True Legend (9 page)

“Maybe he doesn't,” Coach said. “Or maybe it'll be different now that Urban's dead. Whatever. I'll give him a call and see if he'll talk to you. He must know who you are.”

Lee grinned. “Doesn't everybody?”

SEVENTEEN

T
wo nights later, Oakley played Christian Hills on the road, and compared to the Park Prep game, the Red Bull energy of that one, this felt like a preseason scrimmage.

Oakley jumped out ahead 24–4 at the start, and Christian Hills never cut the lead under twenty points for the rest of the game, even
after
Coach DiGregorio had cleared the bench and it was officially garbage time.

Cleared the bench except for Lee, who begged coach to let him stay in and play point after Drew was done for the night.

He promised not to showboat or run up the score. Promised Coach he'd play the right way over the last six minutes.

“Just let the offense run through me for a little while,” he said at a time-out. “Show you I can be a pass-first guy.”

And he did, dishing out five assists the rest of the way, a couple of them beauties, after he broke down the defense like he was doing his best impression of Drew, penetrating inside before kicking the ball back outside.

In the locker room, he said to Drew, “So that's what it feels like to be you.”

Drew put his arm around Lee's shoulder and said, “Keep telling yourself that.”

It was a Friday night, and they were all on their way to Lee's house after the bus dropped them off back at Oakley. This time Drew went along. Mr. Gilbert hadn't even been at the Christian Hills game, had said he had some business out of town. So Drew ate pizza with his teammates and got involved in one of those video games where you teamed up to kill aliens. All in all, one of those nights when he felt like one of the guys.

Even though he hadn't been one of the guys for a long time. Sometimes, at parties like this, he'd look over and catch Lee staring at him and wonder if Lee knew the exact same thing.

Much later, when Lee was driving him home, Drew asked to be dropped off at Morrison.

Lee sighed, making it like the saddest sound anywhere. “Man, you put those blinders of yours on, you don't take them off, no matter what.”

“I just want to know who this guy is,” Drew said.

“What if it turns out he's just some nobody?”

“Then at least I'll know that,” Drew said.

He didn't tell Lee that he had been in the park the last two nights, both times waiting until two in the morning for some sign of Donald before giving up and walking back home. He was starting to feel a little bit like one of those celebrity stalkers. But then he told himself Donald was the one who'd come to Drew's game, admitted he'd seen Drew shooting around at Morrison late at night.

So, what—they were stalking each other?

It was around midnight when they pulled into the parking lot at Morrison, and the police cruiser, with Archey behind the wheel, was just pulling out. Drew told Lee he didn't have to stay this time.

“Forget it,” Lee said. “A wingman is a wingman, even on some dopey stakeout.”

No sign of Donald or anybody else.

This time Drew didn't hang around until two; he gave up a few minutes after one, telling Lee it was his own dang fault, maybe he'd chased the guy off for good.

When they pulled up in front of Drew's house, Lee said, “Can I ask you something?”

Now Drew was the one who groaned. “Please don't ask me again why I'm so interested in this guy.”

“Wasn't going to.”

“Good.”

“But if I ask you something else, straight-up, will you give me an honest answer?”

“I don't lie to you, you don't lie to me,” Drew said.

“And you promise you won't take it the wrong way.”

“Dude, it's late,” Drew said. “You know how long it takes me to fall asleep.”

Lee took a deep breath, then he said, “I'm just wondering if the reason you won't give up on this guy is because he hated on you a little bit after the Park game. And nobody ever hates on you, unless they're playing against you, the way King was.”

Drew turned in the front seat so he could face him, his hand still on the door handle, and said, “What are you now, Coach, worried that I'm starting to believe my own hype? That I think of my
self
as some kind of legend?”

“Do you?” Lee said in a soft voice.

Drew didn't get mad.

“No.”

“You sure about that?” Lee Atkins said.

“You're supposed to be my best friend,” Drew said.

