Breaking Through

Here’s the story real fast-like: I was in ATL for a cover for Dwight…he was about to finish his senior year of HS (actually we did this shoot and interview the morning before his senior prom). The picture at the top is from his parent’s house, where we hung out all morning. Then we went over to his high school to shoot some pics (his dad was the athletic director at Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy and had the keys to the gym). His dad went off to make some calls or something and left us alone in the gym. For one of the first pics Keith, the photog, asked Dwight to pretend to dunk so we could get a pic of him way up in the air. Keith was getting his camera ready and Dwight was practicing and went up and shattered the backboard with a two-handed dunk. There was a loud bang and glass went everywhere. There were only 4 of us in the gym (Keith, me, Dwight and Dwight’s cousin Kevin who still works with him now) and we didn’t know how to react. Everyone was quiet at first and then we all flipped out and started screaming and yelling. Since Keith didn’t even have his camera out we didn’t get a pic of the glass breaking, but we took about 200 pics afterwards, of all of us posing in front of the glass. I grabbed a few pieces of the glass and have some of them here on my desk even now. The down part was when Dwight’s dad came back in and immediately said, “OK, who’s paying for this?” Turned out the school had insurance but was going to have to pay $500 for the installation. When I got back to NYC, Big Dwight (Dwight’s dad) called me like every other day for the next three weeks. I told him I wasn’t in charge of the money and he had to talk to our publisher, but he kept calling me. Then about a month later Dwight signed a $10 mil contract with the Magic. Not sure how that eventually worked out — we may have paid for it. But Dwight’s cousin Kevin always starts jokingly asking me for $500 every time I see him.