City Beat: A Year Covering Hoops in Basketball City U.S.A.

“This must be your first city game.”

At my first opportunity to ask a question on the Flint high school basketball beat in December 2008, I defaulted to the beloved crutch of the sportswriter — the ‘question that’s not really a question’ — and muttered something like “talk about the intensity of this game” to then-Flint Northwestern coach David Bush.

His mostly innocent but still condescending response was certainly accurate — in addition to, well, being the whitest dude in the building, it was obvious that I was nervous, not sure what to expect the first time I’d ever really even set foot in a city school in north Flint, a region where the city’s serious issues with crime and poverty were often most present. In the post-game scramble for quotes after Northwestern’s win over Flint Northern, I’d decided it would be best to take the obvious route and focus on a vague sports cliché so I didn’t look completely out of my element or offend anyone. As an outsider trying to earn the trust of people I’d have to cover all season, I didn’t want to make a confrontational first impression.

And, though a lazy way to lead my game story, of course it was intense. The schools were crosstown rivals, each with proud histories of churning out dozens of Division I NCAA players, several of whom went on to successful professional basketball careers in the United States and abroad. Basketball in Flint, for the city’s top players, had literally provided an avenue for kids who grew up in poverty to see and earn a living in exotic places all over the world.

The 2008-09 versions of the city high school teams were filled with kids with the same aspirations as their decorated predecessors — earning college scholarships and, ultimately, the opportunity to get paid to play basketball in the NBA or overseas. That first game I’d covered was exactly as competitive as you’d expect under those circumstances, with players ferociously attacking the basket, taking full advantage of lax officiating to clutch and grab at every opportunity on defense and feeding off of small but boisterous contingents of fans supporting each team in the stands.

What it wasn’t, though, was good basketball, but as a new face in the environment I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to loudly call attention to that seemingly important fact. Neither team had a player on its roster who was a Division I, let alone, a professional prospect. Neither coaching staff seemed to run any semblance of a cohesive offensive or defensive system. The gym was half-empty, something that would’ve once been unheard of for a Northern-Northwestern game — it wasn’t uncommon for City Series games in Flint to sell out in previous generations.

But I simply had no interest in writing about any of that. As a lifelong basketball fan who stumbled into sportswriting in Flint, Michigan, there was no greater beat in my mind than covering city hoops. In part due to massive layoffs, combined with a growing company directive that favored suburban areas of the coverage are due to stronger readership in those communities, I stumbled my way into a dream beat when my more experienced colleagues didn’t want it. A minute detail like declining talent didn’t change the fact that I had more than a job — I was entrusted with responsibility as a steward for one of the city’s most amazing resources, it’s basketball legacy.

Flint — true to its underdog mentality as a city — has an athletic tradition that is on par with much larger talent hotbeds around the country in places like Chicago, Washington D.C., New York and L.A. The city has produced a Heisman Trophy Winner, Olympic medalists, NBA and MLB All-Stars, NFL All-Pros, members of NCAA, NBA and NFL championship teams and players who, individually, have received numerous other accolades at the pro and college levels.

Serious issues including population loss, poverty and crime have had a significant impact on all aspects of life in Flint, including the city’s sports programs. But similar to the city itself, what remains in the athletic community is an admirable and captivating sense of pride in the past, and an unwavering resolve to reject a fate as anything less than one of America’s great sports cities.

I didn’t cover championship-contending city teams. I didn’t cover college-ready city players. I didn’t cover city coaches who were exemplary mentors and leaders. But the stories that resulted were still every bit as important, compelling and defining as the success stories of bygone generations.

Defining Substance

Glen Rice is the greatest basketball player the city of Flint has ever produced. Rice was a member of championship teams in high school, college and the NBA. He won the Mr. Basketball award in the state of Michigan in high school, was the Most Outstanding Player in a NCAA Tournament, was a three-time NBA All-Star, won an All-Star Game MVP and even received a few votes for the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award on two occasions. 

