He'll still drive back to the old apartment, 17th and Ellsworth, trying to make sense of it all. He'll park his ear and just sit there. He'll stare at the first-floor garage where his stepfather. Sylvester Chaney, made him wash cars all weekend, waking him at 5:30 a.m. and working him till 8 p.m. for 75 cents a day, making him start the whole car over if he missed one spot. He'll stare up at the second-floor flat that was so cold in winter, you had to go outside to warm up.
How? he keeps asking himself. How did he ever get out of where? He'll stare up at the front room where the old man would sit, late on Friday nights, the beer melting away his glacial silence, the anger at life leaking out of him; up at the kitchen, where his mother would cook black-eyed peas with hog jowls, cracking jokes, singing spirituals that turned to spitfire if you were home a minute late; up at the little back room, where the rats scuttled and the three kids slept and he would cry in bed when the Brooklyn Dodgers lost or when another Christmas passed without his getting the one gift he always asked for. Where in that apartment did the innocence come from to make a teenager cry when a team lost a ball game, to make a 16-year-old keep writing to Santa Claus and asking for a bike? Where? He'll stare at the front door and see himself pausing just before going inside, steeling himself for the whipping his stepfather is going to give him for playing basketball again. Survival, that's all the old man's head had room for. How many more years will it take for John to understand that mulish refusal to bend, to know what a black man must become sometimes in order not to turn tail and flee?
He'll blink and see himself walking back out that front door on that evening in 1951, the shoulders of his stepfather's zoot suit sloping off John's skinny shoulders, the too-long pant legs licking at the cement, the necktie wide as a bib, on his way to the Warwick Hotel to receive the award as Philadelphia's Public League MVP. See himself crouching in the toilet stall that night while everyone searches for him to pose in the banquet room for the All-Star photo, see himself climbing up on the toilet seat so his feet can't be seen beneath the stall door, hunching lower, ashamed of his clothes, holding his breath. Holding it like the secret his aunt whispered when he was a teenager, that he's somebody else's son. The secret he would keep behind his teeth all his life so his brother and sister would die not knowing, so John wouldn't feel even more alone.
He'll sit there in his car and feel his hands squeeze the steering wheel, and then the tears trickling down his cheeks. He'll rub his eyes and slowly drive away.
"I found mistrust when I came north. I found evil. But then I found basketball, and all the fear and evil didn't matter, because I was going past them to play basketball." That's how he talks, in pulpit words, pulpit rhythms; God still wonders how He missed him.
John crossed two gang boundaries to reach Ben Franklin High each day, lunched on one-cent bags of cookie crumbs swollen by long swallows of water. Sam Browne, the basketball coach there, saw him playing ball one day early in his sophomore year, saw the dark ferocity and urged him to try out for the team. Beat John for a layup? He would tackle you. "I mean that literally," says Johnny Sample, the old New York Jet All-Pro, who played in recreation leagues with Chaney. "He tackled me when I tried to beat him with the same move twice. John is the most competitive human being I've ever seen."
"All that anger in him," says his old friend, Claude Gross, "it came out in his playing. John commanded the floor. The ball was his. He used to take a tray from the catering service he worked for, load it with cups and dishes, spin the tray on the finger of one hand and dribble a ball with the other. If he were coming along today, they'd have to pay him however many millions they just gave Anfernee Hardaway, because that's how good John was."
He got nothing. The hornet was humming right inside the Big Five's nostrils; the Big Five couldn't feel it, couldn't hear it, couldn't see it. The hornet was black—and born five years too soon, before Hal Lear's and Guy Rodgers's success at Temple in the mid and late '50s began busting down the walls for blacks there and at La Salle, Villanova, St. Joseph's and Penn as well. "MVP of the city, and nobody called," he says.
He stood outside the half-built Veterans Hospital one day in 1951, his high school coach, Browne, at his side, peering up at his stepfather on the steel girders. John kind of, sort of, had a scholarship offer from a tiny black college in Daytona Beach, Fla., of which he knew nothing. A Philly kid at Bethune-Cookman had lipped the coach to this monster of a guard from his hometown...but would the tight-lipped carpenter let his stepson go? Browne called up to the old man, pleading. The old man slowly climbed down. Basketball...college...how did either put dinner on the table? And then a grunt. They took it for a yes.
