The Boys of Dunbar: A Story of Love, Hope, and Basketball - Couverture rigide

Danois, Alejandro

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1451666977 ISBN 13 : 9781451666977

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 2016

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The Boys of Dunbar CHAPTER ONE

“Yes I Can!”

AT THE CONCLUSION OF the first varsity basketball practice for Baltimore’s Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, the young men gathered in the gymnasium were exhausted.

They all stood at attention, varying shades of brown faces glistening with perspiration, staring at the bear of a man who’d alternated between screams of disgust and soft words of encouragement. They were the chosen ones, the few who had actually realized the dream this early in their lives. Through every summer tournament, winter recreation league game, and one-on-one contest, through every solitary morning sidestepping broken glass and empty liquor bottles, dribbling a ball through imaginary defenders to practice jump shots or master the backboard, the boys’ goal was the same. Not the NCAA, not the NBA, but suiting up for the only franchise that mattered to them, Dunbar.

They yearned to hold aloft the flame of Dunbar basketball excellence. Whatever their drill sergeant of a coach demanded of them, they demanded of one another. The Dunbar tradition was a major source of pride to a large swath of the city of Baltimore. This fact was not lost on any of them.

The imposing edifice of Dunbar High School was stuffed tightly amid dreary housing projects and sagging row homes in predominantly black East Baltimore. For all of the drab building’s shortcomings, the gymnasium inside was a veritable shrine, a sacrosanct place to the young men now standing on its hardwood floor. Despite their weary muscles, the boys were anxious to get their season under way.

For head coach Bob Wade, who was also Dunbar’s head varsity football and baseball coach, and returning players like junior All-American Reggie Williams and highly recruited seniors David Wingate and Gary Graham, the disappointment of the previous season’s 94–91 triple-overtime loss to Calvert Hall, a Catholic school, remained fresh in their minds. It was a contest that many thought was one of the greatest high school games ever played between two Baltimore area schools.

Despite the months that had passed and the fresh start that a new season promised, that loss inspired Dunbar from the first whistle of that initial practice. Wade was entering the season with a mind-boggling record of 132–10 as Dunbar’s head coach, having won five Maryland Scholastic Association titles over the previous six years. But there were many people in the city who questioned his success and the tactics he employed to achieve such a sparkling résumé. There were whispers from parents and coaches at other city schools intimating that Wade recruited his players.

Three of his team’s new starters had transferred from other schools at the beginning of the ’81–’82 school year. Some people wanted an investigation and sanctions, referring to Dunbar as “the city All-Stars.” But the truth, as difficult as it was for some to accept, was that Wade did not need to recruit. Dunbar was the city’s marquee public school program, with an astounding talent pool that resided in the surrounding housing projects. Almost every talented kid in the city wanted to play there.

“I never recruited a player, nor did I have to,” said Wade. “Dunbar had a tradition of excellence that many kids dreamed of being a part of. That tradition was established long before I ever got there. I was just lucky enough that so many talented kids wanted to be a part of what we were doing.” Wade may not have “recruited” players, but he certainly singled out those youngsters he believed showed the most promise, regardless of their neighborhood or school district.

The Poets had lost three games the year before. Wade was more determined than ever that this new squad was going to do better. His challenge every year was to find which buttons to push with certain players; who could accept being yelled at and who needed quiet encouragement. At various points in practice, he joked, he cajoled, and sometimes he yelled and insulted. One minute, he’d appear surly, brusque, and dyspeptic, the next solicitous and benevolent. With the talent at his disposal, he drove them mercilessly, determined to make practices so difficult that every game, no matter who they faced, would be a cakewalk. In his eyes, the three losses that they had suffered the year before were three too many.

Wade emphasized the game’s details, the subtle nuances that many high school kids never learn to master. His practices were filled with hours upon hours of drills that fostered a mastery of things like defensive footwork, swift defensive rotations designed to keep players between the opposing man and the basket, how to take charges, how to set screens, the proper angles to take when rolling off the screen and cutting to the basket, how to box out for rebounds, and how to throw outlet passes, among a plethora of other details that could be the difference between a win or a loss in a close game. Wade ran the same drills over and over again, programming his players to react quickly and correctly to various game situations. The casual fans who packed Dunbar’s gym and didn’t have an advanced understanding of the game undoubtedly enjoyed the frenetic pace that the Poets played at, the alley-oops, the slam dunks, and the way they ran the ball down an opponent’s throat. They might have assumed that his players were just great athletes and that all Wade had to do was roll the ball out and let them run up and down the court. But sophisticated students of the game could see the discipline, how fundamentally sound and unselfish his Dunbar teams were, how they’d coalesced as a unit, always seeming to make the right plays by instantaneously adjusting.

