by Mike Lupica
But he could, in the words of Dick Vitale, shoot the rock.
He could fill it up.
“Yeah,” Drew said again. “I got this.”
Mr. Gilbert’s words weren’t just inside his head. They were stinging him. Maybe that was why he’d said he’d take King. People had come to see him versus King Gadsen tonight. Might as well give them what they wanted.
Park got the ball to start the second half. When King saw Drew picking him up in the backcourt, he barked out a laugh. The hot dog just sounding like a dog now.
“I forget,” he said. “Is your real nickname True or False?”
Drew didn’t shut him down from there. But he slowed him just enough. By the time there were four minutes left, the game was tied at 70, and Drew saw from the stats on the scoreboard that King had thirty-nine points for the game. But the ones he’d gotten in the second half, Drew had made him work for each one.
Lee, who’d stayed hot, had thirty.
Drew had scratched his way to twenty-two, but knew his shooting was way under fifty percent, which was never him.
Neither team had led by more than three points the whole second half. It didn’t seem possible to Drew, but the noise inside the gym seemed to keep building, to the point where Drew imagined the walls and the roof just blowing away.
And no matter how much noise there was, King Gadsen kept talking, like he was broadcasting the game and playing it at the same time.
Drew had done his best to ignore him, not let him get inside his head. Or get mad. Or get more frustrated than he already was with his poor shooting. Coach DiGregorio always said, you get mad at the guy, he owns you. But Drew finally beat King off the dribble, drove down the baseline with his left hand, just over three minutes left, and somehow made this blind reverse layup, kissed high off the top of the backboard as King fouled him, hard, knocking him to the floor.
King didn’t offer to help Drew up, and Drew didn’t wait for him to extend his hand. But as he picked himself up, he walked close enough to King to say, “I guess that was a good shot.”
“After the way you shot tonight,” King said to him, smiling at him, “you’re gonna start talking smack now? Go make your free throw, dog, so I can have the ball back.”
Drew made the free throw.
Game tied again, 75 all.
King came right back, backed up his own smack—Drew had to give him that. He stepped back and made a three with Drew hanging all over him, banging him hard as he went into the air, nearly fouling and turning it into a four-point play.
Park 78, Oakley 75.
Two minutes left.
Drew came down, saw Lee open on the right wing—Park had been dumb enough to double Drew, despite the way Lee had been shooting. Even with the double, Drew still thought about taking the ball to the basket, but Lee was way too open and way too hot.
Lee buried the shot.
He raised his arms like he’d made another three, which would have tied the game, but the refs waved it off, saying he had a foot on the line. It was only a two.
Oakley was now down a point, a minute and fifteen to play.
King Gadsen, who hadn’t needed any luck all night long, got some now, banking in a ridiculous three of his own from the right side.
Park 81, Oakley 77.
But Brandon got open on a backdoor move, and Drew hit him with a perfect bounce pass for the assist. Then Tyler Brandt came flying out of nowhere to steal the inbounds pass and lay the ball in.
Game tied, 81 all.
Fifty seconds left. Park called its last time-out.
There were certain rules Drew followed with Coach, and one of them was that when it got down to crunch time like this, when it was what Drew had always thought of as game time, he let Coach do most of the talking.
“King will want to take a hero shot, that’s his DNA,” Coach said. “So give Drew as much help on defense as he needs. If by some chance he passes the ball and somebody else makes the shot, we just say, Too tough. Either way, miss or make, we take the first good shot we get, make the sucker, then see if we can get another stop and then walk off the court feeling the love.”
Billy DiGregorio put his hand out. Drew and the other guys put theirs on top of his.
“Boys,” he said, “these are the good parts.”
But King came right down, no hesitation, split Drew and Lee, somehow elevated over the outstretched arms of both Brandon and Tyler Brandt, and hit a fifteen-footer like he was shooting by himself at Morrison.
Park back up by a basket, 83–81.
King gave Drew a blank stare, trash-talking him now without saying a word.
Drew ignored him and got out of a double-team as soon as he crossed half-court. Tyler Brandt threw a killer screen on the weak side, clearing Lee. Drew waited for it to develop, then threw him the ball. No hesitation. Lee made one more three like it was a layup. Oakley now up a point, 84–83.
Drew gave a quick look at the scoreboard, even knowing inside his head that Lee had thirty-eight points now. Boy was totally off the grid, had been all night.
Back in New York, they used to talk about the Monster of Madison Square Garden. Drew thought this high-school gym sounded like that now.
Oakley still needed one stop for the win. They just wouldn’t get it against King Gadsen, not tonight. He ran some time, got himself into the lane even with Drew still in front of him, even with no room, and somehow made a crazy teardrop shot.
Park back up a point.
Fourteen seconds left.
Win the game, win the night, Drew told himself.
Billy DiGregorio just stood in front of their bench, arms folded, nodding at Drew. No time-out, that’s what he was telling him. Just play.
