Part 1 | Becoming Scott Brooks
I recently spoke with Professor Scott Brooks, Director of Research at Arizona State University’s Global Sport Institute, about his childhood, his athletics coaching, research interests, and more. Check out part 1 (of 5) of my interview with Dr. Brooks.
(The following interview has been edited for length and clarity)
Dr. Brooks, the backdrop of this project, and our conversation, is coaching and civic leadership, but I'm really interested in the person as it relates to those subjects. I've never asked you this but I'm curious, what was it like for you growing up? How was your life outlook formed?
Wow. So I'm a weird bag. I was born in Beirut, Lebanon in the early 70’s as the bombing and the civil war was beginning. My dad had a job in Saudi Arabia, so my family did three different stints there. The last stint in Saudi Arabia was from fourth grade to eighth grade, and then we moved back to Oakland, California. I was in Oakland from preschool to fourth grade, and also came back to Oakland for high school at Bishop O'Dowd in Oakland. So it was a weird thing.
Saudi Arabia got their money in the early 60’s primarily from three industries: the oil industry, desalinization of the Red Sea to make water drinkable, and then last was the airlines because they have to get all of the pilgrims to Mecca. My dad worked for a large airline company, and they had the largest 747 fleet in the 80’s. They still have some of the largest hotels in the Middle East in Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. I grew up within that kind of a context.
I was very aware of race because from four to nine years old I was growing up in Oakland, and I like to say our neighborhood was ‘first generation out the hood.’ My dad grew up in South Central. My mother grew up in more of a solid working class family in Indianapolis, Indiana. They were the first to live on their blocks, but it was segregated. From my dad's standpoint, growing up in the hood to then getting manager jobs as affirmative action is kind of taking place and they're placing Black people in some jobs, we moved into a neighborhood with predominantly older White folks and younger Black families whose parents had gotten these management jobs. In that neighborhood there was a mix of our culture where some of us are still hood. In our grammar school, we had gangs that we put together and had gang wars. As that happened, I saw ‘White Flight.’ As a kindergartener, our school was probably 70% White. By fourth grade, our school was down to 10% White, and all the White kids had moved out of the neighborhood. So I understood that there was something about race.
So in the fourth grade, I go to Saudi Arabia. Most of the other airline employees who ended up in Saudi Arabia were White Midwesterners and Southerners. It was in Saudi Arabia where I was first called Nigger, and that was by Americans. There were also some Scandinavians and British folks. I was called a “darky” in like fourth and fifth grade by a British kid, "Oh look, mommy, there's a darky!" There was all of this racial awareness. When we got to Black History Month and read the three pages at that time on Black people, one of the White kids is whispering to me and calling me nigger. All of that happened and I was contemplating these things.
We lived in a compound with walls around protecting the area, and as a little kid, I remember looking out and just kind of thinking like while yes, I was being called the wrong things, I did not think that that's the way Arab society works, because the Arabs, Muslims, Yemenese, Ethiopians, and Eritreans did treat me well. Folks with brown and black skin from the continent of Africa would be there, and they were friendly to me. It was fine with the people of color. It was with the White Americans where I had to deal with the racism. And I wanted to make changes. I thought, maybe this Muslim thing is better because I'm dealing with Christians, supposedly, and this is how I get treated.
At one point I lived on the same block as the mosque and woke up to the prayer call every morning. During the pilgrimage, Muslims from around the world would go through our city on the path to Mecca. During this time of year, I would see what Malcolm X talked about. I'd see Muslims from all places around the world, in towels and sheets, because they come with humility in all white. I developed a sense of there's a better way that people can be with one another. It doesn't need to be this way. And yet this is what we have in America. I did a book report on Malcolm X in that context, and my teacher didn't like it at first, but when I handed in my report, my teacher talked about how I educated them, because their previous understanding of Malcolm X was of him hating people.
So I became a sociologist early on, seeing how people were interacting, thinking there were better ways for people to get along and wanting things to be different. That's how I developed my outlook.
That's incredible. I'm so glad I asked you that.
When you would come back to the States in between your stints in Saudi Arabia, did you have to ‘re-Americanize’ yourself?
