A kid from the projects of Cleveland sat in a window one Christmas waiting for a father who never pulled into the driveway. Thirty-plus years later, that same kid had played college basketball at Ohio State, signed with the Harlem Globetrotters, eaten dinner with Muhammad Ali, and been waved through a traffic stop in Sydney by an officer who couldn't see a seven-foot driver folded into the back of the car. Derek Polk tells Sam Sapp how all of that fits inside one life, and what it took to hold it together.
What You'll Hear
- The Christmas morning that Derek spent at the window waiting on a father who never came
- How watching Kareem, Oscar Robertson, and Dr. J on TV set a dream he refused to let go of
- The coach at Arizona Western who convinced Derek to turn down early offers and come back for a sophomore year
- Why Derek picked Ohio State out of 80 to 100 scholarship offers, and what it had to do with his mom
- The Sydney traffic stop where the officer swore nobody was driving the car
- Trying calamari for the first time at a team dinner, and accidentally saying "stuffed" in front of the owners
- The Boston Garden parquet floor, its dead spots, and what it felt like to dunk on it for the first time
- The conversation Derek finally had with his father at 48, after his mom told him to go find him
- How Derek Polk Sports is trying to make sure kids who can't afford to play still get to play
The kid at the window
Derek Polk grew up in the inner city projects of Cleveland with a single mom and a younger sister. His dad was out of the picture from the time he was small. One Christmas, around age six, his father called and promised to stop by with presents. Derek sat at the window most of the morning watching for a car to slow down at their building. No car ever slowed down.
That image does a lot of quiet work in the rest of the conversation. Derek doesn't frame it as the worst day of his childhood so much as the day that taught him what he was going to have to do without. His mom and his younger sister became the people he measured his decisions against. His mom had him at 17. His grandmother helped when she could. The neighborhood was tight enough that if a kid was out doing something he shouldn't be, somebody's mother would tell somebody else's mother before he got home.
Derek rode two buses to high school. He talks about being on guard constantly, coming home, going to the store, everywhere. He also talks about how the projects back then were a little quieter than people picture from movies. The danger was real. The community was also real. Both things were true at once.
A first dream that never got swapped out
Most people, Sam points out, trade one dream for another between high school and adulthood. Derek's dream didn't swap. He watched Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson, and Dr. J on television as a kid and decided he was going to play professional basketball. He didn't know how. He just knew.
He wasn't heavily recruited out of high school. At six foot eight and still filling out, he had a decent senior year but not the kind of year that brings 80 coaches to your door. His path opened up through Bob Huggins, who was at West Virginia at the time and had a connection with a coach heading to Arizona Western College in Yuma. Derek flew from Cleveland out to the desert at 17 years old. The heat hit 110 every day. There was nothing to do except school and basketball, which was the point.
He played well enough his freshman year to get calls from four-year programs. His head coach told him to wait. If he came back for his sophomore year, the offers would multiply. Derek talked it over with his mom. She told him it was his decision, the way she always did. He went back for another year at Arizona Western, and the phone started ringing. Ohio State, UCLA, Arizona State, Texas, Oklahoma. He estimates 80 to 100 schools called.
He picked Ohio State so his mom could actually watch him play. She hadn't been able to get to many of his high school games as a single mother working. Columbus was within driving distance, and Ohio State games were on national TV. She deserved to see her son play, he says, and so did his sister. He also became the first person in his family to earn a college degree.
Overseas, and the officer who couldn't see the driver
After Ohio State, Derek went overseas. He played in Belgium, Brazil, Spain, and Australia, with time in the CBA, the league that eventually became the NBA G League. Australia was the one that almost kept him. A former CBA teammate had gone back there to coach and called Derek to come play. The flight was about 25 hours. When he landed in Sydney he saw the opera house on the water and the bridge running into the city and realized he had been picturing the Outback, not a skyline.
His first night in Australia he had dinner at the owner's house. They served calamari. Derek couldn't get past the word squid. They brought out steak and potatoes instead. When he finished and said he was "stuffed," the table started laughing. In local slang, the word meant something cruder than full. He apologized. He filed the vocabulary note.
The team gave him a car. He had to relearn how to drive on the left side of the road during rush hour, which he admits made him nervous. A few days in, a police officer pulled him over. Derek, seven feet tall, had the seat pushed all the way back and the windows slightly tinted. The officer told him he'd pulled him over because it looked like nobody was driving. From the street, he could only see a pair of arms on the wheel. Derek explained his height and mentioned the team he was playing for. The officer smiled, wished him luck, and sent him on his way.
Brazil was a different kind of memory. The team ran hills in the morning, lifted after lunch, and played at night. Derek remembers walking outside with ice cream that started melting before he got home. He also remembers watching kids play pickup soccer at 11 at night under the lights in hundred-degree heat. He says he was a firsthand witness to how deeply that sport sits in that country.