“I am,” Lee said.

Drew said he'd talk to him in the morning, got out of the car, walked into the house, knowing as he did that he'd never answered Lee's question.

EIGHTEEN

C
oach DiGregorio called Drew late Sunday morning and told him he'd just talked to Fred Holman, who said he'd be happy to talk to Drew if he could get himself to Santa Monica.

Drew called Lee right away, even though he knew that on weekends, Lee Atkins could sometimes sleep until the middle of the afternoon if he didn't have anything better to do.

“You gotta get up. We're going to Santa Monica to meet Urban Legend's old coach.”

Lee mumbled something in his sleep-croak that Drew didn't understand.

“What?” Drew said.

“I said the scavenger hunt continues,” Lee said. “Be over in an hour.”

“Don't go back to sleep,” Drew said.

“What, and miss all the fun?”

The ride to Santa Monica was no fun, not because of what Lee had said to Drew when he dropped him off Friday night and not because Lee was wasting perfectly good sleep time driving Drew over there.

It was because Lee had somehow found out what Drew had done on Saturday afternoon: snuck over to Oakley to watch the girls' team play. Done that even though Callie had laid him out in the hallway the other day.

It meant the twenty-mile drive to the address near the Santa Monica pier felt like about two hundred miles to Drew, especially since the traffic for a Sunday afternoon was more like rush hour during the week.

So Drew had to hear about Callie Mason for an hour and twenty minutes, most of it spent crawling along on the 405 and then I-10, the Santa Monica Freeway, as the GPS woman's voice directed them to the address that Coach D said was just down from the pier and from the hotel called Shutters on the Beach, on Pico.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Drew said. “I got no interest in Callie Mason. And, just for the sake of us conversating, if I ever did, why would I after the way I acted like a donkey in the hall that day?”

“It would be better for everybody,” Lee said, “if you'd just admit it. Maybe even to her.”

“Why? So she can laugh at me again?”

“Dude,” Lee said, “it's not like she had a choice. It would have been like trying not to laugh at
The Hangover.
”

“Why are we still talking about this?” Drew said. “Didn't we agree this would be off-limits?”

“For a day,” Lee said. “I think I might have agreed to that one day. But it would be selfish of you to deny me the pleasure of busting on you. Besides, all you got to do is change your attitude.”

“Did you say something to her?” Drew said, whipping his head toward Lee. “Did
she
say she doesn't like my attitude?”

Lee grinned wide now and said, “Got you. Took you to the iron and threw one down on you.”

Drew didn't care.

“Did somebody tell you that for real?” he said.

Lee pointed.

“We're here,” he said.

• • •

Fred Holman met them at the door of a tiny house that didn't look anything like the other, bigger houses on the block, almost like it had been shoehorned in.

Or like the old man was just living in a shoe, Drew thought.

Coach DiGregorio had said Holman played in the original NBA, back in the 1950s, but even with that, he was smaller than Drew expected, maybe five eight, tops, with thin white hair and bright blue eyes that seemed young to Drew somehow. Even in his mid-eighties, the man seemed to carry himself young, not shuffling around the way you saw old guys do at Morrison in the daytime, the ones who sat around on benches and drank their coffee and just watched the world go by.

He was wearing a V-neck sweater over some kind of golf shirt, jeans on his skinny legs and an old pair of Basket sneakers from Puma. White with a blue stripe.

Holman shook hands with Lee first, then turned to Drew and said, “So you're the hot kid, huh?”

Motioned them into the house with a wave of his hand.

Small as the house was, there was a cool view of the ocean from the back patio. Way down to the right, Drew could see the famous Ferris wheel, part of the amusement park on the pier.

Holman was telling them as they made their way to the patio that his daughter was a casting agent in the movies—“divorced,” he said, “aren't they all in Hollywood?”—and that she'd wanted him to move with her to Brentwood after he fell and broke a hip a couple of years ago.

