solemn and focussed. During a game, they are ardent and intense, as if their lives depended on it. Before and after each game, they stand in a circle, make a stack of their right hands, and shout, "One, two, three, Rice! Four, five, six, family!"
Most of the Raiders live in the Bronx or upper Manhattan. Once, after a game, I rode in the van with an assistant coach as he dropped the team members off at their homes. A few of them lived in plain, solid-looking housing projects and some in walkups that, at least from the outside, looked bleak. No one lived in a very nice building. Some of the kids have families that come to all their games and monitor their schoolwork; some have families that have fallen apart. Six of the twelve live with only their mothers. Ziggy lives with his uncle, and the five others have a mother and a father at home. Each of them has at least one person somewhere in his life who arranges to send him to attend a disciplined and serious-minded parochial school. Sometimes it’s not a parent; the Gauchos, for instance, send a number of basketball players to school. The coaches and teachers I met at Rice are white. Most of the teachers are Catholic brothers. The basketball team is all black, and none of its members are Catholic, although Gary told me once that he was thinking of converting, because "being Catholic seems like a pretty cool thing." There is currently a debate in the Catholic Church about financing schools that used to have Catholic students from the surrounding parish but are now largely black and non-Catholic, their purpose having shifted, along with neighborhood demographics, from one of service to the Church to one of contribution to the inner city. The debate may also have a flip side. I had heard that for a time one player’s father, a devout Muslim, was unhappy that his son was being coached by a white man. But Coach DeMello resisted being drawn into an argument about something no one on the team ever paid attention to, and the crisis eventually passed. I didn’t think of race very often while I spent time with the team. I thought more about winning and losing, and about how your life could be transformed from one to the other if you happened to be good at a game.
The seniors on the team are Yves Jean, Gerald Cox, and Reggie Freeman. Yves has signed a letter of intent to go to Pitt-Johnstown, which is a Division Two school; Gerald and Reggie are going to the University of South Carolina and the University of Texas, respectively, which are both in Division One. Yves grew up in Lake Placid. He was more fluent in ice fishing than in basketball when he moved to New York, but he is big and strong and has learned the game well enough, even as a second language. Usually, he looks pleasantly amazed when he makes a successful play. Gerald and Reggie are handsome, graceful players who would have been bigger stars this year if it weren’t for Felipe. Gerald is dimpled and droll and flirtatious. Reggie has a long, smooth poker face and consummate cool. At times, he looks rigid with submerged disappointment. I remember Coach DeMello’s telling me that when Reggie was a sophomore he was waiting patiently for Jerry McCullough, then the senior star, to leave for college, so that at last he would be the team’s main man. Then Felipe came. Reggie and Felipe now have a polite rapport that fits together like latticework over their rivalry.
The team is a changeable entity. Some of the kids have bounced on and off the squad because of their grades. One of the players has had recurring legal problems. The girlfriend of another one had a baby last year, and because of that he missed so much school that for some time he wasn’t allowed to play on the team. When I first started hanging around with the Raiders, Rodney Jones wasn’t on the roster, having had discipline problems and some academic troubles. Sometimes the boys get sick of each other. They practice together almost every day for several hours; they travel together to games and tournaments, which can sometimes last as long as two weeks; and they see each other all day in classrooms, at the Gaucho gym, and on the street. Usually, they have an easy camaraderie. During the other times, as soon as they are done with practice they quickly head their own ways.
"Are you guys listening to me? Are you listening?" DeMello was saying. He was now joined by Bobby Gonzalez, an assistant coach, who was nodding and murmuring "Uh-huh" after everything he said. Gonzalez handed DeMello a basketball. DeMello curled it to his left side, and then held his right hand up, one finger in the air, as if he were checking wind direction. "One more thing. One more thing. If there’s one player you guys want to be looking up to right now, I’ll tell you who it is."
"Uh-huh," Bobby Gonzalez said.
