Winning the City Redux

by Theodore Weesner

  Don’t be a fool, play it cool! Don’t be a jerk, do the work!

  # # #

  SWEEPING HIS SCHOOL’S two gyms, Dale thereupon jumps, squares up, checks eye and aim, and pulls the trigger a hundred times. Shoots free throws, too. Makes himself sink five in a row, then five more, then five more, before driving the hoop with his twisting over-the-shoulder crowd-stopper one last time . . . and hurrying through the locker room and into the hallway at the last second to join the sleepyheads (they’ll fill the stands when the time comes) wandering into the building to start the day, sleepyheads who know nothing of discipline and commitment, of practice versus luck, that life is a game, that everything depends on how the game is played.

  Oh, it’s his year, sweet Jesus, and man, he is ready to go. To say the least, as Zona Kaplan . . . as all the girls in their ninth grade class like to say. To say the least. A flame of desire burning within. To say the least.

  There all at once is Sonny Joe Dillard, the school’s biggest star and most legendary athlete ever, coming in Dale’s direction in a slouch and not hurrying at all. “Hey, I got us a name for City League!” Dale tells him.

  “What’s the name, Wheels?”

  “Not gonna say right now . . . tell you later, asshole.”

  “What if we don’t like it, Wheels?”

  “We’ll like it, don’t worry . . . asshole.”

  “Thought we’d be going for a sponsor this year . . . Wheels?”

  “Aah, you have to go all over town begging people. Screw that.”

  “Tell me at practice,” Big Joe says, ambling on and drawing gawking twin stares over their shoulders from two seventh grade girls passing by.

  “Practice . . . what’re you talking about?” Dale calls after him.

  Joe grins on looking back, adds, “As if you didn’t know.”

  CHAPTER 4

  DRESSED AHEAD OF THE OTHERS, GOOSE BUMPS ALIVE ON HIS legs, Dale leaves the locker room and passes through the tunnel into the boys’ gym. Before him, however, is a surprise. The wall between the two gyms has been opened. They’ve always used the boys’ gym alone for practice while there is the sweep of the main gym with its glass backboards lowered into place at the ends. Loping the perimeter, reminding himself to take the lead, show the speed, do the deed, Dale has to wonder what Coach Burke is up to using the full gym at a time like this. (Five-six at most, Dale tells himself as goose bumps travel his shoulders.)

  He lopes on. Afternoon light from end windows reflect the golden floor and move him as others might be moved by reflections in a cathedral. Dreaming the dream. Today is the day and the future is in his hands. Take the lead . . . show the speed . . . do the deed! The time is here, smart ass.

  “Belly high . . . without a rubber,” Dale sings out, removing himself from a bugaboo thought of his father visiting his mind. The lyric is one he dared recite to Zona Kaplan in homeroom, pleasing him on causing her to raise her dark eyes in disgust. “Ninth grade boys are so immature,” she told him, making him like her even more than he had liked her before. As he lopes on, Zona bounces in his heart, too. And elsewhere. To say the least.

  Loping . . . sensing other players entering through the tunnel, he loops under one side basket and another, lays in imaginary shots while loping on. This is like love, he thinks in his silly-but-cocky not-so-silly frame of mind. This . . . is what love feels like . . . if you know the score and came to play. This is what it feels like to sit in homeroom and have the hots for Zona K. This, he thinks and, pulling up, sends a make-believe Whipp! on its way. “Shake Marilyn Monroe!” he sings aloud to the tune of Shake, Rattle, and Roll.

  Gonna shake . . . Marilyn Monroe!

  Gonna bake Marilyn Monroe!

  The glass backboards offer heavier nets, from which hemp he imagines emanating the sound that can thrill his heart with the power of a kiss stolen on the playground. For even in the all-but empty double gym, in his ongoing dream—in a sport in which to enter practice is to enter a dream—he can call up that sweetest of sounds: Whipp!

  The sudden stopping/pushing up (few players his age can elevate so instantly) in-taking air and up-fixing periscope, hanging for an instant during which to square on the rim and pull the trigger—fire one!—sending the ball tumbling through space, through a pause of heart and mind, genitals and soul and, seeing it arrive, alas, triggering that snapping of nothing but threads! The swish that isn’t a swish at all but the whipp! of a skirt. A payoff sensation letting him know he’s okay, is right with himself and with all things . . . is real and good, leading the way like he knows he can!

