Godballers: One Coach’S Mission, His Son’S Dream and a Sports Writer’S Epic Journey of Faith

Copyright © 2015 Kristian Pope.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-6602-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-6603-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-6601-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015900414

WestBow Press rev. date: 3/4/2015

Contents

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Epilogue

PART 1

1:1 Their Journey

The lights over the football stadium glimmered under the hazy afternoon sky like splashes that break the calm of a still pond. Faith-seekers, youthful and aged, were gathered in the hope that, within those glimmers, they might see the face of God.

The unusual site for worship was being used, temporarily, for this special moment. One by one, they arrived from different places searching for the same answer. Each person needed something.

The 50-yard-line was the pulpit. The bleachers were pews. But don’t be confused by the odd surroundings. The faithful insist that church can happen anywhere. Prayers can be made anytime. It doesn’t matter if they’re made in church or on a grass field, prayers are answered anywhere.

When you turn your burdens over to Him, the pastor told them, you are loosed from the chains of despair.

For these people, God is approachable. That’s why they came together on this day, so their prayers might be answered. Not will be answered, but might be answered.

God isn’t a magician, ready with a trick or slight of hand. Prayers aren’t wishes or strokes of luck. They’re divine. God’s only request is that we bring the faith.

For a special few in attendance, the journey of faith was just starting. Members of a college basketball team were using the time of worship to spark supernatural answers to their humble prayers. You know, easy prayers, like healing from life-threatening illness.

The game of basketball is like a marriage. Unforgettably great one day, a forgettable misery the next. Just when you think your relationship with the game has run its course, something new and exciting happens that leaves you wanting more. Isn’t that what love is all about?

It is for the team’s coach, whose experience with death and restoration were his testimonies of God’s love. He came to the stadium-turned-church to fall to his knees and ask his Helper to lead he and his family to a place they’d never been. He prayed for his real life drama to have a supernatural ending.

There was a young man among the gathered, a member of the team, standing with his arms raised in search of a miracle. He’d come so far already, having beaten numerous obstacles on his way to becoming a star basketball player. On this day, he asked for a miracle for his unborn daughter. Doctors said she’d have a lifetime disability. If God answered his prayers, maybe the girl’s life wouldn’t have so many of the interruptions the doctors predicted.

God reminds us how it’s important to finish our race, the pastor said. When you’re moved by the Holy Spirit, you must finish your race to see God’s miracles fulfilled.

Both coach and player were pulled to the prayer service out of individual faith. The player’s faith was set in seeing his daughter healed and his hope of a better future made real. The coach was placing his faith in the chance to prove that God is real.

They both believed they could work together to reach the common goal of winning another basketball championship.

Their race was just beginning.

1:2 Take It

Why in the world do you want that job?

The person who asked that question should know why. This friend was only investigating a job I’d already been offered and would gladly accept. Besides, the friend is both a wise Zen master of journalism and the executive editor of wit. One can never be certain if his remarks channel his inner Edward R. Murrow or Rodney Dangerfield.

Is he kidding, or passing me a warning?

"Seriously, dude, why do you want that job?"

I wanted the job because I am a sports writer, at that time, an out-of-work sports writer. Writing about people who play games is demanding work, but it’s still better than not having a job and weekends with nowhere to go.

Newspapers chose me, I didn’t choose them. Whenever my father returned from a business trip, he brought back newspapers from cities foreign to me. Whether it was the Chicago Tribune or Dayton Daily News, each one thumped with a unique heartbeat. Newspapers carried me to the front door of faraway places through stories written by people with the incredible fortune of watching history made before their eyes.

For someone with a physical disability, newspapers made the world accessible. They spoke adventure. Their never-ending pages placed me alongside reporters stationed around the world covering everything from politics and war to sports and music. Having no idea of what my adult health would be like, working for a newspaper was a practical and cool choice for work. I didn’t need my hips and legs to write.

Newspapers were noble. Reporters are entrusted with a great responsibility to deliver truth to their readers. When Superman’s cape was stowed, his alter ego, Clark Kent, worked alongside Lois Lane at the Daily Planet. Before Britt Reid donned a mask and became the Green Hornet, he ran a newspaper. If it was good for a superhero, it was good for me, too.

I saw myself traveling around the country covering the biggest sporting events in faraway places I’d only read about. If I could be any kind of reporter, I wanted to cover college sports - compelling games in classic stadiums before roaring crowds.

My dream was to work at the world’s best newspapers, the New York Times or the Washington Post. They were, and still are, the top of the newspaper food chain. Of course, that meant somehow I had to get to the greatest newspaper cities in the world. I made myself a promise that I’d get there. It didn’t matter how I got there or how long it took.

