Last Shot

by John Feinstein

  “I want one of those,” Stevie said to his dad as they walked toward the ballroom.

  “Might blow your unbiased-reporter image, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll wear it inside my shirt, next to my heart.”

  His dad laughed.

  They were met at the ballroom door by a man with a mustache and glasses. “Steven? Mr. Thomas?” he asked as they walked up. “I’m Joe Mitch. We’re so glad you could make it.”

  They shook hands, and Joe Mitch guided them into the room. “Steven, I was one of the judges on the contest. I can’t tell you how impressed we all were with your story. Let’s go up front. I want you to meet Susan Carol and her dad. They just got here.”

  Stevie really wanted to meet Paul Hewitt and Raymond Felton and some of the real writers. “We met Tony Kornheiser last night,” he said to Mitch. “Sort of.”

  “Well, you’ll meet a lot more people today, I promise you that,” Mitch said. “Here are the Andersons.”

  Stevie braked to a halt when Susan Carol Anderson, hearing her last name, turned around.

  The first thing he noticed was that she was about nine feet tall. He looked down at her feet, figuring she was wearing heels. More bad news. She was wearing flats.

  “Steven and Bill Thomas,” Mitch said. “Susan Carol and Don Anderson.”

  There were handshakes all around, and Stevie’s dad asked Don Anderson how their trip to New Orleans had been. “Not bad,” he said. “And you?”

  Susan Carol was eyeing him. Stevie stood up as straight as he could. He figured she was about three inches taller than he was. Okay, maybe four. She had long brown hair and, he had to admit, she was pretty … for a giraffe. “I read your story,” she said. “The one that won. It was very good. I’d like to go to the Palestra someday.”

  She had one of those Southern accents that stretched words out. “Palestra,” in her accent, became Paa-lae-sta-ra. Four syllables. At least.

  “Thanks,” he said. “When did you get a chance to see it?”

  “Oh, it’s up front,” she said. “They blew both our stories up and put them on easels near the podium. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  He had to admit he wanted to see that. “Dad, I’ll be up front,” he said. His father, Joe Mitch, and Don Anderson were chatting away. His father waved and nodded, and Stevie followed Susan Carol to the front of the room, weaving through people. The stories, as she had reported, were sitting on easels, printed like real newspaper stories. “Wow,” he said. “I wish I could get one of those.”

  “You will,” she said. “Mr. Mitch told me they were for us to take home after the breakfast.”

  “Wow,” he said, then realized he had said “wow” twice and probably sounded like a little kid. “I mean, that’s really nice of them.”

  He had been looking at his story, which had been given the headline THE PALESTRA—STILL ROCKING AFTER 80 YEARS, wanting to drink it all in. He looked over at the other easel, where her story was set up. The headline almost made him gag: COACH K—HALL OF FAME COACH … AND PERSON.

  “So, I guess you’re a Duke fan,” he said, not bothering to look at what she had actually written.

  Her face lit up. “Oh, absolutely.” (It came out abb-so-looo-taly.) “My daddy went to divinity school there and I’ve (aaahv) been a fan, I guess, since the cradle. I even got to talk to Coach K for my (mah) story. He was sooooo nice.”

  Stevie felt sooooo nauseous. To steer the conversation away from the saintly Coach K, he said, “Your father went to divinity school?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s a minister.”

  “But he’s not …”

  “Dressed like a minister? No. It’s mostly priests who wear collars. He wears civilian clothes all the time.”

  A minister’s daughter and a Blue Devils fan … Stevie had a thought that made him smile.

  “I hear Coach K curses all the time. What does your dad think about that?”

  “That even Coach K isn’t perfect,” she answered, not seeming even a little bit riled by his gibe at the saint.

  Someone came up behind them.

  “So, I presume you are our two winners. I’ve read the stories. They’re vurry, vurry good.”

  Stevie knew a Philadelphia accent when he heard it. He turned and there was Dick “Hoops” Weiss, who had been a legend at the Philadelphia Daily News for years before moving to the New York Daily News.