  Whipp! Take that, you sonsabitches! Take that and stick it up your candy asses! Did you think Dale Wheeler did not come to play? Whipp! He’s here to do the job, and nobody will be laughing at his old man this time around, you can be sure of that.

  “Wheels, whatta ya doing?”

  Knowing it is his day to lead the way, Dale replies to a boy who is a third-stringer at best: “Getting ready to win the city!”

  “Hey, you bet!”

  “Betcher sweet ass!” Dale tells him.

  “Mine ain’t sweet!”

  “Mine’s sweet as candy! Be-bop-a-lulu, she’s my baby!”

  Dale lopes on, singing and telling himself to not get carried away. Telling himself to play it cool . . . for cool is the only tool when you’re out to rule.

  THE YEAR IS his, but of course it’s theirs, too, the others in their last year of junior high and certainly the school’s star, Sonny Joe Dillard. Scholastic Conference, for which these tryouts have been called, is important; still it’s City League, starting in three weeks, that is the stage for the deepest competition, that calls up dreams of glory and serves as a platform for players like Sonny Joe, and Dale, too, to do their thing for the scouts and coaches in a metro area where students decide which high school to attend.

  Districts, playoffs, and a twelve-game season distinguish City League, compared to the eight-game Scholastic League. Playoffs are the key, offering excitement and sometimes magic. Teams winning districts and progressing through playoffs to the finals at City Auditorium, in March, play sixteen games. Teams with sponsors or names invented by players enter from every district and from private and parochial schools, drawing on a student body five or six times the junior high conference alone. Crowds grow large and wildly partisan when the weather breaks in March and City League finals are on at the big auditorium where the Class A high schools play and Dale has yet to ever put up a shot, where General Motors puts on its New Car Show and Barnum & Bailey rigs its nets when the circus comes to town. Where, on March nights, nothing else in the world matters and hazed excitement fills the air for those who have survived the competition.

  It’s what he’s doing, where he’s going: making his move to win the City. His dream is genuine, for it is more than likely that they’ll pull it off, that the first big deal dream of his life will come true. More than likely, as everyone knows. The Blue Arrows. Thus the name, as all-but-acknowledged captain, he has invented for City League, the name he’ll move they adopt. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Blue Arrows! Winners of this year’s City championship, captained by . . . ”

  “Be-bop-a-lulu, she’s my baby!”

  The Blue Arrows. Dale loves the name so much—like other items of anticipation—that he can hardly wait to present it to his teammates. Still he holds it back, for cool is the way to be. Need to stay cool if you’re going to rule! Everything in due time, as his father would say. Know thyself, as his homeroom teacher, Miss Furbish, would say. And, okay, he isn’t captain just yet, he’d have to admit. But he’ll be co-captain at least, with Sonny Joe, that’s for sure, and they’ll be saying, “Co-captained by . . .”

  Betcher sweet ass . . .

  CHAPTER 5

  OTHERS FOLLOW INTO THE BIG DOUBLE GYM, USHERING another surprise: Coach Burke, carrying two new balls, is accompanied by a giant gray-haired man Dale has never seen before. The man may be but six-six or six-seven, but in the midst of eighth and nint
h graders, and next to squat Coach Burke, he looms as large as a creature from another world. Wearing a gray sweatshirt, the cuffs of his gabardine slacks break upon what is an immediate focal point: White basketball shoes around which there runs a thin red line of rubber just visible within layers of white. Professional basketball shoes. Holy shit. Dale has heard from his father the old saw of shoes telling on the man, and the man’s sneakers, it is clear, have something to say. White side-walls on a vintage Caddy. Horsepower. Authority.

  Dale moves with the others. Like nails drawn to a magnet, they whisper “Who’s that?” as they follow the two men. The visitor’s salt-and-pepper hair is thick, and whatever his age he retains bulk and strength of a kind that looks rust free and well-tuned.

