Once Upon a Project by Bettye Griffin Page A

shook her head. Few things in life were more pathetic than a fifty-year-old drug addict. Douglas Valentine, unanimously considered the best high school player in all Chicago back in the early seventies, dropped out of Wake Forest University in his junior year when he’d been drafted by the Lakers. Douglas had a few shining moments in the NBA, but did not achieve superstar status in that period after Dr. J’s heyday and before Michael Jordan’s rise to prominence. The rumors of drug and alcohol abuse that drifted back to Chicago while Douglas was still at Wake Forest became more heated, and after a few years in the NBA Douglas found himself playing for one of the lesser teams, then an even more inferior team, and finally the European leagues, where he played until his early thirties. Upon returning to Chicago, Douglas promptly was arrested for robbing the corner store on 87th Street where he’d bought candy as a child. He’d threatened the owner with a gun and had driven all of five blocks before the police caught up with him. The presence of the gun added years to his sentence. Douglas Valentine, former NBA player, became Douglas Valentine, convicted felon.
    An incident that occurred between the Valentine boys was what had Ann Valentine looking at Susan with such venom. Douglas and Susan had gone together in high school. The relationship hit the rocks when Douglas accepted the basketball scholarship from Wake Forest. Susan would have loved to have been able to follow him there, but she couldn’t afford it, so she enrolled in one of the City Colleges of Chicago. After three years of seeing each other sparingly and dating others on a casual basis—Douglas much more frequently than Susan—he signed with the Lakers. Now even farther away from Susan and suddenly wealthy, he began sleeping with many of the women who threw themselves at him. Elyse knew that most folks believed that he dropped Susan for greener pastures, but actually she quit him once she got a whiff of what was going on. Within a year she started dating Douglas’s older brother, Charles. For nearly two years they kept their affair under wraps, but eventually the word spread.
    When Douglas learned his brother was dating his former love, he confronted him as Charles and Susan were leaving a bar on Cottage Grove Avenue, and the siblings came to blows. The fistfight shattered their previously close relationship, and soon after Douglas was thrown out of the NBA and went to play in Italy. His drug abuse worsened, and eventually he was cut from the team, returning home in disgrace. The house he’d purchased for his parents was all that remained of his income from professional sports.
    Ann Valentine told anyone who would listen that Susan Bennett ruined Douglas, as well as the lifelong camaraderie between her sons. Most people gave the first part of her rant little merit, believing that Douglas’s alcohol and drug abuse lay at the core of his wasted life. Many said that Douglas’s downward spiral killed his father, who died of a heart attack shortly after Douglas was sent to prison for the first time.
    The two brothers fighting over Susan was a different matter entirely. The altercation occurred out in the open, by a popular bar. Many people said Susan was a whore to sleep with two brothers. But Elyse didn’t see it that way—she felt that Susan had no choice but to break up with Douglas after photographs of him escorting various women were published in magazines. It wasn’t as if Susan took up with Charles the next day, and Elyse doubted she had sought him out. Elyse had always suspected that Charles Valentine had a crush on Susan, but put his feelings aside when she started going with his younger brother.
    In Elyse’s opinion Charles made a much better match for Susan than his trifling brother, but after the brothers fought, Susan left Charles and went up to Kenosha, where her mother had settled after she left