When Ron Fritz, the sports editor of the News Journal in Wilmington, Del., called, I’d forgotten that nearly a year passed since he received my letter looking for a job. After studying journalism at the University of Minnesota, my apprenticeship at the Philadelphia Inquirer was over and I needed a job. In between covering high school games at the Inquirer, were noisy monster truck races, ridiculous strongman competitions and steeplechase horse races in Philadelphia’s haute suburbs where tailgating wasn’t beer and bratwurst in the back of a pickup truck. It was strawberries on stems and bubbly champagne from a white linen tablecloth stretched across the hood of a ninety thousand dollar Mercedes.

There’s an opening you’d be perfect for, Fritz said. It’s a college sports beat.

This was it. The chance I’d long awaited.

The newspaper was in Delaware, not far from Philadelphia. Did Fritz want me to cover one of Philly’s historic college teams like Penn or Temple? Maybe he wanted me to cover Penn State University or the University of Maryland?

I want you to cover Delaware State University, Fritz said.

Is that a junior college? Some place new? During more than two decades of following sports, surely I would have heard of a place called Delaware State University.

Isn’t that the college with the helmets that look like the University of Michigan’s? I asked.

That’s the University of Delaware, Fritz said. I’m talking about the black college, in Dover.

Covering college sports, even teams from a school unknown to me, was my opportunity to fulfill the fantasy of being paid to write full-time for a major daily newspaper. Not exactly New York City. But it was the start I needed.

The Delaware State University sports beat stunk like a raccoon with its tail in the air. The reporters at the News Journal believed Delaware State was infested with trouble, both self-created and beyond the university’s control. Fritz asked everyone on his reporting staff if they wanted the job covering the small Division I college in Delaware’s capital city. Not one taker emerged.

What little I knew about historically black colleges was limited to Grambling and the tradition of their marching bands. No matter. I was offered a true college beat. This job, like all college sports beats, would have me covering everything about the school. If it were connected to Delaware State in any way, I’d need to be there.

I figured my adventure to Delaware would be like a quick stop at 7-Eleven to fill up before a long and prosperous career. My parents always taught my brothers, Jeff and Darrell, and me that everything happens for a reason. None of us knows what we really want. I was thrilled to have any job offer, period. I didn’t care if the mentor expressed pessimism. All anyone can do is take a risk and do their best.

With my parents’ mantra echoing through my head, I convinced myself that covering an unknown black college in a state I’d never been was a job meant to be.

There was something about Fritz’s offer that felt preordained. It felt like it’d come from a higher power, like the offer was as valuable as a winning lottery ticket.

If you say so, the friend said. Just don’t mess it up.

1:3 The Dream To Lead

When climbing the college coaching ranks, opportunity might be more important than salary.

In the late 1970’s, Greg Jackson left an indelible mark playing for St. Paul’s College, formerly a small NCAA Division II black university in the southeastern Virginia outpost of Lawrenceville. Jackson’s identity as a deadeye shooter earned him the school’s all-time scoring title, a tryout with the National Basketball Association and a chance to play professional ball overseas.

Faced with the prospect of losing his college sweetheart if he left the country, Jackson instead chose the lifestyle of a vagabond basketball coach. His first opportunity came in the early 1980’s as a graduate assistant at another black college, North Carolina Central. College basketball’s coaching icons surrounded the small university in the heart of Durham. To his west across town was Mike Krzyzewski at Duke University. Dean Smith, the late basketball coaching legend, was only a few miles away at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

While working as an assistant coach at North Carolina Central University for head coach Mike Bernard, Jackson’s friend and mentor, they led the Division II Eagles to the national championship in 1989. When Bernard stepped down before the 1991-92 season, the school promoted Jackson to head coach. With Jackson now piloting one of the most successful black college programs of the day, North Carolina Central continued its string of good fortune. In nine more seasons, Jackson led the Eagles to 166 victories and seventy-seven losses. Never once did they finish a regular season with a sub-.500 winning percentage. Jackson’s teams won five Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association championships and earned three trips to the Division II Tournament, including one appearance in the Elite Eight in 1993.

Jackson never coached or played outside the familiarity of historically black colleges. To anyone who’s ever been associated with HBCU’s, as they’re known, students and faculty think of themselves as family. They are connected to their institutions almost spiritually. While Jackson felt at home at an HBCU, he longed to coach some place he could call his own and leave a lasting impact.

In whatever coaching job he did land, Jackson kept focus on the most important goal in his professional life: leading a program to the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament. The Big Dance. A national television audience. A cameo in One Shining Moment. Your program talked about alongside the nation’s elite. The only way Jackson could match his coaching acumen against the game’s best was to leave North Carolina Central for a job at the Division I level. If only he could find a job that joined his connection to black colleges and the opportunity to reach the Big Dance, Jackson would be set.

