Play Makers

by Mike Lupica

  “Hey,” Coop said, “they’ve got to play the season, too. Somebody else could beat them.”

  “Really?” Ben said.

  Coop said, “So we’ll have to figure it out, and we’ve got plenty of time, we don’t play them again for a while.”

  The next time they were playing Darby was in the fifth game of the season, right before the Christmas break in the town basketball schedule. Then the two teams played again in the last game of the regular season. Usually teams in the league only played each other once during the regular season, but Rockwell and Darby had always played each other twice, just because of the rivalry between the two towns. This year they’d added a third game when Fort Stuart decided to join a different league. The kids were fine with it, loving the big crowds they got, almost like they were in training for what Rockwell vs. Darby would be like when they got to high school.

  The Game of the Year, times three this year.

  One down, two to go.

  “Here’s the deal,” Sam said. “We only lost by a bucket yesterday. You don’t think we can figure out a way for us to find those two points before we do play them again?”

  “They could get better, too,” Ben said.

  Not giving ground.

  “But you know that we always get better, in every sport, as the season goes along,” Coop said. “Like we didn’t in football?”

  “Basketball is different,” Ben said. “One guy can make a bigger difference when it’s just five on the team.”

  “Chase is still just one guy,” Shawn said.

  “So’s LeBron,” Ben said.

  “Whoa,” Sam said. “Now Chase Braggs is LeBron James?”

  “Dad,” Ben said, “help me out here.”

  His dad leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, looking happy, taking it all in.

  “Sorry, I’m a football guy,” Jeff McBain said.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, “and you never have any opinions about other sports.”

  “Well,” Ben’s dad said, “since you did ask … I actually agree with Coop.”

  “Yes!” Coop said, putting his arm up in the air and then pulling it down hard.

  Ben’s dad said, “You guys always do get better as you go. I also agree with Sam. Next time it might be you guys making the last shot, it’s not like you got your doors blown off yesterday.”

  “I’m getting ganged up on here,” Ben said. “What about you, Mom? Care to jump in?”

  “Guy talk about sports? I’d rather start doing dishes now,” she said, both Ben and his dad knowing she was being sarcastic.

  “One more thing,” his dad said.

  “From the football guy,” Ben said.

  Jeff McBain said, “Not only is your league not just one player, it’s not just one team. Who’re you guys playing next Saturday?”

  “Parkerville,” Shawn said.

  “Well, my suggestion is to get Chase out of your heads, and replace him with Parkerville.”

  Looking at Ben as he said that, both of them knowing that he was only worried about what was going on inside his own son’s head. But then, it happened that way between them a lot, big father-son talks where his dad had to say hardly anything at all.

  Shawn and Coop lived on the north side of Rockwell, and had ridden their bikes over to Ben’s. After the Packers game ended, they said they were going to head out. Sam said he was going to hang for a while, watch some of the second game of the doubleheader, Cowboys against the Redskins. He said as a Giants’ fan it was fun watching Tony Romo throw interceptions.

  But then the Cowboys got ahead two touchdowns in the first quarter and scored another halfway through the second. Sam announced that watching the Cowboys win was never any fun for him, and got up to leave.

  “Let’s go shoot around for a few minutes,” Ben said.

  “Nooooooo,” Sam said. “Can’t we have a hoops-free day?”

  “Please?” Ben said.

  Sam shook his head, already reaching for the ball that was sitting next to the television set. “Sometimes I can’t tell what’s worse, the way Lily dominates you or the way you dominate me.”

  You could see it already starting to get dark. Sam said he couldn’t believe that Ben hadn’t somehow convinced the town council to put lights up at McBain Field, so that Ben could practice like a lunatic as late as he wanted.

  “Lunatic? What’s so crazy about wanting to see an ending to the basketball season that was like the one we had in football?”

  Sam looked past him, squinting, and said, “It’s getting too dark out here for me to see anything.”

