The Best American Sports Writing 2014
In the early afternoon, our bus pulls into Salt Lake City. The station is crowded, but it somehow seems vacant. A room full of exhausted, hungry people gives the long, cold hallways a feeling of vast emptiness. I’ve only been on the bus with TJ a relatively short 14 hours, but it’s already begun to feel claustrophobic and restrictive, like a truck full of cattle.
I find a couple open spaces on the floor at the far end of the station; I put my bag underneath me and sit down. Soon the stench of hours of unchecked sweat spills out across the room. TJ seems unfazed. He pulls out his basketball, nearly worn to the rubber, signed by each of his family members and closest friends like an arm cast, wishing him luck on his journey. He begins casually spinning it around his finger in a tight circle, then around his thumb, then finally transferring the spinning ball to the edge of his cell phone. It’s a party trick he’s perfected to the point of boredom. A smallish man, with thick, worn lines across his forehead, comes closer to admire the skill. TJ smiles proudly.
This is the third time TJ has made this pilgrimage across country. The first time, in 2011, he had no expectations or even a place to stay. He was allotted a free ticket by virtue of working at Greyhound and simply wanted to take the three-day journey, place his feet on the Rucker Park playground, then get back on the bus and head home. However, a few days before he left, as if by divine intervention, he met a fellow streetballer at his favorite court on P Street and 10th in downtown Sacramento. He invited TJ to stay at his family’s place in Queens for a few days, only a subway ride from Harlem.
“The first time I went there I took the subway to 145th Street,” he explains to me through an awkward accent—a slow Northern California drawl (he’ll say “hella” more than a few times) with touches of a Southern twang from his high school years spent in Oxford, Mississippi.
“As I’m walking I see the Polo Grounds Towers and my heart starts racing. I was shaking and nervous because I’m so excited. I sit down during a game and at halftime they ask if anyone wants to dunk. I was nervous, but I know for a fact if I raise my hand they’ll pick me. Why? Because I’m white. Hannibal (an EBC announcer) picked me out of everyone. I went on the court, threw myself an alley-oop, cocked it back, and dunked it. It was 10 at night, streetlights on, music is going. The place went crazy. I dreamed about that my whole life.”
A year later, he returned to Rucker, not just to dunk, but also to enter the open run and try to make a team. However, an ankle injury a few days before derailed his attempt. He stayed in New York a week longer, returning to Rucker Park nearly every day to watch the games, before eventually taking the bus home.
Over the last 12 months, he’s been consumed with thoughts of playing in the EBC and excelling, seeking out that euphoric rush from the crowd on a weekly basis. He wakes up every day at 5:00 A.M., runs suicides, shoots an obscene number of jumpers, then plays in any game he can find.
But he’s also taken to Facebook to boast he’s one of the best in Sactown. He has announced that he is coming to Rucker Park this summer to score 40 to 50 points a game against the world’s best.
People began to take notice. The director of the EBC heard about him, and so did others associated with the tournament. A film production team in Los Angeles got wind of the white kid with the unreasonable confidence and soaring leaping ability, and they got curious.
A producer friend of mine suggested I go up to Sacramento from LA and find out more about him, then document his journey across country. I played 10 years of pro ball overseas, and although I knew very little about street basketball in New York, my friend thought, if nothing else, I’d be a good judge of talent.
The day before we took off across country, I met TJ at his grandfather’s house in the northern Sacramento neighborhood of Del Paso Heights (DPH, or “Deepest Part of Hell,” as TJ calls it). It’s a community of mostly small, decaying California bungalow houses built for migrant farmworkers from Oklahoma and Mexico during the Great Depression and workers at the McClellan Air Force Base during World War II. His place, near the end of the block, sits across from an alley of abandoned furniture and behind a pair of RV dealerships. A couple of the houses on the block are boarded up; the rest seem to be, if not neglected, barely functional, nothing more.
I walk past his uncle’s old Camaro parked across the front lawn. TJ greets me and shakes my hand with an unconvincing flip of the wrist. His cutoff T-shirt shows off sleeves of colorful, cartoonish tattoos that start at his wrist and work their way up.
’80’S BABY, his left arm shouts; a Roc-A-Fella Records logo with the lines from a verse in Jay-Z’s “Lost One”: “Time don’t go back, it goes forward / Can’t run from the pain, go towards it”; a boom box animation with HIP-HOP tagged above it; a Wu-Tang Clan symbol near his right wrist; a large inscription of the ’80s rap group Audio Two (“Milk is chillin’”); an array of colorful dollar signs and tiger-striped stars; and his self-anointed moniker, UPTOWN FINEST.