Playing Days (15 page)

A few months later something happened that suggested a different side to the story. The league we were playing in covered a lot of ground. Sometimes we had to travel six hours by bus to a game, which also meant, since the club was too cheap to pay for accommodation, another six-hour ride home afterwards. Most of the buses had TVs screwed into a corner of the roof up front, with a VCR installed, and the players took it in turns to bring videos along for the journey back.

Mid-December; snow piled up to the side of the highway, melting and yellow under the lamps. Under the moon, the wide forested distances of Bavaria. We had lost a tough game in Freiburg, which turned out to be Hadnot's last game for us, but if he was on the way out, he was the only one who knew it. I can't remember the name of the movie, some kind of romantic thriller. The roar of the coach was too loud for most of us to hear the words, but we sat there, sleepless, uncomfortable, in the sadness that is sometimes deeper than the disappointment which occasions it, watching the images shift on the small screen.

There was a scene in the movie of a couple on a date: the man had cooked a nice meal for the woman at his place. Candles and folded napkins, etc. Dinner was followed by a little music and a little dancing around the
coffee table with its magazines laid out. The music was the only part I could really hear. Eventually they went upstairs and got into bed together, though even that was drawn out and involved a number of artfully angled hesitations. Hadnot started talking as soon as they stood up from dinner, a kind of rumble like the play-by-play of a race announcer. I couldn't make sense of what he was saying, it sounded like so many numbers, and then I realized he was listing a series of odds. From the man's point of view – he was calculating how likely he thought it was that he'd get laid.

This isn't my kind of joke, and it's certainly not the kind of joke I'm good at telling. Besides, you more or less had to watch the movie at the same time, and see the woman accept a cigarette, or blow out the candle, or say something, naked in bed, like ‘talk to me.' But Hadnot had most of the guys in stitches by the end. Five to one, he said, in his soft southern accent, both gentleman-like and rough. Three to one. Seven to two. On and on as the highway miles went by.

It struck me only afterwards how unhappy the whole thing seemed, and I gave the incident a sort of caption in my head, like a
New Yorker
cartoon: The Statistics of Love. On the other hand, it wasn't the joke of a man who never thought about sex.

While all this went on we played basketball, twice a day and a game on the weekends. Sundays off, and Sundays seemed, for the contrast, to belong to a different world, in which other things mattered again. Unemployment, weather, foreign wars. There was a kiosk in town that sold the weekend Herald Tribune, and on Sundays I bought it and sat with a pot of tea over it, looking out the glass door to my balcony and on to the fields across the road.

We won our second game on the road against Augsburg. Hadnot, who had found his legs by this stage, scored sixteen points off ten shots. Milo played well too, under control, and managed to tease and harass their top scorer, a kid fresh from Michigan State, into throwing punches at him; he got sent off. But I was glad to see some of the punches land.

Afterwards, Milo was so happy that he smuggled a girl onto the team bus, who had to be kept hidden from Henkel. She claimed to be at vocational college, training to be a floor manager, but looked no older than seventeen. This seemed very funny for about twenty minutes, until it became clear to her that she would simply have a late ride home again, and Milo and she spent the rest
of the journey negotiating how to get her back. In the end, he drove her; it was only an hour and a half. I felt for the moment a part of the whole stupid setup, laughing at Milo and trying at the same time to keep the girl hidden; maybe I felt this because we had won. I scored three points.

There were ten teams in our league, and everybody played each other twice. At the end of the season, the second place club traveled to the first place club for a playoff that determined promotion to the first division. That was the prize: one game, winner takes all. The first division meant more money, more travel, the European league. National television exposure. Magazine interviews. A different life.

It's hard to describe what matters in sports without resorting to the banality of numbers – which is all that you'd see reported, the day after a game, in the Munich newspaper:

Samstag, 5 Oktober.

TG HITACHI Landshut – TV AXA DIREKT Langen: 83: 85 (49: 41).

