by Mike Lupica
They both heard Ben’s mom at the bottom of the stairs, telling them the burgers were almost ready.
Ben said, “The only reason Sam was out there tonight was for me. Until he gets back, I’m gonna be out there for him.”
“Win one for Sam?” his dad said.
Ben put an elbow in his dad’s ribs, said, “If I ever hear you say that again, the next elbow you get will be a lot worse.”
“Our secret,” Jeff McBain said.
He put out his fist the way Ben’s buds did, and Ben gave him some tap.
But, yeah, Ben thought to himself.
Yeah, his dad had nailed this the way he nailed most of the big things.
Win one for Sam.
There were ten players to a team in their league.
There was no official league rule about every player getting a certain amount of playing time in each game, but most coaches tried to get even the guys at the end of their benches on the court for a few minutes every game.
Get them some “burn,” as Coop called it.
Ben’s dad said that back when he played town ball, there were fifteen players on each team, but they finally decided that was too many. Then it was twelve, and, even then, the coaches said it was way too hard to get all of them in.
Finally they settled on what Coach Wright called a “perfect ten.” He knew he was never going to satisfy all of his players, but at least he could scrimmage five-on-five at practice.
Without Sam Brown, the Rockwell Rams were down to nine players. It means they had to add one player who had gotten cut, and even though they knew it would be up to the board members of Rockwell Basketball to decide who would replace Sam, it didn’t stop Coach Wright and the guys on the team from making what turned out to be a unanimous selection:
MJ Lau.
He had been the last guy cut from the team this season, the same as he had been the last guy cut last season, his great heart nearly making up for his lack of pure basketball talent again. MJ was the first to tell you that basketball wasn’t his best sport. Soccer was, by far, that’s why he didn’t play football in the fall despite being wide enough to have played in either the offensive or defensive line.
MJ was a fullback in soccer, playing the right side on defense. Ben and his buds normally weren’t big soccer guys — other than when Lily ordered them to attend one of her games — but they loved checking out MJ whenever they could because he had a way of making soccer look like way more of a contact sport than football, throwing himself around and walking away from just about every game with a uniform full of dirt, and sometimes a face full of dirt as well.
He played basketball pretty much the same way, diving for loose balls, spending more time horizontal, Sam said one time, than vertical. He couldn’t shoot and wasn’t much of a ball handler, but he could rebound like a madman. And, man oh madman, could he guard. MJ Lau wasn’t big on Coach Wright’s theory about always knowing where the ball was no matter how closely you were guarding your man. MJ’s idea of playing good D was locking on his man and following him all the way to the locker room if he had to.
He committed fouls all over the place, to the point where Ben sometimes felt he should have started scrimmages during the tryouts with three fouls on him already. And he had no game on offense, none. When you passed MJ the ball, he never looked to shoot or drive, just to get rid of it, like he was afraid if he held on to the ball for more than a second, it might explode in his hands.
But if you needed a stop, MJ could get you a stop. You just hoped he could get it without knocking the other guy a couple of rows into the bleachers.
The other guys on the team loved his heart and his attitude and begged Coach Wright to go to the league and let them have eleven players this season, just so MJ wouldn’t have to get cut again, and he wouldn’t be their teammate until baseball season started.
But now he’d made the team, the board members, unanimous on MJ once they’d heard Coach Wright’s pitch. They all knew it wasn’t the way anybody ever wanted to make a team, with somebody getting hurt the way Sam had.
But MJ was finally getting a uniform.
Getting all he ever wanted in basketball, which meant a chance to be on the team, and compete.
MJ was replacing Sam Brown, the best all-around player they had, so they all knew he wasn’t going to make them better.
But before he showed up for his first practice on the Tuesday night after Sam’s injury, Ben was explaining to Coach how they were all going to feel better just having MJ in the gym. He was just one of those guys, like Coop. You smiled as soon as you saw him come through the door.
Ben and Coach had been the first to show up at their gym on Tuesday night, sitting high up in the bleachers.
“Glad to hear you say that,” Coach Wright said. “Sometimes you find out the hard way that there’s all sorts of ways to feel like a winner in sports.”
“MJ will help us on D if we can get him not to knock over guys like they’re bowling pins,” Ben said.
“I want him to do more than that,” Coach said. “I want everybody on this team to contribute at both ends.”
“Coach, he’s not Sam,” Ben said, adding, “Mostly because no one is.”
“I know that. He’s a project. But he’s a project who has a chance to be a whole lot better by the end of this season. And the two of us are going to make sure that happens.”
Ben lowered his voice, even though nobody was close to them, Coop and Shawn shooting around after having just come through the double doors at the other end of the gym, Sam sitting on the floor under the basket watching them.
“MJ never even played basketball till he tried out last season,” Ben said. “Coach, you were there for every minute of the tryouts. He struggles making layups. Let’s just say that the MJ in his name doesn’t stand for Michael Jordan.”
His real name was Mark Johnson Lau. Same as his dad’s. They didn’t want to call him Junior, so he had always been MJ.
“You always make the guys around you better,” Coach said. “So make him better.”
