Summer Ball

by Mike Lupica

  That wasn’t what blew Danny away that day.

  What blew him away was how much Lamar shot.

  He didn’t just look like Kobe, he thought he was Kobe, hoisting up shots every time he got an open look, even if somebody on his team was a lot more open than he was.

  According to Tarik, who was like some kind of one-man Google when it came to answering camp questions, Rasheed was the only friend Lamar had here. Now here he was, alone on this court, totally focused on some kind of shooting drill he seemed to have made up for himself, shooting from one corner, rebounding the ball, sprinting to the other corner, shooting from there, a crazy version of Around the World, where he kept crisscrossing the court as he moved himself along an imaginary three-point arc.

  It was when he banged one off the back rim and had to run to half-court to retrieve the ball that he saw Danny standing there.

  As soon as he did, he burst out laughing, laughed so violently he started coughing.

  “I’d ask you to shoot around with me,” he said when he finally got himself under control, had even wiped tears out of his eyes. “But what’s the point if you can’t get the dang ball to the dang basket?”

  So he’d seen.

  Who hadn’t?

  “Wait, I got a better idea, midget,” Lamar said. “Why don’t you make yourself useful, come shag balls for me?”

  “I’m busy right now,” Danny said, and started walking again, sorry that he’d stopped.

  “Busy with what?” Lamar said, his voice getting louder, like he was playing to a crowd, even though there wasn’t one. Or maybe he was hoping to attract one. “’Cause after what I just saw, you can’t be busy with no hoopin’.”

  Danny didn’t know why, but he stopped, turned and saw Lamar shaking his head, heard him say, “What I just saw over at The House wasn’t basketball. Was more like that beach volleyball. Know what I’m sayin’? Where the little people throw it up there so the big people can slam?”

  He started laughing again.

  “I’ve got a question for you,” Danny said. “Does anybody except you think you’re this funny, Lamar?”

  Lamar’s smile disappeared. “You smart-mouthin’ me, midget?”

  Walking toward Danny now.

  “Just asking a question.”

  Inside his head, Danny was asking himself a better question.

  Where were counselors when you really needed them?

  Lamar was up on Danny now. “You know who’s funny?” he said. “You are. You think everybody in this whole dang camp isn’t wondering how many strings your daddy had to pull to get you in here?”

  “If I stink so much,” Danny said, “how’d we win travel?”

  Danny wanted to step back. The number 8 from his Kobe jersey, the old-school one that Danny knew was supposed to be like the one the old Minneapolis Lakers used to wear, was right in his face. But some dumb part of him wouldn’t allow him to take even one step back.

  This is how fast it could happen. Danny’d seen it his whole life, a basketball court like this turning into the dumbest place on earth.

  “’Cause I didn’t play, midget. That’s why you won,” Lamar said. “The boy with all the basketball smarts the television guys talked about ought to be able to figure that out for himself.” Danny noticed Lamar was palming the ball in his right hand. “So don’t be comin’ ’round and talkin’ no smack about travel with me, or the two of us are gonna have a real problem.”

  Like we don’t already?

  “I’m not talking smack,” Danny said. “But I have as much a right to be at this camp as you do.”

  “Well, then, why don’t the two of us play a game of one-on-one and see just how much you belong, midget man?”

  Then, as if he was throwing some kind of undercut punch, he put the ball hard into Danny’s chest, knocking all the air out of him, doubling him over.

  Danny couldn’t say anything back because he couldn’t breathe.

  “Didn’t quite catch your answer,” Lamar said.

  Danny, having finally managed to straighten up, said in a whispery voice, “I told you, I’m busy.”

  “Yeah,” Lamar Parrish said. “Busy bein’ the camp mascot.”

  This time he bounced the ball off the top of Danny’s head, as hard as he’d punched him with it in the chest. Catching the ball in his huge right hand, he walked away laughing.

  Last laugh of the afternoon.

  The only quiet place Danny could think of was the lake, so he ran down there, ran all the way to the end of the dock and sat down, feeling like he was still trying to catch his breath. Sat there for a long time until Zach showed up.

  This was another time when he felt as if Zach was tracking him by radar.

  “Want some company?” Zach said.

  “If I wanted company,” Danny said, “I would have gone back to the bunk.”

  It was as if he’d whipped a ball at Zach’s head.

  “I just thought you might want to hang,” Zach said. “Maybe play one-on-one later, like we did that first night—”

  Danny cut him off. “Maybe after dinner.”

  “Okay.”

  Still not leaving.

  Danny looked up at him and said, “Run along now, okay, Zach?”

  For a moment, Zach looked as hurt as Tess did that last day at McFeeley, another time this summer when Danny Walker had known he was acting like a total jerk and couldn’t stop himself.

  Then Zach was the one who sprinted on this dock, sprinted away from Danny. With his trusty basketball, Danny noticed now, under his arm.

  From the dock you could walk along the rocky little beach to get to where the coaches lived at Right Way. Or you could take a shortcut through the woods on a dirt road just wide enough for the golf carts that people over there got to use when they wanted to go back and forth.