A wet thundery night at home; the crowds stank of heat and dampness. Karl played especially poorly and for the first time vented his anger on court. Still, we were up at the break, thanks to the big men, Olaf and Plotzke, who played dirty under the boards and got their way. In the second half, Karl more or less refused to pass. Whenever he got the ball, he launched himself into a shot, until Henkel had to pull him and put me or Milo
in. Hadnot played forty minutes. One of those games I'm not sure how we lost. We ran around until our legs gave way and after it was over somehow they had come out on top. Karl continued angry in the shower, and most of us left him alone. I washed back at the apartment, but Olaf stood up to him for once, and they ended up slapping each other and squirting shampoo. Olaf, who was fully dressed, got drenched.

‘Young man,' he kept saying, ‘this is no laughing matter.'

But Karl had cheered up by that time. We lost the next game by twenty to Koblenz on the road.

Something was wrong, even I could see that. Henkel played around with the line-ups in practice, and for a few days I ran with the starting five. The trouble was, his two best scorers couldn't play together: Karl disappeared whenever Hadnot was on court. That's why he started firing up shots against Langen – a childish bid for attention. Henkel could only get forty good minutes out of the pair of them. I hadn't panned out yet, and Milo was too much of a head-case to be trusted on offense. Which left Charlie taking jumpshots when the first option broke down.

On the long ride back from Koblenz, Henkel walked silently up the aisle distributing stat sheets to all the players. Not just for that game, but for the season. There was something awful about seeing your contributions to the cause so concisely summed up. Markovits: 2.3 ppg 35.1% FG etc. Karl led the team in total points, at just under
eighteen a game, but Hadnot shot for a better percentage and scored more per minute. Hadnot was thirty years old, though, and the club was trying to market Karl as a rising star. Henkel wanted the international scouts to make their way to Landshut, but the scouts don't come to watch a div 2 German club that loses three quarters of its games.

As it happens, Henkel was happy with what he called ‘my progress.'

‘You don't play crazy anymore,' he said.

What he meant was, I had learned my role. It was my job to swing the ball on offense, set hard screens on the block, and take the odd open shot. I played the second line on our press and closed off the corner at half-court. On defense, I pushed the wings baseline, blocked out on the perimeter, and made myself available for the outlet. Then I filled a lane behind Charlie. I did none of these things particularly well, but I did them. Henkel had decided what I was good for and how to put me to use.

Something was happening to me, and it occurred to me, a few months into the season, that all my curiosity and mild general friendliness was a defense against whatever it was. My relationship with Anke had pushed aside everyone else. Olaf and Milo cycled to bars together after practice and checked out girls. Charlie never invited me to lunch again. Darmstadt had his high school friends. Thomas Arnold and Karl began to hang out at his father's big place in the hills. And Hadnot – what I was doing with Anke colored my feelings towards him,
too. I was looking after his kid and making out with his wife. The taste of her in those first few weeks, still strange and thick on my tongue, stayed with me all day. Even with the salt of exertion in my mouth. You get used to it, as you get used to your own smell, but sometimes I caught a whiff of that, too.

Hadnot looked out for me more, after our country drive. On Mondays I brought in the weekend Tribune and gave it to him after practice: the back pages covered American sports. We sat on the slatted locker room benches and talked box scores.

‘I used to play against some of these stiffs,' he said.

Often I left him, holding the wrinkled paper in his hands, damp from the shower steam, still reading out the stat lines.

In the morning, I continued to warm up with Karl, but Bo sometimes asked me to work out in the afternoons, and when I wasn't seeing Anke, I spent an hour inside with her husband in a lightless mirrored room, pushing weights around.

These workouts were almost as intense as my dates with Anke. The sweat of his hands was on my hands; I could feel against my skin the heat of his skin. We both stank. More than these things, the companionableness of shared patience: we had a series of set tasks to get through, and it was dangerous to hurry them. Dumb bells, squats, lat pulls. Before and after, we helped each other stretch out. I pressed back against his lifted leg, while he lay flat; one leg and then the other.

