by Mike Lupica
The thing Ben and his teammates liked the best about him? He loved basketball the way they did, seemed to smile the whole time he was on the court with them, even when he was telling them they’d messed up. And talked to them constantly about them playing it the right way.
Of course in the e-mails he sent out to the players and their parents, he said he wanted them to play the “Wright way.”
Except that three minutes into the first scrimmage of the new season it was 12–2, Darby, and he’d been forced to call his first time-out of the season because Rockwell’s Rams were playing the opposite of the right way. Going the wrong way. Fast.
“Okay,” he said when they were all around him. “This is a good thing.”
Coop, who played center, said, “You mean because we’re not down 20–2 the way that guy is playing?”
That guy.
Chase Braggs.
“No,” Coach said, “because now we’ve identified who we need to stop.”
Ben had been guarding Chase. Or trying to. “I’ll settle for slowing him down,” he said. “Like a speed bump.”
It had only been three minutes, and Ben wasn’t about to lose his mind after three minutes of a scrimmage, but so far his main problem with Chase Braggs was this:
Everything Ben did on a basketball court, Chase seemed to be doing just a little better.
He wasn’t that much bigger, but somehow used the size difference between them to his advantage every chance he’d gotten so far. He wasn’t really all that much faster with the ball than Ben was, he just seemed faster right now, as if he were playing at a different speed than Ben and everybody else, and that meant Chase’s own teammates, too.
He had eight of Darby’s points, making two shots from the outside, driving past Ben for two layups, assisting on the other two Darby baskets. One was a pass from halfcourt to their center, who’d broken ahead of the pack. The other was a no-look bounce pass in traffic to Ryan Hurley, a kid they all knew from having played football against him.
“It’s not just you, dude,” Sam said in the huddle. “Ryan made me look like somebody’d Krazy-Glued my sneaks to the floor.”
“Okay,” Coach said, smiling. “Enough of this fascinating play-by-play. I want you all to relax and stop obsessing about the new guy. Everybody help Ben on defense whenever we can, because that’s what we play, boys, against everybody. Help defense. And just keep trying to make the extra pass on offense. Don’t worry about his stuff. Worry about ours.”
Before they broke the huddle, Coach grabbed Ben and said, “You want, we can start messing around with our zone, I was gonna eventually do that, anyway.”
“No,” Ben said, “I got this.”
And went back out there to match up with Chase Braggs. There were some things Ben would never say out loud, but knew in his heart. Like the way he really felt about Lily, who was right when she said Ben had been the best point guard in the league last season. Sam said it all the time, so did Coop, not just Lily. Ben never said it. But knew it was true. He’d been the best ball handler, the best passer of the ball. Maybe not the best shooter, but if you backed off him and dared him to put it up, he could make you pay, especially in a big spot.
Only today, in the only game that ever mattered to Ben McBain — the one he was playing — Chase Braggs was the best point guard in the gym, by a lot, the whole game running through him.
And worse?
He was playing to the crowd every chance he got.
Chase Braggs.
Yeah, it was like he was bragging on himself for real. Chase Braggs was good and knew it and wanted to make sure that people watching knew he knew it. Every time he made a pass or a shot he’d bob his head up and down and smile, like he was the boy with the right answer to every question in class. Sometimes he’d look over into the crowd and point at a man and woman Ben assumed were his parents, the man pointing back at him. Or he’d run past his coach and slap him a quick low five. He didn’t need to draw any more attention to himself, not the way he was schooling Ben and the rest of the Rams.
But he was. Not in a big, showy, obnoxious way. But it was like Chase wanted to control the ball and the spotlight at the same time.
Wanted all eyes on him at all times, like he thought he might end up on SportsCenter tonight, like he was starring in his own highlight reel.
After Chase had made his very first outside shot of the day, Ben slow getting around a screen, he heard Chase say this to one of his teammates:
“That’s why they call me Chase. ’Cause guys have to chase me all day.” Smiling and nodding as he did.
It was 26–6, Darby, by the end of the quarter, at which point Coach Wright put in their second unit, even though he never called it that. By then Ben was still scoreless, had just one assist, to Sam for a layup on a backdoor play of their own.
Ben had also turned the ball over three times, the last right before the quarter ended, taking his eyes off Chase just long enough at the top of the key, waiting for Coop to come up and set a screen. As he did, Chase’s right hand flicked out, knocked the ball off Ben’s dribble, pushing the ball ahead as he did. Ben had no chance to catch him, had to watch from halfcourt as Chase slowed up just enough that he got off his shot before the clock went to zeroes for the quarter, holding his shooting pose again, just long enough to make you notice he’d done it.
He wasn’t pounding his chest the way guys in college or the pros did after a dunk. But the guy clearly liked to style. Had some stuff he was into.
Walking off the court, Sam said to Ben, “Like my dad says, not enough mustard in the world for that hot dog.”
“And relish,” Coop said. “And sauerkraut.”
“Feeling pretty sour myself about now,” Ben said.
Sam said, “It’ll be different in the second half.”
Ben said, “You sure of that?”
