Pitching in for Newark

Rodney Mason’s moment of truth, the event that forever changed and defined him, came on an October evening in 1995, as he sat on the stoop of his Newark apartment building and heard the scream of skidding tires.

It was a Honda CRX with a hooded man leaning out the passenger’s window, aiming a gun at him.

Rodney ran. The gun cracked. He felt a sting near his hip and crashed to the pavement. His lower body went numb. He closed his eyes and told himself to get ready to die.

All these years later, Rodney cannot shake those feelings of terror and helplessness. He replays the steps to that led to the attack, rearranging them like pieces in a puzzle, to see what he could have done to avoid the bullet that claimed his legs, his manhood, his livelihood.

A former high-school pitching ace, Rodney abandoned his budding athletic career in the mid-1980s to become a teenaged drug dealer and for years survived as a street criminal. Eventually it led him into a love triangle that resulted in his rival gunning him down in the street.

From his wheelchair, Rodney spent countless hours obsessing over the cascade of bad decisions that led him to that moment. The exercise was useless and left him depressed.

But lately, he’s learned to turn that fatalism on its head. He tries to focus instead on his life since the shooting — how his injury set him on a slow and precarious journey to remake himself and heal the neighborhood he once helped destroy.

I see a lot of parallels between Rodney and Newark: the failed promise, the rampant pathologies, the physical and emotional toughness. But they also share a stubborn will. They are living proof that an ugly past doesn’t have to define you; what matters is your willingness to change.

Newark has made its share of mistakes and endured plenty of pain. The city was once among America’s most powerful industrial engines. But it failed to anticipate the post-World War II shift away from manufacturing, triggering a precipitous economic decline from which the city never really recovered. Anyone who could afford to flee (whites, mostly) moved to the suburbs, leaving Newark predominantly poor and black.

In July 1967, the city exploded in several days of rioting that resulted in 26 deaths and $10 million in damage. Newark became a national emblem of urban despair, enduring decades of municipal corruption, educational dysfunction and violence. It was repeatedly labeled America’s worst city and became a perennial punch line for late-night comedians.

That reputation stuck even after the city shared in America’s historic drop in crime. The longtime mayor, Sharpe James, declared that Newark was in the midst of a “renaissance,” but proof of it never fully materialized. The beleaguered public school system remained under state control, poverty was still rampant, and the drug trade continued to thrive in many residential neighborhoods, including Elizabeth Avenue, where Rodney, born the summer of the riots, came of age.

I met him in 2005, a decade after the drive-by that left him a paraplegic, an example of the city’s anguish.

But in early 2008, Rodney called to tell me he had an idea. His neighborhood’s struggling Little League had persuaded local politicians to build a state-of-the-art field across the street from his apartment building. The sight reminded Rodney that the game had been his last refuge from the streets, the only thing that had ever made him truly happy. Perhaps he could teach the game to kids and steer them away from the path he’d taken.

“If I would have stuck with baseball, things would have been different,” Rodney explained to me. “That’s what I want to tell them.”

I followed him on his adventure, as he took charge of a chaotic band of young boys and girls who’d never played baseball before. He managed insecure players from unstable homes. He negotiated with frustrated parents, wrangled with unreliable assistants. He came to terms with his own failings as a man and mentor. Twice during that first season, he had to console a player whose parent had unexpectedly died. On many other occasions, he provided kids with the kind of encouragement that a father should have been giving them.

Gradually, the kids developed into a team. They learned to control their anger, to heed authority, to respect rivals (most of the time, anyway). They discovered the value of persistence. They figured out how to win — and lose — with dignity.

The Elizabeth Avenue Eagles became a source of neighborhood pride. The team brought people together, gave them something to root for.

At the same time, Newark was showing signs of progress. Sharpe James left politics and went to prison, and his successor, Cory Booker, a young, charismatic, Yale-educated lawyer, brought renewed attention to the city’s struggle.

Life here is still rough. The recession pushed the unemployment rate to about 15%, double the amount when Booker took office. The city relied on tens of millions of dollars in state aid to balance its annual budget. Newark remained among the country’s most dangerous cities.

But in residents like Rodney, there is a pride that wasn’t there a decade ago. He is 45 now. He says he’s more responsible, more conscientious, more optimistic. He feels good about himself and his city.

“Hell, yeah, [the shooting] changed me for the better,” Rodney told me the other day. “When you go through a crisis like that, it’s either going to make you or break you. And it made me a better man.”

Jonathan Schuppe is author of “A Chance To Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City” (Henry Holt), out now.