True Legend

by Mike Lupica

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “I think you forgot that tonight, turned it into a one-on-one game at the worst possible time. That wasn’t nothin’ but your ego, takin’ over the game as much as you did.”

  “You make that sound like some kind of crime,” Drew said.

  “Not a crime,” Donald said. “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” Drew said, “going on sixteen.”

  “You better watch that stuff, starting right now,” Donald said, “or before you know it, you’ll be the one telling fortunes in the park.”

  Drew heard Lee’s voice inside his head now.

  “Wow, another playground legend who never made it out of the park,” Drew said. “Trying to give me advice.”

  The guy was staring at him harder than ever.

  Stared until he finally said, “Yeah, boy. I’m a real legend.”

  FIFTEEN

  Then he just turned and walked away, basketball under his arm.

  Drew let him go. Maybe it was because he knew this wasn’t the last conversating they were ever going to do. Or maybe he was too tired from chasing King Gadsen around in the second half to even walk after the man.

  Knowing he had more questions than answers, even though he’d met the man now. Especially the answers Drew wanted about how the man who called himself Donald had ended up here.

  Donald telling Drew to make sure he didn’t end up here, too.

  Like I’d ever end up some old park player, Drew told himself.

  He walked home from Morrison, trying not to make too much noise as he came through the front door, knowing his mom was sound asleep by now. Ten o’clock was the latest she made it during the week unless Oakley was playing a rare seven o’clock game. The only way Darlene Robinson was awake past ten was if she’d TiVo-ed something on her bedroom television set and it ran past her bedtime.

  She had left him a note on the table where they both kept their keys.

  Honey:

  Even you can’t win them all.

  Still love you.

  Mom

  At least she didn’t want to analyze the game like she was on ESPN, didn’t want to lecture him about how he should have passed. But then she never thought her boy did much wrong in basketball. She saved her criticism for other things, like his head getting too big or his grades being too small.

  Drew went into the kitchen and fixed himself a big bowl of cereal, Lucky Charms, and when he finished it, he filled up the bowl again, no milk this time, and ate the cereal up like it was candy.

  Wondering if Mr. Gilbert was worrying tonight about his diet, about getting him a nutritionist.

  Way past midnight now, but he was still too wired to go to sleep.

  He shut the lights in the kitchen, went to his room at the very back of the ranch-style house, closed the door, opened up his laptop—not the Dell he had when they were still in New York, but the MacBook Pro Mr. Gilbert had bought him as a present when they moved in, calling it a housewarming present.

  “I just like it because it has the word pro in it,” Mr. Gilbert had said when Drew found it there on his desk, all the stuff from the Dell having been transferred already.

  Drew went online now, saw more messages from Lee wanting to know what had happened to him. The most recent message, from a few minutes ago, was the YouTube link to the video showing Drew attempting the last-second shot against Park Prep.

  Sending Drew to the place where he could watch a shot that could have been Lee’s. Should have been his, if you believed Donald.

  Drew felt himself getting hot all over again thinking about the guy, even now, alone in his room. Mostly getting hot about the guy’s know-it-all attitude.

  You know why I took the shot? Drew wanted to tell the guy. You know why I took it whether Lee was open or not?

  Because I believed I could make it, that’s why.

  That part was right, whether his decision making in the moment had been wrong or not. Drew had never been afraid in basketball, of taking the big shot or anything else, from the time he was the smallest kid on the playground back in the Bronx.

  It was one thing to knock down open shots the way Lee had for just about the whole thing, but something else altogether, almost like a whole different game, when it was all on the line. When everybody in the gym was looking at you.

  Was Lee capable of making the big shot? Was he really? Drew didn’t know that about him, not yet, anyway. Neither did Lee. Maybe they both could have found out tonight. They didn’t. So what?

  I’m not just not afraid to take that shot, Drew thought to himself, alone in his room.

  I’m not afraid to miss it, either.

  Drew pushed away from the desk now, put his head back, felt himself finally winding down, finally dialing down the emotions of the night. He briefly considered doing some research for his English paper, the one he’d fooled Mr. Shockey into thinking he was all jacked up about.

  But there was no need.

  Lee was already on it. He was doing the heavy lifting, as usual.

  Drew Robinson was never going to cheat, never going to have it come out later that somebody had taken a test for him or written a paper, like had happened with other guys. School wasn’t important enough for Drew to cheat at. Still, from the time they became boys, Lee had made it clear that he’d do whatever Drew needed.

  “You’re still gonna have another year at this school after I’ve gone off to college,” Lee had said one time before basketball started. “But this is it for me, my last chance to win a championship. Remember what Drew Brees said to the guys in the huddle, before he took the Saints down the field in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl against the Colts? ‘Let’s be special.’ Now we’ve got the chance to do something special, and I’ll do whatever it takes. You drag me across the finish line on that, I’ll help pull you through junior year.”