As it turned out the second half was pretty much a copy of the first, Chase Braggs doing what he wanted to do against Ben, getting his shots, making a behind-the-back pass to Ryan Hurley before his coach took him out for good early in the fourth quarter, since Darby was ahead by twenty points at the time.
Darby ended up winning, 55–38. Worst beatdown Ben could ever remember getting in basketball, from the time he and Sam and Coop had started playing fourth-grade ball at the Rockwell YMCA, which Ben’s dad ran.
When it was over, Ben walked to the scorer’s table, looked at the scorebook that Coach Wright’s girlfriend kept at games, saw that Chase Braggs had scored twenty-four points even though he’d played just over half the game. Brenda, Coach’s girlfriend and a former player herself, didn’t keep assists for the other team, but Ben knew Chase had to have had at least ten. Maybe more.
Ben? He ended up with six points, two assists, knew that he’d turned the ball over half a dozen times. It was a lot. There had been games last season when he didn’t turn it over at all.
There was no handshake line after the game for the two teams, not after a scrimmage. Even though the scrimmage suddenly felt like a lot more to Ben. Sam and Coop went over to talk to Ryan Hurley.
Ben was still standing in front of the scorer’s table, just wanting to get to his dad’s car, when he saw Chase Braggs walking toward him.
Chase still smiling.
Ben thinking: If I’d played the way he did today, I’d be smiling, too. But already thinking about knocking that smile off the guy’s face the first chance he got.
Ben McBain hated to lose. In anything. Hated to lose as much as he loved to compete. But he knew there was a way to behave in sports, win or lose. Told himself to put on his fake smile and get it over with and get out of there.
Chase put out his right hand, which seemed to be about twice the size of Ben’s, introduced himself. Ben did the same.
“Heard a lot about you,” Chase Braggs said. “You really throw that pass in the championship game?”
“Lucky heave,” Ben said. “Plus, the guy who caught it is the best receiver I’m ever gonna h
ave.”
“Not the way Ryan tells it,” Chase said. “He said the only guy who could have made that throw was the guy who made it.”
“Sort of like the guy making all those shots against me today,” Ben said.
They both shrugged, almost at the same moment, as if they’d run out of small talk. Or ways to blow smoke at each other.
“Well, I hope I can do that when you’re playing your hardest,” Chase Braggs said, and then said he’d see Ben when they played the next Saturday in Rockwell.
There was a ball just sitting there on the floor, just outside the three-point line. As Chase walked across to where his coach was waiting for him, he casually scooped up the ball, turned and squared up and fired one last shot that hit nothing but net, like it was as easy as making a layup.
Then he wagged his finger one more time the way he had in the game, kept walking.
Not even chasing after the ball, as if he knew somebody else would go pick it up later. Just turning and giving Ben one last wave, not to say good-bye, Ben knew, just to make sure that Ben had been watching.
Ben stood there and watched as Chase, hair almost as red as the red uniform he was wearing, got one last high five for the day, this one from his coach.
Ben feeling as if Chase had made one last shot on him, and thinking:
I was playing my hardest.
Sam and Coop rode home in Mrs. Manley’s car, Shawn hitching a ride with them because his parents had to go watch one of Shawn’s sisters play a soccer game. So Ben rode home with his dad, who’d shown up about five minutes before the opening tip.
It meant Jeff McBain had seen all of the bad parts. But being the experienced sports dad that he was — and having been a college football player himself — he knew enough not to say anything about the game until Ben did, which wasn’t until they were ten minutes into the ride home.
Up until then, the car had been as quiet as the school library.
“Nobody picks me like that,” Ben said from the backseat, “even when I go up against older kids in the park.”
They were at a stop sign. Ben’s dad turned around, grinning. “Now I know that wasn’t technically a question,” he said. “But am I allowed to answer, anyway?”
“Dad, there’s not much to say about what you just saw. What everybody just saw.”
“Though, I have to say, you have been doing an excellent job yourself not saying anything about it,” his dad said.
“Please don’t give me a pep talk, Dad, I’m begging you,” Ben said. “Pep talks are supposed to be before the game, anyway.”
“Not always.”
“So there’s nothing I can do to stop you?”
“Not really, no.”
“I was afraid of that,” Ben said.
“I just thought I might be able to bring a little perspective,” his dad said. “Dads have to at least try. It’s a rule they passed for us a while back.”
Ben waited.
His dad was driving again, eyes on the road as he said, “You just finished the season of your life in football. And even though you think football season is over now, that you’ve already moved on, that’s not the way it works. Guess what? You and Sam and Coop and the guys, you haven’t moved on yet, even though you think you have. And by the way? I wouldn’t have been able to move on yet, either.”
“It’s been two weeks,” Ben said. “A full week of basketball practice. I’m not using football as an excuse. You know me, Dad. I don’t make excuses when I lose.”
“But sometimes I do,” Jeff McBain said. “Think of it as me pulling rank on you.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
His dad laughed. “It means that I’m the dad and you’re the kid and I get to make the rules, at least sometimes. In the army they’d say that means I outrank you.”
“Got it.”
“Your body might have been out there on the court today,” his dad said, “but I don’t believe your brain was. Trust me on this, I’m practically like a brain surgeon when it comes to sports.”