John climbed onto the train carrying a cardboard suitcase and a couple of sandwiches. In Washington he and the other blacks were herded into jim crow cars for the rest of the trip south. He sat there, exhilarated at departing, terrified of arriving, the world rushing past his window, the train hurtling him back toward Black Bottom. The solution was simple and hard and cold, insistent as the clack of the wheels. A child is born. A game becomes his sole source of significance, his offering. His real dad never knows of it. His stepfather spurns it. His society snubs it. He can accept that judgment and let his head sag, as gravity and the motion of the train want it to, as the heads of many in the jim crow car do. Or he can stiffen his neck and brace his head, become his own judge and jury, his own scorekeeper...become alone.
He got off the train. His scholarship to Bethune-Cookman—a school of a few hundred students run by Marry McLeod Bethune, adviser on race relations to five presidents—would hinge, he soon discovered, on a tryout with three dozen other young black men. Twist an ankle, catch the flu, you're gone. "I killed 'em," says John.
To reach the place where John Chaney sits today, you must enter McGonigle Hall, turn left, descend a flight of steps, follow a corridor, turn left again through another shadowy cinder-block tunnel and find the door on your right. "You gotta be careful who you let close," he says. "They're the only ones who can hurt you." Inside are two small rooms. One is where the secretary, business manager and two assistant coaches are crammed: the other, the size of the three-second lane, is where John sits, peanut shells on the carpet, fresh bread on the desk—TASTE this! You gonna DROP YOUR DRAWERS! "He's a kitten inside," says his secretary, Essie Davis. "Anybody can walk in here. Anybody. He enjoys people. He just doesn't want anyone to know."
A window? Doesn't need one. He would pull the blinds on it anyway. Xerox machine? What for? Voice-mail system? Please. New furniture and rugs? Somebody did that to him one night five years ago, when he was gone.
To reach where John Chaney sits today, a man goes through four years at Bethune-Cookman, urinating behind trees on road trips because most of the bathrooms along the way are only for whites. Four years of speeding tickets from cops of two-traffic-light Florida and Georgia towns, four years of "So...y'all Mrs. Bethune's niggahs, huh?" Four years of ripping up the NAIA, making All-America, scoring 2,000 points, but seeing it all vanish—poof, never happened—in the mainstream media. Four years of being awakened by a roommate, a premed major named Hubert Hemsley, being dragged to classes and the library, slowly becoming aware how powerful a weapon his mind is. "I was shocked," says John. "I went back to Philadelphia that first summer, and doin' nothin' wasn't funny anymore. I was a new me. Seemed like nobody at home had dreams. Couldn't wait to go back to college." Four years of watching Mrs. Bethune implore her students to double back to the poverty and ignorance they were fleeing, to offer themselves as a bridge...and then walking back to his dorm, hearing the first faint murmurs of the missionary stirring in his breast.
To reach where John Chaney is today, a man swallows his pride whole and moves back into his stepfather's home with his pregnant bride after graduating, because he doesn't have a cent, then accepts an offer to play for the Harlem Globetrotters for $350 a month because he's still five years too early, and the NBA, in 1955, has little interest in a black man. But his innocence is not done being damaged: he's stunned to learn that all the Globetrotters' tricks and games are prearranged, so he quits after two months because the game is life and death to him.
He works three jobs—rushing from his job as a phys-ed teacher at a Philadelphia junior high to bar mitzvahs and banquets, where he waits on tables for white people, to little towns like Sunbury and Williamsport, a three-hour drive away, where he plays in smoky high school gyms on weekends in the Eastern Basketball League for $60 or $70 a game, earning enough to rent a small place in the projects. He's the MVP of a league full of black men who belong in the NBA, a perennial all-star, and every year he tells no one but keeps hoping, just as he had hoped for that bicycle every Christmas, that someone up there is going to notice him, that the universe is fair, but the call, like the bike, never comes. Some nights the whittler's knife fails him. Some Saturday nights as he parks his car in the projects at 1 a.m. after another catered wedding, he feels himself walking on the cliff edge of bitterness, knowing that the black water below can only consume him if he takes that easy step down. He closes the blinds to the sunlight in the morning and remains in bed, wishing he could incinerate hope, burn every last grain of it from his veins, save his soft heart...but he can't, so he's off and running again, John against the world. "Always another wall to climb," he says. "Even when there wasn't no wall."
One night when he's in his early 30's, the roads ice over and he's in a head-on collision on the way to a game, and the doctor tells him the accident has caused phlebitis, a clot in his leg. It finishes his playing career, but the insurance gives him just enough money to limp off and move his wife and three children out of the projects, into a tiny row house on the edge of the city.
