Longshot

by Lance Allred

  My family took turns getting up when I was ready and driving me to the gym. They were all in line to help me chase my dream, which at that time was simply just to be a good basketball player, nothing more. In spite of what my parents always told me, I had no inkling that I could be good enough to be anything I wanted to be.

  I went to those five-thirty practices, just like all of my other teammates, for the pure enjoyment of the game—all of us paying our dues just to wear a uniform, none of us knowing or dreaming we might someday be good enough to even play varsity.

  Our coaches were often late for those practices, as we sat in the freezing hallway, wearing our winter coats over our practice uniforms, tying our shoes in silence, with the howling snow and wind tugging at the school doors. Coach Kernodle usually showed up first. He opened up the door to the gym with a grunt for a hello, his standard coffee and box of doughnuts in hand. Kernodle looked nothing like a coach. He was in his late forties, with an orange handlebar mustache and a beer belly that hung over his waist like a laundry bag of linen sheets.

  While we performed his warm-up routine, running and sliding in the cold, dimly lit gym, half naked in our flimsy jerseys, our knees absorbing the cold shock that reverberated up our legs and into our spines from the frozen wooden floor beneath our feet, Coach Kernodle would be sitting over on the table letting his dangling feet singsong back and forth. His mouth full of powdered doughnuts and coffee, he would call out in a muffled voice, “Pick it up, ladies….”

  By the time we were done with Kernodle’s obligatory warm-up drill, which he used to keep us occupied in the same way a bad parent uses a TV as a babysitter, Coach Gardner would arrive. Coach Gardner was a tank. Each of his arms was thicker than my chest, and I dare say each arm weighed more than my six-foot-eight, one-hundred-eighty-pound frame.

  Coach Gardner’s practices were fun, and he spent a lot of time with me those mornings, teaching me how to shoot hook shots and drop-step layups, as I had no sort of offensive post game whatsoever. He also taught me defensive principles in the post, which to my surprise and dislike consisted of more than just blocking shots. When I told Coach Gardner that I should not have to do any defensive sliding drills and would just block shots, he laughed, slapped me on the back, and said, “So much you still have to learn, big guy.”

  It was nice to be part of a team. In the fall before the season began, I had done well enough under Coach Gardner’s tutelage, combined with the short amount of time I had with Coach Rupp, that I had actually turned into a somewhat decent basketball player, at least decent enough to be considered an offensive option in the playbook.

  Halfway through the season, I was called up to join the junior varsity squad and practice with Coach Rupp. I still remained on the sophomore team and had to wake up and attend practice in the morning, and also had to attend practice after school, keeping me at East High from five in the morning until five in the afternoon. Two-a-days every day. Those were incredibly long days, and not surprisingly, my grades began to drop. You can imagine the displeasure that showed in my father’s face when my report card came in the mail and showed a 2.7 GPA. I know that many parents would be elated to have their child bring home a 2.7, but in my family, we had high expectations, and all of my siblings before me had set a standard of academic excellence. Being the only child in the family to participate in official athletics past junior high, I was something of a new challenge for my parents.

  It ended up being a good season, which gave me enough validation and sense of accomplishment to keep me going. The varsity team made it to the state-championship game for the second straight year that season and lost again. But Rupp lost a strong core of seniors, leaving many positions open on the team for next season. Coach Gardner called me to his room and told me I had a chance to start varsity next season, but that it was all up to me. I had to hold up my end; Rupp wasn’t going to go out of his way to motivate me. When the spring came, I was going to be that guy who took advantage of an opportunity and who accepted full accountability for himself. I was baptized into the blue-collar world of Kerry Rupp.

  When my time did come, the spring after sophomore season, I joined Rupp at six thirty every morning for skill-development sessions—a practice we continued faithfully for two years.

  You either loved or hated Kerry Rupp. There was no in between. He was never insulting to parents, but he didn’t fraternize with them. He was respectful, but he had been around long enough to see the ugliness of the sports world and all the greed, subterfuge, and backbiting that came with school sports and parental school boards. He was impressed by nothing but hard work and integrity.

