Summer Ball

by Mike Lupica

  “Hurry up,” Will said. “We’re timing you.” When Danny gave him another elbow, Will added, “Hey, I time my little brother on stuff all the time.”

  But Zach must have taken him seriously, because he was back with the ball in about a minute, face red, completely out of breath, looking totally pleased with himself.

  That kind of night, Danny thought. Even Zach Fox, camp-hater, is happy.

  And for an hour before they had to get back in the van, without any whistles blowing, without Coach Ed Powers busting his chops, he wasn’t Time Out Walker anymore. Danny was happy, too. He had Zach with him and Ty and Alex. Shirts against the skins.

  Like they were back at McFeeley Park in Middletown.

  For an hour, behind the Congregational church down by the lake in Cedarville, Maine, basketball was fun again, the way it was supposed to be.

  The way it used to be.

  The feeling lasted until the next afternoon, when Danny’s team scrimmaged Ty’s team at The House.

  Of horrors.

  9

  LEAGUE GAMES TRADITIONALLY BEGAN THE SECOND WEEK AT RIGHT Way. Until then, the coaches were free to schedule scrimmages among themselves. There was a big sign-up board inside the front door to The House, and getting court time in there was pretty much first-come, first-served. Jeff announced at breakfast the next morning that each scrimmage was limited to one hour.

  The college counselors reffed the scrimmages, same as the league games.

  Ty’s team was called the Cavaliers. They were coached by Tom Rossi. Danny knew Rossi had started out as a college coach, then took over the Hornets for a few years and was back in college now at Florida State. He was a short guy, slicked-back hair. Ty said he was funny, talking from the time practice started until he blew the whistle and announced it was over.

  According to Ty, Coach Rossi had told them the first day of practice to pay close attention, he was going to explain his entire offensive philosophy all at once.

  “Run,” he’d said.

  Then came his defensive philosophy: “Press.”

  “Great,” Danny had said, “you get the fun coach.”

  Tarik had said, “And we get Dr. Evil.”

  “No,” Will said. “Dr. Evil was funny.”

  The Cavaliers were tall enough that Coach Rossi had Ty playing small forward. Their center, a fifteen-year-old named Oliver Grey, who Tarik said was from the same neighborhood in Coney Island as Stephon Marbury and Sebastian Telfair, was already 6-6, even if he was almost as skinny as Ty.

  Their backcourt was the two Boston kids, Jack Arnold and Chris Lambert.

  As soon as the scrimmage started, just after four o’clock, Danny saw that they ran as much as the guys said they would, ran as though there were some kind of invisible ten-second shot clock right above the backboard. And even though Jack and Chris were supposed to be the guards, it seemed to Danny that Ty ended up in the middle of more fast breaks than the two of them combined.

  Danny saw something else. Oliver Grey had already figured out that if he busted it every time he got a rebound and started another Cavs fast break, Ty would make sure he led the camp in dunks.

  At one point, after he had caught a lob pass from Ty and dunked over Ben Coltrane, Tarik leaned over and said to Danny, “I think after this, Ollie’s gonna take Ty for ice cream.”

  After about ten minutes, the Cavs already led 24–6, and Coach Powers signaled for a time-out. Danny expected him to light into the first team for a change. But he didn’t.

  “That pinball basketball their coach coaches always looks impressive early in camp,” Coach Powers said. “But don’t get caught up in it. Let them keep running till their tongues are hanging out. You boys just keep running our stuff. Okay?”

  Everybody nodded.

  Right before they broke the huddle, Rasheed said, “Hey.”

  It stopped all of them. He never spoke in the huddle unless Coach asked him a direct question. Now he acted as if he’d just been waiting for Coach to stop talking so he could start.

  “But we run when we can, right?” he said.

  It came out a question, but Danny knew it really wasn’t.

  “Absolutely,” Coach Powers said.

  Rasheed said one more thing, to their big guys, Ben and David Upshaw: “You gonna let that Ollie guy school you all day, or what?”

  Now he walked out of the huddle.

