What You're Made For

To Be a Trailblazer

Faith is taking the first step even
when you don't see the whole staircase.

-Martin Luther King Jr.

After my mom was institutionalized, nobody knew what to do with me.

My grandma-as I said, we called her "Dear"-had five jobs at the time, and one of them was working for this white family in Georgetown. She cleaned the house, made meals, baked, and all that stuff. One day Dear told the lady of the house about my mom and how she was trying to figure out what to do.

"Maybe Catherine can help," the woman suggested.

Catherine, it turned out, was the head of one of the branches of Catholic Charities. She was able to get Catholic Charities to pay to send me to a boarding school in Pennsylvania. It was a school for boys from broken homes called St. Michael's.

St. Michael's was founded in 1916 by Bishop Michael J. Hoban. He wanted to do more than feed and house boys without homes; he wanted to educate them and teach them practical skills they could use to make a living.

The boarding school sat on four hundred acres. Surrounded by woods and fields, it was the opposite of urban D.C. in every way, and there was plenty to do. When I woke up in the morning, it wasn't the clanging of street cars or vendors I heard, it was roosters. Here, the nuns and priests did the teaching and the students did the chores. I cleaned coops, baled hay, picked apples, scrubbed floors. I did whatever they asked me. I was just happy to be somewhere other than that little apartment.

Why did they pick me out of all the charity cases? I'll never know. Maybe they saw something in me. Maybe it was just luck, just a random act of kindness. In life, it doesn't really matter why you get an opportunity, only what you do with it.

I decided I wouldn't let this one pass me by.

It was here that I met Jerome Nadine, who would become a pivotal figure in my life. He was a trailblazer. He had been at St. Michael's before me, and as a Black student and basketball player, he had paved the way for someone like me. And after his time at the school, he'd been called to the priesthood, but his success and achievements in sports gave him credibility, and he used that to advocate for me.

Jerome kept pushing me to play basketball, mainly because I was so tall and a decent athlete. The basketball team, Father Nadine told me, travels all over the state to play games. I was looking for a way to occasionally get off campus for a little while and see the wider world, so I started wanting to play basketball. But I wasn't any good. Miraculously, I made the varsity team as a freshman. Years later, I found out that Jerome went to the basketball coach, Gene Vilela, and said, "Hey, I think George is going to be really a good basketball player. Don't cut him. Keep him on the team. He's not ready right now, but keep him on the team."

How did he know? Again, what did he see in me? I have no idea, but to that request I owe the rest of my life. Gene promised to keep me on the team, and each year I got better and better.

But basketball was just part of the story. At St. Michael's, I found myself surrounded by a group of nuns who invested an enormous amount of time in me as a person and a student. Most of them couldn't tell you the rules of basketball, but they saw potential in me and set about helping me realize something I didn't even know existed.

There was one nun in particular, Sister Delora, who took a special interest in my basketball development. She'd get the keys to the gym, come and get me, and I'd shoot for an hour under her watchful eye. It was through the dedication of people like Sister Delora and Father Nadine that I began to believe I could become something.

It was also at St. Michael's that I converted to Catholicism, and Jerome became my godfather. This wasn't just a formal title; it represented a deep spiritual and personal connection that would last a lifetime. Father Nadine went on to serve as a chaplain at various military institutions. I visited him in San Diego a couple of months before he passed away, a final meeting with the man who had been such a crucial part of my journey. You don't have to believe in God, but there is such thing as angels in this world-people like Father Nadine are the real thing.

By my senior year, all this support and hard work paid off. I became the leading scorer in the state, somewhat of a spectacle. People filled the gym to watch me play, and college coaches started to take notice. After a game in which I scored thirty points and something like twenty rebounds against St. Rose of Carbondale, I walked out of the locker room, and as I was walking to the team bus, I heard someone say, "George!"

"Yes, sir," I said.

"My name is Jack Ramsay," he said, handing me his card. "I'm the head coach at Saint Joe's College in Philadelphia. We've been following you. We're planning to offer you a scholarship, and I just wanted to introduce myself because you're going to see me at a lot of games this season."

He shook my hand and told me, "Keep playing good." I'll never forget that. It was so simple: Keep playing good.

Simple isn't the same as easy, but it was worthy of a motto, one I would try to follow the rest of my life.

When I got on the bus, my coach asked me who I was talking to. I handed him the card, and once he looked at the name, immediately, my coach's demeanor changed.

"What did he say to you?" my coach asked.

"He said he's been watching me play and he's going to offer me a scholarship," I said.

Coach gave me a knowing nod and I had the sense that he was proud of me.

So I said, "Coach, let me ask you something."

"Sure," he said.

"What's a scholarship?"

I had no idea. I had no idea that a school would pay for your education, and in return, you play on their basketball team.

I was pretty excited to tell Dear, and I assumed she'd be excited and proud. It turns out, she was even more in the dark than I'd been. "I thought I raised you better than that," she said after I gave her the news.

"What do you mean?" I said. "I think you've done a great job in raising me." She had. There wasn't a day that went by that I hadn't done my best to live up to her example and tried to follow what she had taught me.

"Well, I'm disappointed in myself because I can't believe that you're naive enough to think that some white people are gonna pay for you to go to college just so you can play basketball," she told me. "It makes no sense. They're tricking you."

