Longshot

by Lance Allred

  I was feeling good about things until the NBA draft, when Boston took Glen “Big Baby” Davis in the second round. He just fell to them. The fact that he went that late in the draft had surprised many. I knew I was done for. I was upset that I had locked myself in with Boston for camp. If I was gunning for an NBA team, the only way I was ever going to be considered was by being a deep reserve who would probably never see the floor during games but would find his use on the practice floor. Glen Davis was in that same role as an undersized but energetic and bulky rookie. A résumé like mine wasn’t nearly as presentable as one like Glen Davis had: MVP of the SEC (Southeastern Conference) and a final-four appearance. The writing was on the wall. No matter how well I played, “Baby” was going to get the bulk of the minutes, and he would get the nod over me if it was anywhere close to debatable, because Boston fans would know the name and immediately be excited about him. Whereas for me, who is Lance Allred?

  My fears were confirmed when I walked into the gym upon arriving in Vegas to see Glen Davis and Leon Powe being taken through individual workouts before any of us had arrived. Boston had already made up their mind. It was a done deal. All I could do at this point was just go play and have as much fun as possible, regardless of what happened around me. I played well with what I had been given. John came down and watched the games, and was happy with the way I played. “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” he told me. “You’re making the most of your opportunity, and people notice that.”

  I left Vegas with no regrets, with people whispering to me, “Danny Ainge really likes you,” Ainge being the president of Basketball Operations for the Celtics.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But how much?” They signed Glen Davis shortly after.

  After camp was over, I was invited to go play in China with the NBA Development League all-star squad in the International Stankovich Cup. I was hesitant to do it, but John asked me to, feeling we needed that recognition on my résumé. Furthermore, Randy had been invited to be on the team and said he would go if I went. But Randy flaked out at the last minute, the day before we flew from San Francisco to China.*

  It was a strange setup. There were ten of us, and yet four of us were centers. I don’t know who put the team together, but someone obviously just went with those with the best available stats who were willing to go. Four centers to share one spot, a spot that can be played by only one man at a time.

  The notion that China is our enemy, a future threat to our stability, is preposterous. They f-ing love us! Or at least us American basketball players, who are almost NBA players. “Tracy McGrady!” they’d yell at us as we walked down the street. You would think that Yao Ming jerseys sold the most jerseys in his home country, but really it’s Tracy McGrady.

  By the second day I had come down with food poisoning, and for the rest of the trip I was in pain, dehydrated, and miserable.

  When people find out I was in Hong Kong, they will excitedly ask if I had a good time.

  “Yes. The knockoff shops were such a lovely attraction. If you’re ever there, I recommend you go to the one just off the train at Lon Square. It was so much fun walking through sweatshops, taking advantage of all of those poor people to assuage our vanity.”

  The Chinese love their cameras. And they love to use their cameras to take pictures of Americans. Especially tall Americans. As I walked down a busy sidewalk, the sound of each step I took was drowned out by the clicking of cameras. I often turned around to see a tiny lady smiling, giving me a thumbs-up as she captured my confused look with another quick snapshot.

  I learned to combat this nuisance by pulling out my own camera to take pictures of the people taking pictures of me. It really did cheapen the moment for them, as they’d pull down their cameras to give me their own look of confusion, which I in turn would capture.

  One girl spoke to me in broken English as I immortalized the disappointed look on her face: “No fun!”

  Once I got home from China, I needed money, and Aunt Jeanette lined me up with a landscaping job. It was OK money, and I enjoyed learning how to build and design yards for when my own time comes. But I didn’t like the late-night phone calls from my lonely employer, who left long, inebriated diatribes on my voice mail, talking about how she was still angry that she was never blessed with a child.

  Helga was a demanding boss, and very impatient. I was hired to do the grunt work and ditch digging, but she also had a hired landscaper, Liz, working on her lawn, and the two of them bickered constantly. Like a child of a divorce, I was caught in the middle. It reached its worst point one day while I was working in the back of a truck bed, unloading a shipment of landscape rocks in the snow. I had not expected it to snow in October, and I was trying to get this project done before I headed back up to Boise to start the season. Snow or not, though, I was going to finish. Helga came out holding the phone and said, “I can’t talk to her. She drives me crazy. You talk to her.”

  I took the phone and apathetically asked, “Yes?”

  “Lance!” Liz barked on the other end of the line. “What are you doing shoveling while it’s raining and snowing out? You need to grow a backbone!”

  As much as I enjoy lonely women calling my manhood into question, I wasn’t really in the mood for it on this day. I rolled my eyes, standing there on a pile of rocks, which may as well have been a pile of shit.

  No man can serve two masters, let alone two lonely women. I learned through all of this that no matter how much money I make, it’s never worth the cost or hassle of having someone else do your yard work for you. Why pay someone to do something you can do yourself?

