The Jump, Ian O'Connor

Excerpt From THE JUMP

The gates swung wide in Harlem and two of the most prominent figures in American entertainment came rolling on through, strutting to that exclusive beat of fame, fortune and youth. LeBron James had just agreed to a Nike deal worth more than $100 million, and Jay-Z had already sold 30 million records. So on this close June night, the fans who had assembled across the river from Yankee Stadium made the kind of ballpark sound once reserved for the Babe and Joe D., a sound that would’ve signaled unmitigated love if not for one undeniable truth.

The fans were cheering just as loudly for someone else.

Sebastian Telfair swore he was six feet tall, but as I watched him enter Holcombe Rucker Park with James on one side and Jay-Z on the other, with the certain first pick in the NBA draft and the undisputed king of hip-hop acting as surrogate bodyguards, the kid had 5-11 stitched to him like an Adidas label. His one extraordinary feature was his ordinariness. Telfair wasn’t just a baby-faced point guard from the Coney Island projects with legs skinnier than a Nathan’s frank; he was a ballplayer without any physical attribute to suggest he was LeBron’s personal choice as his heir, and among the most publicized talents in the fabulously rich history of New York City ball.

Well, he did have big hands, hands of a 6-5 forward. But Telfair could barely dunk. He wasn’t heavily muscled about the torso and, in the new-age sports vernacular, he wasn’t particularly long, either. But if Telfair could loom as figuratively large as that old Power Memorial center, Lew Alcindor, who were Jay-Z and LeBron but animate props on the point guard’s stage?

“Bassy...Bassy,” they shouted in honor of the jazzed-up version of Telfair’s given name. The word had gotten out: LeBron wasn’t going to play and risk injury 72 hours before his local NBA team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, would make the chiseled 6-8 son of Akron and St. Vincent-St. Mary High School graduate the No. 1 pick. Jay-Z? This wasn’t some concert at the Garden.

With the Yankees on the road and the Mets locked inside their usual catatonic state, this was the biggest game in town. This was a game at a basketball shrine like no other, a shrine amid the Polo Grounds projects worthy of the hundreds of pilgrims who pressed against the courtside railings, and the hundreds of pilgrims cursing the early birds in vain while pinned behind the blue police barricades outside the park’s fence.

Nobody was giving up a seat at the Rucker. You didn’t make it there, you didn’t make it anywhere. Wilt Chamberlain played the Rucker. So did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and Kobe Bryant. All the great playground legends who never made it to the league -- Earl “The Goat” Manigault, Herman “The Helicopter” Knowings and Joe “The Destroyer” Hammond -- made their names dunking and plucking quarters from backboard tops at the Rucker.

It was a rite of passage, a basketball baptism by fire. This was Telfair’s night to be christened, right smack in the teeming public square at 155th St. and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

Jay-Z and LeBron assumed the role of godparents. Born Shawn Carter, Jay-Z was CEO of a team named for his S. Carter sneaker line that emerged from his unprecedented contract with Reebok; no other rapper had closed such a deal. Jay-Z had his ballers meet at his studio. The rapper rented a luxury bus for the occasion, somehow managed to secure a police escort for the ride, and then made Telfair his team’s starting point guard in the Rucker’s signature event, the Entertainers Basketball Classic.

LeBron was Telfair’s personal coach and psychologist, his Tony Robbins for the evening.

At 18, Telfair had never dribbled across the Rucker court. He had only played there in his midsummer night’s dream, slicing his way toward the basket and into an indelible corner of Harlem lore.

Truth was, the playground had never seen a kid quite like this. Telfair had been covered in newspapers and magazines before his freshman year at Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School. He appeared in a 12-page fashion spread in the magazine Dime, with lingerie models draped all over his underaged limbs. He seized top billing ahead of his good friend, LeBron, on the cover of the hip-hop basketball bible, “Slam,” with the headline screaming: “Sebastian Telfair and LeBron James are about to rule the world. Imagine that.”

Imagine that Telfair was declared the country’s best player in the Class of 2004 while in fourth grade. Imagine that he was staring at a chance to become the first public school star in New York history to win city titles in three consecutive years. Imagine that hundreds of Division I college coaches would trade in their annuities and courtesy cars to sign Telfair, if only the NBA scouts and sneaker reps trailing him stopped obstructing their view.

Imagine that Telfair would say he rejected illicit six-figure offers from men trying to guide his playmaking services to one place or another.

“He’s got the game, the smile, and a name that rolls right off your tongue,” said Sonny Vaccaro, America’s most recognizable sneaker rep. Yes, Sebastian Telfair was a living, breathing study in hype.

