PHILLY
EVENTSThe Promise
The strange sort-of love story of two South Philly basketball stars
HALF A DOZEN YEARS AGO, two 12-year-old boys met on a basketball court in South Philly. They were playing summer league in a magical summer, the one where the Sixers faced the Lakers in the NBA finals. It was a season of hope and possibility: You gotta believe!
Both boys had been born to teenage moms who named them for the fathers: They were Antonio Jardine Jr. and Richard Jackson Jr. But their moms and dads had drifted apart, and Antonio and Rick sought solace on playgrounds, with basketballs in hand. They were as different as two kids could be. Antonio was all hip-hop, cornrowed, trash-talking. Rick was quiet and dignified. Antonio hung with a bad crowd and flirted with danger. Rick steered clear. “We didn’t say much to each other,” Rick recalls of the boys’ first meeting. “We just played ball. And then, sometime, we started to talk.”
What they went on to forge in that hot blacktop summer was a bond that would defy all reason. What they found in one another was the sort of soul mate that’s the stuff of myth: David and Jonathan, Batman and Robin, Frodo and Sam. They swore they would stick together, no matter what. They pledged that when they were old enough, they’d try to get into Catholic League hoops powerhouse St. John Neumann High School. Sure enough, they both were accepted at the start of ninth grade. And that was when Antonio and Rick made The Promise.
It was Antonio who told the Neumann coach, Carl Arrigale, about it. “Me and Rick are gonna go to college together,” he announced their first year. And Coach … well, Coach has seen a lot of kids with hoop dreams. “I thought it was silly,” he says of the pact the boys made. Arrigale knows the way the world works. Basketball is a way out of the wasteland for maybe one boy in a million. What were the chances it would prove the way out for two?
THE WAY ANTONIO TELLS IT, which is volubly, the same way he tells everything, he got his nickname, “Scoop,” within minutes of his birth. “When I came out,” he explains, “everybody was standing around, and Grandma was there, and my mom looked at her and could tell there was something wrong. Something wrong with my head. Grandma said, ‘His face looks like an ice-cream scoop.’” He likes telling this story. “I had my nickname before I even had a real name.”
There are souls who come into this world needy, and that’s what Scoop did, as concave as the kitchen utensil he was named for. Because of the fierce need inside him, he looks outward for acceptance and approval. Praise makes him bask; criticism crumbles him. As you watch him practice, he glances at you after every one of his shots: Did you see that? Scoop’s heart is on his sleeve.
Rick doesn’t have a good nickname story. He doesn’t even have a good nickname. You know because you ask him: “Do you have a nickname?” And he lowers his large head and meets your gaze and says, very patiently, “Rick is a nickname.”
Rick is six-foot-nine and growing. When you ask what it was like to get so tall, he looks at you again, puzzled, because he recognizes, even if you don’t, that it’s a foolish question, since it’s the way he grew up, and how could he know anything else? But all he says is, “I just went along with it.”
It’s a given in basketball that big men come along more slowly. That’s the way it was with Rick. It took him more time to grow into his body than most folk, and to grow into himself. He didn’t have a raging need inside him; he was a work in progress when he and Scoop met.
Scoop was already a playground legend: “I’d pretend to be Michael Jordan. I believed I was Michael Jordan.” But he’d gotten himself thrown out of three schools, and the middle school he ended up at, Thomas FitzSimons, didn’t even have a basketball team. To get him away from the North Philly ’hood, Scoop’s mom sent him to live with her mom, at 24th and Moore in South Philly. That was just a few blocks from where Rick lived.
“He was close to the edge,” Coach Arrigale says of Scoop. “He had to decide whether he was going to go the right way or the wrong way.” Having Rick nearby helped Scoop decide.
And it turned out that Scoop’s neediness molded Rick, or else Rick expanded to fill it. If Scoop was Allen Iverson — surely the neediest soul ever to suit up for hoops — Rick would grow into that summer season’s other hero, Dikembe Mutombo, regal and self-possessed and mysterious, with a voice as deep as the Congo River.
Defining himself in opposition to Scoop might have proven limiting to Rick — if Scoop’s neediness hadn’t been so vast. The more Rick sought to fill it, the bigger and stronger he became, until he was the unshakable hub — figuratively and literally — of Scoop’s world. Point guard Scoop is all over the court in a game, but he always knows where he’ll find Rick: at center. Rick is Scoop’s One Sure Thing. “He’s never fake with me,” Scoop says. “He knows me like no one else does. He’ll tell me when I’m doing good and when I’m messing up.”
