Play Makers

by Mike Lupica

  “You gotta understand something,” Coach Wright said. “They’re too good not to make a run.”

  Coop said, “We’re better than they are today.”

  Before Coach could say anything Ben said, “For a half.”

  “Yeah,” Coop said, not backing up. “The half we just played and the half we’re about to play.”

  “Hold the thought,” Coach said. “But you all gotta go out there with the mind-set that we’re down this many points, not up.”

  Shawn said, “Coach, I heard Jeb say to Chase that this is the most they’ve been behind all season.”

  “So now we’ve got to make sure we keep them down,” Ben said.

  Ben went to get a drink from a fountain at the other end of the court, giving a quick wave to all the parents: his, Sam’s, Coop’s, Shawn’s. Jeff McBain gave him a quick fist of encouragement back, so quick Ben was sure only he saw it.

  On his way back, he tried to lock eyes with Lily, but she was talking away with Molly Arcelus.

  But as soon as he did, he slapped the side of his leg, hard, like he was telling himself to snap out of it, stop worrying about Lily and her new Darby friends, just worry about beating the Darby Bears.

  The Rams held their lead through most of the third quarter, Coach still mixing and matching with his defenses, making sure to get the guys on the second unit some time in the middle of the quarter, like he always did. It was one of Coach Wright’s best things, Ben knew: He played his guys, all of them, no matter how big the game.

  It was 44–32, Rams, just over a minute to go in the quarter, both first units back on the court, when the Bears began to make the run Coach had promised they’d make.

  Shawn threw a lazy pass to Ben at the top of the key, Chase saw it coming a mile away, picking the ball off, breaking away from what looked like it would be a cheap layup. But Shawn, mad at himself for the giveaway, somehow caught up with him, fouled Chase even as Chase was making the layup. So a two-point giveaway became a three-point giveaway after Chase made the free throw.

  Rams up nine now, 44–35.

  Darrelle shot way too soon at the other end, way too early in the shot clock, Jeb Arcelus got a long rebound, made a great outlet pass to Chase, who could have taken it all the way to the rim. Instead he pulled up and made a three-pointer and in about ten seconds, the Rams’ lead had been cut in half.

  Coach yelled, “One shot,” at Ben, with thirty seconds left. And they tried to get off the last shot. But Coach Coppo of the Bears had changed some things on his defense, too, had Ryan Hurley playing center now and guarding Coop. The play they wanted to run had Ben throwing a pass to Coop at the free-throw line, but Coop didn’t protect the ball well enough, and Ryan was able to punch it loose, to Chase again.

  Who got ahead of the pack, pulled up again, made another three.

  The horn sounded before Shawn could even get off a heave from halfcourt.

  Now the lead was down to three.

  The first few minutes of the fourth quarter were pretty much a blur to Ben: Both teams starting to play a little tight now, turning the ball over more than they had in the first three quarters. MJ fouling out. The crowd loud. Chase in Ben’s ear every chance he got, Ben doing his best to ignore that.

  Somehow through it all the Rams held on to their lead. Got tied a couple of times, never gave it up, were back up four with ninety seconds left. Bears’ ball. There hadn’t been much scoring in the quarter, but Chase had done most of it for his team, scoring all but one of their baskets even as Coach Wright kept running different guys at him, still giving him different looks.

  “All these different defenses for one guy,” he said to Ben at one point. “Wow.”

  Not acting annoyed any longer, almost acting flattered. Right where he wanted to be. The whole thing about him.

  But it didn’t matter if the Rams could hold on. Let him be flattered that he’d gotten all this attention on a day his team lost its first game of the season. That’s all that would matter, Ben kept telling himself. Not Chase.

  Ben was guarding Chase again as he brought the ball down, tried to back Ben closer to the basket. But Ben kept cutting him off, anticipating every move. Finally Chase gave up, took the ball back outside, deep into the shot clock now, wheeled and threw a terrific crosscourt pass to Ryan Hurley — even Ben had to admit it — and Ryan made a short jumper.

  Rams up two, 50–48.

