Ministers With Balls

When Calvin Wainright talks about violence, his right eyelid sometimes twitches.

It twitches now, for example, when the 53-year-old recalls his neighborhood on fire.

In April 1968, Wainright was living in a high-rise at the Wayne Miner projects at Ninth Street and Michigan Avenue. He was 15 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and all hell broke loose in Kansas City.

Mobs hurled Molotov cocktails into homes and businesses, and gunmen hid in the smoky shadows, taking aim at the police and National Guardsmen swarming the streets. Armored convoys rolled east of Troost.

"I remember the riots like it was yesterday," Wainright says. "I remember 35th Street burning down."

Wainright had already seen plenty of trouble. When he was 9, his father went to prison for peddling heroin and taking part in a string of robberies. The oldest of seven kids, Wainright looked after his siblings, accepting the burden of being the oldest male in his broken home.

In the years before the riots, when middle-class blacks and whites in the urban core were fleeing to the suburbs, Wainright took refuge at the Boys Club on 19th Street and Paseo. There, Wainright found support from a group of men in their early twenties who taught spirituality and righteousness even as the neighborhood sank into desolation.

Though the riots left half a dozen dead and countless homes and businesses destroyed, the Boys Club stood undamaged.

But so did the nightclubs and bars three blocks from Wainright's house.

"Twelfth Street was really rocking," he recalls. "There were five or six pool halls and gambling joints. I could have easily got involved, but walking down Woodland, you can bypass all that. Because if you keep straight, you're going to hit the Boys Club."

By his midteens, Wainright had gained respect on the basketball court. Soon, leaders at the new Boys Club farther south, at 43rd Street and Cleveland — in a neighborhood not ruined by the riots but corroding in their aftermath — asked Wainright to coach there.

"Mr. Calvin Wainright, he has always been an ideal kid," says Alvin Clark, 70, who volunteered as a coach and mentor at the 43rd Street site from 1968 through 1986. "He's always been the type of kid you want your kid to be involved with."

After he graduated from Manual High School, Wainright signed on to play basketball for Lincoln University in Jefferson City. His sophomore year, the team played an exhibition game against inmates at the prison where his father was serving time. Wainright remembers his father in the bleachers that day. It was the only time his dad saw him play.

"He was sitting in the auditorium, way in the back," Wainright says. "I was asked at an early age if I ever wanted to be like my daddy. I said, 'Hell, no.' I did learn from my father. I learned how to whop a woman. I learned how to disrespect a family, how to tear up a home, how to make seven kids and disappear."

It was men like his father who destroyed the urban core, Wainright says.

He never followed his dream of leaving the ghetto. He studied physical education and sociology at Lincoln but returned home, 27 credits shy of a degree, so he could provide for his daughter. "I had a plan to finish but got a call from child support saying I better get a job," he says.

But he never lost sight of his desire to help troubled kids. He got a job at the Boys Club on 39th Street. Over the years, the club would expand to 11 sites across the urban core (six in stand-alone buildings, the rest in schools during off hours).

Wainright would spend the next two decades coaching in the city's community centers, rec leagues and middle schools. Over time, the Boys Club (since renamed the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City) stopped reaching out to the street kids who scoffed at any discipline or structure in their lives, Wainright says. So he has teamed up with one of the kids he saved and another Boys and Girls Clubs veteran to try to reach the city's toughest cases.

They could use a little help.

After he left Lincoln, Wainright worked first as activity coordinator and then as youth director at the Don Bosco Community Center, at the corner of Independence and Garfield avenues. By 1987, organized street gangs had started smuggling crack and assault rifles into the neighborhoods.

Wainright remembers an early-'90s talk he had with 10 kids he was coaching, including his nephew. "I said, 'Three of you guys are going to die a violent and vicious death. Four of y'all are going to spend time in the penitentiary. Two of y'all are going to catch HIV or AIDS. And one of you guys will probably be really successful."

Less than a month later, one of the teens was shot and killed during a robbery outside a Vietnamese store in the River Market. Within a year, three more were killed during a drug sale, and Wainright's nephew was dead, having crashed his car at 46th Street and Prospect while fleeing the police.