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Schuppe, Jonathan. A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City. Henry Holt and Co., 2013.

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Rodney, a drug dealer, became acquaintances with the reporter, Jonathan Schuppe, for Newark's daily newspaper. He later became good friends with him. Jonathan Schuppe says “Years later when we’d become close, I’d ask him why he, a dealer, continued to pursue a relationship with me, a reporter”(3).

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Rodney was outside playing sports for most of his childhood.

“Rodney spent most of his childhood outside, playing sports. Each building, and block, had its own baseball, football, and basketball teams”(16).

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When Rodney was 14 and preparing for his freshman year at Malcolm X. Shabazz High School, he became an apprentice to a drug dealer who sold joints in his building.

“he approached a man who sold joints in his building. Rodney asked if he could help out, and the man agreed, apparently figuring that he would make more money in the long run with and apprentice”(16-17).

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Rodney became a star pitcher for the Malcolm X. Shabazz Bulldogs in his sophomore year.

“Rodney’s fastball was clocked in the low nineties, and he became a key part of the starting rotation”(20).

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Rodney started getting high off of his own drugs that he was supposed to be dealing where he had a life changing talk with himself, his mom, and god.

“Clara, thinking he was there to repent, saw him and cried, “Praise the Lord.” Rodney knelt to pray, telling himself, I gotta change, I gotta change. From then on, Rodney told me, he never did any hard drugs”(21).

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After many years of dealing drugs, Rodney finally got arrested when he was nineteen and also the year after.

“He managed to keep his adult criminal record clean until he was nineteen, when he was arrested with a small packet of cocaine as he drove back from New York. The following year he was caught with coke in Newark. In both cases, he was sentenced to probation”(22).

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Rodney was shot in his spine by a guy that goes by Hawk, it is expected he’ll never be able to walk again

“Just as he cleared the van, the gun blasted one more time. Rodney felt a burn in his lower back”(28). And later it says “The bad news is he got hit in the spine and it shattered and it doesn’t look like he’ll walk again”(30).

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Rodney finally started doing activities outside his home and his first thing is putting together a little league baseball team that he would coach.

“For weeks, Rodney had been combing the neighborhood for recruits, but now it was late March, a couple of weeks before the start of the 2008 Little League season”(55).

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Rodney started to see his baseball team as his own children and he felt attached to them. This is the first time he’s felt this way about anyone other than his own mom.

“The Eagles were still in many ways a pack of misfits, but they were his misfits. His team. His responsibility”(92).

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Rodney’s baseball team made him feel alive and like a little kid again even if he’s only coaching.

“He’d considered calling time-out and pulling them off the field. But the Eagles had made him feel like he did when he was a kid falling in love with the game”(101).

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Rodney finally found someone that loved him for who he was and didn’t care if he was paralyzed, he also loved her right back. Rodney took her for granted and she later left him.

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Rodney went to a doctor's appointment and his blood pressure was skyrocketing increasing his risk of stroke and heart attacks which would affect his coaching and his bladder had started to spasm which made him prone to infection.

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Rodney was caught doing drugs again by Jonathan Schuppe and eventually he was talked into thinking about his future and what he’d do after the baseball season, also what he’d do when  he gets over his health problem.

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A new mayor of Newark was elected, Cory Booker. Cory Booker’s election came with huge property taxes and he laid off over 600 people. This led to city-wide violence and murders, there were over 35 murders in the first 3 months Booker was elected.

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Rodney and his team lost all of their love for baseball. Rodney was getting irritated with the kids even telling one of them to leave if they didn’t like his rules. Many kids were lazy and skipping practices. Rodney also ruined his relationship with the star player.

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Rodney’s wheelchair was breaking down, and as soon as he was about to get a new one, the doctor working on it quit, medicaid wouldn’t pay or make a new one for him, so he had to get a standard issue one that wasn't portable. Makes life significantly harder for him and harder to do baseball coaching.

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Mark Zuckerberg donated 100 million to schools in Newark. Affects Rodney because he always wants what’s best for his baseball team.

