Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for August 11, 2008 BRIEF FLAME

So sad...

As we embark upon a new school year, we are grimly reminded of the obstacles we face...the overwhelming gravitational pull of "Cairo"...a force that refuses to let it's people go.

A magical season seemed to assure Cairo's basketball team entry to the glittering world beyond. But then the downtrodden town that shaped them pulled them back.

www.chicagotribune.com/features/magazine/chi-mxa0810magcairoaug10,0,3113870.story

By Jason George
Chicago Tribune reporter
August 10, 2008

A magical season seemed to assure Cairo's basketball team entry to the glittering world beyond. But then the downtrodden town that shaped them pulled them back.

As the summer sun begins to set, crowds gather like clockwork at the Leroy McBride housing project's basketball court.

All of downstate Cairo seems to be here when the weather's good, dribbling balls down the concrete court or socializing around its chain-link perimeter fence. With no local movie house, recreation center or shopping mall, basketball at McBride serves for many as the best-and only-show in town.

But there are five young men who rarely appear at the court these days, despite being among the best players this basketball-crazy city has ever produced. Instead, Brandon Childs and Kalin Lowe are often only 100 yards away, drinking beer on a nearby stoop. Anthony Jackson is most likely at his apartment in Cairo's other sizable housing project, Elmwood Place, watching television with his girlfriend. Chances are that Seville Bell and Gary Williams are lounging around in nearby Cape Girardeau, Mo.

It wasn't that long ago, 2004 to be exact, that these five youths, then high school seniors, led the Cairo Pilots through a perfect 30-0 regular season, earning them local legend status and the attention of numerous colleges. By graduation that May, members of the "Dream Team," as they were known, stood poised to escape their ramshackle hometown with the same speed and skill they had displayed on the hardwood.

If everything had gone according to plan, the five would have graduated from college this spring and would be standing on the threshold of successful careers-perhaps in professional basketball.

Instead, the story of the '04 Pilots is one of setbacks and opportunities lost-of how even those holding the rare ticket out of Cairo struggle to succeed.

In a way, their struggle is the struggle of Cairo itself.

From the beginning, Cairo carried the reputation of a rough river town where visitors would be wise to watch their belongings and their backs. In 1842, Charles Dickens, author of "Oliver Twist" and other tales of misery and squalor, visited and wrote that he found Cairo to be "a dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away."

"A place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo."

Commerce, however, cares little for such criticism and Cairo's position at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers proved vital to the growing nation. When Mark Twain visited, 41 years after Dickens, he noted: "Cairo has a heavy railroad and river trade, and her situation at the junction of two great rivers is so advantageous that she can not well help prospering."

And prosper she did. Businesses multiplied and settlers literally arrived by the boatload. By the close of the 19th Century, Cairo's profits from its river and rail shipments made it one of the richest cities in the United States.

In keeping with its growth and refinement, Cairo developed a strong passion for sports, particularly the growing pastime of baseball. The city hosted at least three different minor league teams from 1900-1925; and the St. Louis Cardinals, who got their name from a Cairo woman saying their uniforms were "cardinal red," held spring training here in the 1940s. Another Cairo transplant even designed the original Cardinals logo.

Today you'd be hard-pressed to find any remnants of that baseball glory around town, and children rarely pack Cotter Field, where the Cardinals trained. Now basketball clearly dominates the playgrounds-has for decades-as well as the coffee shop conversations. Almost everyone can tell you the greats through the decades who went from here to college and even the NBA. Every fan, of course, easily recalls the Dream Team's '03-'04 magical season.

"The 2003-04 edition of the Cairo Pilots has a high standard to live up to.

"The current group of players looks poised to maintain that standard, certainly a lot is expected of them."

-The Cairo Citizen, autumn '03

As a former Pilot player, Coach Larry Baldwin understood those expectations better than anyone else. Like his starters he had played on those same McBride Courts before he headed off to college on a basketball scholarship, later returning to coach at his alma mater.

Those five starters, besides all being from Cairo, shared other attributes that bonded them: They were all seniors, all black, all poor. They had all lived without their fathers around much.

Not that these similarities made them the same . . .

Gary Williams stands only 5 feet 6, but compensated on the court with speed and smarts, a natural point guard and team leader. When other players didn't show for practice, Coach Baldwin deputized Williams to drag them to the gym. While other players pounded it out on the McBride court on the weekends, Williams just watched-an exercise in self-control.

"I didn't want to hurt my knees," he remembers.