His history coaching on the Division II level just might be the remedy former Delaware State University President, Dr. William DeLauder was in need of to fix his school’s men’s basketball program. Delaware State was considered one of the worst Division I basketball programs in the country. Problems were everywhere, not to mention the program hadn’t finished with a winning record in a decade. Since the NCAA expanded its Division I men’s basketball tournament to 64 teams, Delaware State never qualified. One reason why the field was expanded in 1985 was to give schools like Delaware State a better chance to get in. The school’s outdated basketball facility, Memorial Hall, was the only remaining Division I gym that still used a rubber playing surface.

President DeLauder had only a beginner’s knowledge of college athletics when Jackson’s resume slid across his desk. He considered Jackson once before, but opted to hire Tony Sheals before the 1999-2000 season. Sheals ended up putting the program in turmoil with allegations he struck one of his own players.

With Sheals gone after one season, DeLauder turned to a group of candidates that included Colorado University assistant coach David Moe and Delaware State assistant Stephen Wilson, the program’s interim coach after Sheals resigned by force in March less than a year on the job. Those candidates notwithstanding, DeLauder wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. DeLauder placed a call to Durham.

The people [in North Carolina] love him,¹ DeLauder said of Jackson at the time. I know he was looking for this opportunity. But he was torn because of his loyalty to his institution, his chancellor and his fans.

In his heart, Jackson didn’t even want the Delaware State job, but he realized that he’d likely never get to the Big Dance if he stayed in North Carolina. Did his first Division I offer really have to be Delaware State? The place was a total mess, he thought. Not even the fulfillment of his lifelong dream was incentive to move his family. Jackson accomplished all he could at North Carolina Central, but was so beloved there and leaving would be difficult.

Jackson was ready to call DeLauder to say thanks, but no thanks. The coach’s oldest son, all of thirteen-years-old, approached the man he admired for his ability to accomplish whatever he set his mind to.

Greg Jackson Jr. offered his father needed encouragement.

Then he issued his dad a challenge.

Daddy, you have to take this job.

His message was simple. If his dad couldn’t turn Delaware State University into a winner, Junior told his dad, then no one could.

The challenge pierced Jackson’s soul. Two months after DeLauder began his second national search in a year, Jackson accepted.

It’s probably been the toughest decision I’ve ever made, Jackson said.

1:4 Youngest Of Three

The blond hair and tanned skin befitting a native of Southern California contradicted my New Jersey-issued birth certificate. Born in Englewood, it says. The town where Vince Lombardi began his career as a football coach at St. Cecilia Catholic High School.

My family and I were transplanted to San Diego before the age of ten. My earliest sports memories didn’t shout New York Mets or J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets. Those teams were foreign to me, things I’d probably never experience in person. But even to a kid who rode skateboards to Pop Warner football practice, Sundays meant two things in our family: church and the Chargers.

Like her six siblings, my mother was firmly rooted in the Catholic faith. The youngest in her own family, Julie Pope was old school and God-fearing, traits she learned from her parents, immigrants from Czechoslovakia by way of Ellis Island, N.Y.

I’m lucky. My childhood memories are largely missing anything negative. Childhood, for me, wasn’t exactly straight from a Norman Rockwell painting, but it was pretty close.

Life did change for me, and our family, in 1984. Mom was preparing to wake me up for school one weekday April morning when a shocking pain pulled me from my slumber. The type of pain average twelve-year-olds almost never experience. The pain shot from deep within my left hip. I cried out loud. Mom ran upstairs to evaluate. Her diagnosis was quick and final.

You don’t feel hot, she said while feeling my forehead in a rudimentary attempt to check my temperature. Nobody knew the fever about to overtake my body wouldn’t emerge for another hour. But I sure felt sick.

Moose, you’re fine, she said more firmly. You’re going to school.

Naturally, she thought I was faking an illness in a bid to play hooky. After some tear-filled convincing on my part, mom relented. She left me in bed before leaving for work as a secretary at dad’s computer programming business.

A few hours later, as I lay motionless with a fever raging, I tried to walk downstairs for some juice to stop my unrelenting thirst. My unstable legs took me as far as the landing of the staircase before my left hip decided it couldn’t support me. Stranded, I returned to bed the only way possible, across the carpet on my hands and knees.

Later that afternoon, when mom returned from work, the fever grew to 104. During the five-mile ride to our family doctor, even the slightest imperfections in the road brought unbearable pain. Our family doctor determined immediately that my hip needed to be drained of the infection I’d contracted. Emergency surgery and three days later, my only memories are waking up to see a plastic tube draining puss from my hip and hearing a short doctor with black-rimmed eyeglasses deliver a life-changing diagnosis. The doctor called what I had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

His name attached to my pain didn’t compute. Maybe I was too young to know what arthritis meant. A year later, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis became a constant and unwelcome companion. My body hadn’t even matured. But arthritis is, if nothing else, a rude disease. It has no manners and does whatever it wants. Doctors instilled an early hope the intruding disease would enter a remission in three or four years and never return. High anticipation accompanied my 16th birthday, but it arrived and departed without taking with it my severe pain, swollen joints and loss of mobility.