  Under a minute. Coach told them to play, no time-out, not to worry about the clock, take the first good shot they saw. Ben waved up Shawn for a pick-and-roll, but Chase smothered it. As he did, Ben saw Darrelle come open over in the left corner, one of his hot spots, and Ben threw a pass over to him, over the defense.

  Darrelle missed. Another long rebound to Jeb Arcelus. Chase took the outlet in stride, looked like he might try to beat everybody to the basket. Then slowed it down when his coach told him to, pulled it back out.

  Forty left.

  Coach Coppo called out a play for them. Jeb lost Coop under the basket, Chase saw him, fired a pass in there, for the layup Ben was sure would tie the game.

  Only Jeb didn’t shoot it. Wasn’t the play. With everybody expecting him to, he turned and threw a two-hand, over-the-head pass to Chase in the right corner. Chase down there alone because Ben had thought he was out of the play after the pass to Jeb.

  Ben ran straight at Chase, arms up, a step late, his momentum carrying him right out of bounds. He watched from there as Chase’s three-pointer went in to put Darby ahead by one.

  First time they’d been ahead all day.

  Bears 51, Rams 50.

  Twenty-two seconds left. Ben’s number. Still no time-out from Coach Wright. “Just look for the first good shot,” he yelled at Ben. The Bears picked up fullcourt. Shawn inbounded the ball to Ben from under the Bears basket. As Ben turned, Coop showed up to set a killer screen on Chase Braggs, giving Ben a lot of open court, just like that.

  Just like that, he was flying down the right side, nobody picking him up right away. Chase did everything for them. Now he was supposed to make up all that ground between him and Ben McBain.

  Only nobody was catching him.

  Ryan Hurley came over as Ben crossed the midcourt line, tried to cut him off, Ben dusted him with a crossover move to his left hand. Now he was in the middle of the court, the defense scrambling to catch up to him, to the play.

  Jeb Arcelus was the last guy with a chance to get in front of Ben, leaving Coop, yelling, “Pick up my guy,” to Ryan as he picked up Ben at the top of the key. Ben slowed down for just a blink, looked away like he was going to pass.

  Jeb bit.

  The path to the basket looked as wide open as the street in front of Ben’s house when he was dribbling toward the basket at McBain Field.

  He heard somebody yell from behind him. Chase probably. Pushed off on his left foot for the layup that was going to beat Darby, telling himself not to rush, there had to be plenty of time.

  Shot it too hard.

  Leaned back from where he ended up under the basket, watched as the ball hit the front of the rim and not the net, watched as it hung there for what felt like about a minute before it fell off, into the hands of Chase Braggs.

  Ben knew enough to foul him. Chase went down, as if Ben had fouled him too hard, full of drama — or just himself — to the end. Said, “Hey, I’m not the one who missed the layup.” Ben just walked away, watched as Chase walked to the other end of the court and made the first free throw of the one-and-one, then the next.

  Darby up three.

  Coach did call a time-out then, drew up one of their last-second plays, Coop setting a pick for Ben, Ben going deep, Shawn trying to throw the kind of Hail Mary pass Ben had thrown in football. Only Shawn put too much on it, trying too hard, threw it over Ben’s head and right into the hands of Chase, back at the free-throw line, like he was a deep safety in football.

  As soon as Chase caught the ball he threw it toward the ceiling, game over, walked right past Ben, sa
ying, “Choker,” under his breath as he did.

  What happened next depended on which one of them you believed. Or maybe it depended on what you thought you saw in the middle of the court at Darby Middle School.

  Whether you thought Ben shoved Chase Braggs or not.

  What Ben and Chase both knew was that Ben hadn’t touched him.

  All Ben had said to him was this:

  “For a great player you don’t even know how to be a good winner.”

  He’d wanted to say more, a lot more, plenty more than that, tell the guy once and for all what he thought about him. But he hadn’t. Just that. Great player, lousy winner.

  He got up on him as he said it, wanting to make sure only Chase heard him, the way only Ben had heard himself being called a choker.