Drew knew that was Coach’s style in moments like this. The rest of the guys knew enough to spread the court, give Drew one chance to break the defense down off the dribble and get to the basket. If he couldn’t, they all knew he’d find a way to pass to Lee.
Drew looked past King, to the clock behind the basket, and made his move with ten seconds left.
He crossed over on King, got past him with a left-handed dribble, then crossed back over to a right-handed dribble and got a step on the other defender. But King got a hand on the ball from behind Drew. Not enough to knock it away, just enough to knock off his timing, make him waste a couple of seconds getting the ball back under control.
Drew was a step inside the free-throw line.
True or False? King had said.
True, he thought to himself.
True Robinson.
It didn’t matter that they’d been talking about King Gadsen all night. They’d be talking about Drew on their way home, the shot he was going to make to win it for his team.
But more for himself.
Next game he’d be a nice team player.
The entire Park defense seemed to be collapsing on him. Drew could hear Lee—having the night of his life, in the game he said he’d been waiting his whole life to win—yell, “True!”
Lee Atkins, trying to make himself heard over the roar that the end of a game like this makes.
“I’m open!” Lee yelled.
Drew knew he was. He had been all night and had to be now. But this time Drew wasn’t passing. This time Drew was shooting, even in all that traffic, going as high as he could, as high as he did when he wanted to dunk the ball, still having to shoot around the stupidly long arms of the Park center, right before the horn sounded.
It was such an awkward shot, an awkward midair move, that Drew went down without being touched after he released the ball. He was sitting on the court when the quiet of the crowd, the worst kind of quiet in sports for the home team, told him the shot had missed.
Park 85, Oakley 84.
Drew stayed whe
re he was for a moment. Before he got up, he saw King Gadsen standing over him. Still not offering him a hand.
“Just so you know,” King said, “your buddy, he’s still open over there on the wing. He just stopped calling for the ball.”
King left him there.
Drew didn’t move, just turned his head. And Lee hadn’t moved from the wing. Was still standing there.
Staring at Drew like he was a stranger.
For some reason, Drew’s eyes moved past Lee, past the Park kids celebrating on the court—his court—went up through the stands, up to the top of the gym, the far corner of the place, away from the basket where Drew had attempted his hero shot.
Up there, all alone, was a guy in a Lakers cap and a hoodie.
The ghost guy.
Eyeballing Drew has hard as Drew had eyeballed him at Morrison.
Shaking his head in disgust before he disappeared again.
TEN
Drew knew he should have passed Lee the ball for the last shot, knew his pride and his ego had gotten in the way of his basketball sense.
But he couldn’t bring himself to admit that after the game.
Instead he told the reporters that he was going to kick it over to Lee but then he thought he could get all the way to the basket before the Park defense forced him into a tough shot.
“I want the ball in my hands at the end of the game,” he said. “I want to take that shot. Tonight it wouldn’t go down for me, but I had to try to make something happen.”
Yeah, he thought, even as he told his locker room lies to the reporters. I made something happen, all right.
Made us lose by a bucket.
And then Drew heard Lee from the next locker, saying how many shots Drew had made tonight, that you could never go wrong with the ball in True’s hands. Lee smiling as he nodded at Drew and said, “How can I be the man when that guy right there is the man?”
Somehow it made Drew feel worse, Lee giving him a pass on the way the game had ended on the night when Drew didn’t pass.
Before the reporters left Drew, they kept trying to get him to talk up King and the forty-eight points he’d scored. Nobody came right out and said that King had won the personal battle between him and Drew, in addition to the game, but Drew could hear it implied in every question.
He just kept saying, over and over, “Glad I got to finally see him in person. Glad I’m going to see him again before the season is over.”
Before he added this: “Next time I’ll be at my best.”
He went to the shower finally, stayed in there a long time under the hot water, trying to wash the game away. He’d ended up with his twenty-two points, sixteen assists, and even pulled down eight boards. Yet it still felt as if he’d played the worst game of basketball since his first games as a freshman back at Archbishop Molloy.
The reporters were gone when he came out of the shower. Only Lee and Brandon and the Brandt twins were left in the locker room. Lee told Drew that the rest of the guys were already on their way to his house, to hang out and have pizza.
“Win as a team, lose as a team,” Lee said.
Brandon said, “Next time will be different.”
Tyler said, “You missed shots tonight you usually make in your sleep, and we still almost beat that guy.”
Not Park. That guy. King Gadsen had won, Drew had lost. It wasn’t what Tyler was trying to say—he was just trying to make Drew feel better. But that’s what Drew heard.
Drew looked at Lee and said, “I really thought I could take it all the way.”
“Dude,” Lee said, “you don’t have to explain anything to me. I was making shots before you ever got here, and we never got a sniff of a league title or a state title.”
Then he sighed and shook his head and said, “But, man, we nearly beat those guys finally.”
It was then that Drew could see how much this game had hurt his friend, coming so close to beating Park. Drew was hurting, too. But not for the same reason. He felt bad because he’d looked bad.
