Trouthe, Lies, and Basketball

by Charley Rosen

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. It won’t take you very long to learn the nuts and bolts. I’ll be your personal mentor. And, I promise, you can always be yourself without having to fit into any kind of attitudinal straitjacket. Speaking of which, you won’t even have to wear a necktie on the bench. Plus, I’ll be running a straight program.”

  “Interesting,” I said, trying to believe him, even though I’d already experienced that so many of his promises had turned out to be bullshit. “So what would the job entail? What would I have to do?”

  “Conduct all the guard drills in practice, and have as much of a voice as you’re comfortable with. Watch scouting tapes with me and help me work out game plans. Maybe personally scout an opponent before a critical game. I’ll always have a quickie conference with you before we huddle for a time-out. I’ll also consult you before making any substitutions. And maybe you’ll do an occasional recruiting trip, but only when there’s a special kid out there that we absolutely have to have.”

  “I see. . . . Um … Who are your other assistants?”

  “An excellent question. There’s Sidney Johnson, remember him?”

  “He had a couple of seasons with Sacramento.”

  “Right. Two seasons. One short of qualifying for an NBA pension. Since then, he’s played in Turkey, Belgium, and I think, Ireland. But now he wants to settle down in the States. He’s originally from Albuquerque and is married with two kids.”

  “What’s his job description?”

  “Ha! Mostly he recruits the black kids. I mean, he’s a big-time bullshitter, so he hasn’t missed so far. Six-for-six, he is. But Sidney’s also got a bit of larceny in him.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Well, he sometimes pockets a few bucks from his traveling expenses. Not so much, though, to be a problem. Otherwise, he works with the bigs in practice and sits quietly on the bench during games.”

  “Who else?”

  “Paul Granderson. Remember him?”

  “Of course. He was the point when I played there. So what does he do?”

  “Recruit the white kids and keep the practice and the game charts.”

  “Who else?”

  “Sammy Giambalvo, a college teammate of mine. He handles the money, makes the travel arrangements, and deals with the NCAA rules. They’re a really good crew, Elliot. I’m sure you’ll all work and play well together.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Oh, yes. The salary is a hundred thousand. You’ll also get a car, a meal ticket, free health care at the school’s hospital, great pension benefits, and an apartment in one of the townhouses on faculty row. What d’ya say? Need some time to decide?”

  “Nope. I’m in.”

  “Great! Terrific!”

  “When do you want me?”

  “ASAP. Lots of game tapes to go over.”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Terrific! We’ll get you a first-class ticket. Just say when and from where.”

  “Kennedy, sometime around noon.”

  “Done. My secretary . . . Kathy, remember her? The blonde? She’ll call you as soon as she can make the booking. . . . Welcome home, E.”

  So I arranged for my money to be transferred to a bank in Tucson, then dropped the Thunder’s courtesy car at a Jeep dealer near the airport, and I was on my way to what Lee called “home.”

  Home. In hell’s furnace. But why the hell not?

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Irecognized her number before I flipped open my cell phone, and I couldn’t keep the slight sneer out my voice when I said, “Monica, it’s you!”

  “Yes, it’s me. And I’ve got to start off by apologizing for not calling and for being such a bitch that time. I’ve been wrestling with my fucking dissertation twenty-four/seven. I mean, I have to remind myself to eat. And If I can get two hours of sleep at night, I’m . . . Anyway, I’m a fucking mess. And, yes, you were right. We should move to a better, safer place. But just the thought of having to get all my notes and source material together . . . It seemed like mission impossible. A ridiculous, undoable thing. So I’m so very sorry I barked at you. It was all on me and had nothing to do with you.”

  Aha! I was right all along!

  “That’s okay—” I started to say, but she interrupted me.

  “Let me finish. . . . There’s usually not much call for a sub during summer school, but an English teacher at Dunbar High School broke his leg waterskiing, so I had to teach his classes for six weeks. Of course, I needed the money, but it also meant that I didn’t have a lot of time or energy to work on my fucking dissertation. So, whenever I was at home, I just switched my phone off. Including on the weekends. And I work almost all night.”

