I Beat the Odds (14 page)

Like a lot of high schools, Briarcrest had a group of kids who played a sport every season. They would go from football to basketball to track or soccer or whatever else was available. What was so great about Briarcrest, though, was that most of the guys didn’t act like the typical high school jock-jerks you see in teen movies. They were actually great people who made me feel welcome and helped look out for me. I had gotten to know some guys a lot better with basketball and track, but I started to make some solid friendships once football practice started that summer.

Summer also marked the beginning of another important change in my life. While my teachers were working on my academic needs, I was still left with the very basic problem of where to live. I had decided I couldn’t keep living with Tony and Steve all the time because I felt like I’d worn out my welcome with other members of the family. But I didn’t really have an alternative. That was when a couple of wonderful families stepped up to help me. There was Matt Saunders, who was one of the coaches for the football team. He let me stay at his home a few times. There was the Sparks family, whose son Justin was on the team with me. They had an absolutely enormous house very close to Briarcrest’s new campus. They invited me to stay with them a lot, and it was my first real look into the side of Memphis I’d never known: the lives of wealthy white people. But amazingly, with the Sparks family as with just about everyone else at Briarcrest, our racial difference was not even an issue.

The family that did the most for me during that time, though, was the Franklins. Quinterio Franklin was on the football team, and I felt like I had more in common with him than pretty much anyone else at the school. He was black and his family was not very well-off financially and, to be honest, that just felt more comfortable to me. The Franklins lived about thirty miles south of Memphis, so it was a long ride to school each morning and a long drive back in the evenings—especially after games. But they didn’t seem to mind having an extra person crammed into their small trailer house. I’m sure I made things feel even smaller, but it was so nice to be with a family that made me feel at home. They let me keep some clothes there, and they were generous with their food. They had nothing to gain by taking me in; they didn’t do it for any reason other than that they had big hearts and they knew I needed a place to go.

At that point, one of the challenges I was facing was knowing that if I went back to Alabama Plaza, where my mother was living, or if I went back to my favorite barbershop for a straight-razor shave, which helps me avoid painful razor bumps, I was now an outsider.

My mother was fine with the fact that I was going to a different school, but she didn’t really care that it was more demanding and made me responsible for my work in a totally new way, and she didn’t even seem that interested in what I was achieving athletically. If Tony picked her up before a game or a meet, she would go to cheer me on. But otherwise, she simply didn’t get involved. It felt like she didn’t actually have any interest in what I was doing or even where I was living.

I felt like an outsider around a lot of other people, too. I was now going to a fancy private school on the other side of town. Some people wanted to tease me about it and other people saw it as a kind of betrayal—like I wasn’t being true to who I was or where I came from. I just didn’t have much of a place in the old neighborhood. So I owe a lot to the Saunders family and the Sparks family, but especially the Franklin family for opening up their homes to me and letting me stay there for as long as I needed. They will always have a special place in my heart for the amazing kindness that they showed me. I was on scholarship and had enough clothes, so all I really needed was food and a place to sleep, but I know that’s still a lot to ask. If I was an inconvenience, no one showed it.

By my senior year, the scouts had started to notice me and the college coaches had started coming to see me play. So it was pretty clear that my grades mattered more than ever. And more than ever, folks stepped up to help me achieve my dream. Now, it wasn’t just about helping me earn my high school diploma; it was about helping me reach the next level. At 6:30 every morning—an hour before school started—I would take an extra class of foundational study skills to help me make up for the gaps in my earlier education, and sometimes I would review my homework and lessons to make sure that I was staying on task and learning the material at the rate I needed to. This helped give me the learning tools and the confidence to take on the rest of my regular schedule.

But the teachers weren’t just interested in helping to make me NCAA eligible. I could tell that they were teaching me because they wanted me to learn and because they knew I could. It was amazing to have that kind of support.

I’ve never struggled with the question of whether I could succeed; I only struggled with how. I was going to find a way, one way or another. I wasn’t sure of the exact path, but I knew I wasn’t going to give up until I’d achieved a better life for myself. The way that teachers and families at Briarcrest rallied around me finally showed me the missing piece in the puzzle. It was a busy and pretty crazy time, with a lot of moving pieces and a lot of complications.

And one family stepped up to the line to help me steer through it all.

M
y transition into life at Briarcrest was a rewarding one, but it was still a transition. I was still stuck with the lack of a normal family and though several wonderful ones stepped up and let me stay in their homes, I knew that those arrangements couldn’t be permanent.

So even as I stayed with the Franklins and Sparks and Saunders, I worried about where I could stay for good. I don’t think that anyone really understood the degree to which I had nowhere else to go back to. I didn’t talk about it much. I’m sure if anyone had known I was homeless, they would have called Child Protective Services believing they were acting in my best interest, and I would have found myself right back in foster care. That was the last thing I wanted, so I kept quiet.

I just tried to do my best, was respectful of the house where I was staying, and presented the best face that I could. The best way I knew how was to stay clean-shaven and always—always—ironed my clothes. I still do. It doesn’t matter if it was a shirt for school or basketball practice, I never wanted to look sloppy, so I did laundry regularly and ironed out every last wrinkle. That was one thing I had noticed: The people at Briarcrest always looked neat. If I was going to be a part of their world, I was going to make sure I was neat, too. Over the past few years, I had used my money from selling newspapers to buy myself clothes and I had enough that still fit me, so I just did my best to take care of what I owned and prayed that they wouldn’t wear out before I outgrew them.

In the meantime, strange things were happening at school.

One of the biggest differences between Briarcrest and all the other schools I’d attended was that lunch wasn’t free. In my public schools I always made sure I was in school at lunchtime even if we didn’t go to any classes during the day—at least I was guaranteed one meal a day. But at Briarcrest, everyone had to pay or pack. Free lunch wasn’t an option; my scholarship just covered tuition. So suddenly I found out that the one meal a day I always knew I could count on was gone.