He mentioned to me once that he figured on having another two or three good years. If he kept himself in shape, if he managed to get out of this Podunk league.

‘I don't know what I'm sticking around for,' he said. ‘My daughter can't talk to me. My wife doesn't want to.'

‘How long you been separated?'

‘Most of the off-season.' He lay back on the bench press and shrugged his shoulders, adjusting his hands on the bar.

‘Can I ask you what went wrong?'

‘You can ask me,' he said, and bent himself to the weight.

Afterwards, I went home with a racing heart to see Anke, but she was cool and sweet as ever, and we spent the rest of the afternoon twisting our fingers together under her coat, while Franziska climbed up and down the slide in the children's playground. I didn't tell her about these sessions, or him either about the days I spent with his wife. I used to be secretive as a child, without having much to keep secrets about. I was a good kid. It was a manner, more than anything else; it didn't count for much. But these days I had good reason. So this is what I'm like, I thought.

Anke, whenever we went out, was conscious that Landshut is a small town. We kissed mostly in the kitchen, with Franziska in her cot two rooms away. Or sometimes, on warm days, under the trees on quiet back
streets, with the girl asleep in her stroller. But when Franziska was awake, we couldn't help being seen together, and Anke once admitted that the sight of me with her daughter aroused something in her blood, almost a sexual feeling. She felt other less happy and more complicated things at the same time; she didn't mean to frighten me away.

‘I'm not frightened,' I said.

Occasionally we treated Franziska to a salty packet of fries from the McDonald's on the High Street. Anke disliked going, she had spent too much time there as a teenager, smoking outside on the benches. And some of the girls she used to go to school with, the ones she despised, still hung around outside, with their babies in buggies, eating chicken nuggets and smoking. But Franziska liked it, so we sometimes went. I liked it, too – the thought of revisiting, a few years too late, the scenes of her teenage rebellion . . .

‘It wasn't rebellion,' she said. ‘It was just boredom.'

But even her boredom appealed to me.

Once, coming out, I saw Milo making his way along the High Street, hunched two-handed over a Styrofoam box, bending from the heat of the sandwich. I almost called out to him; then thought, maybe it's best he doesn't see me here with them. Then thought: maybe he has seen me already.

Milo had been at the club a few years. I didn't know if he could recognize Anke, though even the sight of me
with a girl, a girl with a kid, was enough to make him gossip. But I heard nothing from him at practice that evening, or in the showers afterwards; and nothing the next day. With relief I decided, he probably didn't see us. Even an innocent relation with Hadnot's wife might have been awkward for me, given their public separation and my friendship with Hadnot. We were becoming known as the Americans.

Then, a few days later, I beat Milo for the first time at a suicide shuffle. That was when he complained about my cheating – he had seen me skip one of the repetitions. Out of laziness or tiredness, I don't know; it surprised me as much as anyone when I finished first. Milo always hated losing, but I heard in his protest a little more warmth than usual.

‘Ben cheats,' he said to Henkel. The German word is schummeln, which sounds to my ears almost Yiddish, and especially hateful and vivid. ‘He can't be trusted.' Turning to Olaf: ‘Somebody must have seen him.'

‘Calm down, it doesn't matter. Who cares about these things, anyway?'

Not exactly the defense I hoped for, though it was true: nobody did care. Except Milo and me. But if Milo knew something about Anke, I never heard any more about it.

Once I asked Hadnot what he thought about while going up to shoot. We were feeding each other baseline jumpers, running out at the shooter with stretched
arms. ‘Screw you,' he said at first, and for a second I thought he meant me, that he knew about Anke. But all he meant was, in a general way, when he played basketball he thought, fuck everybody. You don't succeed at sports unless you have a certain reserve of blind anger. I was building mine up.