Seville Bell, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of that playground. However, his mom wanted to get her son away from Cairo and transferred him to a school in Cape Girardeau, 30 minutes away. The 6-foot-7-inch Bell kept sneaking back to practice with his friends.

"Momma said, 'I'm tired of you running away all the time; I'm just going to let you go,' " Bell, the team's center, says in his soft baritone. "I went back to Cairo."

Two players Bell missed playing with were Kalin Lowe, his best friend, and Brandon Childs. If there were troublemakers on the team it was the two guard/forwards, Childs and Lowe, both popular and charming-both lazy and tough.

Scouts had been tracking Childs since his sophomore year. He was, simply put, the best around. Kyle Gerdeman, then an assistant coach for Moberly Area Community College, a Missouri junior college known for feeding Division I teams, says Childs was something special.

"He had this natural talent that was just fantastic," he recalls.

Childs also had a reputation for a quick temper and a bad attitude. Baldwin remembers thinking, as the season began: "If this kid can control himself we can go all the way."

The last player to make up the starting lineup that year was Anthony Jackson. While the other four had nurtured natural talent on the court since they could toddle, Jackson didn't play much basketball until his junior year.

"I was short and chubby," the now trim, 6-foot-3 Jackson recounted with one of his boyish chuckles. "I started sprouting my sophomore year."

Coach Baldwin was the one who looked at Jackson and saw more than just an awkward, "country boy," as Baldwin tells it. He saw heart and a forward who could also sink a three-pointer from the perimeter, where Jackson preferred to play-the outside game fitting his timid, loner personality.

In November of '03 the team began its season with a win, and then another. Then another. Those games, preserved on videotape, reveal a team working like a Swiss watch, playing in perfect synchronicity. As winter turned into spring, the local excitement heated up alongside the temperatures.

Outside the gym, though, Cairo was suffering some of its hardest times. Stories of the team's victories shared space in the local newspaper with articles about how the Illinois attorney general was suing the city for illegal dumping and how the council and the mayor were fighting often, governing little. Many of the city's once-grand houses sat collapsed and rotting, one in four vacant. Few businesses remained. Commercial Street-deserted except for the Maytag repairman and a saloon-proved America's most oxymoronically named thoroughfare.

What had happened to the booming, prospering Cairo of yesteryear?

Ask most people when Cairo cracked and they'll point to 1967, when a black soldier, home on leave, inexplicably hanged himself in the city jail-a suspicious death that sent citizens and the National Guard into Cairo's streets, prompting one of the nation's worst race riots. Preston Ewing Jr., Cairo's NAACP president at the time, remembers that period as well as anyone, but he'll tell you the town's ills were actually a byproduct of an earlier, larger problem-geography.

"The Native Americans would not pitch a tent here," Ewing says of the Cairo area, which regularly flooded before engineers surrounded it with levees and walls. "Even when Dickens came here, the rivers were up. All he could see was a couple of roofs."

Once the levees were built and the flooding stopped, the town on its little peninsula grew, but citizens had painted themselves into a corner: Believing that railroad and river traffic would sustain them forever, they filled almost every inch of usable land with houses, hotels and shops.

"There was no land to diversify," says Ewing, the town's unofficial historian.

"Once the river economy died, Cairo had to die."

That's why Cairo's population, which once grew by the day, actually topped out in the 1920s. By the 1930s, the local newspaper brimmed with job ads from out-of-state firms, trying to attract Cairo's trained workforce. Those with any skills or money just left.

And so, by the time the problems of 1967 arrived, Cairo was already a city suffering and struggling to adapt. Black boycotts, white flight and growing poverty were only nails in an already crafted coffin.

Fittingly for sports-crazed Cairo, its race problems spilled over into its recreation too: White leaders filled the town pool with concrete instead of integrating it. In 1968, officials canceled the Little League season to keep black kids off the team. In 1969, police and a posse of "concerned white citizens" kept blacks out of the parks. It all had the unintended effect of popularizing basketball at McBride, a housing project whites largely avoided.

In a way, Cairo's problems gave birth to its obsession with basketball.

BY ANY MEASURE, Cairo languishes as one of Illinois' poorest communities; and today, McBride is just one of several low-income facilities in the city. In fact, one in four Cairo residents lives in some sort of public housing.

Median income in the city is about $16,000, and one in three lives below the poverty level. Officials estimate more than half of the 3,000 or so residents live, at least in part, on public aid.