"That guy is Reggie Freeman. Reggie Freeman." No expression crossed Reggie’s face. Felipe, who was standing on the other side of the circle, flexed his neck, rotated his shoulders, and then stood still, a peaceful expression on his face. "Reggie is the most unselfish player here. He is the most unselfish. I want you to remember that. He’s grown a lot. That’s who you should be looking at. OK"
"Uh-huh."
DeMello bounced the ball hard, signalling the end of practice. The boys circled and counted: "One, two, three, Rice! Four, five, six, family!" They straggled out of the gym, talking in small groups.
"I never been to Baltimore."
"Let me ask you something. You think Larry Bird’sa millionaire?"
"Larry Bird? I don’t know. A millionaire. Magic’sa millionaire."
"Magic’sa millionaire, and he didn’t have fifty-nine cents to buy himself a little hat and now he’s going to die. The man’s stupid."
"I don’t know if Larry Bird’sa millionaire. I do know he’s never been to Harlem, and he’s never done the Electric Slide."
Felipe on his development as a player:
"Back in my country, I was just a little guy. I tried to dunk, but I couldn’t. I tried and I tried. Then, one day, I dunked. Oh, my goodness. Three months later, I was dunking everything, every way — with two hands, backwards, backwards with two hands. I can do a three-sixty dunk. It’s easy. You know, you jump up backwards with the ball and then spin around while you’re in the air — and pow! I’m working all the time on my game. If Coach DeMello says he wants me to work on my ball handling, then I just work at it, work at it, work at it, until it’s right. In basketball, you always are working, even on the things you already know.
"When I come to this country, I was real quiet, because I didn’t speak any English, so all I did was dunk. On the court, playing, I had to learn the words for the plays, but you don’t have to talk, so I was OK My coach used his hands to tell me what to do, and then I learned the English words for it. There aren’t too many Spanish kids at school. I know a lot of kids, though. I meet kids from all over the country at tournaments and at summer camps. If you do something good, then you start meeting people, even if you don’t want to. Sometimes it’s bouncing in my head that people are talking about me, saying good things, and that some people are talking about me and saying bad things, saying, like, ‘Oh, he thinks he’s all that,’ but that’s life. That’s life. I don’t like when it’s bouncing in my head, but I just do what I’m supposed to do. I’m quick. I broke the record for the fifty-yard dash when I was in junior high school — I did it in five point two seconds, when the record was five point five seconds. I also got the long-jump record. It feels natural when I do these things. In basketball, I like to handle the ball and make the decisions. I can play the big people, because of my quickness. But I got to concentrate or the ball will go away from me. At basketball camp, I’m always the craziest guy — people always are walking around saying, ‘Hey, who’s that Dominican clown?’ But on the court I don’t do any fooling around. I got to show what I got.
"In life, I don’t worry about myself. My brother will run defense for me. I got my family. Some kids here, I see them do drugs, messing around, wasting everything, and I see the druggies out on the street, and I just, I don’t know, I don’t understand it. That’s not for me. I got a close family, and I got to think about my family, and if I can do something that will be good for my whole family, then I got to do it. I think about my country a lot — I want to go there so bad. In Santiago, everyone knows about me and wants to see me play now. If I’m successful, the way everyone talks about that, I’d like a big house there in Santiago, where I could go for a month or two each year and just relax."
After practice, Felipe and I walked down 125th Street in a cold rain. First, he bought new headphones for his tape player from a Ghanaian street peddler, and then we stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken to eat a pre-dinner dinner before heading home. He was dressed in his school clothes — a multicolored striped shirt, a purple-and-blue flowered tie, and pleated, topstitched baggy black cotton pants — and had on a Negro League baseball cap, which he was wearing sideways and at a jaunty angle. In his book bag were some new black Reebok pump basketball shoes; everyone on the team had been given a pair for the Baltimore tournament. Felipe was in a relaxed mood. He has travelled to and played in big tournaments so often that he now takes them in stride. He has become something of a tournament connoisseur. One of his favorite
