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Overview
The inspirational true story about the trials and victories of the Hope High School basketball team in inner-city Providence, Rhode Island.
Hope High School in Providence, Rhode Island was once a model city school, graduating a wide range of students from different backgrounds. But the tumult of the 1960s and the drug wars of the 70s changed both Providence and Hope. Today, the aging school is primarily Hispanic and African-American, with kids traveling for miles by bus and foot each day.
Hope was known for its state championship basketball teams in the 1960s, but its 2012 team is much different. Disobedient, distracted, and overwhelmed by family troubles, with mismatched sneakers and a penchant for profanity and anger, these boys represent Coach Dave Nyblom's dream of a championship, however unlikely that might seem. Nyblom's mostly black players, including several who emigrated to Providence from war-torn Liberia, face gang violence, domestic uncertainty, drug problems, and a host of other issues. But with the unfailing support and guidance of Nyblom and other Hope coaches, their ragtag team gradually pulls together, overcoming every obstacle to find the faith and trust in themselves that Nyblom never stops teaching.
A look at a hidden world that just a few hundred yards from Brown University, Bill Reynolds's Hope is the inspiring true story of young men and their mentors pursuing one goal—a championship—but achieving so much more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466893092 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/26/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Bill Reynolds is a sports columnist for The Providence Journal and the author of several books, including Fall River Dreams and (with Rick Pitino) the #1 New York Times bestseller Success Is a Choice. He lives in Rhode Island.
Read an Excerpt
Hope
A School, a Team, a Dream
By Bill Reynolds
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Bill ReynoldsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9309-2
CHAPTER 1
"If you're not going to do it, just go home," Nyblom yelled as roughly thirty kids labored through push-ups on the old gym floor.
It was the first day of practice and Nyblom was wearing a dark blue short-sleeve shirt with "Hope" stitched over a pocket in white letters, baggy tan shorts, and white sneakers. Overhead, fifteen small blue-and-white banners hung from the ceiling, rectangular tributes to past glories. The walls of the gym were tan brick. There were five rows of dark blue bleachers on one side, and three on the other. A small American flag hung in one corner. Twelve large Palladium windows, six on each side, let in the winter light. One side of the gym looked out over a small courtyard in the middle of the school. The other side looked out to an athletic field in the back, and an affluent neighborhood across the street from the field, one of the oldest in Providence, dating back to the nineteenth century. The basketball court was old, worn by decades of kids running across it. The gym was showing its age, like some dowager who can't hide the years no matter what she does.
"That will get you a ticket right out of here," Nyblom said again in his big, loud voice as one kid threw up a ridiculous shot. "This isn't the playground."
But it sure seemed like it.
My last time in this gym had been in December 1961. I was a junior then, playing for a small suburban high school ten miles to the south. Hope was a city school that had won the state title the year before and had played in the New England Tournament in the old Boston Garden where the Celtics ruled, and on that long-ago winter night Hope beat us, one of only three losses the entire season. Even then, though, the gym was small and everything seemed old, and Kennedy was in the White House and no one had heard of the Beatles, never mind rap.
But if I hadn't been in the gym in over fifty years, I had driven by Hope countless times. I had played basketball at Brown University in the '60s, and Hope is only a few hundred yards away from the seventh oldest college in the country. Across Hope Street from the school is Moses Brown, a private school that's been in existence since 1819. Less than a mile away is the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, which attracts students from all over the world. In front of that school is Benefit Street, the most historic street in Providence, which dates back to the seventeenth century and is now a historic landmark. Hope is on Providence's East Side, the oldest part of the city, an area rich in history that goes back to the beginnings of the country and the beginnings of Providence, an area now lined with million-dollar homes.
Hope was part of my history too, even if indirectly.
My father had played football for Hope back in the early '30s, when it was called Hope Street High School, an old red-brick school located across the street from where it is now; it had first opened in 1898. I have many friends who went to Hope back in the early '60s when it was a melting pot of sorts, full of kids who continued on to college and professional lives and remembered Hope fondly, seeing it as a pathway to success.
But I had seen it change, too. Through the years I had written a few columns on athletes from Hope. One was on a great runner, and we stood in a dirty locker room where too many locker doors were broken, hanging from their hinges. Another time, the football coach said his biggest problem was getting his kids to come to school five days in a row, his rule for who was eligible to play on Saturday. And just a few years ago, I had talked to a Hope football player who had lost one of his closest friends to gang violence, which has become an epidemic in inner-city Providence.
"In my age group, seventeen, eighteen years old, we fear for our lives," he had said quietly.
So what was going on here?
How did a school whose very name is the motto of Rhode Island become a symbol of everything wrong with American education in this new millenium — high dropout rates, absenteeism, violence, the materials outdated and the structure in disrepair, overcrowded with kids the country seems to have few answers for? More important, who are these kids that society seems to walk to the other side of the street to avoid? All these nonwhite, poor kids, the ones with their hoodies and baggy pants, who often fear for their lives?
