Summer Ball

by Mike Lupica

  He heard her laugh, a sound that had always made him feel better about everything, and then she said, “Love you.”

  Knowing he was safe inside the phone booth and that no one outside could hear him, he said, “Love you, too, Mom.”

  “Here’s your dad.”

  The next thing he heard was Richie Walker saying, “Hey, champ.” As soon as he did, Danny cut him right off. “Dad, promise you won’t tell Mom any of what I’m going to tell you.”

  “Promise,” Richie said.

  Then Danny told him as much as he could, as fast as he could, about Coach Ed Powers. He was out of breath when he finished, like he’d just had to run more laps.

  Richie told him to relax, they could talk freely, his mom had just gone out to the store.

  “I can’t believe you pulled him for a coach,” Richie said.

  “Dad, the guy hates me.”

  “He hates anybody who thinks basketball is a sport and not chess with live pieces. And minds of their own. I don’t know how this guy got to be some kind of offensive guru, but he did.”

  “He acted like every single thing I did today other than go to the water fountain was dead wrong.”

  “That’s him,” Richie said. “But remember, it’s still only the first day. He probably just wanted to scare you all half to death to get you with the program. Even he has to know this is summer camp and not boot camp.”

  “But Dad,” Danny said, “it’s not just me. It sounds like he hates you, too.”

  “Oh, God,” Richie said. “Did he give you all that BS about how I changed my mind at the last second about going to Providence, back in the day when he still let his players actually play?”

  “He made it sound like you changed your mind at the very last second.”

  “Don’t even get into it with him,” his dad said. “But just so you know, I turned them down way early in the process, and then turned them down again after one of their rich alums offered me some money under the old table. I’ll tell you the whole crazy story when you get home.”

  Danny said, “It’s like basketball by numbers, Dad. That’s not me. That’s not ever going to be me.”

  “You’ll just have to win him over,” Richie said. “’Cause the guy’s probably going to be as obsessed with winning there as he was coaching college. And he’ll see that you can help him win.”

  “No way,” Danny said. “Remember that kid Rasheed from Baltimore we played in the travel finals? Coach already announced that it’s his ball.”

  “Take it from him.”

  There was a knock on the door. Danny saw Nick out there, pointing at his watch.

  “Coach Powers is gonna wreck my whole camp. I just know it,” Danny said.

  Now he really did sound like Zach.

  Richie said, “Only if you let him.”

  “But, Dad—”

  “Listen, I’m not gonna try and tell you that you didn’t get a bad deal,” Richie said. “You did. But you’ll figure it out.”

  “I can’t play for him.”

  “Guess what? You are playing for him.”

  Nick rapped on the door again. Danny made a sign, like just one more sec.

  “If you’re good enough,” Richie continued, “you can play for anybody.”

  Danny fired one up from half court.

  “Is there any way you could call Mr. LeBow?” Danny said. “Since he didn’t get me in the right bunk, maybe he could do something to get me on the right team.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “You’re going to have to suck it up, pal,” his dad said. “You’ve had one bad day. Get the most you can out of the drills with the other instructors and then just make sure you show this guy what you’ve got when the games start.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “If basketball was easy,” Richie said, “everybody’d be a star.”

  Then he said he loved him and would talk to him next week, and the next thing Danny heard after that was a dial tone.

  Danny Walker stood there looking at the receiver in his hand, and for one quick moment, there and gone, he wished there was a way he could make one more call tonight.

  To Tess.

  Way after lights-out, Danny was sure he could hear Zach crying in the bed next to his. He was trying to be quiet about it, face buried in his pillow. Danny was sure he was the only one hearing it.

  But it was definitely crying.

  When it had gone on for a while, Danny whispered, “Hey, you okay?”

  Silence.

  “C’mon, Zach. I know you can hear me.”

  There was a big moon lighting the lake outside, so Danny watched as Zach turned his head on his pillow to face him now. “Leave me alone,” he said.