  Danny took the path. On his way over, Tom Rossi passed him in a golf cart, and Danny asked which cabin belonged to Coach Powers. Rossi told him it was number 7.

  He was hoping that Ed Powers hadn’t gone into town for dinner or gone to the movies or was just somewhere else. His mom had told Danny his whole life how brave he was, as though it were some kind of automatic that you were brave if you were small. But he wasn’t sure he could screw up his courage twice to do what he had to do tonight.

  He knocked on the door. When it opened, Coach Powers acted surprised to see him.

  Or maybe he was surprised to see anybody coming to visit him.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “This is rather unexpected, Mr. Walker.”

  He was wearing the same Right Way shirt he’d worn at the scrimmage, buttoned to the top as usual. The only difference now that he was home was that he’d changed into shorts, which showed off the closest thing to chicken legs Danny had ever seen.

  In his hand was a pad of long yellow paper. When he saw Danny looking at it he said, “Used to take notes every night on what I wanted to do at practice the next day. Old habits die hard, ’specially for an old man.”

  He motioned to a couple of wicker chairs on his front porch, saying, “It’s such a nice night. Why don’t we sit out here? Would you care for some iced tea? I was about to fix myself a glass before I heard the knock at the door.”

  “Sure, thanks,” Danny said.

  The coach went inside and came back with two tall glasses. He handed one to Danny and took a sip of his own. “It’s the splash of lemonade that makes it just right.” He handed Danny his glass and nearly smiled. “Iced tea, my way.”

  He angled the chairs so they could face each other, and when they’d both sat down, said, “What can I do you for, son?”

  Danny thought, I came here on my own, and I still feel like I got called to the principal’s office.

  But he knew he better get to it right now before he really did wimp out.

  He took a deep breath and said, “Is there any way you can put me on another team before the games start?”

  Coach Powers drank some more of his iced tea an
d carefully put the glass down on the deck next to his chair, as if he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t make a sound. Then he leaned back and folded his arms across his chest.

  “And why would I want to do something like that?”

  Danny had his answer ready. He’d been practicing it inside his head since he’d walked out of The House after the scrimmage, practicing it on the dock, practicing it as he walked through the woods to get here.

  “We’re just not a good fit, you and me, Coach,” he said. “It’s all my fault, for sure, nothing on you, everybody knows what a great coach you are, what a great system you have. I just can’t get it down, is all, probably because I’m not your kind of ballplayer.”

  Coach Powers raised one of his eyebrows amazingly high.

  “Well, there’s quite a mouthful. Is that coming from you or your dad?”

  “Me,” Danny said. “Me, definitely. Absolutely. I haven’t even talked to my dad about this.”

  “Because it sure sounds like something he said to me once, back in the day, not being my kind of ballplayer, like he was some kind of square peg trying to go into a round hole.” He shook his head slowly. “Only he was wrong, and so are you. There’s no such thing as my kind of player. In my thinking, you’re a basketball player, or you’re not.”

  “I’m sure you’re right about that,” Danny said. “I still think we’d both be better off if I was playing for somebody else, and I was hoping you’d agree.”

  He felt as if he said the last part in about one second flat.

  Coach Powers sipped more lemonade. “So you get off to a bad start, and now you want to quit, is that it?”

  “I guess you could say I want to quit your team,” Danny said. “But I was thinking of it more like a trade or something. You know, one of those trades that they say afterward helped both teams.”

  Coach Powers leaned forward, hands on his knobby knees, and said, “It’s not happening.”

  “But—”

  “Hush now and do something you should do a little more of if you want to improve or learn anything while you’re here—which means listen.”

  Danny, both hands on his glass now, realized how hard he was squeezing it and put it down on the deck.

  “The team isn’t your problem,” Coach Powers said. “And I think you’re an intelligent enough young man to know that.” Now he was talking in that soft voice of his that never meant good news. “Do you want me to be honest with you, or do you want me to be one of those modern coaches who’d rather hold your hand than teach you proper basketball?”

  “Be honest,” Danny said.

  Wondering as soon as he said that just how much honesty he actually wanted from this guy.

  “The real problem here,” the coach said, “is that since you’ve been here, Danny, you’ve gotten a look into the future.” He paused. “Your future.”

  It was the first time Coach Powers had used his first name.

  “And what you’ve seen, with your own eyes,” he said, “is that this sport is going to break your heart eventually.”

  Cabin 7 was on a hill overlooking the lake. In the distance, over the coach’s shoulder, Danny could see a couple of rowboats. From the beach, he heard somebody laugh. A small plane flew overhead. When the plane disappeared, Danny heard the first crickets of the early evening.

  Danny wasn’t moving, wasn’t saying anything, just waiting to see where the coach was going with this.

  Coach Powers said, “I was never one of those coaches telling his players only what they wanted to hear, like coaching was some kind of popularity contest.”

