He Found His “Why”
Told by Hector RJ Dixon
Written by Laurie Grobman
The scar on 24-year-old Hector RJ Dixon (RJ)’s head is a permanent reminder of his last fight. A great athlete for his age, RJ had just made the Reading High School Junior Varsity basketball team as an eighth grader. Then, after school one day, RJ’s coach texted the players to go to Wynton Butler and Judge Tonya Butler’s house and just stay there until practice at 3:00 pm. The coaches had heard about a fight brewing. But RJ was “a follower. I was with the north side people. They were my friends. And that’s when gang violence was really vicious, when the east side, the south side, and the north side was fighting all together.” He went with his friends to the steps of the Citadel, joined the fight, threw some punches, and got hit in the head with a wrench.
RJ was bleeding. But he needed to look innocent, like he hadn’t been in the fight. And he knew he couldn’t go to basketball practice looking like that. He wrapped his T-shirt around his head so the police wouldn’t see that he had been fighting, and he left for practice. He was thinking, “everything’s fine. The coach won’t know that I went to this fight.” But when RJ walked into the high school, everybody was standing in the hallway looking at him. He walked into the coach’s office and three coaches were there, Coach Randall, Coach Flowers, and Coach Peter. When they asked RJ what he’d been doing, he lied, telling them he’d been to his aunt’s house. The coaches looked him the eye: “You sure?” And they pulled out a photograph of RJ on the steps of the Citadel. He was caught.
Later at the hospital, his mother was sobbing, telling RJ “You’re falling in the wrong places.” RJ doesn’t “like to see my mom really cry. It was a different type of cry.” And he cried seeing his mom crying like that. He told himself and his mom, “I’m done.” That’s when “I realized I
was either going to be in jail or dead. I didn’t want clout from the streets. I’d rather have clout from basketball or school or good grades or something rather than the streets.” ~~~~~
RJ had been “running the streets” since about 13 years old. His mother worked morning shifts and went to sleep around 8 pm because she woke up at 5 am to get to work at 6. His father worked third shift. That left RJ a lot of time “outside, being a kid, going to parks, running the streets.” It was a lot of fun. Many of his friends were in the gang called the Northside. He’d go home around 11:00 at night: “I stayed at the park with friends. I would go to parties at 14. I would try to be cool. I would try to be with the older kids, do what they were doing drinking, smoking, or do whatever.”
RJ was a follower instead of a leader. His brother is a Hall of Fame track star at Reading High. He’s a Hall of Famer at Shippensburg University. He had tons of people supporting him and helping out. To RJ, it felt as though no one cared much for him. But his friends and the streets gave him a sense of belonging.
RJ was also a good athlete, one of the top kids in Berks County and the city of Reading. He didn’t have to pay for sign-ups for a league or a sports team. Coaches wanted him on their teams. He made the Reading High Junior Varsity Basketball Team. But RJ was also “running the streets, doing what he shouldn’t be doing.”
And then he got caught by his coaches lying about the fight at the Citadel. They looked him in the eye and told him, “You got to have a why. Why are you doing this? What’s making you get up every morning? What’s making you put all your effort into basketball?” Coach Pfizer made RJ wear a light life vest working out: “So that meant that I’m drowning. My life is going
down.” The vest represented protection, but it couldn’t save him. That was up to him. The vest was a daily reminder to RJ “that the streets is not good, the gym is where I need to be, and this is the way of success. And the streets is not the way of success.”
RJ got a lot of support from Wynton Butler and Judge Tonya Butler who “took him as their third child.” He began hanging out with teammates whose “parents had standards. They were held accountable.” He walked to school with them and went home by 8:00 pm. Wynton took his son and RJ to Albright College for everyday workouts. RJ stopped hanging out with his friends in the streets, selling drugs, and just fighting. But he “never stopped loving them.” RJ is grateful for the Butlers and for his coaches: “They saved my life. They showed me why the streets weren’t important.”
RJ began to envision his life and his purpose differently at only 16 years old. He “wanted to be a good person.” He recognized the struggles his mother and father had gone through immigrating to the US from Jamaica. He wanted to “be that successful person for them.”
The next few years went well overall. RJ succeeded academically, got decent grades (as his parents insisted!), and was engaged in all his classes. He was sometimes the “class clown,” but in a good way. He stayed away from the streets. Basketball, and his teammates, were a big part of his life: “We all did everything with each other. I mean everything, really everything.”
Halfway through his senior year, RJ’s basketball team underperformed in the state tournament, losing in the Sweet 16 round. The team expected they’d do better. The coaches and the fans expected it. Everyone felt the team was “destined to go back to the tournament’s Final Four.” RJ took the loss hard, partly because he felt that some of the players “didn’t perform the way they were supposed to.” He was depressed and didn’t go to school for two weeks. He wasn’t motivated in his schoolwork: “I was just having fun with my friends, just trying to end high school and get to college and play ball.” But his grades suffered.