  “Everyone thinks their kid should be a star,” Rupp told us on the first day of his summer basketball camp. “Make sure your parents, if they call, know that I will talk about anything except for what goes on on the basketball court and playing time.”

  I grew to love the early-morning training sessions when it was just me and Coach Rupp with a ball in a cold gym, buzzing lights dimly illuminating the hardwood floor. Rupp met me at six thirty every morning before school. He had no reason to do it but that he loved the game and saw something in me.

  When he gave the team days off, I’d still ask Coach Rupp if we could work out the next morning by ourselves. I knew it would be hard and painful, as he pushed me to the limit and many times past, to the point where I’d vomit right onto the hardwood. But I loved it. I loved the pain and discomfort. I loved the sense of accomplishment I felt once it was all over. I loved to sit by myself there in the bleachers of the empty gym and be lost in stalled thought, my mind and body too tired to think. It was my high. A natural high.

  Those mornings were the purest form of basketball I ever knew. Just me, Rupp, and a ball. No money, no boosters, no politics. It was the pure love and innocence of the game, when it was still a game for me. We both worked and sweated, our shoes squeaking and echoing out the gym and down the empty hallways. I’d pay to have those moments again, those moments of hard work and sacrifice when I knew not what to expect as far as what my future held, with no sense of entitlement, no reward or motive in sight other than just the pure love of the game. I had no idea if I was ever going to be good enough to play college ball. We were challengers of the unknown.

  I wasn’t playing for the future on those mornings with Rupp; I was playing for the moment, for the present. I wanted to be good at something; I wanted to excel at something. Coach Rupp was right there with me, through thick and thin. Rupp knew I was going to play college ball, but he held only the possibility of it before me, like a carrot on a stick. He withheld any certainty he felt about my future—to keep me hungry, to never let me get complacent. But he would come to know me well enough to know that I’m my own harshest critic, my own harshest coach, and that he therefore had no reason to worry I’d become self-satisfied.

  There were a few times in games that Rupp would get in my face and yell at me, but I never took it hard, and he never made it personal. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” he once yelled at me on the bench in the middle of a game. A parent of a teammate leaned over to my parents, who were watching the interaction, and asked if they were OK with it. Mom and Dad simply nodded. They knew that Rupp had only the best intentions for me. They also knew that when I didn’t want to listen to someone, I stubbornly looked away, my hearing loss helping me block out what they were saying. Rupp was smart enough to know that this was a coping mechanism of mine, and he would never let me use it with him.

  A lot of parents had issues with Rupp, and I can understand why. He was very stern and ran a tight ship, with a college-style program at a high school level. Most teenagers just want to show up and play and have fun. With Rupp, it was more than just a glorified extracurricular activity. It was a commitment. How many kids want to wake up at 6 a.m. during the summer to go run sprints? Coach Rupp’s tryouts were the entire off-season, not just the standard obligatory opening-week tryouts in November. His practices were intense and serious. We never go
ofed off.

  For some kids this was too much, but for me, I loved it. I loved the sense of purpose and the camaraderie. I loved having partners in pursuit of a goal. I loved the feeling that I belonged to something, that we were a fraternity of men, all sacrificing time and fun, committing to each other, in pursuit of that goal.

  Rupp and I didn’t have many heart-to-hearts. Like me, Rupp wasn’t very talkative or gregarious. “I’m paid to be your coach, not your friend,” he’d say. “There are two thousand other kids in this school for that job.” But we had a deep respect for each other.

  Kerry Rupp was the greatest coach I ever had. The man knew me and taught me everything I know. Everything I learned under the great-minded Rick Majerus, who is a master of the game, I had already learned at least some facet of under Coach Rupp, who could’ve taught me even more had I been older and my mind able to comprehend. But most of the things that Rupp couldn’t teach me were things I could learn only through experience.