I couldn't help but laugh, but I also understood her skepticism. Given what she had experienced, Dear had every reason to be wary. Her reaction was a powerful reminder of how our past experiences can shape-and sometimes limit-our perception of future opportunities.

In many ways, Dear was a product of her history. She had survived hard years without experiencing much generosity or selflessness from white people. Even though my schooling up to that point had already been taken care of by a charity, it just didn't make sense to her that sports could be a way into higher education, let alone a free one!

Civil rights activist and author James Baldwin would talk about how we carry history with us; in fact, we're unconsciously controlled by it. Dear's reaction was a living example of this truth. Her history-our history-was present in that moment, shaping her interpretation of what seemed to me like an incredible opportunity. It was just beyond her comprehension-and to be honest, it was barely within mine. The idea that playing a game could open the door to a college education seemed almost too good to be true. But sometimes, the path forward requires us to see beyond the limitations of our past experiences, to imagine possibilities that our history might tell us are impossible.

Fortunately, the nuns were able to explain that this wasn't, in fact, too good to be true and that it was the opportunity of a lifetime, a path to a better future. Their perspective, less burdened by the specific history that shaped Dear's view, allowed them to see the scholarship for what it was: a chance for me to blaze a trail that neither Dear nor I had known existed.

They started making me stay after school every day to work on my studies. I didn't know it, but they were preparing me for the college entrance exams. Back then, each college had their own entrance exam. During a visit to Villanova, the head coach, Al Severance, said he was thinking about offering me a scholarship too, but first, I needed to take the entrance exam.

Needless to say, my early education in D.C. had not been great-"separate but equal" had always been a heinous lie-but through the grace of God and the grace of those dedicated nuns, I was able to make up for lost time. I ended up scoring so high, coach Severance offered me a scholarship on the spot. We called one of the nuns, Sister Evelina, to make sure that she approved of Villanova. She did, of course, because Villanova is a Catholic school. The next day, I accepted the scholarship to attend the university.

Like my transition from New Jersey and Florida Avenues to St. Michael's in Pennsylvania, when I got to Villanova, I was once again thrust into a world I knew very little about. I don't think I realized I was poor until I got to Villanova. I had hardly ever heard anyone talk about race until I got to Villanova.

It's important to understand the context of the time. I arrived at the university in the late 1950s, just a few years after the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education had declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The country was still grappling with desegregation, and many institutions, particularly in the South, were resisting these changes. The riots that preceded James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi were still years away.

Villanova, a private Catholic university, was relatively progressive for its time, guided by its Augustinian values of social justice and inclusion. But that didn't mean it was easy being one of the very few Black students on campus. In 1959, Villanova's student enrollment was approximately three thousand. The exact number of Black students wasn't well documented, but it was likely in the single or low double digits.

Suddenly, I found myself in a sea of faces that didn't look like mine, navigating a world of privilege and opportunity that I had never experienced before. It was a stark contrast to my life in Washington, D.C., and even to St. Michael's, where at least there had been a handful of other Black students.

This transition wasn't just about academics or basketball. It was about learning to succeed in a world that was still in the early stages of integration, where my presence was both novel and, to some, challenging. The weight of being one of the few Black students on campus wasn't just a social burden; it was an intellectual one. I felt the pressure to represent my community, to excel not just for myself but for those who had never been given the chance. It was a constant balancing act-navigating the academic challenges while also confronting the subtle and overt racism that permeated every aspect of life. I was not just a student or an athlete. I was, whether I liked it or not, a pioneer.

This idea of forging your own path, of being a trailblazer, is beautifully illustrated in an old Arthurian legend, La Queste del Saint Graal, written by an anonymous monk in the thirteenth century. In the story, the knights of the Round Table are inspired to seek the Holy Grail after it briefly appears before them. But instead of setting out together, they make a profound choice. As the text reads, "They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path."

The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell often cited this tale as a powerful metaphor for the individual's journey through life. To Campbell, it captured the essence of having the courage to follow your own path and find what truly fulfills you. "Where there's a way or a path," Campbell writes, "it is someone else's path."

What Campbell means here is profound: The well-trodden paths in life-the ones that are clear and easy to follow-have already been carved out by others. These paths represent conventional wisdom, societal expectations, or traditional routes to success. But true fulfillment, Campbell suggests, comes from forging your own way.

This doesn't mean that every individual has a predetermined, unique path waiting for them. Rather, it's an encouragement to venture into the unknown, to make choices based on your own values and aspirations rather than simply following in others' footsteps. It's about having the courage to step off the beaten track and create your own journey, even if that means facing uncertainty and challenges.

This ancient story resonates deeply with what it means to be a trailblazer. Just as each knight chose to enter the forest at its darkest point, where no path existed, I found myself venturing into unknown territory at Villanova. The campus was my Forest Adventurous, full of challenges and opportunities that I had to navigate on my own.

This is what an adventurous life is defined by-new environments, new groups, new cultures, new practices. Life as you know it is the work of men and women throughout history who had the courage and determination to blaze new trails forward.

And, of course, we're all pioneers of sorts, roaming into new frontiers of experience and opportunity. We're all put in front of paths never before traveled. Everyone has to be the pioneer, the first explorer, in their own story.

This is not easy. It is easy to default to a well-worn path. To fall in line behind what everyone else is doing, saying, and thinking.