Some of the Division 2 schools were looking at RJ for basketball. He was recruited by Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, but now his GPA wasn’t high enough. The Bloomsburg coach and Penn State Brandywine coach came up with a plan so that RJ would go to Brandywine for a year, increase his GPA, and then transfer to Bloomsburg his sophomore year. RJ was ready and excited for college basketball.
But RJ wasn’t prepared for how college life worked: “I thought it was just like high school. In high school, you had eight periods. You went to class. I didn’t know that in college, you have one or two classes a day. So I was taking advantage. My friends and I would go to Wednesday night parties in nearby Westchester and miss classes on Thursdays.” Many of his high school friends were with him at Brandywine, and others at Westchester University. Living in a dorm, RJ “had freedom and his friends” along with other people from Berks County who went to nearby schools. They partied. RJ skipped classes and didn’t study.
On top of that, the basketball situation deteriorated. When he arrived at Brandywine in August and moved into his dorm room, RJ learned that the basketball coach who’d recruited him was gone. RJ had already paid half his tuition by that point and stayed. But RJ “was lost.” Things went downhill quickly: “The coach didn’t know of me. He only knew the players that had been there before because they won the championship. He was playing people that shouldn’t be playing over me. I got angry. I had attitude problems. I wasn’t listening. I decided, ‘Forget this. I’m going to go back to my old lifestyle.’”
A few days before his first college semester ended, RJ learned something about college he hadn’t known until then–that because of his low GPA, he would lose his scholarship. He could only come back for the spring semester if he paid $10,000 tuition. He went home for break, broke the news to his parents, and again, he watched his mom cry. She told RJ, “You’re falling in the same place you were in high school.”
That woke him up–again. RJ began to lean on his brother to learn more about what’s expected of him in college. RJ’s brother advised and “pushed” him. RJ transferred to Penn State Berks for the spring semester so he could live at home and stay away from partying. He had to take three summer classes to increase his GPA and obtain a scholarship for the fall semester. That’s when his parents had had enough. They “were done supporting him.” RJ realized he needed to change, to “stop the BS.”
RJ went to Penn State Berks in the 2018-19 academic year. He was on the basketball team. But it wasn’t a great experience for him: “People were judging Reading kids. They were saying it was all about gangs.” Coming from Reading High basketball, one of the highest level basketball high school programs in Pennsylvania, RJ came with the attitude of “I want to come to Berks and change it. I want to be the face of the program. I wanted to be the kid from Reading who changed the basketball program.” RJ admits he had “an attitude.”
Then COVID hit, and RJ had shoulder surgery. The surgeon told him he’d be out of basketball for two years, and possibly the rest of his life. RJ went through a “dark period,” thinking “‘My life is over.’ I was just at home in the dark room, door locked, music on. I was depressed, eating, getting big.” But then he had the idea: “Let me coach. Let me stay around basketball. That’s my stress-free space.”
RJ reached out to his former AAU coach, John King, who was still coaching the same AAU team. Coach King had “watched RJ grow up.” King told him, “Of course, you can coach with me.” RJ’s been coaching both in AAU and Reading High since.
When basketball began again after COVID, RJ wasn’t invited back on the Penn State Berks team. He went to Penn State Lehigh Valley and played basketball for one semester, but then realized they didn’t offer his major in Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS). Staying at Lehigh Valley to play basketball meant an added year of college to graduate. And with his older brother’s car accident, RJ felt strongly that he had to be there for his sisters: “At that point, I had to realize college is not all about basketball, not all about sports. It’s about getting education first. I came back to Berks, and I graduated.”
RJ brings his experiences and knowledge to his current job as the Reading High Junior Varsity basketball team head coach. He’s worked his way into this position first as an assistant coach followed by a development coach. Whatever the coaches needed, RJ provided, helping out the kids.
RJ remains passionate about helping out the kids. He sees their struggles and the adversity they face every day. One of his players has multiple young siblings, and if he comes home after 8 pm the door is locked, so he needs to find somewhere to sleep. Other kids don’t have food at home, so the only time to eat is at school. A lot of kids are smoking puff bars (nicotine). Some kids are smoking weed. RJ knows that these kids are looked down on by outsiders, just as he was. But these people do not know what these kids face. RJ lets his players know that he behaved similarly and regrets it. He offers other ways to reduce their stress: “either go for a jog around the city, put music on, or just call me. I’ll go open the gym and get a couple of shots up.”
The scar on his head reminds RJ how difficult it was for him to finally overcome all that held him back, including the stigma of being a “Reading kid.” Now, he’s come full circle: “When I was playing basketball in high school, the kids I coach now looked up to me. And I’ll give them what my coaches gave to me.” He tells his players his story so they’ll learn from it. He
lets them know that even if they don’t play college basketball, they should get a college degree. And he shows them the scar on his head to let them know that he messed up but used the experience to change the course of his life, despite some setbacks along the way.
Like his Reading High former coaches, RJ has committed to helping these kids find their “why” — in basketball, in school, and in life. And when they mess up, he tells them, only half-jokingly, “I’ll get the life vest on you.”