This book that gives a riveting first-hand account of Chicago high school basketball and its tragedies on the West Side was written by a former high school coach and university recruiter who followed the Chicago Public Schools basketball leagues.
The book begins by detailing the shooting of Shawn Harrington and goes back to his playing days at New Mexico State and later becoming an All American in Division II basketball. One of Coach/Author Rus Bradburd’s recruiting enticements to CPS players was offering the kids a refuge far away from the mean streets of Chicago. He landed a few big fish like future NBA superstar Tim Hardaway and the book’s protagonist Shawn Harrington, who also played a bit role in the powerful Chicago basketball documentary Hoop Dreams. I always wondered why our state’s top basketball colleges like The Fighting Illini, DePaul Blue Demons, Loyola Ramblers or Northwestern Wildcats have landed so few Chicago b-ball stars right in their backyard. Certainly Bradburd’s persistent non-stop recruiting of Harrington played a role, but you can’t help but scratch your head and say, no stories of Nike payoffs on behalf of college powerhouses such as Kentucky or North Carolina. Really?
The story of Harrington’s Marshall Coach Luther Bedford is powerful. He is the epitome of the old coach who cares so much about his players that he plays the role model of a parent who looks after them off the court as well as develop their skills on the hardwood floor. If his players didn’t make the grades, he took out the paddle and whooped them hard (F = 3 whacks, D = 1 whack). Of course, the times have changed and when the next coach was discovered employing similar corporal punishment, he was promptly fired. Bedford also made it mandatory for his players to share the gym and attend the girls basketball games at a time when respect for women was not high on the list. This respect impressed the legendary Marshall girls basketball Coach Dorothy Gaters who would win 8 state championships and over 1,000 games.
Shawn attended four elementary schools in six years, including Paderwski. I remember this school when we attended an event to support the school when it was put on the list of school closures during Mayor Daley’s Ren2010 privatization drive. A whole crew of kids jumped on my car when we turned into the alley to park before being escorted by a phalanx of security as we entered the building.
The author puts a lot of himself into this book. He has a personal connection to Harrington where he recruited him and he details from his personal professional view how CPS sports operates, and then his mission to help Shawn after his tragedy rendered him immobile in a wheelchair.
Until the 1980s, every CPS coach taught in their schools until CPS dropped the requirement that all students pass 4 years of physical education, and many coaches taught P.E. As a result, fewer teachers coached CPS basketball.
The first harrowing murder of his mother is told in heart-breaking detail. Shawn Harrington’s mother Frinda had a home business selling candy and single cigarettes. Two half brothers who lived a few streets away heard about her cash business. James, who was a Vice Lord, pounded on her door saying “Chicago Police” before entering with a gun and stealing the money, slitting the throats of two owners and a visitor (who later survived) when his mother entered. Frinda tried to run away out the back door, but they chased her and shot her twice in the head. The murderers were both convicted - one got a life sentence and the other 35 years - and testified that they split $40 worth of candy. I read this, shaking my head in disbelief, ‘Was this a movie?’ No, this is life on the West Side of Chicago. It was his mother Frinda who had earlier told the author/recruiter, “Get her son as far away from Chicago as possible!”
The reason CPS does not produce as many state champions as its suburban counterparts, save for basketball, is that coaches make only about $6,000 for the big team sports which is about half the rate of suburban coaches. Many basketball coaches in Chicago work in the schools but do not have college degrees which tells players getting a degree is not that important.
Shawn’s second brush with violence before his shooting was retold when he was living with his grandmother and a neighborhood friend he had just greeted and embraced went to help calm down an altercation between a few men nearby. “All of you stop this,” he pleaded. Suddenly someone started shooting and Shawn said he was taught to run zig zag when that happens. While Shawn survived that shooting, his neighbor Hawk who tried to broker peace was hit, yet miraculously survived because the bullet went through his cheeks and only knocked out a couple of teeth.
Such is life on the West Side.
Shawn Harrington eventually became that ESP or PSRP, the teacher’s assistant who was invaluable. He dressed well and was a voice of reason for the students. When he spoke the kids knew he knew the school, the neighborhood and he connected to the students. His work with a special education student named Anthony Hunter was the work of an angel. The boy was autistic and a loner and children shunned him. But Shawn took him under his wing and gave him the confidence to break out of his shell and connect with the students all around him. The amazing story was he worked with other students to help get Anothy elected Homecoming King. “I wanted Anthony to get the respect that I got at Marshall,” Shawn said. His plan included lollipops, and talking sense into the leading candidate to allow Anthony to win Homecoming King. He even helped Anthony rent a tux because he didn’t have the money and he rented a fancy sedan and found a chauffeur’s hat and served as his driver to the dance. Although he mostly worked with just a few special ed kids, he knew almost every student’s name at Marshall High. He became known as the go-to person for any student having difficulties. Hunter would later visit Harrington 3 times in the hospital after he was shot and paralyzed. “You’ve helped me more than I’ve helped you,” Shawn told the boy after his third visit.
Author Bradburd said his motivation to write this book was 1) to get his story publicized to raise money to pay for his medical expenses, and 2) help Shawn find a new career. He mentioned being inspired by the book Out of Their League, David Meggyesy’s memoir about the brutality of professional football in the late 60s, and was inspired by the mix of sports and politics as exemplified by greats like Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali and John Carlos, who raised his fist in the black power salut at the 1968 Olympics which ended his career by challenging so openly the system of racism. He hoped Shawn would build a career preaching non violence in Chicago. One galling scene after he and his daughter were shot multiple times in their car was when the police arrived and aggressively moved his body thinking he was gangbanging, which they say you should not do if someone has been seriously injured and may have led to his later paralysis.
