Elmer Anderson got the news early Wednesday morning. His former high school teammate, soul mate and friend, Dwayne Washington — known far and wide as Pearl — had died.
It was not a surprise, yet it still came as a shock.
Washington had been fighting cancer, successfully for the most part, for the past two decades, but his health had worsened over the last year. Anderson, who was Washington’s backcourt mate at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn for two seasons, had been bracing himself for the end.
“We understood that the time was coming,” Anderson said Wednesday morning.