“If you're in the motion-picture business,” the old man said, “everything's a big drama. She pictured me falling the next time and not being able to get up.”

Drew didn't see any signs of him limping, thought what he saw instead was a pretty nice bounce in the old guy's step. A bounce to his whole
self,
really.

There were small pitchers of lemonade and iced tea waiting for them on a table on the deck. Without asking, Coach Holman poured a little of both into each glass, stirring it up with a spoon. It was a drink that Mr. Gilbert liked, iced tea and lemonade, what he called an “Arnold Palmer,” named after a man who, he told Drew, had been a famous golfer.

“It's really an honor to meet you, sir,” Lee said.

Coach Holman said, “You said that at the door, son.”

He was grinning. But Coach D said Fred Holman didn't win more than seven hundred games by being warm and fuzzy, that he was still a hard case.

“Sometimes he just repeats himself until he can think of the next thing he wants to say,” Drew said.

“I coached more than a few like him,” Holman said, taking the chair with the best view of the water. “Sometimes I'd finally ask them when they were going to
stop
talking so I could
start
.”

They all sat there for a moment now, Lee acting like he was afraid to talk, looking out at people walking on a path set back from the beach, or jogging, or skateboarding.

“Couldn't afford this house if I wanted to move here nowadays,” Fred Holman said. “Like I was here and they built all the nice houses around me. People keep asking, do I want to sell it? But where would I go?”

Then he said, “What were you thinking with that shot against Park, you don't mind me asking?”

Even him,
Drew thought.

“I thought it gave us our best chance to win,” he said, not wanting to get into it. “Just didn't work out.”

“You
think
?” Fred Holman said.

“All due respect,” Drew said, “I didn't come here to talk about myself.”

Fred Holman said, “Why are you so interested in talking about Mr. Urban Sellers?”

Drew and Lee looked at each other, and Drew nodded, as if telling him, “You take it.” So Lee, talking fast, the way he did when he got nervous, told Coach Holman about the paper Drew was writing, and how they'd found out about Sellers almost by accident.

“So it's his paper,” Holman said, giving a nod at Drew.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you're here as, what, his coauthor? Ghostwriter?”

Ghost.
The word kept popping up.

“I guess you could say,” Lee said. “Me being a senior and all, and us being teammates and all . . .”

The words just drifted toward the beach.

The old man focused on Drew now and said, “He's just another guy taking care of you, isn't he?”

“We're friends,” Drew said.

“I can see that,” Holman said. “You ever help him out with any of his papers?”

“No, sir,” Drew said.

“So it's a give-and-take relationship,” the old man said. “He gives, you take.”

“Not on the court,” Lee said, smiling. He believed he could make anybody like him. “Out there, he gives, and I take.”

“Not against Park,” the old man said.

It got quiet again, except for the sound of music playing from the beach, the sound of the gulls in the air, some kind of maintenance jeep on the sand out near the water.

“Why don't you boys tell me what you know about Mr. Sellers?” Holman said. “Or what you think you know.”

Lee rattled off what they'd learned from the Internet about Sellers's career. How he was supposed to be on his way to Nevada–Las Vegas to play for a coach named Jerry Tarkanian, known as a guy who'd take any kind of outlaw player, a good coach who won a national championship at Vegas.

Lee didn't tell Urban Sellers's story in any kind of order, just jumped around, trying to recite what he and Drew had found. How the NCAA accused Sellers of having somebody take the SATs for him, even though they could never prove it.

How Coach Holman finally kicked him off his team his senior year of high school, halfway through, by which time he wasn't going to class at all, had given himself no chance to qualify for any four-year college anywhere because of his lousy grades.

How six months later he had some high school diploma nobody believed was real, and ended up in junior college. But he couldn't last there, because he got caught paying somebody to take his tests for him.