  Throughout that summer, John called me often to inform me of offers to go overseas. Some were for ridiculously low pay, and some were quite enticing. But something kept telling me no. I needed to give it one more year in the D-League, give it one more push. I knew myself well enough to know that if I went overseas now, I’d be asking myself What if? for the rest of my life. I stayed. I was going leave no stone unturned. I was going to give this one last push.

  “OK,” John agreed. “But you have to resign yourself to the fact that the day may come where you’ll have to go back overseas.”

  “I know, John. I’m only giving it one more year in the D-League. One more year is all I will allow myself. And if I don’t get that call-up, I will just accept the fact that it wasn’t meant to be, and we will finish my career overseas.”

  I had this feeling in my stomach that my experience overseas had been so bad because I wasn’t supposed to be there, that I was supposed to be in the States. And it was more than just about me: I also felt that to be playing in the NBA would inspire kids with other disabilities. If it had been only about the money, I would have just gone back overseas for the quick check.

  The clock was ticking. It was a strategic move to stay, just as it was a strategic move not to go to any fall preseason camps. I knew the system well enough now to know that I was never going to outjump anyone in the gym or steal the limelight. I was never going to be invited to stay on a team through power of name or reputation. Going to a preseason camp would have ultimately been an exercise in futility, leading to more disappointment, and I was still stinging from the letdown with Boston.

  I chose to stay home and prepare for the season in Boise, which would start back up again in November. Coach Gates was back; so was Randy. There were several reasons why Randy decided not to retire after that year, in spite of earning his pension, being named MVP, and having a son on the way. But I know that one of the big reasons was for me.

  “I need you to help me get there, Randy. You’re the only way I can,” I admitted to him on the phone when I asked him to come back. And he did. Randy Livingston was my last crossing guard, to a place I had been chasing for so long.

  Coach Gates called to tell me he had three new guys coming to the Idaho Stampede: Cory Violette, a former Gonzaga standout who grew up in Boise; Roberto Bergerson, a Boise State legend who had played for the Stampede back in the CBA day
s; and Ernest Scott, a kid from Georgia who had played for Gates in the USBL (United States Basketball League) at one time.

  Coach wanted all three of those guys and me to go on a semi-pro preseason team that toured the country, playing at various colleges, allowing the coaches to gauge their team for the upcoming season.

  It was a chance for them and me to get acquainted with each other and grow familiar with our traits and tendencies. It was a clever way to get the rust and kinks out before the season began, allowing us to ease back into the pace of an officiated game. They all agreed to go, and I agreed to join them. I had nothing else to do. It was a quick way to pass time, get in shape, meet my new teammates, and collect $600!

  I was thrilled upon meeting these three, as I could tell they were quality people. In any business, if you want to win and be successful, before talent and skill, you need good people around you.

  Cory and I took an immediate liking to each other, and we became roommates in Boise. We thought similarly politically and economically and could talk and debate for hours. Cory startled me the first night he and I shared a room on the road when I awoke to find him eating a pizza in the dark. He was either staring at me while doing so, or he was sleep-eating.

  I was very excited about the upcoming season. Training camp started, and Randy flew into town. Camp began without any incident or ripped feet this year. I was in good shape, and it felt good to be back.

  My choice to stay in the D-League proved immediately to be a wise one, as I charged out of the gates with the same fervor with which I had ended the previous season, scoring thirty points in the first game.

  D-League travel is the best.

  You’re never departing from a major city for another one. You’re always traveling from a small, secondary city like Boise or Bismarck to either Los Angeles or Denver or to another small city—the cities with markets in which a D-League team can thrive. Small cities like Boise, where there are no major pro sports teams, are the smartest markets for building a minor-league team.

  With the D-League comes the luxury of the travel. This is the time when you’re reminded of just how good you have it. You wake up at 5 a.m. every road trip and head to the airport, where you once again meander through the tedious security checks, sardonically reminding yourself that freedom isn’t free as you take your shoes off and do your best to tuck in your big toe, which protrudes through the hole in your ratty sock. You walk through the scanner, with all eyes magnetically drifting toward your big toe, which has popped up to tell everyone hello, while holding up your pants by a belt loop as you wait for your gear to come off the conveyor belt.

  Then awkwardly, with one hand, as the other is still holding your pants, you grab your things as quickly as you can and wrestle with your laptop, which you have to take out of your bag every damn time because for some reason everything metal, when wrapped in nylon bags—except, of course, for computers—shows up on X-ray scanners. Still holding up your pants, you try to clear out of the way as fast as you can for the sake of those behind, at least if you’re someone who is polite like me, and then walk over to the two chairs that have to accommodate the thousands that pass through every day. You then just drop all your things on the floor and begin to dress yourself in public.

  Then comes the plane flight, which is hardly an end to justify the means. Because of the simple, economic truth that we’re in a small city, there are no 757s waiting for us. Seven-footers like me have to suck it up by getting on tiny two-seater commuter jets, with cabins that remind you of an MRI tube. A tube in which you do your best to refrain from wigging out in a state of claustrophobic hysteria, pounding the walls, begging for someone, anyone, to let you out.

