All the Dreams We've Dreamed by Rus Bradburd

Author:Rus Bradburd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2018-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

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All three of Tim Triplett’s coaches at Crane had departed, so while he’d only played a single season at Marshall—half a season, really—he had to keep somebody abreast of his new college adventure. Shawn was still struggling with rehab and not involved with the team regularly. Triplett reverted to the Marshall system of texting or calling Cotton regularly, simply to ask how the Commandos were coming along.

And just because Triplett’s high school days were behind him didn’t mean he couldn’t fall back into his over-the-top leadership role. That December he noticed his old team was playing an important game on a neutral court, at UIC. Triplett bought a ticket, and he came down from the stands to join the Commandos’ bench, where he parked himself next to Coach Cotton. “Tim joined the huddle and everything,” Kashanna Haggard recalls. “He was coaching the team.”

Mike Harris estimates he had Triplett in practice well over a hundred times, including open gyms, weight training, and conditioning. Although Triplett was one of the smallest players and not the best shooter, Harris appreciated his mindset. “You never had to coach his effort,” he says. “And some kids you have to train, teach them the tricks of the game and how to get an advantage. Not Triplett.”

Triplett reenrolled for the spring semester. The guard was never late, never disrespectful, and was a positive influence at practice with his buzz-saw style. The coach recognized the bigger challenges Triplett faced. “You’re going to have to leave the street alone,” Harris would often tell him.

By that fall, Triplett’s mother had moved back to Milwaukee, so he was no longer staying with her at the Adams Street apartment, the address listed on his application form. Before she moved, Jutuan Brown noticed her son was getting a slow start to Wright some mornings. “Get some rest and quit doing what you’re doing at night,” she told him. Later, even from Wisconsin, she fretted about Tim, wondering where he was after practice ended. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do,” she says. “He wanted to be the man. I’m grown now, you don’t have to keep telling me what to do he would say.”

One day after practice, Triplett asked Harris for a lift home. Now, he told his coach, he was living on the next street over from Adams—but this was a very different address, location, and feel, not on the West Side at all. It was downtown Chicago. “Here’s where I live now,” Triplett announced as they turned onto LaSalle Street.

“It was right near the Willis Tower,” Harris says.

A popular area for renters in their early thirties, Triplett’s new residence sat within the 60606 zip code, where the residents are 94 percent white and have a college education. The value of the average one- or two-bedroom condo is about $350,000; the average salary for residents is $125,000 a year, more than twice the state’s average.

In other words, Triplett didn’t at all fit the demographic of the yuppie class living there.

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