by Mike Lupica
But the work they did was similar to what they’d done the first time they’d worked together. Today Ryan talked about the difference between an individual sport and a team sport, and what it was like being on the court alone. As he did, Lucas took notes. Then he wrote out a few paragraphs as a way of helping Ryan organize his thoughts.
“Now just go home and put this into your own words,” Lucas said.
“But they already are my words,” Ryan said. “We’ve gone over that already.”
Lucas said, “But Mr. Collins talks all the time about how we have to find our own voice. I know you just said this stuff. But when you write it yourself, put it in your voice. Seriously, dude? We’re almost there. It’s like your shot when we’re playing ball. You just have to trust it.”
When Ryan was gone, Lucas thought about calling Gramps. But he didn’t. Gramps would talk when he was ready. And when he was ready, maybe he’d explain everything so that Lucas could understand. Maybe it wasn’t as much of a mystery as Lucas thought. Maybe everything would make perfect sense, like when you got to the end of a book. Lucas told himself he had to be patient, even though patience wasn’t exactly one of his strong suits.
There was no practice tonight. Dinner probably wouldn’t be for another hour or so. He tried to read, but he just couldn’t focus. So he put down his book, did the little homework he had to do.
Then he quietly made his way back up to the attic. He wasn’t going up there to snoop. He was just curious. He just wanted to know for himself. Even if he found something else, he might show it to his mom, and talk about it with her. But it would just be the two of them. He didn’t want to upset Gramps. He didn’t want to make him talk about things that he didn’t want to talk about. He didn’t want this mystery, if it really was one, to come between them.
He just wanted to know.
Lucas knew Maria had been right at lunch, and that he should drop this now.
But this time when he went up there, he found the letter.
NINETEEN
Lucas had never paid much attention to his dad’s medical books. Without ever asking, he’d always just assumed that his mom kept them because going to med school and becoming a doctor had become his new passion after he’d given up the dream of being a college basketball player.
“He decided that there was a reason he’d gotten hurt,” Lucas’s mom told him one time. “He was going to help people who’d suffered injuries like his get better.”
But for some reason today, he opened the box with some of those books packed in there, trying to imagine his dad having them in his hands, wondering if he could possibly have loved reading them the way he’d loved reading Chip Hilton as a boy. Or the way Lucas loved reading books now.
Lucas smiled as he picked up the book on top, Orthopaedic Surgery: Principles of Diagnosis and Treatment. He opened it randomly and read a couple paragraphs and found himself wincing, hoping he never had an injury like the one being described that would have to be diagnosed or treated. He picked up another: Netter’s Orthopaedic Clinical Examination.
The third one was Textbook of Orthopedic Surgery for Students of Medicine.
When he opened it, he saw the envelope inside. There was nothing written on the outside of the envelope.
The letter, typewritten, was inside.
Lucas took it over to the desk and sat down, and began to read.
Dear Dad,
This is a letter I might never send. I think of it as my end of a conversation we might never have. I haven’t been able to work much lately, because I haven’t had the strength. I still have a great attitude. I still keep thinking I can beat this thing. You know how stubborn I am.
Lucas stopped, and smiled, and said out loud, “Wonder where he got it from?”
He kept reading.
You made it pretty clear, my whole life, that you didn’t have many happy memories from when you grew up out in California the way you did as a foster child, going from one family to another. And I respected that, even though I told you one time that your history was a part of mine. I remember what you said when I did: “I want you to know me for who I am. Not who I was.”
I am stubborn, though. And I’ve had some time on my hands lately. I know when I’ve asked about college basketball, you just told me you’d played for a college that wasn’t even a college anymore, and even there you hadn’t played for long. So I decided to do a little investigating, and see if I could answer some of the questions before… well, while I could still ask them.
(Sorry, that didn’t sound like my good attitude. Maybe this is just one of those days.)
And then one day I was in Mom’s old study. There was this photograph of the two of you, when you were young, and I wanted to have it framed and give it to you for Father’s Day. I couldn’t find it. But what I did find, in a shoebox in her closet, was a picture of you and another guy in a Bisons jersey, and a date on the back from 1961 that was about the right time for you to be in college. The guys were called “Joe” and “Tommy.”
And me, with too much time on his hands now, decided to do a little investigating, thinking I might surprise you with what I found out.
I didn’t know that I’d surprise myself instead.
So I know, Dad.
So I know about the Ocean State Bisons. I know about the scandal. I know about Joe Samuels and Tommy Angelo and what you guys did, and why you never wanted to talk about your own basketball career, or about college, or about the life you had in California before you and Mom moved East.
Even as I’m writing this, writing the letter I might never send, full of questions I still don’t know if I’ll ever ask you to your face about how you came to be Sam Winston, I do realize you were right about something:
Whatever you did and why you did it, I still love you for who you are.
