In “The Assist,” Boston Globe reporter Neil Swidey writes about a very special high school basketball coach, Jack O'Brien, and the inner-city teenagers he helped shape into a solid team of young men with promising futures. Here's an excerpt:
Chapter 2: Ridley
Charlestown High School sat near the water on the northern edge of Boston’s northernmost neighborhood. Water views were pretty common in Charlestown, since the town sat on a peninsula between two rivers and a bay leading to the Atlantic Ocean. The high school, an example of the boxy, graceless architecture that gained traction in the 1970s, was actually two hulking brick structures. On one side of Medford Street was the five-story school; on the other side, the gym and pool. The school’s 1,200 students used an enclosed walkway high above the street to travel between the two structures.
After the final period had ended on a day when the new school year was one month old, Ridley Johnson made his way through the second floor of the main building, glided across the enclosed walkway, descended a flight of stairs, and arrived in the dimly lit lobby outside the gym. There was a wall of glass at one of end of the lobby, providing views of the swimming pool one story below. No matter how much time Ridley and his basketball teammates spent in this building, they never showed any interest in looking in on the pool. The senior co-captain took a right and headed straight for the royal-blue doors with the block letters spelling GYM sideways.
The gym was big and bright, especially in contrast to the dark lobby. Sunlight found its way in through the skylights sandwiched into the ceiling, between heating ducts the size of water-park slides, and through a bank of windows near the top of the tiled back wall. When the blonde-wood bleachers were pulled out on both sides of the court, the place could seat 800 people. In addition to the main glass basketball hoops on either end of the court, there were two pairs of white wooden backboards facing each other from the sidelines, for use in practice and gym class. An electronic scoreboard hung on the red front wall, just to the left of the royal-blue doors. Painted onto the floorboards at center court was a picture of the Bunker Hill Monument. The 221-foot granite obelisk, which stood a few blocks from the school, dominated Charlestown’s skyline, commemorating the American Revolution bloodbath that for centuries had defined Charlestown’s identity of defiance in the face of long odds. Below the picture was the word “Townies,” which was the team’s official name, though none of the players ever used it.
At one time, the Charlestown gym must have looked sleek. But the years had taken their toll. The windows were clouded with grime, the bleachers decorated with graffiti. The red wall paint was faded, and the tiles on the far wall were gray enough to make you wonder if they had ever been white. Several swaths of plaster were gone, leaving only exposed insulation. Gone too were the doors to the stalls in the nearby boys’ bathroom.
None of that mattered to Ridley. All he had to do was glance over at the four rectangular banners hanging on the tiled back wall. The white letters on the red fabric said it all. Charlestown High School Boys Basketball: State Champions.
The banners celebrated not just victory, but dominance. For four seasons, the string was unbroken: 1999-2000, 2000-2001, 2001-2002, 2002-2003. Ridley, who had been called up to the varsity squad during his freshman year, was proud to have been part of two of those title-grabbing squads. Yet, for him, the fact that there wasn’t a state-championship banner from 2004-2005 still stung. The fact that people in basketball circles were predicting there wouldn’t be one at the end of the upcoming season either — when Ridley and Hood would be in charge — stung even more.
There would be plenty of time in the coming months to worry about proving everyone wrong. Today, Ridley had more immediate pressures to deal with. He headed for the bleachers, where he unhooked his belt and let his jeans drop to the floor. He and his teammates always went to school wearing basketball shorts under their pants, so they wouldn't have to bother changing in the locker room. Ridley, who had a faint goatee, boasted a stunning vertical leap that on the court made him seem half-a-foot taller than his 6-foot-3 frame.
Yet in other ways, he seemed young for his age. He wasn’t 18 for another two months. When he took off his shirt to change into his basketball jersey, he revealed a chest so devoid of definition that it might have belonged to a 12-year-old boy. It was a reminder that for all the athleticism coursing through competitive high school leagues, there was a reason it was still called boys basketball. Even Hood — who was a full calendar year older than Ridley, had much more developed biceps, and seemed forever in search of the pose that would make him appear meaner and more mature — even he had a boy’s chest.
