Playing Days (3 page)

It was dark when I woke up, partly from cold. I was hungry too, but not hungry enough to go looking for something to eat at that hour (it had just gone ten), so I decided to get cleaned up and changed and to head back to bed. We had an early start in the morning. Practice began at nine, and we opened the doors to the press from eleven o'clock. My duffel was lying where I had dropped it, on the pillow beside me, and I took out the basketball and began to unpack my clothes.

When I was in college, I never had much interest in fashion, but I did develop a strange sort of ambition, regarding my wardrobe, to pare it down to a useful minimum. When I bought pants, I looked for a pair I could take interrailing through Europe, or wear to a funeral, or to a job interview – that would suit me in hot weather or cold; in rain; on long journeys; at grassy and dirty picnics. Even the sneakers I wore, all-black Air Jordans, once did service, under dark trousers, at a college ball. I liked to consider myself, not handsome or fashionable, but unattached, light-footed, always ready to leave. Folding my few things away, into the heavy antique wardrobe that loomed over the bed, I had the sense that one of my vanities had been put to use at last, had justified itself. That I was living as I had dreamed of living.

The apartment had three rooms: a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom. Only the bathroom overlooked the inner courtyard. There was a high window, designed no doubt to let a little air in, but I was tall enough to see out of it. Lights from the apartment complex glimmered in
irregular squares. In the morning, I could give a shape to the pattern they made. The buildings were identical, but brightly and diversely colored; they'd also been set at odd angles to each other. But all I could see that night were a few lit windows, and I stared out at these for a minute, enjoying the sense of having arrived at a place where other people were already (inscrutably) at home.

After a while, the glow in the nearest window resolved itself into a few dim shapes, and those shapes resolved themselves into a head, an arm, a loose dress. I realized that I was looking at a young woman with long hair. She was brushing it out in a way that suggested to me – I have three sisters – one of the last quiet rituals a girl performs before going to sleep. I was almost homesick for her; I certainly found it hard to look away. But someone or something called her into another room, and I continued to stare with a racing heart at the bright empty space she left behind her (nothing but a wall framed by curtains) until, with a sudden feeling of renewed loneliness, I turned off the bathroom light and went to bed.

The guy who met me at the airport had asked me, in the car, why I'd ‘come so far to play basketball.' As if he'd been wrestling with the question himself. ‘On a lark,' I told him, and this is really what it seemed on the breezy sunshiny morning I woke up to. The weather was just warm enough for me to walk up a sweat on my way to the gym. I passed under the abandoned bridge and noticed, on the far side of it, a row of shops that included a newsagent, a baker, and a little Kneipe or bar called the Unicorn. A man in overalls was rolling kegs of beer down the basement hatch. The darkness inside the bar was spotted with green dust; an aproned woman inverted the upturned chairs. Real work, I thought, and continued towards the river.

It flowed, if you followed it far enough, south and east to Munich, the city my ancestors had fled almost a century before. The sports hall stood on the far side of it, a low sprawling municipal-style complex. Two large pillars framed the front entrance. They were the only nods to grandeur, to the contests that had taken place inside. Part of what excited me (this is the thought I've been leading up to) is the idea that I was about to find out if I was any good. Basketball, of course, is a team sport, but
a big part of its tradition is the solitude in which you learn to play it: by myself, on my father's court, through the heavy rains and the heavier heat of a thousand Texan afternoons. I felt that I was about to test my imagination against the facts of life.

A fat young man with fat wide-open nostrils pointed the way to the locker room. To anyone who has played on a team, such scenes are familiar enough: the peculiar smell, the gray pervasive shadowless light, the sound of dripping showers, the slick rubber matting on the floor-tiles and the rotting wooden benches. The atmosphere of wet nylon and athlete's foot, the feeling of trench camaraderie.

The kid Darmstadt was already dressed when I got there, buzzing around and looking for basketballs; he wanted somebody to play with him. An open bag of training uniforms spilled onto the ground. I picked out a pair of shorts and a jersey and quietly put them on: for the first time stepping into the part of professional athlete. Olaf was there too and told Darmstadt to go chase his tail, or something like that – to get out of his hair. Some of us, he said, are still trying to wake up, and he gave me a sympathetic look.

