Ronnie and I met in third grade, when I was still the new kid. I’d only been at Sugar Mill Elementary for a week or two and didn’t know anyone very well, though I wasn’t too worried about it. Making friends was still pretty easy in those days. But I needed a close friend, maybe even a best friend. The sooner, the better.
And lo and behold, here comes Ronnie, walking right up to me in the hall, smiling. Not that I knew his name at the time.1 I’d never seen this kid before, but he exuded good will. It’s possible he was wearing suspenders.
“What’s your name?” he said.
It felt good to be noticed by someone other than a teacher. Usually, I was a little self-conscious about saying my name, since it sounded so close to Burt/Bert. It was like being named Briam or Brekk. The Sesame Street connection didn’t help either—I got a lot of Ernie jokes back in those days. But something about this short, smiling kid put me at ease.
“Burke,” I said, pronouncing it clearly and calmly.
He looked at me, still smiling, and made my name into a chicken sound: “Burke ba-gurk!”
Then he walked away.
We didn’t speak again for years.
***
In 5th grade, we were in P.E. together at one point. I remember because somebody pulled Ronnie’s pants down.
For some reason, we were playing a version of tag on the school stage in which everyone had to crawl around on their hands and knees.2 Ronnie was one of the last two people left. As a perpetually underwhelming elementary-school athlete, I was already watching on the sidelines. The guy who was “it” chased Ronnie into a corner and then lunged with both hands to tag him but accidentally pulled his pants all the way down to his knees in the process. And the entire P.E. class stared in shock at Ronnie’s red briefs.
Red underwear!
This was the archetypal 5th grade nightmare, to have someone pull your pants down in front of your whole class, boys and girls, on the school stage, no less, while on your hands and knees, exposed for all to see. And in this nightmare, you wouldn’t be wearing good old standard tightie-whities. You’d be wearing red underwear.
But I remember this clearly: as everyone stared, Ronnie just laughed at himself and pulled his pants back up. He didn’t seem to think he was living a nightmare. He seemed genuinely amused. Even when people started joking about his red underwear, he just kept laughing. It’s easy to see when someone is fake-laughing, and this laughter was real.
That moment stuck in my head. It seemed to say something about the good nature of the weird kid who’d made my name into a chicken sound.
***
I don’t know how Ronnie spent his time in late elementary and early middle school, those last years of boyhood. I was busy riding my bike up to the comic book store next to the Safeway, saving up my spare quarters for Street Fighter II, and trying unsuccessfully to draw Spiderman and Spawn in the style of Todd McFarlane. My close buddy Tim and I invented a new sport called Powerball, dominating all of our opponents.3 Meanwhile, when I saw Ronnie in the halls of Sugar Land Middle, he was just a familiar stranger.
By the middle of middle school, though, Ronnie was one of my best friends. As with most friendships, it was mostly a matter of personality and proximity. We started having more classes together, more mutual friends, the same lunch period. And he was easy to talk to, maybe easier to talk to than anyone I’d ever met. Rather than embracing either of the typical poses of male adolescence—withdrawing into a cool protective silence or going on all-time offense with a mocking critical irony—Ronnie was just Ronnie, open and enthusiastic, willing to talk to anybody about anything.
He started coming over after school, joining the Backyard Baseball games at my house, which involved a revolving roster of neighborhood players and a water-damaged sheet of notebook paper taped to the garage, where we kept everyone’s home run stats.4 In one of his first appearances, he made a sliding, game-winning catch in the rain that sealed his place in Backyard Baseball lore.5
Soon, though, the Backyard Baseball games faded away, replaced by Driveway Basketball, a more fitting sport for our newly teenaged selves. I’d played a couple years of YMCA ball, almost always as the most clueless person on my team.6 But now we had a hoop in our driveway and I found myself wanting to practice or play all the time. Basketball went from something to do to my favorite thing to do.
