by Mike Lupica
Cake.
He started to make his long-range shots, and the light from tonight’s moon let Drew and Lee see him smiling. Like the guy was smiling at himself, enjoying his own show as much as Drew and Lee were.
Then he was dunking again, left-handed this time, making it look so easy you would have thought he was lefty if you didn’t know better.
Finally he helicoptered around again, covered his eyes with his left hand, and dunked one so hard with his right hand that the ball bounced away from him, toward where Drew and Lee were hiding in the trees.
He walked toward them.
The cap was still turned around on his head, so for the first time Drew was able to notice a thin, wispy beard, a lot of gray in it.
He picked up his ball, rolled it up his arm and across his shoulders and then down the other arm. More Globetrotter stuff.
Finally he walked away, done for the night, whistling a tune Drew didn’t recognize, but that sounded like the jazz his mom liked to listen to.
“Wow, one more,” Lee said, shaking his head, watching the man leave.
“One more what?” Drew said.
“One more playground legend,” Lee said.
“You don’t even know who he is,” Drew said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Lee said. “He’s all of them. All the guys who never made it out of parks like this, or finally ended up back here.”
SEVEN
The guy was just about out of sight now, limping noticeably, stopping finally to lean over and rub his left knee. Acting his age a little bit, even if Drew had no idea how old the guy really was.
“You want to follow him?” Lee said.
“No,” Drew said. “Leave him go.”
Drew couldn’t explain it to Lee, wasn’t sure he could even explain it to himself. But as much as he had wanted to come back here tonight, he felt like he was intruding now that he’d seen the man again.
There was something about him that made Drew think that if you took this court away from him, this part of the park and this part of the night, you might be taking away all he had.
“There’s so many stories about guys who never made it out of the park,” Lee said. “Like in that book I gave you. One you actually read.”
Lee meant The City Game, by this guy Pete Axthelm who Lee said was dead now. About the old Knicks, but about playground basketball in New York City, too. It really was the first nonschool book Drew had ever read all the way through.
“Like that guy they called ‘the Goat,’” Drew said. “I knew about him even before I read the book. My coach at Molloy used to talk about him, when he was giving us another speech about staying on the straight and narrow.”
“He got himself all messed up big-time,” Lee said. “Another guy all spoiled by his talent.”
“Don’t start.”
“Just sayin’.”
The ghost guy had disappeared now, like the night had swallowed him up.
“Wonder what the ghost’s story is,” Drew said. “How he ended up here.”
But he wasn’t sure he wanted to know, really. This park had always made him happy, at peace with himself. The idea of somebody as good as the ghost guy ending up here—something about that was nagging on him.
Making him sad.
Maybe that was why when Lee asked if he wanted to shoot around, Drew said, no, he wanted to go home.
“But you always want to play, day or night,” Lee said.
“Not tonight.”
When Lee dropped him off at home a few minutes later, Drew did something he never did before he went to sleep: he read.
Got The City Game back down off his bookshelf, read back on Earl “the Goat” Manigault, the guy he’d been talking about with Lee. And Joe Hammond and Herman (Helicopter) Knowings and other guys in the book who never made it past being playground legends, for this reason or that.
So maybe that’s all this ghost was, Drew finally decided.
Another one of those hoopers who couldn’t keep it together, who took their eyes off the prize. He knew these stories were sad, tragic even. He read all those parts of the book tonight and wanted them to turn out differently, for the guys not to take the wrong path.
But they didn’t.
Drew closed the book finally, shut out the light, got into bed, told himself to stop worrying about some old Goat at Morrison and go back to worrying about his own game.
Because no matter how much or how often Lee worried about him, there was nothing in this world that was going to stop him like it did the guys in that book. Whatever his grades were, Drew Robinson was way too smart to be one of those guys who threw it all away.
And yet . . .
The last thing he thought about, right before he closed his eyes for good, was the image of David Thompson, tripping and falling down the steps of that club that night, like he was the one who’d come crashing down out of the sky.
• • •
The Monday after Christmas break, first thing in the morning, he found a note from Mr. Shockey, his English teacher and adviser, taped to his locker.
“See me after first period,” it read. “Checked your schedule, know you have a free.”
Drew wondered if Mr. Shockey knew everybody else’s schedule this well.
And today of all days, he didn’t want to let school get in his way, didn’t want to think about anything except the game against Park tomorrow night.
Not just because it was his first-ever game against Park, but also because the Park Eagles had the next best player in the Valley League and maybe in all of southern California, a point guard of their own named King Gadsen.
He was a couple of inches taller than Drew, a legit six three, and was averaging thirty-five a game this season. It was why the newspapers were going crazy with all the LeBron stuff: LeBron Junior going up against a guy named King, which was LeBron’s nickname.
And there’d been plenty of Facebook trash talk going back and forth between kids from both schools. Nobody was sure if King Gadsen had actually posted the line “Only one guy gets to be King.” Lee was following it all closer than Drew was, but it was still enough to get Drew’s attention.