  The Celtics proceeded to cut into the Cavs lead, mostly because Rasheed got hot, and because of the charge he’d put into Ben and David, who finally started competing against Ollie at both ends of the court. It wasn’t until there were about four minutes left in the half that Coach Powers called down to Danny and said, “Mr. Walker, give Rasheed a rest.”

  Talking to him the way you talked to a scrub.

  Like he was only here to give the star of the team a chance to catch his breath.

  Danny made a couple of good passes once he got in, one of them to Tarik on a backdoor cut. Ollie got over there a step late.

  The other one was on the break. Danny fed Will on the left wing for what he thought would be a jumper. But when the defender went for him, Will—already in midair—passed the ball back to Danny, who slap-passed it to Ben for a reverse layup.

  The Cavs had most of their second team in there, but Danny didn’t care, his team was cutting into that lead, and he was finally hooping as if he still knew what he was doing.

  With forty seconds left in the half and the Celtics only down by a basket, Coach Powers asked for another time-out. He called them over, told them to run a play they’d been working on for a couple of days, one he called “Carolina.”

  Coach Powers had said it was a variation of the four-corners offense his friend Dean Smith used to run with the Tar Heels in the old days, when they wanted to run out the clock. He had told them to use the four-corners to set themselves up for a three-point shot at the end of a half or a game. The point guard would eventually have the ball in the middle of the court, and the shooters would run to their designated spots behind the three-point line.

  With the second team, Will and Tarik were the shooters.

  The Celtics ran down the clock the way Coach wanted them to, passing the ball around near the half-court line, weaving in and out. With ten seconds left, as if on cue, Tarik and Will ran into opposite corners, Alex and Ben ran to set picks for them, and Tarik and Will came curling around those picks ready to shoot.

  Danny dribbled toward Tarik, not even needing the clock now, counting the time off in his head.

  Nine seconds.

  Eight.

  Tarik’s man seemed to read the play perfectly, getting right around the pick and cutting him off.

  But Tarik, knowing how little time was left the same way Danny did, gave the guy a head fake, like he was determined to get open for a three, then cut for the basket instead.

  Wide open.

  Four seconds on the clock.

  Danny fired about a thirty-foot bounce pass that should have had steam coming off it, even on a hot day.

  Best pass he’d thrown at camp.

  Wet, as Tarik would say.

  But Tarik must have taken his eye off it for a second. Maybe it was Ollie Grey, back in the game now, scrambling to get back in the play from the other corner. Maybe he slowed down to get his feet right.

  The ball went off Tarik’s hands and out of bounds.

  He looked at Danny, shook his head, banged his chest hard as if to say “my bad.”

  Then they heard the whistle blow.

  Not a whistle belonging to either of the guys reffing the game.

  Coach Powers had his whistle in his mouth and didn’t blow it once. He blew it again and again.

  He pointed at Danny, then at Tarik, and said, “You two. Take a seat!”

  Tarik, not really thinking things through, pointed to the clock in The House and said, “Coach, there’s only a few seconds left in the half.”

  Coach Powers gave Tarik a look that Danny thought might actuall
y set him on fire.

  “Take a seat,” Coach said, “or take the rest of the day off.”

  It was like they were being sent to the penalty box.

  Where, as it turned out, they should have stayed.

  Because it was late afternoon and practices were ending all over camp, a lot of kids were filling up the stands to watch the end of the Celtics versus Cavaliers.

  Coach Powers had Danny sit next to him for the first ten minutes of the second half, having calmed down by now. He pointed out why this offensive set went wrong or that one did, saying this guy set a pick wrong or that guy was slow to switch, see what happens when a play starts to break down like that?

  He finally gave Danny a pat on the shoulder and one of those smiles of his, the ones where his lips seemed to disappear completely, and said, “Now, go in there for Rasheed and run the offense I want to run, not the one you want to run.”

  The score was 46–40 for the Cavs when Danny went back out there, along with Tarik and Alex Westphal.

  The Cavs immediately went on a 16–2 rip.

  Coach Rossi had his guys start pressing all over the court again, and as soon as they did, Danny felt like he was trying to cross some kind of busy street in traffic.

