//------------------------------// // Chapter 1: Daniel // Story: Once in a While // by Llamas- //------------------------------// "Only you can control your future." -Dr. Seuss Daniel Winters places his right sneaker one inch behind the three-point line, considers the basket with a level gaze, cocks his wrist to shoot, then suddenly looks around. He lifts his nose to the wind like a spaniel, he is gauging air current. He waits until the wind settles, buts of trash feathering lightly to the ground. Then he sends a twenty-five-foot jump shot arcing through the soft summer twilight. It drops without a sound through the dead center of the bared iron rum. So does the next one. So does the one after that. Alone in the gathering dusk, Daniel works the perimeter against imaginary defenders, unspooling jump shots from all points. Few sights on Aurora playgrounds stir the hearts and minds of the coaches and scouts who recruit young men for college basketball teams quite like Daniel's jumper; they have followed its graceful trajectory ever since he made varsity at Aurora High School, two years ago. But the shot is merely the final gesture the public flourish of a private regimen that bring Daniel to this court day and night. Avoiding pickup games, he gets down to work: an hour of three-point shooting, then wind sprint up the fourteen flights in his project stairwell, then back to the court, where he shoots one-handers ten feet from the basket while sitting in a chair. At this hour Daniel usually has the court to himself; most of the other players won't come out until after dark, when the thick humid air begins to stir with night breezes and the court lights come on. But this evening is turning out to be a fine one, cool and foggy. The low, slanting sun sheds a feeble pink light over the courts. Like most of the city's impoverished and pre-dominantly ghetto neighborhoods, Aurora does not exactly shower its youth with opportunity. In the early years of the city, urban renewal came to Aurora in the form of a vast tract of housing projects, packed so densely. The experiment of public housing, which has isolated the cities urban poor from the heart of the city. In this neighborhood, there are almost no stores, no trees, no police; just block after block of gray cement projects, hulking, prison-like, and jutting straight into the sea. Most summer nights an amorphous unease settles over Aurora as apartments become too stifling to bear and the streets fall prey to the gangs and drug dealers. But on nights like these, as the dealers set up their drug marts in the street and alleyways and the sounds of sirens and gunfire keep pace with the darkening sky, it feels like the end of the world. There was a time, of course, Aurora inspired among its residents more sanguine remarks---when the neighborhood was home to three world-renowned amusement parks and is streets were lined with three-story homes, filled with joyful people who proclaimed Aurora the most welcoming place of all time. But now, however, all but a few scattered rides have been dismantled; most of the beautiful homes have succumbed to the bulldozers of urban renewal and in their place the vast tract of housing projects. Most summer nights now, an amorphous unease settles over Aurora, as apartments become stifling and the streets fall prey to the gangs and drug dealers. But on a night like this, as the dealers set up their drug marts in the streets and alleyways and the sounds of sirens and gunfire keep pace with the darkening sky, it feels like the end of the world. Yet even in Aurora there are some uses to which a young man's talent, ambition, and desire to stay out of harm's way may be put: there is basketball. Hidden behind the projects are dozens of courts, and every night they fill with restless teenagers, there to remain for hours until exhaustion or the hoodlums take over. The high-school dropouts and the aging players who never made it to college usually show up for a physical game at a barren strip of courts, where bruises and minutes player are accrued at a one-to-one ratio. The younger kids congregate for rowdy games at Run-And-Gun Land. The court there is short and the rims are low, so everyone can dunk, and the only pass ever made is the one in-bounding the ball. At Run-And-Gun, players stay on the move for another reason: the court sits just below one of the most dreaded projects, where Aurora's worst hoodlums sometimes pass a summer evening "getting hectic," as they say---tossing batteries and beer bottles onto the court form the apartment windows fifteen stories above. The neighborhood's best players, the ones like Daniel, with aspirations, practice a disciplined, team-driven style of basketball at this court by the projects, which has been dubbed the Garden. In a neighborhood ravaged by the commerce of drugs, the Garden offers a tenuous sanctuary. A few years ago community activists petitioned the housing authority to install night lights. And the players themselves resurface the court and put up regulation-height rims that snap back after a player dunks. Daniel may be the only kid at the court, who practices his defensive footwork while holding a ten-pound brick in each hand, but no one here treats the game as child's play. Even the hoodlums decline to vandalize the Garden, because in Aurora the possibility of transcendence through basketball is an article of faith. The notion that basketball can liberate dedicated player like these from the grinding daily privations of the ghetto has become a cherished parable, advance by television sportscasters, college basketball publicists, and sneaker sponsors. And that parable is conveyed directly to the players at the Garden by the dozens of college coaches who arrive in Aurora each year with assurances that even if a National Basketball Association contract isn't in the cards, a player's talent and tenacity will at least reward him with a free college education, a decent job, and a one-way ticket out of the neighborhood. It is not too much to say that basketball has saved Daniel. The Winters, Daniel, his mother, and his father, live in one of the neighborhood's toughest blocks, just a block from this court; and in earlier days Daniel often caused his family considerable grief sometimes leaving home for long stretches to hang out on the streets with his friends. Every teenager does this to some extent, but the custom posed a greater threat in Daniel's case since certain of his friends back then like to wander over to neighboring Ruby Beach in order to hold up pensioners at gunpoint. But having watched so