The schools stand as some of the most under-funded, and under-performing, in the state-teaching some of the poorest kids in the nation. In fact, Cairo's school district has the highest number of students living in poverty in Illinois. When a private education organization recently evaluated Illinois' 609 schools based on teacher-student ratio and standardized test scores, Cairo Junior/Senior High School ranked 602nd. The only areas, outside basketball, where the school tops lists are in dropouts and teen pregnancy.

This past year, about one in four kids who started his or her senior year did not graduate, according to Principal Lynn Byrd. Those who did got praise and Byrd's sobering advice: "The area is going through some changes and the young people are going to have to go where the jobs are.

"So if you can graduate out of high school, you need to continue your education and look for opportunities elsewhere."

Understandably, the cash-strapped district spends little on athletics. It wasn't until the '02-'03 season, when the Dream Team players were juniors, that the Pilots, thanks to an alumni donation, stopped playing in mismatched uniforms. To this day, those players remember their amazement as they traveled to other schools and saw sparkling gyms and new weight rooms. Perhaps the thing that amazed them most, though, was the out-of-town adulation they received during their senior-year streak.

"Every town we went to, little kids were coming up to us and asking us for our autographs. It was insane," Jackson remembers.

People blogged about them on basketball scouting Web sites. The team did television news interviews. The more attention they received, the more they knew a charmed life waited down the road.

That was, of course, before their final game -when each learned just how hard escaping Cairo, and its reputation, can be.

When the season ended perfectly, undefeated, 30-0, the city celebrated-Cairo could use some good news and the team was it.

"We had a dinner for them. Had shirts made for them. We just felt like the kids needed some recognition," says Monica Smith, the town librarian who helped organize the party with the chamber of commerce.

"They had done an excellent job and at the time there wasn't a lot of people who could afford to do something for them."

"We're Ready!" was the Cairo cry as the city and team awaited the upcoming state tournament. The Associated Press had unanimously voted the Pilots the No. 1 team in Illinois' Class A division for smaller schools.

People in town predicted victory in the tournament and success for the five seniors in college and beyond. They noted that the last Cairo team to win 30 games was the 1981 team, which saw three players succeed at the collegiate level.

On the Friday night of the regional basketball championship, the team arrived at Massac County High School with an undefeated record and a deep well of confidence. Williams, the point guard, however, felt a foreboding from the get-go.

"I could feel it in my gut something bad was going to happen that night," he says.

The Massac gym was crowded-too crowded, the Illinois High School Association would later determine-and immediately the Cairo team ran into foul trouble. Pilot players and fans blamed Massac officials, alleging everything from racism-Massac is mostly white-to favoritism. Either way, Cairo was off their game and their starters soon sat on the bench. For the first time in the season, the team trailed at the half.

The third quarter was no better. Shots were missed, more fouls were called. At the sound of the final buzzer, Cairo found itself losers for the first time the entire season. They were out of the tournament in the first round.

As heartbreaking as it was, the real trouble started as the players were shaking hands with the other team. Some Cairo fans-feeling that the one thing they had worthwhile was stolen from them-yelled and refused to leave. The place broke into a riot when a Cairo cheerleader, Williams' younger sister, threw a bottle, on purpose, and hit Coach Baldwin accidentally in the head. It would take the police and pepper spray to clear the trashed gymnasium.

Each member of the Dream Team remembers crying as he went home that evening. They had lost. Their season was over. Plus, the riot only confirmed the belief that Cairo bred nothing but thugs-the old "river rat" brand.

Looking back, Coach Baldwin feels that night was a turning point for his five starters, especially Childs, the star forward, who had struggled his whole life with anger following the death of his parents.

"They took that game from those kids that night," he says. "They, especially Brandon, were never the same again."

AFTER GRADUATION, in the summer of 2004, the future looked bright again. Coach had encouraged the five to accept full scholarships to community colleges, where they could grow as players and men and get ready for a bigger school. When the day came to leave, Coach Baldwin and his wife handed out hugs and spending money as the graduates headed off to begin their new lives.

Childs went to Missouri's Moberly, while Bell, Jackson and Lowe enrolled at Lake Land College in Matoon. Only Williams, who had married his senior high school year, did not continue in school, instead following his wife to her Army posting in Germany.

"We graduated on May 23, and May 24 I was on the plane," he says, recalling his first airplane ride. "I just knew what I was doing with my life and took a different path, basically just trying to get out of Cairo."

Williams ended up working as a civilian laborer on the base in Germany. He was "succeeding" better than the trio at Lake Land-they crumbled within a month.

"There was too much freedom," Jackson remembers. "We were used to somebody always getting us up, you know, but up there basically we were just lounging around."