We traveled to Würzburg on Saturday and the night before the club laid on a special dinner at the gym canteen. Thomas Arnold, Charlie, Henkel all wore jacket and tie; some of the others showed up in sweat pants. One of the administrators, a woman named Angelika, whom I once heard referred to as the Judge's wife, served us – cold meats for starters, and after that, as much pasta as we wanted from large hot tureens. No wine, but a few of the players, when the meal was over, pushed back their chairs and lit cigarettes.

The occasion was a visit from ‘our owner,' as she was introduced to me, a widow named Frau Kolwitz. Very small, with colorless straight hair cut like a schoolgirl's. She rarely spoke, and even when I saw her open her mouth, little sound came out. She had the air of a woman who confided only in trusted advisers, clustering at her elbow, and Henkel, in fact, spent much of the evening with his ear lowered to her lips.

Milo, who was sitting opposite, leaned over and told me what she was worth. Eight or ten million, he claimed, though he had a tendency to exaggerate, especially about money. He believed such stories established him as someone with inside knowledge. Herr Kolwitz, he said,
had made his fortune by providing processing services for various companies; they outsourced their factory work to him. He had developed a number of buildings for flexible use, in Bavaria. It was all very sophisticated, technologically; these factories brought a great deal of work to the region. When he died, a few years ago, the papers carried his picture on the front pages. His wife used to be his secretary.

She wore rimless glasses, with gold ear-hooks, and instead of her eyes, I saw mostly squares of candleshine. I tried to imagine her as an attractive woman. Russell, I heard, was in some way her responsibility.

The club itself had been her husband's pet project. She wanted particularly for us to beat Würzburg, and I heard again the story of our rivalry. A coach and two of our best players had deserted – Chad Baker, an American, and a big German point man named Henrik Lenz. Hadnot wanted to go, too, Milo said, but the league stepped in. Teams often folded, and there were rules about the number of players that could be absorbed by any one club in a single year. Landshut appealed, and Hadnot got stuck where he was. Even so, Frau Kolwitz had never forgiven him. The episode was connected in her memory with the difficult last years of her husband's life: he had taken these desertions personally. A certain amount of ill-will between the teams was only natural and sporting given the circumstances, but this had a trace of real blood in it.

When dinner was over, Henkel stood up and made
a short speech. ‘There are a few people here tonight,' he said, ‘who don't know me well, and I want to explain something important about myself. I am one of five brothers; all of us played basketball. We used to want to play football, but my mother got tired. She couldn't make eleven.' A little pause for laughter. ‘But we took over the local club. I was the youngest and my idea about the right way and the wrong way to play basketball comes from that team. A team is family. Maybe you fight like cats with each other at home, but against everyone else you fight much worse, like – tigers.'

This was really the way he talked. He had two small children and doted on them. He had the childishness of a young parent. Besides, here was a man who had devoted his life to the game his brothers taught him as a kid. ‘The head of this family,' he said, ‘is Frau Kolwitz, to whom we all owe so much.' And we lifted what was left in our mugs of coffee and toasted her.

Afterwards, Frau Kolwitz moved slowly around the table and introduced herself to us one by one. She wasn't much taller on her feet than we were sitting down, so we only had to turn our heads. It would have been rude to stand up. Sometimes she rested her hands briefly on an arm or a pair of shoulders, and I had the strange sense that something sexual had occurred, a kind of assessment. You could see the satisfaction she took in us. Look at all my boys, she might have said; at all this meat. But she didn't stop at Hadnot's chair, and he didn't look up to see her pass.

I heard Karl say in a recent interview that he dates the beginning of his career from his eighteenth birthday, and the game he played in Würzburg the night before it. Some of his high school friends were studying at the university there, and he remembers feeling strange on the long coach ride north, as if he were traveling to visit himself. The person he might have been without basketball. The season had been going badly, and he was disappointed by his own play. Everyone on the club was frustrated; there was a lot of infighting. Perhaps, he thought, I have made the wrong decision, to live this life. Before the Würzburg game, he told himself to have fun, he didn't care. Afterwards, he was going to get drunk with his buddies anyway, so what did it matter. And that's what he did.