Drew picked up the story then, told how they'd read that Sellers couldn't get a tryout in the NBA, even though they were taking high school kids in those days, because he let himself get fat and out of shape after busting out of junior college. So he went to Europe, played in France and then in Greece, but got into all kinds of trouble—including jail trouble—for drinking and drugs.

Then hurt himself falling down a flight of stairs in a bar fight in Greece.

After that, he just disappeared, Drew said, until he died in that fire in Los Angeles.

“And what is it you'd like me to tell you?” Fred Holman asked.

Looking right at Drew now, not Lee.

“How he threw it all away like he did, I guess.”

“How, or why?”

“Either way,” Drew said.

“Only he knew the answer to that,” the old man said. “I kept hoping he'd figure it out before it was too late.”

Drew said, “Coach DiGregorio said that you told him you started losing Legend—”

The old man said in a sharp voice, “I never called him that, not one single time.”

“Coach said you thought you started losing Urban Sellers when he started to believe he
was
a legend.”

“I said that, yes.”

“But if he was as good as everybody says, he was—”

“He was better.”

“If he was
that
good, couldn't somebody stop him?”

“Make him see what he was throwing away?” the old man said. “Make him realize what a gift he had?”

“Yes,” Drew said.

“You mean like you realize?”

“I'm not saying I'm him,” Drew said.

“Let me ask you something,” Fred Holman said, angling his chair more toward Drew, focusing those eyes on him harder than ever. “You spend as much time in the gym as you used to?”

Drew said, “Yeah. I guess so. Sure.”

“Don't sound sure to me.”

“I put in the time,” Drew said. “Nobody ever handed me anything.”

Feeling as defensive as he had in the park with Donald.

“Nobody ever handed you anything until now,” Holman said.

“I'm not sure what you mean by that . . . Coach.”

Hadn't they come here to ask
him
the questions?

“There's all sorts of ways for people to
lose
their way, no matter how good they are. And you are good, son. I've seen that with my own eyes.”

“You've come to watch me play?”

“Three or four times,” he said. “I can still get around.”

“Coach didn't tell me.”

“I didn't tell
him,
” Coach Holman said. “I wanted to see for myself what all the fuss was about.”

Drew waited and then finally said, “So how am I doing?”

“You don't need to wait for college,” the old man said. “You're already there. It's not about the game anymore. It's all about you.”

Drew felt the way he did when he ran into a pick nobody had called out. Getting slammed like this from some old coach who used to be somebody.

I didn't come here to talk about me,
he thought. But he didn't say that, just cleared his throat instead and said, “'Scuse me?”

There had been nothing mean in the way Coach Holman had said it, no change Drew could see in his manner. But he wasn't looking to be some kind of good host now. “You heard me, son,” Holman said. “When you get to be my age, you got more important things to worry about than hurting somebody's feelings.”

He smiled as he kept saying mean things. “If I just went by what I see, you're just another knucklehead who thinks his teammates are what Jordan used to call them: his supporting cast.”

Drew said, “But I'm averaging a double double, points and assists—”

Now the old coach snapped at him. “Don't give me numbers, kid. Don't
ever
give me numbers. What do they call you—True? If you want to be true to your talent, you'll listen to what I'm telling you.”

He was, what, twice the age of Donald in the park? Being twice as hard on Drew.

Lee jumped in now, trying to change the subject. “About Legend,” he said.

The old man looked back out at the water, like he was trying to see something in the distance.

“Mr. Sellers was another one who stopped working at being the best player he could be about this same time in his life,” the old man said. “Decided he didn't have anything more to learn on the court, the way he didn't need to learn anything in the classroom. He used to always tell me, ‘I worked hard to get here. Why can't I have some fun?' And I'd say to the boy, ‘To get
here
?
You're not anywhere yet.'”

“But he wouldn't listen?” Lee said.

“Not until it was too late.”

“Did you stay in touch with him?”

“You mean until he died?”

“Yes.”

“I did stay in touch with him, as a way of keeping a promise I made to him.”