Bio I wrote for a prospective employer

For people that wonder how or when I decided i wanted to be a writer, take a look at this bio I had to do for a job prospect. This is written from a sports perspective, but actually, sports was the first reason I wanted to write.

When I read it, I wonder if I was a lil too honest, especially about Pops and how he taught me to recognize some of the racial/social implications of sports. We'll see. One thing I won't do, however, is become one of those clowns that morph and assimilate just to get ahead. Sure, you have to adapt, but some niggas straight-up change personas. It's sickening.

Anyways, check it out:

I loved to read and loved to write, but for some reason I always hated book reports. I know that “hate is a strong word”, which is why I used it to describe the way I loathed book reports. There were books that I enjoyed – The Count of Monte Cristo; Things Fall Apart; Native Son – but too many times, the English teachers forced me to read and then write about a book I had no interest in, like Moby Dick.

Thank the heavens for Cliff’s Notes and some top-notch BS genes.
Perhaps that’s what made Mr. Duggan’s class so enjoyable. The three aforementioned enjoyable books, I read as part of his class’ curriculum.
I had Mr. Duggan my when I was a sophomore. He was a special teacher. Special, because he got us, he understood us.

I attended Buffalo’s City Honors High School, the toast of public education in New York State, since I was a 5th grader. CHS was a remarkable school, where bright kids of rich parents learned with overachieving ghetto-dwellers and everyone one in between. We were black, we were Asian, we were white, we were everything. We were smart and some of us were rather brilliant. Our teachers ran the gamut, too. Some old, some young; some stodgy, some hip; some sufficient, others memorable. But, for some reason, I was never a huge fan of my English teachers, even though English was my favorite subject. Mr. Duggan was the only memorable English teacher.

For me, in fact, he was life-changing. It was because of him that I decided to become a sports writer. And, it all started with a book report.

“Fab Five: Basketball, Trash Talk, the American Dream”
I used to talk sports with all my male teachers. Mr. Florey, Mr. Fitzpatrick, Mr. Francesco, all of them. So, when Mr. Duggan, like the cool teacher he was, allowed us to choose our own book for our last book report, he wasn’t surprised I chose a sports book.

“Mitch Albom? I thought you were a Wilbon guy,” I remember him saying.
He knew I loved the Sports Reporters show on ESPN. See, I used to kick it with him, not only about sports, but sports issues as well. To this day, he’ll tell anyone that I was Allen Iverson’s first fan outside of Hampton, Va. “But he’s a jailbird Vince,” he would say. “But maybe he shouldn’t be though, Mr. Duggan. And, I hear he’s gonna play for G’Town with Thompson. Wait ‘til you see him play,” I’d reply. (Georgetown was one of my other favorite squads.)
He also knew that Michigan’s Fab Five basketball team was my favorite since UNLV was running everyone off the court a couple years prior to that.

“Oh, I see now,” he said when I showed him the Fab Five book. It was blue and yellow, just like my boys’ jerseys.

“Should’ve known. You always like the thugs,” he said grinning. It was our inside joke. I used to yap his ear off about how the media unfairly gave my boys a bad rep and, because he was your classic cool teacher, he agreed with me even though he was 40 years my senior and grew up in suburban Syracuse.

Anyways, I wrote the (expletive) out of that book report. It only had to be four pages, but I turned in a nine-page behemoth sports masterpiece (I wish I still had it, so I could look back and see how awful it was). I was dropping Gary Grant, Roy Tarpley and Glen Rice references, commenting on the team’s social significance, making hair-brained, young-minded comments for the sake of controversy. It was the first time I had ever written about sports and I attacked it like I was Michael Wilbon or Jack McCallum.

Mr. Duggan loved it and I earned an A+. I think he would’ve given me a cheesy A++, if he were a cornball like Ms. Roachford was. But, he was too cool for that. He was a teacher, not the host of an infomercial.

He would also write long comments after his grades, either to scold a student for a terrible effort or commend one for a worthy effort. This particular comment in April, 1995 made me think, “You know what, I wouldn’t mind writing about sports for money. That’s not even a job.”

I don’t remember all of his thoughts, but a particular sentence has stuck with me to this day. “I can really see you writing about sports for the New York Times or Boston Globe or Washington Post one day,” he wrote. That was that. I was sold – 16-years-old with my career etched in stone…or inked on the back of paper.

My Pops and I
I was a rarity in my neighborhood – a kid who grew up with his father. In East Buffalo, most young kids were fatherless. Their role models were either both Mr. Lumpkin and Mr. Garcia – the guys that ran the Masten Boys and Girls Club – or street dudes, drug pushers, gangstas.

My Pops was my man. Sure, I was physically disciplined a lot, because, in school, I was mouthy and a clown. And sure, Pops set high standards and had a temper,, it didn’t matter, though, because we always had sports. These days, it’s sports and jazz. Back then, it was just sports.

My first sports memories were of him sneaking me out of bed at 10:30 p.m. so I could watch Magic and the Lakers. My mother hated it, since I was only six or seven-years old at the time, and it was the impetus of many arguments. Still, I was his lil’ man and he knew Magic was like my idol.

At first, I only liked Magic because he did. I only knew he made a spectacular play when pops would jump off the couch, get real close to the TV and say something like, “That’s right Magic! Kill them suckas!” The suckas were the Celtics of course, Bird in particular.

Growing up, I should’ve been a Knicks fan, not a Lakers fan. But, Pops was a Canisius College poli-sci dropout, a black-power child of the 60s, and son of a defiant southerner that got fired from jobs as a teenager because he talked back to his white bosses too much. So, if it was Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson, Pops was rooting for the black kid from Lansing. If it were the media darling Celtics vs. the Lakers, Pops was rooting hard for the Lakers.