Thirty years later, arthritis is a lifetime disability. Four major joints have been replaced with plastic and metal. Attempts to be normal are made, but having a chronic illness makes normality fruitless. With every passing day, the degenerative disease destroys a person’s bone and cartilage, leaving behind pain and deformity.

Rheumatoid arthritis is not a disease you fight and expect to win. Lubricating cartilage isn’t the only thing the disease likes to steal. Arthritis means dreams are changed, sometimes even dashed. But I’ve been fortunate to live a successful life having a chronic disease through merely denying its existence. Rather than try to live with the disability, I’ve simply adopted a mindset in which I do whatever I’m capable of and dream to accomplish more.

Three thousand miles from my home in San Diego, a young man was sitting in a North Carolina children’s hospital, learning about a lifetime illness of his own.

1:5 Junior’s Birthday

Greg Jackson Jr. heard his diagnosis for the first time on his 10th birthday, 1998.

Doctors said I wouldn’t live beyond 14, he said.

Sickle cell anemia is an unfriendly disease. It knows its target. Junior inherited the disease from his parents, Greg and Janice, who both had the sickle cell trait. When Junior was born, it was a statistical formality that he’d have the full-blown disease.

Suffered mostly in people whose ancestors are from Africa or the Middle East, experts say one in twelve African-Americans carry the sickle cell trait. Thousands of people are diagnosed with sickle cell anemia every year. The disease occurs in one out of nearly every 500 African-American births in the U.S and more than two million Americans have the trait.² Junior’s odds of getting the disease were greater because both of his parents carried the sickle cell trait. Passing the trait through birth doesn’t guarantee the newborn gets it, but experts say it will increase the likelihood.

What is sickle cell anemia? Patients with the disease have red blood cells that contain an abnormal type of hemoglobin, which is the molecule that carries oxygen around the body. The defect is caused by a single tiny alteration in the protein portion of the hemoglobin molecule, which literally distorts those red blood cells into an odd, sickle shaped cell. Hence, the name sickle cell anemia.

Why is it odd for blood cells to be curved like a sickle? In any healthy person, blood cells are round and smooth. But patients with sickle cell anemia have these altered cells shaped kind of like a boomerang. When these sickle-shaped blood cells flow through the body, they damage the person’s organs along the way. The strange shape enhances the fragility of each cell, making them vulnerable and easily destroyed, which leads to anemia. A plethora of bad things can happen because of the disease, including kidney damage, bone pain, breathing problems and even stroke.³ In some cases the damages are irreversible.

Doctors had reason to warn the Jacksons that Junior may not live to see his 14th birthday. The average life expectancy of sickle cell patients is between 50 and 60 years old. But in Junior’s case, if his disease continued on its destructive path, the young man’s life expectancy would change dramatically due to other factors that arise from suffering irreversible harm to vital organs. He was also susceptible to episodes that doctors call crises, which are caused by the patient’s organs breaking down.

Janice’s family knew her to have visions that foretold the future. The visions ran the gamut. One vision, which she believed were supernatural, showed that a second yet unborn son could be the key to saving Junior’s life one day. Another vision painted the picture of a procedure, like a blood transfusion, that would cure Junior of an incurable disease.

Believing the transfusion could be the catalyst for her son’s healing, Janice researched a special medical procedure to fulfill her vision. Janice’s research discovered something interesting. She read that cells from healthy cord blood – which is part of the afterbirth from of normal infants – could transform diseased blood cells, like those odd-shaped sickle cells, into normal, healthy cells⁴. The theory is simple. Junior could swap out his sickle cell-tainted blood with a sibling’s healthy blood.

Thirteen years after Janice gave birth to the couple’s first child, she and Jackson had their second. It was another boy, Justin. The new addition brought a special purpose for which Janice had the supernatural vision she shared with her family. Justin would be needed someday for something very special. The vision wasn’t specific about what Justin would be needed for, but the premonitions weren’t ignored.

Janice believed Justin’s fate was a stroke of God’s hand. The procedure would be possible because Justin wasn’t born with sickle cell disease. That meant the Jacksons could save Justin’s cord blood at birth, have it frozen by a professional medical staff and hold it until the day arrived when they would allow Junior to undergo the transfusion. Using the cord blood fulfilled a divine promise for the Jacksons.

1:6 My Challenge

My parents demanded to learn more about my diagnosis of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Was it an infection? Could it be cured? Was it all a mistake?

We don’t know how your son contracted this disease, the doctor told them early on.