Only now he had to shift his attention to Mr. Shockey.
So after Drew barely managed to stay awake through anthropology, he walked downstairs to Mr. Shockey’s office. He had actually thought about skipping anthro, but decided it would look bad if he skipped his very first class after vacation.
Appearances, Drew reminded himself.
Sometimes it felt like as much of a full-time job as basketball.
“Come on in and shut the door,” Mr. Shockey said when he saw Drew slouched against the door frame.
Mr. Shockey was smiling, but telling Drew to close the door meant they were—tragically—going to be here awhile.
Mr. Shockey started off with some small talk.
“Good Christmas?”
“Yes, sir. You?”
“A week back in Chicago with my in-laws. Snowed the whole time. My father-in-law still wants to know why Mrs. Shockey didn’t marry a lawyer. That sound good to you?”
“Missed us, didn’t you?” Drew said.
“You have no idea.”
Mr. Shockey was an assistant coach on the basketball team, even though he didn’t do any coaching. It’s like he was some kind of adviser there, too. Billy DiGregorio took care of the X’s and O’s and strategy; Mr. Shockey kept the stats, helped out any way Coach DiGregorio wanted him to at practice, and made himself available to the players anytime they wanted to talk, about basketball or anything else.
More a life coach than a basketball coach.
The players on the team knew that Mr. Shockey cared a lot more about them than he did about wins and losses. Drew cared about him, too.
Liked the man a lot, liked the easy way he had about him, the no-pressure way he tried to push schooling on you. Even knowing that with Drew, he was playing a losing game.
Usually Drew cared about anything where you kept score. Just not school. To his way of thinking, grades didn’t matter in the long run. The short run, even. LeBron never even made it to college, and so what? When he became a free agent, he had some of the richest, most powerful men in the world, ones who owned NBA teams, on their knees, practically begging him to take their money.
Saying, “Please, please, come play for my team.”
And LeBron’s grades in high school had nothing to do with that. Ball did. Playing ball the way he could. Being the best player he could be. The intelligence that Drew had—what he told himself were his street smarts—he wasn’t going to sharpen it in a classroom, like he was trying to sharpen up his left-hand dribble.
Nothing against his teachers. Nothing against Mr. Shockey, a total dude. But they were just speed bumps, was all. That’s why he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong when he had Lee do most of the work on a paper for him. Or when he cut a class with a made-up excuse, either to sleep in or just go shoot around in the gym.
When Drew waited until the last minute to do a paper or study for a test, he’d just look at it as having to make another Hail Mary shot as the clock ran out.
He didn’t see himself acting spoiled, no matter what anybody said. Didn’t see himself cheating anybody. He was just keeping his own priorities lined up in a nice, neat way. Sometimes he thought of school as being like playing with four fouls.
He just had to make sure not to foul out.
Nothing more, nothing less.
If he got out of bed late and showed up late for his first class, it wasn’t like he was showing up late for a game, was it? When LeBron was passing through St. Vincent–St. Mary High School back home, was he there to light it up in class, or on the basketball court?
As Drew liked to say, “figure it out”—it came out sounding like figgeritout.
Like when Lee and him would be in town for pizza or a burger or breakfast, and they’d finish and there’d be no check. It was all part of it. The guy or girl at the register would just wave and smile. Letting him know it was on the house. Drew knew and Lee knew and the people picking up the checks, they knew, too: the real classroom for Drew, the real education, was learning how to be famous.
How to be a star.
“So what’s up?” Drew said, wanting to get down to it, not waste his whole free period here.
“What’s up is this,” Mr. Shockey said. “I’ve gotten evaluation reports from every one of your teachers, and every one of them says the same thing: you’re not coming close to giving your full effort. And before I send those reports along to your mom, I want to talk to you about it.”
He leaned forward, hands clasped in front of him.
“Quite frankly, Drew,” he said, “I’d write up the same evaluation myself.”
“I’m pulling my weight with you.”
“You act more like you’re having teeth pulled,” Mr. Shockey said. “English is a second language for two kids in our class, and they’re making A’s. There’s nobody in the class with lower than a B. Except you. You’re a low C and not that far from a D.”
“I’ll pick it up the rest of the semester, watch and see,” he said.
“You said you’d pick it up before Christmas the last time we had this talk.”
Drew crossed his legs now, looked down at one of his favorite pairs of old kicks, high-top Adidas Superstars, blue stripes on white, like some of the old Knicks used to wear way back in the day.
“I don’t have to tell you that if your grade gets any lower, you can’t play.”
“C’mon, you and I both know I won’t let that happen.”
It wasn’t a school rule or even a league rule about earning D’s in school. But it happened to be Coach DiGregorio’s rule. He let everybody know, especially the media, that the academic standards for his team were higher than anybody else’s. Same as his basketball standards were. He said he’d learned that from Bob Knight when Knight was still coaching.
Drew was just glad that he hadn’t learned how to throw chairs and grab players by their necks, too.