I wandered out, looking for the gym, and had to turn back on myself several times, among the unlit corridors, before finding it. The court itself was vast and dusky and looked like an airport hangar. The floors were
made of some green material. Light reflected dully off it, giving the space a kind of subterranean gloom. Somebody had found the basketballs and the sound of them echoed irregularly against the high aluminum rafters. Milo was practicing jumpshots: shooting, chasing down each miss, stopping dead, shooting again. He was already breathing audibly.

‘Young man,' a voice called out to me, ‘young man.' Charlie wanted a game; he passed me a ball outside the three-point line and crouched into a defensive stance. ‘Let's see what you're made of,' he said.

I began idly to dribble, presenting my side. I wasn't sure how seriously to take this, but he ducked and reached, slapping his palms against the floor.

Charlie played me to the right hand, which I favor. Most right-handed players are left-footed – it helps them to balance in midair. It's one of my idiosyncrasies that I'm not. I used to spend hours after school dribbling and driving against imaginary opponents. An inner critic judged me: had I been quick enough, etc. but the real point is, that I picked up the quirks and irregularities of an autodidact. Also, a few mispronunciations, or their sporting equivalent. Anyway, I like to drive left and crossed over in front of Charlie, paused at the top of the bounce and pushed past him.

‘Do that again,' he said, after I laid the ball in. ‘And again,' he said, when I repeated the move. The next time, though, I spun out of the dribble and knocked down a fifteen-footer as he scrambled to make up the ground.
Breathless already, I closed my eyes to keep the sweat out and heard the thin, almost painful drumroll of a heartbeat in my ears. It was the rhythm to a quiet refrain of self-congratulation: maybe you're good enough, maybe you're good enough. ‘Young man,' Charlie said, rubbing his hands, ‘we're about to get to it' – but Herr Henkel blew his whistle and summoned us to the middle of the court.

What followed was about an hour and a half of repetitions. Henkel was a technical-minded coach. The session had been plotted to the minute on a clipboard he propped up between his wrist and waist. Not that he was above the odd ad-lib. Halfway through, he let us catch our breath with a round of free throws, got pissed off at a few tired airballs, and gave the whole team a suicide for every subsequent miss. A suicide is like a hundred-yard dash in a prison yard: you have to keep switching back, and the court rang with the squeaks of stretched sneakers and the slap of hands on the ground.

I missed both of mine. The blood in my head had begun to color my vision like a changing bruise. Charlie missed one of his, too. He had a strange little stroke, like a corkscrew trying to discharge a cork, that began somewhere behind his head. He wasn't the quickest between the baselines, either (that honor belonged to Milo, who took it very seriously), and I began to wonder whether Charlie really was the boss of the team. At a quarter to eleven, Henkel opened the doors, and a few smiling portly gentlemen, in ties and casual trousers, holding
cameras or notebooks, strolled in. By this stage I could hardly stand.

Coach split us into fives. Olaf and I played with Plotzke and Darmstadt. Plotzke was a great ogre of a man, big-bellied, with the hitched-up shoulders of a hunchback; his voice, though, was soft and complaining. He was taking a year off from his MBA, he explained to me during a breather. This was just a vacation, he said, and smiled, purple-faced. Charlie had Karl on his side, Milo, and a tall stick of a clean-cut young man named Michel Krahm, who moved like an insect and hadn't said a word all day. Most of us had found something to gripe about.

I wish I could say we held our own against them. That was when I realized what Charlie had been proving at lunch; why everyone let him talk. He had a high angry dribble (in spite of being the smallest player on the floor) and pounded the ball like a judge's gavel as he made his way up court, gabbing all the time, shouting, telling the rest of us what to do. ‘Backdoor, backdoor,' he cried at one point. Milo stared at him helplessly, and Charlie threw a pass that caught him full in the nose, cut to the basket, picked up the ball off the bounce and laid it in. ‘Nice pass,' he said afterwards, sprinting back up court.

Later, after a long rebound, Olaf released me on the break. Only Charlie had tracked back. I had him to myself at the top of the key and shifted through the gears of the crossover that had beaten him before. He jumped on the dribble so quickly that I was still leaning into the
move as he began to push the ball the other way. ‘Fool me twice,' he called over his shoulder, ‘shame on me . . .'