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A person named Ackman donated 25 million to help Newark Schools which really helped Rodney’s baseball team to have success in school. The area is improving and so is the community and the team.

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Rodney became really close friends with Jonathan Schuppe, they went basically everywhere together. Rodney also stopped doing and dealing drugs entirely because of Schuppe.

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Rodney’s mom very sadly passed away and one of the kids that he was on bad terms with comforted him in his darkest times.

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The statistics are sobering. Newark, N.J., has a murder rate double that of the Bronx. A third of its residents live in poverty. Only 40 percent of its students graduate from high school. Behind those numbers, though, are people trying to beat the odds.

In his new book, "A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City," reporter Jonathan Schuppe chronicles that effort through the story of a fledgling Little League team, its improbable coach and inspiring players.

At the center of the narrative is Rodney Mason, a drug-peddling ex-con left paralyzed from a drive-by shooting who decides he can make a difference by starting a baseball team in a city where America's pastime holds little allure.

Below is an excerpt from "A Chance to Win," published May 7 by Henry Holt:

For weeks, Rodney had been combing the neighborhood for recruits, but now it was late March, a couple of weeks before the start of the 2008 Little League season, and he had only a handful of completed registration forms.

Baseball just didn't seem to be on many people's minds. Some kids had actually told Rodney that they hated baseball, recoiling as if it were some kind of social disease. He couldn't understand it. This was the national pastime, the game everyone played when he was growing up.

And today was the day. If kids didn't show up this morning, then they never would.

Rodney hoisted himself out of the tub and dried off. He slipped on a condom, fitted to a urine collection bag, and strapped the contraption to his right leg. He ironed his jeans and white T-shirt and switched to a battery-powered scooter that the family of an elderly neighbor had given him after the old man died.

Then he rode a lurching elevator to the lobby and rolled out in the gray chill. The neighborhood was just starting to come alive, people stepping onto their stoops, assessing the weather, waving to neighbors, retreating inside.

The field was empty. So was the parking lot. Rodney pulled up to the dugout, jammed his hands into the pockets of his Yankees windbreaker, and waited. Please god, he prayed. Help me make this happen.

***

Sometimes, when he was not working and his children were at school, Thaiquan Scott stopped by the Jackie Robinson South Ward Little League's old field at the St. Peter's Recreation Center to catch a game.

The diamond was lousy with lumps and the quality of play was terrible, but he occasionally noticed a gifted athlete who, if he found the right coach and stuck with it, could probably go on to play in high school or college. Thaiquan wondered why more black kids weren't interested in baseball.

Thaiquan and his family lived on the second floor of a narrow three-family house with cream-colored vinyl siding on Peshine Avenue. Their block was not what you'd call kid-friendly, though there were many children.

Dope fiends and drunks puttered around in the abandoned lot across the street. Brash young drug dealers played noisy games of dice on the stoops of homes, the tenants too frightened or too complacent to complain. A few days after the Scotts moved in, a thirty-nine-year-old woman was killed in a drive-by around the corner.

Thaiquan and his wife wanted to leave Peshine Avenue, but their house was one of the only places they could find that was cheap and large enough for the seven of them. So they made the best of it by keeping the kids busy and trying to expose them to the world outside the city.

Thaiquan saw baseball, and sports in general, as a bulwark against the streets; the more his kids played, the less chance that something bad would ever happen to them. His father had been an amateur player - a damn good one, he'd heard, but drinking got in the way, and the old man left home without ever passing the game on to Thaiquan.

Now he wanted to give his two oldest children - Nasir, his biological son, and Kaneisha, his stepdaughter - that chance he never got. He pledged that as soon as they reached playing age, he'd sign them up for Little League.

In late March, Thaiquan got word that Nasir and Kaneisha had been assigned to a team. They went to meet their coach and were surprised to see that he was in a wheelchair. Thaiquan introduced himself and felt like he understood Rodney immediately.

"He's from the struggle," Thaiquan said later. "But that don't mean he's not about the kids. He's a product of his environment, so he knows how the kids are and how they grow up. I could tell right away that he was doing it from the heart."

