My Friend God

The Story of The OG Who Became A Mensch

If you’re like me, you’re probably getting a little fed-up with some of the recent stories about the crisis in masculinity (except for the one posted by my wife here: https://pegtyre.substack.com/p/alex-pretti-and-another-kind-of-masculinity). You’d think the only role models are either celebrities, shmucks, or both.

But I want to tell you about a friend of mine, who is not a celebrity or a shmuck but what in Yiddish is known as a mensch: a person who has acted with integrity and decency. And he’s done it far from the spotlight.

God Shammgod has been my buddy for more than 40 years. You may know his name because his son – also God Shammgod – was an NYC playground basketball legend, a star point guard at Providence College in the 90s and then an assistant coach in the NBA – first with the Dallas Mavericks, now with the Orlando Magic. If you’ve seen players do that flashy cross-dribble called the Shamm, he’s the inventor. And he’s gotten even more press lately because he just published a lively autobiography called The Word of God

I got to know Shammgod the father back in the early 80s when I was a young writer trying to make a name for myself. I asked a cop in the NYPD Gang Intelligence Unit what was the roughest crew in the city. He said, “the Five Percenters.” My dim understanding was that this was an off-shoot of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, which went further in believing that 85 percent of the human race is mentally benighted, ten percent are parasites, and five percent are “gods” meant to dominate (if that sounds extreme to you, read the Bible and the Koran more closely).

Anyway, I figured these guys must be bad ass, which would make me bad ass for finding them and writing about them. Somehow I got wind of the fact that they were having a big rally in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, and I showed up thinking I was all that just for being there. And yes, I discovered that some Five Percenters are thugs, just as some Jews are thugs and some Christians are thugs. But most of the people I met that night were - I was chagrined to discover - the salt of the earth.

I’m talking about taxpayers, sidewalk-sweepers, responsible parents, civil servants, and pillars of the community. People you would love to have as your neighbors. Which was crushing for me, at the time, because I was hoping to write a hyper-violent, modern-day Gangs of New York.

Instead, I met guys like Shammgod, an extremely-imposing native of Harlem with a very deep voice and a gentle manner that you do not want to disturb without good reason.

He wasn’t always like that. Here’s how his son describes him in his book: “Like a lot of the OGs of his era, coming up in the 1960s and ’70s, he was an activist, an intellectual, a street philosopher, a fighter, a boxing trainer, a Muslim, and one hell of a disciplinarian. If you’re familiar with the Black Panthers, then you got a taste of what my father and my friends were all about. To them, Black Power was not some catchphrase on a T-shirt. It wasn’t no fashion statement. It was what they were living every single day, for real.”

He was no goddamn choir boy, as Shammgod will tell you himself. One night in the 70s, he used a new guy with his otherwise-experienced robbery crew at a Times Square hotel job, a closet door didn’t get locked properly, and someone got out to call the police before the getaway was made. Shammgod got collared for a second time in his criminal career. He did a five year bid upstate, leaving the three kids he had at that point to deal with the streets of New York in the 70s and chaos in their mother’s home. According to Shamm the son’s book, the wounds from that separation took a while to heal.

After his release, Shammgod the father very nearly blew his shot at redemption by skipping meetings with his parole officer. But a couple people in the system saw some potential in him and cut him a break. He eventually pulled himself together and landed a tech job at Verizon, where he spent 27 years working hard and paying his taxes, while devoting much of his spare time helping his community as a social worker. So the next time somebody tells they don’t believe in second chances, bear that in mind.

My favorite story from that period is about how Shamm once got into a conflict with five hulking boys at a group home for troubled youth where he was helping out. Shamm very calmly told the boys they might beat the crap out of him on that particular night, but he had seven children of his own, four of them sons, and “at least one of them goes to school with you all.” So whatever beef they were starting right then would get settled painfully for each of them in the long run. The boys decided to back down and do what Shammgod told them.

Anyway, Shamm’s got a lot of stories like that, but I want to tell you the one that truly makes his life exceptional.

A few months after 9/11, Shamm met a phone company supervisor named Diane Beatty at a Verizon conference. Though he was single at the time, deeply experienced in relationships and not necessarily looking for another one, something about her kindness and sincerity clicked with him. But she quickly let him know it was a package deal, and one that many men would not accept: She had a solidly-built, fourteen-year-old autistic son named Ahaziah.

“She didn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who was just in it for her,” Shammgod says. “She needed someone who was interested in her kid.

So the first time, Shammgod dropped Diane off at her home, he asked her to send the kid outside to talk to him.

“Diane said, ‘he’s getting older. He needs a man talking to him about man things. Not a woman.’ So I just called him over and said, ‘My name is Shammgod. You want to hang out sometime?’ He said, ‘yeah.’ And I said, gimme a hug and have a nice day. And that was it.”

From then on, they were together as a family. “I told him what I needed him to do. At first, Diane didn’t like it. Because mothers protect their children. She made sure he got his dinner at 5:30 every night. But when I came in the picture, I changed all that. I said, ‘let’s give him a window and let him pick the time inside it. And then if he doesn’t choose, he gets a bowl of cereal and that’s it.’ Same with a haircut. If he wants it, he asks for it. And that’s how he learned to be independent and speak for himself.”

They were together four and a half years. As in any family, there were times of ebb and flow; plans to get married were on and off the table. Diane’s mother, in particular, was a vocal skeptic. But Shammgod really wanted the chance to raise another child, having missed some of his own kids’ formative years. He not only became Diane’s life partner, he made raising Ahaziah his primary goal, riding herd on the counselors at the kid’s special school and coming up with his own game plans as a social worker.

In the summer of 2007, Diane came home from work and told Shammgod she’d read a newspaper article about ovarian cancer. “She told she had three out of the four symptoms,” he recalls. It turned out she had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The hard conversations about life after life began with Shamm. “I said, ‘I said, listen, I don’t care about no money. You just make sure I get this kid.’” They got married on August 31, 2007. Less than three months later, Diane was gone, five days after her 49^th birthday.

Shammgod was good to his word. He raised Ahaziah as a single dad for the next six years. And when he got together with another strong capable woman named Earthly Paradise, Ahaziah, who by then was 22, was a nonnegotiable part of the deal.

That was fifteen years ago. Nowadays, Ahaziah is 37 and lives independently about 20 minutes away from Shamm and his wife in New Jersey. He has his own apartment and works as a contract packer and cleaner. It’s not the glamour profession, but AI isn’t going to take away his job. He talks to Shamm and Earthly every day

Earthly Paradise, Ahaziah, and Shammgod

Maybe that doesn’t impress you. Maybe you’re more interested in what Joe Rogan or Elon Musk or LeBron James have accomplished. Or maybe you think the whole idea of the patriarchy is terrible and traditional masculine identity is toxic.

But we’re living in a dark time and the only thing that gives me hope is our ability as individuals to change and do better. This guy put a life of crime behind him, became a solid citizen, tried to help his community, and raised an autistic boy who wasn’t biologically his son to be a man standing on his own two feet. And if that doesn’t make him an OG and a mensch in your book, then we are in different libraries.

Coming soon: The story of Shammgod’s friend Hakeim Yamadi and an act of forgiveness that will blow your mind.