  It wasn’t as if Drew was going to him all the time, asking for help. He didn’t want Lee to feel as if he was taking junior-year classes all over again along with his senior-year classes. But when Drew did have to pick it up—like now, with Mr. Shockey—Lee was all over it.

  Which meant this paper on playground stars—playground legends—would be like a lot of others they’d teamed up on. Lee would do most of the research, highlight the important stuff he thought Drew should use, even outline it for him.

  Then, after Drew wrote the paper himself, Lee would go over it one more time, fixing up the punctuation, and hand it back to him before it went to the teacher.

  So Drew knew he didn’t need to sweat the start of this paper. It was really just for fun that he went to Google and tried to find out about some old-time basketball star named Donald. First name or last.

  Came up empty.

  Then he played around a little bit, with “playground legend,” but what he mostly came up with was Larry Bird, because they used to call him Larry Legend.

  He tried “Donald” and “Legend” and mostly came up with different kids on Facebook, kids named Donald calling themselves legends.

  Or legendary.

  Lee would probably end up doing most of the work on this, but Drew had to admit he wanted to know, Who was this guy?

  SIXTEEN

  Drew and Lee and the Brandt twins, Tyler and Jake, were walking down the hall the next morning, between first and second period, arguing about whether you’d take Kevin Durant or Derrick Rose if you were starting a team and could only pick one of them, when they saw Callie Mason coming in the other direction.

  “Mayday, mayday!” Lee said, at least not shouting it out. “Callie alert.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Drew said.

  “You better run now, dude. Or you may have to actually talk to the girl.”

  Tyler said, “Drew got a li
ttle thing on Callie?”

  “Get out,” Jake said.

  Drew said, “Maybe Lee’s the one who does, not me. I got no issues with the girl one way or the other.”

  Lee grinned. “Define issues.”

  None of them, not even Lee, knew how right they were, Drew thought. He’d done his best not to let on what he really felt about Callie and how she made him feel—like he was back to being the smallest kid on the court.

  But no way he was going to give them the satisfaction of being right. Or making him feel weird about running into Callie and her friends in the hall—one of whom he knew was named Lizzie, but couldn’t for the life of him remember her last name. The other one he only knew as number 12 from watching the girls’ practice.

  He’d been sneaking around and watching them more than Lee even knew.

  They were about ten feet away from the girls now, and neither group had room to pass. Drew could feel Lee and the Brandts watching him, wanting to see what he’d do, or say, as if they wanted to see how uncool the always cool Drew Robinson could be in that moment, all because of one off-the-grid cute girl.

  So what he said to Callie, in a voice he didn’t even recognize, was this: “Whooo, me, you are lookin’ fine today, girl.”

  And he knew instantly he’d fired up a brick. Hundred percent.

  He heard Lee, right there on his shoulder, groan quietly.

  He saw Callie’s eyes get big.

  “Girl?” Callie said.

  It would have been better if she’d acted mad. Or just ignored him, like she hadn’t heard, and kept on walking. Instead, Callie did something worse.

  Way worse.

  She burst out laughing. Right before she did a pretty good impersonation of the dumb street voice Drew had used on her.

  “You lookin’ fine, girl,” she said to her friends, Lizzie and number 12.

  Who laughed, too.

  Now Callie went to a high-pitched, girly-girl voice, saying, “OMG, Drew Robinson noticed I’m a . . . girl!”

  Drew turned to Lee, looked at him hard, as if saying, Save me. Not this time. Lee just grinned. Drew was on his own.

  But Drew had nothing, other than the heat on his neck, the embarrassment he was feeling.

  All he could do was step aside, let Callie and her friends pass.

  Then he heard the girls laughing again before they disappeared around a corner, heard the same laughter Lee and Tyler and Jake heard.

  The Brandts, even though they didn’t know Drew as well as Lee did, weren’t that kind of bros with him, knew enough not to say anything more.

  Even Lee waited about a minute, before finally saying, “Butter. My man is so smooth you want to spread him sometimes like butter.”

  The Brandts started to giggle, before Drew glared them out of that.

  “Don’t,” Drew said, then he turned to Lee and pointed and said in a voice that had even more snap in it, “Don’t.”

  Lee couldn’t help himself, though. He had one more bullet left in the chamber. Took his voice way down low, like a DJ at a party, and said, “You lookin’ fine, girl.”

  Then they were all moving toward the locker room, everybody laughing except Drew Robinson. Who wanted to move, all right.

  All the way back to New York.

  • • •

  They were at Lee’s house a couple of hours later, in his bedroom, the subject of Callie having been declared off-limits for the rest of the day—and, if Drew had his way, it would be forever.

  Lee’s room was about three times the size of Drew’s. And as big as the apartment he remembered growing up in Crotona in the Bronx. Drew’s bedroom back then was as small as one of Lee’s walk-in closets. That was when Darlene Robinson was still working as an operator for the phone company.

  By now, Drew had explained to Lee why he hadn’t come over last night, telling him he wished he had, not gone to some boring party and then over to the park to get disrespected by the old hooper who called himself Donald.

