Family
The roads were packed and the 1010 WINS traffic lady said the wait at the Holland Tunnel was more than an hour.
“Let’s just forget about going into the city and get off here,” said Laura. “We’ll find a place to eat and then go home.”
“Oh no,” I muttered as I tried to negotiate around him.
“Look,” said Laura. “I think that’s a parking spot,” she pointed up the block to the right side of the street. I pulled around the truck driving with two wheels on the curb then, once I cleared him, angled our car down, bouncing back onto the street.
No Parking 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, the sign said. I looked at the dashboard clock, 5:45.
“Perfect,” I said. “First thing to go right today. Fifteen minutes and we’ll be legal.” I parked then sat quietly, breathing deeply, trying to relax.
“Why don’t we move to a more rural area and forget about this urban, New York crap,” I said, raising a subject that came up every time we got into a mess like this.
I looked up to a giant billboard a block ahead of us advertising a ‘Fun Cruise.’
“How do they know what’s fun for me? A Fun Cruise - how ridiculous. How can anyone tell you that they can supply your fun. You know what’s fun for me? Coming upon a basketball court where there are five guys, and they say to me, ‘Hey, man, do you want to play? We need one
“You’re delusional,” said Laura. “Did you forget that you are already hobbling around on damaged 68 year old knees? And did you forget about the two strokes you had? And the medication you’re on, and the doc telling you ‘ try not to get hit in the head.’ You go out on any court and you’ll likely come home in a chair or with a cane.”
She had a point and had kindly left out the last possibility, on a stretcher.
We locked the car and walked up the street, an unremarkable block of four story brownstones. At the corner a small
It was crowded inside but we managed to find a small booth near the window. I looked around as we slid into our seats and picked up the menus in front of us.
“Laura,” I said. “I think we’re the only white people in here.”
She looked up briefly. “I think you’re right,” she said absentmindedly and looked back to the menu.
“This reminds me of being back on the courts at the med school,” I said, smiling. “Those are good memories. Those were the good times.”
“I thought I saw your face light up,” Laura said.
“I was very happy then. I just didn’t realize it till it was over.”
“I know you were.”
“Of all the things I did at that school, the research, the teaching, all the committees, I still feel that running that basketball league was one of my most important accomplishments.”
“I know she said,” matter-of-factly. She had heard this all before.
“ I wish you could have experienced those days. We would laugh when the university announced a ‘Diversity Day.’ What a joke. That league did more to promote diversity, as they called it, than a thousand of their highly publicized, over-hyped, media-covered, diversity events. What hypocrites; on the one hand preaching about our ‘community,’ and then not supporting the league. They killed it, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” she said.
***
The University Basketball League on the Newark campus of UMDNJ was established in the late ‘70s. It ran for more than 25 years and for most of those years, I was the commissioner. The league was the idea of Charlie, from Receiving, and Reggie, from Buildings and Grounds, who I knew from casual pick-up games. They approached me one Friday after we had played an especially competitive afternoon of basketball with other employees, two or three faculty and several students.
“What do you think, doc?” said Charlie.
In our first season we had five teams, with players whose skills ranged from mediocre (me) to highly skilled. We played our games in a small court behind the cafeteria on a concrete floor with tight walls and tighter viewing space. But news of the league spread quickly and within a few years we had expanded to separate leagues, “A” for the very good, highly competitive players, and “B” , a league of folks who mainly just wanted to have fun.
At its peak, the University Basketball League (the UBL as we called it) had 27 teams involving close to 300 men and women. [The first woman to play in the league was a med student who re-emerged in my life a few years ago to deliver the first, and later two more grandchildren.]
The players came from all over the Newark campus; employees, students from our medical, dental and graduate schools, faculty and staff members. From mid-fall through early spring we played triple-headers on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights with paid referees (local men and women who were either adding to their day wages or trying to work their way into reffing college or professional games), electronic scoreboard, official scorers and statisticians.