Sure, there are other players who had decent NBA careers. Trent Tucker played with Michael Jordan and won a NBA championship. Morris Peterson had a lengthy and productive NBA career and is one of the most beloved players in the still-brief history of the Toronto Raptors. Terry Furlow’s NBA career was off to a promising start before he was killed in a car accident in 1983. But Rice had the best professional career in the best professional league in the world — there’s really no counter-argument if NBA success is the standard for determining a hierarchy of Flint’s basketball greats.

But the thing is, there are counterarguments. They are passionate, occasionally heated, sometimes insane and solely based on the eyes and personal preferences of the beholder.

For a certain generation, former Flint Central point guard Eric Turner is the best the city has ever produced. Turner was a star of championship Central teams in the 1980s, and was a preview of how the point guard position would evolve in the modern game. Turner could certainly pass and run an offense, the vital and traditional functions of point guard play. But he was also typically the best scorer on the court, choosing when to be a distributor to get teammates involved and when to seek out his own shot.

And that shot of his is legendary. I was in an eighth grade gym class in my rural school district 30 minutes east of Flint, with no understanding of the city’s basketball legacy, when I heard my first Eric Turner story. My gym teacher, a weekend warrior pickup basketball player at the YMCA in Flint who sometimes ran into Turner on the courts there, insisted Turner had never missed a shot in the hundreds of pickup games he’d witnessed him play. And this wasn’t just typical sports hyperbole — he adamantly argued on multiple occasions that Eric Turner had not missed one shot in hundreds of pickup basketball games over several years.

If you’re slightly younger, the best player Flint has ever produced is former Flint Northwestern scoring machine Cory Hightower. Hightower was a super athletic lefty wing famous for both his highlight reel plays during games and also an excitable temper that often led to technical foul-inducing highlights every bit as entertaining as his basketball skills.

Turner and Hightower had similar career trajectories — both were second round picks in the NBA Draft who didn’t stick in the league and went on to solid careers in professional leagues abroad. Both also have considerable mythologies that dwarf their career accomplishments.

Turner, an All-American at University of Michigan, used to draw legitimate comparisons to Magic Johnson for his unique array of passing and scoring capabilities, manifesting in a distinguishable style that earned him a legion of devoted followers in high school in the same fashion that Johnson did during his youth in Lansing. Turner even boasted his own Magic-esque nickname — ‘ET,’ a moniker he was given both for his initials and for his ability to “look one way and dish the other way” when passing.

A who’s-who of NBA players still remember Hightower as an elite talent. In an interview with Flint Journal sports writer Eric Woodyard in 2009, former Detroit Piston Chucky Atkins — who had no connection to Flint other than his occasional summer appearances in the city’s pro-am games when he was a member of the Pistons — remembered Hightower and noted that he should’ve been in the NBA upon learning that Woodyard was a Flint native.

And, of course, it’s impossible to mention Hightower’s mythology without addressing the long-rumored reason he didn’t last in the NBA. Hightower, a rookie in training camp with the Los Angeles Lakers, was allegedly cut after he refused his rookie duty of carrying bags for veteran players. And not just any veteran player — one of the greatest players in NBA history, Kobe Bryant. Now, in subsequent years, Hightower has vehemently denied the accusation, but it has undoubtedly aided the growth of his status as a local legend in Flint. And others have insisted that it’s true albeit with a different angry veteran inserted — Derek Harper instead of Kobe Bryant.

Even Rice, in addition to his substantive on-court accomplishments, has quite the urban legend involving a one night stand with a certain future candidate for Vice President during a tournament in Alaska as a member of the University of Michigan’s basketball team.

The neverending and impossible-to-settle debate about the greatest player the city of Flint has ever produced will never have a proper resolution. But the Turner-Rice-Hightower dialogue perfectly illustrates the vital characteristics of Flint basketball. Substance and career accomplishments matter. But equally important is the fact that Flint players are imprinted with a style and bravado that is influenced directly by the personality of the city itself and unmistakably recognizable as its own unique Flint style anywhere in the country. Those who embody that style, that bravado, even if they don’t measure up in overall career accomplishments, are every bit as beloved and important to the city’s basketball mythology.

