Summer Ball

by Mike Lupica

Josh Cameron, just two years younger than Richie Walker, was the star point guard of the Boston Celtics, having won more championships with the Celtics than Larry Bird had. He was Danny’s second favorite player, after Jason Kidd, and he was always talking about playing basketball “the right way.” Right before he’d go out in the next game and show people exactly what he meant by that.

  He was listed at 6-2 in the program, which probably made him five inches taller than Danny’s dad in real life, not that Richie Walker would ever admit to something like that. What Richie would say about Josh, though, every time the subject came up, was this:

  His size had never held him back, either.

  And every time he would say that, Danny would think, Where do I sign up, right now, to be 6-2 someday?

  Where do I sign up to be whatever height, 5-9 or 5-10, that my dad really is?

  According to Richie, Josh Cameron had started Right Way with the help of one of his old college teammates about ten years ago. Now it was supposedly on a level with the Five-Star camps that all teenage basketball players had heard about. It had become such a big deal that college scouts would come up to Maine every July and even start looking at seventh and eighth graders they might want to think about recruiting someday.

  The “junior” part of the camp, the July part, was limited to kids between the ages of eleven and fifteen. The elevens and twelves went into one league, Danny knew from the brochure; the older kids into another. Later on in the summer, there was a separate camp for elite players about to enter their senior year in high school. But in either session, Right Way was all basketball, all the time—clinics and instruction in the mornings, games in the afternoon and at night. Because of who Josh Cameron was, he got top college coaches to come to Cedarville and every year would get some of the most famous college players in the country to come work as counselors.

  Starting next week, Danny and Ty and Will would be going up against the best kids in the country. Until then, Will and Ty seemed to have made it their sworn duty to bust chops on Danny every time he’d even suggest that he’d just rather stay home this summer and hang out.

  “I’m the one who should be looking to stay home,” Will said now. “You both know I’m not good enough to be going to this camp.”

  “Sure you are,” Danny said, halfway believing it by now. “You’re a great shooter and you know it.”

  “But all I can do is shoot,” Will said. “The only reason I got in is because your dad made them take me.”

  Danny grinned. “Maybe he did.”

  “I knew it!” Will said.

  “If you don’t think you belong, why don’t you stay home, then?” Danny said.

  “And mow lawns in our neighborhood like my parents want me to?” Will said. “I’d rather miss jump shots for a month.”

  “In the place known as Will World,” Ty said, “I guess that’s what passes for a shooter’s mentality.”

  Will ignored Ty and said to Danny, “You’re not hacked off because you have to go up to Maine and kick butt, by the way. Oh, no, no, no. You, my friend, are hacked off because you’re having trouble with your main squeeze.”

  Meaning Tess Hewitt.

  Will looked at Ty for approval, which is what he did when he wasn’t looking to Danny for approval after he got off what he considered to be a good line. The three of them were lying in the grass after a couple of hours of made-up shooting drills on the outdoor court at McFeeley, the best in Middletown. “Get it?” Will said. “Maine? Main squeeze? Gimme some love.”

  Ty lazily raised his right arm, got it close enough to Will that they could give each other high fives.

  “Tess is not my main squeeze,” Danny said. “And on what planet, by the way, do they still even talk like that?”

  “She is, and you know it. Everybody knows it.”

  Louder than he intended, Danny said, “She is not!”

  “Which happens to be the problem,” Will said, “even if you are too terminally dense to see that.”

  “If there is a problem,” Danny said, “it’s her problem, wanting to hang out with him rather than do what she’s always done and hang around with us.”

  Him was Scott Welles. Will called him Scooter, even though nobody else did. He had moved to Middletown halfway through the school year from Tampa, where he’d been about half a tennis prodigy at the Harry Hopman Tennis Academy, a place a lot of famous tennis players had passed through on their way to the pros. But his father was a doctor and had gotten a big offer from the North Shore Medical Center, not too far from Middletown. So the family had moved north and his parents had enrolled Scott for second semester at St. Patrick’s.

  As soon as he joined the tennis team at St. Patrick’s, he proceeded to win every singles and doubles match he played all year.

  He also won the occasional mixed doubles match he played with Tess Hewitt, who had taken lessons all winter, really concentrated on tennis for the first time in her life, and turned out to have a better forehand than Maria Sharapova’s.

  In addition to being the tennis star of the whole county and probably all of Long Island, Scott Welles proved to be one of the smartest kids in their class and looked like he ought to be starring in one of those nighttime shows like One Tree Hill.

  And he was tall.

  Taller than Ty and Will, even.

  When Danny walked next to Tess, something that was happening less and less, he still looked like her little brother. When Scott Welles walked next to her, or stood next to her on a tennis court, he looked like a guy in basketball who’d gotten a good mismatch for himself in the low post.

  Now that it was summer, the two of them were the best players on the town tennis team at the Middletown Field Club. Danny asked Tess one time near the end of school what had happened to photography and the way she loved to take pictures, and she joked, “You worried that I might get as good at tennis as you are at basketball?”

  Town tennis in summer was sort of like travel basketball had been. They had started right in as soon as school let out and had played three or four matches against other towns already. All of a sudden, if Tess wasn’t playing a match somewhere, she was practicing.

