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BN: So I want to jump ahead a few years and ask you about the basketball and how the YB team came about.

NN: I guess we could talk basketball, right? And I think you're probably like me, where you kind of grew up with it? So like I grew up with sports, and I think that's one thing that me and my pop had...

[Interruption]

NN: We didn't ever talk a lot, but we would watch sports stuff together. And he took me to the Rams game, free football for kids, and I think he took me to the Coliseum to see the Dodgers, and we went to the sports arena to watch the Lakers kind of thing when we first got out here. And then I like sports, because it was like a release for me. So I guess playing basketball was fun, and I played on the school team and so forth. I guess I got older when I went to College of Visalia when I started to get healthy. Mentally and physically, I played on the team, the junior college team up there.

[Interruption]

BN: So you were talking about your dad and Rams and Lakers games.

NN: So sports has been part of my makeup. And like when I was working sometimes in the summertime, that I got a job with Youth Services to work at a playground, right around different communities and stuff, like I'm working with kids, or supervising kids in the summertime during activities and stuff, so I would prefer working with young people than old people because young people really don't have no hidden agendas more or less. So there's some purity to it, and then teaching... like one thing that I probably know about internally, instinctively, would be like sports things. So I think through sports, you could not only teach certain skills, transferable skills, but also different concepts like teamwork, brotherhood, sisterhood, things that could actually translate to something larger than just a win or a loss kind of thing. And I guess you could do that in art and theater or a whole lot of different endeavors, that maybe sports is one of the ways for me to provide that to younger people. So part of working with young people like the Yellow Brotherhood basketball things, and especially when you're working with families of like minds, that when we started a Yellow Brotherhood basketball team, because I think at that time like when my oldest was like five years old, that it would be good for him to get the opportunity to play. And a lot of my former comrades and friends and movement-minded people, that they all have kids, families the same age. So it was kind of like a perfect storm. Like you had, Sandy and Kenwood lives over there, Bob and Karen Nakamura lives over there. So, I mean, it was a really good fit. I had friends in Gardena, that's where we were living in initially at the time. And there was no thing about, you know what? We got to win, playing time. But we won. [Laughs] We won, but more than that, I think we kind of won in life. So on that end, for my firstborn son, Brett, it was from five years old all the way to high school that we grew together. We grew together, and no longer did we have a strong geographic community. But it was a good sense of community.

BN: So how many years in total did you... and you were coaching this team. So was it pretty much just that span from like age five to high school?

NN: Well, you know, before I even had kids, I was coaching other kids for this Tiger organization.

BN: Okay, so you've been doing this a long time.

NN: Yeah.

BN: Maybe you don't want to answer this, but of course, Tad, Nakamura's son, becomes a filmmaker, and one of his first projects is a film on the team. What was your reaction to that or what did that make you feel?

NN: It was a good movie. Yeah, it was a good movie, and that was Tad's initial chops. Yeah, he did a very outstanding... it was a really good film, and I thought it was a good story and Tad did his research. I'm like a proud parent, it was good.

BN: And it did launch his career.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.