Ridley sat on the edge of the bleachers and laced up his white Nike Jordans with the red soles. “I'm nervous,” he told a kid sitting next to him. “One mistake, man ...”
O’Brien had arranged this “open gym” showcase, where the Charlestown players would run through drills and light play as college coaches with notepads looked on. To avoid running afoul of high school league rules prohibiting off-season practices, O’Brien had to hand his whistle over to someone else and stay outside. He also had to make it a truly open gym, allowing in any interested student, even special needs kids who had no shot of playing high school basketball, never mind scoring a college scholarship. They lined up for the drills right behind O'Brien's varsity starters. No matter. The college coaches all had their eyes fixed on Ridley.
It was Ridley’s graceful jump shot, combined with his vertical leap, that put him on the radar of college recruiters. But he had more than his game going for him. A steady if unexceptional student, he was in the best academic shape on the team. O'Brien had spent the last weeks of summer rearranging his and the other players' course schedules. When O’Brien ran down his schedule for him, Ridley protested when he heard he’d been signed up for a fourth year of science.
“You only need three,” Ridley complained.
O’Brien cut him off. "That's just the requirement to graduate. Colleges want to see more than that."
In a chaotic urban high school, good grades were often less about command of a subject matter than rewards handed out to students who showed up and didn’t cause trouble. Ridley was clearly one of the guys, and he liked to joke around. But there was something about his easy disposition that managed to endear him to even the most hardened, battle-weary teachers. They all seemed to reach for the same words to describe him. "That Ridley," they would say, "he's the nicest kid."
He hadn't posted a great basketball season last year. O'Brien celebrated his friendly ways off the court but kept repeating that he had to get a lot meaner on it. No basketball player ever got ahead by being polite under the boards. Yet ever since Ridley had excelled at a couple of invitational tournaments in the off-season, his cell phone had been ringing with college scouts telling him they liked his game and asking him what he wanted to major in.
His dream school had always been Boston College, which was the closest thing Boston had to NCAA royalty. The thicket of coaches in the Charlestown bleachers included a BC assistant named Pat Duquette. But his appearance indicated courtesy rather than strong interest. Duquette confirmed that, far from getting a hometown advantage, Ridley would be judged more carefully than a player of similar talent from another part of the country. "We pay special attention to a local player, and are very careful to make sure they are the right fit," he said. "We don't want to have a local player who will end up sitting on the bench, so it's a different pressure."
It's an open secret in college basketball circles just how easy it is to get rid of a recruit who doesn't work out. With a lot of neglect and precious little playing time, the kid will likely be gone by the end of the season — quitting in a huff or bombing out academically. Either way, that would open up his scholarship slot for a new recruit who might have a bigger upside. To leave a well-known local kid to wither on the bench would embarrass the team as well as the player.
The NCAA assigns college basketball programs to one of three divisions, based on their size and the resources devoted to their athletic program. Division I teams, like BC's, tend to be well funded, with lots of athletic scholarships covering the full cost of tuition, room and board, plus other resources for players, such as tutors and first-rate travel accommodations. Division III colleges offer no athletic scholarships, though at many of them, athletic talent is the ticket in, and then financial aid can take over from there. Division II programs occupy the space in between, usually providing some full scholarships and some partial ones, and travel accommodations that tend to be more Red Roof Inn than Hyatt Regency. Even within those categories, though, there's lots of variation.
But to the kids who grew up on the courts of any big city in America, nursing their hoop dreams, D-I is the only one that counts. Only Division I teams have a shot at being invited to the Big Dance, the NCAA tournament whose games are broadcast on network television during "March Madness" and become the preoccupation of office-pool bettors everywhere. Never mind that most low- and mid-D-I teams have as good a chance of scoring one of the 64 coveted invites to the Big Dance as an average schmoe does showing up at the box office to buy Super Bowl tickets. The point is: at least they have a shot, and every year there's usually one Cinderella arrival from Gonzaga or George Mason, or some other basketball program no one has ever heard of, going toe to toe with a powerhouse like Indiana or Kentucky.
