In My Skin (11 page)

The second after I hit her, as my arm was still following through, I snapped back to reality, and I knew right away that everything was about to change. I heard the crowd. I heard the boos. I heard the thoughts racing through my head.
Shit. I just really fucked up. This is bad. This is bad. Damn. Damn. Damn. This is my biggest fuckup ever.
I don't even think I could wrap my mind around how big of a mistake it was, how it would haunt me in the years to come. I didn't have any of that perspective yet—I could still feel the anger bubbling inside me—but I knew instantly that it was serious, that I had messed up in a huge way.

Coach Damion came onto the court and wrapped me up. “All right, B, it's good, it's good,” he kept saying. Some of my teammates were going back and forth with players on Texas Tech, so he was worried I might keep fighting. I was ejected from the game, which meant I needed to leave the court. I had punched Barncastle in front of our team's bench, but the tunnel leading to our locker room was at the other end of the court, so I had to walk in front of their bench, then underneath the fans who were sitting in the corner seats by the tunnel. Damion walked on one side of me, and our strength and conditioning coach was on the other side. I still hadn't spoken to Kim yet; I hadn't even looked over at her after the play, because I was scared to see her reaction.

“Damn, you got her,” Damion said to me while we were walking.

“I know.”

“Damn,” he repeated, shaking his head. “We're going to get through this, though.”

“I hope so,” I said, keeping my head down as we walked through the entrance of the tunnel, because I was really worried someone would throw something at us. I'm not sure how I would have reacted to that, but I was feeling cornered and on edge, jumpy almost, so I knew I didn't want to find out.

Damion was trying to reassure me that we would handle whatever fallout came from my actions. I didn't think Kim would kick me off the team, but I was worried the NCAA might suspend me for enough games that my season would be finished. We had only one regular-season game left, so even a five-game suspension would mean I'd miss the entire Big 12 tournament and maybe the first two rounds of the NCAA tourney, making it a lot tougher for my team to advance. There wasn't much precedent for how the NCAA would handle the situation, and I was worried they'd come down hard on me to make a statement.

There were several minutes left in the game, so Damion couldn't stay with me in the locker room. He told me to hang tight as he turned and walked back to the court. I untucked my jersey, letting it hang over my shorts. I rummaged through my bag for my cell phone, then sank into the chair I had sat in before the game. I didn't dare take off my uniform. I knew if Kim came back into the locker room and saw me in my sweats, looking like I had separated myself from the team instead of sticking it out until the very end, she would be angry and disappointed in a whole new way. I leaned forward and untied my sneakers, but I didn't take them off. When I pulled up the score of the game on my phone, I saw Texas Tech was making a run, coming from behind, and I could hear the muffled excitement from the crowd. Everybody was texting me, too. Someone sent me a message telling me the clip had already been uploaded to YouTube. I dropped my head and stared at the space between my sneakers.
How did I get myself here?
There was also a text from my dad saying I should have kept fighting. He was angry that after all the back and forth between me and Barncastle, I was the one who got tossed. Of course I was also the one who punched her in the nose.

After a few minutes, our team manager, Jordin Westbrook, came into the locker room. I looked at her and asked, “They making a run?”

“Yeah, they scored a couple of times,” she said.

“Did it look that bad?” I knew she would know exactly what I meant.

“Uh . . . yes,” she answered. “It looked horrible.”

“Did I actually get her?”

I wasn't sure yet if I had really hurt Barncastle, because I knew I didn't make direct contact. Jordin told me there was cotton stuffed up Barncastle's nose and that it didn't look right. We sat in silence for a few more minutes, waiting for the game to end. By that time, our team had hit a couple of big buckets, and we were clearly going to win. But those were long minutes for me. I was dreading the storm that was coming my way, once the final buzzer sounded. I could feel it, hear it, heading directly for me, as my teammates jogged down the hallway, the sound of their sneakers getting louder and louder. I looked at Jordin and made my eyes big, like,
This is it.

The locker room door swung open and everyone filled in around me, sweaty and out of breath. I could hear the clicking of Kim's heels in the hallway. She walked through the doorway and stood at the front of the room. I was sitting as still as possible, holding my breath, like I was trying to make myself disappear.

“That is totally unacceptable!”

I could feel Kim's eyes on me, like lasers, as she yelled. “I'll deal with your ass when we get back to Waco!”

Everyone was quiet as we showered and got ready to leave the arena. My teammates didn't really say too much about what had happened, probably because they didn't want to be seen talking with me right at the moment—guilt by association and all. A few of them said, under their breath, “Damn, B, right in the nose.” And later, months afterward, they would turn “Barncastle” into a verb. If we were going hard during a scrimmage, someone would say, “Don't Barncastle me.” I think we all knew that the best way to deal with it, to put it behind me, was to acknowledge it, instead of pretending it never happened.

I HAD A MEETING IN
Kim's office the day after we got back from Lubbock. The NCAA had handed down a one-game suspension, and Kim decided to add on another game, to show everyone how seriously she was taking the incident. She also tacked on a number of obligations—most of which were not made public—as part of my punishment. I had to write a letter of apology to Jordan Barncastle. I had to put in a certain number of hours doing community service, which meant I spent many afternoons and weekends working at a soup kitchen, serving food to the homeless. And I had to see a therapist, a requirement I initially rolled my eyes at, assuming it would be the kind of thing you see on television:
And how did that make you feel?

I sat in Kim's office, and we talked about what had happened. She explained she had to take a tough stance, to make it clear she wouldn't tolerate that kind of behavior, because what I had done was wrong, and now I had to go about making it right. But she also said she understood how frustrating it was to be me on the court. She saw how much abuse I absorbed without getting the same calls as players smaller than I am. “You just can't retaliate,” she stressed. “The blame always falls on the player who retaliates.”