Rick pays him back in a voice as rich and measured as Mutombo’s: “Scoop’s there for me.”
IN JULY OF 2004, St. John Neumann High School, with all its rich history and basketball tradition, merged with St. Maria Goretti High School, at 10th and Moore. The merger brought together an all-boys school named for a Bohemian ex-pro wrestler who spoke six languages and organized the Catholic school system in the United States, and an all-girls school named for a 12-year-old Italian peasant who was stabbed to death by a sex-crazed neighbor. They’re used to odd couples here.
The gym doors at Neumann-Goretti open off a crazy-quilt parking lot carved between the cramped backsides of rowhouses and the unimposing bulk of the high school itself. There’s no security, no guard; you walk through the lot and up the fire escape and in the doors, and you’re in the land of dusty wood floors and faded banners and fold-away bleachers. It’s any high-school gym anywhere, with the squeak of sneakers and the ballet of boys running plays. Assistant coach Aaron Abbott leads the varsity team through drills while Carl Arrigale chats with the hangers-on who always congregate at gyms.
Neumann-Goretti’s biggest rivals in the city are Roman Catholic and St. Joe’s Prep, but “We play a national-type schedule,” Arrigale explains in late December. “We lost our first two games this season. We lost this weekend to Towson Catholic” — a powerhouse in Maryland that’s Carmelo Anthony’s alma mater. He shrugs. “We’ll lose a few games at the beginning. If you play tough games up front, it prepares you for the later stages — the big crowds, the noise. You get used to it.”
In nine seasons as Neumann’s head coach, Arrigale has become a legend himself. He’s won four of the last seven Catholic League titles (and weathered the Archdiocese’s suspension of him for the first four games of this season after a Neumann senior’s celebration of his winning basket at last year’s title game sparked a fan fracas). Sports Illustrated ranked his team 11th in the country in this year’s pre-season high-school roundup. (USA Today only pegged it 16th.) He’d seen Scoop and Rick play in the summer leagues, and brought them into Neumann. He sensed that together, they were somehow more than one plus one.
At practice, Coach Arrigale lets out a curt fffttt! whistle, and the players pair off to shoot foul shots. Scoop scurries to the basket closest to where you sit watching in the stands; Rick strides to the hoop that’s furthest away. Coach whistles again, and the team gathers at midcourt, hunkering down for stretches. Rick sits in the middle of the circle, leading his teammates, resolutely counting off from one to 10, while Scoop chatters like a magpie.
Coach Arrigale was happy when Scoop’s skittish compass alighted on Rick’s solid north. Still, he couldn’t help but worry when he heard about The Promise. “They were just freshmen. I said, ‘You’re not at that point.’” He was being tactful. Scoop was already of intense interest to college recruiters, and shoulders above Rick in terms of talent. What if the pact held Scoop back?
But Rick just kept growing. “He was six-two when I met him,” Arrigale says, “and six-five when he came here. Then he was six-seven when he was a sophomore, with a body made for basketball.” Preposterous to suggest that Rick went on growing because Scoop needed him to. Big guys come along a little slower, that’s all. And yet …
“I knew how good he was going to be,” Scoop says.
Arrigale knows how lucky — blessed — he is to have two of the nation’s top 50 high-school hoopsters in his program. And he knows how much he owes to their bond. “You see friendships shifting,” he says, “but those two guys are always there for one another. They’re kind of each other’s family.” Scoop and Rick do everything together — hit the movies, hit the diners, hit on girls. But be aware, ladies, that the competition is formidable. “We’ve built a crazy relationship and chemistry,” Scoop says of him and Rick. “We live for each other. Even when we argue, we get back together. Ask anyone. We’re the best of friends.”
In games, it’s Scoop’s job to inbound the ball. He watches for the open man, but he likes to go to Rick, laying the ball up high, above the defenders’ reach. They’re point guard and big man, yin and yang, even when it comes to tattoos. “Mine says ‘Best-Kept Secret,’” Scoop announces, with a touch of pride. Rick doesn’t have a tattoo. If he did get one? “It would probably be my aunt’s name,” he says softly. “She’s passed on.”