  Sonny Joe Dillard is the last to enter through the tunnel, a lanky, long-armed boy pulling a sweatshirt over his head on the move. The school’s living legend, Sonny Joe, presently six-five and growing, is the tallest fourteen- or fifteen-year-old hoop star in a metro area with a population of half a million. As he enters proximity with the massive stranger, however, he looks like a greyhound in the shadow of an old war horse.

  All the same, Dale guesses, Sonny Joe has something to do with the man’s visit. For just that August, upon countless strikeouts and no-hitters as a left-hander in legion ball—as if his fame as a basketball player were not enough—Sonny Joe was offered, and turned down—as they all knew—a signing bonus from the Detroit Tigers, who had acquired his rights in the year’s schoolboy draft. To sign would have made him ineligible for school sports and, given the Bonus Baby Rule, obligated him to go directly into the big leagues without benefit of time in the minors. Detroit Free Press articles had it that the Tigers thought Sonny Joe might do for them what Bob Feller had done for the Cleveland Indians: pitch in the majors at seventeen and throw sidewinder smoke that left grown men whiffing off balance.

  Dale, for his part, gave up on baseball at about that time. It wasn’t that he disliked the sport, for it had been his earliest sports infatuation and he loved it still. Nor was it that he had batted any number of times against Sonny Joe—probably fifty, in Class E and Class D—and had to his credit but one memorable hit, a double between center and right, a couple scratch singles, and some thirty strikeouts, hard-eyed swings at what went by like a ping-pong ball fired from a rifle and seemed always to smack into the catcher’s mitt an instant before his bat crossed the plate.

  Dale’s problem was that basketball had been seducing him all along. In baseball, well-oiled glove and cleats on the handlebars of his bicycle, hat beautifully crowned, desperate to play, he rode all over town over several summers and could find little more than organized games to watch, in addition to maybe two games his own team would play in a week. No action. For after the first warm days of spring no one ever wanted to play baseball, not even Flies Out or Catch or Pepper. Lobbing a taped ball onto a garage roof and positioning himself as it rolled off, and fielding grounders on the rebound from a cement wall at school, generated next to nothing from any sportscasters in the sky.

  In basketball, however, he could play alone and it was like food to a starving child. Ball in hand, any shots at a hoop could be a game of the mind. To practice was to play, and to play—even in three-on-threes—was a dream. Unlike baseball, others came to the park in gangs and carloads eager for hoop. Dale could hang at the park and shoot by himself, practice his shots, perfect his moves, however much the sun might roast the asphalt. As the sun descended, players began arriving in cars, on bicycles, walking, and half-court three-on-three games took off like an evening tournament. If a threesome did not lose—as Dale’s rarely did—he could play nonstop for hours, right up to the lights going off for the night at eleven p.m.

  Taking it to the hoop. Blind passes and razzle-dazzle moves. Throughout July and August a summer league always attracted the city’s best high school players and college players, too, from around the state. Crowds and girls came to watch, to flirt and laugh, to sit on plank bleachers or stand on the grass. As a park rat, Dale usually slipped on a striped shirt and a whistle to referee games made up of high school stars and former stars gone on to college, when, during time-outs and at half-time, he could put up some shots of his own and, as happened, hear someone shout out the park rat’s reward: “SIGN UP THE REF, HE’S BETTER THAN ANY A YOU TURKEYS!”

  CHAPTER 6

  ON A TWEET OF HIS WHISTLE, COACH BURKE GAINS THEIR attention. He bounce-passes one ball to Sonny Joe, the other to Dale, confirming, Dale knows, that all is well. “This year!” Coach Burke calls out to them. “This year is going to be our year!” He paces several steps before adding, “Go ahead, sit yourselves down.”

  Sitting, Dale knows, isn’t for their comfort but so the squat man can gaze down upon them. Dale knows too that the balls had been entrusted to him and Sonny Joe as designated co-captains and that they’re expected to hold onto them while Coach Burke uses his hands to talk. What Dale also knows is a measure of self-esteem in being acknowledged. Him and Sonny Joe. Returning starters. Co-captains. The best players, as everyone knows. Sensations of pride traverse his veins and he feels comfortable with the pebbly ball in his lap. His year. This is it. Time to show the speed, take the lead, do the deed! Time to win the city not only in Scholastic but in City League, too!

