SHOOT THE MOON
W
HITE MEN IN SUITS FOLLOW FELIPE LOPEZ
everywhere he goes. Felipe lives in Mott Haven, in the South Bronx. He is a junior at Rice High School, which is on the corner of 124th Street and Lenox Avenue, in Harlem, and he plays guard for the school basketball team, the Rice Raiders. The white men are ubiquitous. They rarely miss one of Felipe’s games or tournaments. They have absolute recall of his best minutes of play. They are authorities on his physical condition. They admire his feet, which are big and pontoon-shaped, and his wrists, which have a loose, silky motion. Not long ago, I sat with the white men at a game between Rice and All Hallows High School. My halftime entertainment was listening to a debate between two of them—a college scout and a Westchester contractor who is a high school basketball fan—about whether Felipe had grown a half inch over Christmas break. “I know this kid,” the scout said as the second half started. “A half inch is not something I would miss.” The white men believe that Felipe is the best high school basketball player in the country. They often compare him to Michael Jordan, and are betting he will become one of the greatest basketball players to emerge from New York City since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. This conjecture provides them with suspended, savory excitement and a happy premonition. Following Felipe is like hanging around with someone you think is going to win the lottery someday.
At the moment, Felipe is six feet five. He would like to be six feet seven. His shoes are size twelve. He buys his pants at big-and-tall-men stores. His ears, which are small and high-set, look exaggeratedly tiny, because he keeps his hair shaved close to his skull. He has blackish brown eyes and a big, vivid tongue—I know this only because his tongue sometimes sticks out when he is playing hard, and against his skin, which is very dark, it looks like a pink pennant. His voice is slurry; all his words have round edges. He is as skinny as a bean pole, and has long shins and thin forearms and sharp, chiseled knees. His hands are gigantic. Walking down the street, he gets a lot of looks because of his height, but he is certainly not a horse of a kid—not one of those man-size boys who fleshed out in fifth grade and whose adult forms are in place by the time they’re thirteen. He is all outline: He doesn’t look like a stretched-out average-size person—he looks like a sketch of a huge person which hasn’t yet been colored in.
On the court, Felipe’s body seems unusually well organized. His movements are quick and liquid. I have seen him sail horizontally through thin air. High school players are often rough and lumbering, and they mostly shoot flat-footed, but Felipe has an elegant, buoyant game. He floats around the edge of the court and then springs on the ball and sprints away. When he moves toward the basket, it looks as if he were speed skating, and then, suddenly, he rises in the air, lingers, and shoots. His shot is smooth and lovely, with a loopy arc. Currently, he averages twenty-six points and nine rebounds per game, and he is within striking distance of the all-time high school scoring record for New York State. He has great court vision, soft hands, a brisk three-point shot, and the speed to take the ball inside and low. He is usually the fastest man in the fast break. He can handle the ball like a point guard, and he beats bigger players defensively, because of his swiftness and his body control. When he is not on a court, though, the way he walks is complicated and sloppy. He seems to walk this way on purpose, to make light of his size and disguise his grace.
Before I met Felipe, people told me I would find him cuddly. Everything I knew about him—that he is a
boy,
that he is a
teenage
boy, that he is a six-foot-five-teenage-boy
jock
—made this pretty hard to believe, but it turns out to be true. He is actually the sweetest person I know. At some point during our time together, it occurred to me that he could be a great basketball hustler, because he seems naïve and eager—the ideal personality for attracting competitive big shots on the basketball court. It happens that he is not the least bit of a hustler. But he is also not nearly as naïve and eager as he appears. He once told me that he likes to make people think of him as a clown, because then they will never accuse him of being a snob. He also said that he likes to be friendly to everyone, so that no one will realize he’s figuring out whom he can trust.
