I left Brockton, Massachusetts in 1996 to study and play basketball in New York City. I lost touch with most of my old teammates. Last night we caught up at Owen O’Leary’s over some beers and burgers. It is amazing how things have shifted in 20 years! I jotted down some of my impressions, changing everyone’s name to protect their privacy.
Hakeem was All-American. He was the type of athlete who could drink and smoke all night and then set national records the next morning. When he played against New Bedford, no one thought he was even going to show up for the game. The coach sent a car looking for him. The assistant found him just in time. Without even stretching, he ran for 409 yards and 6 touchdowns. With one foot in the streets and the other on the gridiron, he was always one step from the precipice. He was infamous for shutting down movie theaters. He would come in with his crew then make sure no one else got in unless they paid him for “a second ticket.” He was recruited to be Indiana University’s next great running back. He blew out his knee. A decade later he weighs 350 lbs. After years in the street, he became a foreclosure prevention expert.
Big Glom was Portuguese American. He was one of few English speakers on the soccer team. Even the coach preferred to speak his native Kreolu Kabuverdianu. Glom translated when the referees had to give instructions to Coach Lopez. He did a famous bicycle kick against Durfee. As he did a back flip, he swung his powerful leg around and scored the winning goal. The Brockton faithful exploded into applause and mobbed the field, hoisting Big Glom up on their shoulders like he was Tom Brady. Excelling at soccer, Coach Colombo recruited Glom to be the football kicker. He served in the Peace Corps for four years in Peru. He is now an ESL teacher. The other day after an unfortunate shooting, he wrote on Facebook: “Deeply saddened. 14 years teaching, 6 students murdered.”
Matt was the basketball center behind me. He became a guidance counselor at South Junior High. 6’9” and committed to his students’ progress, Matt is an impressive role model for the students.
Joshua Johnson gravitated between the legal and illegal realm. He was the victim of a drive-by shooting on Route 24. Some local bandits shot up his car and his intestines to send a message. He has lived his life as a half-vegetable since.
Bobby G was a 230 lb. fullback. Today he is a 460 lb. double fullback. He is still sturdy but not as strong. He became an actor and hustled on the side. They called him Goose because of his fondness for Grey Goose and other types of vodka.
Pat and Mark never had good attitudes but they were definitely both great athletes. Ironically, they are coaches today of the teams we once played on. Dealing with 15 and 16-year-old angst, they probably have a different perspective on what they were like at that age.
Wheeze was never an athlete per se; Wheeze was an enforcer. The coaches kept him around for pure intimidation. If there was a scuffle, he tackled the opposing players before a punch could even be thrown. He was kicked out of so many games, there was a debate if he could come back for the playoffs. To get pumped up before games he listened to Rage Against the Machine and went into a trance, bobbing his head up-and-down to his own rhythm. He was too crazy to feel fear. Today he is an artist. He paints and draws expressive canvases. Sometimes he disappears for a week on his bicycle, coming back when he feels he is ready to deal with people again. He lives by Pedro Pietri’s motto: “Sometimes you have to lose yourself for a while in order to find yourself.”
Tyrone was another world-class athlete. He won dunk contests blindfolded. He was a quarterback at Syracuse. He was struggling for a while with unemployment. He entered the Investment Banking world before settling as a representative of a sports community. He said he has not moved to even shoot a hoop or go for a run in six years.
Eastside Willie Nice is washed up. He has 12 kids that he recognizes and a few others that he says are “out and about.” Wearing a gold chain over a burnt-out frame, he is a shadow of his former self. He was famous for taking three point shots three or four steps behind the three-point line. Coach Victor Ortiz hated him but never hated the 30 points he poured in on any given night. Today he collects social security for a “back injury.” He uses social media to harass and gawk at women. Like his father, he became a pimp. He is proud two of his daughters became strippers. He pimps out one of his kids’ mothers to Central American laborers for $50. His twitter feed offers instructions about how to treat “hoes.” He was banned from Facebook. It made me wonder about the social and family forces that create misogynists.