  They had done some work at practice, trying to beat a press.

  Not this press.

  Danny kept trying to tell his guys what to do, where to go. Didn’t help. Wherever the ball ended up, there was an immediate double-team, or a triple-team, one that somehow always seemed to include the long arms of Ty or Ollie Grey.

  The only help they were getting from Coach Powers was this:

  “Think!”

  “You know what I think?” Will said to Danny, while Ty knocked down a couple more free throws. “I think this dweeb only gets to be our coach for about twenty-two more days.”

  “And seven hours,” Danny said.

  Tarik pointed at the real clock, not the game clock. “And thirty-four minutes.”

  Danny threw the ball away twice. Dribbled off his foot when he tried to beat one of the Cavaliers’ traps and get down the sideline.

  He’d had one of his outside shots blocked by Ty, which made everybody in the stands cheer.

  “Sorry,” Ty said quietly after the ball bounced out of bounds.

  “Me, too,” Danny said.

  Danny didn’t look at the scoreboard again until it was 75–50 with one minute left. He was wondering by then why somebody hadn’t invoked the kind of slaughter rule they had in Little League baseball.

  For some reason, Coach Powers called one last time-out. In the huddle he said to them, “Nobody thinks so right now, but this has been a great lesson. Would you boys like to know why?” Without waiting for anybody to answer, he said, “I’ll tell you why. Because everybody on this team got a real nice wake-up call today.” He was nodding his head. “You all learned a lesson that boys learn the first week of camp every single year—that only the strong survive here.”

  Will, behind Coach Powers, made a gag-me motion, quickly sticking his finger in his mouth.

  “So as we go forward as a team after today, we’ll find out who our survivors are going to be,” he said.

  Then he told them to run what he called the old picket-fence play, from Hoosiers, Danny’s true all-time favorite movie. He had had the play memorized long before Coach Powers showed it to them, the way he had the movie memorized.

  They took the ball out on the left side, near half-court. Danny started dribbling right, toward the stands. As soon as he did, the Celtics started setting their screens for him, one after another. First Will, then Tarik, then Alex, who set a monster one on Ollie Grey.

  Danny came tearing around Alex like a streak, hit the baseline at full speed, seeing he had a clear path to the basket now.

  He knew how long Ollie’s legs were, how quick he was to the basket or the ball when he wanted to be. But Danny had him now, by ten feet easy, maybe more.

  He thought about going to his left hand as he came down the right baseline, showing Coach Powers that he could bank in a left-hand layup, but decided against it. He wasn’t taking any chances. He was just going to float up a soft little layup and get the heck out of here, go to supper having scored at least one basket today.

  He kept his chin up, eyes on the basket like his dad had always taught him, in a lifetime of telling Danny to play the game with his head up, putting what he knew was the perfect spin on the ball as he released it.

  Then Danny kept running underneath the basket, the way you ran through first base in baseball, angling his body as he moved into the left corner so he could watch his shot go through the basket.

  What he saw instead was Ollie.

  Catching his shot.

  Not just blocking it, catching it with both hands and letting out this roar at the same time.

  Catching it like it was a lob pass Danny had been throwing to him.

  Ollie was so high, had so much time to kill up there, he actually faked like he might throw the ball down, even if this was the Celtics’ basket. Then he smiled and cradled the ball, landing as the horn sounded.

  But the horn wasn’t the sound Danny would remember.

  He would remember the laughter, from what sounded like everybody in The House.

  All of them laughing at him.

  10

  IF HE HAD BEEN BACK IN MIDDLETOWN, HE WOULD HAVE GONE OUTSIDE to the basket at the end of his driveway.

  Danny would have stayed out there all night if he had to, come up with a new move so that nobody would ever grab one of his shots like that ever again. He would have taught himself to stop when he got to the basket—“Stop on a dime, get nine cents change,” his dad would say sometimes, quoting some old comedian whose name Danny couldn’t remember—so that the defender would go flying past him.

  Or he would have practiced reverse layups, going underneath the hoop and then going left-handed, spinning the ball off the board, repeating the move a hundred times until he got it right.