Of the handful of seniors on the Charlestown team, only Ridley was a D-I prospect. But given BC's perch in the upper reaches of D-I, the school seemed out of Ridley's grasp, especially in early fall, when most programs were still chasing their dream players. Standing beside the bleachers, C.J. Neely, an assistant with Division II Stonehill College, a small Catholic school located half-an-hour away, watched as the star of the day tossed up beautiful jumpers. "We'd love to get Ridley," Neely said, "but I think he'll go higher." As for Hood and Spot, the other players O'Brien was hoping to help snag scholarships, Neely wasn't impressed.
While many of the assistant coaches were content to hang toward the back of the bleachers, Toledo's Stan Joplin made sure he got the best view of Ridley, sitting right near the baseline. He'd gotten lost trying to navigate his rental car through the confusing side streets of Boston, doing battle with the city's infamously gnarled traffic and unforgiving drivers, an experience that stretched a 15-minute drive into more than an hour. After watching Ridley, he would be hopping in the car and heading back to the airport. He was dreading the return journey. Ridley had better be worth it. Joplin had made the trip at the urging of one of his assistants, who had coached Ridley a few months earlier at the Eastern Invitational Tournament in Trenton, New Jersey, one of the biggest meat markets of the summer.
For the first time in a long while, Joplin's mind was also on keeping his own job. He’d been a star during his own playing days at the University of Toledo, leading the team to the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Tournament in 1979, the best performance in school history. But the team's post-season record during his eight years as head coach had been far less impressive. He was feeling the heat, and knew he had very little margin of error for his next class of freshman recruits.
After the drills were done, the Charlestown players took turns using a Gatorade towel to wipe the sweat from their faces. Then they pulled their jeans back up over their shorts and walked across the court to shake hands with each of the coaches before leaving the gym. After years of prodding from O'Brien, the players automatically said goodbye to strangers with a handshake — even those strangers who held no power to determine their college futures. The handshakes with strangers were always brief, and usually wordless, unlike the elaborate hand and body gestures the guys would use when they "dapped up" each other. But they were handshakes nonetheless.
Afterward, Joplin found O'Brien. "I'm not disappointed," he said.
ONE MONTH LATER, AT 5:50 A.M., Ridley rolled out of bed. His room was near the front entrance of a first-floor apartment in a three-decker with gray peeling paint. He and his mother shared the place with the people she took in that no one else would. At this point, the roster included a pair of young brothers who were her godchildren and a former neighbor in his 70s who could no longer afford his rent and now slept on their living room couch.
Ridley shuffled down the hall to the bathroom, past the dining room that his mom decorated by hanging 24 framed plaques her boy had collected over the years, from basketball awards to perfect-attendance certificates. He returned a couple of minutes later, grabbed the Right Guard, chose a pair of Jordans from the stack of a dozen Nike boxes near his bed, and pulled up his jeans. He always showered at night, to make the mornings less brutal.
By 6 a.m., he was outside with his black hood over his head. He walked 15 minutes in the dark along the side streets of Dorchester to catch the 21 bus on Blue Hill Avenue, which would take him to the Orange Line subway stop at Forest Hills, which would take him to the 93 bus in Sullivan Square, which would, if everything went well, deposit him a block from Charlestown High, nearly an hour and 20 minutes after his commute began.
Just an ordinary weekday, but this one was different. The night before, the Boston Red Sox, who had broken hearts for generations, had miraculously captured their first World Series in 86 years. The city would operate in dazed exhilaration for weeks, but Ridley was oblivious to all that. Like his teammates, he followed the NBA, not Major League Baseball, and his team loyalty was always based on individual players, not hometown geography. Something completely different was on Ridley's mind as he walked in the middle of a side street with one of the boys who was crashing at his house.