Wade’s other obsession was academics. From the mandatory study halls that were required for his players year-round, even when their sport was out of season, to the teachers he convinced to give up a slice of their free time to volunteer as tutors, Wade’s commitment to his athletes’ classroom responsibilities was unquestioned. If a star player needed help, Wade had a support infrastructure in place. He’d make sure his kids worked in the classroom because he knew that one day the balls would stop bouncing. If a star player failed, there were no special provisions or demands on teachers to let his boys slide by for the sake of athletic victories. If they couldn’t handle their responsibilities in school, they simply couldn’t play for him.

Wade also had another mechanism in place that allowed him to keep tabs on his players outside of the school: the neighborhood grapevine. He’d walked the same streets during his youth, knew the neighborhood inside and out, and had a network of informants, from law enforcement personnel like his good friend Marshall Goodwin, who worked as an officer with the city’s sheriff’s department and served as the team’s de facto bodyguard, to folks involved in the less desirable elements of the underground economy. Having grown up in the area, he was well respected, even by the criminal element. Despite their illegal activities, even the drug dealers operated by a tacit code in East Baltimore: Bob Wade’s Dunbar Poets were off-limits.

But the city’s drug trade was metastasizing into something far more malignant; its victims were being snared at an earlier age than ever before. When Wade was a teenager, the heroin trade, with its scarce supply and great demand, was run by old-school traffickers whose inventories were, in effect, “regulated.” These were people who saw themselves as businessmen, who kept their circles small. It was a matter of ethics for them to keep the trade away from the street corners and the neighborhood children. Their drugs were processed in safe houses and later distributed through bars, pool halls, and nightclubs, or delivered to individual customers in their apartments or private homes. They had a conservative, long-term approach to their business philosophies.

The old-school kingpins had enduring links to small local businesses through legitimate investments and loans, where they effectively washed their money. They nurtured community support by giving away Thanksgiving meals to needy families, purchasing and having groceries delivered to the elderly, sponsoring bus trips to local amusement parks and neighborhood block parties and picnics. But the demarcation of keeping kids away from the narcotics trade was crossed in the late 1970s when a new breed of kingpin emerged and changed the business model in favor of swelling profit margins. The drugs moved out of the nightclub scene and into open-air markets. But perhaps their most treacherous attempt at modernization was the recruitment of kids to join the expanding workforce. And among the prime recruiting targets were the teenagers in the Lafayette Courts housing projects, where many of Wade’s players had resided over the years.

When Wade was coaching in the early 1980s, cocaine experienced a phenomenal growth in popularity on the already battered streets of urban America. With the bountiful supply of cocaine available, enterprising teens began setting up their own shops, running back and forth via Greyhound bus or Amtrak trains to Upper Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, where they could buy unlimited supplies of high-grade cocaine at wholesale prices. As the adolescent army and new breed of drug dealer flourished, they proved to be wantonly reckless and indiscriminately violent in settling turf wars with rival dealers for the prime drug market corners.

In addition to their fancy clothes, flashy cars, and sparkling jewelry, they also owned a stupefying amount of high-powered semiautomatic weapons. Where the teen gangs of Wade’s East Baltimore were fighting with their hands or knives to settle who the toughest crew was, the teen gangs of East Baltimore in the 1980s were fighting with deadly assault weapons to control the multimillion-dollar narcotics trade. And the body count was becoming increasingly filled with innocent children and working folks who happened to get caught in the crossfire.

“The drug culture in Baltimore underwent a significant change with the emergence of a dealer by the name of Maurice ‘Peanut’ King in the late 1970s, whose rise was precipitated by a joint federal and city law enforcement task force that basically took down the older, major heroin dealers, one by one,” said Sunni Khalid, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “They thought they’d be able to dry up the market for heroin, but I-95, which ran right through the heart of Baltimore, was the East Coast’s main drug corridor, and Peanut King simply filled the vacuum. But he changed the dynamic of the city’s drug business philosophy because he took advantage of Maryland’s lax juvenile justice system, employing teenagers to sell his drugs.

“This was at a time when Baltimore was deindustrializing. East Baltimore was a collection of blue-collar neighborhoods from the 1920s through the late 1970s and early ’80s, but when the shipyards and steelyards started closing down, the neighborhoods and schools started falling into disrepair. These teenage drug dealers became their family’s main wage earners. The proximity of the drugs drew closer to the schools and as cocaine moved in, you had guys like Peanut King reconfiguring the old drug territories, giving the responsibility on the retail level to this army of young, undisciplined, and uneducated kids. As the years progressed, the drug dealers became younger and younger.