SO LONG AS NOTHING MORE than the Catholic League championship was at stake, Scoop and Rick were rock-solid. But then the NCAA scouts started circling. Scoop was foremost in their sights; he’d been on the radar since he was 12. By junior year, though, Rick was in the spotlight, too. The trouble now was finding a school in the market for both a power forward and a point guard. College coaches assemble their teams with great precision, weighing potential players’ differing strengths, maturity levels, styles, heights, builds. …
Coach Arrigale got dizzy just thinking about it. “Antonio liked Villanova,” he remembers, “but they didn’t have a scholarship for Rick. Rick had Georgetown, Wake Forest, UConn, but they didn’t need guards. Virginia looked like a possibility, but then they signed a guard.” To make a crazy situation even crazier, Scoop was being up-front with the recruiters, saying, “Well, do you want Rick, too? Because I’m not coming if Rick’s not coming.” There was something downright perverse in his insistence on a package deal. He and Rick stood on the brink of blindingly bright futures. Heck, they stood where 99.9 percent of America’s high-school boys would gladly have sold their souls to stand.
And you know what? It wasn’t any fun. It only made Scoop anxious. “Every time a college talked to me, I liked them,” he says. “Every day, I had a new favorite college. Coach used to snap on me.”
Rick sympathized. “They get on your nerves,” he says of the recruiters. “Calling you and calling you. They all say the same thing. And they promise you stuff.”
“You don’t know who wants you for you,” Scoop says plaintively, “and not just for the basketball.”
Both boys were getting plenty of advice. “This sport is not in the greatest position right now,” Coach Arrigale says. “There are so many people involved with these kids at such a young age that maybe don’t have their best interests at heart.” Some of those people were trying to divide the two friends, whispering behind one or the other’s back: “Scoop doesn’t pass you the ball.” “Rick’s not giving you the looks.” Arrigale was worried: “It doesn’t take much to drive a wedge between young men.”
Rick saw Scoop spinning, and knew he had to be steadfast. It was easier for him, because he’d come up more slowly: “I didn’t listen to people who only came around after I got good, after I got a name.”
And Scoop fell back on his Sure Thing: “I always knew I had Rick at the end of the day.”
High-school prospects don’t have to commit to college until senior year, but Scoop wanted to make the decision earlier, not later. He wanted the phone calls and courtship and whisperings to end. Most of all, he wanted to play the sport he loves, the one that fills the hole inside him. “I just get up for it,” he says. Even on the court, though, he was feeling pressure, second-guessing himself. “Life used to be easier when nobody knew who I was,” he says ruefully.
So he held tight to Rick, and they stayed close to home base: Scoop’s grandma’s house. “It’s a hangout,” Scoop says happily. “We have the whole team over. She’s the team mom. Team grandmom. There’ll be 15 of us there.” They play NBA Live on PlayStation, go on the computer, do homework. “She feeds us all,” Scoop says. “We can bring a new friend every day, and it’ll be like he’s been there forever.”
Rick would have been fine to wait until senior year to choose a college. But he hadn’t forgotten that Scoop made The Promise when his own hoops future was much brighter than Rick’s. And he saw how the recruiters were making Scoop crazy. The boys had to find a team that wanted both of them. Fast.
IN ALL THE MAD RUSH of promises, there was one coach who went after both Scoop and Rick from the beginning: Jim Boeheim, of Syracuse University. Syracuse, ranked 23rd at the start of this season, is a perennial NCAA tournament contender. More important, three of its starters graduate in June. That meant Scoop and Rick would have a chance to play right away.
Boeheim appreciated their separate talents. “Ricky has really come on in the last year or two,” he says. “There are very few low-post players in the game today, and he’s a good one. And Antonio is just a good all-around guard. He can penetrate, he can shoot, and he’s an emotional leader. You want that kind of emotional leadership in the backcourt.”
But Boeheim, who’s helmed the Orangemen for more than three decades, insists he never bought into the package-deal stuff. “I’ve heard that many, many times over the past 35 years,” he says gruffly. “Most times, it doesn’t work out. They just don’t like the same school.” He wanted Rick and Scoop, sure. But he would have taken either one. What he didn’t see was that Rick wouldn’t have been Rick without Scoop, and the other way around. What he liked in each of them, they developed together, symbiotically, in reaction to one another. And they weren’t ready to be sliced apart.
