One night, when I was a sophomore in college, my father came to see me play basketball in Philadelphia. It was 1984. I was on the team at St.
Joseph’s, and he was the general manager of the Detroit Pistons. He and my mother were long divorced, and I saw him only two or three times a year, when he came to town for a Pistons game or to scout a player. I had lost my starting spot at the beginning of the season, and that night I didn’t play much or particularly well.
My father waited for me after the game, and as soon as I saw him I burst into tears. I can still see his expression, tender and somehow unsurprised, even though we both knew that my performance was irrelevant. I had landed a full scholarship, but it was clear that I wasn’t going to develop into a college player of even minor significance.
Something else was at stake, and I think we knew that, too. The game was the language he spoke, and I was losing my fluency. I grew up the youngest of six, all of us obsessed with basketball.
My oldest brother, Mike, was on the freshman team at Duke; my first team was called the California Fancies. I was four, my brother Roman was six, and our basket was an iron pot set on the coffee table in the rec room of our house in Winston-Salem. As “Kip Reynolds” and “Mike Jetson,” we routed a series of make-believe opponents.
My father was then the head coach at Wake Forest. Every fall, the team came for brunch, and our house would fill with his other family, giants who scooped.