Felipe spoke no English at all when he moved to New York from the Dominican Republic, four years ago, but he quickly picked up certain phrases, including “crash the boards,” “he’s bugging out,” “get the hell out of the paint,” and “oh, my goodness.” Now he speaks English comfortably, with a rich Dominican accent—the words tumble and click together, like stones being tossed in a polisher. “Oh, my goodness” remains his favorite phrase. It is a utility expression that reveals his modesty, his manners, his ingenuousness, and his usual state of mind, which is one of pleasant and guileless surprise at the remarkable nature of his life. I have heard him use it to comment on the expectation that he will someday be a rich and famous player in the NBA, and on the fact that he was recently offered half a million dollars by people from Spain to put aside his homework and come play in their league, and on the fact that he is already considered a seminal national export by citizens of the Dominican Republic, who are counting on him to be the first Dominican in the NBA, and on the fact that he is growing so fast that he once failed to recognize his own pants. Sometimes he will use the phrase in circumstances where his teammates and friends might be inclined to say something more dynamic. One night this winter, I was sitting around at school with Felipe and his teammates, watching a videotape of old Michael Jordan highlights. The tape had been edited for maximum excitement, and most of the boys on the team were responding with more and more baroque constructions of foul language. At one point, Jordan was shown leaping past the Celtics center Robert Parish, and someone said, “Yo, feature that, bro! He’s busting the Chief’s face.”
“Busting his fucking face,” another one said.
“Busting his goddam big-ass face.”
“He’s got it going on. Now Jordan’s going to bust his foul-loving big-ass mama’s-boy dope black ass.”
On the tape, Jordan slammed the ball through the hoop and Parish crumpled to the floor. While the other boys were applauding and swearing, Felipe moved closer to the television and then said, admiringly, “Oh, my goodness.”
FELIPE’S LIFE IS
unusually well populated. He is very close to his family. He is named Luis Felipe, after his father. His older brother Anthony is one of the managers of the Rice High School team. Anthony is a square-shouldered, avid man of twenty-five who played amateur basketball in the Dominican Republic and in New York until his ankle was badly injured in a car accident. Until last month, when he was laid off, he worked at a Manhattan print shop and had a boss who appreciated basketball and tolerated the time Anthony spent with the team. Anthony is rarely away from Felipe’s side, and when he is there he is usually peppering him with directions and commentary in a hybrid of Spanish and English: “
Felipe, mal, muy mal! Cómo estás
you go so aggressive to a layup?” A couple of times a month, Anthony makes the rounds of Felipe’s teachers to see if his B average is holding up. “If he’s not doing well, then I go back and let my people know,” Anthony says. “It’s nice, it’s beautiful to be a superstar, but if he doesn’t work hard he doesn’t play.” Once, Felipe’s father forbade him to travel to a tournament because he had neglected to wash the dishes. This made Felipe cry, but in hindsight he is philosophical about it. “He was right,” he says. “I didn’t do my dishes.” Felipe is also close to Lou DeMello, his coach at Rice, and to Dave Jones, his coach with the Gauchos, a basketball organization in the Bronx which he plays for during the summer, and to Louis d’Almeida, the founder of the Gauchos. Felipe says he sometimes gets basketball advice from his mother, Carmen, and from Maura Beattie, a teacher at Rice who tutors him in English. Neither of them plays. “You know what, though?” Felipe says. “They know something.” His primary hobby is sleeping, but his other pastime is talking on the phone for hours to his girlfriend, who is an American, a resident of Brooklyn, and a basketball fan.
Sometimes his life seems overpopulated. He has so far received four crates of letters from college coaches and recruiters pitching woo at him. Some make seductive mention of the large seating capacities of their arenas. Basketball camp directors call regularly, saying that they would like Felipe Lopez to be in attendance. Officials of Puerto Rico’s summer basketball league have requested the honor of his presence this summer. There are corporate marketing executives who would very much like to be his friends. Not everyone crowding into his life wishes him well. There are people who might wittingly or unwittingly mislead him. Felipe has been warned by his father, for example, never to have sex without a condom, because some girls who pretend to like him might really have appraised him as a lucrative paternity suit. Last year, Felipe and another player were invited to appear in a Nintendo television commercial, and the commercial nearly cost them their college athletic eligibility, because no one had warned them that accepting money for a commercial was against NCAA regulations. There are people who are jealous of Felipe. There are coaches whose hearts he has broken, because they’re not at one of the colleges Felipe is interested in—Florida State, Syracuse, St. John’s, Seton Hall, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, UCLA, Indiana, Arizona, Ohio State, and Kansas. There are coaches who put aside all other strategy except Keep Felipe Lopez Away from the Ball. Some opponents will go out of their way to play him hard. There are kids on his own team who have bitter moments about Felipe. And there are contrarians, who would like to get in early on a backlash and look clairvoyant and hype-resistant by declaring him, at only eighteen and only a junior in high school, already overrated. His response to all this is to be nice to everyone. I have never seen him angry, or even peeved, but when he isn’t playing well his entire body droops and he looks completely downcast. It is an alarming sight, because he looks so hollowed out anyway.
