My Life, My Fight Read online

  Pat Fraser, from the basketball team, was told to be my buddy because everyone figured he’d met me and wouldn’t be scared of me. But I’m pretty sure he was terrified for those first few days. It didn’t help that I punched him in the stomach to test if we could be friends or not. I’m not a big talker and back then I could barely hold a conversation. For me, the only thing that mattered in a friend was whether or not they’d have my back if trouble started. And the only way to test this was to start trouble. While Pat was walking me around the school and answering my questions about everything, I punched him hard in the stomach. He turned around and gave me a mean uppercut right back, knocking the wind out of me. All right, I thought, this guy’s cool. If someone tries to mess with me, he’ll be right in there to take them on. I guess I was looking for someone to have my back like Sid had when I was younger. I found that in Pat, who has been my best friend ever since.

  Having Pat as my friend helped a little with adjusting to the student culture, but that doesn’t mean it was all smooth sailing. To put it bluntly, I was dumb. I could read, but that was about it. At 14 I had managed to avoid having to read and write my entire life, and suddenly there I was, attending one of the top academic schools in the country with a reading age of eight years old. On my second day I was taken to the school library to get a library card issued. I’d never had a library card before and already knew that I’d never use it, but it was compulsory so I signed up.

  When I got to the library it was empty because everyone was in class. It was quiet and had a lot of comfortable seating, which is hard to find at most schools. I knew on that first day that I would be spending a lot of time in the library over the next three years, to get away from all the hectic school stuff and clear my head.

  At the start, I did virtually nothing besides eat a lot of food in the school cafeteria and try to avoid doing schoolwork. I figured that I didn’t have to try that hard in the classroom as long as I was improving on the basketball court. I knew that at other schools rugby players got away with doing hardly any work because their rugby career didn’t depend on it. I was still trying to get up to the national standard for reading and writing, but I dismissed it as unimportant because my improvements on the court were coming faster and faster.

  From the beginning Ms. Glenda Parks, who was in charge of learning development and helped anyone who had fallen behind, became my mentor. A few months into that first year at Scots, I was sitting outside on a bench, wagging class and generally feeling sorry for myself. School was hard, and I couldn’t fix it by going for a run and doing some push-ups. Basketball was at least distracting me from the fact that I was alone in a new city and without my dad, but at Scots I felt alienated.

  I didn’t notice Ms. Parks until she sat down right beside me and asked what was wrong. I mumbled the usual moanings of teenagers until she cut me off. “Steven,” she said, making me look right at her. “How badly do you want this?” The only other person to ask me that was Kenny, and answering him was easy because I was more than ready to commit to basketball every day. But when Ms. Parks asked me, I realized that committing to basketball also meant committing to school, a place I tried to avoid at all costs. “I want it bad,” I said. She nodded and replied, “Well, then this is something we’re just going to have to do.” It didn’t flick a switch and make me suddenly want to learn, but it stopped me from actively avoiding learning, and that’s saying a lot.

  While I was still working every morning with Kenny, he had me train with the Wellington rep team that he was coaching. They were good. Really good. That year they had underperformed at the Under 17 National Championships and were already training for the next year’s tournament to redeem themselves. Rep basketball begins with the under 13 age group, so kids generally start playing the best players in their age group from around the country when they are 11 years old. By the time they get to be 15, everyone knows which are the teams to beat and which players are the stars.

  This particular Wellington team had been the team to beat for a few years already. They didn’t necessarily need a new recruit, but they got me anyway. There was never a proper introduction. There never seemed to be any formal introductions in the Wellington basketball community. Hanging out at the Show Buildings every morning for three months meant that I had seen almost all of the under 17 players come in for a morning workout at least once, though never as a full team.

  By the time I joined one of their team trainings with Kenny, I’d gotten used to working out on my own. Suddenly, I was put into a team where the guys had played together and against each other for five years. It was Scots College all over again. But when it came to basketball I had already worked out what I really wanted and set myself a daunting goal: scoring a college scholarship in the United States. I knew that playing well in that team was crucial for my ongoing improvement and my plan for the rest of my life.

