Sitting in front of his parents’ bed, his father, Kalman, on the mattress and his brothers spread around the room, Tamir Goodman observed the future.
“Alley-oop,” the child predicted.
A few seconds later, the aforementioned slam rocked the Baltimore bedroom. An investigation was launched. How did he know? Tamir had no answer.
Now a 43-year-old man, Goodman has the answer: severe dyslexia.
“Every time I watch a game, every time I watch a player, it still happens to me,” Goodman told Unpacked. “All of my creativity, my inventions, the way I coach the game, the way I see the game, the problem solving – everything comes from being severely dyslexic.”
It’s an issue in his daily life. Goodman struggles with anything involving words or numbers, he said. But that deficiency has enhanced his other senses. It’s what got him noticed nationally in the first place.
Finding basketball
Before Goodman became the first Orthodox Jewish NCAA Division I basketball player, or the first Orthodox Jewish Israeli professional basketball player, or one of the most publicized high school athletes in American history, he was a lanky Orthodox Jewish kid pursuing his purpose.
When he was 8, Goodman tagged along to one of his older brother’s basketball practices. He never left. Goodman got to school early and left late to get in training sessions. After a bad bicycle accident put him in the hospital for an extended time, he was in his backyard jumping rope on his first day home – much to the chagrin of his mother, Chava.
But she, and his father, supported their son’s passion.
“At 9, I told them I wanted to be a professional player and a Division I player on a scholarship, and they supported me 1 million percent, even though we were in an Orthodox home,” Goodman explained. “There was no conflict there.”
As an eighth grader, Goodman started at point guard for a nearby Yeshiva high school. He was on his way to fulfilling his dreams. Until a rabbi approached him and advised him to put more focus on his studies and less on the court.
“He said. ‘Look, you love the game, but realistically, where are you going with it?’” Goodman recounted. “I thought, ‘Maybe he’s right.’ So, I quit.”
Rather than remain in Baltimore and play basketball, Goodman enrolled at the Yeshiva of Pittsburgh for intense Jewish study. On the first day of class, the rabbi spoke to the student body. He told them that everybody is brought into this world with a mission, and their mission is to use their physical talents, abilities, and surroundings to partner with God and create a better world. “Why am I ignoring basketball,” Goodman recalled thinking. “I should be playing basketball and uplifting the game.”
He couldn’t leave immediately – as much as he begged his mother, she insisted he stay. He had made a commitment that he couldn’t back out of. So while he spent his year at Yeshiva, Goodman squeezed in as much practice time as possible.
When he went home for Passover, he had a growth spurt to show off. Now standing at about 6-foot-3, Goodman impressed his childhood and future coach, Harold Katz, at the local gym. That added fuel to the fire.
Goodman made good on his personal promise and had a strong sophomore season at the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore. That summer going into his junior year, Katz took Goodman to a local open gym to test himself against college players.
“I was probably 16, they were 19, 20, 21,” Goodman said. “They were stripping the ball, and I was getting frustrated. I slapped my hand against the mats on the wall behind the hoop. I started crying a little – I was really frustrated that night.”
Katz gave it to him straight – they didn’t have to be there. They could go home. But if Goodman wanted to play college basketball, he would have to face this size and strength. So, did he want to go home?
“I wiped my face off, and I got back out there,” Goodman said. “I ended up playing pretty well, and that summer was a big breakthrough for me.”
Welcome to the circus
Some major camps were taking notice, and Goodman began receiving invitations. Not everyone got the memo.
“I’d be there with my kippah, my tzitzit, and my kosher food, and no one would know me. Everyone thought I was lost,” he explained. “I remember one guy telling me, ‘Did you not know this is an invitational camp, you can’t just show up here.’”
It was a tough image to overcome. Goodman had to set himself apart on the court to blend in better off. It took one moment, and he attributed it directly to his dyslexia.
“One pass changed all of it,” he said. “…I saw a little hole in the defense and managed to throw the ball behind my back from one side of the court to the other in between defenders. That pass caught the attention of the coaches, who weren’t even recruiting me – they came for other players. But off that one pass, they started focusing on me. It was a dyslexic pass. I just saw an opening that others probably wouldn’t see.”
That sparked his college recruitment and a whole lot more. Goodman rose to national prominence, garnering attention from media giants Sports Illustrated, 60 Minutes, ESPN, CNN, and beyond. He was the “Jewish Jordan,” as dubbed by SI’s Michael Bamberger in 1999. Maryland, one of the country’s premier programs at the time, offered him a scholarship. Suddenly, an Orthodox kid from a 72-student all-boy Jewish day school became an overnight sensation.
The microscope zeroed. People knew him. There were expectations. There was intrigue. There was inhumanity.
Goodman recalled one instance when a well-known journalist came to his house for an interview and asked the teenager if he thought he was a modern-day Moses. Already undergoing the impact of the “Jewish Jordan” label, the basketball phenom was scared to respond. He told the reporter he couldn’t answer. Goodman claims that the journalist said he would be “a perfect athlete for the 90s,” then stormed off.
“That hurt, because I wasn’t trying to be arrogant, I just didn’t want to get hurt with that type of question,” Goodman said. “There were a lot of situations like that. Being asked questions like that and all the crazy media stuff that I experienced at a young age, it was pretty out of control.”