I knew she was right. But here's the thing: you don't always understand something right away just because someone explains it. Kim and the other coaches had said all along that I needed to keep my cool, that I would have to deal with a lot of crap on the court, players trying to knock me down to their size. I would nod my head—yup, yup, yup—then step onto the court and push all that advice out of my mind. It wasn't until I punched Jordan Barncastle that the message really hit home for me. That game at Texas Tech would be the last one I played without constantly reminding myself I needed to stay level-headed.

We ended up reaching the Final Four that spring (we lost in the semifinals to Connecticut, the eventual national champion), and I finished the season averaging 18.4 points and 8.5 rebounds per game. I wanted so much to redeem myself, to put the punch behind me, while also trying to learn from it. The hardest part was that nobody really understood my history of fighting. I think Kim knew, just from us talking here and there, that I had some conflicts when I was younger—”altercations,” she called them. But nobody at Baylor, and certainly nobody in the media, had any idea how much I had struggled as a kid, trying to solve my problems and hide my insecurities by fighting. That was my response to feeling vulnerable when I was young: raising my fists.

TOWARD THE END OF
middle school, and even into my freshman year of high school, before I fully dedicated myself to basketball, I wanted to be a real fighter, the kind who steps into a ring or a cage. I didn't know how good I would become at hoops, but I knew I needed an outlet for my emotions, a way to release all my pent-up energy. So I talked to my dad about getting a punching bag and some gear, because I wanted to try boxing. I also raised the idea of MMA and ultimate fighting, but my mom absolutely refused to allow it. (See? She did put her foot down on occasion— and I can't blame her for that.) She could barely understand why I wanted to box.

My dad put the speed bag, punching bag, dumbbells, and hand wraps in a section of our family room, and I would come home from school and work out. I'm an adrenaline junkie, a thrill seeker, so I really connected with the emotional intensity of boxing. Sometimes Dad would come in and hold the punching bag for me. It even got to the point where we talked about getting me some lessons. But Mom was scared; she didn't want me to get hurt. She begged me, and my dad, not to pursue it beyond the family room. So my boxing career was short-lived, although I continued to hit the bag and use the weights throughout high school.

The punching bag was made of this rough material, and I had to wrap my knuckles before practicing. But one time I came home after school and went crazy on the bag, without wrapping my hands. I was steamed about something (I can't remember what), and the next thing I knew, the punching bag was red and my mom was shrieking, “Oh my God, my baby's hands!” I was like, “Mom, chill, it's okay.” Another time I punched the bag so hard, the stand it was on swung backward and put a hole in the wall. I didn't know I was that strong.

IN THE YEARS
after “the punch,” the story line became that I had made this one mistake and it was totally out of character for me.
She's just a big teddy bear. A gentle giant.
I was glad people were willing to forgive what I had done (well, except for the online trolls who still bring it up), but I also felt a little uncomfortable with how simplified everything was—all neat and tidy and fixed—when the reality was that I had worked hard to control my anger.

Kim wanted me to see the therapist every week for the rest of the school year. As I drove to his office for that first visit, I told myself that it was just another obligation, something I had to do to check the box and move on. I wasn't planning to say much, because I'm stubborn like that: I thought therapists were for people who are weak, and I didn't need to see a shrink. I was still learning that the weakest people are the ones who can't ask for help. His office was off campus, unaffiliated with Baylor. There were two large windows in the corner, facing leafy green trees and shrubs. I sat in a leather chair with little pleats in it. (I spent a lot of time fiddling with those stitches.) The therapist sat on the couch, and the first thing he said to me was, “So how are you doing? How was your day?” I had been expecting him to ask me why I punched Jordan Barncastle and if I felt bad about it. I thought the whole thing would be weird and awkward. I remember feeling stiff, ready to shut down. And then he asked me that simple question, as if he really cared about how I was doing, and I felt myself relax into that leather chair. I also liked that he said, “If you want to cuss, go ahead and cuss. It doesn't matter what you want to say, just say it. I'm here to listen. I want to listen. So tell me what you want to talk about.”

We just had a conversation. And it didn't take him long, maybe it was the second or third session, to figure out that so much of who I am, of how I act and how I respond and how much anger I feel sometimes, is a direct result of my relationship with my dad. That first session, the therapist asked me about my family, and he noticed how I kind of changed—my body language, the emotion in my voice—when I started talking about my father. So we stayed on that topic longer, and when we circled back around to it, the same thing happened.

Starting therapy is like pointing a spotlight into your past and into your heart. Although I initially went because of what happened at Texas Tech, it became an important part of my life away from basketball. I stayed in Waco for school that summer, and I stayed in therapy, too. I kept going back throughout my sophomore year, then on and off for the rest of college. At first Kim would check in with me to make sure I was going on a regular basis, but she quickly backed off once she realized I was taking it seriously. As time passed, I would go depending on how I felt each week. If I was stressed about something, I would schedule a session. If things were going smoothly, I'd still try to make time for it every couple of weeks.

It didn't bother me if people knew I was seeing a therapist. A few of my teammates had to see him, too, and they hated it. I would try to tell them, “Just talk to the man! He's not trying to make you do anything. He just wants to hear how things are going.” My therapist provided me with a certain peace of mind. When I became angry about something that happened with basketball, or school, or my dad, I would go talk to him and calm down. Whatever the situation, he helped me look at it in a better way, and he encouraged me to move past the anger I held on to. That has always been my Achilles' heel: letting wrongs and slights fester inside me instead of discussing them right away. I'll tell everyone that everything is fine, until things are so far past fine that I'm about to burst with anger or sadness.

Finding a great therapist was the silver lining that came from the Jordan Barncastle incident. I don't know how I would have made it through my sophomore year, and the swirl of depression I found myself in, without having that support.