Only hype never counted at the Rucker. Street punks were treated like millionaires, and millionaires like street punks. The Indiana Pacers’ Ron Artest, a millionaire street punk, would make that point. Playing in the undercard game on Telfair’s big night, Artest chopped away at every poor soul driving for a layup, inspiring an opposing coach named Mousey Carela “He’s the Phil Jackson of this shit,” one Rucker regular explained -- to race off his bench and into Artest’s face to scream, “We’re going to fuck you up.”

No blood, no technical. At the Rucker, fans were never alone in demanding their own SportsCenter dunks; on-court announcers provided running commentary encouraging a player to either embarrass his opponent or be embarrassed over the mike.

Despite the chaos and the presence of NBA players such as Artest and Lamar Odom, Telfair wouldn’t merely be the youngest and best player in either game; he would be the most poised. The gene pool was tilted in his favor. Telfair was a cousin of Stephon Marbury, and the extended Marbury family was to Brooklyn basketball what the Kennedys were to Massachusetts politics.

Five Marbury boys played Division I ball, and so expectation followed Telfair like a blanket out of the crib. But even Jay-Z wasn’t sure how the kid’s game would play at the Rucker; he’d expressed some reservations on the ride over. “This is like the Apollo,” one of the on-court announcers warned the players. “If you don’t show up you will get booed.” These announcers sized up the worthy players and granted them nicknames that would live in perpetuity, like The Bone Collector and Half-Man, Half-Amazing.

Jay-Z didn’t want Sebastian Telfair to leave the park known as Sebastian Telfair. By night’s end, Jay-Z was comforted by the fact Telfair would forever be known in Harlem as Too Fast, Too Furious.

With the crowd so close to the action it formed the sidelines, Telfair ignored the NBA TV cameras and the pleas to deliver the kind of bounce-the-ball-off-your-opponent’s-forehead game popularized by that rebel sneaker brand, And 1, and those streetball shows thriving on cable.

If Telfair showed Allen Iverson speed, he also showed John Stockton savvy. Every pass was a bounce pass. Every shot was a good shot. Every individual move was made with a team goal in mind.

The one and only time Telfair answered the crowd’s calls for more came on his better-than-Iverson double crossover that nearly broke both ankles owned by the Director, former St. John’s guard and Knicks hopeful David Cain, whom Pat Riley called one of the toughest players he ever had to cut.

This move freed Telfair to suspend his twirling body in midair, draw a foul at the basket, propel the crowd into a near-religious experience and send LeBron racing onto the court.

Telfair calmly made his free throws before the fans and LeBron settled down. He finished with 24 points and, if anyone cared to count, a dozen or so assists. His one turnover came on a bounce pass. His selfless and disciplined play didn’t jibe with family tradition, but his high lift on jump shots did carry the Marbury signature.

All in all, the boy wonder appeared to be precisely what Tiger Woods’ college coach had once called his own prodigy -- half Mozart, half Magic Johnson. Telfair figured out his symphony in the middle of the fast break. Of most consequence, Telfair’s team won the game. That’s how point guards and quarterbacks were judged.

When the show was complete, fans poured onto the court as if they were students out of some nowhere college celebrating their longshot bid to the NCAA Tournament. Carmelo Anthony, who had been sitting in the stands dressed in his Tom Seaver retro jersey, had already left the park. So had Dwayne (Tiny) Morton, the head coach at Lincoln and among the few high school coaches in America who would show up at a game wearing his star player’s jersey. Morton was last seen in his purple Telfair jersey and backward-turned Yankees cap heading for the Jay-Z bus in the game’s final minutes, fleeing the post-game madness to come.

Jay-Z, LeBron, Telfair and a couple of hired hands who looked like NFL noseguards cut through the crowd. Telfair had assistance from the rear. The man was tall, lean and weathered; he looked like some old-school boxing trainer. He had his right hand on Telfair’s left shoulder, escorting him through the hustle and bustle, when I asked for a minute. The old man responded by yanking the player’s top and demanding that he oblige.

When Sylvester “Otis” Telfair was his son’s age, he was almost on his way to the killing fields of Vietnam. That was then, this was now. It was closing on midnight and Otis’ son was standing near a park bench in an unlit corner of Harlem. Sebastian was standing at the four-way, big-business intersection connecting the NBA, major college sports, sneaker-backed tournaments, and high-profile high school basketball.

He was standing at the very point where tens of millions could be made or squandered. So Telfair talked about learning from the cautionary tales embodied by his backup point guard for the night, Omar Cook, and his friend, Lenny Cooke, minor league nomads who cost themselves millions by leaving school early to play in an NBA that wasn’t ready to receive them.

“You definitely look at the negative things that happened to people,” Telfair said, “and then you go in a different direction.”

