Summer Ball

by Mike Lupica

  “Seriously, take it easy, okay?” Danny said. Across the room he could see the two PSP kids giving them a funny look. “This is only your first real day, right?”

  “You don’t understand,” Zach said, leaning toward Danny now, his volume switch finally under control. “They make me do stuff all the time because I’m so little. My parents, I mean. Last year they even made me go to acting classes.”

  Great, Danny thought, now I’m going to hear his life story because I tried to be nice to him. I should’ve stayed for the movie.

  “Listen,” Danny said, “you don’t have to be some kind of rocket scientist to figure out that I know something about being the little guy, right?”

  “Whatever.”

  “And to be honest with you,” Danny said, “even though I’m a couple of years older than you, I wasn’t all that hot on coming up here myself. But now that I’m here, I figure the only thing to do is give it my best shot.”

  “But it’s going to stink,” Zach said. “If I was going to go to sleep-away, I would rather have gone to the one not too far from here that my friends went to, where it’s not all about basketball, where you don’t get sent because your parents think you’re better than you really are….”

  Danny saw Zach’s lower lip start to shake a little. More great news, he thought. He’s going to start blubbering.

  But Zach saved him then, saved both of them, maybe because he wasn’t going to lose it completely in front of some kid he just met. Instead of crying, he grabbed the basketball at the end of his bed and practically sprinted out the backdoor.

  Danny wasn’t sure how to handle this, but something made him follow the kid. Maybe the two of them had something in common other than being short for their age. Because no matter what was happening in Danny’s life, no matter how lousy he felt about something—when his parents were having trouble, a bad grade, getting cut from the Vikings—he’d always felt that basketball could cure everything.

  At least for a little while.

  Zach was on the small, lighted court between Gampel and Staples, already dribbling up a storm, and Danny could see right away how amazing he was with the ball, even as small as his hands looked on what Danny’s eyes knew was a regulation-size ball. He went to the far end and shot a layup, collected the ball, came back the other way, pulled up for about a twenty-footer, what looked to be a little outside his range.

  Air ball.

  It made Danny smile, not because Zach missed, just because of his form, launching the shot off his shoulder as if he were launching a shot put.

  The way Danny had always launched it until his dad made him change.

  “Yo,” Danny called out. “You want some company?”

  “Whatever,” Zach said when he turned around to see Danny standing there.

  “Hey, don’t sound so excited.”

  “You want to play?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, okay, if you feel like it,” Zach said. “But you don’t have to just because you’re feeling sorry for me.”

  “I never have to play basketball,” Danny said. “I always want to play.” Then he made a sudden cut to the basket. As soon as he did, Zach hit him with a pass, right in stride, money. Then Zach broke toward the opposite basket, like he was trying to sneak away in a game, and Danny hit him with a football pass.

  Zach caught it and, without even dribbling one time, laid the ball in left-handed.

  And smiled for the first time.

  Had to, Danny knew from his own experience.

  If you were righty, a left-handed layup always made you smile.

  Danny asked if he wanted to play some one-on-one. Zach, as if suddenly remembering he was supposed to be in a bad mood, went back to his punk voice, the one with the attitude. “Whatever.”

  “Oh, you are definitely going down, sucker,” Danny said.

  How did things possibly work out this way? Danny thought. Me having to cheer up somebody else after the crappy first day I had at camp?

  He decided to stop worrying about it and just play.

  He didn’t play his hardest, just hard enough so that Zach wouldn’t bust him for not playing his hardest. Danny basically wanted it to be a good, close game, so that Zach’s own even crappier first day wouldn’t become something for the summer camp record books.

  They played until the horn sounded from the main building, the one that meant back to the bunkhouses for lights-out. Zach actually ended the game laughing when Danny made a fadeaway, hold-the-pose shot to beat him 10–9.

  Zach laughed so hard that it made Danny laugh, until the two of them realized a couple of guys had been watching them.

  One was Rasheed Hill.

  The other was a kid Danny didn’t recognize, taller than Rasheed. He was wearing a yellow Kobe number 8. His face and short hair even reminded Danny a little bit of Kobe.

  “Check it out,” the other kid said to Rasheed. “These two musta got lost looking for the jungle gym.”

  Then he laughed at his own joke and got Rasheed to give him five.

  Rasheed said to Danny, “What is this, the JV area?”

  Before Danny could say anything back, the two of them walked away.

  “Who’re those jerks?” Zach said.

  “I don’t know the one who was doing the talking,” Danny said. “The other one is this guy I played against once. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You can probably kick his butt,” Zach said, like Danny was his hero all of a sudden.

  “I did once,” Danny said.

  Thinking to himself, Yeah, but can you still?

  6

  MONDAY AFTERNOON. FIRST FULL DAY OF REAL CAMP AT THE RIGHT Way Basketball Camp.

  They’d worked their butts off all morning in ninety-degree heat, occasionally getting short water breaks—but not nearly enough of them to suit Danny, and he never got thirsty or worn out playing ball. The older guys were separated strictly by age today, thirteens with thirteens, fourteens with fourteens, like that, and went from a shooting clinic to a passing clinic to a defensive clinic, even to one for full-court presses, both zone and man-to-man, with a different college coach handling each station. Some of the names Danny knew just from following college hoops; some he didn’t, because not all of them were from big schools.

