Travel Team

by Mike Lupica

  Basically, though, Danny had just decided his dad was who he was. Like some sort of broken and put-back-together version of who he used to be. He was who he was and their relationship was what it was, and Danny couldn’t see that changing anytime soon. And maybe not ever. He’d never describe it to his mom this way, but he’d worked it out for himself. It went all the way back to something she’d told him once about heart, and how you could divide it up any way you wanted to.

  So, cool, he’d set aside this place in his heart for his dad, and what his dad could give him. Wanting more but not expecting more, happy when his dad would show up, even unexpected, the way he did tonight, sad when he left.

  You got used to stuff, that’s the way he looked at it.

  Even divorce.

  He would never say this to his mom, but he always thought he’d gotten used to divorce a lot better than Ali Walker ever had. Or ever would.

  He just didn’t go out of his way trying to put a fake smiley face on it the way they did, at least when he was still in the room.

  So now he was in front of the Compaq his mom had gotten him from CompUSA for Christmas, Googling away. He had typed in “Richie Walker,” knowing the first page of what the search engine would spit back at him, the list of Web sites, knowing that the one he wanted was at the top of the second page.

  ChildSportsStars.Com.

  He clicked on W, knowing his dad’s was there at the top of the list, Tiger Woods’s down a bit lower. And Kerry Wood, the Cubs pitcher, even though Danny didn’t exactly think you were a child because you made the big leagues when you were nineteen or twenty.

  Then he clicked on his dad.

  “The biggest little kid from the biggest little town in the world,” the headline read.

  And proceeded to tell you all about Richie Walker, the dazzling point guard from the tiny town in Eastern Long Island who took his twelve-year-old travel team all the way to the finals of the nationals—what was now known as the Little League Basketball World Series—and about the Middletown Vikings’ last upset victory in their amazing upset run to the title over a heavily favored team from Los Angeles.

  On national television.

  Danny felt as if all of it had been tattooed to his memory, the way you wished you could tattoo homework to your memory sometimes.

  He knew almost all of it by heart, including the stuff in the little box on the side that told you about how ESPN was just starting out in those days and was putting just about anything on the air; how they decided to give the full treatment to the twelve-year-old nationals once they realized what kind of story they had with Richie Walker and his team.

  The bio in ChildSportsStars.Com said:

  “…and so Richie Walker and his teammates became a Disney movie even before Disney owned ESPN, the travel-team version of The Bad News Bears. There would even be the suggestion later that it was the story of the Middletown Vikings that had at least partially inspired the Mighty Ducks movies that would come later, the one about a ragtag hockey team from nowhere always finding a way….

  “But every movie like this needs the right star. The right kid. And Middletown had one in Richie Walker, the sandy-haired point guard with what the commentators and sportswriters of the day described as all the Harlem Globetrotters in his suburban game….”

  By the time Middletown had pulled off its first huge upset, over a heavily favored team from Toledo, Ohio, ESPN had fallen in love with Richie Walker and the Vikings. By the second week of the tournament, the whole thing had picked up enough momentum in the middle of February, the dead time in sports between the Super Bowl and the start of the NCAA basketball tournament, that ABC came in and made a deal to put the finals on Wide World of Sports, just because ESPN wasn’t getting into enough households in those days, cable television not being nearly the force it is now.

  Or so it said on ChildSportsStars.Com, and anywhere else they gave you a detailed account of the life and times of Richie Walker.

  Middletown’s own.

  He had heard so many people say it that way, his whole life, that he sometimes felt as if the last part, Middletown’s own, was part of his dad’s name.

  The son an expert on the town’s favorite son.

  Before it was all over, there would be a small picture of his dad’s face on the cover of Sports Illustrated, not the main part of the cover, but up in a corner. His dad would end up on The Today Show, too.

  Even people who didn’t watch the Middletown–L.A. final on a Saturday afternoon had managed to see the highlights of the last minute of the one-point game.

  Most of which involved Middletown’s little point guard, Richie Walker, dribbling out the clock all by himself.

  Going between his legs a couple of times.

  Crossing over in the last ten seconds and even pushing the ball through one of the defender’s legs when it looked as if L.A. had finally trapped him in a double-team, while their coach kept waving his arms in the background and telling them to foul him.

  Problem was, they couldn’t foul what they couldn’t catch.

  You could watch the last minute by clicking on the video at ChildSportsStars.Com.

  Danny had watched it what felt like a thousand times. Watched his dad and felt like he was watching himself, that’s how much alike they looked (and how many times had people in town told him that, like it was breaking news?). Watched him with that old blue-and-white jersey hanging out of his shorts, dribbling. Finally being carried around the court at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis when it was all over and Middletown had won, 40–39.

  They had that picture on the Web site, too.

  The rest of it told how Richie Walker went on to become a high school all-America at Middletown High. A second-team all-America at Syracuse University and one of the first real stars who helped make the Big East a major draw on ESPN. First-round draft choice of the Golden State Warriors.

  Finally a member of the NBA’s All-Rookie Team, even though his rookie season was cut short by the famous car accident on the San Francisco side of the Bay Bridge after a Warriors-Spurs game.