As interesting as the nuances, characters and debates that make up the city’s basketball history are, they’re also maddening because no one bothered to write that shit down. For a reporter trying to piece together a complex history on the fly, trying to develop sources and trying to become an expert, it was done through an endless string of finding tidbits of interesting information, talking to people and, usually, being told of multiple others who had critical information simply living in their heads.

The lack of a cohesive Flint basketball history in documented form is part of its appeal — the more information I was able to piece together, the more anecdotes I learned, the more I felt like I was part of an exclusive and elite club. Finding out more became an endless and obsessive quest.

The Artist

“Basketball to me is like poetry.”

Watching Flint Northwestern in the 2009-10 season, one player stood out from a purely artistic standpoint — Jaylen Magee. Magee was a strong but undersized wing player, capable of explosive bursts of energy and ability that made it impossible to ignore him on the court. He was crafty around the basket, using his strength and creativity to finish plays in traffic surrounded by bigger players. He was incredibly fast with the ball — combining purposeful and fluid motions with a quick first step to fly to the basket on breaks before defenses could settle. He had range on his jump shot that made it hard for defenses to play off of him, fearing his ability to fly by them to the rim if they got too close.

At its most basic level, basketball is a form of nonverbal communicative expression. No two players approach the game in the same way. Sports media obsesses over crowning the next Magic, the next Bird, the next Jordan, the next LeBron, and then all of a sudden Steph Curry comes along, dominating the game in a way that is completely different and reinventive compared to preceding ‘face of the NBA’ players.

There’s no rational way of explaining why individual styles resonate with some people and not others. But as an observer, the way Jaylen approached the game, used his natural abilities and seemed to have a knack for picking the right times to unleash these explosive bursts of productivity just made sense. He was the first player that I watched in Flint and immediately needed to write something more in-depth on.

I interviewed him sitting in the stands at Flint Southwestern High School while a junior varsity game was going on. Based on my previous experiences interviewing high school athletes, most are typically already versed in jock-speak from watching their favorite athletes give boring answers to even more boring questions on televised games. I wasn’t exactly expecting him to be very forthcoming the first time we’d really talked for more than a minute or two, but was caught off guard with his answer to my first question asking him how he would describe the way he plays. 

He was able to connect what he did on the court with the abstract concept that athletics — particularly a sport as graceful and style-driven as basketball — is an art form. He freely compared his style of play with his interest in writing poetry. In my sportswriting experiences, it was rare for a 17-year-old to make that sort of comparison — instead usually opting for unrealistic comparisons of themselves to superstar athletes. In fact, most high school coaches I encountered had no ability to connect athletic pursuits to artistic ones.

Sports, particularly in urban settings, are taught as a means to an end. You play sports to earn scholarships, or to learn leadership, or to gain toughness. The fact that sports can — and should — feed creative or spiritual ambitions is rarely taught in youth sports.

As a failed athlete myself, I didn’t gravitate toward and love basketball because I was hyper-aggressive, or interested in proving my toughness, or filled with some pressing need to win and dominate. I love basketball because it’s beautiful. The efforts of coaches who saw sports through that lens never resulted in any meaningful take away from their limited interpretations of the value of sports.

Meeting a kid like Jaylen in Flint was both incredibly rewarding and depressing. I felt an immediate connection with him both because of his more thoughtful approach to the game, but also because of his wise-beyond-his-years ability to connect the development of his own style in terms that stretched beyond the typical jock-speak.

And I was disappointed for him because of the complete lack of adults involved in sports who are able to nurture or even explain sports through that lens.

Defining ‘Flint’ as a Style

I’d grown up as a fan of University of Michigan basketball — my family decided they were Michigan fans, and by default, that was the chosen team of my youth. The connection was bolstered by the presence of Michigan’s Fab Five — Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson — in the early 1990s.

They played flashy, the dressed flashy, they pissed off old white people in the suburb I grew up in — they were perfect for a young teenager who was struggling to buy into the longstanding puritanical view of sports, that they represented some sort of moralistic environment where sportsmanship, humbleness and trying really hard epitomized value. I just wanted some dunks, and the Fab Five delivered.

But by the end of the 1990s as I was growing up a bit, forced to work to have any sort of independence and preparing to enter college, my allegiance suddenly and permanently switched to Michigan State with the arrival of four players who had grown up a short distance from where I did.