many of his contemporaries fall into gangs or prison or an early grave, Daniel has developed new ambitions for himself. A few months ago, he led the team at Aurora High to public school championship, which was played at Canterlot and broadcast citywide on cable TV. For most of his teammates, it was a moment to savor, however for Daniel he hardly broke stride to celebrate. Until he wins his college scholarship, sometime in the months ahead, all else in his life seems to dwindle to the vanishing point---everything besides the ball, this basket, and his conviction that, by practicing each day and playing by all the rules, he has set himself on a path that will change his life. Soon the orange court lights at the Garden come on, displacing the encroaching darkness, and two players on either end of the court climb the fence and sit atop the backboards, hanging nets---a sign that a serious game is about to begin. The game has just begun when a crowd starts to form: sidelined players, three deep, waiting their turn. A prostitute trolling for clients. A drunk yelling maniacally," I played with Jordan, played with Stockton, played with Iverson. They ain't shit. And neither are you!". A couple of teenage mothers with strollers come by and get barely any elbow room. "Just do it, right?" said a teen. And his name was Nathan Fox, smiling mischievously, eyes alight. He nods toward the court--players stretching out, taking lay-ups and it does, in fact resemble a sneaker commercial. "Work hard, play hard, buy yourself a pair of Nikes, young man," Nathan yells at Daniel. He laughs and takes up observation on the stands. Nathan is Daniel's best friend and one of Aurora High's other star Junior. He too, expects to play college ball. But he specializes in ironic detachment and normally shows up court side with his I-pod merely to watch for girls beneath his handsome, hooded eyes. Tonight he is wearing a red and white Yankees hat, a fresh white T-shirt, and sleeves to reveal glimpses of his sculpted physique; light denim slim fit jeans and a pair of red and white low top vans. From his earphones come the sounds of Man of the Year by Logic, and Nathan sings along: "Yeah, I'm trying to make it but I gotta find the recipe. Greatest of all time, I want the world addressing me." Although a pickup game has begun at the basket near Nathan, Daniels still commands the other. As the last light drains from the sky, he finishes with three-pointers and moves on to baby hooks: fifteen with left hand and fifteen with right; miss one and start all over again. Nathan smiles and laughs at his friend's discipline. Daniel is hoping to he will be able to play in next year's college conferences, in which the top colleges compete. Last spring, Daniel led Aurora's J.V team to state championship that was broadcast citywide on cable TV. But one can never predict what may happen to Daniel, because as Nathan observes, "Daniel is Daniel." You can guess what this means: Daniel lives in one of the neighborhood's toughest projects, and misfortune seems to shadow him. Last year a fight between Daniel and a boy at school turned violent. Terrified that his future college scholarships had just been replaced by a stiff prison term, Daniel climbed to the top of one of Aurora's highest buildings. It took almost half and hour of reasoned talk by his high-school coach and members to bring him back form the edge. Daniel may be tightly wound, but no Aurora player can avoid for long the agonizing pressures that might bring a teenager with his whole life ahead of him to the edge of a roof. Basketball newsletters and scouting reports are constantly scrutinizing the players, and practically every day some coach shows up, appraising, coaxing, negotiating, and, as often as not, making promises he never keeps. Getting that scholarship offer is every player's dream-in anticipation, no one steps outside in Aurora without one of the Division 1 hats or sweatshirts. But in reality only a handful of the neighborhood's players have ever made it to such top four-year programs; most have been turned back by one obstacle or another in high school. Others who have enrolled in college never saw their dream to completion. The list grim; there was John Christmas, who played varsity for a D-1 school but never graduated, and ended up back in Aurora working in construction; Norman Harris lost his scholarship to a highly ranked D-1 school because of academic problems in high school; and now Anthony Jones, a talented player who never graduated from high school. He dropped out of Aurora High after his freshmen year and become engulfed by the cities environment. He became a part time drug dealer and a gang member. Earlier this summer police found him in his home, his hood pulled over his head and a bullet through his skull and stomach. He was only seventeen. Basketball is so inextricably woven into the fabric of Aurora life that almost everyone there can recite a complete oral history of the neighborhood's players. People remember the exact scores of summer tournament game played at the Garden ten years ago, or describe in rapturous detail the perfect arc that Mark Skyes put on his jumper before he was shot in the elbow. Daniel, Nathan, and other talented teens are the natural heirs to this vaunted tradition. But this is a complicated business: given the failures that have preceded them, the new crew is watched by the neighborhood with a certain skittishness, a growing reluctance to care too deeply. Yet Aurora offers its residents little else on which to hang their pride. So the proceeding here take on desperate, exalted quality, and by unspoken agreement the misfortunes of bygone players are walked up to either a lack of will or plain bad luck, both of which make possible the continuance of hope. Still, the suspicion lingers that something larger and less comprehensible may be at work. Years ago, the City of Diamond produced the best players, but the drug industry and collapse of that neighborhood in to violence, broken families, and ever-greater poverty put an end to its glorious dynasty. In recent years the torch has been passed on to Aurora, which struggles to avoid a similar fate. It's past midnight now and the ambient glow of Aurora's remote skyscrapers has turned the sky a metallic blue. Standing court side, you can see only the darkened outlines of the projects, looking in every direction , and the shirtless players streaking back and fourth, drenched in a pool of orange light. For Daniel and Nathan, the hard labor of winning their scholarships lies ahead; for now this game is enough.