Quincy Wilder’s past is scattered on the floor.

In a loose pile against the wall are newspaper articles his mom clipped and saved from his once-promising basketball career: the player of the year awards, the interest from Louisville, Connecticut and Washington, the limitless future foreshadowed in each story.

Advertisement

These relics make him laugh. He hasn’t played a basketball game, pickup or otherwise, in years.

“Look at that,” he says, holding up a crunchy article from 1999 in which he was named one of Tacoma’s top 100 prep athletes of the century. “The paper’s brown. That’s crazy, right?”

The other pile of papers is from Wilder’s second act. Some he wrote in longhand, some on a computer, some he banged out on an actual typewriter. All emerged from his 13 years in prison, all look back on his journey from the No. 1 high school player in Washington to Idaho inmate No. 82642, and all point in the same direction:

Toward the mistakes that he made. The things that he learned.

Those 5 minutes it took me to go to the store and get beer changed my life forever. At the time I didn’t think anything of it. I figured it was like any other time that I got into a scuffle and nothing happened.

Man, he was wild. That’s what he says inside a suburban natural grocer with a vegan-friendly deli and vegan salad dressing, which he doesn’t put on his salad because he inspects the ingredients and sees soy. Quincy Wilder, now 41, doesn’t mess with soy.

He’s been vegan for months now, and he loves it. He has more energy, fewer headaches. It took, and still takes, the type of discipline he definitely didn’t have before, and he loves that, too. Because of his diet — and the fact he gets up before the sun to work out several times a week — he still looks like he could go get buckets.

Which is what he was really, really good at back in the day.

The basketball coaches in the state of Washington — not to mention the Tacoma News Tribune, Seattle P-I and just about every other newspaper in the state — named Wilder the player of the year in 1996. The Seattle Times once described him as the “anointed savior of University of Washington basketball,” where would have played had his grades been good enough. Instead, he spent two years at Highline Community College and another year at USC.

Advertisement

Some in the Seattle basketball community still insist he’s one of the best high school players they’ve ever seen.

Or, more specifically, the best who never made it big.

“He’s up there with Jason Kidd and Derrick Rose as far as some of the most competitive, on-court, in-game players I have ever been around,” says Brian Scalabrine, Wilder’s college teammate who played 11 years in the NBA. “The only problem with Quincy was he wasn’t like that off the court as well. He was a warrior, but he wasn’t a worker. And if he was a worker, our conversation right now would not be this.”

Yeah, he was wild. Out of control even. It was like there were two Quincy Wilders: the one who was a pleasure to coach and play with on the court and the one who found, but always seemed to escape, trouble away from it.

Then one night in the summer of 1999, Wilder drove to a convenience store in Tacoma to pick up beer. He’d just left USC and was about to head to Boise State, but for the first time his work ethic was starting to match his talent: two-a-days, midnight workouts, keys to the gym. Earlier that summer he’d worked out against NBA players Michael Redd and Jason Hart and balled out. After so many twists and turns, so many setbacks and disappointments, he believed he was finally on his way.

But first he wanted to have a good time, and so that summer night he was smoking and drinking with friends. Around 10 p.m., a teenager either approached Wilder at the store and asked him to buy beer, or was approached by Wilder, who wanted gas money. Either way, both parties agreed on what happened next: Wilder punched the teenager in the face, knocking out his tooth, then took the kid’s money and drove away.

Like he said, man, he was wild.

He spent 11 months in prison for assault and robbery.

On his first night after his release, Wilder jumped right back into his old ways, drinking and smoking with friends. He later met up for lunch with Joe Callero, his coach for two seasons at Highline Community College.

Advertisement

Callero liked Wilder; he was polite and fun and easy to coach. Callero thought if Wilder could just refine his jump shot, he had all the other tools to play in the NBA. But when Callero met with Wilder to talk about where and how he would continue playing basketball after prison, he was disappointed. Wilder told him prison “wasn’t that bad,” which wasn’t what Callero was hoping to hear.

Maybe it was just a front, but Callero left lunch feeling a little uneasy.

My family has a tradition of being locked up … I often wondered if I had been cursed with the troubled gene like many other of my relatives. I was continuing a legacy that I didn’t want to be a part of. Like they say, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

The hustle has always been in him. Back in 7th grade, Wilder sold gum at school, where it was banned: his own little black market. He also sold candy, looking for any chance to make a few bucks.

Money drove everything. He watched his parents struggle and decided that was not for him. He always wanted to take care of them, to buy his mom the big house. He believed it was his responsibility — his duty, even — to look after his family, so he put that pressure on his shoulders and wore it, the undercurrent of his life.