A different direction? Telfair had been pulled in so many directions, his head spun faster than the world-famous Cyclone roller coaster that still raged off the Atlantic Ocean, one bounce pass away from his Coney Island home.

On this night, Telfair was only being pulled in the direction of the bus. LeBron was shouting for him to come. It was a night to light candles to that holy trinity of fame, fortune and youth. It was a night to party at Jay-Z’s new club, 40/40, where a Telfair friend would introduce the point guard to Britney Spears.

Telfair wanted to be half Britney, half LeBron. He wanted his own coast-to-coast tour, and he wanted his games on national TV. Telfair had poured so much blood, sweat and tears into this moment in time. He had studied NBA game tapes. He had run a million miles in the beach sand a block from his housing authority home. He had risen at 5 a.m., day after day, starting his morning just when the dealers were finishing their night, so he could do situps and pushups in his apartment, race up and down the stairs in his 15-story building, jump rope in his lobby, and shoot solitary jump shots in the Lincoln High gym.

Would Telfair ignore conventional wisdom and follow LeBron into the pros? Would he become the first point guard to jump straight from high school to the NBA?

What would he do with his senior season, his one last season by the sea?

Telfair only knew he would do something people wouldn’t forget. You see, kids used to make fun of his name. If Sebastian Telfair had the ring of nobility to it, or sounded like some Evelyn Waugh character out of Brideshead Revisited, the name didn’t charm the boys in the ‘hood.

But there came this seminal moment in the life of Brooklyn’s latest, greatest basketball prince. “I decided I liked my name,” the point guard said. “Sebastian Telfair. It’s a name people are going to remember.”

One way or the other.

********************

This was the night sure to change everyone’s lives. This was a rags-to-riches, American dream kind of night, because David Stern was calling out all those first-round names and Jamel Thomas was certain to be among them.

Jamel was three when his mother was murdered. Erica Telfair already had a full house in her project apartment but she took in Jamel and his one-year-old brother, Deon, because that’s what the good people inside Surfside Gardens did. They took care of their own. Lord knew nobody was about to do it for them.

Thomas wasn’t easy to raise. As a teen, his nickname was “five thirty” -- that’s when he’d come in from the streets and call it a morning. But Thomas was Stephon Marbury’s cousin and best friend, two ballers who would show up in Bobby Hartstein’s gym at Abraham Lincoln High as junior high prospects determined to someday take the Railsplitters to Madison Square Garden and the city crown.

Hartstein knew Marbury. Everyone in Coney Island knew Marbury. He was the wonderchild, the younger brother coming behind Eric, Donnie and Norman, Lincoln stars all. So no, Hartstein didn’t ask Marbury to identify himself. The coach wanted to know a little about his taller friend.

“Who’s that?” Hartstein said.

“My cousin Jamel,” Marbury answered.

“How does he do in school?”

“He doesn’t go to school, Coach.”

“What do you mean he doesn’t go to school?”

“Well, he doesn’t go every day.”

“Where does he think he’s going to high school?”

“Right here, Coach.”

“Well, he’s going to school every single day if he thinks he’s going to play basketball for Lincoln.”

Thomas didn’t go to school every single day, but developed into a representative -- if withdrawn -- student. He was always good in math, but as a freshman he’d refuse to complete the essay portion of a test simply because he didn’t believe he could write one. This inspired Lenore Braverman, English teacher, to make an offer. Braverman asked Thomas if he wanted to live with her and her husband in their upper-middle-class home.

Hartstein thought it was a terrific idea, but he had to run it by the Telfair and Marbury families. “They didn’t know Mrs. Braverman from a hole in the wall,” Hartstein said. “They were wondering, ‘Why is this white Jewish woman going to bring a black kid into her house, because she thinks she’s going to cash in on him someday?’” The coach vouched for Braverman, and Stephon did the same.

Thomas would stay with the Bravermans during the week, and return to the projects for the weekends. Early on, he struggled with the discipline. No kid nicknamed “five thirty” could embrace a 10 p.m. bedtime.

Ultimately, the Bravermans helped him turn around his life. Thomas went from a kid who wouldn’t write an essay to one who scored high enough on his SAT to win a scholarship to Providence.

Thomas earned that scholarship by being 6-5, and by playing Pippen to Marbury’s Jordan. But he was lucky to have had any major Division I possibilities at all. Providence and Rutgers wanted him; all the true powerhouse programs were busy with Marbury, the best prep guard in America.

The Thomas and Marbury home recruiting visits were set up for the same night, with heavyweights such as Syracuse and UCLA making their pitches in Marbury’s fourth-floor apartment while Providence set its sights one floor below, literally and figuratively. Bobby Gonzalez, the Providence assistant, worked Thomas hard, believing he had a steal.