  “I understand,” I said. And I did.

  “But I did miss you, Elliot. Very much. I was under so much pressure to finish this fucking thing so I could maybe get a job somewhere before the fall semester started. Which was a crazy hope anyway, since colleges don’t wait that long to fill any open jobs. Or maybe, I thought, I could get a job starting in the spring. Another stupid idea, which Dr. John Roth, my dissertation adviser, made sure to let me know. John said that even with a PhD the best I could do these days was to get a job at a community college teaching freshman English. Grading dozens of semiliterate compositions. So now I’m all fucked up, Elliot. I know I’m talking too much. Venting. Because you’re the only one I can let it all out to. And I do love you. I really do. But I can’t help thinking that I’m wasting my time with this fucking thing. That I’m wasting my life.”

  She paused, and I thought I heard her starting to cry.

  “Yeah. That sucks,” I said, straining for something appropriate to say. “Anyway, how’s the thing going?”

  “That’s fucked, too. John said that all I did was lay out a list of the medieval conventions, and that I failed to investigate what they mean. Especially the satires of the clergy and of women. His fucking eyes lit up when he said that I should write about how Eve’s original sin was thought to make women the cause of most of men’s problems. Like he still believes this. John’s really young to be a full professor. Maybe in his early thirties. But he’s already an asshole. I don’t think he believes that women should have graduate degrees. Even so, he still tried to flirt with me. Ugh! Anyway . . .”

  “So what are you gonna do? Chuck it?”

  “No. I’ll revise it, do some more research, and plow my way through to the bitter end. I mean, you’ve seen me making sure that I eat every bit of food on my plate, even food that I don’t like. Like liver or broccoli. I have this urge to finish everything I start. I’m sure it’s anal.”

  “Yeah. Well.”

  “I’m sorry, Elliot, for being such a mess and for being so self-involved.”

  “That’s okay. It’s totally understandable. All that stress.”

  “Yeah. You’re a sweetheart, and through it all, I still love you to the max.”

  “Me, too.”

  “So, Elliot . . . what are you up to?”

  “I’m actually in Tucson, back at Southern Arizona as an assistant coach.”

  “Holy shit! And here I thought we could get together tonight and I’d make it all up to you.”

  Then I told her my whole deal: getting cut by the Thunder, not getting picked up by any other team, my own despair, the charity game, Coach Lee’s offer . . .

  “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, Elliot. But what about us?”

  “As soon as I can get a few days off here, I’ll fly to New York and we can figure things out. I’m not sure when that’ll be. Probably in a couple of weeks. I mean, I still do love you very much. . . .”

  So that’s what we planned to do.

  Until then, there were things that had to be done at USA.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Iput in a forty-hour
week watching game tapes. Evaluating USA’s six new recruits, as well as the seven holdover players. Coach Lee also tasked me with coming up with a scouting report of the nine games the team played after he took over. Then I shared my opinion with him over lunch in the faculty dining room.

  For the most part I liked the new kids, all them talented and unselfish. But only one of them, and only three of the returnees, played energetic defense.

  “You’re right,” he said. “And that’s going to something we’re really going to emphasize this season.”

  I also thought tha, during the nine games that I studied, the offense featured the same overabundance of isolation plays as it did under Coach Woody.

  “I didn’t have much choice,” Lee said. “It was so late in the season that I couldn’t put in the stuff I wanted.”

  And for another three eight-hour days, Lee clued me in to his preferred offense sets: a multi-option Flex format. An open-middle passing game. Lots of high screens, weakside screens, pin-down screens, and double-screen baseline snakes. Against zones, Lee would install a Wheel offense.

  His planned defenses included various full-court and half-court trap-presses, some assorted zones, and switching man-to-man designs.