“The Eastern District used to be the smallest of the city’s nine police districts, only 3.1 square miles, but they started experiencing the highest number of drug-related shootings. The dealers were fighting for territories, and they were arming themselves with arsenals. AK-47 assault rifles started showing up on the streets, as did bulletproof vests. The open-air drug markets opened in the early 1980s and stayed open for business, twenty-four hours a day, for close to twenty years. So you had this erosion of respect for elders and any type of authority figures. The effects devastated the community, and the incarceration rates skyrocketed. The mothers, once the strength of the family unit, were now out in the streets chasing the cocaine and crack high.

“The local economy had broken down, the neighborhoods were being transformed for the worse, the good jobs dried up, and family units and schools broke down. It was all such a vicious cycle.”

But while the street culture and mentality of the community were changing, Wade remained rigid in his adherence to old-school principles. One thing he would not tolerate on the basketball court was showboating. No one was ever allowed, after a great play or a victory, to thrust his pointer finger in the air, signifying that he was number one. The Poets were inculcated with the philosophy that to disrespect one’s opponent was disrespectful to the game itself. If a player threw a behind-the-back pass where a simple chest or bounce pass would have sufficed, he found himself sitting on the bench shortly thereafter.

When the final school bell rang on that late autumn afternoon in 1981, the Dunbar players made their way to study hall. At exactly 3:30 p.m., study hall commenced, and the only sounds to be heard were the opening and closing of textbooks, the whirring of the ventilation system, and snippets of conversation from the adjacent corridors and stairwell.

Before anyone could practice, he was required to complete every homework assignment due the next day. Wade set no specified time to start practice; it came after study hall. Only after the homework was reviewed by one of the teachers who volunteered as tutors could players go to the gym. Practice began when the last textbook was closed.

“There are certain expectations that are placed on you as a player who wears the Dunbar uniform,” Wade said, launching into his standard speech before commencing the inaugural practice of each season. “You should have been working out on your own, and if you haven’t, we’ll soon find out. It’s not going to be easy. Because of who we are, there is a target that will always be on your back. In order to deal with that, day in and day out, we will go that extra mile. No one will be more prepared and in better condition than we will. No one has invented a pill that you can swallow to get you in the kind of shape that you need to be in. It starts right here.”

He spoke as if he were reciting items on a grocery list, but Wade was still burning on the inside at how the previous season had ended. He was eager to begin again. Although there were many recent additions to the team and personalities that needed to be incorporated into his system, he liked what he saw early on. This team had size, speed, and quickness. They were tough and looked hungry.

He blew his whistle, and the players strapped on the sand-filled backpacks that sat at their feet. They then scooped up two bricks, one for each hand, and a seemingly endless number of full-court sprints followed. Then, to half-court and back followed by suicide runs—sprints to the nearest free-throw line and back to the baseline, followed immediately by a sprint to the half-court line and back to the baseline, with an ensuing sprint to the free-throw line at the other end of the court and back to the baseline, concluded by a full-court dash to the far baseline and back.

The players were then separated into small groups and instructed to continuously jump as high as they could, with the bricks extended over their heads, up and down and up and down, for twenty minutes straight. Next were agility drills, defensive footwork and step-slides, quick dashes to certain spots on the...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

The inspiring true story of a high-school basketball team that overcame desperate circumstances in 1980s Baltimore to produce four NBA players and give hope to a neighborhood and a city, thanks to a remarkable coach who relentlessly pursued perfection.

As the crack epidemic swept across inner-city America in the early 1980s, the streets of Baltimore were crime ridden. For poor kids from the housing projects, the future looked bleak. But basketball could provide the quickest ticket out, an opportunity to earn a college scholarship and perhaps even play in the NBA.

Dunbar High School had one of the most successful basketball programs, not only in Baltimore but in the entire country, and in the early 1980s, the Dunbar Poets were arguably the best high school team of all time. Four starting players—Muggsy Bogues, Reggie Williams, David Wingate, and Reggie Lewis—would eventually play in the NBA, an unheard-of success rate. In The Boys of Dunbar, Alejandro Danois takes us through the 1981-1982 season with the Poets as the team conquered all its opponents. But more than that, he takes us into the lives of these kids, and especially of Coach Bob Wade, a former NFL player from the same neighborhood who knew that the basketball court, and the lessons his players would learn there, held the key to the future.

Drawing on interviews with Coach Wade, Muggsy Bogues, and others, The Boys of Dunbar is a remarkable testament to the power of dedication, inspiration, and teamwork. It is an ode to an extraordinary coach, a father figure who had lived the life of his players years before and who turned a dream into reality.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1451666977
• ISBN 13: 9781451666977
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 288