The Man with a Bullhorn on the Train
I almost missed him. The first time our eyes met, I was standing in a ticket queue at Princeton Junction. A tall, grey-haired African American man — six feet at least — stood nearby, a manpack across one shoulder and what looked at first like a bullhorn, polished into the shape of a vuvuzela, resting casually in his hand. He had a presence that made you look twice without knowing exactly why. The kind of gravity that is earned, not performed.
We crossed paths again on the platform, where the train to New York was running seven minutes late. I said hello. He smiled — the kind of smile that holds decades of hard-won grace. His name was Wayne Slappy.
What followed was thirty-some minutes on a train that I did not want to end.
"You must pursue that which is bigger than yourself."— Wayne Slappy
Wayne was born into poverty in the projects of Newark, New Jersey — a community of 128 families stacked upon one another in the unrelenting arithmetic of deprivation. He attended Weequahic High School, whose hallways have produced novelists, physicians, athletes, and scholars — Philip Roth among the most celebrated — and which taught its sons and daughters that ZIP codes are not destinies. At fourteen years old, Wayne stood at the threshold of adulthood, watching his mother die, in those very projects, among those 128 families. His parents had refused, from the beginning, to let circumstance write the final word. And neither did Wayne.
He would go on to spend over forty years in the orbit of professional basketball — coaching and sending some of his students to the US National Basketball Association, serving as high school coach to men whose names are spoken today with reverence: Michael Jordan. Kobe Bryant. Wayne Slappy did not carry himself like a man with a trophy cabinet. He carried himself like a man with a purpose still to fulfill. At the Newark Airport stop, he was getting off to go and speak to a school — his grandson's school — to address the student body. On a Thursday. Because someone had to.
Lift As You Climb
That phrase — which Wayne displays in capital letters on his LinkedIn page — is not a slogan. It is a creed that has ordered his life. In the unhurried rhythm of his speech, picking each word the way a craftsman picks a tool — deliberately, with attention — he offered four lessons that I have been turning over in my mind since the train pulled into Newark Penn Station.
Lesson One
Pursue something bigger than yourself
Wayne put it plainly: pursuing only yourself is boring and exhausting. Self-promotion is a treadmill with no destination. What enlivens you — what sustains decades of work and sacrifice — is the act of inspiring people. Not because it makes you look good, but because something larger than you has called for it. The bullhorn in his hand was not a prop. It was the symbol of a man who has never stopped amplifying the voices of others beyond his own.
Lesson Two
Talk about the lives you have touched
Wayne was not interested in talking about himself — at least not in the way we often do. He wanted to talk about the people. He said something that landed quietly but deeply: it is not about you; it is about what God and the Universe knew from the beginning. Your life, in this framing, is a gift already addressed and posted before you were born. Your only task is to deliver it faithfully.
Lesson Three
Be critical of the education you receive
Wayne did not ask us to reject knowledge. He asked us to interrogate its origins. Columbus — who never set foot on the North American mainland — is taught to have "discovered" a land whose peoples had cultivated civilisations for millennia. Thomas Edison is celebrated for the light bulb, while Lewis Howard Latimer — the African American inventor and engineer who, in 1881, patented the improved carbon filament process that made the bulb durable, practical, and affordable for the mass market — is barely a footnote in most classrooms. Every learner deserves to know who built the light, not just who got credit for switching it on.
Lesson Four
Language is an instrument of power
Words encode ideology. Wayne pointed to examples hiding in plain sight: a dark night signals danger; a white lie is forgivable. We speak of the black sheep of the family, of a blacklisted person, a blackmail threat. The "dark side" is where evil dwells; a murky past, a shadowy figure. To be fair, the word itself, in older English, meant beautiful, pure, pale. The language we inherit is not neutral. It is a sediment of centuries of cultural authority. To speak it critically is the beginning of freedom.
Above all of this, I was struck by Wayne's humility. He was on his way to address schoolchildren — not for a fee, not under contract — but because a grandson had asked him to come. When I mentioned that our oldest son Joshua is based in Los Angeles, Wayne's reply was immediate and generous: "Please give him my number."
And when I asked whether Wayne would be willing to speak to a cohort of around fifty students in Uganda via Zoom, his answer was calm and resolute — no hesitation, no committee to consult, no calendar to check:
"Let's do it."— Wayne Slappy
That is the measure of the man. Not the decades associated with the NBA. Not the names he coached. It is the immediate, uncomplicated readiness to give — to students in Kampala he has never met, over a screen, because someone asked and he still believes it matters.
Providence is a strange and generous thing. It put a six-foot man with a vuvuzela on a New Jersey train line and gave me a seven-minute delay to say hello.
Wayne Slappy, thank you. We are already looking forward to that Zoom call.
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