“He never mentioned that letter to me. Not once. Not in nine years. Not when I was fourteen and angry, not when I asked about my father, not ever.
“He kept a copy of what he wrote back. It’s three sentences. I’m going to read it.”
And my son read my own handwriting out loud into a microphone in front of four thousand people.
Mr. Wolcott — Amari is not for sale and he is not available. He knows he has a father who left. He does not need to also know that his father tried to buy him. That’s the last thing I’ll ever do for you.
I broke.
I want to be accurate: I did not tear up. I went down onto one knee against the bench with both hands over my face, in front of four thousand people, and Coach Yarber’s assistant put a hand on my back and stood there so people had something else to look at.
I was crying because he read my handwriting.
That’s it. That’s the whole reason. I wrote that on a Tuesday night in August of 2017 at my kitchen table with a nine-year-old asleep down the hall, and I had never said one word about it to anybody alive, and my son read it into a microphone in a coliseum and it turned out he’d known since July.