Signing with the Globetrotters
Derek went out to the Los Angeles Pro Summer League to chase a shot at the NBA. The Clippers were interested, but their roster was locked up with guaranteed contracts. While he was there, the Harlem Globetrotters were scouting. They invited him to a tryout camp. Twenty-five players showed up. They kept ten. Derek was one of the ten.
He says the moment he signed, his whole frame shifted. He had grown up watching the Globetrotters wondering how they did the tricks with the ball. Now he was going to be one of them. An older Trotter told him the secret wasn't complicated. Take the basketball with you everywhere. Practice in your hotel room. Derek did. He knocked over a few lamps learning.
His first year, the Globetrotters played the big NBA arenas. They came through Cleveland around Christmas, which is also Derek's birthday. He played at the Richfield Coliseum, where the Cavaliers played at the time, and got a standing ovation from his hometown. He played in the old Boston Garden, Celtics locker room, parquet floor, dead spots and all. He calls a dead spot the place where the ball doesn't come back up when you dribble. Veteran players memorized where they were and steered around them.
That first Globetrotters stretch was also when the celebrity ring started widening in a way that he still describes with a kind of disbelief. He went to the White House. He met President Bush's father and Barbara Bush. He had dinner with Muhammad Ali and his wife Lonnie. He met Arnold Schwarzenegger, Florence Griffith Joyner, Mary Lou Retton, Charles Mann, Barbara Mandrell, Kirk Cameron, Dick Van Patten, and Ethel Kennedy. He performed for the President's Council on Physical Fitness. The thing he keeps returning to is that the celebrities were asking him what it was like to be a Globetrotter, not the other way around.
The phone call to his father
Derek's mom told him in his late forties that he should try to find his dad. He was 48 or 49. He says the timing caught him off guard. This wasn't the age most people reconcile with a missing parent. He made some calls. It turned out his father had been living about 15 or 20 minutes away for 10 or 15 years.
When Derek called and said he wanted to sit down, his father agreed. When they met, his father sat a little apart from him, unsure what Derek was going to do. Derek reminded him of the Christmas he never showed up for. He told him that he'd heard his father bragged about him to other people, pointed at him on TV, said that's my son. He asked why. His father apologized. He said he couldn't handle being around Derek's mom at the time. Derek told him that wasn't an excuse. Divorce, he said, doesn't cancel being a parent.
They talked for about four hours. After that they talked once or twice a week for a couple of years. His father passed in 2012. Derek went to the funeral and couldn't cry. His mom passed in 2014. That one dropped his whole world. He calls her his emotional rock. Last year, for the first time, he went to his father's grave with his half-brother, out of respect. He hasn't been back.
He's careful about what he says about his father. He talks about forgiveness as something God asks of him, and says he forgave him, and also says there's still a part of him that resents the years. Both things live together. He brings it up again later, almost in passing, when he mentions that he sees some of his father's traits in himself.
What he's building now
Derek is an assistant coach at Bryan and Stratton College back in Ohio. He still plays three times a week and has been in a travel league for 30 years. The bigger project is Derek Polk Sports, which runs camps, clinics, speaking engagements, and AAU basketball. He started it because every program he coached for before was too focused on the bottom line and didn't have a plan for the kids whose families couldn't afford to play.
He says he sponsored around 1,500 to 2,000 dollars in fees last year so kids could stay on the floor. This year he's expanding from two teams to possibly five. He also wants to add a mental health component, not just for players but for parents, because in his experience the parents carry just as much of it.
He teaches the game the way it was taught to him. The part he keeps coming back to is that basketball is the hook, not the point. The point is helping young men and women get ready to step into a real world that doesn't care how well they shoot. He mentions one phrase more than once. Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens. He says it with the weight of someone who has been on both sides of that sentence.
He also wrote a children's book, "Seven's Travel Around the World," with a cartoon version of himself visiting the places his basketball career actually took him. France, Greece, Sydney, Japan, the Great Wall of China, a bullring in Spain, Toronto. He's planning to sell it through his website so kids can pick it up for a reasonable price. When Sam asks him for one piece of wisdom that has held up through everything, Derek answers with his faith, with the work, and with a version of the thing his mother kept telling him his whole life. You can be whatever you want to be. She'll be there to support you.
About Derek Polk
Derek Polk is a former professional basketball player and Harlem Globetrotter who grew up in the Cleveland projects, played at Arizona Western College and Ohio State, and spent years overseas in Belgium, Brazil, Australia, and Spain. At the time of recording he was an assistant coach at Bryan and Stratton College and the founder of Derek Polk Sports, which runs camps, clinics, speaking engagements, and an AAU program focused on giving underprivileged kids a path to play. Derek Polk Sports