  “We don’t have to stay out here too long,” Ben said.

  Sam said, “Where have I heard that one before? Wait! I know! Here!”

  They just took turns shooting around at first, Ben not wanting Sam to think that he’d just brought him out here to play the part of Chase again. After they were warmed up, they played a game of H-O-R-S-E, even as darkness started to come faster now.

  After Sam beat Ben with a left-handed baby hook, he said, “Before it gets pitch-black, is there anything you want to work on before I go?”

  “You think that’s why I brought you out here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, since you were nice enough to offer,” Ben said, “show me how I can defend a step-back move like the one he put on me yesterday.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Sam said, “but you’re never going to be able to defend a bigger guy with a good step-back. It’s that way from sixth-grade ball all the way up to the pros.”

  “I know that,” Ben said. “But I keep thinking that if I time my move right, as he’s going into his move, I might be able to get a hand on the ball.”

  “Not unless the guy telegraphs when he’s going to turn around and square up.”

  “Let me at least try,” Ben said.

  Sam shot three straight turnarounds after backing Ben in, made two of them, Ben never came close to putting his hand on the ball.

  Sam said, “The only thing I’ve noticed when a guy tries to put that move on me, is that sometimes the last dribble before he turns, he might pound the ball a little harder. Maybe you could look for that.”

  “Why don’t I look for it right here, first to five baskets?” Ben said. “Now that I know what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

  “You can’t look for anything now,” Sam said. “It’s too dark!”

  “Best of three baskets, then,” Ben said. “Who knows, you might improve your shooting eye.”

  “How does that work,” Sam said, “if you already feel like you’re shooting blindfolded?”

  Ben said they could shoot for it, but Sam said no, just handed him the ball, and said, “Let’s get this over with.”

  Despite the bad light, Ben made a long one from the outside before Sam was up on him. But then Sam blocked his next shot, gave Ben a little up-fake, drove past him for the easy bucket.

  “Game time,” Sam said.

  “Bring it,” Ben said.

  Thinking to himself that they were all right, Lily and his buds and his dad, that he was supposed to be having fun playing ball, that he had to stop stressing on Chase and one stupid loss. Just let the game and the fun of the game come to him the way it was right now with Sam Brown.

  Finally seeing it clearly, even out here in the dark.

  He even flipped what Chase had said to him yesterday at the end of the game, saying to Sam now, “You think you can score on me, big boy?”

  “Kind of,” Sam said.

  He started backing Ben in, Ben sure he’d try to win the game with the same step-back move they’d been working on, Ben ready to make his own move at exactly the right moment, waiting for Sam to pound that last dribble before he turned.

  But when he did, and Ben flashed in for the ball, Sam completely faked him out, laughing as he did, like this was too easy, spun around to a left-hand dribble, completely dusted Ben as he drove in for the easy layup that would win the game.

 
Until one stride from the basket he stepped in a hole at McBain that neither of them could have seen, his left leg buckling underneath him, Sam going down hard, yelling in a way Ben had never heard Sam Brown yell in his life.

  Rolling around on the ground immediately, holding on to his left ankle.

  Ben didn’t need much light at all to see the pain in Sam’s face, hear it in his voice.

  “Rolled it bad,” he said.

  “Don’t move,” Ben said, “I’ll go get my dad.”

  Sam said, “Let me see if I can walk on it.”

  “Sam, please wait, I don’t want you to hurt it any worse than you already did.”

  “C’mon,” Sam said, trying to force a smile, “now you be a bro and give me a hand.”

  Ben did. Sam slowly tried to get to his feet, tried to put some weight on the ankle.

  Went right down again.

  And in that moment Ben was no longer obsessing about a player on somebody else’s team. Just about one of his own teammates, one of the best friends he was ever going to have.

  One who shouldn’t even have been out here in the dark, one who was only out here because he was such a great friend to Ben, and always had been.