Our family investigated every possible origin behind the strange disease that first year after the diagnosis. Then came the onslaught of prescription pills, leg casts, surgeries, worry and frustration. Rheumatoid arthritis is now a disease my family and I know all too well.

Any patient with chronic illness knows that you become a partner of your ailment, albeit an unwilling partner. Days of denial are followed by days of fighting back. Eventually, you land in acceptance. A patient can move forward by accepting the ugly truth that their situation may never change. My thought was, just let me live my life the best way I know how. For better or worse, that’s how I’ve coped with the disease.

I am fortunate my diagnosis of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis happened so young. As you age, it gets harder to accept major life changes from illness. Healthy people take for granted their normal abilities, like throwing a baseball, running in the sand or being able to bend over to pick a flower. If those basic abilities are snatched at an early age, it’s easier to adapt. Losing them later in life invokes incredible feelings of loss. I’ve forgotten so profoundly what it’s like to run and bend my knees that my mind can no longer fathom what it feels like to do those simple things anymore.

The disease would never affect a career as a professional newspaper reporter, or so I thought. I later realized the simple fact that my body cannot keep up with what my mind wants to do. From an early age, I pledged to accomplish as much in my career as possible, as soon as possible, because the future is impossible to predict with a chronic illness.

A nagging question remained. Were there larger reasons behind my disease? Was it meant to help others? Was the disease meant to be a counterbalance to people with perfect health? It’s normal for someone who’s sick to wonder why others live entire lives without any health problems. It’s the question every sufferer of a chronic condition asks. Surely, their life isn’t merely a stroke of cosmic misfortune, is it?

If you believe in the simple theory of right and wrong, justice and injustice, then it’s easy to believe that an answer must exist for the question of why one person is healthy and the other is sick. Fate isn’t the answer. Where’s no justice in fate. There must be a reason for illness. It doesn’t matter if you go your entire life searching for that reason and only discover it the second you close your eyes one final time. There has got to be a reason.

Since I spent much of my high school years taught at home because of the disease, I had extra time every day. To relieve the boredom and divert my attention away from sickness, I published a newsletter about professional wrestling. Copies were made at the neighborhood Kinko’s and mailed to a few hundred subscribers. My fantasy in life was to play the professional wrestling character called a manager. They are the television characters that escort those behemoth wrestlers to ringside while shouting challenges to foes and insults to the crowd. Being a wrestling manager would be quite a challenge, however, for someone with a debilitating disease. If I couldn’t live that fantasy, with hair dyed blonde and gaudy costumes, then I was set on dedicating a life to my second passion, newspaper writing.

1:7 Special Love

Some couples have great stories about how they met. Janice and Greg were introduced by accident. But they can also lay blame with the game of basketball and stubbornness?

It was 1977. Jackson was only a freshman at St. Paul’s College. On his second day on campus, he walked into the gym for a pickup game. As the story goes, another player fouled Jackson hard while dribbling to the basket. The ball was swatted from Jackson’s hands and began to roll away. Instead of picking up the ball and handing it to Jackson - which he egotistically expected because, after all, he was the new hot-shot recruit on the school’s basketball team - the student player simply let it roll out of bounds for Jackson to fetch for himself.

Aggravated, Jackson chased the ball as it rolled towards a group of cheerleaders practicing off to the side of Taylor-Whitehead Gym. One of those cheerleaders was a short, fair-skinned young lady named Janice.

When I went to pick up the ball, she had it in her hands, ⁵ Jackson said. When I asked her for it, she pulled back.

Already angered, Jackson’s temper escalated.

Who is this girl? Doesn’t she know who I am?

The girl smiled. Jackson, however, wasn’t in the mood for games. He lunged for the ball and snatched it from the young cheerleader’s thin fingers. With ball in hand, Jackson returned to his pick-up game, shaking his head the whole way. The smile dropped from the cheerleader’s face. Janice didn’t approve of Jackson’s arrogance, so she did to the entitled basketball player what he probably deserved.

She kicked him.

When the pick-up game finished and Jackson was about to leave for dinner, the cheerleader was waiting for him at the gym exit.

Don’t you ever do that to me again, she demanded, but with that same innocent smile. To rub it in, she tripped Jackson as he exited. Both laughed.

Janice didn’t stop thinking about the egotistical, handsome basketball player she encountered earlier. Later that night at dinner at the campus cafeteria, Jackson saw a handwritten note on his food tray.

We owe each other an apology, the note read.

We met in the dorm and started talking that night, Jackson recalled. We never separated after that day.

Janice was different from every other female Jackson met before. What made her different, in his eyes, was her commitment to God. Born into a Christian family, Janice maintained a lifelong relationship with her Maker. In Jackson’s eyes, the teasing cheerleader stood out beyond the others solely because of her impassioned faith.