But by becoming active participants in the Thomas recruitment, the Marburys nearly blew the best scholarship offer Jamel had. Pete Gillen, the Providence coach, made the home visit with his aide, Louis Orr, while Hartstein was in Lutheran Hospital with a bleeding ulcer and other stomach problems. Gerard Bell, Hartstein’s assistant, sat in for his boss. Gillen brought Orr to the meeting instead of Gonzalez because he figured the former Syracuse star and Knicks forward would make a lasting impression.

The Marburys were the ones who made the lasting impression, shuttling between Stephon’s meetings and Jamel’s. Given their experience with college coaches, the Marburys appointed themselves Jamel’s recruiting coordinators. Don Marbury and his sons, Donnie and Eric, sat in on the Providence home visit. During that visit, Orr emerged from a separate conference with Marbury family members to tell Gillen there was a major problem.

Gillen ended the visit, picked up Gonzalez, and arrived in Hartstein’s hospital room. The Lincoln coach had IV tubes running into his arms. He was expecting a courtesy visit, and instead got an earful of bad news.

“Bobby H,” Gillen said. “I think we’ve got to back off of this one. You know we love Jamel. He’s a great kid. But it’s too crazy up there, and I don’t think we can get involved with this one.”

“Pete,” Hartstein said, “let me handle it. As soon as I get this IV out of my arm I’ll straighten it out.”

Hartstein immediately called Don Marbury, the patriarch, and one of his older sons to the hospital. “I laid into them,” Hartstein said. “I said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ They said, ‘Coach, but we didn’t mean anything.’ I said, ‘Listen, do what I tell you and keep your mouth shut. Do you want to ruin everything for Jamel?’ And they said, ‘No, no, no.’”

Gillen would only agree to continue recruiting Thomas if Hartstein gained control of the process. “There were a lot of crazy things in the recruiting process,” Gillen said. “I said, ‘Bobby, if things are going to be off-kilter and not according to the rules, we’re out. We didn’t cheat at Xavier to get 6-9 guys who were lottery picks, Brian Grant and Tyrone Hill, so we’re not going to cheat for a 6-5 excellent player.’

“We just heard rumors. (Jamel) never asked for any money. We just had to watch it and be careful. We heard people were asking for money, and if that happens, we’re out. We’re not going to give a kid a gun and let him shoot us with it. (Hartstein) got involved because some people weren’t doing the right thing on the periphery.”

Asked directly if anyone in the Marbury family had requested money in exchange for Thomas’ commitment to Providence, Gillen said, “I’ve got no comment. I don’t want to talk about that.”

Bell, the Lincoln assistant who attended the meeting in Hartstein’s place, said that if any demand was made, he didn’t hear it. Don and Donnie Marbury vehemently denied asking any coach for money. “We knew the rules,” Donnie said, “and we definitely followed those rules. We never asked anybody for anything.”

Thomas signed with Providence and developed into a Big East star. During his sophomore season he helped the Friars get to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament, beating Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke team along the way. Before that Duke victory, Thomas threatened to boycott the game unless the Friars staff came up with tickets “for a wave of Marburys who came in from Coney Island unannounced,” one Providence coach said. “Thomas demanded tickets for a sold-out tournament game, and we were all going nuts trying to find some.”

They found some, and Thomas delivered a big game against the Blue Devils.

“Jamel was a great player with a tremendous heart,” Gillen said. “A heart of gold.” The coach recalled Thomas sending his basketball shoes and meal money back to the Telfairs, his way of saying thanks. “He didn’t talk about what happened to (his mother), and we didn’t ask him much about it,” Gillen said. “But there was a culture shock coming from Coney Island to this small Catholic school in Rhode Island. There weren’t a lot of African-American students there. And Jamel didn’t trust people. You really had to earn Jamel’s trust. He wasn’t your typical student. In the end, without the Bravermans, he would’ve dropped out his junior year in high school. He’d be nowhere in Coney Island today, just hanging on the corners and getting in trouble.”

Lenore Braverman would only say that Jamel “was a gem, a wonderful young man,” before declining further comment. “Jamel is so shy and reserved,” Hartstein said, “but he’s everything against what was the stereotype of these kids is supposed to be.”

Thomas was also a better-than-advertised ballplayer. He led the Big East in scoring as a senior, this after nearly declaring for the NBA draft the year before. Gillen had left to go to Virginia, and Thomas had come to see him as a father figure. But his decision to stay and play for the new coach, Tim Welsh, proved to be a wise one.

“He could take over a game any time he wanted to on the college level,” Welsh said. “The guy was the leading scorer in the Big East. You figured he had to get drafted.”