  “Listen,” Danny said, “it’ll get better.”

  “It won’t!”

  He was trying to whisper now, but it reminded Danny more of a hissing sound from some old radiator.

  “But you said yourself that having me as your roommate was a good thing,” Danny said.

  “Not good enough. Besides, I’m only with you at night.”

  Danny didn’t say anything. He was sorry he’d said anything in the first place, because he could see Zach getting worked up all over again. “How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to be here?” Zach said. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t be able to leave.”

  “Because you’d be quitting,” Danny said to him, knowing it was something his dad would say, remembering the day at McFeeley when he told Will he sounded just like Richie Walker. “And you can’t.”

  “Why not?” Zach said.

  The words came out of Danny before he even knew he was going to say them: “Because I don’t quit. And you’re just like me.”

  7

  DANNY WAS LEAVING HIS PASSING CLINIC THE NEXT DAY—AT LEAST the coach running that, an assistant coach from Duke, thought he could still pass—when Jeff LeBow came running up and said, “Great news! I found a guy at Boston Garden who’s willing to move his stuff over to Staples Center, where his cousin is.”

  The move, Danny figured, was about fifty yards, but it sounded like some kind of NBA road trip.

  Jeff said, “I don’t know if I can get you in the exact same area as your friends, but at least you’ll be in the same building with them.”

  “Thanks,” Danny said, “but I’m good where I am.”

  Jeff looked at Danny as if he’d just asked if it would be all right if he could help out cleaning the bathrooms every morning once everybody had gone off to breakfast.

  “You want to stay with the young guys?” he said.

  Danny tried to make a joke of it. “I’ll pretend you held me back a year in school.”

  “All kidding aside,” Jeff said. “You sure you don’t want to think this over? Because if I tell the kid at the Garden he has to stay where he is, that’s it for everybody. Done deal. Which means I’m done being a real estate agent.”

  “I’m sure,” Danny said.

  When he explained it to Will and Ty at lunch, Will said, “Let me see if I understand this. You’re staying in a bunk you don’t really want to be in and passing up a chance to move to the bunk you do want to be in so you can look out for a kid who doesn’t even want to be here?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Will turned to Tarik and said, “And he calls me weird.”

  “He’s not weird, dog,” Tarik said. “He just sticks.”

  “Sticks?” Will said.

  “That’s what you do when you’re loyal,” Tarik said. “You stick, even if it’s to somebody you barely know.”

  “Word,” Will said.

  “Beyond word,” Tarik said. “Walker here, he’s wet.”

  “I’m never gonna know all your words, am I?” Will said.

  “Probably not,” Tarik said.

  Ty just sat there doing what he did a lot, only opening his mouth for the purpose of smiling at his friends.

  The second day with Coa
ch Powers was worse than the first.

  Danny never opened his mouth, avoided any kind of eye contact unless Coach Powers was talking directly to him, hustled his butt off even if that just involved chasing a ball that had bounced off the court, and tried his best to learn the offense they were being taught—Coach Powers’s famous Providence College passing offense.

  It didn’t take Danny long to figure out why it was called that, by the way.

  Because all Coach Powers seemed to want them to do was pass, at least until somebody finally got a layup off one of the backdoor picks that seemed to be the only thing in the world that made him genuinely happy.

  “No outside shots until you get it down,” he said. “First team, you guys just keep running it all the way through, and if it doesn’t produce an easy two, then swing it back to the top and start all over again.

  “You’re going to know what to do and where everybody is on the court at all times, as if you’ve been running this offense since your first Biddy Basketball league.”

  “And running…and running…and running,” Will said to Danny on the down-low. “They should call our team the Energizer Bunnies.”

