Tanking to the Top by Yaron Weitzman

Author:Yaron Weitzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Embiid’s injury meant Okafor would open the season as the team’s starting center. He was impressive early on, racking up 26 points and seven rebounds in his NBA debut and scoring 20 or more points in five of his first eight games.

But there were problems bubbling beneath the surface.

“I was in a dark place,” he would say years later.

It all traced back to his childhood. One day, when he was just nine years old, Okafor was sitting in the living room of his Oklahoma home watching music videos on BET when his mother started coughing. He laughed. Dacresha Benton—“Dee” to family and friends—was always joking around. Benton gasped for air. Okafor laughed again. Two weeks earlier Benton, twenty-nine, had been diagnosed with bronchitis. Okafor thought it was funny how she was mocking herself. He figured he’d tease her back.

“I’m going to take your Oreos,” he said, knowing Benton hated when he raided the family’s snacks. He left for the kitchen, waiting for Benton to break character and tell him no. She kept wheezing, each breath more shallow and labored and painful than the one before. Okafor realized something was wrong. The family’s phone was broken. He and his half sister sprinted to a neighbor’s house to dial 911.

The ambulance arrived. Paramedics ripped open Benton’s shirt and applied CPR. She was whisked to the closest hospital. Sad and scared, Okafor sat in the waiting room alongside his sister, aunt, and grandmother, waiting for news. A doctor emerged. One of Benton’s lungs had collapsed. She was dead.

“It happened right in front of me,” Okafor would tell a reporter from Chicago magazine eight years later. “I’ve put myself in her shoes, thinking about what she must have been thinking: I’m suffering and he’s just looking at me, laughing.”

Okafor was asked in that interview if he had stopped blaming himself.

“Yeah,” Okafor initially replied. “But even now I still have to think, What if I could have known right off the bat that she wasn’t playing? She would still be here.”

Okafor’s parents were separated at the time, with his dad, Chukwudi “Chucky” Okafor, having moved back to his native Chicago. After Benton’s death, Jahlil went with him. Chucky had also grown up without a mother; his died of breast cancer when he was just eighteen months old, leaving his father, a Nigerian immigrant, alone on Chicago’s South Side with six kids. He often worked three jobs at once, and Chucky took advantage. He brawled. He helped steal cars. He attended five high schools in three years. He also grew to be 6-foot-5, and could have perhaps fulfilled his dream of playing basketball professionally had he not been kicked off numerous teams—high school and college—for various transgressions. He wound up playing for a junior college on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border, where he fell in love with a 6-foot-2 former high school basketball star. He and Dee raised Jahlil, along with Dee’s daughter from a previous relationship, in the tiny town of Moffett (population in 2005: 222), where Dee’s mother lived.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.