Fathers & Sons & Sports (3 page)

The second day was all about clothes. The Boys Club kids wore oversize pants, oversize shirts and undersize undershirts, while Tebucky’s kids wore snug-fitting outfits from Gap. Young
Tebucky remembers feeling self-conscious, remembers thinking, “I’m not comfortable. I’m not used to being around people from the projects.” There’d been some ridicule that day—the name Prep came up again as he hung out—and when the kids got home that night, they decided there would not be ridicule again.

The third day was all about fitting in. Young Tebucky and Malique had always watched hip-hop videos—“I liked the clothes they wore,” young Tebucky says—but were never motivated to wear XXXLs until that week. And when big Tebucky took them to the Boys Club, he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Their pants were hanging down and their underwear was showing,” he remembers. “They had little earrings, little chains. They walked out of the car like they were Puff Daddy.”

The fourth day was all about sports, particularly for young Tebucky. He was the shyest of the three kids, the one his mom was worried sick about. “I thought, oh my god. We’re putting them in with ghetto kids and haters,” she says. “And I was especially worried for young Tebucky. He talks very proper. Even though he started dressing a little gangsta style, you could tell this boy’s from the suburbs; he’s not from the hood.”

The minute he started playing at the Boys Club, young Tebucky knew it was a different game. Elbows were flying. If someone made a sweet spin move or blocked a shot, the players would ooh and ah. Young Tebucky never saw that in the ’burbs. At the Boys Club, everybody on the court got a nickname. It’d be
Melon Head or Peanut Head or Something Head. Always something with the head.

This is what young Tebucky was learning at the Boys Club: the fine art of talking trash. Big Tebucky says he didn’t want to turn any of his kids into “thugs” and he could tell they still knew right from wrong. But he wanted them to speak up, particularly young Tebucky.

By the end of that spring, big Tebucky ended the Boys Club experiment. None of the kids had been bullied and none of them had become the Bank of America. Letesha, the oldest, soon signed up for the school volleyball and softball teams. Malique signed up for Pee Wee football, and began wearing do-rags and sucking all day on lollipops. He was still a smart, polite kid under the getup, but he couldn’t help it now: he had to wear black every day.

But young Tebucky remained somewhat of an introvert, so late that same spring, his dad made him try out for New Britain’s inner-city AAU team. The team was run by big Tebucky’s high school coach, Stan Glowiak, but young Tebucky was convinced he wouldn’t make the team. “You think I was gonna cut him and deal with his old man?” Glowiak says. “No way.”

They played a doubleheader one morning, and during the first game young Tebucky pulled up lame with a blister on his foot. His new sneakers were the cause, and it looked like he was done for the day. But just when his dad was about to come out of the stands to call his son a Pudding Pop, young Tebucky borrowed
Glowiak’s kicks—beat-up running shoes—and suited up for the second game. Scored thirty-six points, too. Got hammered into a padded wall and hammered the guy back. Big Tebucky pumped a fist. “If it weren’t for the Boys Club, I’d have sat that game out,” young Tebucky says. “The Boys Club woke me up.”

That August, big Tebucky went back to New Orleans for the season, leaving his family behind in Connecticut. Other than during the bye week, he barely saw them. He threatened to put a surveillance camera in the mansion and watch them via the Internet, but it was all talk. So when the season ended—with him about to go to Miami as a free agent—he had no idea what he was coming home to: sheltered kids or independent kids.

Letesha was fine. Some girls at school had begun calling her “rich bitch,” but she didn’t back down. The rift was mostly over a boy, and, in the end, she got the boy. And invitations to the mall.

Malique was fine too. He had the confidence, as a fourth-grader, to crash a seventh-grade dance at a community center. And in his do-rag, he won the dance contest.

As for young Tebucky, he was in size twelve sneakers now, same as his dad. As a 5′10″ twelve-year-old, he could grab the rim now, same as his dad. He cleaned his sneakers with a toothbrush now, same as his dad. He played pickup ball against twenty-year-olds now, same as his dad.

Right after the season, the two Tebuckys played a game of one-on-one, and big Tebucky realized there’d be no need for the
Boys Club anymore. Not only did young Tebucky foul his father hard on the neck and elbow him hard in the chest, he had a name for the old man:

Bean Head.

It’s always something with the head.

Tom Friend has been a senior writer at
ESPN the Magazine
since its inception in 1998. He has previously worked for
The New York Times, The Washington Post,
the
Los Angeles Times,
the
National Sports Daily, The Kansas City Star,
and the
San Jose Mercury News.
Friend has also authored two books
—Educating Dexter
and
Jack of All Trades.
His work has been reprinted in
Best American Sports Writing
and he was named one of America’s top twenty sportswriters by
Men’s Journal.
He is a graduate of the University of Missouri and lives in Southern California with his wife and two children
.

n the patio of the house I’ve moved out of, my soon-to-be ex-wife dribbles a ball, counting down the time. “Five seconds, four …” Elaine sets her feet and heaves a shot that bows the plastic rim before rattling off. I rebound her miss off the backboard. Luke, our seven-year-old only child, stares at me, befuddled. He isn’t used to seeing me in his mother’s yard, almost two years after our separation, and is even less used to seeing us horse around as if those years, and the last few of our
eleven-year marriage, hadn’t been deadly. But it’s the first mild evening of a belated spring, and Elaine and I are gamely making an effort. Not merely to get on better, but to draw him out of the house, where he is more and more the hostage of his disorder.