I was ready for substance over style, and four teenagers went to Michigan State University in the late 1990s confident in one thing — the city they grew up in prepared them with a toughness that uniquely positioned them for success.

By the year 2000, they’d led Michigan State to a NCAA championship and, quite intentionally, thrust Flint into the national spotlight. Mateen Cleaves, Morris Peterson, Charlie Bell and Antonio Smith (who graduated in 1999, prior to the team’s championship breakthrough) became synonymous with their hometown — even successfully appropriating The Flintstones name from Hanna Barbera and giving it a new identity.

Flint Northern’s Smith, despite being undersized among opposing frontcourt peers, was equipped with a stoic toughness, a willingness to engage in battles with bigger brutes under the basket and an impressive ability to infuse that fearlessness onto his teammates.

Peterson was an under-recruited wing from Flint Northwestern who developed a jack-of-all-trades skillset that made him a first round pick in the NBA Draft and a mainstay in NBA rotations for nearly a decade.

Bell, whose scoring ability at Flint Southwestern attracted crowds from around the state to watch him play, molded himself into a serviceable defensive player and a versatile playmaker capable of creating shots for others.

Flint Northern’s Cleaves — the team’s point guard, star player and unquestioned on-court leader — played in the 2000 National Championship game on a badly injured ankle, and highlights of him hobbling around the court are still played every March during the NCAA Tournament.

Collectively, they were resilient — rebounding from a loss in the Final Four in 1999 before their breakthrough the following season. They worked and improved throughout their college careers. Although all four were good high school players, only Cleaves was recruited as a can’t-miss star prospect. And they took very seriously their place as stewards of Flint’s vast basketball tradition, building on what their predecessors accomplished and raising the bar for future generations.

The group famously sported ‘Flint’ tattoos — not just meant as an homage to the city. Cleaves once told me, “There’s something that comes behind that tattoo — it’s about work, it’s grind, it’s dedication. It’s not fun.”

And, unsurprisingly, their statement resonated with players who grew up watching and idolizing them. “I don’t think there’s a basketball player in Flint who doesn’t have that tattoo now,” Bell told me in an interview in 2010.

Despite the fact that the city no longer boasts an environment like the Flintstones grew up in — with Division I-caliber prospects leading each high school team in the city — the ethos and culture they contributed to will always resonate as a deep source of pride in Flint.

Much like the Fab Five, the Flintstones carved out their own national niche as an iconic, nicknamed unit that will forever be imprinted on the history of college basketball. They did it by converting grittiness, toughness and, most importantly, Flint, into a style.

Merging Rivals — A Painful Necessity

During the 1980s, the Flint Central basketball team had such an embarrassingly abundant supply of talent that legendary coach Stan Gooch has an interesting claim to fame among his many accomplishments: he once cut a future NBA All-Star.

Latrell Sprewell had a standout NBA career, including All-Star appearances and league awards, but he is a name never mentioned among Flint basketball greats. And it’s because he never actually played in Flint despite living in the city as a teenager.

Sprewell tried out for the varsity team at Flint Central as a freshman and was cut by Gooch after his first practice. Sprewell then moved to Milwaukee, where he became a high school star, was an eventual first round pick in the NBA Draft and had a lengthy and … memorable … professional career.

As insane as the possibility of not having space for a future NBA player sounds, Gooch was probably justified in cutting Sprewell. At the time, Flint Central was the standard in high school basketball in the state of Michigan. Central won three consecutive state championships in the early 1980s.

By the 1990s, though, the city’s dominant basketball program had become Flint Northern, led by Cleaves and Smith. Northern won a state championship in 1995.

The two schools had a heated and competitive rivalry that extended over multiple decades and wasn’t limited to just basketball – the annual Thanksgiving Day football game between Northern and Central at Atwood Stadium frequently drew approximately 10,000 spectators.

The thought of “combining” talent of both schools at one time would’ve resulted in an embarrassment of athletic riches resulting in a dynastic and unbeatable high school powerhouse. In 2009, that outlandish concept became a reality when Flint Central closed and four players who would’ve been seniors at Central transferred to Northern.