  Ben pulled Sam up again. Even though he was much smaller, he told Sam to lean on him as they began to walk toward Ben’s house, making their way slowly across the field where they’d had so much fun in their lives.

  It wasn’t broken.

  That was pretty much the only good news once they got Sam to Rockwell Medical for X-rays.

  Sam had never broken any bones, neither had Ben. So they couldn’t tell whether or not Sam had cracked an ankle bone before they got to the hospital, even Ben’s dad and mom weren’t sure, telling Sam on the way that sometimes a bad ankle sprain could hurt just as much.

  And every time Sam was asked about the ankle he said it hurt a lot.

  But only when asked. Because he was Sam, he wasn’t saying much at all, not on the way to Rockwell Medical, not while they waited outside the emergency room.

  Right before a nurse came out to get Sam, just as Sam’s parents arrived, Sam did say to Ben, “Dude, don’t tell anybody I screamed like a girl when I went down.”

  Somehow Ben managed a smile, even though he was sure it had to be the smallest one in history, like he was trying to smile through his friend’s pain.

  “You got it,” Ben said. “And I most definitely won’t tell Lily. About your scary-movie scream. Or that you said you sounded like a girly girl. If I do, she might do something to your good ankle.”

  Another nurse came out with a wheelchair, even though Sam said he didn’t need one. But the second nurse said it was a hospital rule, helped Sam get out of the chair he’d been sitting in, get into the wheelchair. Ben saw him make a face, dropping his guard for just a second, Ben seeing how much pain his friend was in.

  Ben walked alongside him as the nurse pushed the wheelchair across the waiting room.

  “I’ll be fine,” Sam said to Ben.

  “Yeah.”

  “For real.”

  “Yeah.”

  Then Sam was through the double doors and gone and, when he finally came back, Ben feeling his heart drop like a rock when he saw Sam on crutches, he found out that Sam Brown wasn’t fine at all, at least not for now, and not for a while.

  It was a Grade III high ankle sprain, the worst kind, the doctor explaining to Ben and his parents what he’d explained to Sam and his parents inside: That there had been a partial tear of the ligament connecting two ankle bones, the fibula and tibia. The two bones having separated, but not broken.

  According to the doctor, Sam wouldn’t even be able to start physical therapy for three weeks, the doctor saying that the swelling hopefully would have gone down by then.

  While Sam’s dad went to pull their car around to the front of the emergency-room entrance, Sam sat back down next to Ben in the waiting room, his ankle already taped with a thick elastic bandage, Ben thinking the ankle looked so big it was as if they’d wrapped the bandage around a basketball.

  Just the two of them, Ben’s parents talking with Mrs. Brown on the other side of the room.

  “How long?” Ben said, both of them knowing exactly what he meant.

  Basketball. How long until he could play basketball? Sam Brown’s favorite sport. Always his favorite season.

  He took a deep breath, let it out, said, “Not until after New Year’s, at the earliest.” Took another breath, deeper than before, and said, “Dude, I’m not gonna lie, the doctor said if this thing heals slowly, ’cause some do, I might be gone for the season.”

  “You’re faster than anybody I know,” Ben said, his voice too loud in the quiet room. “So you’ll heal faster than anybody, right?”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Sam said.

  “Not just a plan,” Ben said to his friend. “Think of it as an order.”

  Then, for what felt like the hundredth time since Sam had stepped in the hole on his way to the basket, Ben said to him, “I am so sorry.”

  Sam said, “You gotta stop. It was nobody’s fault.”

  Nobody’s except mine, Ben thought.

  He went straight to his room when he got home, his mom saying she’d make him a sandwich since they’d all missed dinner, Ben telling her he wasn’t hungry, his mom saying that he had to eat something.

  Ben knew you couldn’t win that one even if you had a whole army on your side, so he just thanked her and said that she could call him when it was ready.

  When he heard the knock on the door about five minutes later, he thought it was her.

  His dad instead.

  “Time to eat?” he said.