  What is also on Dale’s mind—as it has been every day—is how impressed they are all going to be when they see how his game has improved since last year. For he has not been lazy or complacent for one minute as a returning starter. No way. All summer, all fall, up through and including yesterday after school into darkness—as well as that morning in the gym—he has gone for it and done it! Practice practice practice. Work work work. Going all out, as if each shot and pass were for all time, incorporating into himself like second nature the skills and moves he knows will leave the jaws of these junior-high-schoolers and Coach Burke himself hanging in amazement.

  For lazy is everyone’s middle name, as everyone knows. What they had done, most of them, was spend the summer days at lakes and cottages, at East Tawas and Mackinaw Island, lying in the sun, sitting around, sleeping in, rowing boats. It was luxury of a kind that has never been an option for Dale anyway . . . there being but him and his father and having hardly a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.

  Still, no sweat, no complaints. Being poor has only urged him out earlier and drove him harder, longer, deeper . . . had him thinking (as Burkebutt rattled on about good citizenship in the locker room) how in a matter of minutes he will put on a display that will have even Sonny Joe—after his summer of countless strikeout fast balls and big league scouts—regarding him differently. Take the block! Shake the block! Fly through the air and deliver the shock! “Double reverse lay-up left-handed over the shoulder, ladies and gentlemen! Did you see that!? Did you see that!? Good God Almighty, did you see that?”

  Hey, look me over! Dale half-sings to himself. Taking the lead. Generating the speed. Doing the deed! Winning the City!

  AS MISS FURBISH said in homeroom, anyone willing to do the work could reap the reward. She also said that they had to really work and pay the price if they expected things to go their way. Commitment. Not contentment. Commitment.

  Betcher sweet ass, Dale reminds himself.

  He also thinks, sitting there, that he is being looked at as a returning starter, a co-captain, a trusted guardian of a glossy new basketball. The newcomers coming up from juniors had to be thinking, now there is Dale Wheeler and he came out for this team last year and bypassed ninth graders to become a starter after the first game of the season when he came off the bench, scored eleven points, intercepted two passes, dished off four assists! That’s what he would be thinking, Dale admits, though the previous year, looking over the competition, his thinking had run more to: I can beat any of you jerks and that is what I’m going to do! Get outta my way, birdbrains, I am here to play!

  Thereupon Dale makes a conscious decision: To sit on the new ball! He hardly hesitates. He knows Coach
Burke will not berate him, even if sitting on the ball puts him a head higher than the others. He does it, just like that. It’s done and he feels but slightly self-conscious in his elevated position, experiences pleasure in the gift of leadership he knows he has earned by virtue of sweat and thought.

  Boldness and daring, on and off the court. It’s why he’s a co-captain. They can go to their summer cottages and be too lazy to practice in the blazing sun. They can chase girls all the time, and worry about their clothes and hair, their tans and reputations. They can sit around and talk about how great they’re going to be. But when the time comes to win the City, they’ll know whose name to call, and it won’t be Tom, Dick or Harry. He might be called out for being too proud, for thinking he’s hot shit telling others what to do and how to do it . . . but when the chips are on the line and it’s time to go downtown and win the City, they’ll know whose name to call.

  Dale feels as good in these moments of self-awareness as he has ever felt in his life. There is doing it, and there is thinking about doing it, and man, he has done it and knows the way. It’s one of the things he knows he knows. All summer, every night, he dreamed himself to sleep on drives into the key and jumpers at the buzzer, on two-shot options at the line trailing by one. If he knows anything at all, it’s that he knows what he knows.

  CHAPTER 7

  “AS FOR THIS YEAR,” COACH BURKE IS SAYING. “WE HAVE four returning lettermen, and, for the first time in memory, not one but TWO! returning starters: Joe Dillard and Dale Wheeler! making them this year’s designated co-captains! Right now, however—without any further ado—I’d like to introduce a special individual who is visiting today. Boys, the distinguished-looking gentleman beside me, I am proud to say, is none other than . . . Von Bothner!”