After he got out of prison, he played a year of NAIA basketball at The Evergreen State College, an experimental liberal arts school in Olympia where students didn’t have majors or receive grades. At one point, Wilder, then 23, scored 30 points in four straight home games, dropping a school-record 43 in another game.

By the end of college, his basketball options were limited. He gave overseas a shot, but that didn’t last. He tried out for the Idaho Stampede in the CBA, but was cut. His basketball career was over, and he knew it.

Near the end of 2005, Vincent Askew, the former Sonic, was named coach and director of basketball operations for the Tacoma Navigators of the ABA. He wanted Wilder to join his team. Wilder asked how much he’d make, and when he heard Askew’s answer, he told him thanks but no. He couldn’t do it for so little money.

Nobody is invincible or untouchable like I thought I was at one time. My mom and dad were devastated.

Advertisement

A year later, he was arrested with $106,000 of cocaine and a half-pound of marijuana, for which he was sentenced to 25 years.

Twenty-five years, man. All because he chased that easy, fast money.

“Quincy’s story is a tragedy,” his high school coach, Keith Cooper, told the Olympian years ago. “No one has fallen further.”

Wilder calls the arrest and sentencing his defining moment: a gut check. Would he continue down that path and live a life of chaos? Or would he change?

In prison, he wrote frantically about his life, jotting down anything and everything that popped in his mind, which helped him reflect on his past. He also spent a lot of time visualizing his life post-prison.

How do I come out of here better? he asked himself over and over. How can I use this and better myself and write these things that I’ve done?

He worked a graveyard shift as a janitor, trained dogs, worked in the woodshop and sold cars at a dealership as part of a work-release program. “OK, this is what people do,” he realized. “People work jobs!” Before, he had always been too ashamed to work a normal job because, well, what would people think? Now, he liked the sense of accomplishment.

At the car dealership he learned the importance of a credit score and building relationships with clients. Whenever he made a sale, he’d check in with the buyer every few months because who knows when that extra touch might lead to a referral? Along the way, he taught himself Spanish and saved enough money to buy a car two weeks before he got out.

He served 13 years, and when he was released in December 2018, he thought about selling cars again because he was good and knew the hustle. But did it make him happy?

His girlfriend gave him a passion planner, and in May 2019 he wrote down his wishes and goals:

• One-year plan: Invest in the housing market, travel out of the country one time, do some public speaking inside a prison.
• Three-year plan: Own a house, work with prison recidivism.
• Lifetime plan: Take care of my family, run multiple businesses, travel frequently to Spanish-speaking countries.

Around that same time, he grabbed lunch with Joe Callero again. He told his old coach he wanted to train and work with kids. So they talked about business taxes and how to find places to train, all the details Wilder was trying to learn. He knew it would take time to build his business, and he was OK with that.

Advertisement

Callero left that lunch beaming about Quincy Wilder’s future.

My final night in prison…Can’t sleep…Listening to old rhythm and blues on my mp3 player, thinking about what I’ve been through and the next phase of my life. 

On a rainy, foggy Sunday morning, Wilder drove to a gym south of Seattle. He had four training sessions lined up that day with clients ranging in age from elementary school to a freshman in high school. One of the sessions he did for free. The girl couldn’t afford to pay, but he believes in her and wanted to help.

His first session, he had two young girls and a young boy. When the boy first showed up, he was so raw that Wilder started with the absolute basics, but over time the boy slowly opened up and got a little better. Wilder smiles when he talks about watching that process. It does something for him, he says, something for his soul.

His mom films every session with a little video recorder so he can go back and evaluate both his clients and himself. His stepdad hands out tangerines, bubble gum and encouragement. When he’s not working, his younger brother helps out, too.

Wilder still has big ambitions, but now they focus on investments, credit scores, homeownership and using his story to reach someone like him all those years ago.

In this year’s passion planner, he wrote: “study or take a nutrition course online, 100 new clients, share my story on a stage.”

Wilder wants his drills to push the limit so he designs them to be uncomfortable. In his first session with the boy and the two girls, that meant dribbling two balls at once, all while walking forward and backward and alternating dribbles with each hand.

A lot of times, he sees kids drop their heads when they mess up, so after he watched balls collide and scatter across the court, he stopped the drill.

Advertisement

“Just because you make a mistake, that’s not bad,” he said. “’Cause why?”

“You can learn from them,” one of the girls blurted out; clearly, this wasn’t the first time he had made this point.

“That’s right,” he said, smiling. “You can learn from mistakes.”

(Photo: Jayson Jenks / The Athletic)