But on the coach ride over he sat in the back with his headphones on. He liked to claim the last row for himself and stretch out; there was a seat in the middle that made it as good as a bed. A six-hour journey spent in the shade of his sweatshirt hood. The rest of us, though, were in good spirits.

Charlie started teasing me about the beard I was trying to grow. ‘Cut that thing off,' he said. ‘It takes a certain kind of courage to make yourself uglier than you already are. Is somebody paying you to grow it? Whatever they paying isn't enough. I'll pay you twice as much to shave it.'

Even Hadnot joined in. I offered him a sandwich, and he said no, but he wouldn't mind a hand of cards; he'd brought some along. So we played rummy on the tray table over his seat, until Arnold and Plotzke asked to get in the game, and by the end of the journey I had switched places to a window across the aisle, and four or five guys crouched around Hadnot and his cards.

Between deals he was telling them how to beat Würzburg. ‘The problem with Chad Baker,' he said, ‘is that he's a nice guy.' All you got to do is piss him off, playing mean or dirty, and he loses his head. Lenz is tough, but Lenz is a little slow, too. He has his positions on court, where he likes to get comfortable, and if you double him out of those spots, he tends to pass. They've got a new kid, some black kid called Robert something, out of Alabama, exchanging the point with Lenz. ‘Don't know much about him; he'll be Charlie's problem.'

Somebody suggested playing for money, and for the next two hours, they talked nothing but poker. Plotzke cleaned them all out. He had a masters in economics and was getting his MBA, by correspondence, from Berlin.

Hadnot kept saying, ‘What you got in those cards, big man?' Friendly but suspicious, too. He seemed genuinely surprised to be losing. He couldn't believe that a guy that stiff on court could beat him at anything.

We arrived in Würzburg as the late autumn sun spread the red of the rooftops over the white walls of the town. My first visit. The highway descended gradually from the hills, with plenty of weekend traffic. I stared
out the coach window, taking the sunset in. A very beautiful city, ordered, modest, prosperous, packed squarely around a river. It suggested old German virtues, civic contentment, decent isolation. Then we reached the level of the streets, and these were only ordinary streets, with advertising on the shop fronts and bike racks stapled into the pavement.

The coach parked a few blocks from the sports hall, closing off a narrow medieval road, and we got out quickly bag in hand and watched it drive away. You could feel the river damp. There was always a problem, arriving early enough to eat, and Henkel led us directly to one of a chain of chicken restaurants that we found at the end of the street. We changed an hour before tip off in the visiting locker room, and the pace of life slowed down again; conversation lagged. Already we could hear the crowds arriving, the pressure of their voices in the gym, reaching us through closed doors.

Würzburg had a long basketball history. The club president was one of the founders of the league, and the students came out in numbers to support the team. There wasn't much else to do on a Saturday night, and they filled the Kneipen afterwards with pent-up spirits and plenty of drinking energy. Before the game, they put on the usual firework show, and a guy with drums sat behind the home team's basket and banged away between explosions. The refs held up play for three or four minutes while the smoke settled and insisted the drums be removed. There must have been three thousand people in
the stands. It didn't get much quieter when the whistle blew.

Coach put Hadnot on from the tip, for once. He worked free for a couple early jumpers; each hit the back iron. Maybe he was rushing, or had too much juice in him. Lenz took him on both ends of the court, and they knew each other well. He had a couple inches and twenty or thirty pounds on Bo. A classic German basketball player: strong in all his limbs, clean-cut, technically good. Not especially quick, and he couldn't jump much, but he held his ground and took up smart positions.

Milo, sitting on the bench beside me, said, ‘This man don't get out of bed for less than a hundred thousand a year.' One of his favorite lines. Success for him was always measured in what it would take to get you out of bed.