Oakley had lost the game.
But Drew had lost face to King Gadsen.
In that way, it didn’t matter to him that the loss had come against his school’s big rival. It could have come against anybody. This wasn’t about school spirit, because Drew knew he didn’t have any.
Another hard truth about True Robinson.
Lee asked if he was ready to go, and Drew said yeah. They both knew, without it even coming up, that Lee would drive him home when the team party—if you could call it a party—was over. It was like that was one more part of the deal with them, something that was just understood.
“Let’s do this, then,” Lee said, “before the other guys eat up all the pizza.”
They walked out of the locker room and into the tunnel. Seth Gilbert was waiting across from the locker room door, texting somebody, looking impatient, which he could in the best of times.
He looked up at Drew and said, “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Drew said.
“I’ve got some people over at the house,” he said. “I want you to meet them, even though the night didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped.”
Drew wanted to tell him it hadn’t exactly turned out the way he wanted, either. Instead he did something he did a lot with Mr. Gilbert: he swallowed the words.
It was then that Gilbert seemed to notice Lee standing there.
“Tough loss, kid,” he said. “You played good.”
Good? Drew wanted to say. He made threes like Kevin Durant tonight, and you thought he played . . . good?
Drew didn’t say that, either.
Lee thanked Mr. Gilbert, who at least added, “You shot it tonight the way this guy was supposed to,” giving his head a little jerk in Drew’s direction.
Drew said, “Lee’s having the team over to his house. Just to chill. I was gonna ride over with him.”
“You can catch up with them later,” Mr. Gilbert said. “I’ll get Eddie to drive you over there.”
It was his normal way when he wanted something, Drew knew, telling him what he was going to do, not asking.
Drew wasn’t getting a vote on it, and neither did Lee, who’d been a better friend than ever to Drew tonight, letting him off the hook in the locker room the way he had. “Win as a team, lose as a team,” he’d said.
Mr. Gilbert didn’t even make a show of inviting Lee along, not that Lee would have wanted to go.
“Come on, we better get going,” Mr. Gilbert said.
“These people you want me to meet,” Drew said, “who are they?” He didn’t mean anything by it, he was just asking.
Mr. Gilbert gave him a look, then answered as if Drew had just talked back to him. Giving him a fake smile.
“People . . . you . . . need . . . to . . . meet,” he repeated.
Seth Gilbert started toward the exit that led to the parking lot. Walking away from Drew for the second time tonight. But expecting him to follow this time.
“You coming?” he said, giving a quick look over his shoulder, checking his BlackBerry again, as he did about every ten seconds.
Drew said to Lee, “I better do this. He is my mom’s boss and all.”
“Yours, too, sometimes.”
“What’s that mean?”
“No worries,” Lee said. “Just kidding, dude.”
“I’ll catch you later, I promise.”
“Sure,” Lee said.
Drew walked fast to catch up with Mr. Gilbert. When he was the one looking back over his shoulder, he saw that Lee Atkins hadn’t moved, he was standing exactly where Drew had left him.
Like he was still waiting for the ball.
Drew felt a little bad, leaving him. But it was like Mr. Gilbert said sometimes: where he was goi
ng, his buddies couldn’t come.
ELEVEN
Mr. Gilbert made it clear, as the two of them walked through the front door, that there was nothing for him to worry about. Nothing that was going to happen at the party was a violation of NCAA rules, even if there were a couple of what he called “Nike guys” in the house.
“But I’m not even in college yet,” Drew said.
“You’re the most famous high school basketball player in the country. In the eyes of the NCAA suits, you might as well be playing by their rules already.”
“Wish I’d played better tonight.”
“Tell me about it,” Mr. Gilbert said, but even as he did, he pulled Drew closer to him and said, “Who’s got your back?”
“You do.”
“Who’s like your personal GPS, keeping us pointed where we want to go?”
“You are,” Drew said.
It was always like that, almost from the first night they met back at the AAU tournament in New York. We. Us. Mr. Gilbert wanted the team at Oakley to do well. Obviously he had a lot invested in the school and the coach. And Mr. Gilbert was the one who’d picked the school out for Drew before his mom even made it official that they were moving.
All part of the mi casa es su casa deal, the house in this case being a high school.
But in the end, the only team Mr. Gilbert really cared about—even more than the college team Drew would be playing for in a year and a half—was him and Drew.
As they moved out into the pool area, music playing, waiters serving food and drinks, Drew immediately spotted a tall guy with a shaved head, a crowd of people around him, laughing loudly at something somebody had just said. It was Stu Jarvis, who’d played college ball with Mr. Gilbert at USC and who did work for Nike now.
Drew wondered what Stu Jarvis would think if he knew that Mr. Gilbert liked to refer to Nike as “the mob” when it was just him and Drew talking. Telling Drew that once the time came, there’d be no choice, he’d have to wear Nike shoes.