  I truly didn’t care if everyone in the team hated me, so long as I got to go up against the best school-aged players in the country and prove my worth on the court. Thankfully, I never had to worry about that because the Wellington rep team became my family and my teammates became brothers for life. Chris McIntyre, the tall guy who had been mean to me at the training camp earlier in the year, was on the team and once again paired up with me. Except this time we were on the same team and I was able to learn from him instead of being outsmarted. Chris was, and is, a genius. All the guys in our team were awesome at basketball, but none of us were that great in the classroom except for Chris and Stanley, one of the shooting guards. Chris’s brain was like a computer. We started calling him Google because he knew the answer to every single question we asked. I thought maybe he was just smart compared to me, which wasn’t hard, but it turns out he’s smart compared to everyone. He’s at Oxford now on a Rhodes Scholarship, in case you needed proof.

  Although we were complete opposites, Chris and I formed a friendship based on our completely different strengths. Chris was glad to have me join the team so that he had help getting the boards and wasn’t the only big guy in the team. He was tall, but he wasn’t huge, so he preferred to play farther out, sometimes even on the perimeter. With me there as a giant inside presence, Chris got to have more fun with taking longer shots. And I enjoyed having Chris around because I like to surround myself with people who are smarter than me.

  Even though I didn’t have the basketball knowledge other guys had built up, I made the team and was put in the starting five. There were no complaints about some new guy swooping in and taking someone’s spot because everyone already knew that winning as a team mattered more than personal pride and ego. The team was a well-oiled machine, thanks in large part to Kenny as coach and Debbie Webb, the manager. Debbie was famous in the Wellington basketball community. She had managed almost all of Kenny’s teams, first when her son Tom was playing and then when her son Joseph played, who was the same age as me and a point guard.

  Most young rep teams will have a coach and an assistant coach who could act as manager. Kenny didn’t need any help coaching so Debbie was full-time manager and Mum to all us boys. It was incredible. She always had our tournament weeks plotted out right down to the minute and organized a heap of fundraisers so we wouldn’t have to pay much for fees, if anything at all. Debbie wasn’t afraid to tell us off if we misbehaved, and everyone treated her with the same respect they’d treat their own mum with. I considered Debbie to be a maternal figure for me even before she took me into her home as part of her family.

  Things had been humming along nicely at Blossom’s place, where we’d sorted out a routine between us. But before the end of that first year, Blossom was a having a hard time sourcing enough income and couldn’t afford to have me stay anymore. I didn’t hold it against her at all. How could I when she’d done so much for me already? And even though I knew that this whole basketball thing was what I wanted to do and what I should do, I missed Rotorua and being around my family. So I went home. I packed up my bag of clothes and took a bus ba
ck to Rotorua, where I guess we all assumed I’d go back to what I was doing six months earlier—nothing.

  But back in Wellington, Kenny wasn’t ready to let his new project slip away that easily. He talked to Debbie and asked if she and her husband, Chris, would be willing to let me stay with them until Blossom got back on her feet. Kenny knew that the Webbs lived in a big house on a lifestyle block on the fringes of the city, and he also knew that they lived and breathed Wellington basketball. As unco as I was, I would be really helpful on that Wellington team. Kenny knew that Debbie was his best shot at getting me back to training in Wellington. Without hesitating, or even asking how long I would be staying, Debbie said, “Yes, absolutely,” and I’ll always love her for that.

  Living with the Webbs was a surreal experience for me. They were like the families you see in advertisements on TV. It was just Debbie and Chris, their son Joseph, and me living there. They had the nicest home I had ever lived in and a big section of land with a few animals on it. It wasn’t a farm like the ones Mohi worked on, but it was the closest you could get to farm life while still living near the city.

