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would you do this to our family? I would unleash years of pent-up frustrations and rage about how hisactions made me feel. How they had changed the way I thought about him. I would tell him exactly how I had always felt.
    But just as I was about to unload on him, my father made eye contact with me and said, “Jason . . . I am sorry about everything. I hurt you and I hurt your mother, and I will never forgive myself for that. I am not the man now that I was then. I am not perfect, but I promise to never hurt either one of you ever again.”
    I just sat there in my wheelchair at a complete loss for words. Actually hearing him say those things in that moment caused me to reflect on all the mistakes I had made in my life. I realized I needed to learn how to try and forgive people for their mistakes if I was ever going to learn how to forgive myself for mine.
    The therapist locked eyes with me and said, “Forgiving someone isn’t something that happens overnight, Jason, but your father’s apology is a great place for that process to start.”
    It’s an ongoing process for me. I still have moments of frustration when I see my mother’s reaction to something that triggers those dark memories. But all I can do is continue to pray for her to never feel that pain again. I still don’t know if my dad has ever sincerely apologized to my mom, or if he has, whether she ever fully forgave him.
    My parents have lived apart for many years now. My dad still lives in the house I was raised in, while my mother is down in Durham, in a house that I bought when I was 21 years old. They’ve never gotten divorced, and they talk on the phone every day. I often wondered why my mom stayed with him through all the chaos. Maybe she felt it was what was best for me at the time. She told me on more than one occasion that she “signed up for marriage, not divorce.” I think the whole situation is difficult,but it’s their lives and I try not to judge. I just want them to be happy.
    When I was at Duke, I heard a lot of writers and broadcasters go on about my family; Dick Vitale would be on ESPN extolling the virtues of my parents, this perfect college-educated black couple like the Huxtables. Duke was often criticized for bringing in only kids from that kind of family and avoiding the much larger population of athletes from broken homes or more modest backgrounds. Those critics usually mentioned Grant Hill and Shane Battier. And me.
    I let them talk, knowing that the truth was more complicated than the narrative.
    Sometimes when my parents fought, I just had to get out of the house, and do the one thing that was always my outlet.
    Basketball.
    Three times a week, my mother and I would drive down the Garden State Parkway to see my grandma in East Orange, whom I’d always called Grarock, a combination of “Grandma” and “Fraggle Rock” that was the best I could do as a small child. Every time we came to the tollbooth, my mother would have me shoot a quarter and a dime from the passenger seat into the toll basket. It became part of our road trip routine. One day, we pulled up to the booth and I missed a shot. The cars were lining up behind us, honking and cursing like typical Jersey people when there is a delay. My mother just calmly searched for another quarter and dime—for at least five minutes—and she then told me that we weren’t going anywhere until I hit the basket.
    By fourth grade, basketball had become my main focus. I had just gotten a brand-new ball, and like an idiot I left it outside in the rain one evening. The next day when I picked the ball up,it was pretty much flat. When I tried to dribble, the ball barely bounced to my mid-shin. But asking for another ball was out of the question, so I just made do with a flat one. I did all the drills I had learned from going to basketball camps, all the while bouncing this underinflated ball. I really had to pound it to get