Scoop felt so in synch with Boeheim and the Syracuse program that he made an oral commitment as a junior, just to quiet the clamor. He didn’t ask Rick about it first; he just assumed Rick would follow along. After all, that had been the pact. What had changed was that Rick now had every major college in the United States offering for him. “I tried to tell Rick to hold off and see what happens,” says Arrigale. “He took it as that we didn’t want him to go to Syracuse. And we told him — no, no, we just want you to enjoy it for a little while. He said, to his credit, ‘This is what we said we were going to do.’” Rick committed to Syracuse a week after Scoop did.
So in the fall, Scoop and Rick will head there on full athletic scholarships, together. And you’re thinking how lucky it is that Rick and Scoop found each other, because otherwise who knows what would have become of them? “They’re each other’s family,” Coach Arrigale said. And that makes a great story. But it isn’t the right story — at least, not the complete one — because it turns out that Rick is really tight with his mom, whom Arrigale credits with keeping Rick in line academically, and she came to all his games, and so did Rick’s three little brothers and his little sister. And they sat in the stands with Scoop’s grandma and mom and Scoop’s stepdad and little brother and four little sisters, and with Scoop’s other grandma, and all of them cheered like mad. And Scoop and Rick were careful to behave themselves, because they take the responsibility of being good role models to all those siblings very seriously.
And guess who else was in the stands? Rick Sr. and Antonio Sr., who, it turns out, gave their sons a lot more than their names. “The best part of my game is my hook shot,” says Rick Jr. “My dad taught me how to drop the hook shot. We played a lot as we went along.” And Scoop? “My dad never let me back out of a commitment,” he says. “When I told someone I’m going to be there, I had to be there. My dad taught me about being a man, about stepping up and doing what you say you’ll do.”
It’s a happy story, Scoop and Rick’s. And such a Philly story. It’s just like Rocky, where the good guys win in the end. It gets you so pumped that you can’t help thinking about the future. Rick wants to go on to the NBA. Scoop wants the same thing. So you say to Scoop: Hey, how about the NBA? Will you make that a package deal, too?
And Scoop, open-book Scoop, sitting in the bleachers in Neumann-Goretti’s tired old gym, glances at you sidelong and says flatly, “Nah. It’s a business now. You do what you gotta do.”
Both boys had been born to teenage moms who named them for the fathers: They were Antonio Jardine Jr. and Richard Jackson Jr. But their moms and dads had drifted apart, and Antonio and Rick sought solace on playgrounds, with basketballs in hand. They were as different as two kids could be. Antonio was all hip-hop, cornrowed, trash-talking. Rick was quiet and dignified. Antonio hung with a bad crowd and flirted with danger. Rick steered clear. “We didn’t say much to each other,” Rick recalls of the boys’ first meeting. “We just played ball. And then, sometime, we started to talk.”
What they went on to forge in that hot blacktop summer was a bond that would defy all reason. What they found in one another was the sort of soul mate that’s the stuff of myth: David and Jonathan, Batman and Robin, Frodo and Sam. They swore they would stick together, no matter what. They pledged that when they were old enough, they’d try to get into Catholic League hoops powerhouse St. John Neumann High School. Sure enough, they both were accepted at the start of ninth grade. And that was when Antonio and Rick made The Promise.
It was Antonio who told the Neumann coach, Carl Arrigale, about it. “Me and Rick are gonna go to college together,” he announced their first year. And Coach … well, Coach has seen a lot of kids with hoop dreams. “I thought it was silly,” he says of the pact the boys made. Arrigale knows the way the world works. Basketball is a way out of the wasteland for maybe one boy in a million. What were the chances it would prove the way out for two?
THE WAY ANTONIO TELLS IT, which is volubly, the same way he tells everything, he got his nickname, “Scoop,” within minutes of his birth. “When I came out,” he explains, “everybody was standing around, and Grandma was there, and my mom looked at her and could tell there was something wrong. Something wrong with my head. Grandma said, ‘His face looks like an ice-cream scoop.’” He likes telling this story. “I had my nickname before I even had a real name.”
There are souls who come into this world needy, and that’s what Scoop did, as concave as the kitchen utensil he was named for. Because of the fierce need inside him, he looks outward for acceptance and approval. Praise makes him bask; criticism crumbles him. As you watch him practice, he glances at you after every one of his shots: Did you see that? Scoop’s heart is on his sleeve.