  They were on the second team, along with Tarik, who’d turned out to be slow but was a ferocious rebounder. Rasheed was on the first team, of course. Danny was actually curious to see how Rasheed was going to handle an offense like this, one that did everything except puncture the ball they were using to take the air out of it. Danny was sure an offense like this wasn’t nearly big enough to fit Rasheed’s game, no matter how much Coach Powers said he loved him now, even if the coach had practically declared that it was as much Rasheed’s team as his.

  Danny thought about asking him, but Rasheed hadn’t said a word to Danny after the first time they’d seen each other. It was as if they were on different teams, even playing on the same team. Different teams or maybe just different worlds.

  The first hour of practice was spent going through the offense over and over, Rasheed’s five getting a lot more time with the ball than Danny’s five.

  Coach Powers finally blew his whistle and told them to get some water, because after that they were going to scrimmage all the way to dinnertime.

  At one of the water fountains, a safe enough distance away from the coach, Will said to Danny, “Can I say something without you getting that shut-up-or-die look on your face?”

  “If you can say it quietly.”

  Will said, “I just wanted you to know I did notice one guy having fun while we went through ballet class.”

  “Who?”

  Will nodded at Coach Powers.

  “Him.”

  When they were all back on the court, Coach Powers told them to match up with the guys they’d had before. “Now you’re all going to do some real scrimmaging,” he said.

  Danny had been guarding Cole Duncan, a redheaded kid with a million freckles from a town in Pennsylvania Danny had never heard of, and the player on the starting five closest to Danny in size, which meant close enough that it didn’t look like some ridiculous mismatch. Cole was much more of a pure point guard than Rasheed. Danny had seen that right away, the first day they were all together. Coach Powers had Rasheed at the point, anyway, and didn’t seem to mind that even in the big ball-sharing offense, Rasheed still had the ball more than anybody else out there.

  He went over and stood next to Cole now.

  “Walker?” Coach Powers said.

  “Yes, Coach?”

  “Why don’t you guard Rasheed and have your friend…” He hesitated, like he’d lost his place, and finally just pointed in Will’s direction.

  “Will Stoddard,” Danny said.

  In two days, it had become clear that Coach Powers either couldn’t remember Will’s name or didn’t want to.

  “Have Mr. Stoddard guard Cole.”

  Danny didn’t say anything, just nodded as he and Will shifted positions.

  “Thought it might be kind of fun for you and Rasheed to get yourselves reacquainted in a game,” Powers said to Danny. “I didn’t see that big travel final the two of you played down in North Carolina, but I heard it was some game until the refs decided it.”

  The refs decided it?

  Danny bit down on his lip so hard he was afraid it might split wide open, not wanting to say something that would get him in even deeper with this coach than he already was, or get him punished into running around the court for the rest of the afternoon while the other guys played five-on-four without him.

  That was the smart thing to do.

  Just shut up and play. Start trying to win this coach over, like his dad said.

  But he couldn’t do it. Not when the guy was this wrong.

  Not about that game.

  “All due respect, sir,” Danny said, knowing Will’s theory that nothing good had ever come after “all due respect” in the history of the universe, “but you heard wrong.”

  He looked up at Coach Powers and said, “The refs didn’t decide it because we did.”

  Behind him he heard Will say, “That’s exactly what we did.”

  Danny turned his head long enough to see Will shrug. His wingman forever.

  Now nobody said anything on Court 2 at Right Way. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved.

  Finally Coach Powers came over, stood in front of Danny and said, “Is that so?”

  As if Will hadn’t said anything, as if he wasn’t even there.

  Danny knew there was no turning back. So he stood his ground.

  “My dad says the only way the refs ever decide anything is if you let them,” Danny said.

  “Well, I’m the ref today,” Coach said. “I’ll try to stay out of your way, Mr. Walker, let you boys decide things for the next hour or so.”

  He did exactly that.

  While Danny and his team got leveled like they were in one of those end-of-the-world movies.