  After absorbing the Thunder’s various and intricate game plans at both ends of the court, I thought that Lee’s stuff was fairly simple. Just by moving pieces around on a magnetic clipboard, I was positive I could get onto the court and perfectly run every aspect of every alignment.

  “But these kids will have trouble,” Lee warned me, “because they only know how to play one-on-one, two-on-two, or maybe three on-three basketball. Even the guys who’ve been here for a few years still don’t know how to play five-man ball. It’ll take months before they get in gear. And defense will always be a problem. But I promise you, E, if anybody fails to execute the offense or doesn’t play hard on defense, he’ll sit. No matter who he is. Believe me.”

  Okay.

  My fellow assistants arrived on campus during the Friday of the Labor Day weekend, four days before classes would commence. That same night, the three of us met at the campus rathskeller for pizza, beers, and bullshit.

  Paul looked like he’d gained maybe fifteen pounds during the fourteen months since I last saw him. He said that the competition in Belgium was awful, but the food was terrific.

  “I was the best player there, so you can imagine how bad the games were. Even though the refs gave every close call to the Belgians, I still scored like twenty-six points a game. Then I sprained my ankle in the last game before the playoffs. It was a bad one and it still hurts if I try to run or jump. So they cut me like the next morning and made me pay my own airfare home. You know? I had a fully guaranteed contract and they simply refused to pay me like sixty-five hundred American dollars. But fuck it. I’m glad to get out of there. I mean, everybody looked like a Nazi.”

  Sidney was a coffee-colored, wiry six-eight, with a trim mustache and goatee, a shaved noggin, and a tattooed ring of barbed wire circling his right bicep. He laughed easily and listened carefully.

  When Paul hobbled off to “make a pit stop,” Sidney moved his chair closer to mine and said this: “This place is a fucking gold mine.”

  “Really? How so?”

  “You supposed to be doing any recruiting?”

  “Some.”

  Then he leaned closer and said in a soft whisper, “Every time you go on a recruiting trip, you take your own suitcase with all your stuff in it, and Giambalvo gives you a briefcase to take with you too. You know him?”

  “Coach’s high-school buddy who handles the money. But I haven’t met him yet.”

  Sidney laughed. “You will, bet on it. . . . And you know what’s in the briefcase? What’s always in the briefcase? . . . Cash money. Twenty thou in hundred-dollar bills. . . . And you know what that money’s for, doncha?”

  “Airfare, hotel, car rental, food?”

  “Nope. It’s for the kid you’re trying to recruit. Twenty thou if he comes here.”

  “For real?”

  “For real. And here’s the best part. . . . What if you was to keep ten and only give him the other ten? He’d be happy as a pig in shit to get the ten and he wouldn’t know the difference. And even if he did, would he report you to the NCAA for shorting him? Ha! It’s perfect, man. Free money. The perfect gig.”

  “Jesus! Does Paul do that?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe he slips himself a grand or something. . . . But why am I telling you this? So you won’t be surprised if you hear any shit. And also to clue you in on where the gold is so’s you can get married, buy a house, or do whatever the fuck you want to do. You know what I’m saying?”

  “I do.”

  Then we engaged in the shake-grasp-thumb-lock-flip-away handshake like we were in a secret fraternity.

  And I wondered if, when I was called to go a-recruiting, I would succumb to the same temptation. Fortunately, I was never asked to make a recruiting trip.

  Anyway, the three of us would periodically repeat our bull sessions until preseason practice began. And I was alerted to several more of their recruiting adventures.

  “Shabazz Winslow,” said Sidney. “The big kid from Dayton?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I saw some game tapes. He’s really good. Very advanced for a freshman.”

  “You know what I had to do to sign him up? . . . Fuck his mama . . . for real. Otherwise she said it was a no-go. She was single and hot like a bonfire. And horny? Man! She worked me out all night long. One of the side benefits of recruiting.”