“Easier said than done sometimes.”
“Your teammates take their lead from you,” Coach said. “Starting tonight, I just want you to make sure they don’t treat MJ like some kind of mascot. I’m not asking you to turn him into Sam, we both know that’s not happening, he’s gotta be himself. It’s your job to help him find his best self. It’s what point guards do.”
“You think he can help us on offense for real?”
Coach laughed. “Well, maybe not tonight,” he said. “Hey, I know that as fearless as he is, he’s also totally afraid of somebody passing him the ball. But like I said, before the season’s over, we’re gonna change that.”
“But I can’t remember him scoring a single basketball during tryouts,” Ben said.
MJ was in the gym now, and even from the other end of the court you had to notice two things: How big his smile was and how white his new sneakers were.
Coach said, “Think how’ll cool it will be when he gets one in a real game.”
He started to get up, now that most of the Rams seemed to have shown up all at once, but Ben put a hand on his arm and said, “Ask you something?”
“Ask away.”
“I hear what you want me to do with MJ,” Ben said. “But what are we gonna do without Sam?”
Coach Wright gave Ben a smile as big as the one MJ was still wearing as he ran around the court high-fiving everybody in sight.
“Let’s get down there and start finding out,” Coach said.
“We can’t be as good without Sam as we would have been with him,” Ben said.
“I don’t know that,” Coach said, “and neither do you. It’s like an old tennis teacher of mine told me one time when I was about your age: That’s why they put the net up.”
He stopped and turned and said to Ben, “Trust me: It’s gonna be great.”
In that moment Ben believed him because he wanted to.
The only legit big
guy they had now was Shawn, but as athletic as he was, he was still learning to be a basketball player.
Sam, even playing small forward, had always played like a big, which is what they called “big men” now in basketball. When they went to a zone, Sam was in the middle of it. When the Rams needed a rebound, Sam would go get it. When the other team’s center or power forward was its best scorer, it was a no-brainer, Sam would switch over and cover the guy.
And lock him down most of the time.
Last season Ben had never worried about match-up problems, because they had Sam. For the other team, the match-up problem was him. Ben had never said anything about this to Sam or anybody else, but when it got down to crunch time against Darby in their opener, he thought Coach might switch Sam over to Chase, just because if you looked at Sam’s size and length and quickness, he really matched up a lot better with Chase Braggs than Ben did.
He almost suggested that to Coach, but then his ego wouldn’t let him do it. Now it didn’t matter. The next time they played Darby, he’d have to figure out a way to lock down Chase himself.
Because Sam was on crutches, sitting next to Coach Wright now because Coach had named him his assistant, watching the Rams play Parkerville without him, seeing what everybody saw once the game started, how much the whole team somehow seemed to have shrunk without him.
Robbie Burnett, the star quarterback of the Parkerville team the Rams had beaten to win the football championship, was also their best — and biggest — player in basketball. Even if he’d only played the second half of last season, missing the first half while he recovered from a broken wrist. On offense he played small forward the same as Sam had, for pretty much the same reasons as far as Ben could tell:
He was a good enough ball handler and good enough passer that it was like having a second point guard on the floor, and playing the position known as the “3” in hoops just gave him more room to operate.
Normally Sam and Robbie would have been guarding each other, the two of them going at each other hard the way they had in a double overtime game last season, the Rams finally winning when Sam somehow got around Robbie on the offensive boards, got a rebound and a put-back one second before they would have gone to overtime number three.
But today Sam could only watch as Robbie did pretty much anything he wanted against Shawn as the Patriots were building a ten-point lead halfway through the second quarter. Shawn couldn’t keep up with Robbie outside and when he got inside, Coop couldn’t handle him, either. The Rams were playing about as well as they could without Sam on offense, but so far they had no chance on defense.
Ben felt like they were lucky to only be down ten.
So by the time their coach gave Robbie another break, it was 30–20 and Ben was pretty sure without even checking the stat book that Robbie had as many points by himself as the whole Rockwell team.
Maybe Chase Braggs wasn’t the best player in the league after all.
At least not today he wasn’t.
Coach had given Ben a breather right before Robbie got his, and so he was sitting next to Sam when Coach put MJ Lau on Robbie, to see if MJ could knock him off his game a little bit.
MJ proceeded to foul Robbie three times in about a minute and a half.
Ben said, “This is gonna work great until MJ fouls out.”
“Or he puts us in the penalty and Robbie starts shooting free throws,” Sam said.
“Whichever comes first,” Ben said. “He’s gonna drop forty on us the way he’s going.”
“He’ll cool down,” Sam said. “Or Coach will figure out a way to slow him down.”
“How do you know that?”
Sam grinned. “I don’t, actually. I just thought it sounded like something a good assistant coach would say.”
“The only chance we’ve got is if you make a miracle recovery like those people do on TV and you throw down your crutches at halftime.”
“I wish,” Sam said, and just the way he said it, the way just those two words made you know how much he wanted it to be true, made Ben wish he’d kept his big mouth shut.
“Sorry,” Ben said.
