Tigerland by Wil Haygood

Author:Wil Haygood [Haygood, Wil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

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All those around the state who had been hoping for the dream matchup between the two most decorated players in Ohio—Canton’s Nick Weatherspoon and East’s Ed Ratleff—had their wish. Jim Turvene, the Dayton Chaminade coach whose team had just been whipped by Weatherspoon and Canton McKinley, certainly sounded as if he were siding with Canton McKinley in the matchup: “The way [the Canton McKinley team members are] playing now, they’re going to be a tough team to beat in the finals.” Spice, the Libbey coach, announced his own feelings about the potency of the Canton McKinley team and the upcoming game. “It’ll probably go right down to the wire, much like this one did. East has a great basketball team,” he offered, “but McKinley has an excellent team, too.”

And so it would be that eleven months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., the black kids from East High would be going to the state championship game. It gave King’s old friend Rev. Phale Hale a reason to smile. The team gave East High principal Jack Gibbs a reason to smile. As he left the arena, Gibbs thought to himself how beautiful it would be if all the mothers of the East High players could come to the state championship game the next night. These were the mothers who had feared so much for these boys. These were the mothers who couldn’t get to the games because they were working on their hands and knees. They were fixing meals and ironing clothes for white kids. They were emptying trash cans for white families. They were the mothers who had left thank-you notes for the white families they worked for when they were given hand-me-down clothes for their own children to wear. They hadn’t gotten to many of the games because they didn’t have cars. Jack Gibbs knew some of the mothers worked on weekends out in Bexley and Upper Arlington. He couldn’t stop thinking about Lucy Lamar, how she had uprooted herself just so her son could keep his Afro, his pride, and play basketball.

Jack Gibbs went home that night and told his wife, Ruth, that he was going to start making phone calls right away. He was going to get the mothers of the boys to the state championship game.

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