It’s funny, but it took my mother to convince me that Larry Bird wasn’t a bum.
“Dad is Larry Bird one of the best players in the NBA?” I asked him that in front of my mother, confident that he would set this unknowing woman straight.

“Yeah, Vince. The boy is a monster, real good. I just can’t stand him and those bum Celtics,” he said. I was crushed.

“Well he’s not better than Magic is he?” I was praying he’d say no.

“What? Heck naw. That jive dude couldn’t hold Magic’s shorts,” he said. If Mom weren’t there he’d have said jock strap.

Pops and I were ride-or-die Lakers fans and it bonded us. If I came home with a ‘C’ on my report card, he’d be steaming mad at me for a while and make my world miserable, but sooner than later, the Lakers would come on CBS and it’d be him and I listening to Brent Musburger and Tommy Heinsohn.

Heinsohn used to get him really upset, because he was so blatantly pro-Boston and Bird. Everything was a racial conspiracy with my father – Heinsohn, the referees, the fans, the sports writers. Everyone loved the Celtics because they happened to have three of the best white players of the decade (Bird, Kevin McHale and Danny Ainge), he thought, and although people loved the Lakers, they’d love for the Celtics to win the title every year. When the Celtics won, he would tell me, fans and the media took it as an indication that smart and tough white basketball players would always outplay the flashy, prima-donna black players.

He hated how the Celtics would bring “white goons” like Greg Kite off the bench to rough up Kareem and he swore the refs were letting the physical play slide because of race.

His outlook on Lakers-Celtics spilled over to everything. “Why do these people stay on Carl Lewis,” he would wonder. “They can’t stand Georgetown because they got a bad brother runnin’ the show over there in the nation’s capitol at that snob school.”

Without me even knowing, I started to look at sports as more than just a game. They were and still are very much a clear window into society. I can thank pops for that.

He would even play defiant music when we watched the game.

Like when he started blaring Miles Davis’ funk-drenched “What I Say” during the final minutes of Game 5 of the 1987 NBA Finals, when Boston had pulled ahead of L.A.

By this time, Pops had started making a little more money – he had to. Mom stayed at home to take care of my four siblings and me, so Pops was the sole provider. He never took sick days and routinely worked 50-60 hours in a week. Sometimes, the only time I would see him was when we went to our religious meetings, if I got in trouble at school or if a game was on.

Being an electronics-nut, he treated himself with a 40-inch screen and built a makeshift family room in the basement. The seats were benches made out of plywood.

(We had some great sports moments in the basement. None more memorable than Super Bowl XXXX, when Pops, my three older cousins and I were on our knees, holding hands, waiting for Scott Norwood to kick the game-winning field goal; only groan and curl up into separate fetal positions of angst when it sailed wide-right. “Do I have to go to school tomorrow Dad?” I remembered asking.)

Anyways, they we are – Pops and I – June 1987. He has his 40-oz. beer and I have my two-liter of Pepsi (All that caffeine and it’s after midnight? No wonder Mom was always upset.), and I probably have a school exam coming up soon, but who cares? Pops is blasting “What I Say” between timeouts and the Lakers have the ball with less than 10 seconds and their down by one point.

You know the rest. Magic gets the inbound on the left wing, studder-steps McHale out of his Converse and goes up for the “Junior, Junior sky-hook” near the foul line, over McHale and Robert Parish. Swish, game, and series – basically.

That night Pops and I walked to Scottie’s on Jefferson Ave., for a 1 a.m. celebratory steak hoagie. And, we talked sports. I was eight-years-old talking sports with my 30-something father.

Sports journalist in the making
As I got older, we just didn’t talk sports -- we argued sports. I would go with Pops to his friends’ houses to watch games and I’d be arguing with them – a preteen know-it-all arguing about whether Kenny Anderson is the greatest freshman point-guard ever. My friend Craigy’s father called me Stat-Man, because I knew I needed statistics to back me up. Otherwise, I was just a kid running-ff at the mouth.

I also needed those stats as ammunition on those Sunday mornings when he was cutting my hair and I’m trying to prove Kevin Johnson is the best point guard in the league or for when we were in the basement and an argument would erupt and he’d try to bully his point across. That’s when I’d go upstairs, get the Buffalo News out of the 0 ft. x 0 ft. room that I shared with my two younger brothers and prove my point.

“Look Dad. It’s right there, Randall [Cunningham] was like 12-30 and threw five interceptions,” I’d say. “Now, I know he’s a black quarterback and we should support him, but [Buddy] Ryan had every reason to bench him.”
And, I read all the time. I was a fanatic Sports Illustrated collector before I turned 10-years-old. I used to ask my gym teachers to get Bob Gibbon’s high school basketball reports. I used to buy those stupid, no-information, 30-page books they would write about Isaiah Thomas or Barry Sanders, they sold in the school Book Club catalogs. I read as many sports sections as I could get. Once we finally got cable and I had access to ESPN it was game over.

I was obsessed with sports.

So, when Mr. Duggan flicked on that 100-watt light bulb over my head, I was sold. Pops was, too. He knew I’d be the next big thing in sports journalism. He knew he’d see me on ESPN telling everybody what to think about the NBA some day or setting the record straight on some social issue.

If I ever get to the point where I’m talking to Bob Levy on Outside The Lines, reporting a story on HBO’s Real Sports, writing a 300-inch magazine piece on Yao Ming and the NBA’s effect on Communism or finishing my first book on fathers, sons and sports; I’ll have Pops and Mr. Duggan to thank.