They detained me and then sent me home in a cop car. I thought, Do I go to school on Monday with my magazine and get in trouble again? Or do I try to take this basketball novel? I decided to steal the book, but as I was leaving the store, an undercover security guard grabbed my arm. I’d never seen basketball represented in a book before. So, when I saw a novel with a basketball on the cover at Indigo one weekend, I was intrigued. Related: Ten amazing pictures by Jamal Burger, the Toronto photographer who shot DeMar DeRozan for the cover of Slam magazine I’d daydream about cover ideas, but when I brought it to read in class, my teacher took it away. I’d grown up without a father, and seeing successful Black men in the magazine was really inspiring to me. The mixture of sports and art in Slam, which is mostly dedicated to basketball, caught my attention. I got myself a pair of Black Cat Jordan 3s that way.Īround this time, I managed to get my hands on a copy of Slam magazine. Then I could get sneakers for me and my sister. If they couldn’t meet my price, I’d cut them a deal: I’d sell for less if I could use their staff discount to buy new shoes for half price. I’d take a $200 pair of headphones, head to the shoe store and offer to sell them to the retail workers for $120. We would take a Nintendo DS or Bose headphones from a store and sell them ourselves. To get the kind of money it would take to buy new Air Jordans, it felt like the only option my friends and I had was to steal. I’d use the money to help with groceries, or sometimes I’d give $30 to my mom and save $20 for myself.Īs I started growing into adult shoe sizes, I really wanted a pair of Air Jordan 19 sneakers-but my mom said we only had enough money for either new shoes or groceries. I earned a dollar for each box I sold, and most weekends I could sell 50 of them. I saw an ad on a streetlight pole for a job selling chocolate almonds. I needed to fill my time, so when I was 11, in 2004, I started looking for ways to earn some money. We didn’t have a lot of money, so I wasn’t able to join any extracurricular activities. I would go to school, come home and sit on the couch playing my Game Boy while my mom worked downstairs. It’s right between Regent Park and Moss Park, and for a time, my mom had a job as a receptionist there. My mom had me when she was 16, and I grew up in housing provided by Jessie’s Centre for Young Women, a non-profit organization for teen mothers.

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