We started to play. Hadnot was in better shape than when he left the club. The lazy-footed, strong-arm tactics he used against Karl he had no need of here. I took a hard stride to my right, then cut the ball back between my legs. The same move I used on Charlie at the beginning of the season. Another dribble, and a half-second’s hesitation at the top of the bounce. Planting my left foot, I ran straight into Hadnot, who had his chest puffed out like a toy soldier’s. Then he brought both hands down hard on the ball and took it away. ‘Got to be strong,’ he said. ‘Got to be strong.’
So it went on. By this stage it was clear he was angry, too, and I had a pretty good idea what he was angry about. Dribbling lightly, advancing, he watched me back off. Just to show there was no point wasting energy, he called out ‘headfake, jumpshot’ and I bit on the first and watched the second drop softly in. ‘Ball up,’ he said. ‘Winners out.’ As soon as I passed it to him, he bent his legs into another shot. ‘Got to be quick,’ he said, as the ball touched net. ‘Got to be quick.’
Everything he did, he told me what he was going to do first, and sometimes he told me what I was going to do as well. If you can win so easily there should be no pleasure in it. And to be fair, he seemed to take little pleasure. ‘You gonna write about this, too?’ he said. ‘You gonna write about this?’ After a few minutes I was too tired to talk, but he kept up his end of the banter until I picked up the ball and started to walk away.
‘What are you doing?’ he called.
‘Taking my ball and going home.’
I didn’t see him again until the championship game.
28
There was a two-week break after the regular season finished, and most of us went a little crazy waiting for the playoff. Henkel, for the only time all year, insisted that we wear a jacket and tie on the team bus to Würzburg. (They had the better record, which gave them home court advantage.) Several of the players, including Karl and me, didn’t own either, and there wasn’t a shop in Landshut that could fit us. So a few days before the big match, Henkel organized a coach to take us into Munich for the afternoon, and we went shopping – one of those strange, light-hearted afternoons that seem unconnected to the days surrounding it.
Milo complained much of the way then found an oyster-colored seersucker jacket that reminded him of Don Johnson from Miami Vice. Nothing fit Karl. Eventually, he picked out something in unlined linen with a few extra inches on the arms, and the saleswoman recommended a tailor who could lengthen it while we waited. Henkel brought out his credit card at the till and paid for all of us.
‘This league is a hobby,’ he said to us, ‘but the first division is a job. You should dress like it.’
It’s a six-hour bus ride from Landshut to Würzburg. I refused to let Anke see me off, but she spent the night before at my place, and I left her at dawn half-asleep in my bed – an image that stayed with me much of the journey north. We all looked slightly odd waiting at the sports hall for the coach to show up: a dozen oversized men in badly fitting jackets and ties we had chosen ourselves. Somehow impressive, too, and I remember the pride I occasionally felt walking around in a pack. A form of racial pride, itself not very different from the pleasure my mother sometimes admits to taking in the sight of her two tall sons.
Milo was in manic spirits and talked much of the way. I sat one row ahead of him and he kept leaning over to explain things. ‘Young man,’ he said at one point, ‘understand this. In the first division, everyone plays on wooden floors!’ And so on. He was convinced that a great deal hinged on this game. That the vague drifting quality of his early career had been brought at last to a sharp point.
Olaf finally interrupted him. ‘I played in the first division. It is not so different, except that you spend more time on the bench, and when you do play, you have to do exactly what you’re told, otherwise everything goes to shit. There is no room for having fun – the other players are too good.’
‘Yes, but did you play in the Super Liga?’ (It’s hard to convey, in cold ink, the childish exuberance of this word in German. It sounds like a jet taking off.) ‘Barcelona, Milan, Athens. Spanish girls, Italian girls, Greek girls. Even if they don’t like basketball, girls have a natural respect for TV, for men who are on TV. It is a question of evolution.’
The Super Liga is a knock-out tournament for some of the top European clubs. It runs alongside the regular national leagues, but pays much better, if you win, and attracts more media attention. German basketball players very rarely become household names: if they do, it’s because of their performances in the Super Liga.
‘I played in the Super Liga,’ Olaf said. ‘Once.’