  The first clinic was at eight in the morning, and each one lasted an hour. At noon they all dragged themselves to the mess hall for lunch.

  Will said to his buds, “If the afternoon is like the morning, I’m busting out of here like it’s Prison Break.”

  “C’mon,” Danny said, “it’s not so bad. It’s still basketball.”

  Ty, who could go all day the way Danny could, said to Danny, “Tell me you’re not whipped already, and that was only the morning session.”

  Danny grinned. “You’re right. I want my mommy.”

  Jeff LeBow came into the mess hall then with his trusty bull-horn and said they were getting two hours at lunch today instead of the usual one, so they could all be assigned to teams. Mr. LeBow said they’d been evaluated off the morning workouts, and now the coaches and counselors were going to basically choose up sides, trying to make them as fair as possible in terms of size, position, talent.

  “The elevens and twelves are in one league, the Final Four league,” Mr. LeBow said. “Thirteens through fifteens are the NBA, two divisions, Eastern and Western. In that one, we want at least three boys from each age group on each team. Once the games start at the end of this week, if we see we’ve made one team too strong or too weak, we’ll do a little horse trading. But the group you get with today, you can pretty much expect it to be the group you’re going to be with for the month.”

  It was a different place today, Danny had to admit. Everybody in charge moved a lot faster than they had on Saturday and Sunday.

  All ball, all the time.

  In that way, Right Way was his kind of place.

  He felt that way until their long lunch break was over, anyway. Then they all went to t
he big message board where the teams were posted and found out that he and Will and Tarik were on the same team with Rasheed Hill.

  Ty had been assigned to a different team, one that had two Boston kids, Jack Arnold and Chris Lambert, on it, but Ty didn’t care. As long as there was a game being played and he was in it, he was cool.

  He went off to Court 4. Danny and Will and Tarik headed off in the opposite direction, toward Court 2, the one behind Gampel, closest to the lake.

  When they got down there and met their coach, the day only got worse.

  Coach Ed Powers, a tall, thin man whose gray hair matched the color of his face, said that if anybody didn’t know who he was, he’d been the head basketball coach at Providence College for thirty-five years before the good fathers there—the way he said it didn’t make it sound as if he thought the fathers were all that good—had decided it was time for him to retire and turn his job over to a younger man.

  Even in the heat, Danny saw, Coach Powers wore long pants and had his blue Right Way shirt buttoned to the top button.

  He spoke in a quiet voice, but somehow his words came out loud anyway, at least to Danny.

  “Boys,” Coach Powers said, “prepare yourselves over the next few weeks to unlearn everything you think you’ve learned watching what I like to think of as TV basketball. Because if you don’t unlearn that junk, you’re going to spend most of your time with me running laps.”

  He stopped now, smiled the kind of smile you got from teachers sometimes right before they piled on the homework and said, “With me so far?”

  Will whispered, “No, Coach, you’re going way too fast for us.”

  Danny couldn’t help himself and laughed out loud.

  “You think something is funny, son?” Coach Powers said.

  To Danny.

  The players were sitting to the side of the court. Coach Powers came over to Danny and said, “Stand up, son.”

  He did.

  Will’s hand shot straight up in the air. “Coach, wait a second. It wasn’t his fault.”

  Coach Powers said to Will, “Was I talking to you?”

  “But—”

  “It’s good that we get this straightened out our first day together.” Still talking to Will. “The only time I want an answer from you on this court is when I ask you a question.”

  It looked as if it took all the willpower Will Stoddard had to keep his mouth shut.

  To Danny, Coach Powers said, “What’s your name again?”

  “Danny Walker, sir.”

  “Walker?” he said. “Where are you from, Mr. Walker?”

  “Middletown, New York.”

  Coach Powers nodded, started to walk away, then turned back around.

  “Oh,” he said, “Richie Walker’s boy.”

  It wasn’t in the form of a question, so Danny just stood there, waiting.

  “Thought I had your dad recruited, back in the day,” he said. “Thought he was going to be the one to put me in the Final Four, which I was never fortunate enough to make in my long career. But then Mr. Richie Walker changed his mind at the last minute—or someone changed it for him—and it was the Orangemen of Syracuse he took to the Final Four instead.”

  Somebody changed it for him? What did that mean? Danny had no clue.

  “Your dad ever tell you that story?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No reason why he’d want to, I suppose,” Coach Powers said. “But here’s what I’d like from you before we continue: a couple of laps around the court. And your friend there can join you.”

  Danny, feeling humiliated, feeling everybody else on the team watching him, ran twice around with Will, not running his fastest to make sure Will stayed with him.

  When they finished, Danny knew the heat he was feeling on the back of his neck wasn’t just the sun, it was being called out this way in front of the whole team.

  As he stood there catching his breath, Coach Powers said, “When I say run, boys, I don’t mean jog like people my age do in the park.” He didn’t even look at Danny and Will as he said, “Two more.”

