Journey 2006
I wasn't much of a basketball player or fan until I had one to raise. My son ended up at my height of 6'7" and was pretty much a super jock of a kid. He played soccer and basketball and volleyball and baseball and went out for cross country one year. He was in a club basketball team in Middle school and started on Varsity his freshman year in high school. He applied everywhere for college. There were only a few schools interested in him for basketball. Occidental here in Los Angeles and NYU and Stevens Institute in New York. And there was a coach at some school in Buffalo NY that had seen him play in LA, but then he changed jobs and he wasn't in a position to recruit or something like that. Chris had a 26 point game in a summer club thing ( I had a video of it.) and I tried to get USC interested but no luck. Because I worked at USC I got free tuition for him and you could trade it to other schools on a list. Occidental and Stevens were on the list.
So he was invited back to New York to check out NYU and Stevens. His High School Coach was interested in taking him, but after watching him interact with the guy from Buffalo, I decided I would take him. It was winter of 2006 in his senior year. It was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit in NYC during the day. And there was snow. I rented a hotel room for myself and he was going to stay in the dorms with the basketball guys at both schools. I had talked to both schools and explained what I was doing and they seemed fine with it. The High School Coach seemed a bit bent out over my plan. I didn't tell Steven Institute yet about the tuition trade. I figured maybe both schools might offer him something. So away we flew.
I dropped him off at Stevens and went to find my hotel. - a cheapy place across the river in Hoboken, it wasn't too bad. I suddenly flashed on the motel. I was having health problems then and it hadn't been figured out yet. I had a pint of ice cream that night thinking it would help my problems. It wasn't later than I would learn I had developed diabetes. Anyhow, he played and hung out and explored. I spent a lot of years researching a couple that married and was the center of art and literature and theater circles in NYC in the mid-1870s. I finally completed a slightly fictional, slightly true novel about them about year ago, and have written a musical about them as well. Check it out if you are interested: https://www.the-best-of-friends.com/
So I went off to look for where they lived and went off to the Met to look at their art collection and hit all the museums and wandered around the city in the freezing cold. I was amazed by the folks walking their dogs in Central Park in fur coats and snow boots - the dogs, not the owners.The meeting with the Stevens folks went pretty well and when they realized they didn't have to provide a scholarship, they gave him some enrollment credit for being a musician and enrolling in their music industry program as his minor. I got him from Stevens and we went off to NYU and I had a hole in the wall hotel room in the city, which was not fun. I had to go to the front desk and explain to the guy that I needed a room with enough bed to accommodate two 6'7" guys and he looked at me like I was from Mars. Paying an arm and a leg later I got a bed that we could both lay in though it was cramped.
He came back to me exhausted. We did make a trip to the Empire State Building and he brought a present for his girlfriend at the time. (She was already accepted at Columbia there.) And we went back and he slept like the dead for the next eight hours. The return was a bit exciting. The taxi I had ordered for the airport didn't show and there were none to be found on the street. A woman in the lobby had a limo reserved and it showed and I made a deal with her to split the cost and in the whole transaction discovered she was broke and I was probably being scammed but agreed to cover her share because I was so thankful to get to the fucking airport.
This is where he ended up going. Stevens Institute. He saw Sculley land his plane out there. He said there was one bad spring when the rain was falling horizontally on Stevens' hill
So he was invited back to New York to check out NYU and Stevens. His High School Coach was interested in taking him, but after watching him interact with the guy from Buffalo, I decided I would take him. It was winter of 2006 in his senior year. It was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit in NYC during the day. And there was snow. I rented a hotel room for myself and he was going to stay in the dorms with the basketball guys at both schools. I had talked to both schools and explained what I was doing and they seemed fine with it. The High School Coach seemed a bit bent out over my plan. I didn't tell Steven Institute yet about the tuition trade. I figured maybe both schools might offer him something. So away we flew.
I dropped him off at Stevens and went to find my hotel. - a cheapy place across the river in Hoboken, it wasn't too bad. I suddenly flashed on the motel. I was having health problems then and it hadn't been figured out yet. I had a pint of ice cream that night thinking it would help my problems. It wasn't later than I would learn I had developed diabetes. Anyhow, he played and hung out and explored. I spent a lot of years researching a couple that married and was the center of art and literature and theater circles in NYC in the mid-1870s. I finally completed a slightly fictional, slightly true novel about them about year ago, and have written a musical about them as well. Check it out if you are interested: https://www.the-best-of-friends.com/
So I went off to look for where they lived and went off to the Met to look at their art collection and hit all the museums and wandered around the city in the freezing cold. I was amazed by the folks walking their dogs in Central Park in fur coats and snow boots - the dogs, not the owners.The meeting with the Stevens folks went pretty well and when they realized they didn't have to provide a scholarship, they gave him some enrollment credit for being a musician and enrolling in their music industry program as his minor. I got him from Stevens and we went off to NYU and I had a hole in the wall hotel room in the city, which was not fun. I had to go to the front desk and explain to the guy that I needed a room with enough bed to accommodate two 6'7" guys and he looked at me like I was from Mars. Paying an arm and a leg later I got a bed that we could both lay in though it was cramped.
He came back to me exhausted. We did make a trip to the Empire State Building and he brought a present for his girlfriend at the time. (She was already accepted at Columbia there.) And we went back and he slept like the dead for the next eight hours. The return was a bit exciting. The taxi I had ordered for the airport didn't show and there were none to be found on the street. A woman in the lobby had a limo reserved and it showed and I made a deal with her to split the cost and in the whole transaction discovered she was broke and I was probably being scammed but agreed to cover her share because I was so thankful to get to the fucking airport.
This is where he ended up going. Stevens Institute. He saw Sculley land his plane out there. He said there was one bad spring when the rain was falling horizontally on Stevens' hill
1 comment:
Oh, and we got lost and turned around on the subway, but I did learn you could ask for directions and people would answer you.
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