  Richie Walker, Danny knew, overpraised him sometimes. He said he didn’t, wanted to believe he was tougher on his son than anybody, held him to a higher standard. Promised Danny that he’d always be straight with him about basketball when the two of them really got down to it, when the conversation was something his dad described as being “point guard to point guard.”

  “The way all those ex-soldiers say they’re talking marine to marine,” Richie told him one time.

  And most of the time, he would be honest with Danny.

  Problem was, there was one thing he couldn’t overcome: He was a dad. And unless you had one of those psycho sports dads who never thought their kids did anything right—guys who really did act like marines—dads couldn’t help themselves in the end.

  They saw the player they wanted their kid to be. Or just plain-old thought their kids were better than they really were. They especially thought that way if, like Richie Walker, they couldn’t look at their kids without seeing themselves.

  So Danny always thought his dad was going a little bit overboard when he’d talk about Danny having “the eye.”

  Which, Richie said, was something you were either born with, or you weren’t.

  When the subject came up, Danny would say, “Yeah, I know I have pretty good court vision, or whatever. I know that even when I turn my back to one side of the court and head in the other direction, I still remember where everybody is behind me.”

  Then Richie would say, “No, no, no, it’s more than that, and you know it.

  “‘The eye,’” Richie said, “means you see things happening on the court before they actually happen. It’s the reason why the other kids are still holding on to the ball like it’s their blankie instead of doing what you do, getting the open man the ball the split second he breaks open on account of the fact that you’re already passing the ball the split second before he gets open.”

  Even when Danny thought his dad was blowing smoke at him, he still loved how excited Richie would get talking deep hoops like this. It would be another one of those role-reversal deals they had between them sometimes, w
ith Richie Walker the one acting like a little kid.

  Sometimes Danny would throw one of his dad’s favorite expressions back at him. “Pop,” he’d say, “you sure you’re not overthinking this?”

  Richie would give him a brush-off gesture with his hand and say, “Make fun if you want. But with the best thinkers out there, the beauty of the whole thing is that they’re not thinking at all. They’re just playing a different kind of game. ’Cause they see things and know things the other guys don’t.”

  Except on this day, Richie Walker’s son played as if he’d forgotten everything he ever knew.

  As if all the doubts he had before he came here weren’t just doubts, they were all true.

  He couldn’t play with the big boys.

  He didn’t measure up.

  He was pressing, he sure knew that, which meant he was going against one of his most important rules about sports, even if the rule sounded like it made no sense: You had to relax to play your hardest, to have any chance at all to play your best.

  Danny kept telling himself he’d play through his nerves, the way he always had in the past when he got off to a bad start.

  Never happened.

  It also didn’t help that Rasheed was all over him like a bad rash, all over the court, playing a camp scrimmage as if somehow it were the fifth quarter of their game in North Carolina. And it didn’t exactly hurt Rasheed that he had bigger and better ballplayers with him on the first team.

  None of it would have mattered, Danny knew, if he were on his game. He wouldn’t even be looking for excuses because he never looked for excuses when he was on his game, which was most of the time. He’d gone up against bigger and better teams plenty of times, refusing to quit, like a dog with a bone, until he did figure out a way to win.

  Just not today.

  Today he was playing like a dog in front of Coach Powers. All his life, Danny had been the one the guy guarding him couldn’t get in front of, no matter how big the guy was. Only now he couldn’t get in front of Rasheed Hill, who was schooling him all over the place.

  The eye?

  It was Rasheed who seemed to have eyes in the back of his head on Court 2 and Danny who played as if he had rocks in his head. The more he tried to make perfect passes in front of this coach, show him what a good passer he was, the more he threw the ball away. When he would occasionally get a step on Rasheed and get inside against the two tall fifteen-year-olds they had on the team—David Upshaw from Philadelphia, Ben Coltrane from outside Syracuse—he would get completely swallowed up. Then David or Ben would swat another one of his passes away like they were swatting away the summer bugs that seemed to swarm Right Way at night.