Darvin Ham survived the streets, a stray bullet and intense grief to coach the Lakers
Darvin Ham took a stray bullet to the face, witnessed the crack epidemic turn Saginaw bloody and dealt with PTSD on his way to an unlikely NBA career.
www.latimes.com
The bullet pierced the right side of Darvin Ham’s cheek, glanced off his jaw and lodged in the back of his neck.
It was April 5, 1988, a trip for pizza and soda with his older brother that went horribly wrong. A spray of bullets almost made Ham another casualty of his hometown.
Instead, it became a defining moment in the life of the man who would become the Los Angeles Lakers’ 28th head coach.
Blood was everywhere. Ham nearly died, needing 11 days in the hospital.
“Fourteen years old,” Ham, 49, said in an exclusive interview with The Times. “Think about it. I could’ve died. At 14.”
His voice quaked as he recounted the trauma, the first in an adolescence littered with them.
“’Walk it off,’ that’s what they’re telling me,” Ham said, his eyes tearing and reddening. “Walk it off. No, ‘How you feeling? Are you OK? Are you scared it could happen to you?’ … I got to give something back, man.”
It was far from the only trauma he suffered before he left town.
Too many friends buried, too many classmates lost to the crack cocaine epidemic, not enough support to process it all.
When the Lakers play in Detroit on Sunday, it’ll be the first time Ham returns to mid-Michigan as the Lakers’ first-year coach, one of American sports’ most prestigious and scrutinized jobs — coaching LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook only 100 miles from the Saginaw streets that nearly swallowed him.
“It’s wild,” his childhood friend Eric Smith said. “… For someone from Saginaw to be the Lakers coach, that’s impossible. It can’t happen. But it did.”
The weight of Ham’s past, even during a professional high point, is too heavy to hide yet too important to keep silent.
He must share.
“As Black people, we don’t have enough therapy,” Ham said. “I have PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] to this day off them shots ringing out, getting shot, the s--- going on in my neighborhood. And we don’t … we think it’s cowardice or we’re weak if we go get help.”
He paused for a moment.
“And we need so much help, bro.”
His work in therapy has helped him better understand the complex emotions Saginaw evokes in him, how it’s the setting for so much trouble and so much pain. It’s also where he was built, Eastside tough and ready to take on anything.
He met the pressure of a 2-10 start this season with patience and consistency, the Lakers recently ripping off seven wins in nine games, including one in Milwaukee.
“He has this incredible, I believe, balance where he’s kind of fierce, intimidating and has this presence. He’s ‘No bulls---,’ right?” Bucks general manager Jon Horst said. “But he also has the greatest smile, the greatest laugh, will put his arm around anybody. He’s like this inviting tough guy, this really crazy balance. And it’s consistent, his energy every day.
“He’s Darvin. He’s a tough motherf-----.”
Inside the diner with the clever name — the Bringer Inn — Marshall Thomas, 75, weaves through the tables. Before the legendary Saginaw High basketball coach could get to his grits, sausage patties and dry toast, he had to stop to talk to someone at every other table.
“When you coach,” Thomas said, “everyone in town knows you.”
A lifelong resident of Saginaw, Thomas has won a state championship. He coached NBA champion Draymond Green. And, in the fall before the 1991-92 season, Thomas trusted his returning players when they wanted to add Ham to the squad even though he hadn’t played a second of organized basketball at Saginaw High the previous three years.
Thomas has seen the lives ruined by Saginaw’s problems; he’s had his hands on changing plenty of them in town, too. It’s why he’s still here.
“I play the lotto, but I don’t want to hit it,” he says earnestly. “I don’t want to move from where I live. And if you hit the lotto big — not just for your sake but for your family’s sake — you probably have to move.
“But me, I like it.”
Despite surpassing Detroit as the most violent city in the state, Saginaw is also a city with a sprawling footprint that includes lush country clubs, massive cement mini-malls and manicured farmland, almost as if you took all the characteristics of the Midwest and compressed it into 18 square miles.
“Whatever you want, you can have in Saginaw,” said Julian Taylor, Ham’s teammate at Saginaw High. “You got the country part, the rural part. You got suburban parts. You got urban parts. Very diverse.”
No matter how bad it gets on your block, Taylor agreed, prosperity was just a short drive away. “Just across the bridge,” Ham said.
Too big to be called a town, too small to be considered a city, Saginaw’s early prosperity came from the lumber boom in the mid-19th century. When the source of wealth and work in the area quickly vanished, Saginaw became a manufacturing center similar to so many other Midwestern hubs with a tight tie to Detroit’s automobile industry.
“One fell swoop, I saw it go from being a tight-knit community, a neighborhood, and then the neighbors disappeared and now, it’s just a hood,” Ham said.
Quick money from drugs, especially crack, engulfed the areas around his home in violence.