His older brother’s name was Z for Zaaron. He was the only other white kid that played basketball with us growing up. But with a name like Zaaron and his street demeanor, no one believed Z was white. If someone called him Larry Bird or the Hick from French Lick, it was an automatic fist fight. Calling him Bob Cousy was even worse. Zaaron had it rough. His mother was a bad addict who tried to kill him over and over. He must have had more lives than Fidel Castro. He set up booby traps in his house for would-be invaders. We weren’t sure if suffered from paranoia or Brocktonnoia. He flirted with drug-dealing lifestyle but taking into consideration how it destroyed his family, he backed off. He disappeared from public view and resurfaced in Alabama. He went to night classes and got his GED. He won a engineering scholarship to Michigan State, graduating with honors. He runs a computer company based out of Argentina and Guatemala.
Moose was a Cape Verdean force to be reckoned with. He had the most massive biceps and natural afro anyone had ever seen. He had a unique hustle. He would take old bikes on their last leg and ride them to the suburbs. He then made his way back to Brockton on brand new ten speeds and mountain bikes. He flipped them before repeating the endeavor. Moose became a professional football player in Canada. Like most football careers, it only lasted a few years. He became a bouncer.
Manny owns a barbershop. He was a point guard who was fleet of foot and a good conversationalist. He hailed from a long line of pretty boy point guards and players. They say his old man was in his 60’s and still cheated and had women on the side. Manny was on that very path.
Paul came to Brockton as a hustler and left Brockton as a hustler. I’ll never forget when our coach Victor Ortiz sat him on the bench and slapped him in the middle of a game because he didn’t run the right play. That shocked and hurt all of us. We all said if that was us we would have done this and that but the truth was none of us did anything. Paul caught a murder one rap on Main St. He did federal time until he was deported to back to his neighborhood Atchadinha in Praia, Cape Verde.
Conner fought if you looked at him wrong. Conner fought if he though you said something about him. Conner fought & fought & fought. Everyone just discarded him as crazy. But no coach complained about how tough he was on the football field. That was his only relief. Many of us judged him but did any of us know his story. When he was a toddler, his mother intentionally burnt him with a iron to punish him. When Conner was three, she made him eat out of a litter box. When she was in a bad mood, she wouldn’t let him leave his room to go the bathroom. She “played games,” making him drink his own urine and eat his own feces. Most of us can’t understand such unconscionable acts. But when you go deeper into her story, you realize this is what she went through a generation before when she was robbed of her childhood. It is so easy to point a finger at the beasts but what about the social bestiality that called them into existence? For 47 long years, Collin hated his mother. It was only last week that he took a step back and realized why he was always fighting. He started to go to different anonymous survivor groups so that he wouldn’t pass the savagery onto his three daughters.
Edgar De Barros was the craziest and calmest of us all. I remember long conversations in the red caefteria about life and where we would be one day. I also remember pulling his legs back as he lunged into an office at the local YMCA trying to stab Sean Pearson over a disagreement on the basketball court. We had hid Sean in there to try to save his life. Edgar was not deterred. He punched and stabbed out a hole to climb through the window. We continued to pull him back in order to prevent a stabbing. This was 1995. But Edgar matured and started a family just as he had imagined he would in the red cafeteria. Just when things were settling into place, he died in a mountain-climbing accident with his father in their homeland of Cape Verde.
Gary is a family man who works for an insurance company in Boston. He is an assistant coach of the Basketball team. I tried to make conversation but we couldn’t find much to talk about besides the Patriots and Celtics.
Kevin had the potential to play pro. But his sophomore year as a shooting guard at Texas A&M he blew out his knee. Overnight, Kevin went from being a dreamer to a schemer. He transferred colleges after some academic problems and getting caught selling. 20 years later, stuck in Brockton, he was still bitter about his fortunes.
Jeff ended up at Florida State and is a corporate banker with a home in Brookline, a suburb of Boston. Never much of his own man, his wife makes his decisions for him.
