The Whittler

He got off the train. His scholarship to Bethune-Cookman—a school of a few hundred students run by Marry McLeod Bethune, adviser on race relations to five presidents—would hinge, he soon discovered, on a tryout with three dozen other young black men. Twist an ankle, catch the flu, you're gone. "I killed "em," says John.

To reach the place where John Chancy sits today, you must enter McGonigle Hall, turn left, descend a flight of steps, follow a corridor, turn left again through another shadowy cinder-block tunnel and find the door on your right. "You gotta be careful who you let close," he says. "They're the only ones who can hurt you." Inside are two small rooms. One is where the secretary, business manager and two assistant coaches are crammed: the other, the size of the three-second lane, is where John sits, peanut shells on the carpet, fresh bread on the desk—TASTE this! You gonna DROP YOUR DRAWERS! "He's a kitten inside," says his secretary, Essie Davis. "Anybody can walk in here. Anybody. He enjoys people. He just doesn't want anyone to know."

A window? Doesn't need one. He would pull the blinds on it anyway. Xerox machine? What for? Voice-mail system? Please. New furniture and rugs? Somebody did that to him one night five years ago, when he was gone.

To reach where John Chaney sits today, a man goes through four years at Bethune-Cookman, urinating behind trees on road trips because most of the bathrooms along the way are only for whites. Four years of speeding tickets from cops of two-traffic-light Florida and Georgia towns, four years of "So...y'all Mrs. Bethune's niggahs, huh?" Four years of ripping up the NAIA, making All-America, scoring 2,000 points, but seeing it all vanish—poof, never happened—in the mainstream media. Four years of being awakened by a roommate, a premed major named Hubert Hemsley, being dragged to classes and the library, slowly becoming aware how powerful a weapon his mind is. "I was shocked," says John. "I went back to Philadelphia that first summer, and doin' nothin' wasn't funny anymore. I was a new me. Seemed like nobody at home had dreams. Couldn't wait to go back to college." Four years of watching Mrs. Bethune implore her students to double back to the poverty and ignorance they were fleeing, to offer themselves as a bridge...and then walking back to his dorm, hearing the first faint murmurs of the missionary stirring in his breast.

To reach where John Chancy is today, a man swallows his pride whole and moves back into his stepfather's home with his pregnant bride after graduating, because he doesn't have a cent, then accepts an offer to play for the Harlem Globetrotters for $350 a month because he's still five years too early, and the NBA, in 1955, has little interest in a black man. But his innocence is not done being damaged: he's stunned to learn that all the Globetrotters' tricks and games are prearranged, so he quits alter two months because the game is life and death to him.

He works three jobs—rushing from his job as a phys-ed teacher at a Philadelphia junior high to bar mitzvahs and banquets, where he waits on tables for white people, to little towns like Sunbury and Williamsport, a three-hour drive away, where he plays in smoky high school gyms on weekends in the Eastern Basketball League for $60 or $70 a game, earning enough to rent a small place in the projects. He's the MVP of a league full of black men who belong in the NBA, a perennial all-star, and every year he tells no one but keeps hoping, just as he had hoped for that bicycle every Christmas, that someone up there is going to notice him, that the universe is fair, but the call, like the bike, never comes. Some nights the whittler's knife fails him. Some Saturday nights as he parks his car in the projects at 1 a.m. after another catered wedding, he feels himself walking on the cliff edge of bitterness, knowing that the black water below can only consume him if he takes that easy step down. He closes the blinds to the sunlight in the morning and remains in bed, wishing he could incinerate hope, burn every last grain of it from his veins, save his soft heart...but he can't, so he's off and running again, John against the world. "Always another wall to climb," he says. "Even when there wasn't no wall."

One night when he's in his early 30's, the roads ice over and he's in a head-on collision on the way to a game, and the doctor tells him the accident has caused phlebitis, a clot in his leg. It finishes his playing career, but the insurance gives him just enough money to limp off and move his wife and three children out of the projects, into a tiny row house on the edge of the city.

To reach where John Chancy sits today, a man coaches the team at a Philadelphia junior high named Sayre to a 59-9 record, inherits a 1-17 team at Simon Gratz High and turns it inside out, kisses and curses it into a perennial power. He holds dawn practices, two-a-day sessions—Thirsty? There's no water! You in the desert! Keep runnin'!—trying desperately to torch all the self-deceptions and excuses a child can construct in 16 years. Now he's teaching health and phys ed, and he's the dean of boys; his team's the whole damn school, his duty's the whole damn ghetto. He awakes at 5:30 a.m., buys bacon and grits with his own money, sneaks pots and pans from the home-ec room and cooks breakfast in the gym for the students, hoping the smell will lure kids to school. And when that doesn't work, he drives through the God-forgotten streets, pounding on the doors of the absentees, the pregnant and the potheads, peering at the hooded eyes turning from him on the corners, choking back his despair, rounding them up and dragging them back to the fountain, the only hope, education.

One day a teenager pulls out a gun and bodies start scattering, and the coach drops the soft pretzel from his hand, tackles the boy and sends the gun flying, then gets in his car and drives without knowing where or why, parks and slumps over his wheel, feels it all spinning out of control again, the dread coming up his throat, the terror that he can't master his rage and fear and turn them into something clean, the way he once could on a court. He gets crazy when he can't wedge the gospel of Responsibility into the kids' heads. "I loved teachin' high school," says John, "but an anger came over me. I heard myself screamin' more and more. Schools were takin' on the responsibility of parents and jails. I need to see daylight, to see that I'm havin' an effect, and I couldn't. I was so incensed, I wanted to fight the kids."

And still, when the offer comes in 1972 to teach and coach at Cheyney State, 35 miles outside Philadelphia, he hesitates. He never applies for new jobs—wouldn't he owe whoever hired him? And what if he should fail? As white-hot as his frustration is his fear of the unknown; oh, what a trembling child he becomes on a bumpy flight, even though he never fails to get that exit-door seat. But then he receives a letter from his mentor, Marcus Foster, the former principal at Gratz, reminding him of the power and hope in such a new position, telling him that if he can walk into a home and entice one teenager to go to his college, he can raise the aspirations of a whole family, change its cycle for generations. How can he resist?