![]() ![]() "Sometimes I wake up and it feels like a dream that I'm still here. "Every day is a depressing day," Jordan says. They speak about life behind bars, a life Jordan had never experienced until his arrest in June 2016. They speak of one of Jordan's younger brothers, Nieeam Edwards, a budding 15-year-old basketball player in Philadelphia who grew up idolizing Jordan, and who Jordan worries may be tempted by the streets. They speak of the new apartment his mother, Amina Robinson, moved into a couple weeks before to get far away from their rough old neighborhood. They speak of when Rysheed's mother taught him to make fried chicken when he was nine years old, so he could feed his younger siblings when his single mother was at work. Sitting in his cell all day on his 23rd birthday because the jail was on lockdown and knowing that his family was throwing him a party on the outside, watching Jordan's old highlight videos on YouTube and eating red velvet cake, his favorite.Ī guard opens the door to the visitor's room, and Jordan, wearing an orange jumpsuit, a full inch of beard growth and 10 extra pounds, walks in. John's close loss to eventual national champion Duke. Talking with another inmate who raved to Jordan about his nationally televised game in 2015 when Jordan scored 16 points in the first half of St. Those stretches are interrupted by small, painful reminders of what his outside world was like: reading a magazine story about NBA lottery pick Kris Dunn, a friend who was one of Jordan's contemporaries as a collegiate star and NBA prospect in the Big East. Inside here are meals Jordan doesn't find fit for a dog and phone calls to family that last 15 minutes before he's cut off and long stretches of boredom and depression. Inside here is the constant sense of danger, the very real threat that if Jordan crosses the wrong person, he could be attacked, like the inmate he saw stabbed in the neck the other day. Inside here are accused rapists and murderers and gang members among the 100 men in his cellblock. And inside here, instead of being excited about his upcoming NBA season, Jordan is excited for something much more mundane: He got a new job cleaning the jail's gym during the morning, which means if he gets his work done quickly, he can lift some weights, run some sprints and put up some shots. An NBA career seemed just around the bend. He was a big, shifty, tough-nosed point guard who had innate court vision and played tenacious defense. He was a former top-20 recruit in the same heralded recruiting class as Andrew Wiggins and Jabari Parker. John's basketball team, second on the team in scoring and first in assists while playing under the bright lights of Madison Square Garden. Two-and-a-half years ago, he was starring for the St. Inside here, Jordan stays up at night, wondering how it all went so wrong. The attorney had been trying to get Jordan home on house arrest so he can help his sickly mother and six younger siblings, but more than a year after his arrest, he's still inside here, still awaiting a trial, still uncertain whether the outside world has forgotten him. And if it is his attorney waiting on the other side of that door, Jordan is ready to give him a piece of his mind. As the guard escorts Jordan past the fellow inmates he's lived alongside since he was arrested on an attempted murder charge (among others) last year, past the small television hanging from the stairs where he watched the NBA Finals a few days before, the man people once called the Prince of North Philly wonders who will be waiting for him inside the 5-by-10 white cinder block room next to the guard station. The guard strides up to Rysheed Jordan's cell and rouses the 23-year-old. ![]() Inside his small, spare, two-man cell, the Prince of North Philly is taking a nap.Ī guard walks past the communal area, where a handful of metal tables are bolted to the linoleum floor. ![]()
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