***

It began with a trickle: a child here, another there, and soon there was a crowd. Among the first arrivals was Derek Fykes, who arrived with his grandmother Irene. He was ten but had the face of a tired man: eyes narrowed, brow rumpled, lips slack.

He had just been removed from his father's apartment by the state child welfare agency. This wasn't the first time he'd been abruptly pulled from one home and placed in another. Probably wouldn't be the last, either. Irene worried about the lasting damage of an unsettled childhood. But baseball was one of the few things that helped Derek regain his footing.

Derek was an anomaly in that he'd played Little League before. Just one other boy, a heavy trash-talker named William (who went by "Pooh"), had any experience. The others were young and scrawny and clueless; most didn't have gloves, and some didn't know if they threw right-handed or left-handed.

DeWan Johnson, a magnetic 10-year-old with a gap-toothed grin and nubby dreadlocks that poked from his head like spring shoots, was one of the most promising recruits. No one had taught him how to swing a bat or throw a ball or encouraged him to play baseball at all, for that matter. What little he knew about the game came from watching kids in the park and the Yankees on TV. He had an untethered rocket of an arm and bravely planted himself in front of hard-hit grounders. Rodney assigned him to third base.

The kids were arriving in packs now. A pickup game began. Rodney suddenly looked overwhelmed. A couple of fathers offered to hit grounders, keep the books, whatever they could do to assist. Another man showed up and said he, too, wanted to coach.

By that afternoon, Rodney figured that he'd talked to about a hundred people. When Kelley, the league president, stopped by to see how things were going, she found dozens of kids calling themselves Eagles. They threw like shot-putters, swung bats like axes, ran shrieking through the infield with little clue what they were doing.

It was hard not to chuckle, watching them swirl around Rodney as he tried to figure out what to do next. His sister Darlene showed up and was startled by the sight.

"Where did you get those kids?" she said, aghast. "They cannot play baseball."

Rodney didn't care. The hardest part, in his mind, was over; he now had something to work with, something that he could shape into a team. It would not be pretty. But it would happen. Finally. He couldn't wait to get started.

"That's all right," Rodney told his sister. "I'm-a teach them."

Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Schuppe
Jonathan Schuppe is a national enterprise reporter for NBC's local news websites and a former staff writer at the Newark Star-Ledger

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Newark's field of dreams: An ex-con's crusade to bring baseball to the inner city

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The statistics are sobering. Newark, N.J., has a murder rate double that of the Bronx. A third of its residents live in poverty. Only 40 percent of its students graduate from high school. Behind those numbers, though, are people trying to beat the odds.

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Story by Victoria St. Martin/the Star-Ledger In his wheelchair, Coach Rock is the same height as his players.From the sidelines, the volunteer football coach shouts directions at an enthusiastic…

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Rodney Mason, of Newark, coaches baseball for the Jackie Robinson Little League from his wheelchair, at the Weequahic Park baseball fields, in Newark.
(Saed Hindash/The Star-Ledger)
- Rodney Mason was at the Weequahic Park baseball diamond in Newark, where he is most days, in his wheelchair, where he's been for 18 years, when three children ran up.

"Uncle Rock, Uncle Rock, we need help," said Nadiyah Adams, 6.

Trailing behind her was Samir Riley, 8, pants leg pulled up, blood streaming from a cut on his knee, and his sister, Zoey, 5.

"What'd you all do?" Mason asked in tone somewhere between concerned and stern.

"He fell, Uncle Rodney," said Zoey.

A high school softball game had just ended and Mason sent the kids over to where the girls were waiting for their bus. They came back with enough first aid stuff for Mason to clean off Samir's leg and cover the wound.

Mason is not their uncle. He is everybody's uncle, the uncle of the park. This is saying something, because he's not exactly an inviting figure. He's big-shouldered and tall, even in the chair, and wears a straight-brimmed Yankees hat pulled down tight, almost hiding his eyes. He doesn't talk much, smiles less.

He has the face of his past: weed dealer, shakedown bully, drug possession convict. He's in the chair because he got shot.

But he is Uncle Rock, Uncle Rodney to the kids, a fixture around the baseball diamond he says redeemed him. To his players, Coach Rock.

