Excerpt: ‘The Assist’

In “The Assist,” Boston Globe reporter Neil Swidey writes about a very special high school basketball coach, Jack O'Brien, and the inner-city teenagers he helped shape into a solid team of young men with promising futures. Here's an excerpt:  

Chapter 2: Ridley
Charlestown High School sat near the water on the northern edge of Boston’s northernmost neighborhood. Water views were pretty common in Charlestown, since the town sat on a peninsula between two rivers and a bay leading to the Atlantic Ocean. The high school, an example of the boxy, graceless architecture that gained traction in the 1970s, was actually two hulking brick structures. On one side of Medford Street was the five-story school; on the other side, the gym and pool. The school’s 1,200 students used an enclosed walkway high above the street to travel between the two structures.

After the final period had ended on a day when the new school year was one month old, Ridley Johnson made his way through the second floor of the main building, glided across the enclosed walkway, descended a flight of stairs, and arrived in the dimly lit lobby outside the gym. There was a wall of glass at one of end of the lobby, providing views of the swimming pool one story below. No matter how much time Ridley and his basketball teammates spent in this building, they never showed any interest in looking in on the pool. The senior co-captain took a right and headed straight for the royal-blue doors with the block letters spelling GYM sideways.

The gym was big and bright, especially in contrast to the dark lobby. Sunlight found its way in through the skylights sandwiched into the ceiling, between heating ducts the size of water-park slides, and through a bank of windows near the top of the tiled back wall. When the blonde-wood bleachers were pulled out on both sides of the court, the place could seat 800 people. In addition to the main glass basketball hoops on either end of the court, there were two pairs of white wooden backboards facing each other from the sidelines, for use in practice and gym class. An electronic scoreboard hung on the red front wall, just to the left of the royal-blue doors. Painted onto the floorboards at center court was a picture of the Bunker Hill Monument. The 221-foot granite obelisk, which stood a few blocks from the school, dominated Charlestown’s skyline, commemorating the American Revolution bloodbath that for centuries had defined Charlestown’s identity of defiance in the face of long odds. Below the picture was the word “Townies,” which was the team’s official name, though none of the players ever used it.

At one time, the Charlestown gym must have looked sleek. But the years had taken their toll. The windows were clouded with grime, the bleachers decorated with graffiti. The red wall paint was faded, and the tiles on the far wall were gray enough to make you wonder if they had ever been white. Several swaths of plaster were gone, leaving only exposed insulation. Gone too were the doors to the stalls in the nearby boys’ bathroom.

None of that mattered to Ridley. All he had to do was glance over at the four rectangular banners hanging on the tiled back wall. The white letters on the red fabric said it all. Charlestown High School Boys Basketball: State Champions.

The banners celebrated not just victory, but dominance. For four seasons, the string was unbroken: 1999-2000, 2000-2001, 2001-2002, 2002-2003. Ridley, who had been called up to the varsity squad during his freshman year, was proud to have been part of two of those title-grabbing squads. Yet, for him, the fact that there wasn’t a state-championship banner from 2004-2005 still stung. The fact that people in basketball circles were predicting there wouldn’t be one at the end of the upcoming season either — when Ridley and Hood would be in charge — stung even more.

There would be plenty of time in the coming months to worry about proving everyone wrong. Today, Ridley had more immediate pressures to deal with. He headed for the bleachers, where he unhooked his belt and let his jeans drop to the floor. He and his teammates always went to school wearing basketball shorts under their pants, so they wouldn't have to bother changing in the locker room. Ridley, who had a faint goatee, boasted a stunning vertical leap that on the court made him seem half-a-foot taller than his 6-foot-3 frame.

Yet in other ways, he seemed young for his age.  He wasn’t 18 for another two months. When he took off his shirt to change into his basketball jersey, he revealed a chest so devoid of definition that it might have belonged to a 12-year-old boy. It was a reminder that for all the athleticism coursing through competitive high school leagues, there was a reason it was still called boys basketball. Even Hood — who was a full calendar year older than Ridley, had much more developed biceps, and seemed forever in search of the pose that would make him appear meaner and more mature — even he had a boy’s chest.

Ridley sat on the edge of the bleachers and laced up his white Nike Jordans with the red soles. “I'm nervous,” he told a kid sitting next to him. “One mistake, man ...”

He watched as they arrived. One by one, a dozen coaches in polo shirts strode over the Bunker Hill Monument painted onto the floorboards, and settled into the bleachers to the right of the championship banners. They'd come from as near as Northeastern University a few subway stops away, and as far as the University of Toledo, near the banks of Lake Erie some 800 miles away. A good showing, but Toledo's Stan Joplin was the only head coach in the bunch. Ridley spotted O’Brien and could tell his coach was not pleased. Head coaches make the final recruiting decisions; O’Brien had wanted more of them present.

O’Brien had arranged this “open gym” showcase, where the Charlestown players would run through drills and light play as college coaches with notepads looked on. To avoid running afoul of high school league rules prohibiting off-season practices, O’Brien had to hand his whistle over to someone else and stay outside. He also had to make it a truly open gym, allowing in any interested student, even special needs kids who had no shot of playing high school basketball, never mind scoring a college scholarship. They lined up for the drills right behind O'Brien's varsity starters. No matter. The college coaches all had their eyes fixed on Ridley.

It was Ridley’s graceful jump shot, combined with his vertical leap, that put him on the radar of college recruiters. But he had more than his game going for him. A steady if unexceptional student, he was in the best academic shape on the team. O'Brien had spent the last weeks of summer rearranging his and the other players' course schedules. When O’Brien ran down his schedule for him, Ridley protested when he heard he’d been signed up for a fourth year of science.

“You only need three,” Ridley complained.

O’Brien cut him off. "That's just the requirement to graduate. Colleges want to see more than that."

In a chaotic urban high school, good grades were often less about command of a subject matter than rewards handed out to students who showed up and didn’t cause trouble. Ridley was clearly one of the guys, and he liked to joke around. But there was something about his easy disposition that managed to endear him to even the most hardened, battle-weary teachers. They all seemed to reach for the same words to describe him. "That Ridley," they would say, "he's the nicest kid."

He hadn't posted a great basketball season last year. O'Brien celebrated his friendly ways off the court but kept repeating that he had to get a lot meaner on it. No basketball player ever got ahead by being polite under the boards. Yet ever since Ridley had excelled at a couple of invitational tournaments in the off-season, his cell phone had been ringing with college scouts telling him they liked his game and asking him what he wanted to major in.

His dream school had always been Boston College, which was the closest thing Boston had to NCAA royalty. The thicket of coaches in the Charlestown bleachers included a BC assistant named Pat Duquette. But his appearance indicated courtesy rather than strong interest. Duquette confirmed that, far from getting a hometown advantage, Ridley would be judged more carefully than a player of similar talent from another part of the country. "We pay special attention to a local player, and are very careful to make sure they are the right fit," he said. "We don't want to have a local player who will end up sitting on the bench, so it's a different pressure."

It's an open secret in college basketball circles just how easy it is to get rid of a recruit who doesn't work out. With a lot of neglect and precious little playing time, the kid will likely be gone by the end of the season — quitting in a huff or bombing out academically. Either way, that would open up his scholarship slot for a new recruit who might have a bigger upside. To leave a well-known local kid to wither on the bench would embarrass the team as well as the player.

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