Kendrick wanders through the Westgate projects getting high and talking to himself. He was supposed to take antipsychotic meds but preferred to self-medicate with weed.
G-man was a natural born hustler who came up and blew it all. He was a cocaine supplier who got out of the game in time to cross over to mail-carrying. Today he is a family man who everyday resists the impulse to hit the streets again.
Daquan — the goofiest of all of us — became a Brockton cop. After all the trash he talked about being in the streets and hating the police, it was tough to believe the career path he chose.
Deshaun pledged to get as far away from Brockton as he could. He didn’t want his kids to see what he saw growing up in a cesspool of heroin and violence against women. He drives for UPS. He is still a great athlete. He moved to a town in New Hampshire that is .06% Black. Before he moved there with his family, it was 0% Black.
These were the stories I could recover. Other former teammates disappeared from public view.
It was great to see old faces and see how people have grown and evolved. I meditated on former friends who got stuck in their surroundings and never managed to move beyond them. There were some gung-ho, dog-eat-dog, hate-the-Iraqi, blame-and-hang-the-victim type comments floating around that I couldn’t really respond to at the reunion. Beyond that, it was good time.
I wanted to go deeper at some points with the old crew about growing up and the challenges. Whose old man was around and whose had run away? Whose mother was strung out and whose was at home? Whose family had succumbed to addiction & violence and whose had escaped?
So many questions. So few answers. I will pose at our next reunion in twenty years.
And that was our night grabbing beers at Owen O’Leary’s.
Damn, Danny, your writing gets me every time. I sighed deeply with a pang in my chest after each story, smiled some of the time, and wanted to cry at the end. you forgot to add your own story: friend, father, worker, writer, poet, teacher, revolutionary. Thank you for sharing. There’s never enough time to catch up with people from the past.
I love this piece, one of the reason being I can relate to most of your teammates story. The same social issues you had to deal with in the 1990’s is still around up until today. These stories are worldwide issues for the working class poor from as far back as I can remember. The only difference I see today is that whatever social issues that plagued the “ghetto” or poor neighborhood is now creeping into more affluent neighborhoods thus expanding the geographical map on said issues. You took me on a journey with all your teammates and although most of them might seem to be washed up old men some of them came out on top and some went rolling down the mountain called life and ended up broken, battered and torn. Next time I hope you share your story. Thanks again it was a great read.
Wow!! It is sure crazy how people change over the years and the world evolves in different ways. It is amazing how in a short summary you described the lives of your teammates. Some of the stories were really scary honestly, yet some where really sad. Listening to the stories of those that could have had bright future yet chose the wrong path was crazy. The lives of these people were amazingly scary, what they had gone through and how some of them were able to actually succeed on such bad circumstances. But you explained their lives great, it is hard to see as a person how people you used to know change and went into a bad lifestyle. But i also know you were happy for those that even though were feisty and problematic were able to change their lives and be better. In between all of those stories I was curious of your life, even though as a professor in one day of meeting you i can tell you were able to succeed and be better than most of your teammates. I am honestly amazed by reading these peoples stories because honestly I never really though about how peoples lives evolve so bad within the years. I know you would think that maybe all of your teammates would be doing better than you or at the same level as you and you seemed at bit disappointed and even though they were your teammates many years ago I know you still care for them. To come back and find out about the failure of many of your teammates really hurt you. This article is really a reading that has made me think about the future to think about my friends, my family and where they will be in a few years. 20 years from now? Wow!!! I could say I’ve never really thought about the future the way I thought about it today. It made me realize where I want to be in the next couple of years and think about the life of my children as well. This article couldn’t have been more purely expressed and written. I really loved this article and it made me think more about my future.
I enjoyed reading this article. It’s like some of the fictional novels I’ve read in the past. It seems like you guys needed this reunion to move on in life. Some of these people stories are just like some of the people I knew. I look forward to reading more stories on this site.