During the weekend, he had made an official recruiting visit to the University of Toledo and he had liked what he saw of the computer engineering program. (His Charlestown teammates all had PlayStation 2 consoles in their bedrooms, but no computer. Ridley was the opposite.) He liked the campus. But most of all he liked what Stan Joplin and Toledo were offering: a full four-year Division I scholarship worth well over $100,000.
There are two "signing periods" when the NCAA allows colleges to get their recruits to commit, one in the fall and one in the spring. O'Brien usually advised his players entertaining high-level offers to sign early and settle their heads. But with Ridley, he wasn’t certain. He didn't know much about the Toledo program. BC was noncommittal. And the other Division I school showing the most interest, Robert Morris University outside Pittsburgh, already had three of O'Brien's former stars competing for playing time. So he recommended that Ridley wait until the spring, to see what opened up.
Ridley, though, was nervous. What if he got injured? What if he had another lackluster season? A few days after returning to Boston, he called Toledo and told them he would sign.
"I knew that scholarship would go to someone else if I waited," he said as he crossed Blue Hill Avenue, "and I didn't want that to happen."
By the time the 93 bus exited the Sullivan Square, the morning light had risen behind the Schrafft's candy plant, which, after the Bunker Hill Monument, was the most familiar fixture on the Charlestown skyline. For decades, Schrafft's, with its Willy Wonka-like clock tower, had been a pillar of the town's bustling industrial corridor along the Mystic River. Now it provided vanilla office space for generic small companies. The bus stopped in front of a Spanish variety store a block from Charlestown High. Dozens of kids shoved their way off and piled into the cramped market. Ridley bought his regular breakfast, an empañada meat patty and a 20-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, and then made his way to school.
From the Spanish store, Ridley could walk down either Elm Street or Polk Street to get to the high school. Elm Street brought him by restored row houses that had gone condo, with flower boxes under the windows and Saabs in the sloped driveways. This was the typical housing stock of contemporary Charlestown now that white yuppies had largely replaced the white working class. Polk Street brought him along the edge of the Bunker Hill housing development, Boston’s largest project, where almost all of Charlestown’s black and Hispanic residents lived. The kids in school called the project “the bricks” because its 1,100 grim units were spread across a host of flat-roofed brick buildings. Some of the kids who lived in the bricks went to Charlestown High, but many others traveled to some other part of the city. Pretty much none of the kids who lived in the restored row houses went to Charlestown High.
Ridley took Elm Street. Once inside the school, he climbed the stairs to get to the cafeteria, where, as usual, O'Brien and his assistants were waiting for him. All the players were expected to check in with the coaching staff in the morning before heading to their first class. Ridley shook hands with O'Brien and dapped up assistant coach Hugh Coleman, an exuberant 27-year-old former Charlestown star who had graduated from Bowdoin College, married Ridley's favorite aunt, and then returned to teach at his alma mater.
Ridley hustled through the crowded stairwell to get to his Forensic Science class on the third floor. He was a few minutes late, but plenty of other kids, including Hood, filed in after him. The class was designed to convert the popularity of shows like CSI into interest in science. Ridley never watched CSI, but he liked the class because it was a lot easier to take first thing in the morning than English or Pre-Calculus. His teacher, a stocky 40-year-old with a goofy laugh, knew how to keep the kids’ interest. The makeup of the class mirrored that of the overall school: about half black, and the rest split between Hispanics and Asians, with a white kid here and there.
A chatty Hispanic girl named Janice sat across from Ridley, complaining about her Spanish class. She said it was a waste of time because she knew more of the language than her teacher.
"I know, me too," Ridley said.
Janice raised one eyebrow, and then her voice. "You? You Spanish?"
"Yep," Ridley said. "Both my mother and father."
"What kind?"
"Honduran."
Janice wasn't buying it. Like a jeweler using a loop to find inclusions in a precious stone, she trained her eyes on Ridley’s complexion, just a shade lighter than their black slate lab table. Then she pointed to a fair-skinned Hispanic boy at the next table. "He's Honduran, Ridley. You black!"