When North Carolina Central threw him a going away shindig before he took the Delaware State job, Jackson dedicated the move to Janice, his wife of sixteen years.

1:8 The Newspaper Bug

The journey to become a sports writer started in the middle of nowhere.

I dialed the sports editor of a local daily newspaper my parents had delivered every day. The Times-Advocate was a small operation in the inland enclave of Escondido. Located on the northern edge of San Diego, the region is densely populated and very sports centric. The newspaper was similar to many suburban outfits of the 1990’s. What the T-A lacked in circulation it made up for it with a staff of talented local journalists who provided strong, local daily coverage. The paper lived a proud life.

Although I had no professional experience, I tried convincing the editor to give me a shot. I spewed a bunch of clichés at him, like I was ready learn, which I was. Tod Leonard was like all sports editors. They’re like baseball managers. Their job is positioning the best writers they have with the right story. Tod gave me a tryout covering a high school football game, on deadline, that next Friday night.

The adrenaline I exerted trying to desperately write a game story in a matter of about thirty minutes was insane and exhilarating. After writing the story and faxing it to the newspaper, I thought my tryout was at least acceptable although I didn’t hear back from Tod that night. When I opened the paper the next day, my story was nowhere in the paper. I thought my sports writing career was over already.

What I didn’t know was that Tod sent a staff writer to cover the game for real. The next week, Tod called to say I was ready for my first live assignment. This time, I would be going solo. No other writer to cover for me in case I missed deadline. It doesn’t matter if you’re a greenhorn or veteran ink-stained wretch. All reporters are slaves to deadline. Tod wanted to take it easy on me since it was my first real assignment but he couldn’t. Newspaper deadlines wait for no one.

The sports department of the Times-Advocate was a collection of tables and filing cabinets stacked into the back end of a two-story office building. The section rollicked with young to middle-aged white males, all joking about the local high school teams or discussing the Padres’ latest fire sale.

Go sit by that coyote, Tod instructed.

The coyote wasn’t a howling four-legged creature. Sitting atop every desk in the newsroom were brown, bulky and primitive looking word processing computers called Coyotes. With the Internet in its infancy and desktop publishing a maverick concept, Coyotes were the workhorse computers at most newspapers around the world. To me, they made for a rude and mysterious introduction to newspapers.

My deadline, Tod warned, was 10:30 p.m. The story needed to be about 325 words long. No exceptions. I tried to look calm, nodded my head and went off to write my first newspaper story on a real deadline.

The clock on the screen of the Coyote flashed 9:46 p.m. My mind raced as I tried to think about the game I’d spent two hours watching. I began typing words that seemed like pure gibberish. The clock on the Coyote was a constant reminder of the minutes that remained until my certain doom. I kept looking at my notes and typing away. Back, forth, and again. For sure, I thought, the story would be filed late and I’d be history.

With my notebook exhausted and head in a haze, the computer clock flashed 10:29 p.m. so I checked the word count one last time. It read 320. With less than a minute to spare, I sprang from my chair to find Tod but all I saw were the scalps of editors sitting behind their Coyotes as a symphony of fingers striking the Coyote keyboards filled the office.

Tod! I yelled from across the room. I’m done!

Concentrated fury soaked the newsroom. The nightly pressure that overtakes every newspaper’s sports department between a quarter past ten and midnight was foreign to me. That all-important hour and a half is the small window of time when the usual banter about sports and music seizes so everyone can focus on getting the section ready before deadline. For the next ninety minutes I sat and waited. Finishing my first story on deadline made me feel like I’d passed the test.

After midnight, when the bells of deadline tolled and the department could finally breathe, Tod sat me down.

First thing, he said, you wrote the team ‘exploded’ on offense. If they literally exploded, your story would be national news.

I was just glad Tod didn’t find a reason to throw me out of the building. Tod was a fine teacher. He was easy on a first-time writer and did so with equal amounts patience and instruction. I’m fortunate Tod was there for my initiation into the newspaper business. The next day, there it was. By Kristian Pope. My first bylined story in a daily newspaper. No three words ever looked so cool.

1:9 Junior And Janice

Let me tell you a story, my son.

Janice instilled tremendous wisdom in her first son, Greg Junior. She would tell him her favorite fables, which Junior could keep with him always.

There was a baby monkey, Janice would tell him, that held a deep love for its mother. This baby monkey, in fact, loved its mama so deeply that, at any time, it couldn’t be too far away from her. Wherever mama monkey went, baby monkey followed.

Then, as if out of nowhere, Janice would tell Junior, the mama monkey died. The baby didn’t know what to do, or how to respond. Without her comforting presence the baby monkey did the only thing it knew to do.

The baby monkey laid down, curled up next to its mother’s lifeless body and stayed there until it also died. Not from exhaustion or hunger, but from loneliness.

