Henkel chased Karl along the sidelines, applauding earnestly with his hands just under his chin. ‘Auf geht’s!’ he cried, an almost untranslatable phrase, because it has no real meaning, like a lot of encouraging words: just a kind of vector of meaning. I don’t think Karl heard him or cared.
Charlie had a hard time at the other end, too. Tressell was cartoon strong and pushed through him into the lane then jumped full-chested against Olaf’s ribs and laid the ball underhanded in. Darmstadt whispered at my side: ‘He’s bullying the bully.’ The teenager had suffered all year long at Charlie’s hands; it gave him real pleasure to see the tables turned.
There’s a lot of talk in the sporting news about the love of underdogs, but it shouldn’t be confused with an attraction to failure. Really what we like to see is people winning and beating others – the bigger the victim, the better. Darmstadt had no chance of getting in this game and knew it. He could look on as coolly detached as anyone else in the crowd. Also, Hadnot had been decent to him; his loyalties were divided. I won’t say I felt for Charlie exactly, though it turned out to be his last professional game and one of his worst. (At halftime, sitting by himself on a bench bone-tired, he said not a word – of complaint or anything else.) Most of what I felt was wonder. My first few weeks in Landshut Charlie seemed to me just about the canniest and completest point guard I had ever played against. Now he was getting whipped by a kid I never heard of coming out of college who couldn’t land a job in the NBA. What a world it is to strive in.
Karl, on the other end, kept forcing double teams and finding the open man. Würzburg adjusted, but even Lenz, six foot five tall and two hundred thirty pounds lean, was too small and weak to keep him out of the lane. A few minutes in we went up four, five, seven points. Eventually they started cheating inside, leaving Charlie and Milo free at the three-point line. Charlie even tried his hand at a few long bombs. The first one corkscrewed off the front rim and over the backboard; the second landed two feet short. After that, he gave up. He chased Tressell like a dog up and down court, trying to entangle him and draw cheap fouls, but on offense he more or less resigned himself to a bit part.
This shifted the pressure onto Milo, and Milo coped badly with pressure. He knocked down his first three pointer in a red mist and the look on his face had so little pleasure in it and so much relief I almost pitied him. It gave him a kind of license, though, and his next two shots barely drew iron. A minute later, he lowered his head and bulled into Lenz standing his ground at the low post block. When the ref whistled him for charging, he began to shout: obscenities, I suppose, but I heard nothing comprehensible. Then Henkel touched me on the shoulder and the red mist descended on me.
Entering a game is like entering a new atmosphere. The old rules of breathing don’t apply; you have to learn new ones. For the first two minutes on court I don’t know what happened, then Hadnot came on. He sent his first shot long before I noticed I was meant to be guarding him. I never thought of him as a nervous player, but the last time he wanted to win so much, against Würzburg half a year before, he also rushed his shots. And this time he was on an even shorter rope. His new coach, a nephew of Eberhart’s named Oscar, tended to pull him quickly if he missed a few shots. Tall as his uncle, with the large stiff tender knees of an ex-athlete, Eberhart paced gingerly in front of his bench all game like a man trying to put off going to the bathroom.
The next time down, Charlie switched over and Hadnot pushed him into the post. Karl snuck behind them both and knocked his turnaround almost as far as half court. I picked it up on the run, but Tressell was back, so I waited for the help to come. Maybe if the ball had gone out of bounds, Oscar would have taken the chance to pull him. ‘There are other people on the court besides you!’ I heard him call: the kind of prim, vague, correctional coaching patter Hadnot despised.
‘How about passing to Karl?’ Neuwirth Dodds suggested, and there was a shout of laughter in the stands that made its way even to my deaf ears.
In general, the presence of the crowd was as powerful as summer heat, pervasive and just about bearable. You felt the fact that you were being watched. You felt it on your skin. Meanwhile, I was dribbling myself into corners – and about to do Hadnot a good turn.