  “Your mother decided to fire up some burgers,” Jeff McBain said. “She’s under the impression that a hot meal will make you feel better.”

  “She’s wrong,” Ben said.

  “You want to be the one to tell her?” his dad said, and came in and sat down on his bed and didn’t even wait, got right into it, saying, “I’m going to say this one time and then, I promise, I’m not going to say it again: It was an accident, son. On a court I should have fixed up myself if the town didn’t want to do it, because I know how much time you spend pounding a ball out there.”

  “Dad, stop,” Ben said. “You didn’t do this.” Turning around in the swivel chair at his desk, closing the screen on his laptop, where he’d just Googled high ankle sprains. “You didn’t do this. I did.”

  “No one did.”

  “He didn’t even want to play today,” Ben said.

  Stopping then, feeling the tears he’d been carrying around inside himself coming up strong now.

  He swallowed. Hard. Said, “Sam wanted to quit way before it happened.”

  “He was out there for you the way you would have been out there for him,” Jeff McBain said.

  What came out of Ben next came out hot.

  “It should have been me getting hurt!” he said. “It should have been me out for the stupid season!”

  “You don’t know that Sam’s out for the season and neither does he. And neither does the doctor.”

  “Well, it sounded that way to me,” Ben said.

  He stopped again, the tears getting closer now, Ben fighting them again, knowing he would only feel worse if he started crying, that he’d just feel more helpless — and sad — about what had happened to Sam tonight than he already did.

  “You know why this is on me?” Ben said. “Because I got so caught up in what I wanted, what I thought I needed to do, I didn’t think about anybody else. And that’s not me.”

  “Nope,” his dad said. “It’s not you. Not gonna sugarcoat it, pal, but you did start to lose your way a little bit. But most guys I know, when they get lost, they just keep driving around while they get more lost. Just listening to you right now, you corrected things a lot faster.”

  He patted the bed, motioned for Ben to come sit next to him, which he did now.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, “good for me. It to
ok losing Sam for me not to be lost anymore.”

  Jeff McBain put his arm around him, pulled his son closer. Ben let him.

  “Okay, so we know how we got here,” his dad said. “The important question is where do we go from here?”

  “I’ve been thinking hard on that, Dad.”

  “You’re kidding! I never would’ve known.”

  “You’re not making me laugh,” Ben said. “Not tonight.”

  “I can’t make any promises.”

  Ben said, “I’m gonna start by being a better teammate than I’ve ever been.”

  “Pretty hard for you to be a better teammate.”

  “I always tell everybody else it’s a team game, and then I started to forget that myself,” Ben said. “Got so caught up with this guy Chase I couldn’t see past him.”

  “There’s always gonna be a guy like Chase coming along,” his dad said. “That’s just the way it works in sports. If it’s not your school, or your town, it’s the next town. Or it happens at the next level. But there’s always gonna be new challenges. And maybe when you’re in the sixth grade, they can seem bigger than they actually are.”

  “You’re the one always telling me I play older.”

  “Well, there is that.” He turned so he was facing Ben now. “Listen, I know Sam will handle this great. He already is. But you’ve got to do the same.”

  “Whatever the challenge was before, I had Sam to help me,” Ben said.

  “He’ll just do it from the bench now,” his dad said.

  “And he’s gonna see me playing for him now. Every practice, every game. He’s always made me better just by being out there. Now I’m gonna make the other guys better even though he’s not out there.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” his dad said.

  “Better be a good one,” Ben said, “since Sam is our best player.” He paused and said, “Or used to be.”

  “You gotta stop thinking that way,” his dad said. “You really want my two cents? There it is. This happened on my high school football team. Junior year. Our quarterback, guy named Andy Banks, broke his arm in our first game. And I said to our coach, ‘What are we going to do without Andy?’ And Coach looked at me and said, ‘Who’s Andy?’ It sounded mean when he said it, but then he explained that what he was telling me was that he could only coach the players he had.”