Introducing ‘each one teach one’ & Nommo books
(l. to r.) Bob McCullough, Sr., Tony Mack, Rafer “Skip to My Lou” Alston, and Alex Petrie at the book launch for Each One Teach One at Rucker Park. Photo credit: Lilly Tidler.
Greetings, people. If we’ve never met, I’m Mikael.
A few years ago, I started writing a book about Rucker Park, the legendary basketball court in Harlem where everyone from Dr. J to Kobe Bryant has played—and where everyone from Stokely Carmichael to Beyonce have sat in the bleachers. For the past six years, the most famous outdoor basketball court in the world has been at the center of my writing life. I was a college student living not too far from the court when I first heard about it, and my first glimpse came from the grainy footage on the And1 Mixtape, Volume 1, commonly referred to as the Skip Tape, after Rafer “Skip to My Lou” Alston, who was a magician with the rock.
Years later, I’m standing in the doorway of Dapper Dan’s atelier, having just wrapped one of the many sit-down interviews we had that would culminate in a bestselling memoir, and here’s Dapper Dan and his son Jelani telling me that there was a whole history of Rucker Park before the Skip Tape. I heard them drop names like Joe “The Destroyer” Hammond, “Jumping” Jackie Jackson, and Richard “Pee Wee” Kirkland. Pee Wee’s was the only name that rang a bell only because Pusha T had called him a “legend in two games” in that one verse on “Grindin.” That’s how the idea to write a book weaving together all the different eras of Rucker Park started becoming a reality. It’s called Playground Moves: The Story of Rucker Park and Basketball’s Reinvention, and Pantheon Books will be publishing it as soon as I stop being a perfectionist about it.
In the process of interviewing people for Playground Moves, including streetball legends like Pee Wee and NBA icons who used to pull up, like Allen Iverson, I met and developed a unique bond with one of my interviewees: Robert McCullough, Sr.
He’d recently turned 80 when we met, and I was captivated by Bob’s life story and his larger-than-life personality. Even now, at 85, he’s still got the same fighting spirit that made him a playground legend as a youngblood, an NCAA scoring champ in college, and co-founder of the Rucker Pro League, which would become the prototype for all summer professional leagues to come after it and would mark the arrival of street basketball in popular consciousness.
When I began interviewing Bob over the phone, it was the spring of 2020, and we were under lockdown in New York because of the pandemic. Despite the hours I spent interviewing him on speakerphone, it would be another couple years before we could meet in person. At first, my goal was to learn as much as I could about Rucker Park from him for use in my own book, but in the process, I had gathered a whole book’s worth of stories from Bob’s life—funny and moving tales about his childhood in Harlem, about the impact of watching Wilt Chamberlin play in the projects, about dueling against Oscar Robertson for an NBA roster spot, and about establishing Rucker Park as the mecca of street basketball. Some of this would be valuable for my own book, but most of it exceeded the boundaries of what I had planned. “Just get it in the can,” he would say whenever I worried about where it would all fit. “Just get it in the can.”
The truth is, I was so focused on my own shit that it took me a long time—longer than it should have at least—to realize that Bob had his own story to tell. He deserved a book of his own, written in his own voice. For that revelation, I have Melba Wilson to thank. She’s the owner of Melba’s, the world-renowned soul food restaurant, and a celebrity chef in her own right. She knew and admired Bob’s contributions to Harlem history, and one night, when Bob and I were patronizing her restaurant, she leaned over and, in a confiding tone, said to me, “He needs a book of his own.” I cursed in my head, because she was right.
The only problem is that Bob McCullough isn’t a household name, and these days – with the state of reading and celebrity culture being what it is – only household names get book deals. For those who spend their life on the streets, working with young people, admired in their communities but not acknowledged beyond them, even in the media capital of the world, their legacies persist through the people whose lives they’ve transformed, but so rarely make it to print. Bob’s one of the last remaining witnesses of his generation, and as you’ll learn from the book, it’s a small miracle he has survived as long as he has to tell his story—and a blessing how vivid and important his story remains.
So, in under a thousand words, that’s how I came to be the publisher of Each One Teach One: A Streetball Life. The press is called nommo books, which comes from an African concept about the power of words to shape reality, a concept I learned from Arthur Flowers, who briefly explains nommo in one of his essays.
Today is the publication date of Bob’s book, as well as the debut of nommobooks.com. (And Happy Birthday to Ahmir’s sister!) Help me celebrate by ordering a copy of the hardcover from the site—dust jacket designed by Tremaine Emory. The eBook is also available for download on the site and on Book Baby. Next week, the eBook will also be available on Amazon. And later this month, the paperback will start shipping, but you can pre-order it now.
I’ll be posting more updates like this in the weeks and months ahead as Each One Teach One makes its way in the world. Thanks for reading.