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Curtis Malone was walking down a hallway at the DC jail, shackles on his wrists, when he heard a voice he recognized.
“Coach, what are you doing here?”
Two of his former players were staring back at him. The same young men he had coached, mentored, and told to stay out of trouble. Malone had spent years building DC Assault into one of the most successful AAU basketball programs in the country while simultaneously moving heroin and cocaine between Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. In that hallway, he could not compartmentalize his life.
“I did a hell of a double life,” Malone told the audience at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, where he discussed his memoir, Duplicity: Basketball, Drugs, and My Double Life, with Chris Wright. “And these kids thought the world of me. They put me on a pedestal, and I’m like, wow, I let so many people down.”
Wright, a Georgetown alumnus, Washington Wizards broadcaster, and the first known NBA player diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, was once a 12-year-old trying out at Suitland High School under Malone’s watch. He is now a coach himself. He called the evening a “full circle moment,” and the closeness between the two men gave the conversation an intimacy that a standard interview would not have produced.
Malone co-founded DC Assault in 1993. The organization helped more than 200 young men earn full college scholarships and produced NBA players including Michael Beasley, Nolan Smith, Jeff Green, and Quinn Cook. But the program started with a simpler ambition. Growing up in Northwest DC before moving to Palmer Park, Maryland, Malone was shaped by a city where Go-Go music brought rival neighborhoods together and where the drug dealers on your block could also be the men trying to steer you right. He wanted to give kids a way forward.
“I had no idea I would end up having guys like you,” Malone told Wright. “McDonald’s All-American, one of the best players in the country, in my program. It was just about giving back and helping kids.”
Wright pressed Malone on the book's central contradiction. Malone was telling kids to make better choices while making destructive ones himself. He was coaching young men to stay off the corner while running an operation that depended on corners. In 2013, he was convicted of drug conspiracy and served seven years in federal prison.
Asked whether he would make the same decisions again, Malone did not hesitate. “No. I definitely don’t think I made the right decision. Not at all.” But then he added: “That’s the duplicity. Because with that decision, you helped out a lot of folks.”
He did not try to resolve that tension into something clean. The drug money funded some of the mentorship. The mentorship was real. The harm was also real. Malone sat with the contradiction and let the audience sit with it too.
When Wright asked why he wrote the book, Malone pointed to the media coverage during his case, which painted a picture he felt was incomplete. “I wanted people to know how I got to where I got,” he said. “From as a kid to older. There are bumps in life. I did bad things, but I don’t believe I was a bad person. I’m not a bad human being, but I did bad things.”
Malone is back in the game now. DC Assault 2.0, as Wright called it, is a reboot of the program, though Malone’s approach has changed.
“I took my head down for a while,” Malone said of his lowest moments. “But I said to myself, man, I gotta get up.”
He got up.
To view the program, click below.