  “Dick Weiss,” he said, introducing himself to Stevie and Susan Carol. “Steven, as a Philly guy, I loved your story on the Palestra, okay? But Susan Carol, you did a great job with Coach K, too.” They both thanked him. Weiss explained that they would be given their awards by Bobby Kelleher, the Washington Herald columnist who was the president of the USBWA. “After breakfast we’ll meet in the lobby at eleven-thirty and head over to the Superdome,” he said. “Steven, I’m your escort. Susan Carol, you’re going to be with Bill Brill, who is a member of our Hall of Fame.…”

  “Oh, I know just who Bill Brill is,” Susan Carol said. “I started reading his stories when I was little. He’s fantastic.”

  Weiss laughed. “Well, one thing I can tell you for sure. He shares your affection for Coach K. And for Duke.”

  Stevie was about to say something when Bill Brill walked up—he knew it was Bill Brill because he was wearing a name tag on his checked sports coat, which had the widest lapels Stevie had ever seen.

  “Hoops, are these our guys?” Brill said.

  “Yup. These are the winners.”

  “Well, congratulations to you both. Susan Carol, you’re with me today,” Brill said. “I hope you’ll be ready to go by eleven.”

  “Eleven?” Weiss said. “The first practice isn’t until noon and it’s a five-minute walk to the Dome.”

  “True,” Brill said. “But we have to pick up our credentials and the kids’ credentials. And we have to deal with all the new security checks.”

  “And Duke is practicing first,” Weiss said, laughing.

  “Uh, true,” Brill said, reddening slightly.

  “Don’t feel bad, Mr. Brill,” Susan Carol said. “All right-thinking people are Duke fans.”

  “I can see you two will get along just fine,” Weiss said. “Come on, Steven. I’ll introduce you to Paul Hewitt. We’ll see you guys over at the Dome.”

  Stevie breathed a sigh of relief as he and Weiss walked away from Brill and Susan Carol.

  “God, I thought I was going to throw up with all that Duke stuff,” he said to Weiss, feeling he had found a comrade in anti-Duke arms.

  “Did you read Susan Carol’s story?” Weiss asked.

  Stevie grinned. “No,” he said. “Was it gross? Nothing but a Coach K love-in?”

  “Actually,” Weiss said, “it was vurry, vurry good. Might even convert a skeptic like you. She’s a talented writer.”

  Stevie groaned. Nine feet tall and a talented writer. Great. Just great.

  3: DICK VITALE, BABEEE!

  ONCE EVERYONE WAS SEATED, the breakfast didn’t take very long. Stevie calculated that the two acceptance speeches lasted about ninety seconds—seventy-five of them for Paul Hewitt; no more than fifteen for Raymond Felton, who thanked his teammates and his coach and sat down. Bobby Kelleher introduced both Stevie and Susan Carol, complimented them on the quality of their work, and then talked about how important the writing contest was because it was vital that older writers encourage younger writers.

  “We’ve got too many kids today who want to grow up and be on television,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with TV work except that it’s shallow and requires that you spend most of your life screaming into a microphone about how great every coach is. We need to encourage real reporting because it’s important.”

  Stevie was relieved when neither he nor Susan Carol was asked to speak. They just had to pose with their plaques and Kelleher for a couple of pictures. It was almost eleven o’clock by the time the breakfast was over. Weiss found him as he and his dad were heading for the door. Stevi
e introduced him to his father. “Read you as a kid,” Bill Thomas said, shaking Weiss’s hand.

  “You’re making me feel old, okay?” Weiss said, laughing.

  He then suggested to Stevie that they meet in the lobby in about fifteen minutes. “Did you bring a laptop?” he asked.

  Stevie said he had. The USBWA had made arrangements with twenty small-town papers that couldn’t afford to cover the Final Four to use Stevie and Susan Carol as their correspondents for the weekend. They were supposed to write features—one story each day, beginning today.

  “Once you decide what you want to write about today, I think it will be easier to do it from the Dome than from back in your room,” Weiss said. “Have you ever written on deadline before?”

  “Only when he waits until the last minute to finish a paper for school,” his father answered.

  “I remember that feeling,” Weiss said. “You’ll be fine. I’ll be there to help and there will be guys all over who can feed you quotes if you need them.”