That's a great question. At the youngest ages, I don't really know much. I know my cousins thought we were a little bit weird. We didn't have all the technology whenever we were in Saudi Arabia, so we'd come back to the States and my cousins were into cartoons. Besides that, my dad was an educator before and after his job with the airline. I had the dad who was like, "You don't get to watch TV that much. You have to do work. You have to read, you have to do these things," and that was weird to my cousins. We weren't the fun house. My cousins didn't want to come hang out with us because they could end up having to work out in the yard because we weren't watching TV. We didn't have a lot of toys. My parents invested in us traveling. Flights were discounted and they really took advantage of that. We became kind of ‘global citizens’ at a very young age, so that was weird for my cousins and we knew we were different.
Coming back to Oakland for high school was the biggest transition. I would come back to the States every summer. I might be home for a month and a half and I'd get to see my friends from grammar school. I grew up with Jason Kidd since nursery school. His dad worked with my dad, and I remember when Jason moved to Oakland from San Francisco, we became very fast friends. I introduced him to soccer and we played together on one of the earliest select teams in Oakland – it was a big time team. We'd travel to Europe to play. I had been the starting forward and he came and then I ended up starting full back. He was just that level of an athlete, even though I was a year ahead of him, he was that fast. I won state championships in track, but JKidd was JKidd. His dad was an uncle to me and we carpooled to games. At one point, Jason was actually possibly going to come and live with us in Saudi Arabi to get an international experience, but Mrs. Kidd would not let him go. Jason was one of my close friends in the States, but after four and a half years of being gone, our relationship was loose and he was doing other stuff and was a big time ball player by the time we were in high school. And then my other really close friend was Jasen Powell, who is now the Head Trainer for the Clippers. So it's a small world. Jasen Powell played at Bishop O'Dowd with me. And Jasen and I were really close because we stayed at the same grammar school. So I would come and hang out with Jasen Powell.
The weirdest instance I remember was when I came back for high school. I remember one of the first days on campus, I see a girl from fourth grade that I had gone to school with since nursery school and I said “Hey,” as I passed her in the hall and she said "Hey Scott." And then I'm hearing her talk to her friend as they keep walking. And her friend asked, "Who is that?" And she's like, "Oh, some weird dude who lives in Africa."
That's what my experience was in high school. I was the weird dude who didn't really fit. There were people who did know me, but they clearly didn't still know me. It was like, I know who Scott Brooks is, but I don't really know the person.
I was just different. Those four and a half years away from Oakland meant that I lost all my Oakland slang. I had a very different mindset, having gone through being around a predominantly White and European setting and dealing with racism. Whereas, if you're in Oakland going to all-Black schools, you're only experiencing racism maybe from some teachers. Oakland was an all-Black experience. And then I had this heterogeneous experience and now I come back for high school, and it just didn't fit, man. And that was really part of the story of my basketball and football career there. In football, my assistant coaches would call me names like ‘Shaka Zulu.’ They could only think of Africa in weirdness.
And at basketball, my coaches struggled to figure me out. I was a co-captain, but I've talked to my assistant coach who said, "We knew we needed to get something more out of you, but we had no idea of how to connect to you," because I was not like anybody else. We had the kids who were from West Oakland in the hood, or ‘the flats,’ and we had kids like me who grew up in ‘the hills,’ that ‘first generation out of the hood.’ But I was something else. And it was a weird experience.
Some of the other piece is that it’s not like we came back and had a pot of money. I worked in the cafeteria and washed dishes at my high school. I worked for my junior varsity coach at the all-White country club, washing clubs because I needed work. I worked and did landscaping in the neighborhood to make money. I started DJing my junior year in high school with one of my older cousins at Cal Berkeley. I went on to DJ my way through college and paid for all my room and board and most of my tuition. I remember Berkeley more for the work and the DJing and the gigs and the parties than my classes. I remember a few classes and some academic experiences and I enjoyed them, but it was much more about work.
I've just always been kind of on the margins. I've always been someone that's good, but doesn't quite fit.
That sounds like a good place to be as a sociologist…
It is a great place to be as a Sociologist.