Brooklyn Heights
(Page 3 of 3)
And she was a die-hard gym rat years before other girls in her class. The MLK center’s late-night supervisor Wayne “Spanky” Lewis, himself an old player from Hughes’s 1965 state championship team, knew what he was looking at when he first saw Brooklyn coming in to play pick-up games with the guys. Usually girls would be there to attract a guy’s attention. Brooklyn, on the other hand, consistently played to win, and the boys ratcheted up their game to avoid defeat by a girl. Lewis, who predicted she’d be famous someday, started calling her “Brooke Shields.” That was six years before she surpassed him in height.
When Brooklyn finally arrived at Dunbar, Coach Robinson knew her job wouldn’t be as simple as handing the new kid the ball. Dealing with a gifted player is tricky. “You want to structure her, but you don’t want to take away her talent,” said Robinson. And the game has to stay fun. “[At the San Angelo playoffs], she attempted to dunk it, and she came to me afterward and said, ‘Coach, I don’t know what happened. I was just going at it really hard and it just happened.’” Robinson laughed. “So you accidentally dunk?”
ROBINSON AND OTHER COACHES say they are often taken aback by Brooklyn’s knowledge of the sport. When she isn’t playing, she and her dad watch old VHS tapes from the public library, memorizing big games and talking shop. At home, her older brothers grill her about televised games. Which player is doing what? Why? What should he be doing instead? She studies basketball history and the players whose posters neatly adorn one of her bedroom walls. At her house one night, she curled up on the couch and started talking about her favorite players in her low, silky voice. She didn’t just know which players were great; she knew why they were great: “Of course I like Michael Jordan—he’s the typical choice as a favorite—but I also like Bill Russell because he was the champion. I like LeBron James because he passed expectations. I like Magic Johnson because he did the unexpected thing: He played guard at 6’9” back in the days when you had a 5’11”, 6’ guard. [Magic’s] a big old dude that could play center.”
She also understands that some of those players knew the art of trash talking. One night we went out to Wing Stop with her next-door neighbor E’Tasha Keeton, who plays ninth-grade volleyball at Dunbar. Brooklyn is a giant compared with the petite E’Tasha, a sweet-faced girl who is pleased to have finally reached one hundred pounds this year. E’Tasha often flashed a smile while we talked, while Brooklyn struck a cool pose, playing the straight man.
“Brooke, you know, she’s fun,” E’Tasha told me, teasing her friend. “She brags a lot though.” Then she took my tape recorder and began to pretend to interview the superstar: “With all this stuff about Brooklyn Pope, do you get a big head?”
Brooklyn slipped on her sunglasses and leaned back, perhaps imagining herself at a post-game news conference. “No,” she said. “I stay down to earth. I keep it real for myself and others.”
“What would you say about your playing? Overall, how is your game?”
“Real talented. I have a lot of faith in my game.”
They continued like this, Brooklyn teetering on the verge of remaining humble until E’Tasha began a brief exchange about who was better than whom at what, like the time they played each other in eighth-grade basketball. Then E’Tasha offered a challenge. “Look at that little bitty box over there in the corner. Who’s going to get through that thing quicker, me or you?”
“Me,” said Brooklyn, “because I’d bust it up while you’re trying to crawl through.”
“Uh-uhhhh!” said E’Tasha.
“I win!” Brooklyn said with her arms in the air.
“I will win. You will lose,” said E’Tasha. “You would lose in volleyball too.”
“I would spike it,” countered Brooklyn.
“No you would not. Your height doesn’t matter!”
At this, Brooklyn simply put her hand up in front of her.
“Don’t wave your hand at me!”
“I’m just tryin’ to get some air,” said Brooklyn.
A SEA OF BRIGHT-BLUE T-SHIRTS marked the sections that held the Dunbar Lady Wildcats fans at the Erwin Center, in Austin, for the 4A championship game on March 5 against Angleton. One of the Dunbar fans told me she hadn’t missed more than five boys’ basketball home games since 1974, and several of the men were wearing T-shirts that read “Stop Six.” Among the crowd was Hughes, who had been down to Austin with the boys from Dunbar thirteen times over the years and was a month from announcing his retirement. “Usually, when you go down to the Erwin Center,” he said, “the only seat worth a dime is the seat next to your team. Any other seat is unsatisfying. But this is not me looking at a team I don’t know.”
I took a seat in an area adjacent to the tightly packed Dunbar crowd, where the two men next to me were leaning back in their chairs, talking about Brooklyn. “So this girl from Dunbar can dunk?” one asked.
“So they say,” said the other.
“I read in the paper she wanted to scare the other team.”
“I guess if you can do it.”
Dunbar jumped out to an early lead, shooting an astounding 63 percent from the field in the first half. But it couldn’t pull away. Each trip down the court, concerned that her team was losing patience, Coach Robinson would yell at her players—“Calm down! Calm down!” Before heading into the locker room, Angleton had cut Dunbar’s eleven-point first-quarter lead to seven.
And in the second half Angleton was matching Dunbar basket for basket. When Brooklyn started playing aggressive defense, she quickly picked up her second and third fouls, and while she sat on the bench, Angleton continued closing in, pulling to 41–40 by the beginning of the fourth quarter. The Dunbar fans were now standing and hoarse, shouting with exasperation, “Come on, ladies!” “Defense!”
When she finally got back in the game, Brooklyn immediately helped swing the momentum. She pulled in a long, downcourt pass near the sideline, and, after barely maintaining her balance to stay inbounds, she drove in for a layup. After trading a few more baskets, Dunbar pulled ahead 53—49. Then, with 57 seconds on the clock, Dunbar guard Victoria Davis stood at the free-throw line. She hit the first shot, and the crowd cheered. When she missed the second, Brooklyn stepped in once again to make the big play. Moving in off the key, she grabbed the offensive rebound and made a quick put-back for two points. Angleton would make one more free throw, but when the buzzer sounded, Dunbar had won, 56—50.
The team ran to center court, crashing into a heap on the floor and then rolling over one another like puppies. As the sea of blue T-shirts finished a round of high fives in the stands, Brooklyn posed for photographs with her teammates, then she held her index finger high in the air and led the team in a cheer: “D! H! S! D! H! S!”
“This is the first championship for the Lady Wildcats…” said the announcer over the loudspeaker. Then he read an announcement passed to him from Coach Hughes: “Stop Six will rock the night.”
TRY TO REMEMBER WHEN you were a freshman in high school. You didn’t have a driver’s license yet. Maybe you had braces. Chances are, especially if you were a girl, you tried to find a spot in the world where you wouldn’t be horribly embarrassed just to exist. So when the announcement was made that the fifteen-year-old freshman with so much hype had been named the tournament MVP, was it anything but beautiful when she slowly strutted off the court wearing her flashy sunglasses, proudly reveling in the spotlight? A few days later, Coach Hughes would tell her that if he ever saw her showboating with her shades like that again, he’d make her run laps. But that would come later. On that night in March, as she posed for the cameras with her arms folded across her chest, Brooklyn Pope had earned every bit of her delightful brashness.
Okay, Brooke, you can quit reading now.