“Wait till this kid gets a body,” Coach DeMello likes to say. During practice, DeMello will sometimes jump up and down in front of Felipe and yell, “Felipe! Make yourself
big
!” The best insult I ever heard DeMello hurl at Felipe was during a practice one afternoon when Felipe was playing lazily. DeMello strode onto the court, looked up at Felipe, and said acidly, “You’re six-five, but you’re trapping like you’re
five-eleven.
” Anthony Lopez can hardly wait until Felipe gets a body, so sometimes during the offseason he will take him to the steep stairway at the 155th Street subway station, in the Bronx, and make him run up and down the hundred and thirty steps a few times to try to speed the process along. Felipe is less than crazy about this exercise, although he appreciates the advantages that more bulk might give him: “When I first came here, I could tell the guys were looking at me and thinking, Who is this skinny kid? Then they would say, ‘Hey, let’s’—excuse my language—‘bust his ass.’ ”
Felipe’s body is an unfinished piece of work. It gets people thinking. Tom Konchalski, a basketball scout who follows high schools in the Northeast, suggested recently that if Felipe ever wanted to give up basketball he could be a world-class sprinter. Coach DeMello said to me once that, much as he hated to admit it, he thought Felipe had the perfect pitcher’s body. Felipe’s mother told me that even though Felipe is now a fast-break expert, she thought he should sharpen his ability to penetrate to the basket and go for the big finish—say, a windmill slam dunk. I once asked her whose style of play she wanted Felipe to emulate, and she pointed to a picture of Michael Jordan and said, in Spanish, “If he would eat more, he could be like the man who jumps.”
Felipe’s father, who played amateur baseball in the Dominican Republic, thought he saw in his son the outlines of a first baseman, and steered Felipe toward baseball when he was little. But Felipe was hit in the nose by a wild throw, and decided that, in spite of its popularity in the Dominican Republic and the success Dominican ballplayers have had in the United States, baseball was not his game. Maura Beattie, his English tutor, is an excellent tennis player, and one day, just for fun, she took Felipe with her to the courts. She was curious to see if someone with Felipe’s build and abilities could master a racquet sport. He beat her. It was the first time he’d held a tennis racquet in his life. Another time, the two of them went to play miniature golf in Rockaway, and Felipe, who had never held a putter before, made a hole in one. Some of this prowess can be attributed to tremendous physical coordination and the biomechanical advantages of being tall and thin and limber. Felipe Lopez is certainly a born athlete. But he may also be one of those rarer cases—a person who is just born lucky, whose whole life seems an effortless conveyance of dreams, and to whom other people’s dreams adhere. This aura of fortune is so powerful that it is easy to forget that for the time being, and for a while longer, Felipe Lopez is still just an immigrant teenager who lives in a scary neighborhood in the South Bronx and goes to high school in Harlem, where bad things happen every day.
Currently, there are 518,000 male high school basketball players in the United States. Of these, only 19,000 will end up on college teams—not even 4 percent. Less than 1 percent will play for Division One colleges—the most competitive. The present NBA roster has 367 players, and each year only 40 or 50 new players are drafted. What these numbers forebode is disappointment for many high school basketball players. That disappointment is disproportionate among black teenagers. A recent survey of high school students by Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society reported that 59 percent of black teenage athletes thought they would continue to play on a college team, compared with 39 percent of white teenagers. Only 16 percent of the white athletes expected that they would play for the pros; 43 percent of the blacks expected that they would, and nearly half of all the kids said they thought it would be easier for black males to become professional basketball players than to become lawyers or doctors. Scouts have told me that everyone on the Rice team will probably be able to get a free college education by playing basketball, and so far all the players have received recruiting letters from several schools. The scouts have also said that it will require uncommonly hard work for any of the boys on the team other than Felipe to ascend to the NBA.