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chin as he cut down the nets, appeared in the New York Times. At a college still trying to figure out why their white boys were being whipped so routinely by the other team’s black boys, he was an instant legend.
That was the joy; the misery was his essential powerlessness. He was at the mercy of a single man who specialized in tearing his players apart and leaving them in pieces. From the moment he had arrived at the Ole Miss gym, Sean realized that his coach had him trapped: he could only afford to stay in school so long as he played basketball, and he played at his coach’s pleasure. His entire identity hung in the balance. “From the age of five I had been trained to do this one thing, play basketball. And if I couldn’t do that, where did it leave me?” And this coach, who had him by the short hairs, loved nothing more than to give them a yank: threatening to bench him, pull his scholarship, humiliate him in front of his hometown crowd when the Ole Miss team played in New Orleans. Early in his freshman year, for instance, the team had traveled to Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, to play in a tournament. In the first game they beat Loyola Chicago; in the finals they got beaten badly by a nationally ranked Illinois State team. The game ended just before midnight, and they were supposed to drive the four hours to the St. Louis airport, then catch an early morning commercial flight back to Memphis. Sean had played every minute of both games with a torn cartilage in his knee, and afterwards had to be treated by trainers. When he emerged from the locker room, he found a fleet of cars and only one spot left in them, right beside his coach. No one else on the team wanted to sit next to the coach. “For the next four and a half hours,” he said, “not one word was spoken. Not one word. I got a cramp in my leg and I remember holding back a scream because I was afraid of getting in trouble.”
They caught their plane, and returned to Memphis, where a bus picked them up and carried them the rest of the way to Oxford, Mississippi. “We drove onto campus. There isn’t anyone there. It’s Christmas Day. It’s now eleven in the morning and we still haven’t slept. Coach gets up in the front of the bus and says, ‘Dressed, stretched, and taped. Thirty minutes.’ And I just remember going: ‘I don’t know about y’all but I haven’t slept.’”
Still, the players all trudged to the locker room, donned practice uniforms, and set out for the film room. That’s how practice always started: by watching films of their most recent performance and being humiliated by Coach. The players found their seats, the lights went down, and Coach entered the room. He always took a wide circle on his way to his lounge chair in the back: the players felt watched. “I had played forty minutes of both games,” Sean said. “My knee was swelled up as big as Dallas. We hadn’t slept. It’s my first Christmas away from home. Coach walked around so he was right behind me and stopped. Never once in four years did he call me ‘Sean.’ It was either ‘Buddy’ or ‘Twelve.’ Now he comes right up behind me and says,
“‘Hey Twelve. Merry Fucking Christmas.’
“The lights went out and I cried for the next forty-five minutes. The assistant coach literally sat there rubbing my back and patting me.”
For four years he’d played what he called “survival ball.” He had to play, or he couldn’t afford school. The New Jersey Nets drafted him in a late round to play in the NBA, but the desire had gone out of him. He left Ole Miss with a fiancée and a new religion. But he left without a penny.
Now, by the fall of 2002, he’d become, by just about every way they measured it in Memphis, a success. He’d been Born Again, and helped to create one of the fastest growing evangelical churches in Memphis, the Grace Evangelical Church. He’d married the Ole Miss cheerleader who, twenty-five years later, could still pass for an Ole Miss