It's Not A Game!

Tayshana Murphy, one of the best high school basketball players in America shot dead at 18!

Last year I started this blog because I was frustrated with the lack of compassion in sports media for the real life issues that so many of our athletes face everyday. There was no one in sports journalism that seemed to understand that athletes are real people with real life issues. They would only report the story, give their opinion’s without truly understanding why the athlete was even in the situation in the first place and then move on. Well it's deeper than just saying “Athlete X” did XYZ and he or she was wrong with no regard to the why and how!

Growing up in the inner city is like being raised in a war zone and if you've never been there it's impossible to understand it. Clinical studies have shown that kids growing up in the war zone ghetto suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because of the amount of violence that they've seen on a daily basis. By the time a kid is 13 years old they've seen it all and that's goes for the big time recruit as well. Highly touted girl's prep basketball player, Tayshana Murphy, 18, was shot to death in a New York apartment building.

She was shot in the head by a gunman in a hallway of her home, a housing project in Harlem's Morningside Heights neighborhood. According to media reports, Murphy, a senior at the time at Murry Bergtraum High School who previously attended Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, may have been the victim of mistaken identity. Witnesses told the New York Daily News that Murphy, who was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, was mistaken for a boy who had gotten in a fight with men from a nearby housing project.

"She was pleading for her life," her friend Teka Taylor, 22, who was with her at the time, told the Daily News. "She was saying 'No, please, I don't have nothing to do with it.' "

The national media only reported this incident because Tayshana was the class of 2012's No. 16 point guard by ESPN.com's HoopGurlz recruiting site. She was cited as one of the top girl's basketball prospects in the city by the Daily News. This young lady was about to get out of the projects and see the world because of what many call the game of basketball. To a kid growing up in the hood it's not a game. It's their one way ticket out of hell.

Murders like this happen in the ghetto daily and many of our athletes are either victims of or witnesses to this madness. I remember when I was a senior in high school in 1985. Ben Wilson, the #1 rated basketball recruit in the country from Chicago's Simeon High School, the same school that would eventually produce Nick Anderson and Derrick Rose, was shot to death on his lunch hour. He was killed because he accidentally bumped into another kid coming out of the store.

Not only was he the best player in high school at that time, but he also played on the best team in the country as well. Those kids had to continue on without him just as Tayshana's teammates had to do in New York. How many kids in the suburbs have to deal with that type of stress? Not very many bruh!

Guys like ESPN’s Colin Cowherd and others that have an opinion about why guys get involved in situations on or off of the court have no idea why they make the decisions that they make, right or wrong. In order to understand it, you've got to understand the player. If you haven't lived in the same environment you can't possibly understand why a guy chooses to carry a gun with him when he's a millionaire. On the surface it's easy to say he's an idiot but Tayshana's teammates will be forever scarred by this incident and all of the others that have taken place that haven't made the news.

Think about the amount of classmates of their’s that have already been killed since they've started school in kindergarten. My wife had 9 classmates murdered while she was in high school alone. So it's larger than just saying the guy's an idiot and he shouldn't have been with a certain group etc. Sometimes that group serves as protection just to make it to school in the mornings bruh. We called it “Rolling Deep!” That's why you see guys with what the mainstream media would call an entourage but in the hood it's called making it home safely.

 It's incidents like this that causes a big time pro athlete to have ten guys with him every time he leaves the house. You don't know how many friends of his were murdered on the way home or just standing in the hallway of their apartment building while he was growing up. Those are lasting images that will forever be implanted in their minds.

 Home is supposed to be safe but those of us that grew up in a war zone understands oh so well that it's never safe. So if you can be killed at home, you surely can be a victim in the streets regardless of how much money you've got. It takes time to mature to the point where they began to understand that they don't need a crew to survive. That typically doesn't happen until they turn about 30 or so. So when you see a guy rolling deep don't condemn him, try to understand him!

Holla At Ya Boy!
Jay Graves
Twitter: @jaygravesreport
Information from the Associated Press was used in this article.