Mitchell, left, and Marshall, right, eating mud pies on Ensenada Court in South Mission Beach, San Diego, CA circa 1962
This is the last poem to be penned
Composed in syllables of eight
The final entry in our blog
Now shuttered by the hands of fate
This is the cherry on the top
The closing run of our sad play
Shakespearean as clever fools
With nothing really left to say
That destiny should find us here
To bleed like mad from every pore
The bitter last and dying nail
For talking twins who talk no more
It came out of left field
Like a fatal disease
A hard shattering fact
Not a word could appease
It came out of left field
Like a grim coup de grace
A sad backstabbing truth
Of the lines he would cross
It came out of left field
Like a cruel kiss of death
A deep heartbreaking wound
To my last dying breath
All men must go
All men must die
Beyond the reach
of knowing why
All men must fade
All men must yield
Beyond the reach
of kismet sealed
All men must fall
All men must leave
Beyond the reach
of last reprieve
I'm in big trouble now, again
Between a rock and a hard place
On the verge of calling it quits
Afraid to say it to her face
I'm on the wrong road now, again
Skidding along a dead man's curve
On a steep and slippery slope
Going for broke without the nerve
I'm in the crosshairs now, again
Under my seesaw of a thumb
On the brink of catastrophe
Alone and scared of what may come
Were it not for you
Crowding up the womb
Mucking up the works
Bringing down the room
Were it not for you
Trouble with a T
Turning on a dime
Roaming fancy-free
Were it not for you
Breaking every rule
Lacking self-control
Acting like a fool
Were it not for you
Brother with a B
Living like a clone
Copycatting me
Sure, you can tell me things I don't already know
but they absolutely must be solely about science
Sure, all your other thoughts and opinions can blow
because personal beliefs aren't scientifically reliant
Unless you can agree everything's a science show
your judgmental notions won't be conjuring up truth
I previously explained science carries all of my faith
Just when I thought we would make it
Bad choices in life took their toll
We kicked the bad habits in time
But suffered too much on the whole
Just when I thought we had made it
Old age made us stop and think twice
We smoked the peace pipe in the end
But ten more years sure would be nice
We're going to slide like duck shit
with a croak pushing excrement out
slipping uncomfortably into something
our in memoriam resembles no doubt
I'm a heart attack waiting to happen
A blood clot away from fading out fast
I'm worn out and ready for the bone yard
My face a poster for things that don't last
I'm an embolus ready for action
On high angina pectoris alert
I'm so bloated and stiff and arthritic
Like rigid road kill in postmortem dirt
I'm an LAD artery pending
A widow maker made for leave-taking
I'm done for in mind, body, and spirit
My final curtain call in the making
Mitchell Evan Lilly (born June 19, 1959) is an American former high school basketball standout at James Madison High School in San Diego, California. Mitchell became the county's first 30-points-a-game scorer, setting two prep records by averaging 31.9 points per game and scoring 61 points in a single game. Named the 1977 CIF Player of the Year, he appeared in the April issue of Sports Illustrated's Faces in the Crowd.
Mitchell picked up the game of basketball in the sixth grade at Mission Beach Elementary school in South Mission Beach, where he and his identical twin brother, Marshall Earl Lilly, learned how to dribble, pass, and shoot on an outdoor fan-shaped backboard and halfcourt on the blacktop of the outdoor playground area. The school closed in 1973.
The naturally coordinated and quick-footed 11-year-olds might have picked up any other sport better suited to their white men can't jump athletic prowess, including tennis or surfing, but as fate would have it they they fell in love with hoops.
Of all sports, they chose the sport of biologically engineered Africans.
Early Life and Education
During his development years as a somewhat agile but physically limited future high school basketball star, Mitchell and his twin brother Marshall honed their skills practicing and playing on various courts and teams from their elementary and middle schools, local churches, Boys Clubs, and recreation centers.
During the 1972-73 season, their father, Thomas Earl Lilly (February 2, 1928-March 7, 2013) moved the family to Iceland, where he worked for one year as a civil engineer at Naval Air Station Keflavik. A massive and fully equipped basketball gymnasium on the base became Mitchell and Marshall's second home.
Then 13, the twins spent countless hours playing pickup games with older men and also competed in their combined school's league for eighth graders. Marshall, whose skills and knack for the game had by this time Mitchell's, earned a position as a starting guard on the junior varsity squad.