  Pictures of that, too: What was left of the Jeep Cherokee Richie Walker had bought before the season with some of his bonus money, the one they had to use the Jaws of Life to get him out of that night.

  Danny knew the pictures the way he knew everything else about his dad’s basketball career….

  “Hey sport,” Richie Walker said now from behind Danny. “What you looking at there?”

  Danny executed the essential kid laptop move, clicking off and folding down the screen, as slick as anything he could do on the court.

  He gave his standard answer, no matter which parent was the one who’d suddenly appeared in the doorway.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  He and his mom were in the kitchen having breakfast, both of them already dressed for school, him for the seventh grade at St. Patrick’s, his mom for her eighth-grade teaching schedule there. He went there because she taught there. They could afford Danny going there because she taught there, and his tuition was free.

  His mom used to joke that it was usually private-school people that were supposed to be snobs, but that somehow they’d tipped that on its head in Middletown, and it was the parochial school kids, the ones who didn’t go to Springs, that were supposed to be from the wrong side of the tracks.

  “Even though we don’t really have any tracks,” she’d say.

  He had SportsCenter on the small counter television set, sound muted. It was part of their morning deal, just understood. Sound on until she came into the room, then sound off.

  If there was some important news story going on, they watched Today.

  Danny said, “Did he tell you why he’s here?”

  “He says he’s not sure, exactly.”

  Ali Walker stuffed one last folder into an already-stuffed leather shoulder bag, one that looked older to Danny than she did.

  She turned and looked at him, hand on hip.

  Givi
ng him her smiley-face, even with his dad nowhere to be found.

  “Sometimes he can’t figure out why he’s here until he’s not here anymore,” she said. “Part of your father’s charm.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

  “Look at me,” she said. “Do I look mad?”

  Danny knew enough to know there was nothing for him with an honest answer to that. “No,” he said.

  “I’m not mad,” Ali said, “I’m just making an observation.”

  “Right.”

  Aw, man, he thought. Where did that come from?

  Rookie mistake, Walker.

  “What does that mean?” she said. “Right?”

  Danny took a deep breath, let it out nice and slow, trying to be careful now. Trying to make his way across a patch of ice. “It just seems to me, sometimes, no big deal, that he seems to make you as mad when he is around as when he’s not around. Is all.”

  She started to say something right back, stopped herself with a wave of her hand.

  “You’re pretty smart for a guy who’s really only interested in perfecting the double dribble.”

  “Crossover dribble.”

  “Whatever,” she said, as if impersonating one of the girls in his class.

  “Hey,” he said, “that’s a code violation.”

  Another one of their deals. There were strict rules of conversation at 422 Earl Avenue. No cursing of any kind, not even in the privacy of his own driveway. No “duh.” And, under penalty of loss of video privileges for the night, no “whatever.”

  Ever.

  Ali Walker taught English. And was constantly telling her son that in at least one classroom—hers—and one home—theirs—the English language was not going to sound as if they were communicating by instant-message.

  “I was just making a joke,” she said. “Trying to sound like one of the dear, ditzhead girls in one of my classes.”

  “Well,” he said, imitating her now, “I’m going to let it go just this one time.”

  She laughed and came over with her coffee and sat across from him at the table, close enough that he could smell the smell of her, which was always like soap. She looked pretty great for somebody’s mom, the way she always did, even before she started fussing with her hair and doing some fast makeup deal and getting ready for the day. Danny knowing that his mom was the prettiest woman in their school and probably in Middletown. Occasionally even described as “hot” by the high school boys at St. Pat’s, something he wasn’t sure should bother him or not. He just decided it was the ultimate guy compliment and left it at that.

  This morning his mom wore the new blue dress she’d bought for herself last week at the Miller’s fall sale.

  Because Ali Walker was, in her own words, the “queen of sales.”

  As moms went, from his own limited experience with them, Danny believed you couldn’t be much cooler than his was, even considering all the things she didn’t know about guys.

  Despite all she thought she knew.

  “Straight talk?” she said.

  He knew what was coming, just because sometimes he did, sometimes he got into her brain the way she got into his. Maybe because it was just the two of them.

  “You have to be strong today, you know that, right?” she said.

  Danny said, “I’d have to be strong at Springs. I don’t even think anybody from St. Patrick’s made the team.”

  “Are you sure? Did Jeff Ross tell you that?”

  Danny pushed Waffle Crisp cereal around in his bowl. “I’m the best at St. Pat’s,” he said.

  “Your friends are still going to ask you about it. And they’re going to want to talk about it. Because that’s what kids do, they talk dramas like this to death.”

  He was still staring down at what was left of his cereal, as if there were a clue in there somewhere.

  Or a code he was trying to crack.

  “Them asking me can’t be worse than him telling me,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “Hey,” she said, “is that true? The whole team is going to be from Springs this year?”

  “Last year we only had three from St. Pat’s. Me. Matt Fitzgerald. And Bren. Bren didn’t even try out this year, he said he heard they thought he was too small to have made it last year.”

