Basketball (or Something Like It) (6 page)

“You can’t pull his shirt, son. Next time that’s a foul.”

You could hear the dads shouting from the bleachers.

“Shoot.”

“Shoot the ball, Sam.”

“Take the shot, Tyler!”

“Drive in, Hank. Drive in.”

“Matt, you’re wide open, just shoot!”

The moms seemed more interested in defense.

“Hands up!”

“Hands up!”

“Watch out!”

“Oh, no.”

And, of course, the other team trash-talking the whole time. Nobody heard that but the boys on the court. Kids do it all the time. If you’re really good at it, nobody hears but the kid right next to you. Those
Walton kids were real good at it.

“Rich boy, you couldn’t hold onto that ball with superglue.”

“Nice uniform, preppy.”

“Rich kids can’t even buy a basket.”

And under their breath when they thought no one else could hear, “Even their black kid can’t play ball.”

There were two black kids on Walton’s team. One was real tall, real skinny, and real good. He scored most of the fifty-four points for their team. The other kid was very dark skinned and kind of chubby. He didn’t play much. His glasses got knocked off his face in the first few minutes of the game, and he mostly sat with ice on his nose.

Nathan was glad it was over. He was glad nobody had gotten him the ball. He was glad it wasn’t a close game so it hadn’t have mattered when his inbounds pass was intercepted by a kid on the other team. He was glad it was such an awful game that nobody would really wonder why he had gotten picked for the team.

Nathan wondered.

But mostly he was glad his father hadn’t been there.

C
oach C. was fired. Well, not fired exactly, since he wasn’t getting paid in the first place. He was a nonparent volunteer, and he got unvolunteered after the first game. What followed was a semi-democratic hostile takeover.

An emergency meeting was held in the North Bridge Public Library community room. The Gremans were thrilled. The Neeleys said, a bit too casually, that they didn’t care one way or the other. In fact, Mr. Neeley would remain assistant coach either way.

Dan Morrisey, Michael’s dad, was furious. He thought Coach C. had done “a damn good job, considering what he had to work with.” Camden’s parents thought Coach C. was a little too rough for
kids that age. The Waterhouses thought it was too early to tell. Nathan’s father was at work. His mother showed up but was in the bathroom changing a poopy diaper when the crucial vote was taken.

The minirevolution was staged and the coup carried out. Coach C. was history.

J
oel Bischoff and Coach Neeley ran the practices for the next couple of weeks. Sam Bernegger’s mother worked over at the university, and she said she’d put up a notice for a new coach. A paid coach. Maybe a physical education major or just one of those sports-crazy young students would be interested.

What they got wasn’t a phys ed major or even a student exactly, but Duke Hand
was
crazy. He had taken a couple of undergraduate classes that semester and he saw the posting. He wanted to someday “major in law” so he could become a sports agent and make a lot of money. The North Bridge parents had another meeting, and they even agreed to pay the little extra for Coach Hand’s transportation costs.

N
athan had never known a grown-up who cursed like Coach Hand did, not in public, anyway. It was kind of exciting, like all of a sudden being in a movie that his mother would never have let him see. And being that he was sitting on the bench for the entire North Bridge vs. Strathmore game, Nathan got to hear it all.

“One of these home games, I’ll come to,” Nathan’s father had told him that morning.

This was when Nathan acted all hurt and he pretended to beg his father. It was the reverse-psychology manipulation. And it was working.

“C’mon, Dad. You’ll love it. It’s real exciting.”

“If you were really doing it just for fun, it wouldn’t matter if I came to watch or not,” his father said. “You don’t ask me to watch you play computer games, do you? You don’t want me to cheer you on when you’re playing GameBoy?”

“No,” Nathan answered.

“This whole sports thing is out of control. It’s not about the kids anymore,” Nathan’s father said. He got up from the table to clear his breakfast dishes. “Maybe it never was.”

Nathan watched his dad. All these weeks he had come home from practices and told his dad about the
scrimmages and about the other players. Mostly he told his dad about Jeremy, about how he made the shot in the final seconds, or how Jeremy had stuffed some kid just as he was about to make a crucial layup. He told his dad about how Jeremy never lost the ball and could dribble between his legs.

Only when Nathan told the story,
he
was Jeremy.

His father never seemed to notice. At first Nathan was certain his father would realize these stories of amazing feats of athletic ability couldn’t be about his son. But he didn’t. And the stories just got bigger.

And bigger.

His father just listened, as if he had expected Nathan to be some great basketball star all along, just like everybody else had. Only he wasn’t. Being black may have gotten Nathan on the team, but it didn’t get him onto the floor. After the first couple of practices, it was obvious he never should have made the team.

Of course, nobody said that.

Nobody even seemed to believe it. Nathan just kept puttering along, missing layups and double dribbling. When they got to the game, he pretty much sat on the bench. At that last game, it had turned out to be the best seat in the house.

C
oach Hand argued every call. He even argued the jump ball to start the game. He said that the referee threw the ball closer to the kid on the other team. At first the referee was nice about it.

“Coach, you got possession. What are you complaining about?”

But about two minutes into the first half and twenty comments later, the referee started to lose his temper.

“Call the foul, ref!” Coach Hand yelled. “I could hear that slap from here.”

Matt King had lost the ball coming downcourt. The referee said it was clean, but Coach Hand didn’t agree. It didn’t help that the North Bridge parents
seemed to be fueling Coach Hand’s paranoia.

“What horrible reffing,” Hank Adler’s dad called out from the bleachers.

Coach Hand stood up in full agreement with that assessment.

“Sit down, coach,” the referee said. “This is a warning.”

Coach Hand yelled back, “Just call it both ways.”

The referees gave him a look and then began the play again. This time it was Tyler Bischoff going in for a layup and missing the shot.