Another powerful and sad story is that of Martin Satterfield, who like his old coach was shot multiple times and paralyzed. Except he had no money or support (he collects a monthly $300 social security check). He moved to the South Side to get away from the violent West Side. The most popular kid who helped Anthony Hunter win the Homecoming King at Marshall told Dorothy Gaters that he saw Satterfield in his wheelchair on the street in a windbreaker in freezing temperature. She promptly bought him a coat. He said he refused to testify against his executioner who went to prison because, “I’m from the streets and that’s the code.”
The rest of the book he chronicles his quest to find help for Shawn. He calls every college coach he can think of, sports writers, the Chicago Board of Education, city sports officials and others to help Shawn. It’s mostly a sad journey after the initial stories were written about his fallen player and the limelight briefly shined, now dark. Sometimes Shawn would spend days in his apartment not able to leave because there was no one to help him. One CPS athletic director told him that he assumed Shawn was a gangbanger, a common belief many of us have about the people being shot in the city. He also said his supervisor said if they gave a job to Shawn it would be like admitting gun violence was a problem in the city.
Bradburd profiled several Marshall basketball players murdered, in particular a star named Tim Triplett. He wrote that the area where he lived and died was called Holy City, which runs from Pulaski to Kezie and Roosevelt to Cermak, right near where I work. It received the Biblical name from the Vice Lords 50 years ago. CPS open enrollment policy has created a recruiting battle for high school coaches. They may leave schools like free agents to other schools where the coaches will ‘coddle’ them. I question what he means by coddle? These coaches certainly hold a lot of power when future multi-million dollar contracts are being waved in their players faces. He wrote that future Illinois at Champaign Final Four Superstar and NBA star Nick Anderson was poached from Prosser High School, which prompted their coach Gene Ideno to quit in disgust. Triplett did not choose his neighborhood school Farragut, a basketball powerhouse where NBA legend Kevin Garnett played, as well as high school phenom Ronnie Fields. Instead he chose Crane, a few miles away. Crane Principal Richard Smith knew that students who attended different schools because of athletics or a school closure were particularly vulnerable to gangs. Smith went from custodian at Crane to the Principal in 2007. He wrote further that Smith ordered Triplett his first year to remove his baseball cap on sideways that symbolized gang affiliation. He said he didn’t think the basketball star had been around strong men who demanded respect. This reminded me of George Schmidt, the editor and founder of Substance News, who told us how either strong principals or tough gangs ran the schools in certain neighborhoods. Due to Chicago’s privatization craze under Ren2010 that mandated closing public schools and opening charters, Triplett played under 3 coaches in 3 years at the school. After razing the Rockwell Gardens and Henry Horner housing projects on the West Side, gangs were broken up and instability led to more violence. According to the story told to Bradburd, gang leaders came to Principal Smith and warned him that Triplett’s life was in danger, so Smith got him to transfer to Farragut, and according to the author, saved his life. However, that story told in the book doesn’t quite hold water with one insider.
While Bradburd is a high school basketball insider, his knowledge of the city education politics is a bit disjointed. He writes correctly that gangs have changed over the years in the city after leaders were jailed, high-rise public housing was torn down, guns proliferated, many public schools were closed and more kids crossed lines into unfamiliar territory. One of the stars of his story, ironically enough, is Arne Duncan, the guy who finally got Shawn Harrington a job after Bradburd's endless search. Duncan was the chief of the public schools under Mayor Richard Daley who helped close all these schools that led to the deaths and explosion of violence inside and outside the schools before becoming the Education Secretary under President Barack Obama. I would say they were crocodile tears Bradburd writes to describe Duncan - who now heads some nonviolence non-profit group - sheds when he talks about murdered kids in the city. It was also Duncan who took credit for the Turnaround model that went national when he went to work in Washington D.C. Turnaround was the wonderful idea that the school was a failure and so you needed to fire everyone in the building and start over. Marshall High School was a turnaround, something Bradburd barely mentions. It was interesting reading how he skipped around this inconvenient truth - for example, he writes that Tim Triplett, another murdered basketball star told people he transferred from Crane because it was a failing ‘turnaround’ but fails to mention that he went to Marshall which was also a turnaround school. The Marshall turnaround was so embarrassing until someone finally told the fools at CPS that they had to make an exception and keep Gaters, the winningest girls basketball coach in state history. That could have been a reason why even though Arne and his minions finally got Shawn a job at Marshall again, he ended up leaving because he couldn’t recognize anyone. The Marshall Family highlighted in the book was destroyed by the very guy the author lauded.
Bradburd toward the end of the book tells his readers that one of his hopes for the book was encouraging others, especially students to write or talk about how gun violence has affected their lives. His book has brought out the humanity behind the victims. I remember reading CPS students' essays published in The Chicago Tribune too many years ago when I was a student and what they wrote - they hope to live long enough to graduate. It had a profound effect on me, but nothing has changed.
After you read this harrowing tale of woe and the lives destroyed in this city, many who performed incredibly on the hardcourt, you feel a sense of despair. There is a sense of despair that there really is no plan to stop this carnage on our streets in which young black boys are murdered every day. If people like Arne Duncan need to say Black Lives Matter, when they certainly did not when he was a top education official who closed many of their schools and fired many of their teachers, then we are certainly facing a world under seemingly eternal dark clouds. The problem here is we live in a capitalist system where nobody’s lives matter, only the almighty dollar. Profits over People. This government has no problem murdering minority people here everyday, and millions around the world in its pursuit for territorial control to keep making money. Until we throw out this system, and form something by and for the people, (not to be confused with the words of the wealthy slave-holding uber capitalist Founding Fathers), then the murders will only continue, and the tears keep flowing.