‘And did you win?’
‘Let me explain it to you. It is called the Super Liga because everybody is better than you . . .’
Outside Ingolstadt, the rains set in and followed us through the forests of Altmühltal, covering the windows so thickly with water I could only see the blurred green of trees. But the noise allowed me to retreat into my own silence, and I thought of Anke and tried to sleep. We arrived under a lifting sky in time for lunch, and afterwards Henkel gave us a few hours off to get comfortable in our rooms.
In fact, I ended up staying with him, at the house of Würzburg’s club president, a man named Eberhart. Eberhart was famous in the small world of German basketball and one of the founders of the Bundesliga. He used to teach history and fell in love with the sport in the sixties during a sabbatical at Berkeley. Everyone called him Herr Professor. His house had a couple spare bedrooms in the basement, which he offered to Henkel, along with any other player who cared to join him. Henkel picked me, because he considered me the most presentable or the most dispensable, I don’t know. My bedroom itself was windowless and institutional, with a rugged beige carpet and cheap furniture. It looked like the kind of room strangers passed through. But the house itself was more attractive, modern and full of gadgets. Glass sliding doors opened from the sitting room onto a narrow deck. Below, the townscape glittered like a beach.
I met Eberhart only briefly as I settled in, a tall, elderly, childish-looking man. He shook me by the hand, a firm grip though slightly wet from something, a fact that contributed to the distaste I always felt for the touch of old people. I wondered when he’d last used the bathroom. Then Henkel claimed me for a late afternoon practice and an early team dinner – just a walk-through and a plate of spaghetti.
Everyone was quiet. Even Milo’s high spirits had worn off. Henkel and I shared a cab back together, and I squeezed myself against the window and tried not to look at him. There was something about his decent, assured looks that brought out in me a filial shyness. My father once praised a man for being ‘virile, in an attractive way – not in the least a show off.’ I was struck by this comment, as evidence of what he admired, and never forgot it. He might have had Henkel in mind.
‘When I was younger,’ he said, as the car pulled up, ‘before all the big games I used to think, this might change my life. They never did.’ Getting out, he added, ‘But maybe. Maybe.’
Eberhart invited us onto the balcony for a good night drink. He himself always took a glass of mint tea to bed with him, and he offered me the same. Really, it was still too cold to sit outside, even with the door to the sitting room open, but he brought three rugs out and laid them across our laps. He apologized for the smell: his dog used to sleep on them.
For a few minutes we sat looking out at the view, made up now entirely of strings of light. Then Eberhart and Henkel exchanged companionable complaints. Recently, Eberhart had given up jogging; his knees couldn’t stand it any more, and even walking up hills caused him pain. ‘You probably don’t know it,’ Eberhart shifted the conversation, ‘but twenty years ago Herr Henkel used to play for me. I had a short experiment with coaching; it didn’t last long.’ After another pause: ‘I’ve never seen anyone who liked winning as much as your coach.’
Henkel said, ‘I would like very much to win tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow or nex
t year, it doesn’t matter. Some day with that young man you will win.’
‘It matters to me. I don’t think we can keep him another year if we lose.’
‘Is he as good as that?’ Then Eberhart turned to me. ‘A long time ago, I lived in California, outside San Francisco. Sometimes on a Friday morning I used to drive down to Los Angeles just to watch a basketball game. A full day’s journey, then back again the next day. I had not many friends at first and such trips were an excuse to look around. I bought a second-hand Ford and learned to drive in one day; in Germany, nobody had a car. A very exciting, lonely period in my life. There were wonderful players then: Gail Goodrich, Jerry West. Oscar Robertson. I never thought in my lifetime anyone would come out of Europe who could touch them. But the day is not far off now; it almost saddens me.’ He looked at Henkel. ‘For a few years, I thought that you might be good enough to play in America, but they had a prejudice then against German players.’
‘I was too small. One of my brothers is five inches taller. If I had been born like my brother.’
‘And what about this one?’ Eberhart asked, pointing at me. ‘Is he any good?’
‘Yes, a very good Dolmetscher,’ Henkel said.
