During my childhood and adolescence, my family—consisting of my three sisters and me, our mother, who was present in my early life only sporadically, and our stepfather—had lived in a series of houses, walk-ups, and flats, punctuated by intermittent separations and stays with a series of relatives, all within a four-block area. Finally, we had moved into a small house in a neighborhood considered to be somewhat upwardly mobile. It may have only been so in comparison to where we’d been living before, but this house was nonetheless “movin’ on up”—à la the Jefferson family, who still had another five years to go to get their own TV show. The TV on this particular day was, in fact, the focus of my attention, and key to my mood of happy expectation, not only because I was getting ready to watch the last of the two games played in the NCAA’s Final Four, but because I had the living room all to myself. This meant that I could hoot and holler all I wanted, and that I could talk out loud to myself if I so pleased, and answer myself right back. (My mother had this habit too. When others asked what she was doing, she’d always say, “Talking to someone with good sense.”)
Another cause for feeling good that day was that my mother happened to be the only other person at home. Even if she wasn’t sitting down beside me to watch the game but was somewhere nearby—busy ironing clothes in the adjacent dining room, as it so happened—
it was as if the house was breathing a sigh of relief for just the two of us to be there, something that almost never occurred, especially without my stepfather’s menacing presence.March Madness, which came every year at the end of the college basketball season, was always thrilling for me, and an excellent distraction from heavier thoughts I was having about the tightrope I was walking from the end of adolescence into manhood. The tournament was always full of surprises, Cinderella stories, and human drama, starting with the nation’s sixty-four top teams in thirty-two matchups as they rapidly whittled down to the Sweet Sixteen, then the Elite Eight, and ended up with the two games of the Final Four before the winners played for the championship title. All eyes this year were on how UCLA would fare in its first season without seven-footer Lew Alcindor (soon to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) after he had led them to three consecutive titles. The team that seemed destined to make sure UCLA didn’t go home with the championship this year was Jacksonville University, a heretofore unknown college program that boasted not one but two stars, Artis Gilmore and Pembrook Burrows III, both over seven feet tall. It was unusual enough at this time for players to hit the seven-foot mark, let alone to have two of them on the same team.