Sizing a free throw, I glance at Luke, who has begun to point with both hands to the door. We’ve been out here five minutes, and already the uh-oh moment, his balky signal that he’s had it with novelty. What he wants, with a tireless monomania, is the same thing he’s wanted for the past four years: to be alone with his TV/VCR. There, he will swap Elmo tapes in and out of the slot while hopping up and down, flapping his arms. Left alone for any time, he’ll strip off his clothes, then alternate between flapping his arms and fondling himself. With my stress level spiking—I am always clenched now, conditioned by his history of seizures and meltdowns to anticipate the worst—I hit upon a thought. Tossing a flat shot off the chest-high rim, I grab the ball and hand it to him. Luke stares at it, turning it this way and that, as if trying to recall this Spalding fellow whose name appears between the seams. “Jam it!” says his mother. “Throw it down!” For encouragement, she pelts him with kisses.

He reflects a while longer, looks at both of us, and tosses the ball behind him in the weeds. “Bye,” he says, and starts up the stairs, unbuttoning himself as he goes. He stops and waves, my receding son. “Bye,” he says. “Buh-bye.”

From the beginning the signs were bad, and they worsened as we went forward. Luke was floppy at birth, with muscles so weak
his mouth wouldn’t latch to his mother’s breast. He was late rolling over, later sitting up, and was so late learning to crawl we thought he had cerebral palsy. Those first years were a roundelay of doctors, with each more stumped than the last. Meanwhile, time passed, and Luke’s companions stood up on two legs and left him, running after the other kids in the park. Here was a parent’s vision of hell: a child whose nameless condition was so dire that two-year-olds had cast him out.

We swept in quickly and found therapists and teachers, getting him home-based treatments early on. Disabled though he was, I was fixed on raising a son who could delight in his body like other kids. Even before he crawled I put him on the floor, rolling balls to him in our master bedroom. He had a natural arm and loved playing catch, though he lacked the least instinct for cupping his hands and seeing the ball safely into his grasp. Still, I took heart and bought him the equipment: a Little Tikes backboard with a weighted base, a football net with a ball he could kick (with help) and a set of oversize bowling pins that he thought were a scream to knock down.

Approaching his third birthday, he suddenly started walking, and our hopes briefly jumped up with him. Soon he was running, and I took him to the park with our trove of balls to try to engage him with boys his age. It worked for a while; he got a kick out of making other kids chase down his errant throws. But one day a boy plucked the ball from his hands, and Luke howled as though he’d been slugged. It was a tantrum from hell, wild-eyed and
gasping, the other parents looking on in horror. In a matter of weeks he lost interest in the park, and jerked away when I drove up to it, screaming his one word: “No!” The greater loss, though, was his pleasure in playing ball, which was replaced by the VCR. Before long he’d doubled his working vocabulary, grunting “Elmo” (actually, “Uh-mo”) until I caved.

That summer there was another significant development: Luke finally had a proper diagnosis. He has, we learned, a syndrome called Fragile X, a single-gene mutation at the base of the X chromosome that wreaks a range of nervous-system havoc. That flawed gene, identified in 1991 through an outgrowth of the Human Genome Project, fails to make an important protein that regulates other proteins in the brain. No one knows the exact function it serves, but without it key brain cells develop abnormally and their ability to send their signals is impaired. Physical manifestations are, for the most part, innocuous (long faces, prominent ears, and in males, enlarged testes), and kids so afflicted are usually otherwise healthy and can expect to live to old age. But the effect on developing brains is profound, a cure through gene therapy is decades off, and a promising class of experimental drugs is just now entering human trials. For the estimated 90,000 sufferers in America alone, relief is years away.

In its mildest, which is to say rarest, form, Fragile X causes modest retardation and a host of social dysfunctions: shyness, slurred and/or repetitive speech, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors, to name just some. In the middle range, those symptoms
are more pronounced and often appended by neuropsychiatric woes: panic, phobias, sleep disorders, and severe overreactions to bright light and loud noises. And then there are the kids in the bottom bracket whose nervous systems are under sensory assault. Picture having to live in a video arcade with the volume and wattage up full, where everyone around you is racing past, speaking Mandarin at the top of their lungs. Your shirt feels like Brillo, your shoes like cement, and the breeze on your skin like the thwack of a soaking towel that’s been left to chill in the fridge.

That, in a nutshell, is my little boy, who, like many of his profoundly affected peers, has autism, epilepsy and an IQ we can’t measure because he can’t, or won’t, follow instructions. He is months or possibly years from being toilet-trained, eats with his hands and has no capacity to tie his shoes, though he is Harry Houdini himself at getting out of them.

We have tried (and tried) to ease his symptoms with all the conventional treatments, but have gotten very little bang for our hard-earned bucks in speech, occupational and physical therapies. The only thing that’s helped, and that just barely, is a mix of powerful drugs: Luvox for mood swings, Abilify for attention-deficit problems and Trileptal for seizure disorder. Forty years ago most kids like mine were raised in institutions. Luke may still wind up in a residential school, coming home to Elaine or me on weekends. For now, we’re doing all we can to fend that off, day by day.

One night, after an hour of ritualized groveling to get Luke
to sleep, I collapse on the couch to watch TV. Spinning the dial, I happen upon a profile of a man named Izzy Paskowitz. A goateed, lion-maned surfer who was a longboard champion in the early nineties, Paskowitz runs a bustling surf camp on the beaches of San Diego with his wife Danielle and several of his eight siblings. He and Danielle also founded something called Surfers Healing, a series of traveling one-day surf camps for autistic children. He has a kid so afflicted himself, a boy named Isaiah whose development was normal till he woke at eighteen months “changed totally.” His language was gone, he became agitated and began throwing tantrums that were hard to quell.