To reach where John Chaney sits today, a man coaches the team at a Philadelphia junior high named Sayre to a 59-9 record, inherits a 1-17 team at Simon Gratz High and turns it inside out, kisses and curses it into a perennial power. He holds dawn practices, two-a-day sessions—Thirsty? There's no water! You in the desert! Keep runnin'!—trying desperately to torch all the self-deceptions and excuses a child can construct in 16 years. Now he's teaching health and phys ed, and he's the dean of boys; his team's the whole damn school, his duty's the whole damn ghetto. He awakes at 5:30 a.m., buys bacon and grits with his own money, sneaks pots and pans from the home-ec room and cooks breakfast in the gym for the students, hoping the smell will lure kids to school. And when that doesn't work, he drives through the God-forgotten streets, pounding on the doors of the absentees, the pregnant and the potheads, peering at the hooded eyes turning from him on the corners, choking back his despair, rounding them up and dragging them back to the fountain, the only hope, education.
One day a teenager pulls out a gun and bodies start scattering, and the coach drops the soft pretzel from his hand, tackles the boy and sends the gun flying, then gets in his car and drives without knowing where or why, parks and slumps over his wheel, feels it all spinning out of control again, the dread coming up his throat, the terror that he can't master his rage and fear and turn them into something clean, the way he once could on a court. He gets crazy when he can't wedge the gospel of Responsibility into the kids' heads. "I loved teachin' high school," says John, "but an anger came over me. I heard myself screamin' more and more. Schools were takin' on the responsibility of parents and jails. I need to see daylight, to see that I'm havin' an effect, and I couldn't. I was so incensed, I wanted to fight the kids."
And still, when the offer comes in 1972 to teach and coach at Cheyney State, 35 miles outside Philadelphia, he hesitates. He never applies for new jobs—wouldn't he owe whoever hired him? And what if he should fail? As white-hot as his frustration is his fear of the unknown; oh, what a trembling child he becomes on a bumpy flight, even though he never fails to get that exit-door seat. But then he receives a letter from his mentor, Marcus Foster, the former principal at Gratz, reminding him of the power and hope in such a new position, telling him that if he can walk into a home and entice one teenager to go to his college, he can raise the aspirations of a whole family, change its cycle for generations. How can he resist?
To reach where John Chaney sits today, a man blinks back the tears when his first college recruit, the ghetto kid with the blind eye and the bullet lodged beside his spine, the first in his family ever to attend college, becomes an all-conference center and then walks into practice at the beginning of his senior year and says he's not going to play his final season, going to take the coach's two-hour sermons to heart, concentrate on graduating on time, get a good job...and does it. Kids like that, out there in the darkness, struggling to light a match—he can't walk away from them. He can't let them shiver. Whatever it takes, even crazy. When the proprietor of a Long Island motel refuses to turn up the heat in his players' rooms during a Christmas tournament, John asks the man to come to his room, jams a piece of wood into the index finger of a glove so it looks like a concealed gun, leaps from behind the door when the man enters, presses the makeshift gun to his head and screams, "We gel heal, you son of a bitch, or von get heat!"
To reach where John Chaney sits today, a man must have a wife who virtually never attends a game, who allows him, as Jeanne does, to compartmentalize his life, to hide from the world when he comes home, to hide even from her. A wife who uses quiet humor and patience to work around his blind spots, who has her own life, as a teacher and a traveler and a flea-market addict, and doesn't exploit his guilt that he's not spending more time with her and the three children. He must have assistant coaches who have a few of those traits too. At times he'll tell the university president to funnel his pay raises to them. Tony Pinnie and Charlie Songster at Cheyney State, Jim Maloney and Dean Demopoulos at Temple—a decade passes, and they won't leave his side.
A man must set his jaw as the team bus is getting ready to head to the airport for the Division II Final Four in 1978, and his sixth man appears without a necktie. He must leave the kid home. As he's showering a few hours before the national championship game, he hears a knock at his door, shouts out and learns it's the opposing coach, coming to his hotel room to wish him well—nobody has ever done that before. And suddenly he feels the old suspicion of anything new, of anyone who might be trying to get an edge on him, and so he bursts out of the shower naked and soapy, raising the ante, hugging and kissing the coach, leaving him covered with suds, then bids a cheery farewell and patters back into the shower, scowling. "Nothin' wrong with your last name being Trust," he says, "as long as your first name's Mis."