If I wasn’t playing in my own driveway, I was playing in Jayme’s driveway in Covington Woods or in Adam’s driveway in Sugar Lakes. Once or twice I played in Saqeeb’s driveway in Barrington Place. One night during the summer between sixth and seventh grade, Jayme’s dad even took a bunch of us to play full court at the Pavilion, the covered, lit-up outdoor courts7 next to the Knights of Columbus Hall, after all the older dudes had left.8 That enchanted evening, for the first time in my life, I couldn’t miss. Despite my unsound shooting form, I discovered what it felt like to feel it. If I wasn’t hooked before, I was hooked after that.
Ronnie wasn’t a basketball player. He played football and he played violin in the school orchestra. But he began joining our driveway games, starting out raw but catching on quick, just like he’d done in Backyard Baseball. And once we started playing together, basketball became the bedrock of our friendship. He joined all the games on all the various driveways, becoming my most constant pickup partner.
When tryouts came around for the school team, I more or less guaranteed the coach that I would make the squad.9 Despite never playing organized basketball before, Ronnie tried out, too. We both made it, but I made the A Team10 and he made the B Team. We wouldn’t get to play together. For most of the season, we had to play on separate teams, practicing at different times.
Near the end of that season, though, the coaches decided to call up Ronnie to the A Team. His first game would be on a Saturday morning, part of a weekend tournament. We were thrilled. All season long we’d been dreaming about being on the same team, and now it was finally happening.
Then Saturday morning came and Ronnie didn’t show up. He wasn’t in the locker room, wasn’t outside by the bus. Finally, we all got onto the bus and the coaches waited a little bit longer, shaking their heads, and then decided to leave him. Ronnie was missing his big chance. Pre-cellphone, I had no way of finding out where he was or what happened.
The bus rolled out of Sugar Land Middle, heading down 7th street. I was anxious and bummed out, looking out the window. When we stopped at a stop sign, another car pulled up next to us. As we started to move forward, Ronnie jumped out of the car—his mom’s car, I now realized—carrying his bag and wearing his uniform, waving frantically at us. The bus stopped again and the driver opened the doors, with the coaches shaking their heads again.
Ronnie ran up the bus steps, harried and smiling. Everyone was cheering, razzing him, giving him five. He moved down the aisle and sat next to me. That bus ride is easily one of the happiest sports-related memories of my adolescence.
***
The first time I ever went to Ronnie’s house, he was celebrating his 13th birthday, having a sleepover party. His neighbor had a hoop out on the street, so we played basketball, of course. Playing on opposing teams, we got overly competitive, as we often did, fouling and banging into each other in the post. At some point, as he fouled me or I fouled him, I took a shoulder to the mouth that dislodged the wiring in my braces, causing one of the wires to stick directly into my gums. The most middle school injury ever.
I kept playing, the needle sticking into my gums only making me respond with more competitive rage. After a couple more possessions, our collisions in the post turned into yelling and shoving. And then my yelling and shoving turned into crying.
I ran inside his house in a huff, went to the bathroom and messed with the wire until it stopped sticking into my gums. Then I asked Ronnie’s mom if I could use their phone, calling my mom to pick me up early from the party. Ronnie told me not to go. “Just stay, man. It’s alright.” The other kids, most of whom I didn’t know very well, told me to stay too, though they must’ve thought I was emotionally unstable. But I insisted: I had to go home. I blamed it on my braces and left before we even had cake.
Back at home, I tried to tell myself that I had a good reason for leaving the party, even though a little voice told me I should be there right now. I semi-successfully ignored that voice for the rest of the night.
When we got to school on Monday, we both acted like nothing had happened. Ronnie could’ve been cold or distant towards me, but he wasn’t—he was his usual amiable self. Any lasting friendship requires a significant amount of mercy.
