Shooting Hoops for Dreams

By the time he returned to Montreal in 1966, White knew the importance of organized sports to a poor community – they provide entertainment and distraction and encourage discipline and focus, skills key to finding and keeping jobs. Sports can also lead to scholarships and a chance at a higher education, which poor families can ill afford. But there were no organized sports activities in Little Burgundy.

It was during the summer of 1976 that White met the then 11-year-old Trevor Williams and his 14-year-old friend Wayne Yearwood. The boys, like many in the neighbourhood, had been meeting with friends in vacant lots, shooting "hoops" through plastic milk cartons with the bottoms cut out of them. One day, White told the pair to meet him at the lot the next morning. He arrived with a bag of cement, a car tire, a pole and a sheet of wood with a hoop on it. He and the boys filled the tire with cement, attached the board to the pole and planted it in the cement, creating a basketball hoop Harlem-style. White also supplied a real basketball to replace the beach ball the boys had been using.

White knew the importance of organized sports to a poor community – they provide entertainment and distraction and encourage discipline and focus, skills key to finding and keeping jobs

Frustrated with the limited opportunities for kids in Little Burgundy to play organized sports, White decided to take matters into his own hands and founded WESA, operating with donations of cash and used equipment. Williams and Yearwood were among his first members.

White pushed the WESA boys, making them sweat through drills for as long as six hours a day. Then he would reach into a shopping bag filled with prizes and hand out such things as movie tickets and old records. He encouraged the kids to think for themselves and inspired them to imagine a life outside Little Burgundy. "This is not just a basketball," he often said, holding a ball above his head. "This could be your ticket to university or your dream job."

When not coaching, White was raising funds and soliciting donations of sweatsuits and sneakers. A passionate and relentless rabble-rouser for his cause, he had the bottled-up anger and courage needed to accost high-profile visitors who toured Little Burgundy canvassing for votes or seeking publicity. "Why don't you help us out down here?" he heckled them. "It costs $60,000 to keep a kid in jail for a year. Give me half that much and I'll keep 100 out of jail!"

Almost immediately, WESA's four basketball teams began to attract attention by walloping some of Montreal's most established city teams. White could see that some of his players had the potential to play professional basketball but stood little chance of being discovered in Little Burgundy. So he loaded his best players into a car and drove them to basketball camps in upper New York State.

Trevor Williams was one of those kids. At the camp he attended he caught the attention of scouts and was offered a basketball scholarship to Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Williams accepted it and later, in 1992, played with Team Canada at the qualifying tournament for the Barcelona Olympics, facing his heroes Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan of the U.S. Olympic Dream Team. Wayne Yearwood had gone to the University of West Virginia and in 1988 played for Team Canada at the Seoul Olympics. He then played professionally in Europe.

When his sports career had run its course, Williams returned to Montreal, where he landed a job coaching at Dawson College. He also volunteered at inner-city schools but wanted to do more to help kids. And then one day in 1992, White said to him, "This city needs a really good basketball camp."

And so that summer, White and Williams, along with two other WESA alumni, Dean Smith and Michael McLean, rented a gym. With a few ancient basketballs that were literally bulging at the seams, they started TWBA, modelling its camps on the American Five-Star Basketball Camps Williams had attended. But Williams insisted they also embrace White's WESA philosophy of helping every child realize his or her potential on and off the court. It was through basketball that Williams had learned such key life skills as anger management, conflict resolution, discipline and tolerance, along with the importance of helping others, and he wanted to pass what he'd learned on to the next generation.

That first summer, 18 boys showed up for the one-week camp. The following year, 100 came. By the summer of 2003, Williams and White had moved the program out of cramped quarters in an inner-city high school and were running six week-long camps at Dawson College's bigger, more easily accessible air-conditioned gym. Nonetheless, he was still forced to turn away 250 children each week.

The TWBA camps also provide much needed summer jobs for 50 to 60 university students, who act as counsellors and coaches. "We have very strict screening," says Yearwood, who joined TWBA in 1999. "The students we hire must play ball well and be at university. There's an important lesson for the kids who attend to learn, and the coaches we hire help deliver it – use sports to get an education. Use the game, don't let it use you."

Despite the fact that TWBA is now on the roster of camps visited by high-powered American sports agents, the association continues to make it possible for talented young players to attend U.S. basketball camps, where they have a better chance of coming to the attention of university scouts. Since 1976, more than 1,000 young people from some of Montreal's poorest neighbourhoods have gone to American as well as Canadian universities on basketball scholarships as a result of their involvement with TWBA and WESA. Some have realized their dreams of playing at the Olympic level, others with the Harlem Globetrotters or the National Basketball Association (NBA).