The teams had names like Canine Eminence (dental students), Four Guards and a Prayer
In the more competitive division there was a fierce rivalry for the annual championship, with its trophies, jackets and most important, year long bragging rights. In the other division, it was more for fun, but as with any sport, there were rivalries, like when a team of first year dental students played first year medical students.
One year, the medical students were undefeated going into the first round of the playoffs where they were to play the winless Acid Fast, a mostly out-of-shape, somewhat disorganized, group of grad students and faculty. But this rag-tag team had taken on a secret weapon about halfway through the season. Judy, was a grad student who had played college ball at Montclair State and almost accepted an offer to play in a woman’s league overseas. She had been in and out of games all year (balancing laboratory experiments with basketball), but watching her play, we all knew that when she was in the game, anything was possible.
The grad student team played at a high level in the first half, holding a slim lead as the buzzer sounded, with Judy scoring from all over the floor. The med students were shocked and baffled. By then the gym had filled with players from the next games, most of whom cheered wildly for an upset. But at the scorers desk, we predicted that the Med students would take over the second half, clamp down on Judy with their superior talent, youth and fitness, and would run away with the game. They started the half by guarding Judy closely as she brought the ball up court. But Judy was ready for this and as she had instructed her team at the break, every time they double-teamed her, she passed the ball to one of her open teammates. Those inspired teammates responded to the challenge and shocked us all by making most of their shots. In the final seconds with Acid Fast down one and the gym bursting with every play, the ball and the expected double-team came to Judy. But this time, unlike most other plays in the half, Judy, instead of passing, faked the defenders and then drove left (‘I didn’t know she could go left,’ I said to the official scorer) for a layup and a foul that won the game.
Chairs came flying out onto the floor (with quick apologies because the guys knew they could be bounced from the league for that kind of behavior); but the crowd was jubilant at the upset and didn’t know how else to react. The fans mobbed the floor and the winless Acid Fast had memories that would last a lifetime and Judy became an instant legend in our league. Acid Fast returned to form in their next game and lost by 30 points (Judy couldn’t get away from an experiment that ran later than she had thought).
One year, in the highly competitive “A” division, a talented team composed of security guards and maintenance staff, had unexpectedly lost all of their regular season games. Just before the playoffs, their captain, Silk Russell, appeared at my office door to tell me a member of his team was injured and asked if he could add a player, a guy he knew from the dental school and played with on Friday afternoons. This ploy was not unusual and the rules strictly forbid it (the rosters were fixed weeks before the playoffs and teams were urged to always have enough players to absorb an injury). But Silk, a very persuasive guy, persisted and finally I told him that he could add the player if the other teams in the league agreed and their coaches signed a paper to that effect.
A few days later, I got the signed paper and saw the player – a non-descript white guy (the only one on Silk’s team) of average height and build who could shoot and knew the game, but was by no means an overwhelming player. At least, that’s what everyone thought. But this ordinary white guy was the missing ingredient - the one man who made a team of excellent players into a coherent ensemble – they never lost another game and went off with jackets, trophies, and of course bragging rights. We talked about that season for years after.
In one of the later years of the league, Stan Bergen, the founding president of UMDNJ, and a huge supporter of the UBL, stood with me in the cramped gym watching a game (he would make a point of coming to at least one of the playoff games, usually the championships, each year). I said to him, “Stan, do you remember when this was just a bunch of white guys and black guys running up and down the court?”
He smiled and nodded as we watched a med student in a bright red turban race down the court as part of a team that seemed to be composed of all members (black, white, Asian, middle-east, women) of the diverse community that came to define the Newark campus.
As the league began to change complexion, many of the traditional white and black players were skeptical of the abilities of the Chinese and Indian students joining the game. That quickly came to an end in one game where well into the second half, a team of mostly Asian second year med students were playing a more traditional team of all black guys from the cafeteria, maintenance and security. On three successive plays, Nishant, a slight, Indian kid came down the court, set up just beyond three point range and drained all three shots.