  But that wasn’t what Chase wanted everybody in the gym to see, even if only he and Ben had heard what went on between them. So he backed away like Ben had bumped him or pushed him, exactly the way guys flopped when they were trying to draw a foul during the game, yelling, “Hey, back off!”

  Sam and Coop and Shawn would say later that they hadn’t seen what happened, but as soon as they heard Chase, saw there was some kind of scene, they came running across the court to get between them.

  “Hey,” Chase said, being held back by Ryan Hurley, “tell him to get off me, I wasn’t the one who blew the layup.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ben said. “I was never on you.”

  To his guys Ben said, “I’m fine, nothing happened, the guy’s making it up.”

  Coop was walking him away, anyway, saying, “Chill.”

  Ben said, “I am chill. The only reason I said anything to him was because he called me a choker.”

  A look came over Coop’s face that Ben hardly ever saw, only ever saw during a game when he thought someone had cheap-shotted him or one of the other Rams, or crossed some kind of line with chirp or trash talk. “He called you a what?” Coop said, and now he started toward Chase until Shawn stepped in front of him.

  “We gotta get out of this and out of here,” Shawn said.

  They could all hear Chase saying to his own teammates, “All I tried to do was shake the guy’s hand and he goes off on me.”

  Ben shook his head. “Total lie,” he said.

  But he knew it was a bad scene now, after a bad loss, knew that Chase wanted him to look worse than he had missing the layup that would have won the game.

  Why wasn’t that enough for Chase Braggs?

  Lily, Ben thought.

  This all had to be for Lily’s benefit, he could even see Chase looking up into the stands now to where Lily was frozen in place next to Molly Arcelus, staring out at the court. Staring at Chase as he pointed to Ben and then to his head, as if Ben had somehow just lost his mind.

  The two coaches were there now, then the refs, telling Ben and Chase to cool it right now. The taller of the two refs asked Ben what had happened and he said, “He said something to me, I said something back, that’s all.”

  Chase rolled his eyes and said, “Whatever.”

  The taller ref said, “Is that what happened?”

  Chase said, “If he says so, I don’t want him to get suspended or anything.”

  They all knew that a shove didn’t get you kicked out of the league the way throwing a punch did. But if one player shoved another, during a game or after it, that player was suspended for a game.

  “I didn’t do anything to get suspended,” Ben said, standing his ground, shaking his head, looking down at the ground so he didn’t have to look at Chase Braggs, now a liar on top of anything else. “I just basically called him a jerk. Which he is.”

  “Right,” Chase said. A sneer now where the fake smile usually was. “I’m the jerk.”

  Ben knew he shouldn’t have said anything, should just have walked away. Nothing to do about it now. Shawn was right. The only goal now was to get out of this … thing, get out of the gym, get out of Darby.

  The taller ref turned to Coach Wright and said, “Is that what you saw?”

  Coach Wright had his arm around Ben, not trying to restrain him, just casual, a way of showing everybody they were standing together.

  “Didn’t have to,” Coach said. “This boy doesn’t lie. Ever.”

  Chase said, “Yeah, right.”

  Coach Wright made a slow turn of his head now, as if he’d just realized Chase Braggs was standing there. Then he said, “Son, I don’t believe I was speaking to you.”

  Mr. Coppo, knowing his player had crossed the line, walked Chase away from them now, leaning down, talking in his ear, Ben not able to hear what he was saying, just this from Chase when Mr. Coppo stopped talking:

  “Not my fault he acted like a loser all over again.”

  This time it was Sam who started toward Chase, crutches and all. But Ben was the one stopping him now. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I shouldn’t’ve, either.”

  “But he’s the loser,” Sam said.

  “Nah,” Ben said. “He got everything he wanted. He got the game, he got me missing the layup that would’ve gotten us the game. And on top of that, he makes everybody think I’m the blockhead, not him.”

  The refs and the two coaches got with each other and had a quick conference, telling the players from both teams to stay where they were. Ben saw Coach Wright shaking his head. They talked a little more. Came back out to halfcourt.