***
8th grade. Amidst all the weirdness—the acne and armpits and burgeoning body hair, the intense awareness of sex and social status and one’s own self-consciousness—basketball offered a much-needed escape, a near-daily source of joy, and an endless topic of conversation. There’s a reason many of us get hyper-focused on our chosen pastimes right around the age of fourteen. Basketball gave my life a center of gravity when I really needed one.
Nearly all my basketball memories from those days involve Ronnie. We played together on the 8th Grade A Team, a Fighting Trojans squad that amassed at least one win. We played together with the old heads at the Pavilion and the dudes at the water tower courts and at any available gyms we could get into, whether we were allowed there or not. We played NBA Jam and NBA Live 95 together, while discussing the contents of Slam magazine and the latest episode of NBA Inside Stuff with Ahmad Rashad. We watched the NBA playoffs together, cheering the Rockets on to a second straight championship.11
We rented White Men Can’t Jump from our local Blockbuster12 and began to think of ourselves as a younger version of Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes. We didn’t have much in common with our respective characters, but we attempted to play the roles. We dreamed of hustling someone. Or maybe I dreamed of hustling someone and Ronnie just went along with it.
But it was tough to find a good mark. We couldn’t trick our friends, and the dudes who drove up to the water tower courts were too old and too good and also a little scary. You wouldn’t want to hustle those guys.
One day, though, we finally got our chance. Walking home from the water tower courts, we encountered two burly boys shooting in their driveway—brothers, it turned out, one of them a bit older than us and one a bit younger. Finally, we had our marks. We asked if we could shoot around with them, and then I started missing shots on purpose, something that came surprisingly easy. Ronnie just acted normal. But when the boys agreed to play us in two-on-two, I kept up the charade and we lost big.
Then, in my most casual voice, I asked if they wanted to play the next game for money. “Let’s say…ten bucks?” (My mom had given me money to buy Gatorades.) They hesitated, but then the older brother made the younger one go inside and get the money, possibly from their mom’s purse. Game on.
I don’t remember much about that game, except that I played my hardest and the win didn’t come automatically like I’d hoped. I expected the brothers to be shocked by my sudden basketball prowess, but neither of them seemed to notice the difference. The older brother didn’t really know how to play basketball, but he was bulky and strong—a true power forward. Ronnie and I ended up winning, barely. We exchanged fives and knowing looks while the brothers yelled at each other.
“Pay up,” I said.
At that moment, I felt like I’d finally achieved my masculine ideal: I was a badass. And in that stage of my adolescence, part of me—not the only part, but a shamefully substantial part—thought there was no higher achievement than being a badass.
In my memory, the next few moments went down like this: the older brother stared at me for a second, as if he’d forgotten we were there. Then he walked up and got close to my face.
“Get off our damn driveway right now or I’m gonna kick both your asses.”
He wasn’t suggesting that I had multiple asses—he was threatening both of us. My confrontational side, which basketball always seemed to bring to the surface, thought about talking back, but I could tell that this burly buzz-headed boy meant business.13
I can’t remember if we walked or ran, but we left quickly and without protest. By the time we turned the corner at the end of the block, we both acted like the whole experience had been a full success. Man, we hustled those boys.
***
Towards the end of middle school, I convinced Ronnie to apply with me to the local Jesuit high school, even though neither of us were Catholic14 and almost entirely because they had a basketball team that was ranked in the Top 25 nationally, according to USA Today. Up to that point, attending a private high school hadn’t been even a remote possibility. I didn’t concern myself with how my parents would pay for it, much less how Ronnie’s mom would pay for it. Those were adult concerns. We both took the entrance exam. We both got in.
At the time, this felt like the first step towards our future as varsity basketball stars. I no longer expected to play in the NBA—I merely assumed that Ronnie and I would one day become the starting backcourt for our own USA Today nationally-ranked Top 25 high school team, before we both moved on to successful careers playing at the college level, preferably in the ACC, ideally at Duke or North Carolina.
Less than one semester at Jesuit disabused me of these dreams.