Ridley knew he didn't fit neatly into any of those race circles they ask you to fill out with a No. 2 pencil. Whenever he had to choose one, he chose black, because that part was obvious. His mother would probably have chosen Hispanic, but that's because she still spoke a lot of Spanish. Ridley couldn’t speak much Spanish, but he understood a good deal. Still, the only time he really felt his Latin roots was when he was eating his mother's food.
In English class, his teacher was out, so Ridley spent the period playing Connect 4. The pace was slow in pre-Calculus class as well. The teacher was an older woman with long white-blonde hair and glasses that seemed to rest permanently on the end of her nose. Even if the subject matter was brutally dull, all the basketball players loved Ms. Raimondi because Ms. Raimondi loved all the basketball players. In a school where faculty members were usually no-shows at the basketball games, Diane Raimondi came to many games and even brought along her own homemade cheering signs. A weary veteran of the Boston schools, Raimondi taught in an old-school manner that contrasted sharply with the newfangled approaches favored by all the recent Ivy League grads who had been invading the Charlestown teaching ranks. But O'Brien liked putting his players in her classes because Raimondi had realistic expectations about what they could handle.
Ridley dreaded fourth period the most because it was the slowest of all. That's when he should have been in gym class. But O'Brien, one of two phys ed teachers at the school, had persuaded the headmaster to let his players skip gym in favor of a study hall that O'Brien monitored with ferocious scrutiny. Over the years he noticed his players' biggest academic troubles usually occurred out of basketball season, when he had the least control over their lives. The in-school, year-round study hall was his way of extending control. Sitting at the front of the room, wearing one of his warm-up suits, O’Brien insisted on monastic silence. As Ridley did his homework, he plotted in his head when he would take his bathroom break to best keep the boredom at bay.
O’Brien wasn’t like the stereotypical jock coach trying to line up gut classes for his stars. He often pushed his guys to stretch, as long as he was sure the teacher would work with them, giving them extra help and making sure they never failed. This year O'Brien had put Ridley in an Advanced Placement American history class, which was a gamble. He knew colleges reward ambition, but penalize failure. The class was like nothing else in Ridley's day. In pace, substance, even the look of the classroom, it was like being transported to a competitive school in some affluent suburb.
There were two young, demanding teachers for 14 students. The classroom was vibrant. The walls were decorated with bumper stickers that read "I think, therefore I'm dangerous" and blown-up quotes from the likes of Malcolm X. There were flip charts and study guides and color-coded assignment sheets and handouts of writings by left-wing historian Howard Zinn. There was even a very verbal white girl with purple hair who repeatedly spoke in affected sentences that always seemed to begin with the word "distinctly."
The lead teacher was a short, stout young woman who wore an extra-long denim skirt and kept a pen hanging on a string around her neck. As she began her lesson on the Whig Party, Ridley took out a piece of loose-leaf notebook paper and wrote CHAPTER 14 in block letters at the top. He tried to keep up, turning repeatedly to the black girl sitting next to him. Menda Francois had her hand up almost from the moment she walked into class, confidently fielding the teachers' questions about 19th-century politics. She was smart and talkative and serious, a girl in a hurry. Back when she was a freshman, Menda had treated school like a joke, ending the year with a D average and an abysmal attendance record. Not long after that, somehow her interest got sparked in a college awareness program in Vermont. Her low G.P.A. sank her application. That rejection turned out to be all the motivation she needed to transform herself into a straight-A student by her sophomore year. She had remained a high flier ever since.
The class was the closest thing Ridley had to a true college prep experience. If everything went right, it would give him vital skills for next year. But first he had to get through it. By October, his average grade hovered around a D-minus.
With basketball season still a month away, Ridley didn't have after-school study hall or practice yet. Instead, when the final bell rang, he headed for the weight room, trying to add some muscle to his upper body on his march to get meaner on the court. After the workout, he and Spot hung out in the lobby outside the gym. There, they were met by a dodgy guy named Jermaine, who looked to be in his early thirties. He herded the two high school seniors into his car to so they could play for a team he coached in a men's league. It didn't matter that Ridley and Spot weren't exactly men yet. The important point was they were shooters.