“You saw things change, man,” Ham said. “I’m talking about kids coming to high school, thousand dollars in their pocket, big gold ropes, big-ass triple-fat goose coats, fur coats. It was real man, real.
It was April 5, 1988, a trip for pizza and soda with his older brother that went horribly wrong. A spray of bullets almost made Ham another casualty of his hometown.
Instead, it became a defining moment in the life of the man who would become the Los Angeles Lakers’ 28th head coach.
Blood was everywhere. Ham nearly died, needing 11 days in the hospital.
“Fourteen years old,” Ham, 49, said in an exclusive interview with The Times. “Think about it. I could’ve died. At 14.”
His voice quaked as he recounted the trauma, the first in an adolescence littered with them.
“’Walk it off,’ that’s what they’re telling me,” Ham said, his eyes tearing and reddening. “Walk it off. No, ‘How you feeling? Are you OK? Are you scared it could happen to you?’ … I got to give something back, man.”
It was far from the only trauma he suffered before he left town.
Too many friends buried, too many classmates lost to the crack cocaine epidemic, not enough support to process it all.
When the Lakers play in Detroit on Sunday, it’ll be the first time Ham returns to mid-Michigan as the Lakers’ first-year coach, one of American sports’ most prestigious and scrutinized jobs — coaching LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook only 100 miles from the Saginaw streets that nearly swallowed him.
“It’s wild,” his childhood friend Eric Smith said. “… For someone from Saginaw to be the Lakers coach, that’s impossible. It can’t happen. But it did.”
The weight of Ham’s past, even during a professional high point, is too heavy to hide yet too important to keep silent.
He must share.
“As Black people, we don’t have enough therapy,” Ham said. “I have PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] to this day off them shots ringing out, getting shot, the s--- going on in my neighborhood. And we don’t … we think it’s cowardice or we’re weak if we go get help.”
He paused for a moment.
“And we need so much help, bro.”
His work in therapy has helped him better understand the complex emotions Saginaw evokes in him, how it’s the setting for so much trouble and so much pain. It’s also where he was built, Eastside tough and ready to take on anything.
He met the pressure of a 2-10 start this season with patience and consistency, the Lakers recently ripping off seven wins in nine games, including one in Milwaukee.
“He has this incredible, I believe, balance where he’s kind of fierce, intimidating and has this presence. He’s ‘No bulls---,’ right?” Bucks general manager Jon Horst said. “But he also has the greatest smile, the greatest laugh, will put his arm around anybody. He’s like this inviting tough guy, this really crazy balance. And it’s consistent, his energy every day.
“He’s Darvin. He’s a tough motherf-----.”
Inside the diner with the clever name — the Bringer Inn — Marshall Thomas, 75, weaves through the tables. Before the legendary Saginaw High basketball coach could get to his grits, sausage patties and dry toast, he had to stop to talk to someone at every other table.
“When you coach,” Thomas said, “everyone in town knows you.”
A lifelong resident of Saginaw, Thomas has won a state championship. He coached NBA champion Draymond Green. And, in the fall before the 1991-92 season, Thomas trusted his returning players when they wanted to add Ham to the squad even though he hadn’t played a second of organized basketball at Saginaw High the previous three years.
Thomas has seen the lives ruined by Saginaw’s problems; he’s had his hands on changing plenty of them in town, too. It’s why he’s still here.
“I play the lotto, but I don’t want to hit it,” he says earnestly. “I don’t want to move from where I live. And if you hit the lotto big — not just for your sake but for your family’s sake — you probably have to move.
“But me, I like it.”
Despite surpassing Detroit as the most violent city in the state, Saginaw is also a city with a sprawling footprint that includes lush country clubs, massive cement mini-malls and manicured farmland, almost as if you took all the characteristics of the Midwest and compressed it into 18 square miles.
“Whatever you want, you can have in Saginaw,” said Julian Taylor, Ham’s teammate at Saginaw High. “You got the country part, the rural part. You got suburban parts. You got urban parts. Very diverse.”
No matter how bad it gets on your block, Taylor agreed, prosperity was just a short drive away. “Just across the bridge,” Ham said.
Too big to be called a town, too small to be considered a city, Saginaw’s early prosperity came from the lumber boom in the mid-19th century. When the source of wealth and work in the area quickly vanished, Saginaw became a manufacturing center similar to so many other Midwestern hubs with a tight tie to Detroit’s automobile industry.
“One fell swoop, I saw it go from being a tight-knit community, a neighborhood, and then the neighbors disappeared and now, it’s just a hood,” Ham said.
Quick money from drugs, especially crack, engulfed the areas around his home in violence.
“You saw things change, man,” Ham said. “I’m talking about kids coming to high school, thousand dollars in their pocket, big gold ropes, big-ass triple-fat goose coats, fur coats. It was real man, real.