  Although Joseph and I shared a room, we had the whole downstairs to ourselves with its own bathroom and lounge. Joseph had been coming to morning trainings most days and as soon as I moved in he started coming every single day too. After all, we were sharing a room, so it’s not like he could just sleep in while his teammate went off to train at the crack of dawn.

  Debbie and Chris would make bacon and egg–filled English muffins and wrap them in tinfoil for us to eat after training, and I would drink all the milk in their fridge. I’d say I drank at least a liter a day: regular milk, chocolate milk, banana milk…. That was my hydration throughout the day. I know now that milk is expensive, but the Webbs never mentioned anything; they just always had the fridge stocked and told me not to hold back. Scots College was providing lunch for me, so the Webbs only had to give me breakfast and dinner, but I still ate more than the average person.

  Every morning the whole household would be up by 5:30 a.m. and ready to go. I’m not a morning person at all, but it’s hard to stay in bed when everyone around you is up and moving. Joseph and I would be dropped off at the Show Buildings at 6 a.m., train for two hours with Kenny, get showered, then go to school. Joseph went to Wellington College, which was just down the road, but Scots College was miles away so Kenny would drop me off. After school I would catch the school bus to the train station to meet Joseph and we’d get the train home together.

  Debbie ran a tight ship when she managed her teams and she ran a tight ship at home, which was ideal for me. Everyone had a routine and mine slotted in alongside Joseph’s nicely. When he did his homework, I did my homework, or at least I tried to. Then we’d have a break and play table tennis or go outside to shoot on their hoop. They had a whole half-court set up with a proper hoop, not one of those cheap ones you get for $50. I figured it would be strong, but I forgot to factor in that it had been outside in the wind and rain for months. I told Joseph to watch me while I ran up, gripped the ball in both hands and tried to dunk it how I’d seen players do on TV. The hoop broke clean off the backboard and I landed on the ground still holding it. They never did replace that hoop.

  I’d like to think I made up for breaking the Webbs’ hoop by helping out on their lifestyle block. They only had about 30 lambs and a few cattle, but it still needed work, and over the course of a few weekends, Chris, Joseph, and I put up a new fence running down their hilly section. I knew all about fences. Fences were my thing. So when it came time to get things set up and in place, I was there in my Swanndri and carrying fence posts like it was a paid gig. Doing some work on their section wasn’t quite the full Mohi farm experience, but it helped to ease a bit of the homesickness I would occasionally feel. As much as I enjoyed seeing myself improve in the gym, being virtually a full-time athlete at 15 years old can get draining. Instead of doing nothing to unwind, I preferred doing something productive, like building a fence. Or breaking a hoop.

  I lived with the Webbs for almost six months. There’s no way they anticipated that I would be staying for that long when Kenny first pitched the idea to them, and yet I never heard them grumble. They didn’t even get that mad when I accidentally kicked a hole in their wall while trying to dance.

  When Blossom got sorted I started staying with her again for a few days a week and eventually moved back in with her full-time because it was hard to argue with the convenience. She lived close to Scots College and to Kenny, who could drive me to and from trainings when Blossom was at work. I would do whatever it took to achieve my goal of a scholarship and playing professional basketball, and I think everyone involved—me, Kenny, Blossom, the Webbs—knew that living with Blossom was the right thing for me.

  Moving back in with Blossom didn’t mean life just went back to how it was before I’d left. It had been six months and she’d kept in contact with Kenny to follow my progress on the court. When I settled back in with Blossom, she announced that it was time for me to hit the gym. I thought I already was hitting the gym, but she insisted I needed to build up my strength with weights in an actual gym. Blossom was a personal trainer at Les Mills, so she was able to get me in there to work out if I wanted. Like everything else, I didn’t actually know what I wanted, but I did know that Blossom knew what she was doing, so I trusted her.