  Mostly with Scott Welles.

  Danny hardly saw her at all anymore, unless he happened to ride his bike past the field club or the tennis courts at McFeeley near the back entrance to the park. Every once in a while, Danny would talk to Tess online, but it wasn’t every night the way it used to be. And it wasn’t as fun, or funny, as it used to be. Nothing was the way it used to be when it was just the four of them—Danny, Will, Ty, Tess—when they were the Four Musketeers.

  Before Scott Welles had to move to town.

  On the grass at McFeeley, the afternoon stretched out in front of them like an open court. It was the kind of afternoon that made Danny wonder sometimes why he wanted to go anywhere this summer. He said, “She’d just rather be with him than with us, is all.”

  Back to Tess. Whatever kind of conversation they were having lately, somehow it always came back to that.

  “I actually think she’d rather be spending more time with you,” Ty said.

  “Captain Cool on the court,” Will said. “Captain Klutz off it.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means,” Ty said, “that you and Tess used to be able to read each other’s minds, and now you can’t even talk to each other.”

  Before Danny could say anything back, to either one of them, Will said, “Dude, can we get real serious for a minute?”

  Will didn’t want to get serious too often. But when he did, you had to pay attention. Danny knew how smart Will was once you got past all his jokes, like you were breaking a full-court press. In school, he got straight As even though he studied about half the time Danny did.

  “Talk to me,” Danny said.

  “You know Tess is just hanging around with Scooter because of tennis,” Will said. “When we get back from camp, and for sure by the time we’re back in school, the two of you
will be as tight as ever.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Nobody said anything. They each had their own ball, and there was a moment when all three balls were being spun toward the sky.

  “Okay, now you answer me a serious question,” Danny said.

  “About Tess or camp, those’re the only things we talk about these days. Especially now that you and Tess aren’t talking.”

  “Camp,” Danny said. “Are you really all that fired up for it?”

  Will grinned. “Doesn’t matter whether I am or not. You know the only reason I’m going is because you guys are going.” He acted like he was talking to both of them now, but Danny really knew he was talking to him. Will had known Danny longer, and better, than he knew Ty, no matter how much they hung with each other now. “If you’re there, I’m there,” Will said. “I got your back, dude. In everything. Forever. That’s the deal.”

  The only thing you could do when he said something to you like that was bump him some fist. Danny would never tell it to him this way, but the coolest thing about Will Stoddard wasn’t the way he made him laugh. It was that Danny already knew he had the best friend he was ever going to have in his life.

  “I’m happy you’re going with me,” Danny said. “And that Ty’s going, especially since he could go to any camp he wanted. I just wish I was happier I was going.”

  “C’mon,” Will said. “Basketball always makes you happy. It’s who you are, dude. Your whole life, every single time you need to show somebody new that you have game, you show them. Big-time.”

  “You sound like my father.”

  “Okay,” Will said. “That hurt.”

  “All I’m trying to say,” Danny said, “is that it’s been a while since I had to go through all that first-day-of-school crap. And don’t tell me it’s not gonna happen, because you both know it is. We’ll be there about ten minutes, and somebody’s going to tell me I’m not supposed to be up with the older kids. I just don’t need that anymore.”

  It wasn’t the whole truth, the part about him being scared, but it would do for now.

  Ty and Will looked at each other, like they didn’t know who should go first. Ty said, “You take it.”

  Will said, “Yeah, nobody’s going to have any idea who you are after you’ve won travel and did all the TV we did. You got to be the most famous twelve-year-old in America for a while.”

  “We were all famous,” Danny said.

  Will shook his head.

  “They liked us,” Will said. “They loved you.” He grinned. “The way Tess does.”

  “You’re a freak,” Danny said.

  Sometimes Will called the whole thing Saved by the Ball Handler— everything that had happened after Danny had gotten cut from the regular seventh-grade travel team in Middletown, the Vikings. Right after that, Richie Walker came back to town and started up another team, one made up mostly of other kids who’d gotten cut, and somehow got them into the Tri-Valley League after a team dropped out.

  Things got crazy after that.

  Danny became a twelve-year-old player/coach after his dad’s car accident. Ty, who’d been playing for the Vikings—a team his dad coached—switched teams. The Warriors ended up beating the Vikings in the league championship game on a sweet feed from Danny to Ty at the buzzer.

  Then they really got on a roll, winning the regionals at Hofstra University, playing their way to North Carolina—the Dean Dome!—for the semis and finals.

  They showed the finals, against the travel team from Baltimore, on ESPN2. By then a lot of media from around the country, not just from the New York area, had gotten pretty fired up about the team from Middletown coached by Richie Walker’s son, trying to win the same travel title that had put Richie on the map when he was Danny’s age.

  It didn’t seem to hurt the story that Richie Walker’s son looked little enough to be ten.

  If that.

  Middletown ended up beating Baltimore in the final game, 48–44. Baltimore was supposed to be better, lots better, mostly because of a miniature Allen Iverson playing for them—same hair as number 3 of the 76ers, even a couple of tattoos—named Rasheed Hill. But Danny finally came up with a cool box-and-one defense after Rasheed had torched everybody who tried to cover him for twenty of his team’s twenty-four points in the first half.