Lenz played defense like Hadnot did, with muscle rather than speed. He spread his knees and held his arms wide. Wherever you moved, you moved against him, or some part of him, and had to fight your way around his obstructions. Hadnot picked up an early foul trying to push through him, and then another, pettily, reaching in on a drive. Five minutes into the game and Henkel had to sit him down; we were down already by five.

Then Charlie swung the ball to Karl in the corner. Lenz switched over but was too short to bother his shooting hand, and Karl quietly knocked down a three. Baker answered inside against Olaf. A long-haired, leggy American, he moved his head more than was strictly
graceful but could hold his pivot through any number of up-and-unders, and score with either hand. Olaf and Plotzke spent the whole game trying to pin him down. Charlie drove hard at the other end, got stuck inside, and kicked the ball out to Karl, who had drifted to the top of the key. Karl drained another three. Then Lenz finished off a drive by the other American, the kid from Alabama, named Tressell, a short muscular two-guard who played running back in college. He was much too strong for Charlie, but the real problem was that Karl never boxed out. Henkel nagged at him all the way down court, following him up the sideline and past the scorer's table.

‘OK, OK,' Karl said.

He called for the ball on the wing, and Lenz pushed up against him. Karl held the ball for a moment one-handed above his head, then strode suddenly past Lenz's shoulder, a single step, and pulled up. Lenz scrambled to make up the ground, and by the time he got his feet back another three had slipped in.

By this stage, a few of Karl's friends in the Würzburg section were standing and shouting at him, mostly good-natured abuse. The score was tied. ‘Let me in, coach,' Hadnot said. ‘I'm ready to go back in.'

But Henkel never looked at him and only repeated, ‘In a minute, in a minute.'

I'd like to paint this as a sea-change in Karl's play, but the truth is, already against Langen he had decided to shoot whenever he got the ball. The difference was,
against Würzburg the shots went in. It was like watching the big boy at a birthday picnic take all the cake: he had realized there was no one who could stop him. The next time down, Lenz tried to keep him off the ball, and Karl cut backdoor. Charlie found him with the bounce pass, Baker came late on the rotation, and Karl ended up sitting on his shoulders with his elbows at the rim. Even in Würzburg the crowd responded, with a kind of happiness; people were laughing.

After a while, they didn't care anymore who won, or rather, it's not that they didn't care, but that they wanted Karl to score more than they wanted their club to come back. ‘I'm glad they aren't our fans,' Hadnot said, sitting beside me. Karl scored seventeen straight for Landshut in one stretch and finished the half with thirty. By the end most of the people were on their feet – they cheered us on our way to the locker room.

‘Well,' Hadnot said, as we sat down among the showers, ‘I guess this is what we all been waiting for.' He led a brief round of applause, which maybe came across as ironic.

Karl said something like, ‘You are all assholes,' and blushed.

I think he was actually a little embarrassed. We had caught him out in a kind of boast. He had more or less confessed, this is how good I think I am. Of course, he was right, but he looked like a boy who had been discovered kissing the prettiest girl at the party: proud and somehow ashamed at once.

In the second half, Würzburg quit trying; it was impossible to play through the laughter of their own supporters. The only question was whether Karl would get his fifty, which he did, on two free throws, with six or seven minutes left. After that, Henkel sat him down (to a standing ovation) and gave me a chance to work off the nerves I had built up watching him from the bench. Mostly scrubs left by that point. We won by twenty-odd.

Hadnot and Karl stayed in town overnight – Henkel gave them dispensations. I remember seeing Bo, after the game, touch fists with Baker and Lenz, who introduced him to the kid from Alabama. Briefly, I saw him crouch into his defensive stance, with his hands up; I wondered if he was talking about Karl. This is how you defend him. Like this. The rest of us showered and filed out shivering slightly under a sky cold with stars. Happy in victory, but not especially happy. The coach was parked several blocks away, down unlit cobbled medieval streets. Far enough that we were glad of its close, upholstered air as we climbed in. We all felt that something had happened and that it wasn't really to do with us.