As he walked out of the gym, Ridley was stopped by two different girls, each wanting to hug him. Around the school, it was obvious more and more girls were trying to catch Ridley's rising star. As the guys drove off in Jermaine's tan luxury sedan with leather seats and rap blasting on the stereo, they passed a girl walking alone up the street between the high school and the housing project. Spot rolled down the window and flashed his Hollywood smile. "I love you, baby!" he said, holding his hand up to his ear. "I'll call you tonight."
Ridley asked Jermaine what restaurant he would be taking them to after the game.
Jermaine turned down the stereo. "If you niggas don't win, there ain't gonna be no food." Then he turned the volume way up and pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator.
IN EARLY NOVEMBER, A FEW DOZEN PEOPLE walked into the small cafe on the fifth floor of Charlestown High to witness Ridley's signing ceremony. He would be officially committing himself to the University of Toledo. In truth, the signing was for show. All the details of Ridley's scholarship had already been worked out behind the scenes. But O'Brien wanted to give Ridley a chance to bask in the limelight and, more important, give his younger players something to strive for. There was pizza and a huge sheet cake with Ridley's picture on it.
"One of every 10,000 high school basketball players in this country receives a basketball scholarship," O'Brien, dressed in a red Charlestown warm-up suit, told the gathering of players, teachers, and Ridley's family. "One out of every 10,000." He had read that statistic somewhere, or at least he was pretty sure he had. No matter — he knew no one in the crowd would challenge him on it. He simply wanted to drive home that point that Ridley's achievement was special, and had taken lots of hard work.
For most of the players in the audience, who were as familiar with Toledo as they were with Tajikistan, O'Brien made sure to orient them in a language they would understand. "Toledo is in one of the top 10 basketball conferences in the country," he said. "Turn on your TV on December 12, and you'll see them playing Duke on ESPN."
O'Brien unfurled a flurry of other figures for the crowd, some of them goosed a little to improve their motivational power. How Ridley's scholarship was worth $145,000 over the next four years. How Division I scholarship athletes needed a minimum combined SAT score of 820, while Ridley's was 960. How they needed to have completed 14 core courses, while Ridley had 22 under his belt and was an honor roll student. "I hope you younger guys look at him and say, 'You know what, I hope to be in that position some day.' "
"Most of all," O'Brien said, "he's a real good person." As the group applauded, Ridley, wearing square zirconia earrings and a gray Charlestown hoodie, walked up to the front of the room. O'Brien then said, "Ridley also brought his honey. Say hi to Rebecca." Wearing a cream-colored top and a black skirt, Rebecca Johnson stepped forward, a smile filling her heart-shaped face. "I'm Ridley's mom," she told the crowd, waving tentatively.
Back at the table, looking a little uneasy, sat a man with short hair, squarish on the top, and a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard. Ridley's father, McClary Johnson, was dressed stylishly in jeans and loafers. Rebecca had met McClary on one of her trips home to Honduras after the death of her first husband, with whom she'd had a son and daughter. McClary followed her to the States, they married, and then had Ridley. When Ridley was about 5, they separated, though the divorce hadn’t gone through until last year. McClary lived with his own mother just a few miles away from Ridley, but as the years went by he had seen less and less of his son. That only endeared Ridley more to Rebecca. One evening, as she pointed to McClary across the room, Rebecca said, "My heart don't beat no more for him. Only for Ridley. He's my pride and joy."
As for the signing ceremony, Ridley didn't want to make too much of a fuss and asked his mother not to tell his father about it. "I won't," she had assured him.
Instead, she not only told him, but brought him with her in her car. "I wanted McClary to hurt a little bit," she said later. "To see what he missed."
Excerpted from “The Assist” by Neil Swidey. Copyright © 2007 Neil Swidey. Excerpted by permission of Public Affairs Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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