But the real revelation of that training session was Karl. I don't know if he was faster or stronger than the rest of us, or what. He seemed to be moving according to a different scale. Once I tried to step in the lane in front of him, and after a second, wondering where he'd gone, found him hanging from the rim behind my head. ‘Look at the Kid!' Charlie shouted. ‘Look at the Kid!'

Charlie had a way of praising his teammates that sounded like bragging, but he made the nickname stick. Even the local papers began to adopt it. (Germans have a strange passion for English words.) Somehow the name covered up the fact that Karl really was a kid, a seventeen-year-old young man, nervously stepping into the role that his talents had thrust upon him. He had a habit of fading on his jumpshot, ridiculous in a seven-footer; took too many threes and front-rimmed a lot of them; loafed on defense, trusting his long arms to make up the ground that his feet had failed to.

In fact, that's how we almost beat them. Karl gave me the three-point line, and I managed to find my eye and knock down a couple before he reacted. The next time down, Charlie pulled him off me (by force, with two hands) and bodied me up as soon as I crossed midcourt. I pushed my way to the blocks, then cut back up. Olaf set me a screen at the elbow, and I curled off it, catching the pass, and straightened up to shoot. I've got seven inches on Charlie and knew he couldn't reach
my shooting-hand. What he did instead was give me a little nudge with the butt of his palm against my stomach. The ball fell short and I cried foul at the same time. Coach sucked on his whistle but didn't blow, and Charlie shouted, ‘I thought this was a man's game,' and winked at me. By this point, Karl was flying up the wing and Charlie had picked up the outlet. He cradled the ball against his wrist, like a roll of carpet, and sent a long looping pass down court that reached Karl in his stride. He dunked in stride, too, and let the weight of his run carry him back again the other way.

Game over. Cameras flashed, and I could see in the morning paper what the look on his face had been. A barbaric yawp, I want to say – except that his eyes, which were stretched wide open, seemed anxious rather than joyful. I stared at this photo (there was another beside it, which I'll come to) for several minutes in the course of my tired and almost hungerless breakfast the next day. Giant Steps, the caption read, but another came to mind that captured much better my sense of his odd look: Pretending to Roar. He was imitating the stars he had seen on TV, most of them black, and hadn't yet learned to feel the anger or joy they felt at their own gifts, and which the game allowed them to express. Karl was whooping because it seemed expected of him.

The newspaper was called the Bayrisches Bauernblatt, the Bavarian Farmers' Page. Circulation: twenty thousand. I got up early the next morning to buy a pint of milk and picked it up from the shop at the bottom
of the hill. Most of the stories had to do with the weather, the price of feed, the agriculture ministry, etc. It was printed in town at an old-fashioned press in the office itself, which was on the third floor of a nineteenth-century townhouse, just across the river from the theater. The floor below was occupied by the local radio station, which shared many of its employees with the newspaper. These pictures made the front page. After breakfast, I cut out the second photograph to send home to my parents. They kept it and framed it and gave it back to me, when I asked for it, a few years later. I'm looking at the photograph now.

My younger self looks back at me, faded to nothing more than an outline on the cheap thin paper. A drop of spilled milk over somebody's shoes has turned pale purple with the passage of time. It's a team portrait, arranged in two rows. The front row is kneeling, and includes Charlie Gold, Willi Darmstadt (grinning like the schoolboy he is), Milo Moritz and Herr Henkel. The back row, made up of the taller players, are standing arm in arm; Karl has his hand on my shoulder. With a burst of affectionate presumption, I've rested my palm on Charlie's head, on what's left of his curly hair. ‘Playing Days,' the caption says.

The cameras made for happiness, that's what I remember. I don't just mean the photo itself, but the presence of the photographers. (The press never showed up to any other practice.) They turned the gloomy hangarlike court, at the edge of a small market town in rural
Bavaria, into a scene of importance; they turned us into basketball players. Just a few lines of the article have survived the picture's framing. Herr Henkel, it reads, has brought in several young talents to make a push for the first division. He says that Charlie Gold, last year's star, is just the man to bring them into shape. The only question mark is Hadnot's knee; whether he can recover from surgery in time for the season. In the event of the worst, they've signed a young American to replace him . . .