Great story!! It was uplifting to see that everyone didn’t surrcum to their surrounding. Even Hakeeem, who was an All-American and even after blowing out his knee was able to move forward over time and become a foreclosure preventing expert. Make me wonder what my highschool classmates are doing after 20 years.
Each of these stories shows us the challenges thee teens faced growing up. These stories teach us that challenges are thrown at us and we can choose to face them or let them bring us down. Each of these people who were talked about had a choice in who they wanted to be and how they would make it there. We see some made the sacrifices of moving and starting fresh which is hard for anyone to do. But, those who didn’t face their challenged spiraled down and followed footsteps of relatives or friends who didn’t grow up to have a good life. I believe that we are given a choice and what we want to do as we grow up. We are given 2 paths one which is the good and one that Is bad and its up to us to choose the one we want.
Man I can relate so much to this story. I can’t say it has been 20 years, but I went back to my hometown recently and linked up with some guys from my old high school football team. The various stories and the different states they are in at this point. in their lives are fascinating to say the least. Some have children already, unfortunately some have passed away, and some have even relegated themselves to the street life. Leaving for college, I was unaware just how much has changed in such a small amount of time. At the end of this story I just thought to myself ” Wow…. imagine how things are going to look 20 years from now!” Needless to say, this article really resonated with me.
It’s honestly crazy how life works. One minute you’re a superstar, one bad move, the next minute you’re at an all-time low. But I believe that one thing everyone must do is keep their minds open and not judge, because like your friend Connor not everyone can move on from their past and become better people. On the other hand, there are people like Zaaron who want more than what they grew up seeing and decided to be better than his past.
Me at only 20 years old have seen how quickly people’s lives have been ruined because of their pasts or just one bad move. Some of the people I went to high school with are still living their high school lives; addicted to drugs, selling, partying every day, not taking life or school seriously. I think it’s pretty sad, but I am a firm believer in everything happens for reason but I also think that it’s important to live beyond your expectations.
In high school, I actually had two friends who were star basketball players (I know nothing about basketball so I won’t go into detail), they were both seniors and had scholarships to play for the best colleges. One night they had just won a really important game and decided to go out and celebrate. Unfortunately, they got into a bad accident and both their basketball careers were over. Even though a lot of the time it’s not a person’s fault if things don’t go as planned but it definitely is something you could fix/control.
I think that even if life is throwing us down and giving us signs that what we dreamed of and what we want for our future is not going to work out, we should keep striving for success and for better versions of ourselves. Some of your friends, and mine, are probably satisfied with the life they live even if we think it’s not a great life, but we must keep in mind that everyone has different views and values and we must respect it even if we don’t agree.
Twenty years can fly by so fast. Not only does your life change, but the people you once knew changed entirely. Personally, I liked how each person had a short story that gave a glimpse of how their life was compared to now. As a reader, I was drawn to this particular post because of the many emotions it possessed. In the article, it mentions successes and failures, illegal and legal activities, passion and apathy, and hardships and happiness.
Everyone went down different paths with different careers and lifestyles. Some of the athletes became role models, others examples. There were devastating stories, such as Conner’s fight from his past and Joshua Johnson’s half-vegetable stage. But, there was, also, stories of motivation. For example, Matt becoming a guidance counselor and his commitment to his students. It is interesting to see how these great athletes changed within those twenty years. There was so much to find out in such little time. But, each life story was given in just a few minutes of small talk, and that is what beers and burgers are all about.
It is crazy to see how everyone’s life slowly changes as the year’s progress. Being that I’m only 21, all my friends are still young and experiencing the highlights of their sport careers, or still in school like myself trying to get a sustainable job once we’ve graduated. When we were younger all the guys had dreams of being a big team athlete, playing for a major team in a big organization but as life progressed we fell from that high and began accepting reality. One of my friends, easily the best running back our school has seen in years is becoming an accountant. Another is becoming a teacher at North Rockland High School and will also coach wrestling. Not to rant on but others are either still at college or are unsure what field they want to progress with. It’s not upsetting because now we are transitioning from boys to men and as we break through that threshold we still manage to keep a part of us youthful. Mainstream shows how athletes in schools go on to become players for prestigious organizations but they do not tell us how to get put in that position. Of course there are some parents who know what to do so that their children may go on and be placed in better positions for success but none of us knew how to fully capture our dreams. Of course it is to late because mainstream media shows you the end results and being kids we only saw the end result, never the steps on how to get there. That hasn’t stopped us from continuing life though, hopefully we’ll all be successful 10+ years from now.
