It will get to a degree the place you don’t wish to repeat-write a few totally different circumstance however a really related theme. Basketball and bullets. The 2 all the time appear to seek out each other, regardless of how far, distant, obscure or painful the attain.
The story of Raekwon Drake is uncommon however not drastically dissimilar to the tales of so many others who’ve been raised on these Chicago concrete magnets that maintain us in methods a quantum entanglement physicist couldn’t even determine. A younger brotha who did every little thing he might to detach himself from the pull of the blocks that surrounded his upbringing. One in every of many who used basketball as his pre-RIP resurrection.
The paradox of how the previous Orr star and two-time state champion ended up being convicted in July of second-degree homicide — down from the first-degree homicide he initially was charged with in 2021) and sentenced Dec. 3 to a further 14 years (on high of three already served within the Prepare dinner County Division of Corrections) is simply the latest instance of Chicago basketball’s too-personal relationship with weapons.
In Drake’s case, that relationship compelled him to run into his condo to get his gun after some dudes tried to rob him and stole his $4,000 French bulldog. He emerged again out of the condo in full assault mode along with his 9mm to get his canine again, chasing down the robber who had thrown the canine to the bottom to flee. After the following scuffle, the assailant, Martin Palafox, was mendacity on the bottom face-down, arms up. As assistant state’s lawyer Jennifer Cooper mentioned in court docket, Drake then “put the gun to the again of [Palafox’s] head, regarded round and he pulled the set off.”
The “Shoot hoops, not weapons” mantra meant nothing in that second. By no means does. Simply one other finish to at least one Black man’s life and a gateway to the top of one other’s over some dumb s–t. The identical dumb s—t that often is the primary character in these tales, that reared itself within the Story of Benji (Wilson), that popped up within the Story of DeDe (Rainey), that famously ended the Story of Malcolm Jamar Stuckey. The Story of Maurice Davis, Englewood’s most interesting.
There’s a connecting of dots between Drake’s story and the survival of former DePaul Prep and De La Salle gamers TY Johnson and TaKiya “TK” Howard and Marshall coach Shawn Harrington, about whom writer Rus Bradburd wrote “All The Goals We’ve Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago’s West Aspect.”
There are tales on the opposite facet of the connection: Danville’s Keon Clark, who, at 38 years outdated in 2013, after enjoying for the Suns and the Jazz, discovered himself in a Colorado courtroom being handed an eight-year jail sentence on weapons and DUI fees. Former Corliss Excessive College and Celtics participant Nathan “Grave” Driggers discovered himself convicted in 2017 of promoting stolen weapons, reportedly 30 of them. As with Clark, the system acquired eight years of his life.
Armond Williams involves thoughts. The previous Solar-Occasions All-Public League fourth-team participant from Austin Excessive College, 2000 state slam-dunk champ, UIC star and 2004 Horizon League Event MVP discovered himself pleading responsible to first-degree homicide for taking pictures the doorman on the Sound-Bar in 2019.
However that’s simply Chi. We are able to go means deeper into the Ja Morant conditions and the Gilbert Arenas circumstances and the Allen Iverson and Rajon Rondo circumstances in relation to this. Be it sufferer or sufferer of circumstance, by some means, someway, they all the time discover one another. The ties that bind. Hoop life. Gun life. Our lovely, darkish, twisted basketball tragedy.
For Raekwon Drake, its harrowing. Stark. For his sufferer, it’s sorrowing. Darkish. In Drake’s case, every little thing he has discovered and been taught and skilled, every little thing the sport give him, is now gone. Whilst basketball actually had nothing to do with what occurred in that second, it, the sport — like with so many people — appeared to be Drake’s life, his incomplete story, making every little thing that occurred, sadly, part of our lives.
And sometimes our deaths.
“I simply wish to say . . . I’ve by no means been bother,” Drake informed the decide at his sentencing. “I’ve been occurring, enjoying basketball as a result of that was the one means out for me.”
By some means that didn’t work. By some means that wasn’t sufficient.
We’re informed that in the event you let it, in the event you comply with its lead, the sport of basketball will be your savior. But the redemptive energy of recidivism solely blankets half of this story. The opposite half, not a lot. This isn’t to single Drake or his scenario out. This isn’t the highlighting of some cautionary story that hopefully modifications the route of an ongoing narrative that continues to have one unhealthy ending adopted by one other, worse ending.
Nope. That is a few relationship, a union of two addictions of Chicago life that sadly discovered each other, preserve discovering each other and might’t appear to let each other go.
Drake’s fortunate. The useless whose lives had been basketball however had been ended by the bullets that exited a gun can’t ever be reclaimed.