29
I’ve heard that the Spanish have a word for the time wasted before traveling; there should be such a word for the build-up to a big game. Around eleven o’clock the next day, we jogged lightly through the Saturday morning streets of Würzburg, a dozen tall men shaking off sleep. A few photographers followed, when they could, taking pictures of Karl. Pedestrians moved aside and stared at us, recognizing that we were people of some temporary local significance. Some of them wished us luck.
Afterwards, Henkel had arranged for each of us to have a session with a physio at the hotel, but there were only two physios and they called on us in order of significance. That is, I waited two hours. Thomas Arnold discovered an old set of Connect Four among the children’s toys in the TV lounge, and Krahm, Arnold, Darmstadt and I played round-robin together. Krahm never lost; he was studying engineering, a stretched-out, skinny, clean-shaven young man with a very small face. All afternoon I took from him the comforting sense that these games mattered as much to him as anything else we expected to win or lose that day. There was money at stake, too. I lost five marks and remembered my father’s warning about gambling: ‘These aren’t the kids you grew up with.’
Milo had begun his long pre-match retreat. He looked like a man coming down with a cold and sat in front of a television watching footage from Würzburg’s recent games. Sometimes I joined him on the couch. It was odd seeing Hadnot in another uniform. It was also the first time I had watched him on TV. He looked shorter than in life, more dependent on others to clear out some room for him to work. The fury of his presence somehow failed to come across; also, what was muscular in his precision. He moved in short quick steps, but with an air of neatness and deliberation. You saw the textbook diagram behind each posture or gesture – he gave the impression of somebody who would line up the pencils on his desk.
Olaf spent most of the afternoon on the phone in the lobby, without saying much. He seemed to be trying to apologize or calm someone down. ‘Na klar,’ he kept repeating, and ‘Was denkst du?’ Of course. What do you think? It upset me, on this, the last working day of our season, that our friendship had come to so little. I wondered if he felt the same.
After an early supper, more pasta and salad and rice, we could finally make our way to the stadium. Already a few fans stood outside the entrance, watching the television crews prepare, but we went around the block and made our way in through a service door. About an hour before tip-off. Olaf, waiting to get taped up, asked me to help him stretch out on one of the gym mats lying on the floor by the trainer’s table. Perhaps his own quiet nod to friendship. ‘Trouble at home?’ I said, lifting his heavy leg and pressing it down against his chest.
‘Just my sister.’
Then the other leg. I remember the physical intimacy of athletes – their easy relations with their own bodies and the bodies of others. All this heightened by the steadily increasing pressure of what awaited us outside. Later I said to him something like, It’s a funny kind of year that ends in March, and when he didn’t respond, I asked him, ‘Has it been a good year for you, personally, I mean?’
‘Ask me again in a few hours.’
‘Is it as simple as that?’
‘Of course, it’s simple. If you win, you are a winner; if you lose, you are a loser. That’s what all of this means.’ After a minute, he added, ‘Sunday night I have a date with my sister’s friend in Munich. I like her; I don’t want to be in a bad mood.’
This seemed to me as good a reason as any to want to win. I found the idea that lives and careers might depend, in any significant way, on my performance increasingly awful as the game approached. My own life and my own career as well.
No one in the locker room had much to say for himself. The noise we got dressed to was the sound of Milo’s music leaking out of his earphones. He sat on a bench, wearing nothing but his game shorts; his top was draped over his head.
As soon as we emerged on court, other sounds overwhelmed us. The sound of wooden stands on loose wheels filling with people. Disco songs, blasted from tall black loudspeakers at either end of the hall. The echo of basketballs. Then there were the hand-held fog horns, which a few of the fans had snuck past security. Boom boom boom: pure expressionless noise.
Four different television stations had set up their cameras on the baselines. I counted them during the layup lines. A local Würzburg station; then a crew from Munich; another one I didn’t recognize; and several cameras, on wires and booms, bearing the Eurosport logo. I remembered something Anke once said about Hadnot. That most people change a little, helplessly, in front of cameras, but that they had no effect on him at all, and I wondered if this applied to the way he played basketball, too.