Simultaneously, Goodman was struggling to pass his SATs. The dyslexia that fostered incredible advantages on the court was a scholarship roadblock. On top of that concern, the fear of the media finding out was further anxiety ignition.
Survival
His relationships grounded him: with his family, with his community, and with Hashem. Goodman ran basketball clinics to make some extra cash, then paid an expert tutor $50 an hour to help him. He stayed in the gym, grinding to maximize his potential. He held ironclad on preserving the sanctity of Shabbat – not as a check for the Jewish people in the macro box of life, but as a personal stance in his relationship with Hashem.
“I grew up hearing about Holocaust survivors who had to get a new job every week, because they would get fired every Friday or Saturday for not wanting to work on Shabbat,” Goodman explained. “These people got to America with nothing, and they would still find a new job every Monday. I don’t know if it’s because of stories like those, but something about Shabbat is a special mitzvah for me personally. That really pushed me a lot in training.”
Both of his mother’s parents experienced the Holocaust. His saba had his first wife and baby taken from him by the Nazis. His savta, Roza Sheffer, was ripped from Yugoslavia to Auschwitz with her sister and parents. Only the two sisters survived. Naturally, this had a profound impact on the family for generations, especially with savta living in Goodman’s home when he was growing up.
Goodman kept Sheffer’s spirit of choosing joy despite tragedy close to his chest as he engaged in “survival mode” through his high school years, he said. After his junior year, Talmudical told him that if he stayed at the school, it would close its basketball team – the media frenzy that orbited Goodman was too much to handle. Resolved to remain on the court, Goodman and Katz began the hunt for an alternative, somewhere that wouldn’t play on Shabbat. They found it in Takoma Academy, a high school of Seventh-Day Adventist faith, a Protestant denomination of Christianity that observes Saturday as the Sabbath.
Goodman was the only Jewish kid in a school composed of mostly Black Christian students, and it worked out perfectly. The basketball star said that he is still close with his teammates from that season, and he is happy with his Christian high school diploma.
All the hard work hitting the books paid off, too. Goodman received the minimum SAT score he needed to get a scholarship. He committed to Maryland, the program he grew up admiring.
Things fall apart
Once Goodman announced his Terrapin intentions, other schools stopped their pursuits. What seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime in College Park collapsed when it became apparent during a meeting at Cole Field House that the Terps wouldn’t allow the player off on Shabbat, plank-walking him to uncertainty with millions of eyeballs on his back.
Towson tossed a lifeline. Head coach Mike Jaskulski and his assistant came to the Goodman home, pulled out a calendar, and marked down the dates of the Jewish holidays – even down to sundown times. It wasn’t an easy translation, but the dedication made the difference to the player.
The program adjusted its 2000-01 schedule to accommodate Goodman’s needs as best as possible. The player said he is still very tight with his teammates from his freshman year, which includes people from a wide array of backgrounds. Goodman said he and his former roommate, a Muslim named Muhammad, hang up the phone professing their mutual love to this day.
Towson fired Jaskulski in 2001, and things did not go well between Goodman and the replacement. A locker room incident that traumatized the player was the end of his time with the Tigers seven games into the 2001-02 campaign. It was a massive blow.
“I felt like I had been through so much to get to that point, and I finally got to the point where things were finally great in my life after all this navigating,” Goodman said. “It was very hard at a young age to bounce back from that. I was broken: emotionally, physically, and spiritually.”
Goodman believes he still hasn’t fully healed from it. Sometimes when he’s sleeping, his brain will go back in time, and it will play out his sophomore and junior years at Towson. But that’s the part of his mind he can’t control.
“That happens subconsciously,” he said. “Consciously, thank God everything worked out.”
The turning point
Goodman’s ultimate departure from college basketball resulted in a professional playing career in Israel for Maccabi Tel Aviv, Giv’at Shmuel, Elitzur Kiryat Ata, Maccabi Shoham, and Maccabi Haifa.
In addition, he has invented multiple basketball products, like NBA-embraced training device Zone190, the first-ever moisture wicking and antimicrobial net, and moisture-wicking tzitzit. He runs basketball clinics in the United States and Israel, authored “Triple Threat,” an autobiography infused with spirituality and practical basketball tips, and has another book coming out soon called “Live Your Dream,” which aims to show kids how their hurdles can be their successes.
Notably: it put him on the path to his wife, Judy, and the five children they share together in Jerusalem today.
“It’s a Jewish concept to channel your challenges into a hidden blessing,” Goodman said. “Sometimes, God sends us challenges, because overcoming those specific challenges, that’s where we find our calling in life.”
Rugs find their way from under his feet. Injuries prematurely derailed Goodman’s professional playing career and robbed him of portions of what should have been his prime, and the business world has tested his mettle. Dyslexia lingers. It hasn’t been easy – it’s been meaningful.
“Every time I go through it, I say there was something to learn here, some type of growth here,” Goodman explained. “God’s not mad at me, just telling me there’s more growth I have to go through to reach my potential, which is ultimately why we’re here. I don’t think I would want to serve a God that I understood everything that God did.”