The following year, Mitchell's family, including his father, Thomas, his mother, Marsha Ann Lilly (September 11, 1935-April 16, 2016), his older brother Byron Joseph Lilly (born June 14, 1957), and his younger sister Anne Grace Lilly (born July 9, 1963) returned to San Diego, where Mitchell and Marshall graduated from the ninth grade at Pacific Beach Middle School.
As ninth graders, the twins excelled in physical education class and displayed above average athletic ability and competitiveness in a number of other sports, including over-the-line, a bat-and-ball sport first played in Mission Beach in the 1950s.
Together with a third player, the twins won the Old Mission Beach Athletic Club (OMBAC) junior tournament in the summer of 1973.
High School Career
In his sophomore year at Mission Bay High School, Mitchell struggled to keep up with his hoop savvier brother. Both twins made the varsity squad, but at the start of the 1974-75 season Marshall was a first string guard and Mitchell was a scrub sitting on the bench.
Several games into the season, the twins' mother, Marsha, visited Mission Bay Buccaneers coach Larry Willis in the coaches' office. She explained to coach Willis how devastating and demoralizing it was for Mitchell to watch his identical twin brother get unlimited playing time. She told coach Willis that she could not allow one of her twins to suffer the emotional trauma of going through an entire season sitting on the pine, and begged Willis to make Mitchell a starter.
Willis agreed, and Mitchell played on the first team for the rest of the season. The Bucs finished the rebuilding year somewhere in the middle of Coastal League, but Mitchell gained valuable experience to improve his skills and stay a step behind his slightly more talented twin.
In their junior year, Mitchell and Marshall lead Mission Bay to winning records in both the summer league at Municipal gymnasium and the regular 1975-76 season. The Bucs won the annual holiday tournament at the University of San Diego and were crowned champions of the Coastal League.
The twins received multiple press clippings in the local Sentinel newspaper and were also featured as players of the week in the San Diego Union-Tribune. Marshall made the first team All-Coast League, and Mitchell was named to the second team.
At the end of the school year, Marshall told Mitchell he wanted to leave Mission Bay and play for Kearny High School. The idea of transferring to another school for their senior year had never crossed Mitchell's mind. Although two minutes older, his temperament was docile and easygoing compared to Marshall's rebellious and hardnosed nature, and as such, Marshall had become the natural leader of the pair. Mitchell would follow his brother wherever he lead him, and surprisingly, their father also acquiesced to Marshall's traitorous plan.
Thomas marched his twins into the Mission Bay attendance office one bright May morning and approached the attendance secretary's desk.
"Good morning, Mr. Lilly, are we checking in today?"
"No, we're checking out."
And that was it. The twins' playing days at Mission Bay were over.
The twins walked around the campus for several minutes, getting their final grades from their teachers. While doing so, Coach Willis got wind of the mutiny and caught up with his star players in one of the school's long chain-linked walkways.
"What's going on?" he asked, a stern but confused look on his long, gaunt face.
"We're moving to the Kearny district," Marshall blurted out.
The coach looked at Mitchell, who immediately looked away, out through the chain-link fence at the manicured bushes and shrubs growing in the green space along the breezeway.
Willis looked at Marshall, who stood in the middle of the hall like a stone statue, staring defiantly back at his former coach.
"What do you mean?" Willis asked, his voice cracking with disbelief.
"We're moving, coach. We're transferring to Kearny High," Marshall crisply answered. He turned to Mitchell and said, "Let's go, Mitch."
As the twins moved on to the next classroom, Coach Willis turned and eyed them with the suspicious gaze of a shellshocked general seeing his two best soldiers turn into traitors right before his eyes.
"You're going to regret this!" he yelled.
But the twins didn't look back. They keep on going, glad to be rid of a coach they never really liked or respected.
Tom Lilly rented a studio apartment a few blocks away from Kearny High, and the twins lived there for the last few weeks of the school year.
Staying in the studio was harder on the twins than they knew. Except for the time they spent five days at a John Wooden basketball camp, they had never been on their own. Their dauntless yet foolhardy decision to bail on the Bucs had suddenly thrust them into a strange place and the unpleasant position of having to fend for themselves.
Marsha Lilly was against the idea from the start. The thought of putting her 16-going-on-17-year-olds up in the studio alone made her heart sink. Despondent but ever resourceful, she delivered groceries and household supplies to the studio every Saturday morning. Once there, she would sit and talk with her boys at a chipboard breakfast table in the tiny kitchen for awhile before driving them back to their house on Mission Bay.
"So, what do you guys want for your birthday this year?" she asked one day in early June.
"New Converse for the summer league," Marshall shot back.
