The end of a long journey for local product
CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – Jermaine Watson has come a long way in four years. He’s certainly not the same player he was when he first came to The Heights. But his transformation as a player pales in comparison to what he’s gone through over the course of his life.
The story is an all-too common one. He grew up in the inner city near Boston, an economically depressed area where opportunities aren’t exactly waiting around every corner. It’s an area where all too many people fall through the cracks, where it’s all too easy to become another statistic. It’s not all gloom and doom – while he says that “there’s a lot of people doing a lot of nothing,” he acknowledges that there are plenty of people doing positive things, which typically go unnoticed like so many such efforts – but the obstacles are plenty nonetheless.
“Where I’m from in Roxbury, there are a lot of people who don’t have the same opportunities as just a regular student at Boston College has,” Watson reflects. “I’ve been blessed with the gift to play basketball, with a sound mind, that’s helped me get to be able to be here. The average person from where I’m from doesn’t come to Boston College. I’ve been blessed with the skill, and my mom staying on me, making sure I was always hitting the books in high school, has allowed me to be here.”
Not a straight line from Point A to Point B
The path to get there wasn’t easy. The first obstacle came at home, as Darrel Watson, Jermaine’s father, died of cancer at the age of 34 and when Jermaine was just eight years old. Watson would be reminded many times later on, like when he would see fathers of other players at tournaments cheering on their sons, and says that to this day he still plays back snapshots of his dad when he plays the game.
“It was definitely very hard for me, because even to this day, I still have memories of hanging out with him,” Watson said. “My first memories of actually playing basketball were with my father out on the court, on outside courts teaching me how to shoot.”
At that point, Watson’s story starts to sound like those of many others who grew up in areas like his. It’s one that brings to mind the old proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” He had several men who took him under their wing, in addition to important people in his family who cared deeply about him. There is his mother, of course, whom he credits right away, as well as his older brother Tyrone and his uncle Lenny Durant, a constant presence at Boston College home games. He says his mother really kept on him in high school to make sure he took care of academics, and Lenny did much the same. They all knew that basketball would take care of itself; it was other things that mattered.
“He’s always supported me, and made sure that academically I was doing well for myself,” Watson says of his uncle. “He would always be like, ‘you’ve got to get your grades right, there’s no guarantee you’re going to be playing major Division I basketball’. It used to get me upset, but he was just telling me that because he wanted to make sure that if I didn’t, I was going to be able to go to college.”
He remembers his first basketball coach at the Roxbury Boys & Girls Club, the late Manny Wilson. A police officer, Wilson died while pursuing someone, and at a bad time for Jermaine because it was not long after his father died, and Manny had taken him under his wing like a father figure.
But as happened before, there would be more caring people that would come into his life. There were people at places in Roxbury like the Shelburne Center and Roxbury YMCA as well that helped keep him going. The people who helped him are among the many unsung heroes in everyday life in America; they don’t make the eleven o’clock news, they aren’t winning awards that we all hear about, but one has to constantly wonder how different things would be without them. Watson is one who was heavily impacted by their work.
“They don’t get paid well or anything like that, but if you’re hungry and you’re willing to put in the work, they’ll dedicate some of their time to you, and they definitely helped me work on my game,” he said.
“A lot of them demanded that they would talk to my mom to make sure that I was doing well in school and not acting up at home. A lot of the men at the community centers took an interest in me, and made sure that things were going good for me. When I was at the Shelburne Center, they wouldn’t let me walk home by myself at night – they would give me a ride home on many a night.”
When he got to high school, Watson became the star on the hardwood. By that time, he had long decided that basketball was the sport to focus on, despite some success in baseball as a pitcher and catcher (he was his team’s MVP in his last year in Little League) and some other sports. He could score with the best of them, with his quickness and ability to get to the basket making him almost unstoppable. His jump shot wasn’t as good, but he was so good at getting to the basket that he didn’t need to shoot it much. He played on the Boston Amateur Basketball Club AAU team with players like fellow Eagle Steve Hailey and current Notre Dame junior Torin Francis, who was also a teammate of his at Tabor Academy. At Tabor, he led the team to a New England Class B championship as a junior and averaged 28.5 points per game as a senior. He later played in two prestigious postseason all-star games, the Capital Classic and the Pittsburgh Hoops Classic.