  They were on the floor now, Lee holding his computer in his lap while Drew showed him what he’d found on his own laptop last night.

  “The only guy who fits his description happens to be dead,” Drew said.

  Lee brightened. “Dude!” he said. “You’re back to where you started. With a ghost!”

  “A guy called Urban (Legend) Sellers,” Drew said. “From Sacramento.”

  Lee grabbed Drew’s computer, put it on his lap. “But it says here that Urban Sellers died in a fire in Los Angeles ten years ago.”

  “And his name wasn’t Donald,” Drew said.

  Lee had his nose practically pressed to the picture of Urban Sellers he’d enhanced on the screen.

  “You can’t tell too good from this,” he said. “This guy has more hair and even a full beard. Never could have played for Coach D.”

  “But it doesn’t matter whether he looks like him or not,” Drew said. “Because the guy’s dead.”

  “And our guy is alive.”

  Drew said, “And maybe just a legend in his own mind.”

  According to the obituary in the Los Angeles Times, they’d started calling him Urban Legend, or just Legend, back at Sacramento High in the 1980s. That was before he got into trouble with cheating in school and drinking and drugs and found himself in Europe. And then he disappeared for a long time before ending up dead in a fire that ate up a shelter for homeless people in South Central Los Angeles.

  There was a link to some old video of him on YouTube that showed Urban Sellers apparently taking the first three-point shot in high school history. His sophomore year.

  In the obit, it had said that Sacramento High had moved up its opening game a night so he could get the first official three-point attempt.

  Urban Sellers had missed.

  But that wasn’t what made Drew and Lee watch the video over and over. It was what happened after he missed. When he blew past everybody else on the court, took off from behind the free-throw line, caught the ball with his right hand, as high as the top of the backboard, and jammed it home.

  Drew and Lee went from there to Google Images, looking for a better picture of the young Urban Sellers than the one in the Times. But in almost all of them, he was wearing oversized shades of some kind to go with his full beard. It was that way even with his yearbook picture. Not just shades in that one, but a Dodgers cap.

  And Drew knew exactly why his school would let him pose that way.

  Because he had the numbers.

  The game.

  According to the story, Urban (Legend) Sellers had averaged thirty-five points a game in his three years on varsity for Sacramento High, eleven assists, and nine boards.

  Yeah, Drew thought, you put up numbers like that, they let you take any kind of picture you want for the yearbook.

  “I mean, this could be the guy I saw the other night,” Lee said. “Just an older, skinnier version.”

  “Only it can’t be,” Drew said.

  “Because that would make him an older, skinnier version of a dead guy.”

  Drew nodded. “Tough to get around that.”

  “So maybe this guy Donald in the park, maybe he just wanted to be a legend,” Lee said.

  Drew said, “Let me see the video of the dunk again.”

  They watched it again, Lee freezing Urban Sellers at the highest part of his jump, when he’d put his left arm behind his back just to make the dunk showier, more memorable.

  “Well, when this guy was alive, he definitely did not stink,” Lee said.

  “The guy in the park has ups like that,” Drew said.

  “Ups, dude. But not like Legend’s.”

  “The guy in the park looks smaller than him. Like he shrunk back inside himself.”

  “Smaller or jus
t skinnier?” Lee said.

  “Both.”

  “Okay,” Lee said, “we gotta stop now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this guy can’t be our guy,” Lee said, “unless you do believe in people coming back from the dead.”

  “It’s just that Donald carries himself like a player, you know? Talking down to me the way he did, like he knows things about ball that I don’t.”

  “You gotta let it go, what he said to you,” Lee said. “About passing the ball.”

  Lee still playing wingman on what he knew was Drew’s team.

  Then Lee had an idea. “Y’know, if we really want to know more about this dude, we should ask Coach D. He must have heard about him when he coached in Sacramento at McClatchy High.”

  “Would’ve been before Coach’s time,” Drew said. “And he didn’t grow up in Sacramento, remember? He grew up in Oregon someplace.”

  “Still,” Lee said, “if he coached in the same city and this Legend Sellers guy was that big a deal, he must’ve heard about him.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense. Let’s ask him at practice tomorrow.”

  Drew still didn’t know if he was more interested in the dead Legend or the one at Morrison Park.

  The one at Morrison—Donald—had told Drew not to end up like him. In the park, he meant. But what about Urban (Legend) Sellers, who didn’t even make it back to the park, who’d pretty much died on the street?

  Two Legends. One dead, one alive.

  Both of them were telling Drew not to end up like them.

  • • •

  Coach DiGregorio said, sure, he’d heard of Urban Legend, everybody in Sacramento—at least everybody of a certain age—had heard of him.

  When Coach asked why they cared, Drew said it was for the paper he was working on. When Coach heard that, his eyes lit up like Drew had just made a pass or a play.

  “That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” he said, his excitement level going from zero to sixty. “I knew I had myself a real student ath-a-lete waiting to bust out.”