Catch a Star Read online

  © 2016 by Tamika Catchings

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2016

  Ebook corrections 04.13.2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-1963-3

  Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations marked Message are from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  Published in association with the literary agency of Legacy, LLC, Winter Park, FL 32789.

  Contents

  Cover 1

  Title Page 2

  Copyright Page 3

  Foreword by Tony Dungy 5

  Part 1: Silence 9

  1. Play 11

  2. Different 15

  3. Lost 23

  4. Pressure 39

  Part 2: Noise 49

  5. Split 51

  6. Texas 67

  7. Chosen 85

  8. Tennessee 95

  Part 3: Music 113

  9. Perfect 115

  10. Champions 137

  11. God 153

  Part 4: Voices 173

  12. Fever 175

  13. Building 185

  14. Relationships 197

  Part 5: Harmony 217

  15. Winning 219

  16. Life 235

  17. Transition 245

  18. Looking Back, Looking Forward 249

  Acknowledgments 251

  Notes 253

  About the Author 255

  Photo Insert 256

  Back Ad 267

  Back Cover 269

  Foreword

  I was the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts for seven years, and during that time I had the privilege of working with some tremendous athletes. Our 2006 Colts team brought the city a Super Bowl title and featured players who will one day be voted into the NFL Hall of Fame. But it would probably surprise people to know that the most decorated athlete in the city of Indianapolis at that time didn’t play for the Colts. Most people would guess Peyton Manning of the Colts, and if not Peyton, then Reggie Miller of the Pacers. But as great as those two were, and as much as they did for the city, their accomplishments in the athletic arena did not match up to those of Tamika Catchings.

  Tamika played on a State Championship high school basketball team and an NCAA National Championship team at the University of Tennessee. She won a WNBA title with the Indiana Fever and has been named MVP of the league, MVP of the Championship Series, as well as Defensive Player of the Year. Tamika has represented the United States in international competition as well, and has won three Olympic gold medals. In fact, I don’t know an athlete who has accomplished as much in his or her sport as Tamika Catchings has in women’s basketball.

  Detailing her achievements on the court, however, barely scratches the surface of her impact in the city of Indianapolis and all over Central Indiana. Tamika has been a shining light in the community, a tireless worker, and a tremendous role model for not only young athletes but for everyone. She is one of the rare superstar athletes who really “get it.” As a Christian athlete, Tamika understands she has been gifted by God and that with this blessing comes responsibility—a responsibility to give back to those in her community, but also a responsibility to let her light shine and point others to Christ.

  Getting to know Tamika Catchings was one of the great privileges I had while working in Indianapolis. During my time there I got to see her interact with people at games, charity functions, and events for her Catch the Stars Foundation. I also got to see her away from the crowds and the lights, simply interacting with young people. And no matter where we were, or who we were with, Tamika was always the same—personable, caring, and humble. She has an amazing ability to be a leader to her teammates on the court, but also to connect with people who look up to her and make them feel comfortable.

  At first glance, it would appear that Tamika is one of those people who has been incredibly blessed with God-given talent and who has worked hard to take advantage of her opportunities. While that’s true, she has also had to deal with many personal challenges and setbacks. In reading her story you’ll learn of some of those obstacles, how she used her faith in Christ to deal with them, and how overcoming those obstacles helped shape Tamika into the person she is today. I believe Catch a Star will not only give you a look into Tamika’s life but will also inspire you to strive to be all you can be in life as well.

  Tony Dungy (2015)

  I’m sitting on a playground at three years old, and my back is to my dad. He’s calling my name. “Tamika . . . Tamika . . .”

  But I don’t hear anything. I’m lost in my sand castle. Lost in my own world. Happiness displayed in my body, my face, and my smile. My dad thought I was ignoring him, but the truth was I did not hear him.

  That’s the moment my parents started wondering, “Is something wrong with her? Can she truly not hear us?” And then the thought, “Please, Lord, not again.” My older brother, Kenyon, had just gone through the same extensive hearing testing I would go through. And in the end, I would be diagnosed with a moderate to severe hearing problem, slightly worse than Kenyon’s but causing the same frustration and the beginning of a life of adversity.

  Part 1

  Silence

  Lips move . . .

  Silence Surrounds . . .

  The world flashes by but all I see is movement.

  All I hear is silence.

  Darkness settles in,

  But I am not scared.

  Not scared of being alone,

  Not scared of the emptiness around.

  Not scared of the emotions swirled round in my head.

  Though it’s dark,

  I see light.

  And I force my steps into that direction.

  I’m guided by a pleasant presence

  One not seen, but known.

  Welcome to my reality . . .

  My life.