By the start of 9th grade, Ronnie and I had probably been teammates in a thousand pickup games. We knew how to play off each other’s strengths and read each other’s basketball thoughts. Plus, I could hit threes now. In my mind, we were no longer Wesley and Woody. We were Mark Jackson and Reggie Miller.
For a very brief period, before the actual season began, we thought we could beat anybody. We’d challenged a couple sophomore players, who began talking smack right away, laughing at the idea that two freshmen would try to take them on. We beat them in three straight games. Somehow word of this got back to the two best sophomores at school, Sam and Broderick, and they approached us about a game.
Sam and Broderick were the true Woody and Wesley of Strake Jesuit College Prep, both already on varsity, both destined for D1 scholarships. (Broderick played at Wake Forest, while Sam ended up at San Diego.) And now they wanted to play us in two-on-two. This was big. Even before the game, I had a sense that the results would tell us something about our future.
We played best of three. In the first game, we scored first—I hit a three. And then I’m pretty sure I never scored again. They ended up demolishing us, to the point that we all seemed to realize that this game wasn’t worth their time. They did everything Ronnie and I could do on the court, except at a significantly higher level. They were quicker, stronger, better shooters, better finishers, played better D, had better court-vision and better handles. They even looked like the two of us, except cooler. By the time they put us out of our misery, I’d decided that Ronnie and I were the generic, inferior version of Broderick and Sam. We were knockoff Dr. Peppers. They were the genuine article.
Not that Ronnie and I ever acknowledged this. We didn’t immediately pack up our gym bags and quit. We kept practicing, kept playing on the school team, kept seeking out other opponents, kept enjoying and obsessing over the game we loved.15 But it was clear, in my mind at least, that Sam and Broderick had shown us our ceiling. And it was lower than I’d assumed.
So, in the end, we didn’t become basketball stars. Not even close. But we had the most enjoyable basketball season of our lives—it’s not even debatable—playing on the freshman team, making a bunch of lifelong buddies in the process. And Ronnie did go on to play varsity, along with several other guys on that squad, while I went on to play a bunch of CDs in my car.
***
That’s not where the story ends, though. If ours was just a basketball friendship, it might’ve faded away when we stopped playing on the same team. But that didn’t happen. The best friendships might start off being about one thing, but they always end up being about everything.
I could tell you about the two of us watching Contact when we were seventeen, talking excitedly about the movie for the rest of the night, fascinated by both the religious implications and the aliens. I could tell you about how I read Kerouac or Mojo magazine while Ronnie and my younger brother sat nearby playing X-COM: UFO Defense, which they obsessed over long after I’d lost interest in video games.16 I could tell you about the many times Ronnie patiently, if somewhat resentfully, listened to Bob Dylan in my car on the way to school, when he would’ve much rather been listening to UGK—or, really, anyone but Bob Dylan. I could tell you about the only time we ever exchanged Christmas gifts, and how I got him NBA socks while he got me I Love Being the Enemy, Reggie Miller’s autobiography. I could tell you about all the times we listened closely to each other’s advice on life and love, even when it wasn’t at all what we wanted to hear. I could tell you about going off to college and coming back for the holidays, and the way that Ronnie would act like we hadn’t seen each other in a few minutes, rather than a few months.17
But even if I told you about all of this, I’d still be leaving out too much—way more than I was able to put in. Not to mention all the parts that only the two of us would understand. And, of course, I’m only giving you my side of the friendship anyway.
So I’ll just tell you one last thing, a tiny, random moment that I still think about sometimes. One afternoon, just before the start of our junior year, I was doing our required summer reading while Ronnie and my brother played video games yet again. The book was T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. One of my brother’s friends was there too, and he asked me what it was about. I said it was about King Arthur.
“Who’s King Arthur?” my brother’s friend said.
Ronnie turned away from the TV screen, still holding his controller, with an utterly appalled look on his face. “Who’s King Arthur?!” he said. “Only the GREATEST KNIGHT EVER!”