  Rupp never embarrassed you if you made a mistake—an unusual trait in a coach, as I would find out. If I made a mistake, he took me out or pulled me aside, and then simply asked, “Do you know what you did wrong?”

  If the answer was yes, he would say, “OK, learn from it.” If no, he would explain it. The only time Rupp would yell at me was when I wasn’t playing the hardest I could. And with all the hours we spent alone, one-on-one, Rupp knew what my hardest was. Rupp demanded a lot of his players, but above all he simply demanded that you play hard. If you didn’t, you would come out. He let you play through your mistakes—if they were honest mistakes, of course, mistakes of omission.

  As long as I was playing hard, Rupp let me have a long leash, to learn from my experiences. I did well with that style of coaching. I’m so incredibly analytical and critical of myself to this very day. When you’re worried about making a mistake, you’ll make a mistake. Trust me, I know. Basketball is a game of flow, and if you’re playing in fear, your body and mind cannot get into the rhythm.

  Since our days at East, Coach Rupp has, like me, gone on his own journey and is well traveled. Like me, too, he has sacrificed dearly, with little reward other than his own personal sense of accomplishment. It’s scary just how parallel our lives have been since those days of innocence at East High School. He taught me so much, and yet we both have had similar experiences of heartache and disappointment within our profession, though from different vantage points. But as Rupp taught me every morning to never give up, challenging me to chase down every missed shot and put it back in, we both, since then, have never given up.

  In the capricious world of basketball, we challenged the unknown, but we did so with passion, and the journey has been the reward.

  11

  That day comes for all teenage boys—and yes, girls, too—when all they can think about is sex. And when they’re sixteen, they get a sex-education class, where they can giggle and laugh at all the anatomical references and diagrams yet burn in their bosoms with desire and yearning for the pleasurable.

  The time came when I was eligible for sex ed. I was given a disclaimer to take home to my parents and have them sign, saying they were aware and either encouraging or silently disapproving of my education in the science of procreation. I arrived in class and handed the disclaimer to my teacher. Those without disclaimers were excused: some piously held their noses high, clinging to their innocence and chastity, for which they believed God smiled on them; others wistfully looked back over their shoulders at what they could only imagine we were about to see, and what they wanted to see.

  The lights dimmed. I’d no longer have to rely on the sketches my Dad had provided many years ago; they were surprisingly detailed, but still, they were sketches. The TV blared on. The film started. Ink blotches spotted the screen. A scratchy soundtrack crescendoed from the tatty speakers of the TV. The sound and musical quality of the track combined to create a score that you would expect to hear as an accompaniment to a 1950s Cold-War propaganda 8 mm projector presentation.

  The black screen then exploded to life, with a big white shining title: “The Miracle of Life.”

  I’m already disappointed. Disappointment soon turned to curious bewilderment.

  What is all that hair? Wait…. Is that…is that a vagina? All that hair. It must be a monkey or an ape…nope, it’s a woman. A woman with a very hairy vagina, so hairy that it looks like an Italian mobster’s ass. Why doesn’t she trim it? She knew she was…her vagina was…going to be on camera,…didn’t she? Wait, OK…this movie must have been made in the seventies.

  Vaginas are ugly. Do they have teeth? Is it safe to…? Wait, why is her vagina moving? Is that blood coming out of her vagina? Oh my gosh, it is! There’s BLOOD COMING—…OK, there’s now a big white something pushing open her vagina. Annnnnnnnd her vagina just ripped. More blood.

  OK, I got it: the big white thing tearing up the vagina is a head.

  Now, some might be surprised that I didn’t receive any formal sex education until I was sixteen. But you should know that Utah County, aka Happy Valley, home of BYU, has one of the highest per capita teenage pregnancy rates in the country. But we ignore this. We don’t talk about the bad things. We don’t talk about the things that rattle our paradigm of bliss. Utah also is the top state in downloaded porn per capita in the country. Why is this? Because we don’t teach, nor do some of us fully understand, nor are we properly taught, the consequences of sex. When something is taboo, teenagers, who will always rebel, will touch and flirt with it, in hopes of finding their identity.

