There was a vital section in which John Wall choked on his own existence. In a crude and honest way he would admit it himself later. It was a dark time, in which depression acted as an implacable demon that, perched on his shoulder, whispered to him that his journey had to end. Even that this was for the best. He was about to give in.
To Wall, who during the months of April and May of 2017 savored the milestone of feeling like one of the best point guards in the world, a respected icon on the field and feted at all levels off it (he would sign, months before, a succulent contract with the Wizards worth $170 million), his flame went out just two and a half years later, when the death of his mother, Frances Pulley, a cancer victim, created a hole that was impossible to digest.
“I dialed her number to talk to her even knowing that she was no longer there,” the player confessed in a letter in The Players’ Tribune. Deep down, Wall clung to one of the most robust habits of his life, contact with his mother, with the only hope of hearing that voicemail that breathed a sprout of life into him before hitting him even harder. .
His mother was everything to him, even more so considering that he basically only knew his father behind bars. When John took his first steps, his father -also called John- was already in prison. There he would visit him periodically as he grew up. When the boy was nine years old, his father –suffering from cancer- was let out… to lose his life. The memory of meeting him knowing that it would be the last time still reverberates in his bowels.
The vital situation made her mother act as a support, emotionally and materially. Because she with three jobs simultaneously supported the family-he and her two sisters-her, with the hope that her children would have opportunities in the future that she did not have. It was she who paid for the amateur circuit tournaments. It was she who calmed the anger of that boy who, as a teenager, paid with the world for the inability to understand himself. She was, ultimately, the person who completed every lack of John.
His departure left an irreparable void. And his departure was linked, to top it off, to the disappearance of the other great refuge that he always had. The one that was always there, to the rescue of almost everything: basketball. At the end of 2018 John Wall was detected with an injury to his left heel which, after becoming complicated as a result of the first intervention, ended up being devastating after, in a domestic accident, the Achilles of that same foot was broken.
Wall would go two years without playing an NBA game. In that stretch, he lost his mother, her vital compass. And he publicly went on to become more than a player in a toxic contract that no one seemed to want. The Wizards’ former messiah had come to be disowned, to the point of being pierced by the franchise of his life. “That destroyed me,” he would later reveal.
The ghosts squeezed his spirit until he was shivering, on the edge of the abyss until that morning when he understood that he was either asking for help or staying on the road. The resurrection of John Wall would then begin. The therapy helped him heal without bleeding. The peace of mind to focus his energy on his wife, his son and rediscovering basketball.
After that brief adventure in Houston, the destination of his transfer, John Wall did not play a single NBA game last season, because the Texan franchise understood that its project phase needed to provide opportunities for young people more than a veteran with asterisks, both physical -because of his long inactivity- and economic -because of the long shadow of his voluminous contract-.
After playing just 40 games in three years, the Clippers came to Wall’s rescue last summer. Prior to the termination of his agreement with the Rockets, the Los Angeles team provided an opportunity for the point guard: he would integrate one of the deepest and most talented rotations in the League. Starting from a secondary role, the pressure would not grip. And with the confidence of both the coaching staff, headed by Tyronn Lue, and the hard core of the locker room -he maintains a great friendship with Paul George-, he could find the long-awaited lost continuity.
The result is exceeding all previous expectations. John Wall has not taken long to become an important piece in some Clippers that, despite the tepid start of the course marked by the physical problems of both the aforementioned George and Kawhi Leonard, continue to appear as one of the main candidates for the throne of the West.
He looks fine, brave and lucid. With details of that rocket that, unstoppable in transition, found free companions with a brilliance within the reach of very few. Wall smiles again on the track, he feels like a player again.
At the end, the letters that, in the form of ink, dress his back with the motto Dear Mama [Querida Mamá] reveal a posthumous tribute to his mother. But it is the facts, having recovered the direction of a life that seemed broken, that offer the best honors to her memory.
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