He showed up to every game. That included the whole season I never left the bench.
Coach Whitfield actually pulled him aside once, midway through that season, half apologizing for how little playing time I was getting.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Marcus told him, loud enough that I heard it from the water cooler. “I’m not here for playing time. I’m here because he’s here.”
I never forgot that, even years later, the specific weight of a grown man choosing bleachers over better things to do with his Saturday, over and over, for a kid who barely touched the court.
I asked him once, years later, why he’d bothered showing up to games I clearly wasn’t playing in.
“Because someday you might,” he said, simple as that. “And I wasn’t about to miss it deciding you weren’t worth the gas money until then.”
He sat across the kitchen table from me most nights, working through algebra he clearly hadn’t touched since high school himself.
He’d squint at the problem for a solid minute before admitting he had no idea either, then pull out his phone and look it up right alongside me, no pretense that he already knew everything. “We’re figuring this out together,” he’d say. “That’s still figuring it out.” I never once heard him complain about the hours it cost him, even after a full shift at the warehouse where he worked nights sometimes.
One night around eleven, I said I was done and I was quitting the problem set.
“Read it to me one more time,” he said. “We’re not stopping yet.”
We didn’t stop that night, not until close to midnight, when I finally got the whole page of problems right, every single one, and he made us both a late bowl of cereal to celebrate like we’d won something real.
“You know I never actually finished this class myself,” he admitted that night, milk still on his spoon. “Dropped out senior year, went straight to work instead. Family needed the money more than I needed the diploma right then.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me that at the start? Would’ve saved us both some embarrassment.”
“Would’ve given you an excuse to quit,” he said. “You needed someone who wasn’t going anywhere, not someone with all the answers.”