  “Jimmy Puma?” said Paul. “The little point guard from Indianapolis? The pizza-faced kid with all the zits? Well, when he came down here for his visit, he came up to me all private like and says he’d only sign up if I got him laid while he was here. He said he was a virgin and he would be ashamed to still be one by the time he entered college. So I went straight to Marty Taylor and he set the whole thing up. That’s why the kid is smiling all the time.”

  My only contributions dealt with the routine in-game fuckups committed by Brook Davis.

  “Un-fucking-believable,” was Sidney’s response. “That’s even worse than the coach I had in Turkey that made us run laps while we had to keep tapping these balloons to keep them in the air. He said it would improve our shooting touch.”

  “Ha,” said Paul. “So I played last season in Belgium, right? Anyway, we had this point guard from Italy who wasn’t any good. But he never passed to me. Never. So I asked him what the fuck was going on. And he said he wanted a present from me. A present? What kind of present? A gold watch. What? So I went out and bought him some cheapo watch that looked like it was made of gold, and from then on, he passed to me and not to anybody else. But then, at the end of the season, the watch started to turn green and stopped working. So, before and after the watch, I averaged about ten points a game. During watch-time, I averaged thirty-five,”

  One afternoon I heard the familiar sounds of a ball bouncing and sneakers squeaking as I passed the arena, so I opened a door and poked my head inside to investigate. No surprise that a bunch of the guys were playing a pickup game. According to NCAA rules this wasn’t a problem, but I was prohibited from watching them. I was spotted before I could duck away.

  “Lookee here,” said Barry Malone, who was a junior when I played there, and was two years older than me. “If it ain’t the junior coach.”

  The game stopped, and all of them approached.

  “Hey, Junior,” said another ex-teammate.

  “Yeah,” Barry said. “I heard you just came from the infirmary to get alla those splinters outa your ass from sitting alla time on the bench.”

  Their knee-slapping laughter was so insulting that I couldn’t contain myself. “All right, you bozos.” I stepped out of my sweats and onto the court. “Let’s go.”

  “Oh. Junior wants to play
with the big boys!”

  “Come on, Junior. We’ll make sure not to hurt you.”

  “Or embarrass you.”

  If I hadn’t played much with the Thunder, I’d matched up against Rashon Williams and Darren Mosley in dozens of scrimmages. So, playing against these guys was like playing one-on-none.

  I drove and dunked at will, rarely missed a jumper, stole clearly telegraphed passes, and ripped predictable dribbles. Then, after embarrassing them for about thirty minutes, I simply walked off the court.

  “Damn,” said Barry.

  I’d arranged with Coach Lee to absent myself for a long weekend before preseason practice commenced. So, early on the preceding Monday morning I called Monica to make arrangements.

  “Sorry, but the number you have dialed has been disconnected.”

  Say what? There must be a mistake. Some crossed wire between Tucson and New York. But the same message was repeated.

  In frustration, I even sent her an e-mail. But it was quickly kicked backed as “undeliverable.”

  What the fuck was happening?

  My emotional distress didn’t improve when the season turned out to be a shit storm.

  Although the squad was loaded with talented players, and although, based on my performance in that preseason scrimmage, they all respected me, I didn’t like the way any of them played. It was the four senior starters who set the negative example. Their primary motivation was to rack up their own personal numbers to enhance the chances that they’d be drafted. The result was a contagious me-first attitude along with a quarrelsome jealousy that quickly infected even the incoming freshmen.

  During a water-break pause in one midseason practice session, I heard one of the seniors saying this to a freshman: “I’d rather score twenty and we lose than score ten and we win.”

  And I blamed Coach Lee for this because of his casual attitude about on-court discipline. I began to feel that he was afraid to get involved in confrontations with his players. Having the players think he was a nice guy seemed to be his main concern.

  When he did bark at them, they nodded obediently, then rolled their eyes when he turned away. And when I tried to berate any of them for their sticky-handed play, Lee would get upset with me for “undermining” his authority.