One night, when I was a sophomore in college, my father came to see me play basketball in Philadelphia. It was I was on the team at St. 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. 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. 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. 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 me up and set me on their shoulders.
I was captivated by them, and named my imaginary friend Walker, after the co-captain Dickie Walker. There was a feeling of fun, of constant tumult, in our house, but my father could be a hard-ass, too. He had no tolerance for the spoiled, the entitled, the soft. Above all, he hated attitude. What finally brought him to the prosβin , he got a job coaching the Portland Trail Blazers, and my family moved across the countryβwas an inability to keep sucking up to high-school recruits.
One day, he went to see a star senior in New York. The kid was spinning the ball, acting cocky. Things got off to a bad start in Portland. The Blazers had the No. My father clashed with the star forward Sidney Wicks. Losses piled up. After two years with Portland, my father was fired.
By , he was floundering, trying to sell time-shares in Hawaiian condos from a rickety desk in our den. And then, that spring, my parents got divorced. My father had fallen in love with someone else. He rented a grim little apartment in a Portland exurb, where my brother Roman and I, still young enough to be living at home, visited him.