Rick doesn’t have a good nickname story. He doesn’t even have a good nickname. You know because you ask him: “Do you have a nickname?” And he lowers his large head and meets your gaze and says, very patiently, “Rick is a nickname.”
Rick is six-foot-nine and growing. When you ask what it was like to get so tall, he looks at you again, puzzled, because he recognizes, even if you don’t, that it’s a foolish question, since it’s the way he grew up, and how could he know anything else? But all he says is, “I just went along with it.”
It’s a given in basketball that big men come along more slowly. That’s the way it was with Rick. It took him more time to grow into his body than most folk, and to grow into himself. He didn’t have a raging need inside him; he was a work in progress when he and Scoop met.
Scoop was already a playground legend: “I’d pretend to be Michael Jordan. I believed I was Michael Jordan.” But he’d gotten himself thrown out of three schools, and the middle school he ended up at, Thomas FitzSimons, didn’t even have a basketball team. To get him away from the North Philly ’hood, Scoop’s mom sent him to live with her mom, at 24th and Moore in South Philly. That was just a few blocks from where Rick lived.
“He was close to the edge,” Coach Arrigale says of Scoop. “He had to decide whether he was going to go the right way or the wrong way.” Having Rick nearby helped Scoop decide.
And it turned out that Scoop’s neediness molded Rick, or else Rick expanded to fill it. If Scoop was Allen Iverson — surely the neediest soul ever to suit up for hoops — Rick would grow into that summer season’s other hero, Dikembe Mutombo, regal and self-possessed and mysterious, with a voice as deep as the Congo River.
Defining himself in opposition to Scoop might have proven limiting to Rick — if Scoop’s neediness hadn’t been so vast. The more Rick sought to fill it, the bigger and stronger he became, until he was the unshakable hub — figuratively and literally — of Scoop’s world. Point guard Scoop is all over the court in a game, but he always knows where he’ll find Rick: at center. Rick is Scoop’s One Sure Thing. “He’s never fake with me,” Scoop says. “He knows me like no one else does. He’ll tell me when I’m doing good and when I’m messing up.”
Rick pays him back in a voice as rich and measured as Mutombo’s: “Scoop’s there for me.”
IN JULY OF 2004, St. John Neumann High School, with all its rich history and basketball tradition, merged with St. Maria Goretti High School, at 10th and Moore. The merger brought together an all-boys school named for a Bohemian ex-pro wrestler who spoke six languages and organized the Catholic school system in the United States, and an all-girls school named for a 12-year-old Italian peasant who was stabbed to death by a sex-crazed neighbor. They’re used to odd couples here.
The gym doors at Neumann-Goretti open off a crazy-quilt parking lot carved between the cramped backsides of rowhouses and the unimposing bulk of the high school itself. There’s no security, no guard; you walk through the lot and up the fire escape and in the doors, and you’re in the land of dusty wood floors and faded banners and fold-away bleachers. It’s any high-school gym anywhere, with the squeak of sneakers and the ballet of boys running plays. Assistant coach Aaron Abbott leads the varsity team through drills while Carl Arrigale chats with the hangers-on who always congregate at gyms.
Neumann-Goretti’s biggest rivals in the city are Roman Catholic and St. Joe’s Prep, but “We play a national-type schedule,” Arrigale explains in late December. “We lost our first two games this season. We lost this weekend to Towson Catholic” — a powerhouse in Maryland that’s Carmelo Anthony’s alma mater. He shrugs. “We’ll lose a few games at the beginning. If you play tough games up front, it prepares you for the later stages — the big crowds, the noise. You get used to it.”
In nine seasons as Neumann’s head coach, Arrigale has become a legend himself. He’s won four of the last seven Catholic League titles (and weathered the Archdiocese’s suspension of him for the first four games of this season after a Neumann senior’s celebration of his winning basket at last year’s title game sparked a fan fracas). Sports Illustrated ranked his team 11th in the country in this year’s pre-season high-school roundup. (USA Today only pegged it 16th.) He’d seen Scoop and Rick play in the summer leagues, and brought them into Neumann. He sensed that together, they were somehow more than one plus one.