The Würzburg players came in after us and the noise doubled. Tressell, shrugging his head from side to side like a boxer; Chad Baker in long striped socks, pulled up to his knees; Henrik Lenz; Hadnot.
I hadn’t seen him since running off stupidly the last time we played basketball together. The sight of him reminded me of something else – one of those dusty corners under the bed that count for little in our lives but which we expose unwillingly. A few days before, while Anke was spending the night, I’d had a vague and in some ways not dissatisfying dream about him. Hadnot and I were alone and had somehow agreed, reluctantly and without attraction, to a kind of expedient sexual exchange. Part of growing up, it seems to me, involves learning to dismiss such dreams more or less lightly. Naturally I didn’t mention it to Anke, but the effect of this dream stayed with me and made his presence distasteful.
Henkel, just before tip-off, drew us in a huddle around him and made a speech. I remember his moustache moving over his lips but not a word he said. I don’t think I heard him. Performance-deafness had set in. There was nothing in my head but the beat of my pulse and what the Germans call an Ohrwurm – an earworm. Sometimes a few lines from a song or a book or a recent conversation would echo around my mind during a game, not so much against my will as indifferent to it. This time the refrain was very simple: Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher.
Of course, I spent the first twenty minutes sitting down. Karl and Chad Baker jumped center together, and Karl knocked the ball to Charlie, who brought it slowly upcourt.
All week, during the build-up to the most important game of his career, Karl had been having a sort of subterranean argument with Henkel, but to the rest of us he presented a very easy face. If he was nervous, he was smilingly nervous. I said to Olaf at the time: he’s like a man who has cut himself painlessly, and only realizes later, so he shows you the blood on his finger with a kind of wonder. Look at me, nerves . . . But these had nothing to do with winning or losing. He had invited a prominent American agent to watch him play, a man named Neuwirth Dodds, whom I noticed myself in a
front row seat wearing cowboy boots and a skinny tie. Dodds was well connected, especially among the West Coast teams, and Karl was anxious to impress him.
There’s a story I heard about Dodds on the long ride home; I don’t know if it’s true. That Hadnot had approached him before the game and said something like, ‘How about I score more points than your boy, you get me into one training camp next year. I don’t care which.’
They were both southerners, and Bo knew him vaguely from his first few years out of college, when he made a real push to reach the big leagues. Dodds said, ‘And what do I get from you, when you don’t?’
It was a part of the story that he found his own remark very funny. I should add, Milo, Olaf, Plotzke, the rest of them, also found the whole thing funny, and not because they bore Hadnot any ill-will. Athletes just like to see people put down, they like shows of power – it’s the business they’re in.
What Henkel and Karl were fighting about had something to do with Neuwirth Dodds and the other suits like him lined up along the two front rows. Henkel had decided a few weeks before the game to wrong-foot Würzburg by moving Karl to the point. Karl resisted him, for a few reasons. Partly, because it was likely to cut into his scoring, and he wanted big numbers to impress the Americans. Partly because he didn’t think he could play point in the NBA, and he hoped to prepare himself for the transition. Both good reasons from a personal angle, but clubs and players, whatever coaches like to say, have very different interests at heart. Anyway, there was nothing Karl could do. He gave in, but Henkel’s insistence might have cost him in the long run, too.
At the time, the guy who suffered most in all this was Charlie. After Karl tapped the ball to him, he crossed half court and motioned everyone into place. Motioned, I say, because there was no use calling out plays. The noise of a big game is most overwhelming right at the beginning, before the crowd has shouted itself out. There’s a kind of tradition in some clubs of standing till the first points are scored, which produces, as soon as a shot goes in, a satisfying collapse and collective release of breath. Karl worked himself free at the top of the key, and Charlie swung the ball to him, then cut down to Olaf on the block and curled off. He had become a shooting guard who can’t shoot. Karl still had Baker on him from the jump, but there was no way Baker could keep up with him outside the paint. Two hard strides to his right and the rest of the defense converged, leaving both Olaf and Plotzke wide open under the basket. Karl picked Olaf, who lifted himself heavily off the ground and dunked. Two nothing. Everybody in the building sat down again; it was as if the stage curtain had been drawn at last.
Playing Days Page 22
