Free I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe Page B

because people were going to expect him to be more mature than he actually was. But his dad was excited. His son was going to make it. Dad believed he knew why he himself never had, despite all his clippings and stats. He’d had the misfortune of playing in the 1970s, when the black players had begun to dominate the game at the college level and captivate the recruiters. Perennial basketball powers like Bradley and St. Bonaventure were daring to put all-black teams on the court. Jojo’s dad was no genius perhaps, but he had figured out one thing: the advantage the black players had was absolute determination to prevail in this game . To them it was a disgrace to let yourself be pushed around by anybody and a terminal humiliation to let yourself be pushed around by a white player.
    That summer, when Jojo was fourteen, his father started driving to work in the morning and dropping Jojo off at a basketball court on a public playground in Cadwalader Park, a mainly black area—Jojo and a brown paper bag with a sandwich in it. The court was asphalt with metal backboards and hoops with no nets. His father wouldn’t pick him up until he got off work late in the afternoon. Jojo was on his own. He was going to learn to play black basketball or else, sink or swim.
    This wasn’t as drastic a form of education as it would have been in a big city. Trenton wasn’t the sort of place where the presence of a white boy on a mainly black playground would create an automatic flash point. But it was drastic enough. The black kids played a physical game with absolute determination. If you were white and backed down from them, they wouldn’t do anything or say anything. They would merely run right over you with a cool aloofness. Without so much as a word, they’d let you know that you deserved no respect. After one day of it, Jojo resolved never to back down from a black player again.
    The playground game wasn’t so much a team sport as a series of duels. If you had the ball and passed it to the open man under the basket, nobody considered that admirable. All you’d done was throw an opportunity away. The game was outdueling the man guarding you. Making a terrific jump
shot from outside didn’t get the job done, either. The idea was to fake your man out or intimidate him, outmuscle him, drive past him “into the hole,” soar above him, score a layup or dunk the ball if you were that tall, and then give him the look that said—this was where Jojo first learned it—“I’m kicking your ass all over the court, bitch.”
    One day Jojo was defending against a tall, aggressive black player they called Licky. Licky feinted this way and that, then gave Jojo a shoulder in the chest, drove for the basket, and soared for a layup. But Jojo soared higher and blocked the shot. Licky yelled, “Foul!” They began arguing, and Licky decked Jojo with a single punch to the face. Jojo got up seeing red, literally. A red mist formed in front of his eyes, and he threw himself on Licky. They exchanged a few wild punches, then went crashing to the asphalt and rolled in the grime. The other players stood there rooting for Licky but mainly just enjoying the beano. After a while they broke it up because Licky and Jojo were running out of the energy required to make it interesting; they wanted to get back to the game. When it was over, Licky was on his feet, heaving for breath to the point where he was unable to enunciate the curses he intended to direct at Jojo, who was sitting on the asphalt with a bloody cut over one eye, a split lip, a fat nose, and blood running down from the nose and the lip and dripping off his chin. He struggled up, wiped the blood off his face with the tops of his forearms, walked to the center of the court, and made it obvious that he was ready to resume play. He heard one player say to another, sotto voce, “ That white boy’s got heart.” He took it as the