  Bren Darcy had been an inch taller than Danny since first grade, an inch Danny kept thinking he could make up on him but never did.

  “But what about Matt?” his mom said. “He’s the tallest seventh grader in this town. God, his sneakers look like life rafts. If the mission statement is to get quote bigger unquote, how does he not make the team?”

  “The only reason he made it last year was because he is so big. But he really doesn’t know how to play basketball yet, and I don’t think anybody’s ever really taught him. His dad’s a hockey guy, and I still think he’s pis…mad that Matt didn’t want to be the world’s tallest defenseman.”

  “Your father always said you can’t teach tall.”

  “Matt had just made up his mind that he was lucky to make it last year and wasn’t going to make it this year. Like the opposite of Bren. And that’s pretty much the way he played in tryouts.”

  “A self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  Danny looked up at her. “Like you telling me how hard today is going to be at school.”

  “I’m just being realistic,” she said. “You know some of your friends are going to know, I’m sure the news has been instant-messaged through just about every neighborhood in Middletown, USA, who made the team and who didn’t.”

  “Mr. Ross said the letters won’t arrive until today’s mail.”

  “Right. And everybody in this town is soooooo good at keeping secrets.”

  “Mom,” he said. “I’m okay. Okay?”

  “Look out for the ones who bring it up first, like they want to commiserate.”

  He was pretty sure what she meant, just by the way she said it. The rule was, if he didn’t know what a word meant, he was supposed to ask.

  She said, “You know what I’m saying here?”

  “They’ll act like they feel bad, but they really won’t?”

  “They’ll be the ones who are happiest that you didn’t make it.”

  “I get it.”

  “And you’ll get through this, kiddo,” she said. “It’s like I always tell you: Everything’s always better in the light of day. Especially for my streak of light.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Danny?”

  “Yes, I’ll get through it. And everything is better in the light of day.”

  Ali Walker said, “I don’t have to tell you about Michael Jordan again, do I?”

  “Every time I go out for anything, you tell me about how he got cut from his junior high school team.”

  “There’ll be other teams,” she said. “There were for Michael Jordan and there will be for you.”

  He thought: Just not this team.

  Not the one that’ll probably be the first one to make the World Series since his dad’s.

  “Are you ready to rock and roll?” she said.

  Danny took his bowl over to the sink—good boy, Walker—and rinsed it and placed it on the bottom rack of the dishwasher.

  “‘Rock and roll’ is so incredibly lame,” he said. “You need to know that.”

  “Rock and roll is here to stay,” his mom said. “And will never die.”

  “You tell me that about as often as you tell me about Jordan getting cut.”

  She shut off the television, and the kitchen lights, made sure the back door would lock behind them when they left.

  “I get with a good thing,” she said, “I stay with it.”

  “I forgot to ask before,” Danny said. “Is he staying?”

  Ali Walker went out the door first, saying, “He actually mentioned that he might hang around for a while.”

  Danny made one of those looping undercuts like Tiger Woods made after sinking a long putt.

  Without turning around,
his mom said, “I saw that.”

  4

  AS SOON AS HE WALKED IN THE SIDE DOOR AT ST. PATRICK’S, THE SIDE FACING the baseball and soccer fields, Danny knew that everybody knew.

  As if somehow his classmates had all Googled up “Danny Walker” and there was a place you could go to read all about how he hadn’t made seventh-grade travel. How being a small, flashy point guard in Middletown wasn’t nearly as big a deal as it used to be.

  How Richie Walker’s kid hadn’t made the team.

  He walked down the long hall to his locker, eyes straight ahead, imagining they were all watching him and they all knew.

  Even the girls.

  Tess Hewitt, who he really liked—though he was quick to point out to Will that didn’t necessarily mean liked liked, and to please shut up—was standing next to his locker when he got there about ten after eight, five minutes before first period. So was the red-haired witch, Emma Carson.

  Danny believed that Emma got to St. Patrick’s every morning by taking the bus from hell.

  Emma had started liking Danny in fifth grade, and had continued liking him right up until it was clear that not only did he not feel the same way about her, he was never going to feel the same way, he didn’t even want her on his e-mail buddy list. That was when she apparently made a decision to torture him any chance she got.

  Which meant today was going to be the closest thing for her to a school holiday.

  Or a national holiday.

  “Any word yet on travel?” she said.

  Tess gave her a look and poked her with an elbow at the same time. Tess was taller than Emma, taller than Danny, too, by a head, with long blond hair that stretched past her shoulders, and long legs, and blue eyes.

  Next to her, Emma Carson looked like a fire hydrant.

  She wasn’t as pretty as Tess, as nice, as smart. As skinny. Even at the age of twelve, Danny Walker knew that Emma going through middle school and maybe even high school standing next to someone who looked like Tess Hewitt wasn’t the most brilliant idea in the whole world.

  Danny tossed his backpack, the one his mom said was heavier than he was, into his locker, grabbed his algebra book; he’d done his homework in study hall the day before, knowing he wasn’t going to be much interested in cracking any school books later if he happened to find out early that he hadn’t made the team.