  This time Danny ran like he was in the last leg of one of those Olympic relays, even if it meant getting to the finish line about ten yards ahead of Will.

  “More like it,” was all Coach Powers said when they finished, before he addressed the whole group again.

  “Make no mistake,” he said, “we will all be on the same page here, from the beginning of the book. Which is going to seem like the first book on basketball you’ve ever read in your lives.”

  He took a whistle out of his pocket, hung it around his neck.

  “There’s something all you boys need to know,” he said. “My team has won the camp championship the last four years. Walked away with a little something they now call the Ed Powers Trophy here. And as unlikely as it seems to me right now, looking at this group in front of me, I plan to make it five in a row a few weeks from now.”

  He blew the whistle, making Danny jump, and said to them, “Now stand up.”

  They all did, as if it were a contest to see who could get up the fastest and stand the straightest. “Least we got some size to us,” Coach Powers said. “With a few exceptions.

  “Players who want to win in basketball get with the program,” he continued. “The ones who don’t will end up doing so much of the running Mr. Walker and his friend just did they’ll think they ended up at soccer camp by mistake.”

  Danny thought he was already getting paranoid because of this guy, because he was sure the coach was looking right at him as he said, “And from the look of some of the fancy players I saw at this morning’s clinics, soccer camp is where some of you belong.”

  He had been walking up and down in front of them, a basketball he’d picked up on his hip. Danny was almost positive he could hear him creak as he moved. Suddenly he stopped in front of Rasheed.

  “Now, from what I saw this morning, I was lucky enough to end up with the most complete player in this whole camp, young Mr. Hill, here,” he said.

  What, Danny thought, he’s not a fancy player?

  Then he watched as Ed Powers handed Rasheed the ball and said, “This is your ball, son, until somebody shows me they can take it away from you.”

  Danny just stared at the two of them, feeling Will’s eyes on him like they were laser dots.

  Danny just knew Will wanted him to turn around in the worst way, but he wasn’t doing it, mostly because he knew what his friend was thinking:

  His ball.

  Not Danny’s.

  Before they’d even scrimmaged.

  Coach Powers put his arm around Rasheed now, as if they were already one team, and the rest of the guys standing in the line were another.

  “I know they call this camp Right Way,” Coach Powers said. “But let’s be real clear about something from the start. From now on, you young men are going to play the game my way.”

  Each bunkhouse had a designated night to use the pay phone in the old-fashioned phone booth outside the main building. Jeff LeBow had informed everybody that they were here to play, not do play-by-play for their parents.

  Gampel’s phone night was Monday.

  Danny thought there’d be more kids wanting to use the phone, but the line that Nick organized—he seemed to put the saddest looking kids at the front of it—wasn’t as long as he expected it to be.

  Zach Fox still looked sadder than anybody in the whole bunk, but he’d stayed behind.

  “I’m not going to lie to them and tell them I’m having a good time when I’m not,” he said.

  “But you said you liked your coach and some of the guys on your team.”

  Nick said Zach had gotten the youngest coach in Division I, Bill Brennan from Fordham, who was just thirty years old.

  “Just because he’s a good guy doesn’t mean I want to spend half my stupid summer with him,” Zach said. He flopped back on his bed and started rifling through the pages of a Hoop magazine.

  Ali Walker answered wh
en Danny finally got the phone. And she immediately started asking a lot of Mom questions about the trip up there, his counselors, the food, if he was showering and brushing every day, how pretty the property was, even asking a joke question about where the nearest girls’ camp was.

  “I have no idea,” Danny said.

  Ali said, “I could MapQuest it for you.”

  “Mom,” Danny said, “if there is a girls’ camp nearby, I guarantee you, Will Stoddard’ll find it.”

  “Excellent point.”

  The two of them kept making small talk like that, and as they did, it occurred to Danny that he was making everything sound better than it really was, which meant telling the kind of lies Zach Fox was refusing to tell to his parents.

  He told her about being in the younger kids’ bunk, tried telling her it was no biggie before quickly changing the subject, but his mom was all over him. “Are you sure it’s no biggie?” she said.

  “I practically feel like one of the counselors,” Danny said. “It’s kind of fun being the old guy for a change.”

  There was a pause. Mom radar at work, even long-distance.

  “You say it’s fun,” she said. “But you don’t sound that way.”

  “It’s fine, Mom, really,” he said. “Plus this guy I’m with, Zach, could use a friend.”

  “Well,” Ali said, “he couldn’t have a better one than you.” Then she said she was going to put his dad on the phone, they probably had big basketball things to talk about.

  “Oh, wait, I almost forgot,” she said. “Tess called.”

  Danny stood there in the old phone booth and couldn’t help feeling ridiculously excited. But he wasn’t going to let his mom in on that, even if she had her good radar going tonight.

  So all he said, making his voice as casual as he could, was, “How’s she doing?”

  “We didn’t talk all that long. She just wanted the address up there,” his mom said. “I hope it was all right that I gave it to her”—Danny heard the smile in her voice as she added—“even in a time of war.”

  “C’mon, you know it’s not war,” Danny said, trying to use the same tone of voice, like this was no biggie, either, the subject of Tess. “It’s much more serious than that.”