He Was Late Five Days Running and Lied About It Every Time.
On Friday His Coach Read Every Excuse Back to Him.

The James Brown Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"And now today, who's the real James Brown? Can I trust you? Can you trust yourself?"

- Morgan Wootten, as recounted by James Brown

Five Days of Excuses. Then His Coach Recited Them All Back.

Morgan Wootten coached at DeMatha for forty-six years, won 1,274 games, and never had a losing season. The summer in question, James Brown was working for him as one of a dozen or so coaches at his basketball camp. And every single day that week, JB turned up late - five minutes, ten minutes, three minutes.

Monday, Wootten asked why. JB gave him something that wasn't quite the truth. Tuesday he asked again. "The only thing about telling a lie is you have to remember what the previous lie was." Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

On Friday his coach sat him down in a room with nobody else in it, and recited the week back to him. "This is what you told me Monday. This is what you told me Tuesday. Wednesday was a doozy. I'm not even sure how you could have conjured up the excuse for Thursday."

JB traces every commentary he has ever delivered on CBS back to that afternoon, where he was forced to take ownership of his actions. When his bosses asked him to speak to the Ray Rice domestic violence case, he says he never once considered the questions a publicist would have asked - whether it would cost the network, whether people would turn on him. He prayed on it, examined his own heart, and told the truth as he understood it, which included the admission that he had been shaped by the same culture he was criticizing.

The blowback came. Rush Limbaugh said on air the next day that what JB was trying to do was "chickify" football. The correction that actually landed came from somewhere closer: his own assistant pulled him up on something he'd said and asked whether he'd heard himself - and he hadn't, because the attitude was ingrained deep enough to be invisible to him.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The week of lies, and the Friday sit-down - ~1:30

A Teacher Saw His Library Book and Told Him to Pick Another Career.

His elementary school in Washington had only just integrated. During a free period he went to the library and came back with a book called So You Want to Be a Doctor, because he wanted to be a physician and he had a heart to help people. His teacher walked past, paused, read the title, and told him he might want to consider another career - because kids like you do not do well in math and science.

He never told his mother. She ruled that house and the children brought her everything, and to this day he cannot explain why he kept this one experience to himself. He internalized it instead, and it held him back for years. He is in his early seventies and still calls it a wound.

What rescued him were two teachers at his DC middle school in the late sixties - Mrs. Pendleton, his homeroom teacher, and Mrs. French, who taught French. He remembers them in their own words rather than in summary. "Baby, talk to me." "Sweetheart, no, no, you absolutely can do this - let me show you why." "Honey, come sit down and let's look at it. Is there anything really difficult about this subject matter here?"

Sixty-five years on he remembers the encouragement as precisely as the insult, and he connects the pair of them directly to the work he does now. An unresolved hurt that never gets excised, he says, keeps growing, and it will eventually show itself in the worst possible form. He is careful - and David was careful with him - that this excuses nobody's behavior. It only changes the question you lead with. Not what is wrong with you. What happened to you.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The wound, and the two teachers who undid it - ~8:29

He Missed the Layup and the Gym Laughed. The Coach Kept Him Anyway.

Before he was good at basketball, JB was not good at basketball at all. His junior high coach was Don Fugle - the white coach at a predominantly Black school, whom the kids called the "White Shadow." At the assembly introducing the team, each player was supposed to run the court, make a layup, and wait under the basket. Nobody was defending him. He missed. The students laughed.

Fugle kept him at cuts anyway. JB asked him why, and the answer was that he paid rapt attention to what was being taught. Fugle routinely kept nineteen or twenty players on a roster meant for twelve, because he saw the game as a way out for kids who had been told they had nothing in them worth developing.

Wootten first spotted him at a youth-league baseball playoff game, where he had come to scout somebody else entirely - a three-sport star with a wicked curveball - and noticed the tall, lanky kid who could maybe play some basketball. The roadmap came later, and it was three separate sheets. "Here are the fundamentals if you want to be an all-county player. Here they are for all-state. And here is the exhaustive list if you want to be an all-American." JB didn't take the first two sheets.

Behind all of it was his mother, whom he called Sarge. One breadwinner, a homemaker who ruled the roost with non-negotiables: nothing replaces hard work and perseverance, and this household has a spirit of excellence. When practice ran long enough that he wasn't home for his schoolwork, she called the gym. Wootten's answer was, "Yes ma'am, you're right, he'll be home, and it won't happen again." - Which is why his practices stayed inside two hours. On his list of priorities, basketball came fourth, after God, family and school.

She stayed out of the recruiting entirely - more than 150 schools offered him athletic scholarships - until the day a letter arrived from UCLA, from John Wooden, after JB had already shaken hands with Harvard. He wanted to visit. She stepped in exactly once, and the ruling was that he would not be going, because he had given his word.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The coach who kept him on the bench - ~15:37

Two Teams Cut Him. He Says He Simply Wasn't Good Enough.

Atlanta took him 62nd overall in 1973 and cut him on the last day of training camp. He went home and didn't leave the bedroom for two weeks - the most painful loss of his athletic life, because of everyone whose work it undid. His own verdict is unsparing: he did not work as hard or as smart to stay on top as he had to get there. He rested on his laurels. He has never allowed himself to be outworked since, which is why people call him a workaholic, and he wonders aloud whether he is still running from that day.

Then the Celtics cut him too. David asked why, and the pause before the answer is the most honest moment in the hour.

Red Auerbach told him he had the ability and the talent, and that if he went overseas to sharpen it he would come back and make an NBA roster. There was no guarantee attached, and against it sat everything his parents had sacrificed to put an education in place. He chose the career. Years later the coach who cut him in Atlanta found him at a CBS game and said he shouldn't have - that he'd known a Harvard graduate would be fine in the game of life. JB didn't say what he was thinking, which was that being fine in life had not been the point. Making the team had been the point.

Forty years, three Emmys and more Super Bowl broadcasts than anyone in history later, he describes himself as having a free agent mentality rather than a guaranteed contract. He never assumes he has made it. After nearly every appearance he still turns to someone and asks a version of the same question - it used to be, "How did I do?", and now it is whether there was anything he could have done better, anything he missed, anything he left out.

Wootten never cursed once in forty-six years of coaching. JB asked him why not, and the answer was a question: why would I want to create a toxic environment? Asked by a writer after a particularly good season to assess it, Wootten told him to come back in about ten years and see what those young men were doing in the game of life - then he'd say how well the season went. Every commentary JB has closed on CBS ends the same way, with the line that the answer can be found in love.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The draft, the cuts, and the two weeks after - ~37:22

"I'm James Brown, and the person who believed the most in me is Morgan Wootten."