The Point Guard of Deer Meadow

On the greatest birthday party of my childhood, addiction, ambition, and a random Bulls/Heat game during the 2012 regular season

When I was little, a professional basketball player lived on our street. This was back in the eighties, when most NBA players made less than a million per year, and some made five figures. Our neighborhood¹ wasn’t fancy, but the Professional Basketball Player and his family lived along the cul-de-sac in a two-story house that, compared to our single-story house, seemed like a mansion.

I remember my dad telling me that the Professional Basketball Player had been an All-American in tennis, too. He could’ve been a pro at either sport, said my dad, but he chose basketball and ended up being the first point guard ever chosen #1 overall in the NBA Draft. If he’d been my neighbor as a teenager, I would’ve been awestruck. But during that earlier stage of my childhood, none of this seemed so remarkable.

The cool thing about being a little kid is you have no regard for adult notions of status. It meant very little to me that our neighbor was a well-known professional basketball player. When I was five years old, I was much more in awe of the guys who collected our garbage, hanging dangerously off the end of the truck. That’s the job I wanted.

I wasn’t into basketball at all.² And I couldn’t really play with the Professional Basketball Player’s kids, because one of them was a girl and a little older than me (and seemed much wiser, somehow), while her tiny brother, who she called John-John, was a couple years younger than me, a big gap at the time. On the rare occasions when they came down the street to hang out in our front yard, the big sister did all the talking. John-John didn’t say a word.

I got invited to his birthday party, though.

One Saturday morning, my family walked down the street from our house to the Professional Basketball Player’s house. This stuck out to me because we never walked to parties. We were always piling into our brisket-scented station wagon to go to birthday parties—at McDonald’s, at Skate Central, at Fame City, at Regal Ranch, at Peppermint Park, at Physical Whimsical, or just at someone’s house who didn’t live near us. But now we were taking a short walk past all the cars of people who had to drive to John-John’s party. A lot of cars.

I walked up the driveway without any anxiety or expectation. I was still in that blessed stage of childhood where walking into a large party doesn’t make you nervous at all, where you don’t stop to wonder if you’ll actually know anyone at the party, where you take each moment as it comes, when life feels almost like a perpetual dream (though not always a good one). And what happened next felt very dream-like.

When we got to the end of John-John’s driveway, we discovered an entire carnival in his backyard. There were rides, carnival rides, in John-John’s backyard. Rides that spun you around or lifted you off the ground or just moved you from one place to another, at a speed that a little kid would find pleasing. There was also a zoo, a petting zoo in John-John’s backyard. Goats and rabbits and ponies, just standing in their little pen, or walking around aimlessly, allowing you to pet them. Or feed them—you could feed the animals in John-John’s backyard.

There were people everywhere, like we were at a rodeo carnival or a state fair. So many people. Were there men in top hats walking around on stilts? Were there jugglers? Were there clowns? Maybe! Not to mention a lot of regular people, non-clowns, milling about and talking to each other, holding little drinks, eating sweets. It’s very possible that several gigantic Rockets loomed over the crowd, possibly even a young Akeem Olajuwon, reluctantly (or enthusiastically!) attending the birthday party of his teammate’s son. But I wasn’t interested in that. All adults seemed like giants to me. I was almost entirely interested in the fact that John-John somehow had rides and a petting zoo in his own backyard.

I ran off to play, weaving around the legs of strangers, leaving my parents behind. It was the greatest party of my young life—maybe the greatest moment of my life up to that point. I petted the animals. I rode the rides. I ate the sweets. And I watched the whole spectacle in awe.

Did I tell John-John happy birthday? Did I even see John-John, amidst the enchanted splendor of his party? I’m not sure. I’m assuming we all sang to him at some point—me, my parents, John-John’s parents, John-John’s sister, Akeem, the other professional basketball players, the jugglers and the clowns, and all the other guests. It must’ve been pretty loud. For a tiny kid like John-John, who didn’t say much in public, the whole thing must’ve been overwhelming.

Or maybe not. Maybe that was the best day of his early years, too.

Either way, though, I wasn’t thinking about John-John. Or at least I wasn’t thinking about him during the party. But after my parents told me it was time to go and we started back down the street, I did think about him. I felt something I wasn’t used to feeling at that age, something that maybe I was feeling for the first time ever: jealousy. It wasn’t an intense, burning jealousy, but it was there, nagging at my small-child self: Why did John-John get to have an entire carnival in his backyard? How could one kid be so lucky?

***

Most of the time, as you might imagine, the Professional Basketball Player wasn’t home. And when he was home, he stayed inside. We’d see John-John and his sister, sometimes even their mom, who was really nice, but we wouldn’t see their dad. I only ever encountered him once, ever, on our street. But it was a memorable encounter.