Watson was courted by Miami and Georgia Tech in addition to Boston College, but the Eagles were the team to beat for him. He was interested in them when he was much younger and remembers being wide-eyed at the school wanting him to come to a game. Ultimately, he signed to play at The Heights, and feels this was unquestionably the right decision.
The transformation of a player
As a freshman, Watson didn’t light up the Big East and become a freshman sensation. Part of that was playing time; he was playing behind an All-American in Troy Bell and a player fresh off a big freshman season in Ryan Sidney. Playing time was at a premium, and when he got in the game, he often tried to do too much. He said he would be “in a panic”, thinking he had to score, and as a result, he struggled at times. With the talent he had around him – as good as even the powerful BABC teams were, he never had this much talent around him – he had to learn to let the game come to him, after all those years of forcing the action. He had a tough go of it, but realized the adjustments that had to be made.
“It’s a point of knowing what you want to do and how you see yourself contributing when you’re out on the court,” he reflects. “I wasn’t going to outscore Troy, and I wasn’t going to outscore Ryan, either. It was just the small things that Coach Skinner has the respect for.”
The transformation is now complete, though it involved a little more. After starting his whole life and playing almost every minute except in blowouts, Watson has never started a game at Boston College. He embraced the role of the reserve who comes in and brings energy at both ends of the floor, some instant offense and defense. This season, while Sean Marshall has started at shooting guard, Watson has often finished games at that position, in part because he has become an ace free throw shooter – another area of his game that took some work from his first days on campus.
His free throw shooting is perhaps the best case study of how far he has come in four years. As a freshman, he struggled mightily at the foul line, shooting just 52.5%. He topped 60% as a sophomore and made nearly 73% as a junior, and will enter his final regular season game this season shooting over 82% from the line this season, which places him among the leaders in the Big East in that category. He credits the team psychologist, George Mumford, with some of that, as well as learning what’s important in shooting free throws.
“It’s shooting a lot of free throws, getting what I call a standard operating procedure when I get to the line, doing the same thing every single time,” he said.
The night has come
Monday night was Senior Night, the last home game for Watson and center Nate Doornekamp. It was also the team’s last home game as a member of the Big East Conference. While there is still more basketball ahead for the Eagles, Watson has been reflective about this day.
“This year it’s just flown by, I can’t believe senior night is here already,” Watson said after Saturday’s 70-58 win over Seton Hall. “I guess I’d rather have it go by quickly, and get here quickly, because we’re winning almost every night we’re on the court.”
The winning is what Watson remembers the best and will probably be remembered for the most. While he hasn’t lit up the scoreboard like he did in high school, his value to this team cannot be debated, and the team has gone 86-28 in that time. He realized his destiny was not to be the scorer he was in high school, but he’ll take the winning.
“There’s nothing like winning,” Watson said. “If you drop 20 and lose, no one really remembers that, but if you’re winning and breaking records, and helping to bring Boston College basketball to a level that it hasn’t been, it’s a great feeling to be part of that. People will remember this season, people will remember the last year BC was in the Big East.”
Watson is also grateful for the position he is in. He hasn’t thought much about what he really wants to do when his basketball playing days are over, but he can probably put that decision off for a little while even though the NBA almost certainly doesn’t beckon. He thought about this when Uka Agbai had to miss most of the 2002-03 season and was nearly paralyzed, but it just reinforced what previous events in his life had already taught him about life and opportunities. In keeping with the theme of reflection, he thinks back about his father and how he still motivates him as he goes forward.
“I just hope, a lot of times, that I’ve grown into a young man that he would be proud of. When I have children, I want to be the type of father that he was to me. He had me with him all the time.”
His father is probably looking down on him from above, looking at how his son has turned out. The village has raised the child, and the result is the senior guard who walked across the Conte Forum floor smiling alongside his mother, uncle and younger sister on Monday night. The cheers from the crowd as he was introduced were resounding, just as resounding as the cheers of all the people who took an interest in the young man over the years – all cheering because their work has been rewarded.