  Stevie had already given some thought to what he would write. His first idea was a story describing his impressions—what it was like to be at the Final Four with a press pass for the first time. But then he decided that would make him sound like a wide-eyed little kid. He had thought about profiling a benchwarmer, or maybe about how each practice that afternoon was different. Or maybe he would try to talk to some fans about what it meant to them to be at a Final Four. They were all decent ideas, but his secret wish was to do a feature on Chip Graber—you had to root for the short guy.

  “One thing you ought to do,” Weiss added, “is talk to Susan Carol to make sure you don’t write the same type of story.”

  Stevie nodded. He told Weiss he would go get his computer, then he and his dad headed to the elevator. The Andersons were standing there waiting. “I guess we need to bring our computers to the Dome,” Stevie said. “Mr. Weiss said it would be easier to write our stories from there.”

  “Oh, well, I guess you should,” Susan Carol said. “But I’ve already written my story for today.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes, well, the people at Duke were so nice to me when I did my story on Coach K, so I called on Monday and asked if there was any way at all to get an interview with Coach Boeheim from Syracuse to find out how he feels being here after finally winning the championship a couple of years ago. Well, Coach K is a friend of his, and he actually called him for me, and I met with Coach Boeheim yesterday afternoon at his hotel! He could not have been nicer. So, I wrote my story last night.”

  “Knowing Coach K was certainly a big help,” said Mr. Anderson.

  “I guess the key to success is knowing Coach K,” Stevie said.

  His father gave him a sharp look. The Andersons said nothing. Fortunately, they had reached their floor and were able to escape into the hallway.

  “That was a snotty thing to say,” Bill Thomas said.

  “Yeah, I know. But Dad, how much of that Coach K stuff can you take?”

  “Well, it was nice of him to help her out. And give her credit. She got an interview with Jim Boeheim because of him. It was a good idea.”

  Stevie groaned. This fair-and-unbiased-reporter thing was harder than it looked.

  Things got better once he and Hoops began their walk over to the Dome. It was a perfect early-spring day and the ramp leading from the hotel to the Superdome was filled with people: fans in the colors of the four teams were everywhere; vendors hawked “official” Final Four memorabilia; and every few yards they would walk past someone with a cell phone in one hand and tickets in the other. “Anybody selling?” they would ask.

  “Why are they trying to buy tickets?” Stevie asked Weiss, who laughed at the question.

  “They’re not trying to buy tickets,” Weiss answered. “They’re scalpers.”

  “Then why are they asking if people are selling?”

  “It’s a code they use in case there’s an undercover cop around. It’s illegal to solicit someone to buy a scalped ticket in Louisiana. But not to ask if someone wants to sell them a ticket.”

  “But you can see they’ve got tickets in their hands.”

  “Right. So if someone is looking to buy, they just stop and say, ‘I’m buying.’ Then they go off someplace quiet and make the sale.”

  “How much are people paying for the tickets?”

  “Someone told me yesterday the scalpers were getting twenty-five hundred bucks a ticket downstairs; closer to fifteen hundred upstairs.”

  Stevie’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my God! My dad was going to try to get a ticket—what’s the lowest price? How much do they normally cost?”

  “I think it’s two hundred and fifty bucks for downstairs. Of course, most people who get the chance to buy tickets paid a lot more for the right to buy those tickets in the first place.”

  “Huh?” People paying for the right to pay for something?

  “Most people who get tickets go through the schools that make the Final Four,” Weiss explained. “Even though there are sixty-five thousand seats in the Dome, most of them are so far away from the court, you can barely see. The really good seats go to the coaches’ association, the NCAA for its sponsors, and to the schools. The way the schools decide who gets to buy the tickets they are allotted is by how much people contribute to their athletic department.”

  “How much do you have to contribute to buy tickets?”

  Weiss shrugged. “Usually at least fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Each?”

  “Yup.”

  Stevie shook his head in wonderment. “Must be some rich people.”

  “At the Final Four,” Weiss said, “there are no poor people.”

  “What about students?” Stevie asked. “They can’t pay fifty thousand dollars.”