He himself once told me the secret of intercepting passes. Work out the pecking order on the other team, he said. Most bad passes get thrown up the order – guys get bullied into it. When Karl crossed half court, he clapped his hands twice, calling for the ball, and I obliged him. Hadnot jumped the passing lane and made off the other way. Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher, I thought. There was nobody back but Plotzke, who was too tired to run, but Bo pulled up for a three-pointer regardless, which hardly shifted the net as it dropped in. Returning, he touched my elbow lightly – not in apology or anything like it, but just to make sure I was taking note.
Henkel sent Milo in to replace me, and I spent the rest of the half on the bench, getting colder and watching Hadnot go on one of his streaks. A fifteen-footer from the elbow off a double screen. A runner in the lane; another three. I’m trying to remember what I hoped for when he went up to shoot. I think for the first time I wanted him to miss. Henkel whispered to me, ‘Before it is over, I will need you again.’ And childishly solemn and grateful to him, I nodded.
Someone had rigged up a large mechanical board in the place of the gym clock, which recorded points, rebounds, minutes played, etc. Instantly, the fluid living unfolding of events was converted into a box score. At halftime, I looked up to check it. Hadnot led all scorers with thirteen points; Olaf had twelve, Karl ten, enough to give us a three-point edge. It occurred to me that Olaf’s family might be sitting in the stands. I remembered his father especially, long-limbed, distinguished and balding, with curly hair. This seemed just the kind of experiment, regarding his son’s character, he might be curious about, and as I jogged stiffly back to the locker room I scanned the crowd for faces.
Anke was sitting several rows up towards the visitors’ end – on her own, in a plain blue dress that showed the brown freckled skin of her neck and chest. Since she wasn’t looking at me I couldn’t acknowledge her presence in any way, short of shouting. Instead I ducked my head under the doorway, feeling suddenly the flush of some emotion I found very hard to place. She hadn’t told me she was coming and I hadn’t asked her to. Probably it was only the strange nervous anxieties of the day, but the thought crossed my mind that she hadn’t come to watch me.
In the privacy of the locker room, Henkel and Karl continued their argument. Karl, red-faced and restless with unspent energies, shouted at one stage, ‘You think it is all coaching. You don’t remember what it is like any more.’ Russell, looking blank, handed him a towel from a bag of cheap white overwashed towels he dragged around with him across the tiles. Karl folded it over his head like a shawl and strode large-footed back and forth between our legs. ‘Out there, nobody cares about the coaches. It’s always this way with you. You think too much.’ And so on. I could see Henkel reminding himself, like a good father, it is not my job to respond to anger with anger; it is enough that I listen. He may also have felt that such reserve somehow proved Karl’s point.
Eventually, he repeated the facts: that we were winning by three in spite of Hadnot’s hot hand; that Baker, Lenz and Tressell each had two fouls; that Olaf and Plotzke had twenty points between them, because of Karl’s unselfish play.
Karl bent down to him at last, less angrily. ‘You must understand. I can do everything I want out there, but for you. No one can stop me.’
Frau Kolwitz, the owner, walked in, wearing a grey mandarin coat buttoned up to her neck. Charlie was the shortest player in the room and he was sitting down; the top of her head came up to his eyes. She stood in the comforting shelter of Henkel’s elbow and muttered something at us. Nobody could hear what – words of encouragement, I suppose. But somehow they had their effect. Karl fell quiet and the rest of us took the chance to unwrap and pass around bottles of water from the stack Russell ha
d kicked into the room. At the end I could just make out faintly, Thank you, thank you, bobbing her head, thank you. She really seemed to belong to a different species, and we treated her with the suspicion and tenderness you would show a small animal.
‘Give me twenty more minutes,’ Henkel said to Karl when she was gone. ‘And then you can shout at me as much as you like.’
When the second half started I found it very difficult not to turn my head and try to catch Anke’s eye. There was no reason not to, except that I knew what she would be looking at: her husband. I had a seat on the bench; Hadnot was on stage.
