Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  Y

  Yield

  The benchwarmer yields. That’s one of the things I remember from the last game of my season as the backup to the backup forwards on an all-Caucasian northern Vermont NAIA college basketball team that started a melancholy six-foot-four Grateful Dead fan at center and lost unceasingly. That moment just before the opening tap, when our huddle at the edge of the court disbanded and the starters ambled onto the floor while the rest of us receded from the impending action and found a seat—I was yielding the court. I had been yielding the court all season long without any awareness that I was doing so or, rather, any awareness that it wasn’t exactly something that was being done to me but that I was doing it. I sensed this in my last game because I didn’t want to yield the court. Some part of me was pushing back on my fate as a benchwarmer. It was the last game, and I didn’t want to yield. I loved the game, and it was all going away. I knew I wasn’t going to play anymore beyond this season. I wanted to be a part of it. The seconds, the minutes—flying. Time was running out. I wanted to play.

  The benchwarmer yields. The days, the weeks. After Jack’s first birthday the months flew. You X the days off the calendar: another fall, another winter, another spring. In Jack’s second June we had another party at our house, this time for a friend, a baby shower. Our house filled up again with parents and kids. Jack wanted to be in my arms the whole time, away from others. Was something wrong with him? Was he destined to be like me—living at a remove, yielding, benchwarming through life?

  He got down from my arms briefly and was pushing a little wagon when another kid came and took it from him. Jack didn’t care, but I got furious. I started fixating on Jack getting tough, fantasizing about him telling the other kid to fuck off. I internalized it, made it about me: I had to teach Jack that this is the way of the world: you have to grab and take. I was very raw and sensitive by the time, that night, when we were trying to get Jack to sleep. He was going nuts, going through another in a seemingly endless series of rough nighttime stretches. As always Abby was up and hushing him to sleep, with me benched nearby, making occasional hesitating forays to the scorer’s table to try to check into the action. On this night, it seemed to me, Abby first mocked my attempt to help then mocked that I wasn’t helping. I half-rose from the couch and reached over to Abby and Jack, also on the couch, and tried to shove Abby aside and take Jack. My forearm pushing against her. It was a light shove. Can I feel better about that? Not really.

  “I’m sick of this shit! Give him to me!” I said.

  “Are you crazy?” she said and stood her ground.

  I sat back down, nauseous with guilt. Now I wanted to dissolve into complete oblivion, which seemed close at hand, invisible in our living room air. But it didn’t come. I had to just sit there next to my wailing little boy and the wife I’d just shoved. It seemed I had no control over anything, least of all myself. I’ve known for a long time that the benchwarmer yields, but I always harbored the fantasy that this yielding was a way, in ceding any control over anything else, to at least retain control over myself.

  Yips

  Before our last game, in the locker room, the starting small forward, Tector, sought my counsel. This is a sign of how bad the yips are, how desperate they make you. The loss of control inherent in the yips—the tennis player stricken with an inability to land a second serve, the golfer with a putter suddenly as unfamiliar and uncontrollable in his slick palms as an eel, the baseball player undone by the simplest throw (see Sasser, Mackey)—will drive you to look for help from anywhere, from anyone, even the benchwarmer.

  Tector had never racked up impressive stats but was a good all-around player with a quick mind and an excellent feel for the game. The first time I’d ever seen him play, in a pickup game, he’d stunned me by making a brilliant fast-break touch pass to a streaking teammate for a layup. I wondered how he had even seen the possibility of the play, let alone executed it. But our long losing streak had worked on Tector like an encroaching fog, obscuring his subtle talents and enlarging his shortcomings, such as his mediocre jump shot, into large shadowy masses. He had been in a terrible shooting slump for weeks.

