The morning after interviewing Anosike, a few hours before the deadline of my Sunday column, I woke up thinking about a man named Mel Selznick, who had run the youth basketball leagues at the Staten Island Jewish Community Center a few miles from the projects. My family couldn’t afford a membership—or at least keep up the monthly payments—but I had desperately wanted to play in an organized league. Carrying my gym bag, I would push open the side door into the building’s cramped gymnasium, ready to make eye contact with Selznick. Never once did he fail to point me in the direction of the locker room, whether my dues were paid up or not. Get dressed. Go play. I was on unofficial scholarship.
My Sunday column told the story of how Summitt had recruited Anosike from the West Brighton Houses. But it was also about how Selznick—who had died suddenly that very week, just as plans had been finalized for a large reunion with him as the guest of honor—had helped rescue me.
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I never dreamed of being a sportswriter—or any kind of writer, for that matter. I did love watching and reading about sports, usually in the solitude of my bedroom, locked away from the ongoing tensions caused by my family’s financial travails and the inevitable pressures that piled up on my father, leading to the occasional outburst of anger.
He didn’t care much about sports, but he did help ignite my interest when he took me with him to a neighbor’s apartment to watch Game 7 of the 1960 World Series with several men from our building. I was eight and largely clueless about baseball. But as the drama built in what ESPN would in 2010 call “the greatest game ever played,” and the beer-fueled hysteria grew in that cramped living room as the Yankees and Pirates battled 9–9 into the home ninth inning, the first signs of my eventual addiction to sports surfaced: I cried and carried on so much after Bill Mazeroski homered for the Pirates to end the series that my father dragged me upstairs and sent me to my room.
A few years later, still seeking refuge from ongoing family drama, I began making regular visits to a quiet public library a few blocks from home to do schoolwork. There I discovered and devoured a series of novels by Duane Decker on a fictional baseball team called the Blue Sox. Reading about real sports was also good escapism. As a teenager and rabid sports fan, I grabbed the New York Post sports section from the back pocket of my father when he arrived home late afternoons after a long commute from the historic James A. Farley post office in Midtown Manhattan—a landmark building that sat directly opposite, of all places, Madison Square Garden.
By early high school, my older sister, Sharon, had gifted me a subscription to Sports Illustrated, which arrived every Thursday chock-full of the most sophisticated sportswriting America had to offer. But I can’t say that any of those words infused me with an aspiration to be a sports journalist. I never wrote a word for my high school newspaper. I didn’t fill notebooks with commentary about my beloved Yankees and Knicks.
In the projects, there weren’t many—if any—professional role models. My father dropped out of high school to join the army, served in World War II, and braved the shelling of London as a firefighter. No one in multiple generations of my immediate or extended family had stepped foot in a college classroom.
I was the middle child between two girls, set in my late-1960s habits of listening to the emerging rock and folk music, smoking pot, playing hoops. I did my homework and had my share of complimentary teachers and academic triumphs. I still never gave much thought to what would come after high school—even after being chosen for a program targeting at-risk kids whose standardized test scores showed more promise than their grades.
By my senior year at Port Richmond High, a diverse public school in the shadow of the Bayonne Bridge on the island’s north shore, many of my friends from outside the projects and especially the Jewish Community Center were touring colleges in upstate New York and beyond. My “tours” consisted of filling out an application for the City University system that was handed to me one day in class, listing three choices. Having had good fortune in the draft lottery, I had little chance of winding up in Vietnam; an older cousin had not been so lucky. Not because I had any good idea about a career path, but more because I couldn’t think of anything better to do, I signed on to study at Brooklyn College, qualifying for free tuition.
But soon after high school graduation, before I even stepped into a college classroom, I received an offer that rerouted my life. At the JCC, I had become friendly with a volunteer coach, Danny Colvin, who was working his way into teaching while moonlighting on the sports desk of our local daily, the Staten Island Advance. All these years later, it remains unclear to me—and to Colvin—why he asked if I was interested in doing menial work at the newspaper. The job required a drive into Manhattan late Saturday afternoons to the Associated Press building at Rockefeller Center in the ancient time not only before the internet but before transmission of glossy photos. After returning to the Advance newsroom, photos in hand, I would stay on until midnight to strip wires and attach the old tickertapes to the corresponding hard copy of the stories