They stopped going to class and eventually practice too. Lowe was the first to bail, but Jim Dudley, the now-retired Lake Land coach, says the other two withdrew at the same time.

"Once one gave up, they all did," he says.

"They were all good players-great potential. So many kids have come out of down there and they all end up back down there. I don't know why."

Baldwin blames the player's Cairo connections as much as the teens themselves.

"There's so much to pull them back," he says. "The things that are not important to us are important to them: They've got the girlfriend, they've got families who tell them to just quit when it gets hard."

Childs-who averaged 20 points a game that year and showed NBA potential-fared worse, if that's possible, at Moberly: He fought with an upperclassman at a pre-season pickup game. The coach, who already had experienced enough of Childs' temper, kicked him off the team on the spot, canceling his scholarship.

Childs had been at school five days.

"When they got rid of him I tried to get him. He could have still been eligible that year," says Coach Gerdeman, who had recruited Childs for Moberly as an assistant coach, but had since taken a job at another junior college.

"It was a deal where we were on the phone one afternoon-and this school was closer to his home, in fact-and he said, 'Call me tomorrow at 11 a.m.'

"We called and he didn't pick up. I tried again for a few days and just moved on."

NOT ONE OF THE FIVE has a parent who had ever attended college. In fact, the only college graduate the players talked to from home was Coach Baldwin. Just the same, all of them blame themselves for their failures.

"I think I just made the wrong decision, because I wanted to stay when they wanted to come back," Jackson says. "I was thinking maybe I can't do this by myself, so I just left."

His eyes well up as he runs the decision over in his head.

"That was my biggest regret. I regret that so much every day.

"I don't even watch basketball no more."

Bell watches basketball religiously, although it's painful. He remembers watching the NCAA tournament this year, when players that Cairo had played against-and dominated-appeared on national television.

"I was in here and I almost cried," says Bell from his apartment living room.

"We was better than Josh Tabb and look at Josh Tabb," he said of the University of Tennessee guard, who played three high school seasons in nearby Ullin.

"I called Kalin and said, man, you see this? He was a good player, but we beat them."

"I had to go to the store and get me a beer, cuz."

Out of the four who went to college, only Bell returned, enrolling at a community college in Nebraska on a basketball scholarship for the 2005 school year. There too, he didn't make it through the fall.

"I feel like I could've taken it to the next level, but I basically got homesick, you know what I'm saying? I was like, man--I can't do this."

IN THE YEARS since their college stints, the starters of '04 have struggled to stabilize their lives.

Gary Williams, the point guard, stayed in Germany with his wife for two years, until she was relocated to Tennessee. There, he worked in a factory. This spring, Williams, now 23, and his daughter moved to Cape Girardeau to live with his mother while his wife serves a tour in Iraq. Most of his time is spent providing child care. The family's money comes from his wife's check. He plans to enroll in barber college after the summer.

Seville Bell, 22, lives a couple of miles away. He too stays home with his children while his wife works. He's still stands the tallest and weighs the most of the five, but he's known as the "teddy bear," and becomes emotional when discussing the last four years.

"I feel like basically I let my momma down. My momma just knew I was going to stay in school."

Both he and Jackson, 21, who is trying to become a custodian at his old high school, still hope for another chance on the hardwood. Given the right coach and direction, there is no doubt they could still play.

"I'm hoping that they pursue some of their dreams, and it's not going to be easy but hopefully they're going to be able to in the next four years," Coach Baldwin says.

"I think it's going to be tough, but I don't think it's impossible."

"They've always been somebody, they just didn't always realize it."

Kalin Lowe, 22, still plays some basketball, although his recent "court time" includes appearances at the Alexander County Courthouse, where he was convicted of selling drugs.

"We've got to work," he explains matter-of-factly.

Teens in Cairo call Brandon Childs, 22, one of the best local rappers. He records demos about his life, which varies little: He wakes up around noon; he drinks, he smokes, he gambles.

"I've got to make money for my son. You can make $200 with dice."

He remains a sight of gifted grace on those occasions he still shoots hoops.

LOOKING AT the entire Cairo class of '04, many are now either unemployed or underemployed earning minimum wage around town, or commuting to jobs in Missouri and Kentucky. Of the 30 graduates who did not comprise the Dream Team, at least four are now in the military or law enforcement. Only one, Julian Watkins, the class valedictorian, has completed college, graduating this past May from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

One could take those stark numbers and say the five players didn't do much worse than the rest of their class, yet that would be forgetting how much fans and family had hoped for them.

If only someone had expected something out of them, it all might have turned out differently.