Mason is the star of a new book, "A Chance to Win," by Jonathan Schuppe, a former police reporter for The Star-Ledger. The story of Coach Rock and his South Ward Little League team first appeared in the paper in 2008.

As a cops writer, Schuppe covered a lot of homicides; the first few years of the new millennium brought record numbers. But for a few inches, Rodney Mason would have been one of them. He was shot in October 1995, not by a rival drug dealer or gang member, but over a woman. He was paralyzed before he hit the ground.

"I realized I was jumping from shooting to shooting and wasn't telling the story of the residual effects on the city," Schuppe said. "What happens to the people that don't die? Or the kids who witness this stuff?"

Schuppe met Mason, now 46, while working on a story about shooting survivors through the Rev. Tom Ellis, and kept in touch.

"He was a pretty hard, angry, stoic guy, and at first, our talks were very superficial," Schuppe said. "But it seemed every time I drove down Elizabeth Avenue, I would see him sitting outside Zion Towers in his wheelchair, and I'd stop by to talk. I got to understand some of his pain. Of course, at this point, he was still dealing drugs from his wheelchair."

Schuppe, the cops reporter, and Mason, the drug peddler, had some common ground. Both were pretty good high school pitchers, in places just miles but worlds apart. Schuppe played at Millburn, about a decade after Mason starred at Shabazz.

From Mason's apartment in Zion Towers, he could look down at the Weequahic Park fields where he played as boy. Like much around him, they were neglected.

"I look out one day and they're redoing the field," he said. "I heard Joe D. (Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo) wanted to fix the park, then I saw them doing the work."

Turf was put down over the brick-hard dirt infield, and real base paths were made. A new, domed backstop was put up, and fences around the new dugouts. An electronic scoreboard was installed.

"Last time, I saw a field like that was when I played up in Belleville and Nutley and Millburn. We never had nothing like that in Newark," Mason said. "When I was playing here, we had to move out the rocks and garbage and stuff ourselves just to play."

Just watching the field being rebuilt lifted Mason out the depression that anchored him to the chair and the despair of the streets.

"One day he calls me up and says, 'I'm going to start a Little League team,'â" Schuppe said.

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Schuppe decided to follow Mason's efforts to form a team, to coach them from a wheelchair, to chase them down and discipline them, to deliver something as normal and routine as Little League baseball to kids who never before had a chance to play.

The book is honest and gritty. It is not a stereotypical feel-good story, or one of best efforts in vain. It's a book about the gift of normalcy.

"I saw a lot of things I experienced growing up," Schuppe said. "Just the joy kids get from playing baseball, and the thrill their parents get watching them. The difference is the resiliency of the people to fight for something normal against the backdrop of this city."

Rodney Mason was part of that bad backdrop, and now part of the good. The Little League team is still running, he coaches flag football, and he is the uncle of the park. Uncle Rock. Some of his boys are now young men and come back to help.

"We've reached more kids than I ever thought we would," he said.

And they've reached him.

"These kids saved my life. I owe them more than they owe me, that's for sure."

MORE MARK DI IONNO STORIES

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Diamond in the rough's winning story unfolds on Newark's little league fields

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Mason is the star of a new book, "A Chance to Win," by Jonathan Schuppe, a former police reporter for The Star-Ledger. The story of Coach Rock and his South Ward Little League team first appeared in the paper in 2008.

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Rodney Mason's journey from drug dealer to Little League coach is chronicled in "A Chance to Win." Jennifer Brown/The Star Ledger

Rodney Mason's moment of truth, the event that forever changed and defined him, came on an October evening in 1995, as he sat on the stoop of his Newark apartment building and heard the scream of skidding tires.
It was a Honda CRX with a hooded man leaning out the passenger's window, aiming a gun at him.

Rodney ran. The gun cracked. He felt a sting near his hip and crashed to the pavement. His lower body went numb. He closed his eyes and told himself to get ready to die.

All these years later, Rodney cannot shake those feelings of terror and helplessness. He replays the steps to that led to the attack, rearranging them like pieces in a puzzle, to see what he could have done to avoid the bullet that claimed his legs, his manhood, his livelihood.