  In retrospect it’s clear that the slump coincided with the growing collective awareness that the most consistently effective player on the team was no longer my fellow Grateful Dead fan, Nick, but Lundy, the poetry-deriding offensive-glass specialist, this awareness carrying with it the corollary awareness that Lundy should no longer be coming off the bench but should be starting in place of the frontcourt player with the least measurable impact on the game, Tector. Lundy was the primary backup to both Tector and the starting power forward, a bruising human expressway girder in serial-killer glasses, Bellini. Throughout the first half of the season the play of the starting frontcourt was the core of periodic moments of encouraging play by the team, the offense running smoothly through the generous and imaginative pivot, Nick, with Bellini clearing space by setting jarring picks and glaring maniacally and Tector helping glue it all together by always being where he was supposed to be. We almost won a few games with this combination, but then in the second half of the season Nick started losing focus, and the trio unraveled—Bellini still knocking people over but not in a way that ever led to anything and Tector unable to use his keen sense of being where he was supposed to be because there was no longer anywhere specific to be. There were only shots to heave, cut loose from any semblance of a working offense.

  This broken approach didn’t suit Tector, but Lundy took to it, as he had an offensive game built on one simple principle: attack. Whenever he got the ball he dribbled head down and solely with his right hand into the key, cleared space by butting his defender with a muscular shoulder, and shoveled an inelegant shot-put jump shot toward the hoop, which was, even beyond its formal deficiencies, less a jump shot as most players understand the jump shot—as an entity unto itself—but rather the opening salvo of a tenacious assault on the basket. If the ball went in, great, but if it didn’t, Lundy would be continuing his fullback surge toward the rim and would often be able to grab his own rebound and be closer to the hoop for another try, and if that try or any subsequent tries didn’t make it through the net, he’d keep grabbing and hurling and grabbing and hurling until it did. Lundy was a nice guy, a good guy. He worked tremendously hard at his physical conditioning and at basketball. He was putting himself through college, and for most or all of that season, impoverished, he slept on people’s floors or, in above-zero weather, in the woods outside campus in a tent. He would go on to a successful career as a coach in Division I women’s college basketball and mounted a booming side business of doing family-friendly halftime basketball-juggling exhibitions with his wife and their several beaming children. But Lundy, fucking Lundy. He scored points like he was cornering an edgy marmot and clubbing it to death.

  It was effective, and if we’d featured him more prominently, we may have finally experienced winning. For better or worse our coach, the English teacher, remained bound to the glimpses of collective harmony shown by the starting frontcourt in the early moments of the season, and he refused to let go of it by benching the trio’s most unassuming member, Tector. So Tector was left to twist in the meaningless widening gyre, attempting occasional broken-play jump shots, haunted by the mounting evidence that he wasn’t as deserving of a starting spot as his power-­lifting unflappable backup. Tector’s jump shot, never more than functional at best, got progressively worse until it resembled the spasm of someone with irreversible nervous system damage. Finally, just before our last game, he came to me for help.

  What drew him to me, as best I can recall, was that he saw that I had my favorite crystal with me. I don’t know whether drug-addled Caucasian college kids are still into crystals, but they were big in my day. I don’t know why. They were supposed to have power or something. I had gotten one from somewhere that I gripped onto for dear life through several acid trips, and the pressure from this grip h
ad bestowed upon it, so it seemed to me, a faintly benevolent feel. I gripped it from time to time for luck. I’m not sure what I would have to offer in the way of evidence that the magic crystal delivered me any tangible winnings from the world, but I still believed in it or at least considered that there might be something to believe in.

  In the locker room before our last game I handed the crystal to Tector, and he squeezed it with his shooting hand for several seconds, sitting there on the bench near his locker and clenching his eyes shut, appearing to be straining with all his might to believe that some pure mystical energy would cleanse him of doubt and bring back his feel for the game. One of the few specific traces of in-game action that I remember from that long losing season was Tector’s first jump shot after the locker room crystal ceremony. It came early in that last game and was his worst shot yet, a rushed fearful needing that paradoxically also suggested a whole-body constriction, his desire to be rid of the yips overwhelmed by a deeper desire to disappear into himself, and the shot never got even close to the hoop, a droopy impotent air ball, an embarrassment. I sunk a little lower on the bench, feeling somehow responsible.