Like everything she said to her children, Janice used the story as a teaching tool.

You’ll have to learn to do things for yourself, Janice would tell ten-year-old Greg Junior. Someday, I won’t be around to care for you.

The fable about the baby monkey and its mama was just the type Janice was known to tell. It was a window into her own toughness, the attitude she believed Junior needed.

While Janice was born near the mean streets of Washington, D.C., dad hailed from the bucolic streets of Augusta, Ga. Greg Junior learned from each, but not in ways one might imagine. Ironically, from his dad, the disciplined, hard-line basketball coach, Junior learned love and tenderness. From his mom, toughness, perseverance.

Whenever we visited mom’s family in D.C., it was a total landscape change, Junior said. She was raised in the hood.

With medium length hair colored midnight black and soft skin a few shades lighter than his own, Junior said, his mom was 5-foot-2 and perfectly huggable. From her day job as a secretary for the Veteran’s Administration and the uncomplicated personality, what you saw from Janice was exactly what she was about. Foremost, Janice liked being a mother. Junior liked being a son even more.

There’s a unique bond that develops between a mother and her child whenever chronic illness is involved. The bond is as strong as any relationship in the world. If a child gets sick, mothers can attribute blame to themselves, even when they’re blameless. The emotional void that accompanies helplessness is, for a mother, the worst feeling in the world. Sometimes all a mom can do is rub their child’s back and tell them everything is all right.

Janice told Junior that no matter how bad his illness got, a time comes when he must move forward. She wanted Junior to be independent, self-sufficient and carry himself with pride. Early on, she instilled his no-limits attitude in the face of serious illness. The long-term prognosis of sickle cell anemia was unknown. But as long as he walked the Earth, Junior knew he’d never limit himself or refuse an opportunity.

The quest for good grades was one of Janice’s motivational tools she learned as a youth. Your grades, Janice said, must be better than the lifestyle he chose for himself.

I know you like living a nice lifestyle and you enjoy nice things, Janice would say. Then you’ve got to earn A’s and B’s in school.

If Junior’s report card ever included a D or F in any subject, she’d, in his own words, tell me what time it is.

It was a wise method to teach a pre-teen about achievement. Janice’s logic was more about thinking smartly than it was about getting whipped on the backside.

She had to be tough on me, Junior said, because daddy wasn’t around. He was out there coaching all the time.

At Junior’s young age, Janice knew exactly when to be mom and when to be friend. She folded both perfectly and with equal balance. When he first started to notice the opposite sex in school, Junior knew whom to ask.

Just be nice to those girls, Janice told her son, and they’ll be nice to you.

Junior was fighting the same battles of any teenage boy. He wanted to fit in. He tried to unlock the mysteries of the opposite sex. He wanted to learn what it means to be a man. All the while, he had an illness that made his experiences uniquely different from the average teenager. Janice knew her son would live a different life.

1:10 Dream Job

Sports writing can seem like the coolest job on the planet. You know what? It is.

But there are drawbacks. Sports writers don’t get much respect, a reality that didn’t occur to me as a fresh-faced journalism student at the University of Minnesota. The job of a sports writer is polarizing. Readers either want your job or hate your guts. The people who beg for free tickets are usually the same folks demanding your termination from behind an Internet pseudonym. I must enjoy punishment. The more time I worked as a sports writer, the more attractive the job became.

Is there any coincidence that Hollywood’s coolest actors of all-time played characters who were sports writers? Spencer Tracy did alongside another newspaper scribe played by Katherine Hepburn in Woman of the Year. Walter Matthau will always be best known for playing the cranky and lovable New York City sports columnist Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple. The coolest of them all, Humphrey Bogart, personified a down-on-his-luck sports writer in The Harder They Fall.

What do sports writers actually do? My family often asked me that question. Before learning the finer points of the newspaper business, my family asked questions like, Did you really talk to so-and-so, even though the person’s comments were in my story. The reading audience assumes if one calls himself a sports writer, they must know everything there is to know in the world of sports. My brother Darrell, who is a huge fan of the Baltimore Ravens, asked me once to name the backup left tackle of his favorite NFL team.

I have no clue, I told my brother. Why would I know that?

You’re supposed to know that kind of stuff, he mocked. And you call yourself a sports writer?

Most sports writers have a passing knowledge of the entire sports landscape. National sports columnists such as Bill Plaschke and Christine Brennan are paid to follow the entire world of sports. They bring a deeper knowledge about all-things sports. But when it comes to specific knowledge, beat writers are different. Beat writers, both college and pro, possess a more limited view of sports. They generally have little time for anything beyond the team and league they cover.

If you ask a reporter who covers the New York Yankees a question about the University of Kentucky men’s basketball team, they’ll probably sound uninformed. But that same Yankees reporter should be able to tell you everything there is to know about every prospect in the team’s minor league system.

