Free Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams Page B

it behind his head for an easy layup. Our team won. Perry pointed at me and nodded and a couple of players gave me dap as we headed to the sideline. One of them took me aside and said: “Yo, you had that shot, son; don’t just look to pass, go for yours next time.” I nodded and said I understood.
    Sometime after I got back home I told Pappy that I didn’t think I needed to go back to St.Anthony. He looked puzzled, but said that was fine—he had meant it when he told me that he didn’t care to see another black athlete or entertainer. One thing he wanted to say, though, and something he wanted me to think hard about was what Coach Hurley had told him. “Thomas doesn’t have the toughness,” Hurley said. “He isn’t from where my boys are from. I could tell that he was out of his element the moment he walked through the door, and so could my boys. My boys are hungry, and Thomas is not.”
    That assessment, as much as it stung, was fair. Though my comparative privilege embarrassed me, and I clung to the delusion that I could be just as hard as Hurley’s boys if I tried, I knew deep down that I wasn’t nearly as tough or as desperate. The truth is that I wasn’t all that hungry for a life devoted to sports or entertainment when I really thought about it—and Pappy had made it plain from the beginning that I didn’t have to be.
    Like hip-hop, basketball had simply always been around me: You’re black, and you’d better know how to hoop. I was better than average at it. But coming into such close contact with the life-and-death manner in which the boys at St. Anthony approached the game, the frenzied and terrified way they played basketball—a sport at the end of the day—the way they made this game their lives gave me real pause. Even I knew the disheartening math, even I knew that only one or two players—at generous maximum—from that undefeated St. Anthony squad, perhaps the best varsity boys’ team in the whole country, would get a shot at a career in the NBA. And what becomes of the rest of them?
    That was my junior year, what Pappy called the single most crucial phase of a high school student’s life, the moment the SAT moves from abstraction to reality. How you do on this test, Pappy said, more than anything else you can do right now, will determine what kind of life you will be able to lead. I was still trying as hard as ever to keep it real and I continued to play AAU ball and to understand myself mostly through my body, but I also began to suspect that “going for mine” now would need to mean something more than taking open jump shots.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Street Dreams (Who Am I to Disagree?)
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    P eople say that hip-hop is more than just a genre of music—it’s a certain bounce in your stride, it’s the way you shake hands, it’s the ideas that circulate in your head. It’s the ideas that don’t circulate in your head. A philosopher might say it’s a way of being in the world. An authority on the subject, like the rapper Nas, says, “It’s that street shit, period.”
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    As I exited my senior prom, it was one of Nas’s songs, a track titled “Street Dreams” that rattled out of the trunk of my friend’s new chrome-rimmed Acura RL, filling the banquet hall’s parking lot with a thugged-out adaptation of the Eurythmics classic.That night, in a monsoon wave of Fahrenheit cologne, Cuban-link gold chains, freshly braided cornrows, gravity-defying hair weaves, pastel-colored tuxedos, gator boots, painted-on evening gowns, and six-inch stilettos, several dozen African-American members of the Union Catholic Regional High School class of 1999 hopped into a cavalcade of rented Range Rovers, Mercedes-Benzes, Cadillacs, and BMWs and sped down the Garden State Parkway to a seedy and unassuming strip of beachfront motels in the Seaside