I know a guy who could hoop better than Jordan: he's flipping burgers

Ebony, July, 1998 by Kevin Chappell

I recently attended my 10-year high school class reunion to confirm a few inclinations. A decade earlier, I had vowed to keep in touch with my classmates. And I did, at least during the summer. But that fall, I went off to college, met new friends and -- you know the rest -- I never really found the time to correspond with any of them.

I had convinced myself that my absentmindedness didn't matter. I had rationalized that even though I was halfway across the country, I had a pretty good idea what everyone from my high school was doing -- who was successful and who wasn't, who had flourished and who had floundered, who was a player in the game of life and who was getting played. By taking variables like book smarts and talent, factoring in family connections and adding such intangibles as genetic traits, I had it all figured out, like one of those tough math problems in algebra class.

So I went to my class reunion not to catch up on past time missed, but to give myself a pat on the back for being able to predict the future. More than anything else, I wanted to leave my class reunion telling myself, "I told you so."

The first person I saw when I walked into the hotel ballroom was the lanky guy who was the star of the varsity basketball team. Back in the day, this guy could hoop better than Jordan. Well, maybe not better than Jordan, but he was good. He was the first person I had seen who could dunk from the free-throw line.

"What are you doing now?" I eagerly asked, expecting him to say something like he's playing professional ball over in Europe, or that he's a college basketball coach. Turns out he's flipping burgers at the local hamburger joint. The guy with the million-dollar game is now, the guy with a minimum-wage job.

Hopes dashed, I began frantically scanning the room, searching for someone, anyone who could prove my character judgments light. Across the room -- doing the Electric Slide on the dance floor -- was the Brother who was a singer in the choir. To this day, I haven't heard anyone who could hit the range of notes that he could.

"Just finished cutting your first CD, right?" I said to him as I slid between the Brother and his date. "Not quite," he responded in mid-spin. "I'm cutting hair."

I stopped in my tracks, threw the entire line off. I was feeling a little disoriented, somewhat dizzy. Beads of sweat were forming on my forehead, my mouth was dry and my shirt collar was a little tight. I grabbed a drink from the passing waiter and proceeded to make my way through the crowd.

To my dismay, the rest of the night went much the same way. The guy who could drive a baseball some 400 feet is now driving a cab. The Brother who knew calculus better than the teacher is now selling carpet cleaner door-to-door.

And then there were the classmates I figured were the least likely to be doing anything noteworthy. They were successful. The guy who was held back and had dropped out of school for a year is now a big-time attorney. The guy who had become a father during his senior year is now happily married to the mother of his child and has started his own business.

I left the reunion with more questions than answers. Why do some people make it, while the ones who seem to gave all of the tools to make it don't? Looking for anything that would help clear up my confusion, I popped in the video tape of my graduation. Therein lay the answer. During the commencement speech, our principal talked extensively about life and in it there is little room for error. How the right path is so narrow that sometimes it is as thin as a tightrope, and sometimes nobody has been down it for so long that it has disappeared, leaving you without a guide, forcing you to use your own good judgment to determine which way to go. On the other hand, you can skip down the wrong path "with your eyes closed and never have to worry about straying off it," she said. "It's traveled on so much that grass will never cover it."

Although none of us paid much attention to what she was saying back then, today her words ring true. While book smarts and talent give you a good start, it takes drive, a little good fortune, a lot of discipline, and sometimes even street smarts to make it in life.

Not to say that the classmates who fell short of my lofty expectations are failures. Far from it. But it was obvious that those in my class who knew how to play society's game, how to get the most out of what they had to work with -- even if they weren't blessed with the most talent or enough smarts to make the honor roll -- ended up on top. They were the ones who realized sometimes they had to swallow their pride, do things they might not want to do, to get ahead so that one day they would be able to do exactly what they wanted to do. It all comes down to choices, the momentary choices we make every day and the long-range choices that chart the course our lives will take for years to come. And it's never too late to make the right choices. That's what my high school principal said.