  1

  Play

  Tamika is just one of those people who could excel at anything she set her mind to. She just works that hard. She could be a Serena Williams, if she had chosen tennis. Well, she chose basketball.

  Tauja Catchings

  My dad tells about that day. About Tauja and me playing basketball outside in the driveway. About a “friendly” game of one-on-one.

  It was our favorite thing, basketball. It was our whole family’s favorite thing, even though as a family we enjoyed lots of sports, including soccer and volleyball. But if someone asked the question, “Do you want to play?” no one ever had to ask, “Play what?” That orange basketball was the fiery nucleus our family life spun around.

  It’s almost like there’s a basketball gene that our parents passed down to their children. The Catchingses had it, big time—my dad playing in the pros with Dr. J and the 76ers; my older sister, Tauja, eventually playing in colleg
e and beyond; and my older brother, Kenyon, playing on his high school team until his dreams for the game were cut short by illness.

  But more than any of them, I was bound and determined to be a basketball player. Even as a young girl, I knew basketball was going to be my game. And, no, it wasn’t that I just had lucky genes. A lot of people have physical ability to play—height and agility—but to play well at a high level requires more. Intensity. Desire. Passion. Focus. Determination. Hard work.

  Back then, at the age of nine, I didn’t have the physique for the game. Not yet. I was small, but really because of my slouching to “blend in.” And not only that, but I couldn’t hear very well—I’d been born with moderate to severe hearing loss.

  But so what if I was skinny and short and couldn’t hear much? What I did have was intensity. I had desire. And I had passion and a willingness to work hard for the game like no one else in my family.

  As Tauja and I played in the driveway that day, we were slamming hard against each other, as we always did. Our game was one of fighting for the ball, defending tough, scraping and scrapping to get the edge and score yet one more basket. I’d sink a basket, and then Tauja would take the ball at the other end of the driveway, dribble it forward, juke and deke to try to get me off-balance, giving her an opening to burst through and slide toward the hoop for a layup. Then I’d have the ball again, walking it up toward my big sister, and I’d feint one way and dribble the other to get around her and score.

  Later in life my dad would say one reason I got so good was because of all those early years playing against Tauja, who was the best talent around. I think that’s right. She made me better. She was a year older, taller than me then, and in my eyes just perfect all around.

  All those realities just made me compete harder.

  We’d play so physical that we’d sometimes send the other flying, with a yell or a shriek, clearly a foul in any refereed game but perfectly acceptable on the court of our driveway arena. We’d scrape an arm or a knee, wipe off a little blood, and start playing again, yelling and taunting and at times screaming at each other.

  My dad tells about that day, how the yelling and screaming got to be too much for him. He could tell we were playing each other hard. He knew there’d been some blood. He’d heard one scream too many. He walked out on the porch and yelled, “That’s enough!”

  We froze in our tracks. He came out to the driveway, confiscated the ball, and took it inside with him.

  Frustrated, Tauja stormed up to her room. I knew she’d probably play with her dolls after she cooled down. Dad settled back down inside.

  Sometime later, as Dad tells it, he looked up from his paper and realized Tauja had come into the house, but I hadn’t. Where’s Tamika? he thought.

  Looking outside, he saw me still in the driveway. And there I was—playing.

  With an imaginary basketball.

  He watched me dribble my invisible ball behind my back, through my legs, then toward the basket, where I’d launch myself for an imaginary layup. And I picked up that pretend ball as if it were real and walked it to the back of the driveway. And I’d start all over—dribbling, dodging an imaginary player so I could get free, jump, and shoot my imaginary ball, for an imaginary three-pointer, from beyond an imaginary arc.

  I did this again and again. Over and over.

  I could hear the game in my head.

  What I couldn’t hear for real, I could hear in another way. The smack, smack of the ball as it bounced on concrete, the slap of my hand against rubber as I grabbed the ball on the upward bounce, and the oh-so-lovely swish as my imaginary shot arced through the air and slipped cleanly between the rim—nothing but net.

  In imagining the game, it was like I could sense other players, where they were on the court, even without hearing a thing. It was as if I could hear one player racing stealthily from behind, rushing in from the side to swipe a steal, and I could feel the vibration of his or her thudding feet just in time to grab the ball from my dribble and swing it away.

  As I played within my silence, I could dart and weave through the holes in the defense, racing toward the basket. As I jumped, the imaginary ball rolled off my fingertips against the backboard. And it was as if I could hear it, the sound of it banking against the glass, clanging on the rim—once, twice, and more—before finally, finally, finally falling in.

  Yes, basketball was my game.

  And for the longest time, it was where I could hide and hear what I wanted to hear.

  2

  Different

  Could you imagine if somebody traveled back in time to that moment and went up to us and said, “Hey, you two are going to be some of the best basketball players to ever pick up a basketball?” We’d be like, “What?”

  Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers

  I don’t know why I thought I might go unnoticed, but I hoped since our school was brand-new in Abilene, Texas, no one would make a fuss over how my brother and sister and I were new too.

  It’s no use thinking you can slip into obscurity when you already stand out. I didn’t look or talk like the other kids at Reagan Elementary School. It wasn’t just that I was the new girl from another city. I was the new girl from overseas, from Italy, and yet not Italian. I was a United States citizen, with a mom from Texas, and yet not at all steeped in Texas culture. The only thing I understood about being in the Lone Star state was being lone.

  I wore glasses and these brown, matchbox-sized amplifying devices that fit behind each ear. A light brown plastic casing wrapped over the upper ear lobes and connected with tiny tubes to a clear, bulblike speaker that tucked inside each ear itself. I didn’t think much about wearing them. You get used to them, like glasses. I don’t remember not having them when I was young, so they were just a normal thing to me.

  Until other kids made me aware that they weren’t. I was the only one in my class with items that made me look so different. I might have been wearing a sign that said “Something’s wrong with me.” My new classmates noticed, and they weren’t about to let anything different go without comment.

  Kids can be so mean.

  “What are those?” kid after kid asked on my first day of second grade. They pointed at my ears.

  “Four eyes,” another kid said, snickering, pointing at my glasses.

  For the first time I realized I was different. I’d worn the big box hearing aids as long as I could remember. My older brother, Kenyon, was also born with moderate hearing loss. It skipped Tauja, just twenty-one months older than me, and she was used to being our ears for us. She would make sure to repeat what we couldn’t quite make out and tell us what we never heard.

  She became my voice too.

  Ever shy, I’d learned to rely on Tauj to speak up for me. I felt completely safe and connected with her. Though we couldn’t be more different personality-wise, she understood me and looked out for me. She was the instigator, and I was more of a go-with-the-flow girl. I was prone to think more on something before digging into it, and while Tauj is a thinker too, she’s more likely to plunge right in, start a thing by doing it. Where I loved books and reading, was a tomboy, and kept to myself, not speaking much to people I didn’t know, Tauja could talk your ear off (and would), and played sports but loved playing with her dolls more.

  So early on we became a team, balancing out one another. Where I would hold back, she bounded forward, fearless. Where I didn’t want to speak up, she spoke for me. What I couldn’t hear, she repeated and passed along. We felt at home with one another.

  That was good—because home changed a lot for us.

  We had moved across the country and the world almost as fast as the basketball our father, Harvey Catchings, dribbled down the court in the NBA. He played in the league from 1974 to 1985, beginning in Philadelphia for the 76ers, then for the Nets in New Jersey, where I was born, then Milwaukee for the Bucks, and a year in Los Angeles for the Clippers.

  When he finished his pro career in the NBA, we all wondered wh
ere we were going to go next. We were told we weren’t just going to move to another city. We were going to move overseas. And I remember thinking, There’s a world outside of the USA?

  Dad was going to play for an Italian team, Segafredo. We moved to a little town called Gorizia, in the northeast corner of Italy, about a day’s drive from Venice. This would be the fourth home I could remember. I was just seven.

  The Italian league Dad played in featured some former NBA basketball players, including a guy named Joe who went by the nickname of “Jellybean” who had played with the 76ers the same years Dad had played in Philly, at the beginning of the team’s Julius Erving era. Of course, I didn’t know much yet about the NBA. I just knew my dad was a great basketball player who’d played with some other guys in the pros—this guy named Jellybean and some doctor. Dr. J.

  Jellybean Bryant’s family was living there also, and we got to know them well that year. His wife, Pam, was real nice, and they had two girls, Sharia and Shaya. And a boy by the name of Kobe.

  Kobe Bryant.

  We played with each other. We did sightseeing together. We had so much in common—not only English and being American but we were African American families in a country that didn’t have many of “us.” Strangers in a strange land, our families developed a close relationship while we were there.

  We were in Italy just a year before moving to Abilene. Later I would come to cherish that year and come to think of it as the last time I really felt free. In another time and place my childhood friendship with Kobe Bryant might have seemed pretty awesome to the kids at school in Abilene. But Kobe Bryant wasn’t “Kobe” to anyone yet.

  And Tamika Catchings was still just an odd-looking girl with big box hearing aids over her ears.

  Italy should have made my challenges the next year in Abilene, Texas, less surprising.

  In Italy, I’d glimpsed what it was like to be an outsider. I’d begged my parents to let me learn Italian. Kobe spoke Italian. But my real reason was I wanted to understand what Italian people were saying at school and in our neighborhood. But Mom and Dad wanted me to master English first.