At practice, Coach Arrigale lets out a curt fffttt! whistle, and the players pair off to shoot foul shots. Scoop scurries to the basket closest to where you sit watching in the stands; Rick strides to the hoop that’s furthest away. Coach whistles again, and the team gathers at midcourt, hunkering down for stretches. Rick sits in the middle of the circle, leading his teammates, resolutely counting off from one to 10, while Scoop chatters like a magpie.
Coach Arrigale was happy when Scoop’s skittish compass alighted on Rick’s solid north. Still, he couldn’t help but worry when he heard about The Promise. “They were just freshmen. I said, ‘You’re not at that point.’” He was being tactful. Scoop was already of intense interest to college recruiters, and shoulders above Rick in terms of talent. What if the pact held Scoop back?
But Rick just kept growing. “He was six-two when I met him,” Arrigale says, “and six-five when he came here. Then he was six-seven when he was a sophomore, with a body made for basketball.” Preposterous to suggest that Rick went on growing because Scoop needed him to. Big guys come along a little slower, that’s all. And yet …
“I knew how good he was going to be,” Scoop says.
Arrigale knows how lucky — blessed — he is to have two of the nation’s top 50 high-school hoopsters in his program. And he knows how much he owes to their bond. “You see friendships shifting,” he says, “but those two guys are always there for one another. They’re kind of each other’s family.” Scoop and Rick do everything together — hit the movies, hit the diners, hit on girls. But be aware, ladies, that the competition is formidable. “We’ve built a crazy relationship and chemistry,” Scoop says of him and Rick. “We live for each other. Even when we argue, we get back together. Ask anyone. We’re the best of friends.”
In games, it’s Scoop’s job to inbound the ball. He watches for the open man, but he likes to go to Rick, laying the ball up high, above the defenders’ reach. They’re point guard and big man, yin and yang, even when it comes to tattoos. “Mine says ‘Best-Kept Secret,’” Scoop announces, with a touch of pride. Rick doesn’t have a tattoo. If he did get one? “It would probably be my aunt’s name,” he says softly. “She’s passed on.”
SO LONG AS NOTHING MORE than the Catholic League championship was at stake, Scoop and Rick were rock-solid. But then the NCAA scouts started circling. Scoop was foremost in their sights; he’d been on the radar since he was 12. By junior year, though, Rick was in the spotlight, too. The trouble now was finding a school in the market for both a power forward and a point guard. College coaches assemble their teams with great precision, weighing potential players’ differing strengths, maturity levels, styles, heights, builds. …
Coach Arrigale got dizzy just thinking about it. “Antonio liked Villanova,” he remembers, “but they didn’t have a scholarship for Rick. Rick had Georgetown, Wake Forest, UConn, but they didn’t need guards. Virginia looked like a possibility, but then they signed a guard.” To make a crazy situation even crazier, Scoop was being up-front with the recruiters, saying, “Well, do you want Rick, too? Because I’m not coming if Rick’s not coming.” There was something downright perverse in his insistence on a package deal. He and Rick stood on the brink of blindingly bright futures. Heck, they stood where 99.9 percent of America’s high-school boys would gladly have sold their souls to stand.
And you know what? It wasn’t any fun. It only made Scoop anxious. “Every time a college talked to me, I liked them,” he says. “Every day, I had a new favorite college. Coach used to snap on me.”
Rick sympathized. “They get on your nerves,” he says of the recruiters. “Calling you and calling you. They all say the same thing. And they promise you stuff.”
“You don’t know who wants you for you,” Scoop says plaintively, “and not just for the basketball.”
Both boys were getting plenty of advice. “This sport is not in the greatest position right now,” Coach Arrigale says. “There are so many people involved with these kids at such a young age that maybe don’t have their best interests at heart.” Some of those people were trying to divide the two friends, whispering behind one or the other’s back: “Scoop doesn’t pass you the ball.” “Rick’s not giving you the looks.” Arrigale was worried: “It doesn’t take much to drive a wedge between young men.”
Rick saw Scoop spinning, and knew he had to be steadfast. It was easier for him, because he’d come up more slowly: “I didn’t listen to people who only came around after I got good, after I got a name.”
And Scoop fell back on his Sure Thing: “I always knew I had Rick at the end of the day.”