Early in that season, the coaching staff at Northern invited Cleaves to speak to the team and reinforce the legacy the players were now a part of. Cleaves – hilariously wearing a shirt that said ‘Free Plax’ on the front and ‘Bloomberg’ with slash through it on the back – noted that the team had quite a lengthy state title drought. “It’s a shame that the last banner up on that wall is from when I was here in 1995,” Cleaves told them.

The merger didn’t result in a state title contender, or even a feel-good story about players from both schools merging together seamlessly and having a strong season. The Vikings had no perimeter shooting, making it difficult for the team’s two best players — Shaquille Smith and Gerald Williams-Taylor — to use their best skills, slashing to the basket. Defenses, not scared by any of the team’s perimeter threats, routinely packed players inside, resulting in some awful shooting games and pedestrian results for the season — Northern finished in the middle of the pack in its conference and couldn’t even get out of its district in the playoffs, let alone make a championship run.

A few years later, in 2013, Northern would also close, bringing to an end two of the city’s incredible basketball legacies in less than five years.

A pipeline to … Iowa?

Talented basketball players from Flint have obviously had a major impact on college basketball in the state of Michigan. Three Flint players — Glen Rice, Kelvin Torbert and Monte Morris — have won Michigan’s Mr. Basketball award as the top high school player in the state. Rice led the University of Michigan to a national championship. Cleaves, Peterson and Bell led Michigan State University to a national championship. Cleaves and Eric Turner were both drafted by the Detroit Pistons. Terry Furlow preceded Magic Johnson as Michigan State’s marquee player, and was instrumental in getting Johnson to commit to the Spartans.

But, oddly, Flint has also been instrumental in creating a basketball legacy in the state of Iowa. The leading scorer in the history of University of Iowa basketball is Flint’s Roy Marble. The top two scorers in the history of Iowa State University basketball are Flint natives — Jeff Grayer and Barry Stevens.

Marble’s son, Roy Devyn Marble, never played high school basketball in Flint, but during an interview in 2009, the senior Marble noted that his son “knows everything” about Flint basketball and spent large portions of his life growing up in the community. Roy Devyn also followed that Flint-to-Iowa pipeline and had a standout career of his own with the Hawkeyes, and was selected in the NBA Draft in 2014.

Stevens and Grayer were teammates at Flint Northwestern, with Grayer supplanting his slight elder Stevens in Northwestern records, then doing it again when he followed Stevens to Iowa State.

And nearly three decades later, Morris chose to attend Iowa State, leading the Cyclones to NCAA Tournament appearances and solidifying himself as a NBA prospect.

Flint players have notched impressive basketball accomplishments in all corners of the world — even Iceland! — and that legacy has served as an incredible source of pride for the community, but also created immense pressure for players growing up in the city now to carry on the tradition.

The Fabulist

The emails started in 2009, as soon as a few of my bylines covering high school basketball appeared in the Flint Journal. There were at least three different names — all very common, but the only one I remember vividly is ‘Thomas Smith.’ And the content of all of their messages was the same — not only the same theme, but suspiciously similar phrasing and terminology used by these “different people.” The message was clear — I needed to check out a kid named Roy at a small district just on the outskirts of the city limits.

Despite warnings from colleagues, who had all been targeted by the same email campaigns and learned to ignore them, I was willing to put aside the fact that I was clearly being played and see for myself. I drove to the tiny Hamady gym — think of a typical resource-strapped inner-city high school, only about a quarter the size, and that’s Hamady, located just outside of Flint but close enough for residents to share the same pride of growing up in a tough, hardknock community as their city of Flint brethren. 

I watched Roy play, and what I saw as a solid high school player who had a work ethic that his coach routinely praised and he was clearly good enough to play low-level college basketball somewhere. That’s a great accomplishment — few high school players are good enough to play college basketball at any level.

But he was also a player whose dreams outweighed his potential. That’s also not uncommon — most anyone who plays organized sports has ambitions of starring in the best college and professional leagues. 