  The taller ref said, “It’s not like we can do a replay, the way they do in college and the pros. The best thing to do is for everybody to just shake hands and then it’s over.”

  Chase Braggs didn’t look too happy about this, but he put out his hand.

  Ben looked at it, left him hanging.

  Ben McBain said, “No, sir. I can’t do that.”

  “Son,” he said, “I’m not gonna suspend you, or write you up. I just want you two to shake hands like good sports.”

  “I already am a good sport,” Ben said. “He’s not. I can’t shake his hand.”

  He looked at Coach Wright, saw him smiling as he said to the ref, “Tried to tell you.”

  Everybody stood there for a moment, nobody saying anything, until Chase Braggs said to Ben, “Now which one of us is a bad sport?”

  He and Mr. Coppo walked away. Coach and Ben and the guys did the same. As they did, Ben looked up to where Lily had been sitting.

  But she was gone.

  Ben rode home with his parents, telling Sam he’d be over later, they were doing the Saturday-night sleepover at Sam’s house tonight, the guys all fired up to watch the Bulls play the Heat on television, Derrick Rose against the Heat’s Big Three, LeBron and Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh.

  As soon as he was in the backseat, before he even buckled his seat belt, Ben said, “I didn’t touch him.”

  “I know,” Jeff McBain said. “I was going to come down and tell everybody that, I saw the whole thing, but then I remembered our deal.”

  “Don’t come on the court unless I’m hurt,” Ben said. “And I better be hurt bad.”

  “Your father decided to let you handle it,” Beth McBain said from behind the wheel, “whatever it was.”

  “The ref wanted me to shake his hand,” Ben said. “I wouldn’t do it.”

  His dad, in the passenger seat, turned all the way around, said, “Really? This guy really did get to you.”

  “Yeah, Dad, he really did. He called me a choker, even though he wouldn’t admit it.”

  “He said that for real?” Ben’s dad said.

  “Yeah,” Ben said.

  Beth McBain said, “And you couldn’t walk away this time?”

  “No.”

  “Because this guy has gotten to you,” Jeff McBain said.

  “Big-time. Somebody that good — and I know how good he is, trust me — ought to know how to act. He doesn’t.”

  “And that’s all?” his mom said.

  They were at a stop sign. He could see her looking at him in the rearview mirror. Calm. Waiting. The way Lil
y looked at him when she didn’t think she was getting the whole story.

  Ben thinking in that moment: Lily was the real elephant in the room.

  Or this car.

  But he didn’t want to talk about her right now, especially not with his mom. The best he could do was, “Mom, he started it,” knowing how weak that sounded.

  “So it was all because of him starting it, and the way the game ended?”

  Almost home. It was such a short trip from Darby to Rockwell, but sometimes it felt like they were going cross-country.

  “All because I missed a stupid layup!” Ben said, his voice way too loud in the car, and now everything that had happened today, from the time he had missed the layup, the game and Chase and Lily, all of it, just seemed to eat him up all at once, so much that he felt his face getting hot, and his eyes, and thinking that it would be another horrible ending now, him starting to cry. In front of his parents, even from the backseat.

  “Hey, bud,” Jeff McBain said, his voice soft, turned back around now, maybe seeing what Ben was feeling. “Everybody misses easy ones. You dropped an easy pass that would’ve won you guys a football game early in the season, and look how the football season turned out.”

  Ben said, “We could have turned this season around today!”

  “Sometimes you can just want something in sports too much,” his dad said. “And not just in sports, by the way.”

  Tell me about it.

  They were one shot away from being just one game behind Darby in the standings and now look where they were.

  Ben went straight upstairs when they got home, closed the door behind him, wondering as he did if Chase Braggs had actually been right about him today. Wondering if wanting something too much in sports was just another way of saying you had choked your brains out.

  Ben had a cell phone now, his parents had given it to him a month ago, having given in because so many other sixth graders at Rockwell Middle School had cell phones now.

  But he didn’t carry it with him all the time, wasn’t texting friends every couple of minutes the way so many other kids in his class were, even though when Ben saw the incoming or outgoing texts, he thought they were mostly about nothing.