The family that took in Thomas as a child figured much the same. The Telfairs read the magazines and listened to the draft experts. Mid-to-late first round, they heard from many sources. That meant big money, guaranteed money. That meant the first real chance to escape the crime and poverty that were as much a part of everyday life at Surfside Gardens as the seagulls hovering over the boardwalk across the street.

True believers all, the Telfairs gathered in their apartment for a draft night feast. Otis and Erica were there with their children, including 14-year-old Sebastian, the sibling who never left Jamel’s side.

Erica had been talking up the new home Thomas might buy for her. Stephon Marbury had just finished his third season in the NBA; he’d left Georgia Tech for the draft after his freshman season. The Marburys had moved out of their fourth floor apartment and on to a new and prosperous life, leaving the Telfairs behind in their third-floor unit, waiting for the same kind of break.

Only Thomas wasn’t Marbury, maybe the most talented guard ever to come out of New York. Thomas was known as a tweener -- a player a little too short for the forward position and a little too rough around the ballhandling edges for the guard position.

NBA scouts didn’t question Jamel’s ability to score, but did question his commitment to defense. “So I was worried for him,” Gonzalez recalled. “But I was still confident he would at least get drafted in the second round.”

The Telfairs didn’t want to hear anything about the second round. Only first-round picks got guaranteed contracts and salaries that could forever alter a family’s life.

After dinner, the TV went on and the NBA’s annual beauty contest began. Sebastian had told friends he was sure Thomas would go in the top 20, and the Telfairs would’ve been just fine with that. So when David Stern announced the first five picks and called out the names of Elton Brand, Steve Francis, Baron Davis, Lamar Odom and Jonathan Bender, nobody was alarmed.

But by the end of the first round, people started breaking down. Twenty nine players were called, players from high school, community college, the Big East, France and Russia. The guaranteed cash was going, going, gone.

Thomas figured he’d at least get plucked in the second round by a general manager who would discover in training camp that he’d found the steal of the draft. Only that didn’t happen, either. Utah selected Eddie Lucas of Virginia Tech with the 58th and final pick.

The Telfairs came unglued. They felt like they’d been had.

“The only ones who didn’t cry were me and Jamel,” Otis said. “I didn’t cry because I’m the head of the family, and I had to hold it in. I told Jamel, ‘This ain’t the end,’ but Sebastian cried like a baby, and it just killed my wife.”

The Telfairs feared that Jamel represented their last hope. They figured that getting shut out on draft night meant being locked inside the projects forever. Sebastian? At 14, he was very much a phenom; in fact, he was considered the best eighth-grade basketball player in all of America.

But Erica couldn’t look at her short, skin-and-bones son and see anything but another practical joke, a cruel hoax perpetrated by someone fixing to dupe her -- like Lucy pulling away the ball from Charlie Brown -- when it was time to cash in. “When Jamel was supposed to get drafted, honest to God, we didn’t know anything about Sebastian,” Erica would say. “Honest. We didn’t pay this kid no attention. We had no idea the kid could really play.”

“That’s true,” her husband would say. “We never dreamed anything would happen to Sebastian. After Jamel failed, we felt like we gave it a good try.

“But man, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. You want to talk about the worst day of my life.”

The worst day of his life? For Otis, that was saying a mouthful.

As a young soldier, he had lived the horrors of the Vietnam bush. As the angry victim of an all-American mugging, he had killed a man on a Coney Island street.

********************

Talking about Coney Island, circa 1988, was much like talking about Vietnam, circa 1968.

“Brooklyn was the killing fields back then,” said Sari Kolatch, a white-collar criminal defense attorney in the New York firm of Cohen Tauber Spievack & Wagner, LLP, and the woman who put Otis Telfair in jail.

Kolatch was familiar with Stephon Marbury, the Knicks’ new point guard, and vaguely familiar with his 18-year-old cousin, Sebastian Telfair, the star at Lincoln High. But 16 years after the fact, Kolatch couldn’t remember the Otis Telfair manslaughter case. Brooklyn was a depressing blur of murder and mayhem back then, a non-stop procession of Otis Telfairs being spit out of a revolving door.

She was an Assistant District Attorney under Elizabeth Holtzman then, and prosecutors were just changing their computer programs to substitute the word “crack” for “cocaine.” Crack was suddenly all over the place. Gangs were selling it. People were killing neighbors for a $10 vial.

“Sometimes we’d go to crime scenes and people would be shooting out of their windows,” Kolatch recalled. “I was a five-foot Jewish white girl. If I went to the projects, everybody knew who I was.” Same went for the two accompanying homicide detectives. They’d all sprint from into crime-scene buildings out of fear of getting shot.