It doesn’t mean I understand why you and your teammates did what you did. It really is like you were another person. But it could never change the dad you’ve been to me, the husband you were to Mom, any of that. Maybe I would have felt this way if I’d found out this stuff when I was a boy. But I didn’t. I’m a man now, still trying to be the man you always wanted me to be.
I’m not sure why I even kept that picture. Maybe I should have left it in the box. I’m not positive why I’m writing this all down. But you know me: You’ve always told me I was as full of questions as I was full of beans.
Lucas stopped again, hearing Gramps telling him at the dinner table last week that he was the one full of beans. He was starting to tear up, but not because of that.
There was just a little left in the letter.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since I got sick, it’s that I know as well as anybody ever could what really matters. And what matters to me is the time we’ve already had together, and the time we’re going to have. (Did I mention that I don’t give up?)
Since I found out what I did, I feel like I’ve had a lot of feelings to unpack, all because I had to unpack that shoebox. But one feeling will never change:
How much I love you.
Mike
There was a date on the bottom. Lucas looked at it, and realized it was a month before his dad had died.
Now he cried.
TWENTY
The pages that Lucas had printed out, about Joe Samuels and Tommy Angelo and the point-shaving scandal at Ocean State University that had finally put the school out of business, were on the kitchen table. His mom had them in front of her.
She slowly turned page after page, reading the old stories from newspapers that Lucas had already read.
“It’s the same as if he lied to us,” Lucas said.
“That’s not true, honey,” she said.
“Well, he didn’t tell the truth,” Lucas said.
“He just didn’t tell us the whole story,” she said.
She took off her reading glasses and looked at him across the table.
“I know all this is a shock,” she said. “But none of this
changes the wonderful man Gramps has been to you.”
“You sound like Dad,” he said.
“That used to happen a lot,” she said.
Lucas reached across and poked a finger on one of the pages in front of his mom.
“No wonder he wanted to be somebody else,” Lucas said. “No wonder he turned himself into Sam Winston. He didn’t want anybody to know that he tried to fix basketball games when he was in college.”
Lucas felt as if he were out of breath.
“When I was online reading about this stuff, you know whose name came up? Clair Bee?”
“He wrote the Chip Hilton books,” his mom said.
“They called him Coach Clair Bee on some of the covers,” Lucas said. “It turned out he’d coached a college team once and this happened with some of his players.”
“Your dad told me about it,” his mom said. “It was at Long Island University. Coach Bee resigned because of it. But you should know that he also ended up in the Basketball Hall of Fame.”
“How can you not think he lied?” Lucas said. “And that means to both of us.”
“Maybe he thought the truth would hurt too much,” she said.
“Well, at least he got that right,” Lucas said.
“But he still has the right to tell us his side of things,” she said. “We owe him that.”
“Why?” Lucas said.
“Because you love him and he loves you,” Julia said.
“I love Sam Winston,” Lucas said. “Not Joe Samuels. Not the guy in those stories. Not the cheater.”
He practically spit out the last word.
“They’re the same person,” she said in a quiet voice. “Like two sides of the same coin.”
“He talks all the time about doing things the right way,” Lucas said. “Playing basketball the right way. And now it turns out he did something as wrong in basketball as you could ever do.”
He stood up.
“I want to stop talking about this now,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
Lucas turned and walked out of the kitchen. He went up to his room and shut the door. He was still angry. He could still feel the heat inside him. And the disappointment. And the shame. But he made himself sit down and open the file on his basketball journal and write about the coach who it turned out he didn’t know at all.
When he finished, he shut his laptop and got on his bed.
Then he started to cry again, rolling over so he did it into his pillow, so his mom couldn’t hear how much the truth really had hurt him.
TWENTY-ONE
The gym at Claremont Middle was open after school on Friday, so Lucas and Ryan, and Richard and Billy, played two-on-two.
Lucas didn’t tell Ryan about Gramps. He hadn’t told Maria at lunch, as much as he wanted to, because she was smart and sensible about everything.
For now he just kept what he’d learned from his dad’s letter, and then from his own research, to himself.
When they’d lost track of how many games they’d played, Lucas told the guys he was going to stay in the gym and work on some of his stuff alone.
“You want us to find you a sleeping bag so you can sleep here tonight?” Ryan said.
“Just trying to get better,” Lucas said.
It was only four thirty. His mom wasn’t picking him up until five. Still plenty of gym time left. You never wasted that, even when you were feeling as hurt as Lucas did right now.
So he worked on taking outside shots without dribbling the ball, just catching and shooting, because in a real game, in real time, sometimes you just did the defender a huge favor by taking one more dribble. He worked as hard as ever on his left-handed dribble, working toward his ultimate goal of being as confident going to his left as he was going to his right.
He made himself knock down ten free throws in a row, as usual. So far this season all the work he’d done was paying off, because his free-throw shooting had been pretty solid. He still wanted to be ready when a game was on the line.