  You hit your head on all the open cabinet doors, each encounter more agitating than the last because you cannot see ahead but you know it’s coming. You walk blindly down the aisle, as you cannot stand up straight. You can only bend at the neck and stare down at your feet and the white emergency exit lights, which will never ever light up for you and let you live to tell of it. At least for me, these dormant Valkyries earn their keep by serving the semiredeeming, offhand purpose of guiding me in a straight line back toward the rear of the plane.

  People then laugh and point at you and ask, as though no one else before or after them has done so, “Are you guys a basketball team?…

  How is the weather up there?” They will then turn their heads and watch you maneuver, twisting and turning as you tuck yourself like a folding chair, a skill mastered over time. It’s not pleasant or fun. It’s simply what needs to be done.

  “Is that uncomfortable?” the annoying woman a few rows up from you asks; she, of course, got to the airport early to claim the emergency-exit row and is now too self-absorbed for it to occur to her that she should probably trade you seats.

  “Yes,” you answer as politely as you can in a strained voice as you adjust your knee to stop it from digging into your ribs. You give her a polite smile and take out your book, which is the only painkiller you have to help get you through the torturous flight ahead. The book also serves a second purpose: letting exit-row lady know that you’re not in a chatty mood. She checks back periodically throughout the flight to see if you have put your book down, hoping for conversation.

  If you make the mistake of putting your book down, she may force the issue and ask over the heads of the people between you, “How tall are you?”

  “Five-one” is your default answer to that question, which you have been asked more times than a soap star comes back from the dead. It immediately lets you gauge a person’s intelligence by seeing how long it takes them to figure out that you’re lying to them. Exit-row lady lights up with duly noted and impressed eyes, nodding approvingly at you, and begins to turn away, her body language conveying her internal dialogue: Five-one, that’s really…Wait, I’m five-six. That can’t be right.…She turns back around with a look of amusement on her face, thinking you’re being funny and playing with her when really you’re hoping it will let her know, for the love of all that’s holy, that you’d like her to please leave you alone.

  When you land at the airport closest to wherever your final D-League destination may be, you’re packed away in a caravan of minivans and driven for hours to where you’ll be playing, because money is tight and the owner sees no point in getting a bus when vans are cheaper. As you stow yourself away along with your luggage, you listen to rap music on the radio, because it’s cool and cliché, while you munch away at your Fig Newtons, which you share with Coach Gates, because they’re a white-man treat. You never have to worry about your teammates taking your Fig Newtons; they’re black-man proof. Not because Randy thinks they’re gross, but because he has no idea what Fig Newtons are, scared to try new things, choosing to remain on his steady diet of Big Macs and potato chips. You can eat only so healthy on a thirty-dollar per diem.

  The pinnacle of your D-League experience will occur when you take that christening bus ride through the night along I–94 from Sioux Falls to Bismarck, North Dakota. As though it’s an intro to a bad horror movie, the bus breaks down at two in the morning, thirty miles outside of Fargo. The frosty December winds that howl across the Dakota plains pound against the bus, rocking it, asking you to all come out and play. You sit there in the back of the bus with Randy, Cory, Ernest, and Berto, covered in blankets, your clothes layered, your beanie tucked to the lowest point possible, as you play poker through the night, doing your best to take your mind off the cold.

  Randy will keep buying back in and playing every hand he has.

  Ernest will sit and watch, because his girlfriend gets mad when he plays.

  Cory will sit there and complain with food in his mouth that we’re such terrible players and thus are impossible to read.

  Berto will chew his fingernails in solitary frenzy.

  And you’ll look out the window, across the field, to see the ghostly silhouette of a Chippewa warrior riding his horse across the frozen Dakota plains.

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  I, Lance Allred, am a child of God, and I know that He loves me.

  I will be an example of Him at all times.

  I, Lance Allred, will live life to the fullest and never settle for less

  than my best.

  I will be the best basketball player that I can be.

  I, Lance Allred, will play in the NBA.

  I will hand over my life to the Lord for his doing.

  I, Lance Allred, will achieve all that I desire, for the Lord has

  promised me so.

  This is my mantra, my goal list that I repeat every night before I go to bed and every morning when I awake. I repeat it every game while standing on the court, at the free-throw line, during the national anthem. This has been my mantra since I was seventeen years old.

  I wrote a letter to my heavenly father at the start of the week of the annual NBA Development League showcase, which is here in Boise this week. It’s the week of January 14, 2008. The showcase is a gathering of all the D-League teams, who play two games each in a four-day span. It’s a convenient setup that allows all the general managers of NBA teams and European clubs to gather in one place and achieve all of their scouting in just four days in one place, rather than through weeks of traveling to various cities that they haven’t the time to visit.

  To My Father in Heaven,

  I hope you enjoy my first letter to you, which is a bit odd considering how long it has taken me to write you one. My ability to write is nothing short of your doing and it is the talent I am most grateful for that you have given me.