Who are these kids?
It was the question the country was grappling with throughout 2012, after Trayvon Martin, a young black male in a hooded sweatshirt, was killed by a civilian in a gated community in Florida who believed he shouldn't have been there, must have been there to commit a crime.
So who are these kids?
And what do they dream?
In many ways they had become invisible to me, too. They were the kids you sometimes saw walking down Thayer Street, the hip commercial street full of Brown students, on their way to the nearby bus tunnel that went downtown. They were the ones you saw downtown on Kennedy Plaza in front of the gray stone City Hall where the buses from all over the city stop. They were the ones who played in the Rhode Island Interscholastic League that was traditionally dominated by Hendricken and La Salle, the two parochial school powerhouses. In so many ways, these kids from the public schools in Providence were out of sight, and out of mind, even in sports.
But who are they?
In December 2012 I decided to find out.
So there I was at the first day of practice, watching kids in their baggy shorts and different-colored sneakers, in their gym class T-shirts and their ragtag uniforms and their hopeful expressions. And at first glance it all looked like basketball chaos. One kid rocked a big Afro, as if he'd been transported from the '70s, complete with a red tattoo on his throat. One had a ponytail and the first initial of his first name tattooed on the back of one leg, and the first initial of his last name tattooed on the other. A couple of others styled their hair in cornrows. Two played with no shirts at all. They were all black kids, except for sophomore guard Angel Rivera, who had been born in Puerto Rico. This was supposed to be one of the best high school teams in Rhode Island?
Two starters were missing because they played on the football team, which had a playoff game scheduled for that night, and Wayne Clements, the starting point guard from last year, was recovering from knee surgery.
And where was Emmanuel Kargbo, whom everyone called Manny?
Manny was the best player at Hope, second-team All State a year ago in the Providence Journal. He was a six-foot-two senior, with wide shoulders and slim hips, and an expression that could turn from warm and happy to disconsolate in the blink of an eye. He had been born in war-torn Liberia, and remembers soldiers shooting during a soccer game between a Liberian team and one from Ghana in his native Monrovia. He came to Providence with his mother and two brothers in the summer before his freshman year, after living in Delaware since he was seven. But he still carried remnants of the Liberian English he had grown up speaking, to the point where he seemed to preface every sentence with "Yo, yo," as some sort of verbal warm-up.
Where was Manny?
"Something's going on with him," muttered Keith Moors, a six-foot-six light-skinned black man, a former prison guard, who has given countless hours of his time over the past six years as a volunteer assistant coach. "It's like he's fighting us."
Moors and Nyblom had first met at a Christmas party at a local sporting goods company six years ago. Moors had told Nyblom he was interested in getting into high school coaching. That was the beginning.
"Dave told me to come to practice, and I had never seen anything like it," he said. "Guys talking back. Guys getting thrown out of the gym. One took his shirt off and threw it on the floor. Another threw a trash can across the court. It was crazy. That whole season was crazy. Kids yelling when they got taken out of a game. Kids quitting. Others getting thrown off the team. It was like the Wild, Wild West and it sabotaged the whole season."
Not that Moors was a wide-eyed innocent. For years he was a guard at the Adult Correctional Institute in nearby Cranston, and he had his own dramatic back story. But this was a high school basketball team.
"It's always something," he continued. "Too many of these kids have no structure in their lives. None. They're living with grandparents. Or an older sister or brother. You see where they come from. Where they live. It's scary. Ninety-eight percent are good kids. But there's nobody at home. No discipline. It's difficult. Because they don't want to open up, don't want to tell you what's really going on at home."
Moors looked out on the gym floor, lost in thought, as if seeing something only he could see.
"They all think they're going to the NBA," he said, resignedly. "Or at least going to a Division I college. It's unbelievable. You ask the seniors, 'What are you going to do next year?' They'll say college. Have you applied yet? No. Then you turn around the next year and they're back here in the gym asking for help. I should have listened, they say. Every year it's something. In '09 we had three kids get arrested for stealing some laptops and an iPod when we went across the street to play Moses Brown. The kids were lying to the cops, and the cops already had everything on tape. That sucked the life out of the whole season."
He paused.
"You see a little bit of everything here. It's always something."
He pointed at Nyblom, this big man with his shorts and sneakers and his cropped hair the color of sand, this man who had a visible presence, commanding the gym with a big voice and a natural whistle that seemed as loud as a real whistle.
"They think he's the enemy. He's not the enemy. He'd give his right arm for these kids. The problem is too many don't realize it until it's too late."
"WAKE UP!" yelled Nyblom as he watched the basketball sacrilege going on in front of him, a simple three-man weave being treated as if it were some mathematical equation.
"CATCH THE BALL. ... BOUNCE PASS. ... GO BEHIND HIM, ANGEL. ... WAKE UP! If you can't pass and catch the ball, fellas, it's going to be a long season. How are we supposed to run a play when we can't even run a three- man weave without any defense? This is Basketball 101."