Something about Ronnie’s offended response, the pitch of his voice rising in defense of King Arthur, really cracked me up. I couldn’t stop laughing. Only the greatest knight ever! We all mocked his reaction far more than we mocked my brother’s friend’s ignorance about medieval legends. But Ronnie just laughed it off, the same way he’d laughed off the red underwear situation in elementary school.
For a long time, it was just a funny, random line to me. But I see it differently now. Now I see someone who was able to preserve the beautifully weird, unique, sincere, goofy part of himself, long after many teenagers have lost or entirely suppressed that part. Even today, he hasn’t entirely lost it. That’s one of the many reasons I’m glad he’s been a part of my life for several decades now. When my kids are sixteen, I hope they’re all lucky enough to have a friend who cares that much about King Arthur.
Also: his real name isn’t Ronnie. His mom, who’s Jamaican (and who, not long ago, earned a PhD in her seventies), named him after a famous Indian cricket player, except with an alternate spelling. But even she just called him Ronnie, and that’s what I’m calling him here.
If you’re wondering—and who isn’t?—this was the same stage where Tim and I performed our plagiarized comedy show.
I can’t remember who our opponents were. The sport never really caught on beyond my front yard.
The home run distance in those games, measured from home plate near the back fence to the gutters of my house, was approximately 60 feet. We used a Wiffle ball. This was basically the steroid era on steroids.
I was the one who hit the ball, but I handled the loss with grace.
For many years, my parents would invoke the deadpan refrain of the older dad who was my YMCA coach: “Burke, that’s your man…Burke, that’s your man.” They say the coach spoke those words so often that he’d sometimes say it even when I was on the bench.
This was a few years before the city shut the Pavilion down, after a drive-by shooting, and turned it into a skate park.
What an act of generosity by Jayme’s dad, to take a bunch of neighborhood kids up there on a summer night. And he played too, which made it even more fun.
A little context: I’d made an impulsive decision to play football in 7th grade. I was a third-stringer on the B team and quite possibly the worst defensive lineman in the history of the sport. I also hated every single moment of every single practice. But one of our assistant football coaches was the head basketball coach, and I remember sidling up to him on the practice field when the subject of basketball tryouts came up: “Don’t worry, Coach. I’m actually good at basketball.” That might’ve been the most confident statement of my entire low-confidence adolescence.
At 5’10” and approximately one hundred pounds, I was the starting power forward. Powerless would’ve been more accurate. In the opening minutes of our first game, attempting to get back on a fast break, I got dunked on by a 7th grader who appeared to be in his early twenties, an experience that made me strangely proud.
I remember the two of us, along with my bro, going ABSOLUTELY NUTS upstairs at my house when Mario Elie hit the “Kiss of Death” shot. Pure joy. Clutch City, baby.
But not the same Blockbuster where my brother and our good friend Reese saw Shaq renting a movie a couple years later. They never saw what movie he was renting, but we said it was Kazaam. (Reese’s mom was waiting in the car, astonished to witness Shaq exiting a Blockbuster in Sugar Land. He winked at her as he passed by.)
I was one of those obnoxious players who liked to almost get into fights. I was not at all the kind of player who liked to actually get into fights. (Unfortunately, I’m not sure if these sentences should be written in past or present tense.)
I’m Catholic now. But that’s a whole other story.
In fact, right around this time I ordered a pair of “Strength Shoes” from a tiny advertisement I saw in Slam. The ad promised a remarkable increase in vertical leap, up to 30 inches. I spent quite a few evenings jumping up and down in those platformed shoes, with no measurable increase in my vertical. Never got beyond grabbing rim.
One night, after they played until 2 or 3am, my little brother finally went to sleep. He awoke a couple hours later to someone shaking him in his bed. He opened his eyes and saw Ronnie, who spoke to him with an alarmed expression on his face: “The aliens just signed a treaty with the Chinese.”
In fact, he still acts this way, even when it’s years that have passed, not months.