It also didn't take me long to decide that Tri-Cities wasn't for me, and that I wasn't going to go there to play basketball.
Race wasn't an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures.
You have to remember that coaching wasn't sophisticated back then - you didn't have the camps, clinics and all the technical advances that are available today - so from that standpoint, playing with a cast on my arm was a fortunate event in my life.
That seemed to be the case with most of the teams based in the smaller towns - the fans were more rabid, and they wanted to literally kill the opposition.
I had endured six years of frustration so I think winning it all meant more to me than most of the others on the team.
I won the city scoring championship as a senior.
My biggest win was getting the meal money bumped from $5 to $7.
Russell joined the team in December, 1956, following the Olympics.
Cooper was my road roommate, and also happened to be the first African American player drafted by a National Basketball Association team.
Back then every small town had a gym, and if itseated more than 2,000 then we'd be interested in playing in it.
We lived in Yorkville, which is located on the East End of Manhattan. It's further east than Hell's Kitchen, and back then it was the kind of place where the roaches and cockroaches were big enough to carry away small children.
French was my first language.
We ran an up-tempo, transition-style of game at Boston College - very similar to what we ran when I played for Arnold.