I could only hope that, one day, an editor would offer me the rare opportunity to have a beat, like covering the Kentucky Wildcats or New York Yankees, all to myself.

The reality of a sports writer usually doesn’t mirror the fantasy world of the silver screen. Outsiders don’t see the holidays spent away from family, the overtime worked without the overtime pay and puny paychecks that make you question if there’s any financial benefit at all to being a newspaper reporter.

Starring in the last feature film he ever made before his death, Bogart said it best while playing the character of a once-famous sports writer. Bogart’s character, named Eddie Willis, was lured by the promise of a big payoff from a corrupt boxing promoter while mired in the dusk of his writing career.

A newspaper job pays a living, said Willis. I need a bank account.

1:11 Mother’s Love

T! A! K! E!

Take, take, take that ball away!

Look around. From the right and to the left, not an empty seat in the house. Students and spectators are watching the spectacle before them. They’re celebrating like it’s 1999.

For crying out loud, it’s a college basketball game on a weeknight in Durham, N.C.

The arms of the cheering students flail wildly like a conductor at Hollywood Bowl. The cheerleaders are bouncing around without a care. When the referee calls for a timeout, the brass section of the school band shrieks as loudly as a Midwest tornado warning.

Amongst the students is one fan too young to be a student. It’s Greg Junior, the son of the home team’s coach, sitting next to his mom. Jackson’s family has always been his personal cheering section.

Junior and his mom were regulars at McDougald-McLendon Gym on the campus of North Carolina Central University, in the heart of the Raleigh-Durham black community. The whole atmosphere, from the players on the floor to the crowd cheering in the stands, was intoxicating. The highlight for the Jacksons was watching dad work the sidelines. The cheers of mom and son from behind the home bench were a regular accompaniment to the craziness of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a Division II conference for historically black colleges.

When you put a whole lot of black people in one area they are bound to be entertained, Junior said.

The CIAA, known to regulars as the See-Eye-Double-A, is relatively unknown, but it carries traditions that few athletic conferences anywhere can boast. In its heyday during the 1960’s, the rivalries of the CIAA were the most intense among black college sports. Winston-Salem State versus Shaw University. Saint Augustine’s versus Virginia State. Ironically, its shortfall is the one characteristic that helped firmly root its rivalries. The Division II level isn’t known by the mainstream. Marketing a Division II conference is an inherently tough sell simply because its championships will always be secondary to Division I, the highest level for college sports.

Try telling that to the people who attend lesser-known schools like North Carolina Central.

I’d never been anything like it before, Junior said about attending his dad’s games. The players are the stars. It was my NBA.

Not even the Division II kiss of death diminished the CIAA. Think about the legacy left by the defunct American Basketball Association. Fans of the ABA’s Kentucky Colonels, Denver Nuggets and Pittsburgh Pipers brought the same heated passion that fans of the CIAA brought to their schools.

When you’re sick, a need is created for an activity that takes your mind off the troubles brought by disease. The games of the CIAA were an oasis for Junior as he learned to cope with sickle cell anemia. Watching his dad coach at Central was the focal point Junior needed to get his mind off his illness. It did something else for him, too. Watching his dad planted the idea that, one day, he’d be well enough to play for his dad.

Daddy, that’s going to be me out there someday.

God won’t let me down, Daddy.

He told me I’d play for you.

One day, I will.

1:12 The Agate Weasel

The journey to become a beat writer started in the lowliest position on a newspaper’s sports staff. Agate clerk is a job aptly named. Agate is the tiny typeface used on the agate page, historically one of the last pages of a daily sports section. The agate page is where readers can find all the necessary stuff like baseball box scores, transactions and league standings. The Times-Advocate agate page also had daily reports of fish counts, horse racing odds and local surfing conditions. To me, the agate page was special because it was a way to get your foot in the door. Doing agate meant you were on the staff and mastering the delicate art of deadline. Best of all, editing the agate page brought opportunities to write.

Before Twitter transformed the morning newspaper into 140 words and a cloud of dust, pages like ours at the T-A were constructed using paper, scissors and hot wax. Sports editor John Bisognano was in desperate need of a new agate clerk the day he called. I was a student at Palomar Community College in North County, San Diego, and busy following its national championship winning football team for the student-run weekly newspaper.

The quarterback of the Comets was Tommy Luginbill, a quiet leader whose father was, at the time, the football coach at San Diego State University. Tommy recorded more than 4,000 passing yards in one season for coach Tom Craft and his score-at-will spread offense, which earned him a shot to play at Georgia Tech University. It’s funny watching the younger Luginbill these days working as an analyst for ESPN. Those of us at the Palomar College newspaper didn’t know Tommy as a big talker.

At the time, Bisognano