Drew said to Mr. Shockey, “You wouldn’t sit me down. Mr. S, you’re my boy.” Grinning.
“I can always feel us getting closer when you need a grade from me,” Mr. Shockey said. “But then I imagine teachers have been letting you slide from the time you were the best basketball player in every school you ever went to.”
Drew couldn’t help himself, even now, hearing about academic trouble the day before the Park game, hitting on something Mr. Shockey always hit on in class.
“Ending a sentence with a preposition there, Mr. S?” he said.
Mr. Shockey slapped his desk, not in a mad way, looking excited, happy almost. “I know you’re busting on me, but you’re really proving my point at the same time,” he said. “You’re smart, Drew. You know it, and I know it, but the problem is that I’m the only one who cares. Wasting a mind like yours would be the same as wasting the talent you have for basketball.”
Drew tried not to roll his eyes, listening to the same talk he’d been hearing from Mr. Shockey ever since they got to know each other.
“I’m trying, a hundred percent,” Drew said.
“No, you’re trying thirty percent, tops.”
“Not true. Maybe I have been letting things slide, just wanting to get the basketball season off to a good start for me and my teammates.”
“Baloney.”
Drew really didn’t want this to go on all day. “Tell me what I have to do,” he said.
“You have to do your best work on the paper you’ve got coming up, because that is going to be thirty percent. Of your final grade.”
The theme of the paper was “A Life Worth Knowing” and had been assigned before Christmas break. They had to find someone nobody else in the class knew about, had ever heard about, and write a paper making people care about him or her.
“Who’d you pick, by the way?” Mr. Shockey said. “You told me you were going to come up with an idea and start working on it over break.”
Drew Robinson had always prided himself on being able to think fast, whether it was basketball coming at him or just life.
The way life was coming at him now.
“I do got somebody, as a matter of fact.”
“You have somebody, Mr. Grammar. So who is it?”
“A guy I saw playing ball one night at Morrison Park,” Drew said.
Then it was like he was writing the paper out loud as he leaned forward in his chair, telling Mr. Shockey about the guy, how amazed he was at the basketball things he could do, how he scared the man off, bringing Lee back with him, almost as a way of proving to himself that the guy was real.
Even as he talked his way through his paper, Drew realized he was actually going to have to find out what the guy’s story was. But he’d worry about that later.
For now, he just needed to get Mr. Shockey off him, like he did when somebody guarded him too close.
Get out of this room.
“Why do you care about this man?” Mr. Shockey said.
Drew was still thinking fast.
“I think one of the themes of my paper ought to be that, even though I feel like I know this guy, I don’t want to be him.”
Mr. Shockey slapped the desk again, even harder than before. “See, that’s what I’m talking about! This is a subject you’re passionate about!”
“Oh, yeah,” Drew said, trying to make himself sound as fired up as Mr. S was. “I feel like I’ve been watching guys like this from the first time my mom thought I was old enough to start going to playgrounds by myself back in New York.”
One more time, he was letting somebody, Mr. Shockey in this case, hear what they wanted to hear.
It was easy, once you got the hang of it. Another way of getting somebody to do something for you.
If there were grades for learning how to do that, Drew Robinson knew he would be getting straight A’s all the way through.
He didn’t think he was being phony or playing a role. If anything, he told himself, he was playing the role of himself. People always said he made the game of basketball look easy, but Drew knew how hard you had to work to get to there, making it look that easy. It was the same with the things he had to say and do, the poses he needed, to make his life easier for him.
“I know you can come through,” Mr. Shockey said, “just like you do when a game is on the line.”
“I’m gonna prove to you I can do this.”
“Prove it to yourself,” Mr. Shockey said. “I have a feeling this is going to be your best work yet.”
Well, Drew thought, mine and Lee’s.
As soon as he was out of Mr. Shockey’s office, he went straight for the gym. He had a class after his free, history, but his history teacher, Mr. Williams, was the biggest basketball fan of all his teachers. Had played high school ball himself—a story he never got tired of telling Drew—and had never gotten over it.
Drew knew he could skip history as much or as often as he wanted, that Mr. Williams really was his boy and would take care of him.
The gym would be empty this time of day. So he went to his locker, got into a Kentucky T-shirt that John Wall had sent him before he went to Washington to play in the pros, got into his favorite baggy white practice shorts, went and found himself a game ball.
Then he was out there on the court at Henry Gilbert, not talking some talk about English or some paper he had to do and nodding his head to a teacher, even one he liked, about a game being on the line.
Not pretending he was all invested in some old playground player.
Not having to pretend, period.
Out there, Drew never did.
EIGHT
There was no practice on Thursday, because Coach DiGregorio had to attend a once-a-year coaches’ conference in San Diego. So Lee and Drew had made a plan to hang out after school. Nothing solid—Lee told Drew he’d have to wait until around four thirty because he had a conference of his own with his Spanish teacher, Mrs. Conte.