  Yet another training session was added to my daily routine. On top of the morning trainings and the after-school and social games at night, I did a workout with Blossom at Les Mills, usually right after school and before the night game. Sometimes I’d just join in on a spin class, but other times Blossom would take me through a personalized workout. I’ve always been naturally strong, or at least proportionally strong, but I was never a force to be reckoned with. Blossom had talked to Kenny and knew that the goal wasn’t for me to get muscly, it was for me to be stronger overall, especially in my core.

  Most of the time I was the only kid in the gym because gym memberships are expensive. I didn’t know this at the time and just thought other kids were too busy socializing to bother. I thought a personal coach and personal trainer were what every athletic kid could have if they wanted it. I’ve since realized that having someone willing to train you one-on-one for free in the basketball gym, and then another person to work with you every day in the weight room, is bloody rare. Kenny and Blossom wouldn’t have pushed me so hard for so long if I had turned out to be lazy and not committed to the goal, but not everyone has people in their life like that.

  Our Wellington rep team was good because we had a stacked bench. New Zealand is small and basketball isn’t the main sport, so even good rep teams will have a few players who don’t contribute much. We had a full roster, where everyone was crucial to the team and had a role to play. That was Kenny putting together a championship-caliber team from the very beginning, but we were also good because we trained harder and better than everyone else. Kenny has always said that if he could get New Zealand athletes to train like American athletes, we’d have a lot more players in the NBA and the WNBA.

  When I first went to Kenny, I was so naive and unaccustomed to the training methods for most young basketballers in New Zealand that he was able to train me like an American—every day, twice a day, a full-time commitment. And when he coached a Wellington rep team, he demanded that same commitment. Our team always trained more than any other Wellington team. The open morning trainings became just another team training for us. Even though they weren’t compulsory, almost everyone showed up, because if you didn’t, you’d be behind on the plays at the next official team training.

  The team was a playoff team with a new asset (me) and we seemed unstoppable before we’d even played a proper game. Then we took the court for our first game at the regional tournament—and promptly lost.

  6.

  NATIONAL CHAMPIONS

  I wish I didn’t have to use this comparison, but it’s the only one that works. Our Wellington team was the Gold
en State Warriors of New Zealand basketball. Our team was stacked, and everyone knew it.

  Every year there are tournaments for each age group, under 13, under 15, under 17, right up to under 23. At the start of winter there are four regional tournaments. The top four finishers from each region qualify for the National Championships, which are held a few months later over one week. The idea is that the semi-finals at Nationals would be made up of regional tournament winners. That’s the idea anyway.

  We were in region three, which is basically just the wider Wellington region and a few extras like Hawke’s Bay, New Plymouth, and Palmerston North. We knew going in that Hawke’s Bay would be our biggest regional rivals, but we had the same defensive approach to them as to every other team—let them shoot and crash the boards. It’s rare for a young team to have a high overall field goal percentage so we knew that as long as we got all the rebounds and ran our offense, we’d be fine.

  What we didn’t count on was for every Hawke’s Bay player to shoot the lights out in our game. Their main weapon was a tall white guy who was playing as a four man but who could shoot threes all day. I mention he’s white because in New Zealand there aren’t a whole lot of standout white players. National tournaments, especially the girls’ ones, are overwhelmingly made up of Māori or Pacific Islanders, and the Hawke’s Bay team was no different. But this one guy must have shot 80 percent from the perimeter and we couldn’t do anything to stop him. It was a much-needed wake-up call.

  Losing at Regionals is a sign that you will struggle to make the top four at Nationals. We were planning to take out the whole championship but couldn’t even win the first game at our local tournament. After the loss, Kenny sat us down for a team debrief and we realized that even stacked teams can lose when they come up against a team that gels on the night. On one hand, there’s not a lot you can do when a guy is hot and can’t seem to miss, but we knew we needed to pay Hawke’s Bay more respect next time around. Victor, the guy I had blocked at my very first training camp and who was now a small forward, called out Joseph and a couple of other guys for not hustling enough. “Every loose ball should be ours,” he said, “but you guys aren’t scrambling.” It must have got into Joseph’s head because the next game he was diving all over the floor like someone was dropping money.