  Jared Sperry introduced me to porn. It was under his guidance that I witnessed my first taste of it on the Internet on his personal computer in his sequestered room, which he kept locked at all times. Our friend Greg Noble and I were sitting on Sperry’s bed one day when he said, “You guys want to see something cool?” And before we could answer, an MPEG was flashing in front of us. When I registered what I was seeing, I crinkled my nose and flinched. Greg did the same, and we both turned away in disgust, holding our hands up to shield our face. Had we been warned beforehand, we might have been able to enjoy it, but as it was, it wasn’t enticing.

  Sperry loved to play pranks on us: sending in a subscription for Greg to Playboy and having it delivered to his house, where his mother would receive it on a day that should have been just another quiet weekday; having Astroglide sent to the neighboring Maxwell house; or logging on to a gay porn site at my parents’ house and then purposely leaving it on-screen for my father to come home and see and grow even more concerned about “little boys in the shower.” Can you imagine the awkward moment of shame and the words that cannot quite roll off the tip of your tongue as you try to explain to your father that it wasn’t you who logged on to a gay porn site, but rather a friend of yours who did it as a prank—especially when it’s the oldest excuse in the book to point your finger at your absent friend in order to avoid being reprimanded?

  In our senior year, Greg and I were in a computer-science class where we had to make up our own Web pages for our finals. Greg did his on aviation, and I did mine on basketball. Sperry was a brilliant computer-science nerd who knew tons more than I will ever know about computers and said he would help us. The night before the project was due, Jared and I reviewed the page and what I wanted on it, and the three required links to related Web pages, which on my page were ncaa.com, espn.com, and nba.com. When we finished up, Greg showed up to work on his project, and I left them to their own devices, my project complete.

  The next morning in class, I logged on to my Web page via the Internet and did one last look-over to make sure everything was in order before presenting it on the overhead projector. All the links were working, the sounds and graphics were up and running, the comment board was functioning—all was great, until I clicked on nba.com.

  The screen slowly began to fade as a Flash player was activated. While the screen was black, a looped high-frequency audio clip squealed out, “Lance Allred! Lance Allred! Lance Allred! Lanc
e Allred!” My peers looked up from their monitors as I fumbled for the speakers, but not in time to cover the screen, which flicked on to show a skeezy-looking man with a black handlebar mustache, in ass-less chaps, gazing over his shoulder with a come-hither look. He had the studded leather necklace and the Nazi biker cap, a leather vest, and a perfectly waxed rear end that fit snuggly in the holes on the chaps. Sperry had created a gay porn site, recording his own voice saying my name and then tuning it to a high frequency to make it sound like a little boy’s, which was creepy enough to deprive anyone of sleep for a good forty-eight hours.

  The site was on a timer that caused it to gradually fade in to full sight over the course of a good ten seconds before you could even close it. All I could do after I finally managed to turn off the volume was flick off the monitor. The teacher popped up: “What was that?”

  Frantic, I removed my arms from around the computer, looking down to make sure the screen was blank before finally letting go. I downplayed: “Just some silly e-mail my friend sent me.”

  Greg was leaning over in his seat, facing away from me, hugging himself as he laughed hard and quietly. He had been in on the prank. When I had left Sperry’s the night before, he and Sperry had conspired against me, to humiliate me. Fortunately, I had done my routine maintenance check beforehand. If I had not done so, and all had gone according to Greg and Jared’s plan, my name would’ve shrieked through the classroom as a Chester-child-molester in ass-less chaps appeared on the classroom wall looking lustfully at all the innocent boys. Those ten seconds would’ve seemed interminable, with utter chaos and madness ensuing.

  Before I could voice my displeasure, I was called to give my presentation.

  “Ah,” my teacher, Mr. Stoker, said as my Web site came into view, the montage of various University of Utah basketball players appearing before the class. “Here is a theme that’s dear to his heart.”