Free Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams

when Coach called me over to the sideline. I hadn’t spoken to him since practice.
    â€œWhat’s up, Coach?”
    â€œWhat’s up is that you’re coming off the bench today.”
    â€œWhat? But Coach, this is my hometown. That’s embarrassing!”
    â€œI know,” he said. “And that’s the point.”
    I played less than five minutes that game, while Larry dropped more than twenty points and laughed at me from the court. Scotch Plains won by double digits. I went home in a terrible funk. Pappy, who never could acclimate himself to the idea of a white man dressing down a black boy in public, whatever the reason, wasn’t happy when he heard about it. He ordered me to quit and offered to transfer me from Union Catholic to a list of other schools, but to the surprise of us both, I balked at this deal, at the thought of not being around Stacey every day. In this way, I was what Ant called “a terry cloth nigga”— too soft. I just couldn’t do it. To my shame, I felt the need to stay put, to stay with Stacey at all costs. The truth is that, more than even playing basketball, it was being with Stacey, I felt, that validated me. I couldn’t imagine losing that validation for anything. Instead of leaving, I decided to play AAU ball and go to summer camps, hoping that would be enough to get a scholarship to college, even though I knew it almost certainly would not.
    One of the camps I attended the summer after quitting the team was run by Bob Hurley, the coach of St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, consistently one of the top-ranked teams in the nation. His was the only school for which I might have been willing to part with Stacey. The difference between the varsity squad at St. Anthony and the one at Union Catholic is the difference between Paris, France, and Paris, Texas—they’re not on the same map. All week long at camp I played hard, trying to shine in front of Coach Hurley, whose own son had famously made it to the NBA. I did well in league play, and when Pappy came to the rural campsite to pick me up he introduced himself to the renowned coach, who told him he had noticed me and that I was welcome to work out with his team, the Friars, when school resumed in the fall.
    My mother drove me out to St. Anthony twice.What I remember most about the long trek there from Fanwood is the overwhelming stench that sets up shop in your nostrils as soon as you approach the Jersey City exit on the Turnpike. It smells like a little patch of Mexico City has been grafted onto the Garden State and you are waylaid in it. My mother and I rolled up the windows and turned off the highway, creeping through bleak service streets, looking for the gym, which, to our surprise, was smaller and of even more modest construction than the one I had used as a child at Holy Trinity. Inside, though, there was nothing modest about the game that was under way. I spotted Coach Hurley—besides my mother, the only Caucasian in the room—stalking the sidelines, tracking the action with the severest blue eyes in the world.
    As I approached, he studied me for a second—piercing through me, it felt like. He was polite, neither friendly nor unfriendly; he greeted my mother and then smiled at me with his mouth but not those eyes. Get loose and link with the other boys on the sideline, who have next, he told me, and then his attention was no longer mine. That is the way a Don looks upon the face of a flunky, I thought and began to stretch. Two or three of the players in the gym I recognized from camp, the rest I hadn’t seen before, and one of them I knew by reputation to be Anthony Perry, the star of the team (insofar as there are things like individual stars at a place like St.Anthony), a soon-to-be McDonald’s All-American, and one of the best high school players in the country on anybody’s list. His team won.
    I stepped with my five onto the court and it occurred to me