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in their social education had been a couple of years earlier, when the track team traveled to Chattanooga for a meet. Coincidentally, also in Chattanooga, a Briarcrest tennis player was playing a tournament at the fancy local country club. Sean thought the black kids at Briarcrest might benefit from some exposure to tennis and golf and other white country club sports; and he thought the Briarcrest tennis player would enjoy a cheering section. Gathering up all two of the black kids on the track team—which amounted to two thirds of the blacks at Briarcrest—he drove them to the Chattanooga Country Club. Sure enough, it was, for them, an entirely new experience. Neither had ever seen a tennis match in person. And while they had no idea how to keep score, they quickly worked out that the Briarcrest kid was making mincemeat of his opponent. After each point they’d stand and holler and raise their fists:
Woo!
Woo!
Woo!
Rather than explain tennis club etiquette, of which he vaguely disapproved anyway, Sean let them have their fun. Between sets they ran over to the concession stand where a little old lady sniffed at them, “I just think y’all are in bad taste.” To which one of the kids replied, “You must be rootin’ for that other little white guy.” The lady went off in a huff and the kids returned to the match, where the Briarcrest player kept on winning. The breaking point came when one of the kids stood up and screamed: “Keep on! You beatin’ him like a two dollar whore!” Sean tried to drag the boy by his oversized jersey back into his seat, but before he could get him down, the boy spotted the little old lady in the stands, glaring at him, and screamed: “It’s got to be killing ya, ma’am! It’s got to be killing ya!”
Afterward, Sean realized that it had been awhile since he had had so much fun. And by the time he met Big Mike, he had a new unofficial title: Life Guidance Counselor to whatever black athlete stumbled into the Briarcrest Christian School. The black kids reminded him, in a funny way, of himself.
Sean knew what it meant to be the poor kid in a private school, because he’d been one himself. First off, none of the rich kids realized that one big difference between public schools and private schools is that, in the public schools, lunch was free. Every day for several years in high school Sean arrived without lunch, or money to buy it, and bummed what he could from friends. “When food is finite,” he said, “you’d be surprised how much time you spend thinking about it.”
He also knew what it was like to think of sports as a meal ticket. His sense that his future depended on his athletic ability was driven home during his freshman year in high school, when his father, a legendary but ill-paid basketball coach, suffered a stroke and ceased to function. Sean had adored his father. From the age of three, when he had grabbed a basketball and followed him to work in the morning, he had spent the better part of his life on his father’s heels, soaking in everything he could about basketball and life. Twenty-five years later he would say, “Everything I do is still all about my daddy.” And yet when he lost his father, he, and everyone around him, went on about their lives as if the earth had not just opened and swallowed the most important person in his life. The fancy New Orleans private school was still, for him, free; lunch was not.
He’d left New Orleans for the University of Mississippi on a basketball scholarship. When he set out for Ole Miss he was a six one, 147-pound exception; he wasn’t even sure he could cut it as a college basketball player. When he walked off the court after his final game, he’d set the NCAA record for career assists; and, twenty-five years later, he still holds all meaningful SEC assist records. After he’d led Ole Miss to its first (and still only) SEC Championship, in 1981, a photograph of him, perched on top of the rim and bleeding from a cut on his