He stepped to the line and proceeded to make his first eight.
Then he missed.
He started all over again.
He was stubborn, and wasn’t ever going to cheat himself.
I’ll never cheat the game.
He got to nine in a row.
Missed the tenth, feeling like a choker.
Started all over again.
He looked at the clock as he did. Five minutes to five. But he pretended it was a game clock. Told himself he wasn’t trying to make ten in a row in the next five minutes.
Told himself that every shot he knocked down was with a game on the line.
He got to nine again.
Lucas went through his routine. Took one last look at the rim after one last bounce of the ball. Took a deep breath.
Knocked it down like a champ.
“Ten for ten,” the voice behind him said.
He didn’t have to turn around to know it was Gramps.
He was limping in Lucas’s direction from the other end of the court. He wore his faded black Celtics cap with the shamrock on the front.
He walked all the way to where Lucas stood at the free-throw line, ball on his hip.
“I let your mother know I’d pick you up and give you a ride home when she told me where you were,” he said. “Told her we needed to talk. All of us need to talk, now that I think about it. But first you and me.”
“Mom told you that we know about you?” Lucas said.
“She did,” Gramps said. “And you do know. Just not all of it.”
“You lied to me!” Lucas said, unable to control himself. “Everything I thought is a big fat lie!”
“No, son, it’s not,” Gramps said.
Even trying to keep his voice low, it sounded loud in the empty gym. Just not as loud as Lucas’s had been.
“I don’t even know you!” Lucas yelled.
He could never remember raising his voice to his grandfather, not one time. But he’d never had a reason, until now.
“You do know me,” Gramps said. “Just not who I used to be. Even if that dumb boy made me the man I am now.”
“You took money to cheat the game,” Lucas said.
“The person I really cheated was myself,” he said. “Now come sit down so we can have a talk we should have had a long time ago.”
There were two folding chairs set up at one of the corners of the court. Gramps walked toward them. Lucas followed.
“I’m not going to make excuses for what I did,” he said. “But I’d rather you heard the whole story from me instead of reading it.”
They both sat down. Gramps talked for a long time then.
Ocean State had been a pretty famous program in college basketball, starting in the 1930s, and had nearly made a Final Four during World War II. He’d gotten a scholarship there from Bakersfield High School. The Ocean State program hadn’t been great for a long time, but Joe Samuels decided he could be one of the guys who could restore its former glory.
“The tournament was a lot smaller in those days,” he said. “I thought we had a chance. This was before UCLA got great and started winning almost every year.”
Lucas just listened.
“It wasn’t just me who was a dumb kid,” Gramps said. “We were all dumb kids, most of us lucky to have a scholarship, because just about every one of us on the team came from almost no money at all.”
He didn’t even know his teammates were taking money at first. But slowly he started to wonder about some things he was seeing, especially at the end of games. Tommy Angelo would start throwing the ball away, and big leads would become small leads. There were a couple games that they shouldn’t have come close to losing, but nearly did. The two guys messing up the most were Tommy Angelo and the team’s center, Ed Dolph.
Finally one day Gramps asked Tommy Angelo why he seemed to turn into a different player in the last five minutes.
Tommy was from Las Vegas. He had uncles who worked
in the casino business. He took Gramps out for a burger one night and explained that a couple friends of the family had shot some money his way and asked him to “manipulate” the point spread in certain games.
“That’s the big word he used for trying to do the same as fix a fight,” Gramps said. “Manipulate.”
Now Lucas spoke.
“Why didn’t you tell the coach?” he said.
“I told him I was going to,” Gramps said. “But Tommy said that Coach was in on it and that there were only five or six games left in the season and they could all make some extra money and never do it again.
“No harm, no foul, he said,” Gramps told Lucas.
Gramps told Tommy Angelo he’d rather quit playing basketball than do that. Tommy said that if he ever told anybody, Tommy would tell the whole world that Gramps had been in on it too.
That same night, someone threw a brick through the front window of the grocery store that Gramps’s parents owned back in Bakersfield. It was, he said, the same as a threat.
“It was a message,” he said. “I had to go along to get along.” He gave Lucas a long look. “And so I did.”
Until the whole thing blew up on all of them.
Somehow a reporter from the Los Angeles Times got a tip about what was going on with the Ocean State Bisons. The tip turned into a source in Las Vegas. The reporter went back and looked at the games that had been “manipulated.” He went back to Las Vegas and did some checking and found out that a lot of money had been bet on Ocean State in those games, way more than the usual amount.
“It wasn’t every game,” Gramps said to Lucas.
“Is that supposed to make it all better?” Lucas said.
“I was dumb and scared,” Gramps said. “That’s a reason, I know, and not an excuse. I wasn’t just afraid for me, I was afraid for my family.”
“You told me once that character was doing the right thing even if no one is around to see,” Lucas said.
“I know I did,” Gramps said. “I know.”