High-school prospects don’t have to commit to college until senior year, but Scoop wanted to make the decision earlier, not later. He wanted the phone calls and courtship and whisperings to end. Most of all, he wanted to play the sport he loves, the one that fills the hole inside him. “I just get up for it,” he says. Even on the court, though, he was feeling pressure, second-guessing himself. “Life used to be easier when nobody knew who I was,” he says ruefully.
So he held tight to Rick, and they stayed close to home base: Scoop’s grandma’s house. “It’s a hangout,” Scoop says happily. “We have the whole team over. She’s the team mom. Team grandmom. There’ll be 15 of us there.” They play NBA Live on PlayStation, go on the computer, do homework. “She feeds us all,” Scoop says. “We can bring a new friend every day, and it’ll be like he’s been there forever.”
Rick would have been fine to wait until senior year to choose a college. But he hadn’t forgotten that Scoop made The Promise when his own hoops future was much brighter than Rick’s. And he saw how the recruiters were making Scoop crazy. The boys had to find a team that wanted both of them. Fast.
IN ALL THE MAD RUSH of promises, there was one coach who went after both Scoop and Rick from the beginning: Jim Boeheim, of Syracuse University. Syracuse, ranked 23rd at the start of this season, is a perennial NCAA tournament contender. More important, three of its starters graduate in June. That meant Scoop and Rick would have a chance to play right away.
Boeheim appreciated their separate talents. “Ricky has really come on in the last year or two,” he says. “There are very few low-post players in the game today, and he’s a good one. And Antonio is just a good all-around guard. He can penetrate, he can shoot, and he’s an emotional leader. You want that kind of emotional leadership in the backcourt.”
But Boeheim, who’s helmed the Orangemen for more than three decades, insists he never bought into the package-deal stuff. “I’ve heard that many, many times over the past 35 years,” he says gruffly. “Most times, it doesn’t work out. They just don’t like the same school.” He wanted Rick and Scoop, sure. But he would have taken either one. What he didn’t see was that Rick wouldn’t have been Rick without Scoop, and the other way around. What he liked in each of them, they developed together, symbiotically, in reaction to one another. And they weren’t ready to be sliced apart.
Scoop felt so in synch with Boeheim and the Syracuse program that he made an oral commitment as a junior, just to quiet the clamor. He didn’t ask Rick about it first; he just assumed Rick would follow along. After all, that had been the pact. What had changed was that Rick now had every major college in the United States offering for him. “I tried to tell Rick to hold off and see what happens,” says Arrigale. “He took it as that we didn’t want him to go to Syracuse. And we told him — no, no, we just want you to enjoy it for a little while. He said, to his credit, ‘This is what we said we were going to do.’” Rick committed to Syracuse a week after Scoop did.
So in the fall, Scoop and Rick will head there on full athletic scholarships, together. And you’re thinking how lucky it is that Rick and Scoop found each other, because otherwise who knows what would have become of them? “They’re each other’s family,” Coach Arrigale said. And that makes a great story. But it isn’t the right story — at least, not the complete one — because it turns out that Rick is really tight with his mom, whom Arrigale credits with keeping Rick in line academically, and she came to all his games, and so did Rick’s three little brothers and his little sister. And they sat in the stands with Scoop’s grandma and mom and Scoop’s stepdad and little brother and four little sisters, and with Scoop’s other grandma, and all of them cheered like mad. And Scoop and Rick were careful to behave themselves, because they take the responsibility of being good role models to all those siblings very seriously.
And guess who else was in the stands? Rick Sr. and Antonio Sr., who, it turns out, gave their sons a lot more than their names. “The best part of my game is my hook shot,” says Rick Jr. “My dad taught me how to drop the hook shot. We played a lot as we went along.” And Scoop? “My dad never let me back out of a commitment,” he says. “When I told someone I’m going to be there, I had to be there. My dad taught me about being a man, about stepping up and doing what you say you’ll do.”
It’s a happy story, Scoop and Rick’s. And such a Philly story. It’s just like Rocky, where the good guys win in the end. It gets you so pumped that you can’t help thinking about the future. Rick wants to go on to the NBA. Scoop wants the same thing. So you say to Scoop: Hey, how about the NBA? Will you make that a package deal, too?
And Scoop, open-book Scoop, sitting in the bleachers in Neumann-Goretti’s tired old gym, glances at you sidelong and says flatly, “Nah. It’s a business now. You do what you gotta do.”
Originally published in Philadelphia magazine, April 2007