Something else I meant to say about her feelings for me, something that had occurred to me in Flensburg. Anke was a girl who had a natural respect and admiration for good luck in men. I mean the kind of luck inherent in us, something we possess ourselves, like health or looks. Not the other kind, that rolls the dice for us and decides our chances. At my mother’s childhood home, a short walk from the beach, among all those family associations and traditions, it was easy for Anke to consider me what my grandmother sometimes called ‘a good bet’: she meant, a young man worth holding on to. Part of what soured their marriage was the fact that Hadnot seemed to Anke, increasingly, a bad bet. He had a kind of smell to him, the smell of somebody who doesn’t get what he wants from life. And Anke, like a good, proper, fastidious girl, wished to avert her nose from it. But no one could sit in that stadium and compare the two of us to my advantage.
I don’t know that I ever saw him play better, given the stakes and the intensity of the occasion. I had certainly never seen him in better shape. The summer fat he started the season with had burned itself off; he gave the impression of someone who had sloughed old skin. Most of the crowd, of course, favored Würzburg, and everything Hadnot did was attended by a chorus of general happiness. Milo spent much of the second half chasing him around. Even when the mist descended on him, Milo was an excellent defensive player, aggressive and long-armed. But Hadnot turned his aggression against him. He worked him so hard off screens Milo ended up with a bruise the size of a footprint running up the side of his chest. (He showed it to me in the morning with a kind of pride, hungover, contented, passing time on the coach ride home.) But then Hadnot was just as likely to fade off a screen and drift baseline, clearing out for himself that instant of space which was all he required to catch the ball, dip his legs and shoot.
Maybe what saved us was the fact that everyone else watched him, too. Sometimes a streak shooter can have this effect. Even Tressell, bullish, unflappable, began to pound the ball on the wing, beating time with his hand until Hadnot got open. It was like watching one of those intricate children’s toys: you put a marble in the slot and waited for it to come out again somewhere else. Or a mouse in a maze. In and out, around, along the baseline and up, with his quick short steps. Charlie once called Hadnot selfish, and this is what he meant: for him to play well his teammates had to arrange themselves around his performance. Baker and Lenz setting picks; Tressell feeding him. I won’t say he didn’t care about winning, but winning itself never satisfied him. After a certain amount of disappointment, you need more than a single victory to prove how much of it was undeserved. Losing might have been preferable in its way. Look, he could say, you see how well I’ve played and it’s happened again. No, not preferable. Eventually you can’t help believing you deserve it.
Karl, on the other hand, needed no help from anyone to please himself. He started the second half ignoring Henkel and everyone else and simply launching himself at the basket. Even if he missed, it didn’t matter; Karl reached over the heads of Baker and Plotzke with his long arms and tapped the ball in. Then they began double-teaming him as soon as he touched the ball, Tressell and Lenz together confronting him from either side. Sometimes Baker, too, even twenty-five feet out.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Henkel muttered. ‘Pass, pass.’
And Karl passed.
Milo had a shocking afternoon. He suffered from a kind of incurable impotence, which, like the sexual kind, was only made more painful by desire. Probably he was the second best shooter on the team, behind Karl, but nothing went in and after a while he stopped trying. You could see on his face a sort of childish resolution: since I can’t, I won’t. Since I can’t, I won’t – I imagined the refrain running through his head. Olaf, of all people, began drifting into the open spaces and knocking down jumpshots. In his sullen, indifferent way, he lived up to the occasion.
As for me, I kept waiting for the nod from Henkel. But he decided to go big: Krahm and even Thomas Arnold got in the game. With Karl attracting so much attention, there were plenty of cheap points available under the basket. Nothing came cheap to Hadnot. I don’t want to say he never missed, but some things the numbers fail to account for. After a while, everyone knew he was going to shoot, so every shot got harder. Still, he found ways to work himself free, and the way he found them was more remarkable than the simple outcome of a ball going in or not. With three or four minutes left and the score tied, Hadnot pulled up coming off a high screen and Milo fell into him from behind. He had fouled out. So Henkel looked along his bench, once and once more; then he looked at me. I was sitting on my hands to keep them warm.