But Roy — industrious as he was — would not be deterred, and with his army of email accounts, photos of stationary from high major Division I colleges with his name on it and even stories of recruiting visits to those campuses (hey, a visit to Duke is still a visit to Duke, even if Coach K doesn’t invite you). 

When the Division I plans didn’t work out directly out of high school, he landed an opportunity at a community college and did well enough to earn the chance to finish his eligibility playing low-level college basketball if he wanted to. Instead, his admirable propaganda campaign continued — the high major offers were once again pouring in, he was once again touring the country looking for the right major university to serve as the springboard to his NBA career. It wasn’t Duke or North Carolina or Wake Forest or any of the other potential suitors his mysterious email supporters had predicted — it was tiny Arkansas Pine-Bluff.

He appeared in five games during his lone season of Division I college basketball, scoring five total points.

He did not play his senior season, briefly appeared in lower rung “professional” leagues — the type of leagues known mainly for not paying their players — and, a full two years after appearing in a college game, filled out the paperwork to make himself eligible for the 2016 NBA Draft.

Along the way, he carved out an impressively ambitious social media presence that includes professional-quality selfies, inspirational quotes about his NBA pursuit and comparisons of himself to some of basketball’s biggest stars. The entertainingly boastful and completely lacking in self awareness social media presence, incidentally, was always a stark contrast to his actual humble and soft-spoken personality in face-to-face interviews.

Roy won’t ever play in the NBA, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But too often, kids grow up fixated on a dream that is only reachable for a few, poorly advised by adults who don’t know any better, fruitlessly pursue it (in this case, even creating a carefully crafted narrative over several years in a desperate attempt to create a reality that is not possible) and — in the process — ignore the other avenues to create successful lives for themselves, most notably missing opportunities for a free education.

A byproduct of the athletic tradition in Flint is that it creates an impression that there’s only one way to escape the immense burdens of living in the inner city, resulting in a singular focus in kids who don’t have the talent to achieve those heights, but can’t imagine themselves doing anything else.

The fact is, Roy was trying to work me, and tried to work multiple other sports reporters, to gain publicity, which he thought would help him achieve his dreams. But rather than get upset about it, it provided an eye-opening epiphany about the symbiotically exploitative relationship athletes and media.

He wasn’t a star athletic prospect. But if he was, news outlets would’ve undoubtedly devoted resources to covering him. That coverage wouldn’t result from some warm-hearted mission to cover the most newsworthy stories. It would’ve resulted from the fact that star athletes help media outlets attract eyeballs to their online products, sell print products and even develop new products — hello, poster inserts and photo prints that can be ordered! — to sell. I had no problem with Roy trying to take advantage of a system that by its very nature sets out to profit from the accomplishments of others.

The City Gives and Takes

At its best, the gritty, blue collar toughness the city of Flint is known for creates athletes infused with an unshakeable self-assuredness that they can overcome any challenge possibly presented to them in the sports world after dealing with the day-to-day real-world struggles that accompany living in the most downtrodden regions of Flint.

At its worst, the constant, dangerous pitfalls that go along with growing up in an area plagued by violence, crime and poverty aren’t picky about who they manifest themselves in. 

Former Flint Northwestern star Jody Allen was murdered. Former Flint Central star Takais Brown was charged with robbing and murdering a 79-year-old. After his best NBA season, drugs were discovered in Terry Furlow’s system after his fatal car accident. And many other star players from the city have been involved in illicit behavior that includes drugs, domestic abuse and sexual violence.

No matter how promising or beloved, dangerous reminders of how quickly the same elements of the city that can be character-shaping for those who aren’t engulfed by them are ever-present. 

* * *

After a 2008-09 season filled with mediocre play by all city teams, Flint Northwestern gave me the greatest hope that I would have to cover a throwback, dominant team in 2009-10. They were the best team in the city the previous season, returned four starters, including their three leading scorers, and added a high-scoring transfer from Hamady High School in Dominez Burnett. 

They were a team with four players who had legitimate chances to play college basketball and were great high school players, plus a collection of role players who complemented the skills of their stars well. 