  Rasheed fouled out with three minutes to go, Danny drawing a charge on him. The Warriors were down six points at the time, but from there to the finish, it was the Danny Walker–Ty Ross show in the Dean Dome. Danny kept feeding Ty the ball, or sometimes just running isolation plays for him, and nobody could stop him.

  And when it was all in, like they said on the poker shows, nobody could get in front of Danny Walker.

  Danny was the one who finally put his team ahead for good with a steal and a layup. Then Ty sealed the deal with a bunch of free throws in the last minute, making them as easily as he did when he gave Danny and Will a good beatdown at McFeeley if the two of them were silly enough to challenge him to a free throw shooting contest.

  After that, everything was in fast-forward mode. They did a satellite interview on Regis and Kelly. The whole team got to go to New York City and do a Top 10 list with David Letterman. They even visited the White House. The highlight of their visit, at least as far as Danny was concerned, was Will Stoddard asking the president if he had any game.

  When the president had shaken Danny’s hand, right before Danny presented him with a Warriors jersey that had the number 1 on the back, the president had said, “You sure are following in your dad’s footsteps, aren’t you, little guy?”

  Danny thought that day, Man, you can even get little-guyed by the president of the United States.

  It was the beginning of the best year of his life. His dad got back together with his mom. Now his dad had decided to take the coach’s job at Middletown, in addition to the weekend college basketball show he was doing for SIRIUS Satellite Radio. And, like the whipped cream on top of a brownie sundae, Ty had done his transfer thing so he could come play with Danny and Will and a lot of the other Warriors who were already attending St. Patrick’s.

  Basically, Danny Walker had still felt like he was getting carried around on everybody’s shoulders.

  Then came his varsity season at St. Pat’s: six wins, seven losses, too many games when Danny didn’t just feel like he got little-guyed by the other team but felt like some ninth grader on that team had made him disappear completely.

  On top of that, Scott Welles moved to town.

  So more than a year after the biggest win of his life, it didn’t take some kind of nuclear scientist to figure out why he was feeling smaller than ever these days.

  Will got up, saying to Danny, “You want to go to Subway with Ty and me?”

  “Not hungry.”

  “You pack yet for camp?” Ty said.

  “Not yet.”

  “You want to go see the new Vince Vaughn movie tonight?” Will said. “It’s actually PG-13.”

  “Not in the mood.”

  “Not, not, not,” Will said. “You know you sound like a knothead lately, right?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Wait,” Will said, getting that look he got when he was sure he had come up with another brilliant idea. “Why don’t I call Tess on her cell, tell her why you’re moping around like the world-class mope of the universe, and ask her if she can do something to make you less jealous, just till we get to Maine?”

  Will wasn’t trying to be mean. He wasn’t wired that way. There were just times when he knew, and Danny knew, that he just had to push Danny’s buttons to get him to lighten up.

  Do anything to get a smile out of him, no matter how challenging that seemed sometimes.

  Like now.

  “You know,” Danny said, “one of these days I’m going to figure out a way to out-annoy you.”

  “It can’t be done,” Will said.

  Then he said he and Ty were going to Subway,
and right then, whether Danny wanted to come along or not.

  Danny preferred to stay and work a little more on his shot, said he was going to start getting his head right for Right Way now, so he’d be ready for the big boys next week.

  “Got to bring my A game,” Danny said.

  “On the worst day of your life,” Ty said quietly, meaning it, “you’re an A-minus.”

  Will said, “You sure you don’t want me to talk to Tess?”

  “Please go,” Danny said, then said something he said to Will all the time: “I’ll pay you.”

  “But you do plan to talk to her before we go, right?”

  “Sure,” Danny said. “I just don’t happen to feel like it right now.”

  “Well,” Will said, “start feeling like it, Sparky. Because here she comes.”

  3

  SHE WAS WEARING A WHITE, COLLARED TENNIS SHIRT AND WHITE TENNIS shorts, carrying her racket, hair tied back into a ponytail. There were hard courts and clay courts at McFeeley, but you could see the hard courts from the basketball court. Tess must have been playing on the clay courts, on the other side of the big baseball field.

  Probably with Mr. Perfect.

  Danny watched her come toward him, happy to see her despite everything that had been going on—or not going on—but still thinking, Man, her legs are longer than I am.

  He heard Will and Ty yell “hey, Tess,” as they walked in the other direction, toward town.

  “Hey,” she said when she got to Danny.

  “Hey.”

  Maybe he was Captain Klutz when it came to girls. Even this girl, who could walk around and be better looking than any girl in Middletown and still hang with the guys like a champ.

  She dropped her racket into the grass, next to his big bottle of blue Gatorade. Danny always liked it better if they were sitting when they were together, because it made him feel like they were the same size.

  “So,” she said, forcing a smile on him, “you guys ready to go?”

  “Next Saturday,” he said. “Good old JetBlue from JFK to Portland. Then a bus to camp.”

  “So you decided on the one in Maine.”