"No, new Duck Feet," Mitchell quickly chimed in. The classic body surfing fins made by Voit looked like the webbed feet of ducks.
"Which is it, then?" asked Marsha, giving the twins' a make-up-your-minds look.
Mitchell and Marshall looked at each other. At first glance the twins appeared practically identical. Marshall looked more like his father, with higher cheekbones and slightly bigger, wider set blue-green eyes. Mitchell looked more like his mother, with a longer face, pointier chin, and smaller, beadier eyes the same color. Both had fine, medium-length reddish brown hair atop high foreheads, Greek noses, square jaws with dimpled cheeks, and small mouths with thin upper lips.
Despite minor differences in their facial features, at first glance strangers often found it hard to tell the twins apart. But as people got to know them it always got easier to figure out which one was which.
They were good looking boys, with pleasantly attractive faces and lean, well-proportioned, six-foot athletic bodies. As such, the twins had had many girlfriends and sexual encounters starting from the seventh grade. Then, at the height of their high school jock power and popularity, they gave it all up for a dream that would never come true.
Compared to the airy, laidback vibe at the Mission Bay campus, with its calming sea breezes and friendly, familiar faces, Mitchell saw Kearny as frightenedly territorial, like a mixed-race turf war ready to explode. He got stink eye from many students, including jocks on the Kearny Komets football team and a few graduating seniors from the basketball team.
One of the players was Alan Trammell, who played shortstop for the Detroit Tigers for 20 seasons and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018.
Five months earlier, during a semifinal game against the Bucs in the holiday tournament at USD, Trammell had suddenly slapped Mitchell in the face just for being in his jock on defense. Coach Willis immediately jumped up from the bench screaming and pointing, but neither official saw the technical foul. Mission Bay won, upsetting the top-seeded Komets in a close contest.
Walking down the school's crowded and contentious central hallway, Trammell gave Mitchell a gladiatorial sideways glance only once, then never looked in his direction again.
Summer League
The Komet's varsity coach, Tim Short, reluctantly welcomed the Lilly twins with half open arms. Coach Short already had all the players he needed to contend for championships in both the Summer League and regular season.
During afterschool practices the twins quickly earned starting guard positions, but during the summer league Coach Short frequently rotated his top junior players in and out of games. As a result, the twins sat on the bench for nearly half of the Summer League championship, which Kearny handily won.
After the game at San Diego State University's Peterson Gym, Marshall stopped Mitchell on their way out to the parking lot.
"We need to find another team," Marshall said, gripping both ends of a towel slung around his neck and shoulders.
"What do you mean?" asked Mitchell, looking around to make sure no one was listening.
"I mean we we're not gonna play for Kearny next year."
He leaned in closer, putting his right hand on Mitchell's left shoulder. "We're not gonna sit on the bench for half our senior year," he whispered mutinously.
"Where are we gonna play, Marshall?
He nodded and said, "I think I know where."
Senior Year
The place Marshall had in mind was Madison High, home of the Warhawks. Madison was in a rebuilding year without any top players, which meant the twins would spend most of their senior year on the court rather than the pine. When he heard the news, Madison coach John Hannon said he was tickled pink. Tom and Marsha went along with the plan, and at the end of the summer they rented a house in Clairemont Mesa where the family lived for the 1976-77 school year.
Moving into the Madison attendance zone meant the family had to pack up and leave the 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom bayfront house they had rented for the past five years. The oddly built yet stunningly remarkable beach shack sat on a large plot of land at 3930 Bayside Walk.
Built in the 1960s, the single-story abode's quirky, one-of-a-kind aesthetic included a large outdoor parking area next to a big front yard filled with sand, a partially covered and enclosed laundry and storage area with an outdoor shower and hidden doorway along a narrow alley and entrance to the property on one side, a gated and fenced in garden area running next to and behind the house along the Bayside Walk side, and wall-to-wall sliding glass doors across the front offering panoramic, million-dollar views of Sail Bay. At high tide the family could jump right from the retaining wall in the front yard straight into the water.
Early Romance and Relationships
Mitchell lost his virginity at the tender age of nine.
Professional Career
Mitchell had many jobs, including short and long stints as a bus boy, dishwasher, liquor store clerk, basketball referee, waiter, auto detailer, model, catwalk coach, stripper, word processor, carpet cleaner, public relations specialist, customer service representative, divemaster, mobile disc jockey, wedding officiant, photographer and videographer, TV news reporter and sports anchor, and ESL teacher, tutor, and trainer.