Very talented athletes that went through horrible obstacles which almost prevent them to be successful in a future. Many of this athletes did many things that almost cost them their career but they still manage to keep it up. As an example this football player who use to get very drunk before games at night and the next day he surprises many people who thought he might not be there on time and he prove them wrong. I think the best way to look for the solution of a problem you’re having is by figuring out yourself, I hardly believe that two brains work better than one but not in all situation. Another example is the basketball player who the coach hated because he used to make three point shot from two or four step back from the line but he still manage to average 30 point per game with it is really good for a basketball player but the coach still hated him for not doing what he was told. Some other athletes have even lost their live and other have a career who they will never thought they will have.
Big Glom was a really good soccer player who was not good at speaking English few years later he became an English teacher. I believe sometimes destiny chooses you, you don’t choose destiny. I relate to him because my English is not that good and I prefer to speak Spanish rather than English but I can never say that that I will never be a English teacher. In conclusion my whole point in order to succeed in people have to go to many obstacles in their life and they have their way of succeeding because they will overcome that obstacle that they are having in their own way.
Jose Rivera
I love how in detailed and thorough you were with explaining everyone’s life so far. When reading the title at first I was 1. surprised because I never meet anyone from Brockton or that knows where that is 2. I thought it was going to be a boring “basketball” story but it wasn’t. I suppose that’s what people mean when they say don’t judge a book by its cover. It was entertaining to read about places I know due to having family in Brockton, and shockingly going there this weekend. Many of the stories you said are relevant now where the violence is still accurate and people are still hanging around with the bad crowds. Luckily I haven’t experienced any of the violence from the times that I have visited. Your humor is transparent throughout the blog post and it makes the reader catch themselves laughing publicly on the MTA (yes, I read your blog post on the subway). From reading this one post it intrigued me to continue on reading further more into your older posts. I can’t wait to share with my family this weekend that my professor is from Brockton, maybe even get them to read this post and enjoy a little black humor.
I loved this piece. Each and everyone of your teammates have characteristics that were stuck with them. It is amazing to see how much detail was given to each person. It is always great to catch up with people from the past and to see how they have grown or changed. Every person in this story has evolved in their own unique way.
The biggest lesson I took away from these individuals is that no matter how difficult life can be, these athletes were all great people in the end who made a life for themselves. Nothing is ever handed to you. If you want something you have to go out and get it for yourself. We are in charge of our how we end up and only we can determine our future. These stories have made me look forward to the reunions I will be having and I can’t wait to see every individual from my past grow and make it in life.
Brandon Jimenez
Professor Danny Shaw
LLS 124
Homework Assignment
It was great reading your article on catching with all your friends back from school and to see how they changed over time. Some for the better and others for the worse. Doing some research online of Brockton, Massachusetts it looks to be like an under developed town majority of the population to be Hispanic and Black. I would imagine that growing up in that environment with crime was not a good area to grow up in. It’s crazy to see how everyone’s life change over time. A few of your friends excelled and are doing well for themselves and other are in jail for life. Not to stereotype but I think you are able to tell who will end up taking the wrong paths you more your hanging out around them. My thing is to stay away from people like that. Surround yourself with those who will uplift you, challenge you, and ultimately push you to be the best person you can possibly be.
When I was in high school I played many sports so I was always active. Fast forward to college I don’t work out as much and lost some motivation. On the bright side to that I recently opened up a new gym membership and go three to four times a week to the gym. I always told myself if I ever meet up with my boys back from high school or middle school I would not be the one who let go of themselves after. Ha!
–Brandon Jimenez