A former high-school pitching ace, Rodney abandoned his budding athletic career in the mid-1980s to become a teenaged drug dealer and for years survived as a street criminal. Eventually it led him into a love triangle that resulted in his rival gunning him down in the street.

From his wheelchair, Rodney spent countless hours obsessing over the cascade of bad decisions that led him to that moment. The exercise was useless and left him depressed.

But lately, he's learned to turn that fatalism on its head. He tries to focus instead on his life since the shooting - how his injury set him on a slow and precarious journey to remake himself and heal the neighborhood he once helped destroy.

I see a lot of parallels between Rodney and Newark: the failed promise, the rampant pathologies, the physical and emotional toughness. But they also share a stubborn will. They are living proof that an ugly past doesn't have to define you; what matters is your willingness to change.

Newark has made its share of mistakes and endured plenty of pain. The city was once among America's most powerful industrial engines. But it failed to anticipate the post-World War II shift away from manufacturing, triggering a precipitous economic decline from which the city never really recovered. Anyone who could afford to flee (whites, mostly) moved to the suburbs, leaving Newark predominantly poor and black.

In July 1967, the city exploded in several days of rioting that resulted in 26 deaths and $10 million in damage. Newark became a national emblem of urban despair, enduring decades of municipal corruption, educational dysfunction and violence. It was repeatedly labeled America's worst city and became a perennial punch line for late-night comedians.

That reputation stuck even after the city shared in America's historic drop in crime. The longtime mayor, Sharpe James, declared that Newark was in the midst of a "renaissance," but proof of it never fully materialized. The beleaguered public school system remained under state control, poverty was still rampant, and the drug trade continued to thrive in many residential neighborhoods, including Elizabeth Avenue, where Rodney, born the summer of the riots, came of age.

I met him in 2005, a decade after the drive-by that left him a paraplegic, an example of the city's anguish.

But in early 2008, Rodney called to tell me he had an idea. His neighborhood's struggling Little League had persuaded local politicians to build a state-of-the-art field across the street from his apartment building. The sight reminded Rodney that the game had been his last refuge from the streets, the only thing that had ever made him truly happy. Perhaps he could teach the game to kids and steer them away from the path he'd taken.

"If I would have stuck with baseball, things would have been different," Rodney explained to me. "That's what I want to tell them."

I followed him on his adventure, as he took charge of a chaotic band of young boys and girls who'd never played baseball before. He managed insecure players from unstable homes. He negotiated with frustrated parents, wrangled with unreliable assistants. He came to terms with his own failings as a man and mentor. Twice during that first season, he had to console a player whose parent had unexpectedly died. On many other occasions, he provided kids with the kind of encouragement that a father should have been giving them.

Gradually, the kids developed into a team. They learned to control their anger, to heed authority, to respect rivals (most of the time, anyway). They discovered the value of persistence. They figured out how to win - and lose - with dignity.

The Elizabeth Avenue Eagles became a source of neighborhood pride. The team brought people together, gave them something to root for.

At the same time, Newark was showing signs of progress. Sharpe James left politics and went to prison, and his successor, Cory Booker, a young, charismatic, Yale-educated lawyer, brought renewed attention to the city's struggle.

Life here is still rough. The recession pushed the unemployment rate to about 15%, double the amount when Booker took office. The city relied on tens of millions of dollars in state aid to balance its annual budget. Newark remained among the country's most dangerous cities.

But in residents like Rodney, there is a pride that wasn't there a decade ago. He is 45 now. He says he's more responsible, more conscientious, more optimistic. He feels good about himself and his city.

"Hell, yeah, [the shooting] changed me for the better," Rodney told me the other day. "When you go through a crisis like that, it's either going to make you or break you. And it made me a better man."

Jonathan Schuppe is author of "A Chance To Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City" (Henry Holt), out now.

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Rodney Mason's moment of truth, the event that forever changed and defined him, came on an October evening in 1995, as he sat on the stoop of his Newark apartment building and heard the scream of...