Again, it was a situation where if I had told anyone, I know they would have immediately helped me out. But I didn’t, and I guess it just didn’t occur to anyone that two or three dollars a day for lunch was more than I could afford. It was one thing to bum a bed on the sofa or some food at dinnertime. It was a totally different thing to ask for money for lunch. So I just did my best to make do, having a snack if someone offered me something in the lunchroom and hoarding food whenever I could to always have a little stash I could go to.

But suddenly I discovered that I had a lunch account. I can’t remember who told me, specifically, but I just know that one day I was told that I could just get whatever I needed in the lunch line and it would be covered. The feeling of relief that day was huge. I was starting to see God at work around me; I had a need, it was met. That’s pretty powerful.

Later I would find out it was Sean Tuohy who was my cafeteria sponsor. I should have guessed it was him because he seemed especially interested in getting to know me. He was a volunteer coach for the basketball team, so I had gotten a chance to talk with him a little bit at the end of the season my sophomore year, when I first started to play. He did a lot with the track team then because his daughter, Collins, was on the team.

I had noticed him before I even started playing basketball, when I would sit in the bleachers to watch practice and remind myself of why I was working as hard as I was. He seemed like a smart coach and a nice guy. He must have noticed me, too, because he came over and talked to me one day. It wasn’t much—just a little introduction—but then I saw him again when I started playing ball and when track started up; it was nice to feel like I had a connection to one of the coaches. It would still be a long time before I would be a part of his family, though.

 

 

SCHOOL HOLIDAYS WERE SCARY TIMES FOR ME. Every other kid would be so excited about the break, talking about where their family was going on vacation or how late they were planning to sleep in. But I dreaded the times when the school would be closed. It was easy to catch a ride home with someone after practice, and then stay the night. But no school meant no practice, which also potentially meant no place to sleep. Like I said, if any one of the families I was staying with had realized that I really had nowhere to go, I know they would have welcomed me without a second thought. But I didn’t volunteer the information. In truth, my mother was back on drugs and I was afraid to go back to my old neighborhood because I felt like it might swallow me up one day and never let me back out.

Thanksgiving break of my junior year was just one of those times. A big winter storm was moving in, with sleet and wind. That was okay, though, because I had decided that I would go to the gym at the old campus to shoot hoops. I bundled up the best I could in long pants and a sweatshirt, and set off. I felt responsible, like I was doing my homework for basketball. And I felt some pride and ownership of that space: It was my school, and since I was part of the team, it was my gym, too. I knew it would be warm there, and sheltered. It seemed to me like heading to the gym was a smart decision, given the situation. It never occurred to me that it might not be open.

I didn’t even notice the silver BMW that drove past me that November morning; the part of town I was walking through is full of BMWs. It wasn’t until the car turned around and pulled up to me that I realized Coach Tuohy was driving, and there was a very tiny, very loud lady sitting next to him. When they told me that the gym was closed, I agreed to let them take me to a bus stop.

A week or two later, once school was back in session, Coach Harrington talked to me after practice one day to tell me that one of the parents at school wanted to take me shopping for some new clothes. Would I be okay with that? I wasn’t sure why anyone would want to go shopping with me, but I agreed. The next day Coach Tuohy’s wife, Leigh Anne, loaded me up in her car and we headed to a big and tall men’s shop I knew of on my end of town.

She still teases me about all the striped rugby shirts I picked out, and that scene made it into the movie. But what the film doesn’t show is the hideous shirt covered in flowers and palm leaves that she pulled for me to try on. It looked like something an old man would wear on the beach in Hawaii. It was truly ugly! I passed on that. But I did end up with some shirts that, for maybe the first time, actually felt like they fit the way they were supposed to fit. I always felt like too-small clothes just made me look bigger, and as a teenager I was still very self-conscious about my size. But clothes that were loose felt like they might hide me a bit more instead of making me look like I was so huge I was about to rip out of them like the Incredible Hulk.

As I got to know the Tuohys, they invited me to come to their house after school, an invitation I ended up accepting pretty quickly. They lived just a couple of blocks from the old campus, so I already was familiar with the area, even though high school classes had moved to the new campus south of the city. Coach Tuohy would drive me over to their house after basketball practice sometimes, and I would stay for dinner (which was whatever they ordered in, since no one in the family liked to cook). Then he would drive me back to wherever I was sleeping at the time, usually stopping at a fast-food place somewhere along the way to order me something to tide me over until breakfast.

One evening after a track meet, when I didn’t give Sean a clear answer as to where I would be staying that night, they invited me to stay the night on the sofa in the game room. And so the Tuohy family became part of my rotation. I would stay with them for a couple of nights, always trying to be sure I was a good guest by making a very neat bed with the sheets and blankets they offered, and folding them up neatly on the corner of the sofa in the morning.

The more time I spent with that family, the more I felt like I had found a home. It might have been a little bit of a crazy home with people who seemed always to be running in and out, between Collins’s friends stopping by all the time and Sean and Leigh Anne’s work schedules, but it was a comfortable kind of crazy.

To be a part of a community at Briarcrest, as well as starting to feel like part of a supportive family, made all the difference in the world for me, because I’d never been around people who were cheering me on. One of the most important things going on for me at that time was building relationships, because that was something that had been lacking in my life. Of course I had my biological family and I loved them fiercely, but as I mentioned, love was something we never discussed much in my family. We never, ever said those words to one another. And yes, while everyone around us, from social workers to foster families, could see that we all had a deep love for one another—and it is more important to show love than just to say it—a child still needs to hear those words, too.