They were also the team I’d covered the most in 2008-09 and I’d formed what I considered good relationships with many players on the team. I’d run into some of them in public around the city and they’d talk to me. I’d met some of their moms and would make small talk with them in the stands during games. I started off on the beat with no connections and, by the end of one season, felt confident that I was becoming accepted, trusted and a part of the Flint basketball world that was so intriguing to me.

But, not only would those assumptions I’d made be shaken, the Flint Northwestern basketball team would become a painful example of the tragic consequences of poor decisions.

* * *

In August of 2009, Willis ‘Ray’ Arrington, a starting forward on the team and a star wide receiver on the football team, was shot and killed by a homeowner. Arrington and five others were reportedly attempting to break into the man’s home when he shot at them.

Burnett was arrested and charged with armed robbery in early 2011.

The incidents those players were involved in represent an unfathomable responsibility and stress for coaches of inner-city teams — namely, they’re often powerless to protect players on their team once they leave school or the gym. And for a reporter who covered those players, got to know them on some basic level, it was a painful reminder that I was still an outsider. I had no comprehension who the were outside of the basketball-controlled environment I saw them in. I had no way of understanding the day-to-day stresses and pressures in living in a crime-filled environment surrounded by many people who make decisions without their best interest at heart or, in some cases, with downright evil and malicious intentions.

When Arrington was killed, I remember not having any idea how to cover the story. On the one hand, he was a likable, polite kid who I’d gotten to know a bit through interactions with him and his teammates over the course of approximately a year, and I felt a strong need to honor that. On the other, there’s no way to justify what he was doing at the time he was killed, and I in no way wanted to minimize that he was doing something wrong.

The indecision paralyzed me from even starting a story. Thankfully, I wasn’t left alone with my thoughts long. Mike Williams, a great basketball coach at Beecher High School, located just outside the city limits, a teacher at Flint Northwestern and one of the few adults involved in coaching in the city limits who I’d comfortably call a mentor to the kids he interacted with, called me before I’d even formulated a plan to run by an editor.

“I just wanted to say some good words about Ray,” Williams told me, before poignantly and painfully discussing the many warnings he’d given Arrington and other students he taught and coached in Flint — including a story about a friend he had growing up who was killed in a similar attempted robbery.

The violence, the crime, the lack of attention and supervision and the lack of access to necessary resources are recurring problems in Flint and cities like it all over the country. They’re problems that coaches like Williams are forced to cope with — the supervision, safety and guidance you can provide to students is limited to hours in school or the gym for practice and games. What do you do when the kids go home?

For those who make it, the immense struggles associated with life in Flint create a positive narrative for obstacles that shaped a path to accomplishing goals and experiencing successes. But for far more people who become ensnared in the clutches of the city, those struggles create a reality that is often inescapable.

For decades, Flint has faced a seemingly endless — and escalating in magnitude — series of crises that would cause a weaker city to crumble.

The city is the birthplace of the American auto industry — Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley. Flint has produced a litany of talented innovators, artists, entertainers, thinkers and athletes. There’s a history here that is nuanced and has made vital contributions to the development of the United States. 

Basketball is a perfect example of precisely why Flint endures — the people. Watching a high school basketball game in a musty gym in Flint, it’s impossible to not feel a part of something important. Regardless of who is on the court, of who is coaching the teams, of who is sitting at the scorer’s table writing about the game, of who is watching in the stands … there’s a sense of importance that is palpable and a responsibility to live up to and honor immense standards created by the success of predecessors in those gyms.

In recent years, as the quality of basketball has visibly decreased, there have been no shortage of critics who willingly — and sometimes, sadly, gleefully — point out the shortcomings of the latest generation of athletes doing the best they can surrounded only by the ghosts of former greats in the now-deteriorating gyms and schools left in the city. But the experiences of those kids, the struggles they have, the hopes they have and the very real sense of pride they take in being able to call themselves a part of Flint’s basketball legacy are all palpable as present as they ever were. The city’s often dire circumstances have deteriorated immensely since the peaks of basketball dominance the city enjoyed, but the atmosphere in the city’s basketball landscape endures through all. 

Flint is the best basketball city in America. Try and tell us otherwise.

Originally published in Happy Anyway: A Flint Anthology