The drill continued, over and over, with similar results.
"TURNOVER CITY!" yelled Moors.
"Fellas, we can't keep doing this," said an exasperated Nyblom. "If we only have six guys who can do this then those are the six guys who will play, and everyone else will go home."
But they did keep doing it. It was a practice full of basketball atrocities.
And the next afternoon was more of the same, starting the minute practice began.
"LINE UP ON THE BASELINE!" yelled Nyblom.
Once again it looked like a ragtag group, more like a gym class than a high school basketball team.
"In order to play basketball you have to have your sneakers tied," he said, distinctly staring at one skinny kid who looked back at him, clueless.
"Yeah, you," Nyblom said.
Hope had lost in the state football playoffs the night before, so there were a handful of football players at practice, including two prospective starters. One was Delonce Wright, the best football player at Hope, a five-foot-ten kid who had run 4.37 in the forty-yard dash at the Boston College football camp, the kind of speed that gets everyone's attention in football.
There was something a little different about Wright. He seemed more socially poised than most of the other kids. Maybe that was because he had spent a year at St. Andrew's, a private school in suburban Barrington, before being thrown out after his freshman year for what had been called "bringing some product from his neighborhood to the campus." Or maybe it was because he had gone to the Paul Cuffee School in Providence as a kid, a school generally considered better than the Providence public schools for so- called at-risk kids. You could have a conversation with Wright, which was more difficult to do with most of the other players.
The other football player was the dark-skinned Johnson Weah. He, too, had been born in Liberia. But his mother took him and his older brother to the Ivory Coast when he was just nine months old to escape the civil war that raged on for fourteen years. He only saw his father once, when his father made a short visit to the refugee camp where his family lived. He remembers him as "just a normal person who got caught up in the war." He spent the next eight years in a refugee camp, as his mother and older brother cut wood every day. He went to school, but it was basically just daycare. The only sport the refugee kids played was soccer, with a ball made out of old plastic bags.
"My mother worked with me on my ABCs and times tables," he said. "That was the highest education I had when I came to America."
He was ten years old, without any formal schooling, when he first came to Providence. He was put into the third grade.
"To be honest, I didn't feel like I was in my own body," he said of that first year in an American classroom, both older and bigger than anyone else around him, with a profound sense of displacement. He had arrived in a strange new world that no one had prepared him for. "I had a problem reading. I didn't mix in with the other kids. I felt left out."
Weah was six-foot-two, rock-solid, a player who didn't have many skills but was the very definition of tough and hardworking, the ideal teammate. He also knew how fortunate he was that his mother took him out of Liberia, for if he had stayed he would have been conscripted into the war, just another child soldier in a brutal war full of them.
"If I had stayed I would have been forced into it," he said softly.
He, too, carried his Liberian childhood in his speech.
"What language did you speak as a kid?" I asked him one day.
He looked at me as though he didn't understand the question.
"English."
So why can't I understand you, I wanted to say.
"Liberian English," he said, no doubt seeing my confusion.
"What's that?" I asked.
"You wouldn't understand," he said.
"Try me," I said.
He paused for a second, then looked at me.
"You, me, go to corner, yo?" he said in an almost singsong voice.
I would come to learn that Johnson Weah was very sensitive about his speech, to the point that he thought you were making fun of him if you had trouble understanding him and asked him to repeat himself. He was proud, almost regal in appearance, with ebony skin, and scars on his back that no one ever asked him about. But if Johnson didn't say much, there was no doubt he would try to run through a brick wall for his teammates, no questions asked.
The addition of Wright and Weah instantly made Hope better. Put them with Kargbo and junior Ben Vezele, the thin, long-armed left-handed forward, and there was no question Hope was an athletic high school team by Rhode Island standards.
The only problem?
The senior point guard was nowhere to be found.
I noticed him sitting by himself on the last row of the bleachers, as geographically isolated from the team as he appeared to be psychologically.
"I remember a kid puked in a bucket when I was a freshman and I was nervous I was going to do it too," Wayne Clements said, almost to himself, as I sat down next to him.
He was thin, five-foot-ten or so, with cornrows and a boyish face. His entire persona screamed out too-cool, but every once in a while a smile would sneak across his face, like when he described how he broke his elbow.
"There was a big girl fight down on a field by Brown last spring and then three cops came and they were pepper-spraying everybody and I was running to get away and I jumped over a fence and fell on it."
This was said matter-of-factly, as if relating just another normal afternoon after school. He'd had surgery on his knee in August, after hurting it playing basketball over the summer, and more surgery in September after reinjuring it. And it wasn't better yet, much to the consternation of the coaches, who felt he wasn't exactly punishing himself in his rehab.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hope by Bill Reynolds. Copyright © 2016 Bill Reynolds. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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