“New rules,” Sam said. “From now on you have to give me a dollar every time you say ‘sorry.’ I figure by Christmas, I’ll have enough to buy that Xbox 360.”
Ben went back out for the last four minutes of the half. The Parkerville coach kept Robbie — who had two fouls — right next to him, playing some guys off their bench.
Over those last four minutes, the Rams played their best ball of the season.
So did Ben McBain.
He fed Shawn for an easy two on a two-on-one break. Then got into the lane for one of his teardrop shots, high over their center, Ben feeling like the ball took about a minute to come down, but hit nothing but string when it did.
Now they were down six.
“Keep pushing it,” Coach Wright said as Ben ran past him.
“Copy that,” Ben said.
Ben felt himself smiling, feeling it now, maybe for the first time all season. Shawn got a rebound, they pushed it again, Ben drove to the basket, probably had everybody thinking he’d gotten too deep. But what they didn’t know was that he’d done it on purpose, one of his favorite moves, went all the way underneath, reached around their center and threw a perfect bounce pass to a cutting Darrelle, money.
The Rams finally got it to 34–32, minute left in the half, Robbie still on the bench, his coach not wanting him to get a third foul before halftime.
Parkerville tried to hold for the last shot, but Ben sneaked in behind their shooting guard, the guy Darrelle was guarding, stole the ball, walked the ball up the court.
Now the Rams had the last shot.
Ben spread everybody out, kept his dribble, out near halfcourt, eyeballing the clock. Made his move with eight seconds to go, as soon as Shawn came up and set the high screen Sam used to set in moments like this.
Ben went around the screen, took it to the middle, into the lane.
Five seconds.
The defense collapsed on him, just the way he wanted, but when he looked over to the wing, where Sam always was, nobody was home. Shawn had stayed where he was after setting the screen, watching the action now instead of being a part of it.
Ben couldn’t allow himself time to check the shot clock over the basket, knew he was up against the horn now, stepped back and let the ball go, shooting it higher than he normally would have wanted to get it over the long arms of Max Mahoney, the Parkerville center.
Another one that hit nothing but string.
Tie game.
Sam didn’t even bother with his crutches, just got himself standing and hopped over to Ben, saying, “A fallaway? Seriously?”
“That’s what happens when you lose your wingman,” Ben said. “Sometimes you lose your mind.”
After they’d all gotten their drinks, Coach gathered them around him underneath what was going to be their basket the second half, said, “Okay, now we’ve got to figure out a way to stop that guy.”
“Which guy, Coach?” Coop said, trying to sound innocent.
Coach laughed. “The guy we’re making look like his name should be Kobe LeBron Durant,” he said. “We’ve run just about everybody we can at him, and nothing’s worked. Not for lack of effort. Just because he’s having one of those days, and one of those days can be the toughest thing to beat in sports sometimes. My feeling is we go back to the zone, make him keep making shots from the outside. If he does, we shake his hand at the end and say, ‘Too tough.’”
Ben saw Coop raise a hand, his face full of fun.
“Coach,” he said, “I think I speak for the whole team —”
“No,” Sam said, “you don’t.”
As usual, Coop ignored him, kept going.
“We don’t want to shake his hand and say, ‘Too tough,’ at the end,” Coop said. “We mostly want to beat his —”
“I think we get your meaning,” Coach said. “If the zone doesn’t work, we’ll have to
go back to Plan B.”
“Which is?” Ben said.
“The plan I haven’t thought of yet,” Coach Wright said.
The zone didn’t work. Robbie stayed hot from the outside, got a couple of put-backs on the offensive boards, Parkerville stretched its lead back to twelve with a couple of minutes left in the third quarter, sat down again when he picked up his third foul.
Coach Wright had already done some subbing of his own, keeping everybody involved, the Rams made another little push with Robbie out of there, cut the lead down to six going into the fourth. It would be their starters against the Rockwell starters, maybe the whole rest of the way, depending on fouls, Robbie with his three, Shawn with three, Coop and MJ with four apiece.
In the huddle, Coach said, “Assistant Coach Brown has come up with Plan B.”
He had their attention.
“We’re playing a one-four defense the rest of the way,” Coach said. “Our version of the old box-and-one.”
He waited, knowing he really had their attention now, like he was telling a story and just now getting to the good parts, Ben feeling as if they were all leaning forward.
“Tell them what Plan B really means,” Coach said to Sam.
And Sam said, “Plan B means Ben,” looking right at Ben as he said, “The one on Robbie will be you, dude.”
Ben said, “He’s, like, twice my size.”
“But only half as fast,” Coach said. “Sam’s right. Robbie can do a lot of things, but what he can’t do is get around you. You pick him up as soon as he crosses halfcourt. If he brings it up, like he has sometimes, you pick him up in the back- court. Push him side to side as much as you can, and if he does get around you, we got the rest of the guys strung out like they’re sitting on a fence.”
“Coach, you know I’m up for this,” Ben said. “But he can still shoot over me.”
“Anytime he gets near one of his happy spots, we’ll run Shawn at him or Darrelle or MJ. Or even Coop.”