  Young, Anthony

  How responsible is anyone? How much control? The day after I gave my wife a shove, Jack tripped and fell and bashed his face three times in a row, all with me on watch. The appropriate response to a toddler falling is to comfort them gently, but I was always overwhelmed by varying levels of self-hating fury. On Jack’s third fall Abby swooped in to placate him, and I went past my breaking point. Despite my promises to Abby, I stalked off to the bedroom to beat the shit out of myself, clawing at my stomach and chest, ripping my shirt, pummeling my head and face (see Glass Joe). I knew I wasn’t supposed to do this, but after shoving my wife I had little resolve left. I hate when Jack falls, when I can’t take care of him. I hate not having any control.

  “I see the marks on your face,” Abby said when I reappeared. For a long time we’d had an understanding that I was done with this habit. This understanding preceded Jack’s arrival, but his arrival intensified the stakes. Now it wasn’t just me I was harming.

  “Just get out of the house,” Abby said, not looking at me. “Get away from us. Go.”

  For the first time in almost two years, since Jack was born, I had nowhere to go, nowhere to be. I wandered, wanting to be nothing and nowhere. I ended up drifting several blocks south to Wrigleyville. There was a Cubs game in progress. I didn’t want to have even the least contact or interaction with other people, but I could have watched a baseball game. Unfortunately, to do so involved interacting with another human, namely a scalper. I walked around for a while hoping a scalper would approach me, but the only ones around were skulking in doorways. I would have had to approach them, an assertion of myself in the world that was at that moment far beyond me, so I drifted away from Wrigley Field, ghostly cheers gusting up from within the walls of the stadium now at my back.

  Many years earlier I’d neglected to go with my friend Ramblin’ Pete to see the Mets’ game at which Anthony Young was poised to break the all-time record for most losses in a row by a pitcher. I don’t know why I turned down this chance. I was hoping to find, in researching this unanswerable question, that the game had been on a weekday, which would have at least given me the excuse that I’d had a shift at the liquor store. But the game was on a Sunday, when liquor stores in New York are all closed. Sunday, June 27, 1993, just under twenty years to the day before my miserable bruise-faced Sunday wander. In twenty years what had I learned? What control had I brought into my life?

  There was nothing I could possibly have had to do on a Sunday that couldn’t have waited until after a trip to the ballpark to see history. Some people, the ones to whom sports are about champions and strength and the home team winning on a bright afternoon, might say that it wasn’t the type of history that mattered, but of course I am not one of those people. Anthony Young did lose that day, his twenty-fourth losing decision in a row, breaking Cliff Curtis’s eight-decade-old record for consecutive losses, and I missed it. My best guess is that I neglected to go to this game because I wanted to write. That’s almost all I ever cared about. I wanted to believe there was some way I could gain some control over the world. I always thought that every day could be the day I finally broke through and said something indestructibly true.

  “I always think this will be the day,” Anthony Young said after his record-breaking loss. He lost three more decisions to run the record to twenty-seven before finally scavenging a relief win that featured one inning of unremarkable work in which he allowed the opposition to take a lead; in the bottom of the inning the Mets rallied for two runs, which technically made Young the winning pitcher. He was mobbed by his teammates for this arbitrary release from his arbitrary suffering. The statistic that had haunted Young, the win, had taken root in the National Pastime as an irreducible unit of pure worth, the key identifier separating the good from the bad. But Young had not pitched badly throughout his streak, as evidenced by all his other numbers besides wins and losses. In 1993 he finished with a record of one win and sixteen losses but posted an ERA of 3.77, respectable by anyone’s standards. But the myth around pitcher wins is similar to the sentiment voiced by the championship-winning soccer coach at my college when disparaging my basketball team: Some people know how to win and some don’t. But Anthony Young was proof that no one really has that much control.