  “No, they can’t,” Weiss said. “Which is why each school usually only sells about seventy-five to a hundred student tickets.”

  They had reached the ramp leading up to the walkway that, according to the signs, would take them to the media entrance. Another cell-phone-carrying man approached. “You guys selling?” he asked. He was wearing a white cowboy hat, black leather pants, and cowboy boots.

  Weiss smiled and stopped. “If we were selling, how much would you be paying?” he said.

  The man eyed Weiss suspiciously from under the cowboy hat. “You a cop?” he asked.

  “No, not a cop, a reporter,” Weiss said. “I’d just like to know how much you guys are getting.”

  The scalper smiled and looked behind him for a minute. “What we’re asking may be different than what we’re getting,” he said. “I got seats in the lower bowl, twenty rows up from midcourt, that I’m hoping to get three grand apiece for.”

  Stevie almost gagged. Three thousand dollars? For one ticket?

  “People paying it?” Weiss asked.

  “Not right now,” the scalper said. “But it’s early. By Saturday morning, I’ll get it. Maybe more. If you know anybody, tell ’em to look for Big Tex. They’ll know me by the hat.”

  “Big Tex” was about Stevie’s height. He wondered how Susan Carol Anderson would react to meeting Big Tex and vice versa.

  “I’ll be sure to tell them to look for you,” Weiss said.

  “You do that,” Big Tex said. He reached into his pocket, produced a card, and handed it to Weiss, who looked at it, smiled, and passed it on to Stevie. There was a big white cowboy hat on it with the words “Big Tex” in red letters. At the bottom was a phone number. “That’s this,” Big Tex said, as if reading Stevie’s mind, holding the cell phone up. “I got it on all the time.”

  Stevie stuck the card into his back pocket and they moved on.

  “If you want to do a piece that’s a little different, you might talk to some of these scalpers,” Weiss said. “I guarantee you they’ve got some stories to tell, okay?”

  Yeah right, Stevie thought. Susan Carol would be sending an exclusive Jim Boeheim interview, and he would respond with a Big Te
x interview. That would really impress people.

  “I’ll give it some thought,” he said.

  Weiss laughed. “No you won’t. You’re going to want to write about the people inside this place, not the ones outside.”

  Stevie breathed a sigh of relief. He had thought for a second Weiss was going to push him to chase down Big Tex. They made it to the door labeled MEDIA ENTRANCE without any further encounters with scalpers or anyone else dressed in loud colors or cowboy hats. They had to wait in line for a few minutes because the security people were checking everyone’s bags and wanding people the way they did in airports. Weiss sighed as they waited.

  “Not like the old days,” he said.

  “What was it like in the old days?” Stevie asked.

  Weiss laughed. “Where to begin? I’m old enough that I remember when games were played in about ninety minutes,” he said.

  “Ninety minutes?” Stevie repeated. “How could they possibly have done that?”

  “Easy,” Weiss said. “There weren’t five TV time-outs in every half, and when there was a time-out, it lasted one minute, not three. And halftime didn’t take twenty minutes.”

  Stevie couldn’t imagine a college basketball game only taking an hour and a half. To him, anything under two hours and fifteen minutes was a fast game.

  The security check didn’t take long. Getting their credentials did, because the guy handing them out kept saying he had to see Stevie’s driver’s license. “It’s right in the handbook,” he said, producing a phone-book-thick booklet. “You see, it says right here in section eighteen, paragraph three, line four: ‘To receive a credential, one must produce a government-issued ID, i.e., driver’s license or passport.’ ”

  Weiss rolled his eyes. “Come on, Mike. He’s thirteen years old. He doesn’t have a driver’s license and probably doesn’t have a passport, right?” Stevie nodded to confirm that Weiss was correct. “He’s one of the winners of our writing contest. You have a pass there for him. And I’ll vouch for him.”

  The NCAA guy, who was wearing a blue blazer complete with a name tag and a pass dangling around his neck that said “All Access,” eyed Stevie and Weiss suspiciously, shaking his head as if to say, No can do. “Just because I have a pass for Steven Thomas doesn’t mean he’s Steven Thomas.”