Small children were caught in the crossfire. “These projects were just horrendous,” Kolatch said. “In that Coney Island neighborhood, the odds of kids getting out then weren’t good....Every kid in Coney Island knew someone who was murdered.”

In fact, Sebastian would often say he knew of more friends, acquaintances and neighbors who were murdered than he could count. “And Coney Island is a better place now,” Kolatch said. “I still wouldn’t want to live in those projects, but they’re not as dangerous as they used to be.”

Otis would attest to that. “In the late ‘80s,” he said, “you’d come home and all you heard was gunfire. It was Dodge City around here.” Coney Island was a place where problems were often solved on the street, just like they were on August 7, 1988, when Otis was jumped by three men. He had been fishing on the pier with a few of his kids. Otis said he left them to get bait, and that he stopped at a friend’s home on the way back. When he left his friend’s home, Otis’ life changed for keeps.

“They beat the shit out of me,” Otis said. “They kicked my teeth in, and then they took the money that I had in my shirt pocket. I went home, thought about it for five minutes, and then I went back outside.”

On the corner of Mermaid and West 19th, Telfair did what he’d been trained in Vietnam to do. He located the enemy and aimed his loaded gun.

********************

Otis Telfair was out of school and out of work when he decided he wanted to become a Marine. He failed their test before passing the Army’s exam. “I was 19,” Otis said, “and suddenly I was being trained how to kill.”

Soon enough he was overseas with the Army, boxing on German military bases. He was 149 pounds and good with his hands. The Army’s team trainer called him “Sweet O,” for some unknown reason, a nickname that evolved into “Otis,” the name Telfair would carry back to the States.

Telfair did one tour in Vietnam before returning home. Like many veterans, he didn’t easily share tales from the crypt of that war. Telfair would say he never appreciated the way history kept score.

“We won all the battles but lost the war,” he said. “Don’t get it twisted: We could’ve won there. At times, I’m bitter about the whole experience. I feel it altered my life and gave me a lifestyle I didn’t like.”

Otis hadn’t even smoked his first cigarette yet, and here were men being shredded and slaughtered right before his eyes. “It’s not like in the movies and on TV, where it’s clean and glorified,” Otis said. “I’ve seen what bullets really do to bodies, and it’s the worst horror you can imagine.

“You had to be a violent person to survive. I got Agent Orange. I think I got it in Lai Khe, but I don’t know. I got jaundice, too. When I came back I was completely yellow, my eyes and everything.”

His right eye was permanently damaged when struck by a branch released by an American soldier barreling through the bush. Otis would spend more than two months in a New York hospital, where he was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. The government would award him $2,000 a month in disability. Another vet Otis knew, a vet who’d lost his arms and legs, got more than double that amount.

“I saw worse things in the veterans hospital than I saw in the jungle,” Otis said. He never took a bullet in Vietnam, but dodged his share of artillery fire in Lai Khe, otherwise known as Rocket City.

Survival didn’t guarantee a happy ending. “We didn’t get any kind of welcome when we got back,” Otis said. “All we ended up getting was some names on a wall.” Otis would recognize too many names on that memorial wall, and he would come to see the survivors reading those names as casualties all the same. The war, he said, “did fuck a lot of us up.”

Back from Vietnam and out of the hospital, Telfair found work driving 18-wheelers, a job he grew to love. But long before he approached his assailants on August 7, 1988, Telfair’s life had come undone. In 1983, he was convicted and jailed on charges of criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, criminal sale of a controlled substance in the fifth degree, and criminal possession of a controlled substance in the fourth degree.

So he carried a felony record with his gun to the corner of Mermaid and West 19th on that fateful August night. Two of his three muggers had fled, and a 28-year-old man named Edwin Arroyo had not. Arroyo had just been discharged from prison and into a work release program after serving time on an attempted robbery conviction.

At approximately 5:50 p.m., Otis Telfair fired his weapon and ended Arroyo’s life. According to police and court records, a .25-caliber pistol, a magazine clip and four spent shells were recovered at the scene.

The first officer on that scene, Donna Bianco, saw a man running south on 19th Street with a weapon in his hand. Bianco apprehended Telfair and placed him under arrest.

Two boys in the area told investigators they saw a man run, stop, and throw a gun into a junkyard lot. In separate viewings, the boys identified Telfair as the man who had disposed of the gun.

When first brought into the 60th precinct, Telfair told a detective named Daniel Rizzo that he shot Arroyo only after the victim had pulled a gun on him, according to a police memo. Telfair told Rizzo that Arroyo’s gun went off during their struggle. John O’Connor, Assistant District Attorney, videotaped Telfair’s statement and decided “the case looked like it would be justifiable.”