  “It seems like the ball has eyes when I’m pitching,” Anthony Young observed.

  In the clubhouse after Young’s streak finally came to an end Young’s catharsis was soured when Mets pitcher Bret Saberhagen sprayed bleach onto reporters, an incident that, along with Mets outfielder Vince Coleman pelting fans with lit firecrackers, came to embody the 1993 Mets, one of the worst and most embittered teams in major league history. Losing and lashing out, lashing out and losing. Twenty years later I wandered the streets as if in those miserable cleats, looking for some place, any place, to sit.

  Z

  Zero

  Benchwarmers on elite college basketball teams are an anomaly among benchwarmers in general in that, given the right conditions, they may serve a purpose, however negligible. You’ll see them spring into action during March Madness in the frenzied last seconds of a game. Almost always they are short, stocky white guys. Upon a tying or go-ahead basket they rise from the bench, arms fenced outward like riot police, to keep their excited teammates from bounding onto the court midgame in paroxysms of joy. These benchwarmers hold guys back, and then when that moment has passed they resume their benched station to pray, to hold one another, to cheer. But what of the benchwarmer on a team on which there are no celebrations? This benchwarmer is the purer breed of the species. This benchwarmer sits.

  “I want to play,” I’d said to our coach, the English teacher, just before our last game. He stared back at me blankly. At that point in the season his team was such a mess that he couldn’t be motivated to worry about me, the last guy on the bench, who was, by definition, the least of his problems. I took a seat for the opening tap and didn’t rise until we were filing into the locker room for halftime, already down by twenty. Time was running out, moving toward zero, and I was angry. Why not me? How could I be any worse than what was already happening? I glared at the locker room floor all through halftime and didn’t hear a word anyone said. I followed everyone back out onto the court and joined the layup line. Every time it was my turn I tried to dunk it. I’d never dunked a ball before. But I was in the best shape of my life, and not getting in the game had started to work me into an adrenal rage. I wanted to throw one down for once in my life. I got pretty close, but pretty close is ugly when it comes to dunking. Again and again I charged toward the hoop with a murderous look on my face, leaped, and rammed the ball against the back of the rim. Finally the halftime buzzer sounded, ending the display, and I yielded the court and took a seat on the bench. Actually it was a metal folding chair.

>   But still: there is a bench. When I pounded on my own face and was sent out of my home, away from my wife and son, I walked for hours. Eventually I came upon a bench. This is the bench I have been telling you about all along. It’s not in a park or at a bus stop. It’s one of those benches you see sometimes that don’t really make sense. It’s on a sidewalk on a nondescript side street and overlooks—or more precisely abuts at a slight, haphazard angle—a square of dirt bordered by some bricks. Presumably something was supposed to grow in the dirt. There are some cigarette butts, a few blades of grass, a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrapper, my shadow.

  I’m sitting on this bench.

  As I sat on a metal folding chair in my last game we fell so far behind that I knew I would get into the game in my customary role, as our last and most raggedy human white flag, and yet still the seconds kept ticking off the clock. You might think our coach was making some final stab at authority, teaching me a lesson for confronting him so directly with selfish demands of playing time. But he wasn’t like that. He was flummoxed, reeling. I think he simply forgot I was there. As the seconds ticked away some part of him had relaxed. He took a seat in his own metal folding chair. He leaned back into a slouch. The clock wound down toward zero.

  You don’t always get your ultimate defining moment, your victory, your climactic epiphany. I wanted to believe otherwise during the first days and weeks and months of parenthood, that at some point I’d open my eyes and know how to be a father. I’d feel like I’d arrived. But every day you’re back at zero. You know nothing.

  The backup point guard, Rat, picked up his dribble and called a timeout with fourteen seconds left in the game. He knew I wanted in. The English teacher stood up from his chair, looking quizzically toward Rat, and I rose with him and got in his path. He seemed not to recognize me for a second but then managed a weary grin.