“That was a foul,” Coach Hand stood up and screamed.

This time the referee blew his whistle. He made the shape of a T with his hands, a technical foul. Coach Hand went crazy. The parents did, too.

“What?” Tyler’s dad shouted from the bleachers. “What kind of call is that?”

The referee went over to the bleachers. He pointed right at Tyler’s dad. “Look,” he said. “I’ve got a certificate and rule book in my car. Do you want to see them?”

“Yeah, well. I got a pair of glasses and a whistle in my car, wanna use
them?”
Tyler’s dad shouted back.

The referee made the big T with his hands again. That’s when Michael Morrisey’s dad stood up. “You can’t T up a parent!”

“I just did,” the referee answered. “That’s four shots for Strathmore.” He blew his whistle extra long and loud. But it wasn’t over.

It was
not
over.

Not before Coach Hand let fly a combination of four-letter words that most of the boys had never even heard before; some configurations of people and animals and curse words that defied the imagination. Even the North Bridge parents got quiet. Everyone was looking at Coach Hand, who didn’t seem to notice. He still seemed to feel the power of the mob that was no longer behind him.

That’s when it ended.

The coach was asked to leave. Actually the referee threw him out of the game and Harrison Neeley’s dad (speaking for everyone involved) asked Duke Hand not to come to the next practice.

North Bridge lost 63–28.

J
eremy went straight up to his room after the game. His grandmother hadn’t been able to go this time. She had to work. She had tried to change her schedule with someone else at the post office, but
that person had a doctor’s appointment and, well, Jeremy’s grandmother was sorry. Jeremy knew she really was.

She wasn’t home yet, and Jeremy was kind of glad. He didn’t feel like telling her about the game. He didn’t even care. He barely got to play. But it wouldn’t have made much difference.

Jeremy sat down on his bed. On
the
bed. It wasn’t his. Not really. His grandmother said it had been his father’s room, though you’d never have been able to tell. There was no evidence of this having once been anyone’s bedroom, except for the bed. It looked like the room had been used as storage for about a hundred years. His grandmother had tried to clean it out as best she could (she bought him a new comforter), but there just wasn’t a place for all of this stuff. Pictures, boxes, folded blankets, old clothes, smelly books, smelly magazines, a bag of extension cords. A bag of bags. His grandmother didn’t throw much away. She just put things in bags and pushed them into the corners.

So this had been his father’s room. Jeremy looked around at the walls. They were dark-paneled wood, or fake wood maybe. He couldn’t tell.

And so this was the town that his father had grown up in. Weird. Totally weird. Everyone here was
so fancy and rich. Nothing like his father. Or nothing like what he remembered of his father.

What did he remember about his father? He hadn’t seen him in almost six months. Jeremy knew that after his mother died, the woman in the next apartment started baby-sitting. It wasn’t Lannie. It was two or three someones before Lannie. Jeremy was only five, but he remembered it didn’t feel right that the baby-sitter starting staying with them even when his father came home from work.

Jeremy did remember his father’s mother, his grandmother, coming to visit sometimes. She always brought presents, and Jeremy liked that. But his father didn’t. You could just feel it. Something was wrong. They didn’t like each other. His dad didn’t like Jeremy’s grandmother and Jeremy’s grandmother
really
didn’t like the baby-sitters. Any of them.

Jeremy kicked off his sneakers. One slid onto the floor and the other one went the other way, against the wall. It knocked into a little green-painted frame hanging sort of cockeyed, almost completely hidden by a tall cardboard box. It was the only thing in the room that looked like someone had once put it there on purpose. Someone had bought that cheery green frame and framed whatever was under that glass.

Jeremy leaned off the bed to read it.

It was his father’s diploma, still hanging on the wall. Framed. Well, so here was definite proof that this had been his father’s room. His father really had lived here. Gone to school here. Slept in this room. Studied. Maybe talked on the phone to his friends.

And all of a sudden something jumped into Jeremy’s brain. Something from the game that afternoon. It was after Coach Hand had gotten kicked out and they started the game again. The team was down by a million and two points. There was no chance of even
coming close. The coach called Jeremy and a bunch of other kids off the bench. He went in with the loser team.

He didn’t care.

There was a minute and a half left on the clock. Jeremy stole the ball. He’d passed it to that big kid, Joey Water-something, and by some miracle he caught it. Jeremy dodged inside. He didn’t look. He knew it, the ball was coming back to him. The big kid bounced the ball back, and Jeremy snagged it down low. He dribbled two times hard, between two kids on the other team who were closing in on him. It was like slow motion. He went up. The ball rolled off the tip of his fingers and through the net, and then, out of the corner of his eye, Jeremy thought he saw him. He thought he saw his father. Was that him? Or someone who looked like him?

Forty-five seconds left.

He really did. It was as if his father was there. Watching him. So proud.

It felt like energy inside. It felt, for those few seconds, like everything was all right again. The other team scored, and on North Bridge’s next possession Jeremy came downcourt, caught the ball at the three-point line, and hit the shot.

He was sure someone was watching him. But when the buzzer sounded to end the game, Jeremy looked again. No one was there.

T
wo days later Coach Vince was hired and Harrison Neeley’s dad was demoted to score-keeper. Although it wasn’t called a demotion. It’s just that in an effort to be 100 percent fair there really shouldn’t be any parents on the bench during games. If there are no parents coaching, then no one can accuse anyone else of playing favorites. An objective, honest, qualified coach was needed once more. And Coach Vince accepted.

It seemed just right. Vince Anderson had played high school and college basketball. He had coached at the Y and the Boys and Girls Club in New York, where he was from. He was married only a few years
and had no children yet. He worked during the day and his wife worked late. He loved basketball and he loved kids.