‘Ben,’ he said. I stood up, feeling stiff, and walked on.
The middle of a basketball court, like any stage, is brighter than the wings. The lights shine off the wooden floors; you emerge into light. Charlie said to me, resting a wet arm on my shoulder, ‘Take Hadnot. It doesn’t matter who got him today.’ And then: ‘If the ball comes to you, shoot it.’
What I remember from the next fifteen minutes of my life, for that’s how long it took to play out the game, are mostly impressions. Hadnot’s sudden nearness to me, his familiar face. I could hear him breathing through his strong front teeth; he blinked constantly against the sweat running off his crewcut. All this time Anke was watching us – I wondered who she was rooting for. It occurred to me that this was a test of the affections you could feel in your gut, that you couldn’t at all doubt. Hadnot didn’t say a word to me, hardly noticed who I was, probably. But it would be fair to say that for the next quarter of an hour I hated him.
The first time down he curled off a screen I didn’t see, and by the time I got back on my feet, with an ear ringing, everyone had run the other way. The sequence of events escapes me. They were up by two, and then it was tied, and then we were up by two. And so on. Lenz hit a fifteen-footer; Tressel made two free throws. Once, as Charlie predicted, the ball fell into my hands and before I knew what I was doing, I rose up to shoot. When I first came to Landshut there was a kink in my shot, a touch of left thumb inherited from my father, which I spent the next eight months ironing out. Well, it was ironed at last: the ball dropped in.
You think about the score much more when you’re watching a game than when you’re playing it. I remember being surprised, glancing up with thirty-odd seconds left, to see that we were down by two. Then Karl waved everybody away. Baker jumped out at him when he crossed midcourt, but he moved around Baker into clear space and knocked down a three-pointer from twenty-five feet. The reason it seemed nothing much had happened was just that everybody in the building went quiet. Three thousand Würzburg fans forgot what they were cheering for. The old-fashioned jury-rigged mechanical scoreboard read: Landshut 81 Würzburg 80 Time: 00:15. I looked to see if the seconds would tick away, but Eberhart had called time out, so we all gathered dutifully around our coaches. I have no idea what Henkel said: we might as well have been under water. Then we drifted on court again and I tried to find Hadnot.
It seemed to me likely they’d run a play through him; I was almost relieved when they did. He held the ball on the wing, comfortably against his belly, while the time ran down. At least, I thought, I don’t have to chase him around. Here he is. And then it occurred to me what he was going to do. There’s a move he used to practice on the right baseline, sometimes against me. A Russian taught it to him, a very simple move, but the
kind of thing Soviet-block players get drilled into them again and again. Hold the ball. Plant your right foot, take two hard dribbles right. Fix the defender against your left shoulder. Plant your left foot, then jump a little backwards with your shoulder still turned and shoot.
If you do it correctly, moving quick and hard, it’s almost impossible for anyone to reach your shooting hand. Hadnot alone in the gym expected to make eight out of ten. I watched him do this a hundred times, counting aloud, one for one, two for two, two for three, three for four, and so on. Against a tall defender, who knew what was coming, his chances dropped to five out of ten; he told me this himself. When we were working on the move together, one morning before practice, I asked him again what he thought about while going up to shoot – forgetting I had asked him before. But this time he gave a different answer. ‘I always think the same damn thing,’ he said. ‘Go in.’
The phrase came back to me, in the heat of that moment, as phrases sometimes do – without meaning much. For a few seconds we stood there, amid three thousand people, on one of those strange, sudden islands that emerge from the flow of play. This is how I like to think of him: just as far away as the reach of my arm, with the ball in his hands and everything still undecided.
Playing Days Page 23