Nobody's going to pull one over on him. He'll croak, "Out!" at anything that's even close to the line when he's playing tennis; call timeout, for crying out loud, when he's trapped in the corner in a pickup game of basketball, and scream at the first fool who says, "You can't do that." His heart turns to jelly for all of society's losers—but goddam if he's going to be one of them. He beats that coach, by the way, who interrupted his shower. Wins the Division II national title with his sixth man sitting in his dorm, wins Pennsylvania's Distinguished Faculty Award for his work in the community, classroom and gym, but who notices? It's 1980, and the Big Five still has never had a black coach, still can't feel the hornet humming inside its nose.
He begins developing a vice. Eventually he'll tear out his closet door and have an extended clothes rack installed to fit all the $80 silk ties, the $120 shirts. Many will go for years unused in his closet, or he'll give them away five minutes after losing a game in them, or let them get so rumpled and untucked, you would never dream that anyone designed them. It's being able to buy the clothes that matters, not wearing them. It's final liberation from the Warwick Hotel toilet stall.
At last, in 1982, Temple offers to make him the Big Five's first black coach. He's 50. He won't have to straighten out a whole student body anymore, as at Gratz, or three or four classrooms of kids, as at Cheyney State. Just 10 to 12 kids a year, just one team. A man's born into crazy, and he keeps whittling.
He has crossed the moat, scaled the walls and found himself inside the palace, inside the system that all those years rejected him, and when they ask him if he would like to sit in the more spacious, easy-to-reach offices just inside the front doors of McGonigle, he just blinks at them. "My deepest-seated fear," he says, "the thing that would go against every fiber in my body, is that I would ever leave the common people. That I would ever become a high-and-mighty jackass."
Pigeon-toed, one pant leg up, he walks down to the dungeon.
So there they are. There's Arthur Ashe's head on the screen one night five years ago on Nightline, coolly arguing in favor of the NCAA's decision to take a year's eligibility from incoming freshmen who don't score 700 on their SAT's and average 2.0 in core curriculum, and to make them pay their own way during that ineligible first year. And there's Ted Koppel's head, quietly quoting statistics indicating that the new legislation is compelling the underachieve(tm) to produce better grades. And there's John Chaney's head—no, it's not his head, it's all heart—gushing metaphors about racism and stigmas and closed doors and crushed dreams, leaving Ted and Arthur blinking. You can't argue with John. To refute his argument is to refute his life.
He missed the civil-rights movement—survival was all his head had room for in the '60s—but, Lord, he's not going to miss the train now. He's a member of the executive committee of the Black Coaches Association, which is holding the boycott blade over the NCAA's neck, and he'll let the blade drop if things don't change soon. "Sure, graduation rates will rise under Proposition 48—what else are they going to do after you lop off the bottom?" he cries. "Do you only perpetuate yourself? Is that the only goal of higher education? To educate the educated? I wouldn't have passed that SAT test coming out of high school. Where would I be? Can an SAT measure heart? If a kid can't read in 12th grade, it's because he didn't learn in first grade! That's where our society needs to start! But we gotta keep the window to heaven open for poor kids! We gotta keep that hole open in the sky!"
He forces all of his players to attend an hour-and-a-half study hall every afternoon, with tutors looming over them. He runs them ragged if they cut a class and refuses to speak to them, even if they're in the NBA, if they stop pursuing their degrees.
"Sure," says Paul Gibson, "a lot of people argue that he's racist, that he's selfish, that he's pushing for a rules change that'll help him recruit 6'10" black kids and win basketball games. But look at the kids he takes under Proposition 48. They're not the Jason Kidds. They're not highly sought players. He takes guys who aren't going to make a great difference in his program. It puts so much pressure on him to prove his point, to get them to graduate. He takes on all the problems of their backgrounds. He's totally involved. It beats him up. It wears him down. By the end of each season, his eyes are drooping and the bags under them are getting deeper and deeper, until you wonder how much more John can take."
I just want to stay in the bedroom sometimes. A place where there's no more horror. I can't hear too many more problems, because I'm a sponge. And the pain of people who suffer blisters me raw inside. I'm just not sure anymore. Seventeen-year-old blacks shooting babies.... Crimes with no motive, no meaning, no remorse. What am I gonna tell kids, what do they have to look forward to? They have no dreams today. Dreams are shattered.
You know, when you're young, it seems like so many things goin' on in the world. When you're old, seems like just two things happenin'. Birth and dyin'. My sister, my brother, my stepfather, my mother.... I buried than all in the '80s. Why am I the last one left? Is it because the worst is waiting for me? Or because I'm privileged? Am I left here to be special? Or to be tortured? I don't understand.... I'm just gonna disappear someday. I know myself. I'm nothin' but an exclamation point, and one day I'm just gonna shout it out...Excuse me!...while I disappear.
He climbs out of bed. It's game day.