From the beginning, the league faced two potential threats to its existence; fights and lawsuits. We had players sign waivers of responsibility forms that seemed to satisfy the University and in those 25 years, no one ever even threatened a lawsuit. There were injuries, of course, plenty of them. But they would usually be handled by one of the players who might be an attending in the ER or in Orthopedics telling the injured player, “listen, stay off the leg (twisted ankles were the most frequent injury) and come see me tomorrow, I’ll take a look at it...” There was an unwritten rule that those players with the medical skills would take care of those who got injured.
I recall few actual fights other than the usual shoving or threatening, except for once when I got a report that there had been a fight between two of the players in a game the night before. “Wait,” I said as I heard the story, “Aren’t they brothers?” When I saw their mother (a security guard) later in the day she said, shaking her head, “Doc, those two been fighting since they were kids. If that happened at home I just took them by the scruff of the neck and threw them out in the backyard till they cooled off…” We resolved that incident without further problems.
Racially motivated fighting, that was for many of us our unspoken fear, happened only once when John a white official was abused by one of the black players for one of his calls. John quickly lost his temper and started racial name-calling. Some of the players charged him but we got in the middle quickly restoring order; we cancelled the rest of the game. In the coming days this incident was resolved and John apologized to some of the players. After a brief suspension John resumed officiating. The day of the fight, one of the other officials took me aside and whispered, “You know, Doc, John’s wife is black and they’ve been having some issues. So I think there may be things going on that run a bit deeper than what just happened on the court…”
But those incidents are the only ones I recall over a 25-year period. And what were the benefits of this league?
There is a dark year that hangs over the heads of all of the long-time
Only a few weeks later another long-time player, Will, also died, perhaps of a heart attack we were told, and a third, Cool-Aid fell to the sidewalk with a seizure and never recovered. Cool-Aid (I knew him for more than three years before finding out that his real name was Michael) had been mugged several years earlier on the streets of Newark and the thought was that the seizure was probably a result of the brain injuries he sustained then. These deaths all happened within a few months.
The league ceased operation in 2005; a casualty of the lack of interest by a new administration, a chance to save a few thousand dollars and other reasons that I never understood.
***
“Laura,” I said as she returned to the table from the bathroom. “Those were great years, great years.”
She smiled. She knew where I had been.
“It still depresses me,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “But it is a part of your life that’s over, gone. Let it go.”
“I’m just still so angry at what hypocrites they are.”
“Don’t turn around,” said Laura. But there are two guys at the bar who have been watching us, How close is the car?”
“Not very close.” I looked out the window. It was dark and it appeared that several of the streetlights were out. Uh oh, I thought, “Will you be OK if I go to the bathroom?”
“Yes, sure. I don’t think anything would go on in here. I’ll pay the check,” she said.
I was on my way back to the table when I noticed that the guys who had been at the bar were gone. I would have felt better if I knew where they were, that they were still inside and not out in the street waiting for us. Then I saw them. They were at our table hovering over Laura.
“Can I help you?” I said, approaching the table.
One of them spun around. “Now, Doc. Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me.”
“And if you say all black folk look alike, I’m going to mess you up,” said the other, a huge grin on his face.
It took a moment before it registered. I hadn’t seen any of those guys in at least five years and, like me, they had aged. I broke into a grin that had to be as big as theirs. I felt the tears well up and then I fell into the arms of the biggest of them.
“You can buy me a beer,” I said, wiping my eyes. “But I’m paying.”
“You know you won’t get an argument from us,” said Silk, grinning.
“Laura,” I said. “You see, some things never change. Four Buds,” I called to the bartender.
“Those were the good days, Doc…” said Perkins.
“They were, Doc. They really were,” said Silk.
Nick Ingoglia
About 3,300 words
Rewrite 02.29.12; 09.16