  All I wanted to do was get off your stupid team, Danny thought. Now I’m going to have to hear your life story.

  Or mine.

  “My dad says that sports always tells you the truth,” Danny said. “Whether you always want to hear it or not.”

  “Oh, is that what your dad says?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we’re not here to talk about your dad. We’re here to talk about you,” Ed Powers said. “I don’t want you to quit my team any more than I want you to quit this camp. And I’m not telling you that you can’t be a fine player in high school. But—”

  He stopped now. Came to a dead stop. Coach Powers did it on the court sometimes, as if he’d lost his place or had forgotten what he wanted to say next. The kids would just stand there and wait until he remembered what he wanted to say.

  Finally he said, “What I guess I’m trying to say, in a nice way, is that you’re probably never going to grow enough to get to where you want to be in basketball.”

  “What about travel?” Danny said.

  “That’s the seventh-grade world, son. I’m talking about the real world.”

  Danny put his head down, almost talking to himself as he said, “I’m a good player.”

  “I’m not saying you’re not,” he said. “And if sports were fair, and you were even close to being the size of the other boys, I’m sure you could shine. But sports aren’t fair. And the other boys aren’t your size. They’re not just bigger, they’re a lot bigger. And you see what’s happening because of that, before we even start playing real games. You saw what happened out there today.”

  Coach Powers said, “I’m only telling you this for your own good.”

  Danny wanted to say something back to him. Tell him how wrong he was, that the problem was what he came here to talk about, that he was just on the wrong team. But he didn’t. And knew why.

  Here was a famous basketball coach, one he didn’t even like, putting Danny’s worst fears into words.

  Saying them out loud.

  “Danny,” Coach Powers said, “you can learn things here. I can teach you things if you’ll let me. I just can’t teach you to be as big as you need to be.”

  The coach stood up then, his way of saying, Danny knew, that the visit and the conversation were coming to an end.

  Almost over, but not quite.

  Coach Powers said, “Let me leave you with one more thought I had which might sound crazy to you at first, but could be something for you to think on.”

  “What?”

  “Soccer.”

  The word seemed to float there like one of the first fireflies of the night.

  Coach Powers said, “I was only kidding that first day when I told you boys I was going to run you like soccer players. But the more I’ve been thinking about it, watching the way you can run, well, soccer’s full of fast little guys like you.”

  Danny stood now. He’d thought that Ollie Grey catching his shot that way, then the other guys laughing at him, was going to be the worst thing he heard today.

  “You’re telling me to…to find another sport?” he said.

  Coach Powers put a hand on Danny’s shoulder.

  “I’m telling you to at least think about it,” he said.

  11

  DANNY WALKED BACK ALONG THE BEACH, STOPPING EVERY TEN yards or so to skip another flat rock across the water. Pretending he was trying to skip a long bounce pass to somebody cutting for the basket.

  Find another sport, Coach Powers had said.

  Not saying it in a mean way, the way he could get so mean on the court sometimes when you messed up. That would almost have been better, Danny told himself.

  No, this was much worse, definitely.

  He meant this.

  His idea of finally being nice was telling Danny in a nice way that he couldn’t play.

  Danny reached down, found a smooth, flat rock, a perfect skipping rock, the kind you could bounce across the smooth surface of the water five or six times. But he threw it too hard, way too hard, so it dove into Coffee Lake and disappeared like a gull diving into the ocean back in Middletown.

  Back home.

  This sport will break your heart eventually, Coach Powers had said.

  Danny was back at the dock by now. It was starting to get dark, and he noticed the lights from what he was pretty sure was the girls’ camp across the lake, the summer homes on
both sides of it.

  What if Coach Powers was right?

  What if he was somebody telling him the truth, somebody not afraid to hurt little Danny Walker’s feelings?

  What if he was an adult who didn’t think it was his job to make Danny go through life feeling special?

  Okay, here was another what-if:

  What if Ollie Grey wasn’t even one of the best big guys in camp? What if there were guys a lot better than him? What was going to happen when Danny went up against them? Reach for the sky, his mom had always told him. Well, how had reaching for the sky worked out for him today, in front of what felt like the whole stupid camp?

  When Danny had walked out of the gym, he’d briefly imagined himself as somebody who’d just been gotten good on Punk’d, imagined somebody running up and telling him it had been some kind of prank they’d pulled on him, that it was all just a big joke.

  Only there were no television cameras, because the joke was on him.

  He’d never quit anything in his life. He’d thought about it a couple of times. He’d never done it. He hadn’t even quit piano that year his mom had made him take it.

  But he was sure of something now.

  He needed a ticket out of here.

  He didn’t have the whole plan worked out yet. Just the start of one. And the start of it was acting like he never wanted to leave Right Way, like he was a kid trying to make a team.

  That’s how hard he tried at every single clinic.

  When a ball would bounce away from one of the coaches, Danny would sprint after it. When they’d ask for a volunteer to get back on defense for a three-on-two drill, his arm shot straight up in the air.