  He would have figured something out, the way he always had with basketball things.

  Figure it out.

  Isn’t that what his dad had said about camp?

  Problem was, there was no basket at Right Way that belonged only to him, even at night. No place where Danny could be alone. It was something you learned pretty quickly at camp: You were hardly ever alone. There were always other guys around.

  He’d only been here a week, and already he knew that camp was pretty much the opposite of being alone.

  Oh, sure, there were courts and hoops everywhere you looked. But when you did get a hoop to yourself, that never lasted for long. As soon as somebody saw you, it would be like there was some big flashing sign at the top of the backboard: Please come shoot around with me.

  He and Will and Ty had joked about being famous when they got here, because of the way everybody wanted to talk to them about their travel team. Now he was famous at Right Way for something else, for being the first kid at camp to get laughed right out of the gym.

  Ollie came over to him after it happened and said, “Didn’t mean to show you up that way, little dude.”

  Danny had always prided himself on being a good loser. His dad always told him that if you didn’t know how to lose you’d never know how to win. But all he said to Ollie was, “No, nothing like that.”

  “Being straight with you, little dude.”

  “Hope you make SportsCenter,” Danny said, and walked away.

  Outside, Will said to forget it, no biggie, it was just one stupid play. Tarik said the same thing. Danny told them he’d see them at the mess hall for dinner, he was just going to chill for a while.

  Telling your buds you needed to chill could get you out of almost anything, Danny knew by now.

  So he headed off in the direction of Gampel, wanting to be alone. Or maybe just not wanting to be here, not wanting one more person in the whole stupid state of Maine to tell him that it really wasn’t so bad, Ollie Grey giving him that kind
of diss-down in front of what felt like half the camp.

  He passed Gampel, passed the court there, a bunch of eleven-and twelve-year-olds playing a pickup game the way they usually did at this time of day. He didn’t see Zach out there but didn’t look too closely, either. If he kept moving, nobody would talk to him between now and dinner.

  The next bunkhouse after his own was Staples. There was another court behind Staples, one Danny figured would be empty, because the league games, Danny’s and everybody else’s, had just ended.

  But as he came around the corner he heard the bounce of a single ball, then saw that this court was the private property of Lamar Parrish.

  Rasheed’s friend. The Kobe look-alike in the Kobe jersey who’d made fun of Danny and Zach that time. Danny knew his name now because everybody in camp did, because the consensus among the rest of the campers, no matter what age they were, was that if Rasheed didn’t have the most pure talent at Right Way, then Lamar did.

  Some other things Danny knew about him, mostly from Tarik: Lamar was supposed to have been on the Baltimore team Middletown had played in the travel finals in North Carolina, but had left the team halfway through the season when his mom had gotten a job at some fancy private school in Alexandria, Virginia, one with a big-time basketball program.

  “His mama was just part of the deal,” Tarik had said. “The coach there saw Lamar play in some AAU game that fall and wasn’t gonna take any chances. So he recruited Lamar and his mama.”

  “Wait a second,” Danny had said. “You’re saying that this coach recruited a seventh grader?”

  “Duh,” Tarik said. “These guys see somebody they even sniff might be the next LeBron, they show you a first step even quicker than LeBron’s.”

  Danny wanted to know why that same coach hadn’t gone for Rasheed, too.

  “He did,” Tarik said. “’Sheed’s mama wouldn’t let him do it.”

  Lamar Parrish was loud, cocky and, from everything Danny had seen and heard, a bully. Not the kind of bully you’d run into at school sometimes, the kind who went around looking for fights, who acted like fighting was the only thing he was good at. No, Lamar was a basketball bully, one who knew he could get away with acting however he wanted, acting as mean as he wanted or as obnoxious as he wanted toward the other team or his own team, just because he was better than everybody else. Danny had watched his camp team—the Lakers, of course—scrimmage one day, heard how much talking Lamar did even though there was supposed to be a camp rule against trash talk, watched how Lamar’s coach—Rick Higgins, from Cincinnati—acted as if he was the only one on the court who couldn’t hear the abuse Lamar was heaping on any player who wandered into his space.