“Three days later,” Telfair recalled, “they changed it. They said once I went back home and thought about it, I was no longer in danger. It wasn’t self defense anymore.”

Telfair was indicted by a grand jury on the charges of murder in the second degree, criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree, and criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree. One year and one day after the killing, Telfair stood before the Honorable Ruth Moskowitz inside State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. Telfair was represented by Barry Krinsky; the people were represented by Sari Kolatch. The judge confirmed that the parties had negotiated a plea bargain and that Telfair was a repeat felon. Before he was sent back to prison, Telfair was asked if he had anything he wished to say.

“Yes,” he said, according to court records. “To the Court, I would like to say there was no intentional, uh, murder. I’m charged with manslaughter. I’m guilty of manslaughter. But I didn’t intentionally set out to kill no man.”

“That’s why I permitted the plea to manslaughter,” Moskowitz said.

“And I’m sorry for a death to be involved,” Telfair continued. “I’m sorry that this man wound up dying. I ask God and the court to forgive me for my sin, because a death was involved. I’m happy that the court took into consideration the circumstances of the case and reduced this to a manslaughter. And I feel that I’m going to serve my sentence and go home to my wife and kids.”

“That’s good,” Moskowitz said. “The plea was agreed to because of the circumstances. It’s uncontested that you were attacked by the persons, one of them being the person who was eventually killed, prior to the time that this incident took place. And that’s why the people offered -- and I agreed -- to impose the sentence I am glad to impose, which is, you’re sentenced to a minimum of six years and maximum of 12 to the New York State Department of Correctional Services. And the mandatory surcharge is waived.”

Krinsky then asked the judge if she would consider recommending his client for the earliest possible parole release, given the fact that he was beaten, and beaten by men with criminal records. Moskowitz asked Krinsky if Telfair had a narcotics problem. “He had a narcotics problem many years ago,” Krinsky said.

Moskowitz then pledged to write a letter to the parole board in the event Telfair used his jail time to participate in educational programs. Krinsky thanked the judge, who then advised Telfair that he had a right to appeal the sentence just imposed.

Finally, Moskowitz said, “Defendant remanded.”

“Thank you,” the defendant responded.

Some fifteen years later, Telfair said this of his day of rage in the Brooklyn killing fields: “People think I’m some crazy killer, a murderer, and I’m not. I’m not crazy or sick....I just left a fishing pier and didn’t come home until eight years later.”

********************

Sebastian Telfair was three years old when his father killed Edwin Arroyo. To hear Telfair tell it, his one-parent childhood was just another obstacle to clear, just another cone for a young Coney Island point guard to dribble around.

“When you come from the projects,” Telfair said, “you can adapt to any environment. We visited my father in jail a lot. My mother made sure we know who our father was. We’d go see him like once a month. He was in jail eight straight years, came back, then went back for violating parole. But if (the killing) happened the way it looked like it happened, he would’ve been in jail a lot longer than 10 years. He would’ve done 25. He would’ve been in there forever.”

It seemed like forever all the same.

Otis Telfair lifted weights in prison. Lifted weights and read the Bible, the Koran and the Torah. “The scripture says we’re made out of dust, dirt and the mud of the earth,” Otis said. “Go out on the beach and grab a handful of sand and put it under a magnifying glass. You’re going to see a billion colors, right? If we’re made from that, then that means there’s every color in every one of us.”

Over time, the Telfair home became its own kaleidoscope. Danny, Helen and Terica were Erica’s children by Dan Turner, who left the family when Danny, the oldest, was five. “A coward,” Danny said of his father, who died of a heart attack years after leaving the home. “My mother had to be my father, too.”

Jamel and Deon were taken in after their mother was shot dead. Sylvester, Sylvia, Sebastian, Octavia and Ethan were Otis’ children, making 10 in all, not counting Jerry Ferguson, the cousin the Telfairs treated like a son. Rasheem “Bubba” Barker, Sebastian’s closest friend, and the Marburys would come and go through the Telfair home like the Telfairs, Turners and Thomases would come and go through the Marbury home.

“A lot more than 10 kids lived here,” Erica said.

“And I don’t take any credit for raising these kids the right way,” Otis said. “I never willingly left my family; I was taken out of the home. But when I was away, my wife held everything together.”

Erica raised six boys and four girls in the projects, which surely earned her a free pass to heaven. She was a large, warm and gregarious woman who often shouted when she spoke, the natural yield of talking above the prattle of so many kids. Erica’s children often marveled over the fact that she never used drugs, never so much as rolled a joint, even when practically everyone she knew was lost in a cloud of smoke.

“The perfect mom,” Danny Turner said. “Basically, she taught us how to be a man.”