My little brother and I were playing in the front yard. We weren’t supposed to play in the street, but we’d crept right up to the edge, standing on the curb, or at least near it. And then we heard tires screeching as someone made a hard turn onto Deer Meadow. And the sound of a racecar coming down our street: Brooooooooooooooom.

There’s something scary about hearing a car speed down your residential street, especially when it’s coming your direction. Just that sound makes me jump a little bit and hold my breath for a moment, even now. But maybe my five year-old self was still oblivious to the pain that a vehicle could cause.

My brother and I looked down the street and saw a sports car driving very fast in our direction. Maybe 50 mph, by my adult estimation. We watched it come toward us, not even thinking to move away from the edge of the street. The car didn’t slow down. When it got close, we saw the driver had his windows rolled down and his head sticking way out of the driver’s side window, so far out that I wonder now how he could even keep his hands on the wheel.

As he zoomed by—neither swerving towards nor away from us—he made eye contact with me and my brother, and shouted, “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Our heads swiveled as the car sped towards the end of the street, the driver still shouting, his voice getting softer in the distance. And then I processed everything: that was John-John’s dad.

Another thing about small children—a strange, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking thing—is that they don’t have a fully developed sense of what’s normal. They haven’t lived long enough. So when something weird happens to you as a little kid, you tend to just add it to your available reality, assuming it must not be as weird as it seems. When your parents inform you that, on one particular night of the year, a bearded man you’ve never met is going to come down the chimney and give you presents, you’re like: Okay, cool. When your parents inform you that you’re going to have a baby sister soon, and that the baby sister will be coming out of your mother’s belly, you’re like: Makes sense. And when the Professional Basketball Player who lives down your street speeds by with his head sticking out the window, shouting wildly at you and your little brother, you think: Probably normal.

But part of me must’ve known it wasn’t normal, or I wouldn’t still remember it so clearly. Throughout childhood and into adolescence, having very in-control-of-themselves parents, I always felt disturbed by those rare moments when I witnessed an adult acting out of control. Kids were supposed to act that way, not adults.³

Some time later, though, my parents gave me the news: John-John and his family were moving because his dad had been kicked off the Rockets for using drugs.

Did I even know what drugs were? Maybe I’d seen Just Say No stuff on TV. (“I learned it from watching you!”) Or maybe I didn’t know anything about drugs at all. Which meant that I had to ask: What are drugs? And after learning the answer, I would’ve had another strange thing to add to my understanding of the world.

What I was too young to know was that the Professional Basketball Player had already been suspended from or kicked off other teams for doing drugs, that newspapers and magazines had been writing about his substance abuse problems and erratic behavior—missed practices and flights, showing up late to games—for years. He’d spent time in rehab, but kept relapsing. An old Sports Illustrated article from less than a year after I was born describes a moment when one of his former teams announced his suspension for the rest of the season over the loudspeakers during a game. And most of the crowd cheered.

What even my parents couldn’t know: the Professional Basketball Player was struggling whenever he was back in that house at the end of our street. Later, the stories would come out—he would tell them himself. Stories about being paranoid in that house, hiding inside, turning out the lights, looking through the blinds, worried someone was out to get him. Stories about the kids seeing him with cocaine in the house—John-John’s sister telling him to stop. Stories about the day he left his house on a bender, sped away in his sports car, and ended up on a street downtown, waking up on the concrete, wearing a suit and several pairs of socks and no shoes, soaked in his own urine, unable to find his car. He missed his game that night and got kicked off the team within twenty-four hours.

If I envied John-John after the party, I pitied him after he moved away. Which would’ve very likely been the first time I ever pitied anyone. Imagining other people’s suffering is pretty difficult for a kid. I don’t know if I even tried. But I know this: I felt an impossible-to-articulate sense that something sad and strange had happened at the end of the street, especially to John-John and his sister, something from which they might not ever be able to recover.

***

After a couple more years, we were gone, too—off to a slightly nicer suburb in a slightly different part of town.

Within a few years, I got really into basketball. I’d spend most of my free time playing two-on-two with my friends, or beating my little brother mercilessly at one-on-one, or just practicing alone in my driveway, dribbling and shooting baskets, imagining my own future greatness. As a skinny, brown-haired, extremely pale kid, I thought I could be the next Kevin McHale. Or maybe, if I only grew to be 6’4”, the next Jeff Hornacek. I was still living under the joyful and childish misunderstanding that extraordinary success would come easily, even naturally, just by dreaming of it.

