Garrett Temple Rumors

The community needed to let the players know the pain that was roiling the city in the wake of the police shooting death of an unarmed 22-year-old man, Stephon Clark, in his grandmother’s back yard March 18. “We did a few word association games,” Temple said Saturday night. “One of them was ‘safe places,’ and people started saying things to us: ‘mom’s house,’ ‘church.’ I yelled out ‘basketball gym.’ People were yelling out certain musicians, like you go somewhere to listen to certain musicians to feel better. One kid, he had to be 12, and he wrote a rap. He wrote it on the spot. He wrote ‘the safest place for a black boy is in the grave.’ And when he said that, me, Doug and Vince was like, man, that’s crazy. He just wrote this in the last 10 minutes. That was what was on his mind.”