Ben said, “It wasn’t my brain that kept getting beat by that guy today.”
“One scrimmage,” his dad said. “Which you played half of.”
“It still felt like a total beatdown to me,” Ben said. “A complete facial.”
It was how Marv Albert, one of Ben’s favorite basketball announcers, described dunks sometimes. The guy dunking the ball giving the guy he was dunking on a facial.
“I’m sorry,” Ben’s dad said. “I know the redheaded kid had a terrific game, but for the life of me I can’t remember him throwing one down on you.”
“Well, that’s the way it felt,” Ben said.
He leaned back, closed his eyes. But it wasn’t like the ride over to Darby now, this time when he closed his eyes, there were no sweet memories from the championship game in football.
Just one picture after another of Chase Braggs scalding him. All day long.
“I am gonna have to get a whole lot better,” Ben said finally, filling one more silence in the car.
“And you will,” his dad said.
There was still plenty of daylight left when they got home, even though the afternoon had gotten colder. Ben ran upstairs, threw on a hoodie, grabbed his outdoor basketball, went straight to the hoop at the far end of McBain Field.
Went to work.
Ben had nothing against going out and practicing by himself and trying to get better.
When it was baseball season he had absolutely no problem with asking his dad for the key to the batting cage behind the Y, feeding balls into the machine, working on his swing, making himself take pitch after pitch up the middle if he could, giving himself points every time he’d smack a line drive off the machine.
Ben wasn’t afraid of work.
But more than anything, he just wanted to play.
He wanted to play games, real games or pickup games with his boys. Even video games. He just loved to compete, that was the real fun of sports for him and why when one season ended he really couldn’t wait for the next one to begin.
Only now the next season for him had begun like this, in a glorified pickup game that felt as real as it could possibly be, even an hour after it had ended. Getting scalded and schooled and torched like that by the new guy.
It was why he was out here at McBain Field, the hoop with the blue halfcourt in front of it, the key and the free-throw line and the lane painted in white, even though all the paint was beginning to fade and Ben had noticed that there were even a few more little potholes than he’d noticed the last time he had been out here shooting around.
When Ben was on his way out the door his dad had said, “I assume you’re gonna be out there awhile, right?”
Ben nodded.
“Till dinner?” his dad said.
“At least.”
“Have at it.”
“Don’t worry,” Ben said. “I will.”
He didn’t need to warm up, mostly because he was still hot from the game.
It was the steals Chase Braggs had made against him that bothered him more than anything.
If there was one thing Ben was most proud of in basketball, it was the way he could handle the ball, even with small hands. He could handle and he could dribble with both hands, even at eleven. His dad had always told him that being able to dribble with both hands in basketball was like being a switch-hitter in baseball.
One of Ben’s first coaches in the Y league, fourth grade, Mr. Russell, had said to him: “The way to play this game as a point guard is not let the guy guarding you overplay.”
So even though Ben was right-handed he’d never cared if somebody tried to force him to go left, because he had a left hand, and wasn’t afraid to use it. It was why he’d always been able to drive the defense crazy because they didn’t know which hand he was going to use when he wanted to drive to the basket.
Until today, anyway.
Today Chase Braggs had been able to read him like Ben was his
favorite book. Like he knew where Ben was going before Ben did. Even though they’d never set eyes on each other before the scrimmage, it seemed as if Chase already knew all of Ben’s best moves, as if they had played more games against each other than Bird and Magic did.
It was why the boy who loved to play was out here working, working hard, at McBain Field. Thinking to himself how it never really ended in sports, how even though there was always a new season coming along there was always a new challenge, some new way you had to prove yourself.
In football he’d had to prove that he was a better quarterback than Shawn O’Brien, the coach’s son, despite the fact that Shawn was so much bigger than Ben, that he looked the part of a quarterback so much more than Ben did.
And, man oh man, he had proved it, right through the last play of the championship game, that pass to Sam Brown. Only now here came Chase Braggs, an opponent he had to overcome instead of a teammate like Shawn.
Even though Chase wasn’t all that much bigger than Ben, his longer arms and greater wingspan just made him seem bigger than he actually was, especially when he was taking the ball away from Ben and making it look so freakishly easy. But it wasn’t just the steals. One time he’d backed off at exactly the right moment, right as Ben was committed to passing the ball to Sam on the wing, Chase jumping the route the way cornerbacks in football did when they seemed to just know where the quarterback was going to throw. He had intercepted Ben’s pass and almost in the same motion thrown the ball all the way down the court to Ryan Hurley for an easy two.
People always liked to talk about what a great head Ben had for basketball.
Only Chase had been in it all day.
And still was.
It was one of the reasons why Ben didn’t even think about shooting the ball the first half hour he was out here. He just dribbled. Side to side, sometimes going all the way around the small court, switching back and forth from his right hand to his left, changing direction sometimes on the fly, crossing over, keeping the ball low. Imagining Chase on him, ready to swipe at the ball with those long arms, Ben making sure to keep his free arm up, the free arm and his body between the imaginary defender and the ball.