Some of the most successful of "Bobby's kids," like Pascal Fleury, return to volunteer their time at Williams's camp. The 7'3" Fleury, whom White put on a track that led to stints with the Harlem Globetrotters and professional teams in France, spent the entire 2003 summer-camp season coaching at TWBA. Others show up to talk to the kids about everything from preventing teen pregnancies to the importance of finishing high school.

Figures from other sports drop by as well. One Monday afternoon, Williams gathers the kids together and introduces Alvin Powell. "I'm here to tell you how drugs became my master," says the former Seattle Seahawks and Miami Dolphins football player, whose cocaine addiction cost him his National Football League (NFL) career and almost his life. "But I have some tools to help you steer clear of them." The gym is silent; eyes are riveted on the football player. The kids have all heard Powell's message before at school and from parents, but when the words come from their sports heroes they really listen. "They think they're here to learn basketball," White notes. "But that's only the carrot. What we're really teaching them is the game of life."

BY TUESDAY MORNING, the coaches are rearranging players according to their abilities in teams from "Pee Wee" to "NBA." "Prince, you're in NBA," Williams calls out, motioning the young athlete to the far end of the gym where the older kids are clustered. Both Burke brothers have turned out to be highly talented players.

Prince and Bazoo are among dozens of youngsters – talented athletes and good students from under-privileged families – whom Williams has taken under his wing. He treats the boys like sons, regularly keeping in touch with them throughout the school year and now and then taking them to a hockey game at the Bell Centre or to other sports events. He makes sure they have shoes without holes and is there to take their distressed phone calls in the middle of the night. And he has made them a promise: for every A or B grade on their report cards, they receive a free week at camp. "It's important they know someone is watching out for them," says Williams. "Because if we let go, they could slip away. We see it all the time – smart kids with potential doing drugs and drinking in the park. Some of them are dead."

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, the final day of camp, the elite "NBA" team plays the coaches. "I never even saw a basketball star when I was a kid," Yearwood pants as he runs off court. "Here, they get to play ball with them."

Prince weaves and dashes, looking as if he could run between the legs of some of the coaches. After the game, prizes and evaluation sheets are handed out with personal comments to each camp participant. Goodbyes are drawn out. Three girls have tears in their eyes as they hug Williams.

It's clear there have been changes in many of the campers within the week. Parents speak with astonishment about how much more polite and courteous their children have become. Shy kids have blossomed and tough ones mellowed. Two summers ago, Chris Michaud, a single father and freelance journalist who worked long days supplementing his earnings with a job as a courier driver, enrolled his 13-year-old son in a TWBA camp. Chris had been worried that Matthew would fall in with the wrong crowd during the long days of summer. When the 6'3" boy arrived at the camp, he had a problem dealing with confrontation, tending to react physically. Williams saw that Matthew craved attention and direction, took him aside and spoke firmly with him about getting along with others. He then assigned him additional responsibilities to channel his aggressiveness. Williams found, as he had with some supposed bullies in the past, that Matthew was a natural leader.

"He's much calmer now," Chris commented toward the end of the camp. Matthew agreed. "I learn lots of things here about how I'm supposed to act," he said. "They teach you how to respect others."

Williams believes children crave the discipline they experience in his care. "They're not always taught respect and discipline at home or at school," he says. "I can't believe how some of these kids talk to their parents, particularly some from well-to-do families. They may run their households, but not this camp."

Twenty-six-year-old Michael Mills has spent the past 10 summers at TWBA, first as a camper and now as one of its most promising counsellors. A social work graduate from Dawson College, he would like to start a similar program in Ottawa. "This camp spreads love," says the soft-spoken young man. "This is the best kind of social work."

Williams – who was voted Quebec's 2003 Coach of the Year by the Canadian Colleges Athletic Association – doesn't miss an opportunity to pay his mentor credit. "I know a lot of people today who would be in jail if it wasn't for the West End Sports Association," he says. "And I certainly wouldn't have had the opportunities I've had in my life if it hadn't been for Bob. Now it's my responsibility to help create the future leaders of our community."

White shrugs off the accolades with uncharacteristic shyness and grins from beneath his hat. "We're just taking the weeds out of the cement and turning them into roses," he says. "From ghetto to glory."