Despite my delusions, basketball was the first pursuit where I ever felt any real ambition. That special milestone of growing up: the first time you ever want to be really good at something. I practiced a lot, for hours at a time, in a way I’d never practiced for anything else. Jumpers, bank shots, left-handed layups, reverse layups. I practiced for the present—I just loved shooting baskets—but I also practiced for the future. I wanted to get better. And I did get better, just not better enough to match my ambitions.⁴

When my kids watch a movie or TV show, they’ll sometimes do this funny thing—although it’s not funny to them—where they call out who they “are” as the show begins. Like: “I’m Chase!” “I’m Rubble!” “I’m Skye!” That’s kind of how I watched college and pro basketball during adolescence, even if I didn’t explicitly shout it out. (“I’m Cherokee Parks!” “I’m Matt Bullard!”) Every time I watched a game on TV, any game, I imagined the day when I’d be out there on the floor myself. It was like imagining heaven.

As my basketball fandom increased alongside my basketball ambitions, I began to hear the name of our old neighbor, the Professional Basketball Player. It turns out that directly after getting kicked off the team, he got sober and stayed sober. Then he began helping other pro basketball players with their own sobriety. He even wrote a book. After being famous for struggling with addiction, he’d become famous for mentoring other athletes struggling with addiction.

And then, against all odds, he became an NBA head coach. From the time I was twelve to the time I was sixteen, the very peak years of my basketball obsession, our old neighbor was the head coach of the San Antonio Spurs and then the Philadelphia 76ers.⁵ (Later, he would be back in Houston as a long-time assistant with the Rockets, the same team that had once kicked him off the roster.)

I encountered this news with the same accepting and incurious spirit with which I’d learned about Santa Claus and human birth: Wow, cool.

My adolescent self never thought about what it meant that our old neighbor had changed the story of his life to such an astonishing degree. Adult addictions were a mystery to me, one that I had no interest in considering. Only now do I think about how hard that whole journey must’ve been, for the Professional Basketball Player and his family. How incredible it was that he ended up in that position—and how easily it could’ve all gone differently.

But here’s the coda to this whole story. Years later, I was living in Georgia, married, over thirty, with an almost-one year-old, teaching first-year writing at a university near the Alabama border. In other words, I had not become an NBA player.⁶ But it was a good life in Georgia. And my dreams of greatness persisted in more sedentary pursuits.

I still loved basketball, though. Still wished I’d gotten a little closer to achieving my athletic ambitions, even the more modest ones I had when I began to face the reality of high school competition. I still had hoop dreams, but now they were actual dreams, at night, where I suddenly realize that I can dunk.⁷ And I still loved watching basketball.

And so one Wednesday night in March, after the little one was finally in bed, I found myself tuning into Bulls vs. Heat on ESPN.

This was 2012, so we’re talking about the Big Three Heat: LeBron, D. Wade, and Bosh. They’d win their first championship a few months later. And on this particular night they were playing a Bulls team that was missing Derrick Rose, the reigning league MVP, who was out with a groin injury. (His awful career-altering knee injury would come the following month, during the playoffs.) In other words, this game had all the makings of a blowout.

But here’s one last thing I didn’t realize as a kid: In real life, nobody can ever really know what’s going to happen next. Although LeBron and Wade combined for more than seventy points, the game didn’t go at all as expected. Can you guess who scored 24 points off the bench for the Bulls? Can you guess who scored 11 in the fourth quarter, including a crucial basket in the final minutes over King James himself? Can you guess who was the MVP of the game, despite being his team’s third-string point guard and the smallest guy on the court?

It was John-John, of course, having the time of his life at one of the greatest carnivals ever. I’d never felt prouder of someone I didn’t actually know.

1. We lived in a subdivision with the Joycean name of Meadowcreek, in the Quail Valley area of Missouri City, which wasn’t a city in Missouri but a suburb of Houston.

2. I still remember when my dad put up a hoop above our garage, possibly inspired by his new neighbor, and then played a sweaty game with his buddy Randy Curry, aka Currdog. At some point, they let me have a shot. Small child that I was, my attempt traveled maybe three feet in the air before bouncing in front of me. At which point I returned inside to play with my toys.

3. Some of those out-of-control-adult moments still stick with me so clearly, like the time I saw one of my Little League coaches making out with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Or when the dad of one of my high school basketball teammates head-butted a ref after a game. Stuff that I pretended to be amused by, but that made me feel strange and disturbed.

4. It took me many years to realize that practicing a lot is not enough to realize any big sports ambitions. Even people who are physically gifted need to practice a borderline-psychotic amount to be successful at the highest levels. Which means that someone who isn’t physically gifted (i.e. me) would have to practice even harder than that borderline-psychotic amount.

5. This was the pre-Duncan Spurs and the pre-Iverson Sixers, FYI.

6. My basketball “career” ended after my 10th grade year. Meanwhile, my little brother, the one I always beat at one-on-one (until one day I didn’t), became an all-district high school player.

7. I still have this dream at least once a year. And I always wake up disappointed.