Once when Jamel was about 12, he came upstairs crying after losing a fight with a bigger kid. Erica Telfair sent Jamel right downstairs to resume the battle. She stood there as Jamel took another beating, refusing to let any of his siblings jump in. When Jamel went down, she yelled, ‘Get up. Get up.’

“She was teaching us to stand on her own,” Turner said. “She was the spine of our book. Without her, the book would’ve fallen apart.”

And the city-owned Surfside Gardens was an easy place for a family to fall apart. Surfside was a five-building, 597-unit complex bordered by West 31st and 33rd Streets and Surf and Neptune Avenues. The area was surrounded by vacant lots squared off by twisted chain fences and choked by wildly overgrown weeds and piles of sheetrock and plywood.

The ocean boardwalk across the street was home to abandoned shacks and run-down hamburger huts with shattered windows. The neighborhood high-rises had a mind-numbing sameness to them, block after block of cement-colored projects that were home to welfare families trying to negotiate their children through a maze of homeless men nodding on park benches, teenage truants huddling on street corners, and drug dealers doing business through car windows.

Outside Surfside Gardens, ballers were forever running full-court games on the legendary court known as the Garden. Inside the Telfairs’ 15-story building on 2940-42 W. 31st Street, dark and narrow stairwells were littered with garbage and defaced with profane scribblings. The drab yellowish hallways and reddish brown apartment doors were in dire need of paint jobs, and the relentless odor of urine told a resident he or she was home, bittersweet home.

Erica had lived in this building since it opened in 1969. She’d lived with Otis and the children on the 11th floor, in a three-bedroom unit, before petitioning the city for a bigger place, one flight below the Marburys. “We had to go to court,” Otis said, “and the judge awarded it to us. We ended up with one of the largest apartments in the projects. Five bathrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, living room and dining room.

“The only income we had was my government check, but it could’ve been a lot worse.” The Telfairs had enough to pay the rent, buy food, cover the phone bill. They had each other, too. “When I wasn’t (in prison) upstate,” Otis said, “we were one of the few families with two parents around. Sebastian once told me that not one of his friends had his dad at home, and I didn’t believe him until he started naming names.”

Somehow, some way, Sebastian Telfair counted himself among the blessed in Coney Island. He had older brothers to act as his shepherds. He had a mother who was drug free. And he had a father who was in the home, with the family, when he wasn’t doing time upstate.

“I’m not going to put my father down,” Telfair said. “I love him so much. He’d die for us right now.” Sebastian didn’t prod his father about Vietnam; the kid harbored an unspoken respect for the soldier’s sacrifice and valor. But Sebastian was very much Erica’s son.

When Otis was in prison, Sebastian said, “my momma always made sure we had food. But we were poor. Poor poor. We didn’t have shit. We’d go down to the Salvation Army right before Christmas to pick out a toy because we couldn’t afford anything else. At some point, we needed a break as a family. We needed something to happen to turn everything around.”

********************

Jamel Thomas didn’t happen, not the way the Telfairs had hoped. He would play in Europe, land an occasional 10-day contract in the NBA, and send back whatever money he could. It wasn’t enough to get the Telfairs out of the projects.

The Marburys had already made it out through basketball, through the millions Stephon scored as the fourth overall pick in the NBA draft, and the Telfairs figured their best hope, their only hope, was to follow the same trail. Danny Turner had played high school basketball but was built like a noseguard; no scholarship offers came his way. His brother, Deon, earned a degree at St. John’s the way Thomas had earned one at Providence, but Deon didn’t play college ball.

Sylvester was a role player at Lincoln, a kid who had enough trouble staying in school and out of jail. His hands weren’t reliable enough to carry the family’s future, a future so fragile it needed to be handled with the utmost care.

The Telfairs needed a quarterback, a point guard, their very own Stephon. Suddenly, they needed to believe what people had been trying to tell them all along: their eighth child was the one.

So after Thomas “failed,” in the words of Otis Telfair, the family drew up a new play. The time had come to give young Sebastian the ball.

The Jump

THE JUMP

Excerpt

Excerpt From THE JUMP

About
Ian O'Connor

Ian O'Connor Bio

Copyright
Info

Copyright Information

Purchase Information

Book
Suggestions

Here Are Some Other Non-Fiction Titles You Might Enjoy

Send this Page
to a Friend

Help Spread the Word

The Jump

THE JUMP

Excerpt

Excerpt From THE JUMP

About Ian O'Connor

Ian O'Connor Bio

CopyrightInfo

Copyright Information

Purchase Information

BookSuggestions

Here Are Some Other Non-Fiction Titles You Might Enjoy

Send this Pageto a Friend

Help Spread the Word

About
Ian O'Connor

Copyright
Info

Book
Suggestions

Send this Page
to a Friend