A tribute to two Tucson hoops stars

He can still smell the food, hear the laughs, and remember the stories he heard as a boy.

Now he is back in Sugar Hill, for years the largest Black neighborhood in Tucson, and a fitting place for one of its own to find his voice as an author.

“This neighborhood is a big part of who I am,” Price explains. “My parents grew up here, my grandparents were still living here, and when we’d visit on weekends I might see 70 or 80 people. Family, friends, all their kids. … Everybody knew everybody, and everyone had stories. Since my writing so far has pretty much come from my own experience, it just feels right to live here myself now.”

An emerging poet, essayist and author who has generated significant followings on YouTube and Facebook, Price has self-published five books, beginning with “My Train is On Schedule” in 2021 and “From the Observer to the Observed” in 2022.

His latest is “The Backcourt,” which profiles his father — Delano Price — and his father’s best friend, Wallace “Hoegie” Simmons. Playground legends for more than 20 years, the two are best remembered for leading Tucson High School to the Arizona state championship in 1969.

Released in January, it is a basketball story, to be sure. Even now, Price and Simmons are ranked among the best high school players in local history, but readers are equally intrigued by the backstories and family histories that form the foundation of the book.

We learn of the two families’ long-ago struggles in a segregated South, and the journey that brought them to Tucson.

We visit Sugar Hill, where the Price Family lived, and South Park — the predominantly Black neighborhood that Simmons called home.

In the end, we share in the author’s wonder that Delano Price and Hoegie Simmons could be so close — yet so very different.

“I probably started thinking about this book when I was 8 years old,” Price said. “Because of the basketball, I spent a lot of time with them growing up. Even later, after college, I was still hearing stories about them everywhere I went. After a while, it just became something I needed to do.”

Price met with aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. He interviewed former basketball players, such as Bob Elliott and Lafayette Lever, and pored over family albums to find photo clips cut from the local papers.

“Once I started writing it last year, it became an obsession with me,” Price said. “I worked on it every day. When I finished a chapter I felt good about, I’d send it to my dad to see if I had the facts right. Then I’d show it to my girlfriend. She doesn’t know anything about sports, so if both of them liked it I figured it was okay.”

The finished product is way more than okay, a 341-page tribute to two men and two families whose stories could not be more lovingly told.

Tucsonans who spend time with the sports page know Delano Price wasn’t the only basketball player in the family. Márquez himself was a Badger star, a 5-foot, 9-inch guard who led the team in scoring from 1997-2000.

Indeed, after Márquez posted a 37-point game as a sophomore in 1998, a headline in the Arizona Daily Star read: “Tucson High’s Price tops his pops.”

“I’d been playing basketball since I was old enough to walk,” Price said. “I saw myself as a basketball player, for sure. My Uncle Michael gave me a Georgetown T-shirt when I was in middle school, and my dream was to be the next Allen Iverson at Georgetown.”

Over time, though, Price began seeing another face in the mirror.

Always an honor-roll student, he had gifts as a writer that caught the attention of English teacher Chris Goldsmith.

“At the end of my first year at Tucson High, Mr. Goldsmith asked me if knew who Richard Wright was. I didn’t, so he gave me a book called ‘Native Son’ and suggested I read it over the summer. It was incredible, so I found another Richard Wright book, ‘Black Boy,’ and read that one, too. I was totally enthralled by them. When school started again in the fall, I asked Mr. Goldsmith why he’d given me the book. He said he could see Richard Wright in me. Pretty soon, I started to see myself as a writer, too.”

The throughline between then and now is hardly a straight one. Price would major in psychology and philosophy at the University of Arizona. He worked for the county probation department. He became a student advisor at Pima College.

Then, during the early days of the pandemic, an impulsive Facebook rant about George Floyd led to an essay that appeared in Kathleen Dreier’s popular “Faces of Race” series.

“In the first 48 hours we got thousands of impressions,” Price recalled. “It kinda freaked me out at first. All these people now know my thoughts?”

Luckily, it also reminded him of Mr. Goldsmith. And Richard Wright.

“We were all working from home then. It was just me and my dog alone in the house. I had plenty of time on my hands, so I bought a new laptop and started to write.”

Those early musings would become his first book, “My Train is On Schedule,” which sold well on Amazon and encouraged him to keep going.

Another collection of poems, “From Observer to the Observed,” had similar success, but Price reached a new level with “The Algorithm of a Culture,” a full-length essay he published in 2004.

An exploration of the ways Black culture and history have shaped the Black experience today, the cover features an assault rifle whose barrel is a pencil.

Price produced only 100 copies. He priced them at $100 each. He sold them all within 30 days.

Today, the 42-year-old Price manages a literary consulting company called Teach One Publishing, which promotes “authorprenourship” and helps writers produce and market new projects.

This fall, he will start working with young people at the UA Poetry Center.

“You know, I never thought I’d love anything the way I loved basketball,” Price said. “But Mr. Goldsmith was right. There may be some writer in me, too.”

Footnotes

— Now retired, Delano Price enjoyed a long career as a coach, teacher and administrator at Sunnyside, Catalina, Sahuaro and Sabino high schools.

— Hoegie Simmons would become a star at Texas A&I University, at one point scoring 50-plus points in back-to-back games.

— The Sugar Hill neighborhood is located north of East Speedway between North Stone Avenue and North First Street.