Game (2 page)

Nobody had any questions, but I wondered what was bugging House. We had a dynamite squad last
year and had played good team ball. I figured he was just letting us know he was serious about moving on, and I was cool with that.

In the bags that House gave us were the tape measures he'd mentioned. All of them were exactly six feet long. Okay, I got the point. Last year it was two passes before every shot. This time it's work the ball inside more. No big deal.

The Baldwin Chargers would start the year with twelve to fourteen players. Usually by midseason we had lost three or four of the original guys because they had messed up in school or moved out of the neighborhood. When I was a freshman, they even had a kid who dropped out because he got stabbed halfway through the season. We also added players, so when I saw two new guys in uniform, it didn't mean much. Neither did the coach's talk. I loved ball and knew I was going to bust it, whatever joint he was running.

House told us to get into layup lines, and I felt myself getting excited. I liked everything about playing ball: the way the ball sounded hitting the floor when the gym was empty, the shine of the lights off the polished boards, the smell of the locker
room, everything. What I liked most was the feel of the ball in my hand, the pebble grain against my fingertips.

“Hey, Drew, we got two new white players.” Ricky Montez was behind me in the layup line. “I guess they didn't have to try out for the team.”

“Maybe they're in an affirmative action program,” I said.

When it was my turn to cut for the layup, I moved down the side of the lane, pivoted off my right foot, got the pass, and put the pill up softly with my right hand. I knew the first one who dunked was going to catch it from House. It was Sky.

Sky is a stone clown. He would be a better ballplayer if he didn't do two things—fool around so much and hang out drinking beer all the time. He got the ball about nine feet from the basket, did his little foot shift like he always did when he was going for the dunk, and then went up.

Bam!
Sky had that big grin on his face and House was turning red blowing his whistle. What cracked everybody up was that Sky started running around the gym doing laps even before House could tell him how many he had to do.

We did layups for a long ten minutes; then we did box-out drills for twenty minutes with House and Joe Fletcher, the assistant coach, throwing balls against the backboard. One of the white guys was soft looking. I felt the other dude, the one House kept putting on me, was checking me out for some reason.

“Watch your elbows, Drew!” House called out. “You're not strong enough to hold him out without fouling?”

I went to the bench and sat down. House came over and asked me what was wrong.

“I got a cramp in my side,” I said, not looking at him.

“In your side or in your style?” he asked. Then he walked away.

I didn't like that remark, but that was the way House did his business.

After the box-out drill we had loose-ball drill before calling it a day. Ruffy caught up with me at the door and asked what was going on with House.

“I don't know,” I said. “We were good last year. Maybe he thinks we can go all the way this year.”

In the locker room everybody was kidding around, cracking jokes, like they always did. All the guys on the team like playing ball, and that made being on the team a tight roll. Nobody was sweating House's new philosophy, because we had all heard a thousand of his theories before.

Fletcher got us all quieted down and told everybody to give his name and position so the new men would know who we were.

“Needham Brown, forward.”

“Sky Jones, star center.”

“Ernie Alvarez, guard.”

“Drew Lawson, guard.”

“Ruffy ‘the Man' Williams, center.”

“Colin O'Brien,” the small white guy said, “guard.”

“Malcolm Small, forward.”

“Tomas Dvorski, forward,” the other white player said. He pronounced his name as if he was saying
toe
-mus.

“Abdul Ghoia, forward.”

“Bobby Rice, lover!”

We all shook hands and said “Hey” to the new players. There weren't that many white guys in
Baldwin, but we didn't have any problems, so it was all good. I showered, got dressed, then went over to where Fletch was counting supplies.

“What you think?” I asked. “We going to do it the second half of the season?”

“Depends on how deep your game is,” he said.

“It's deep, my brother.”

“We're going to find out just how deep,” Fletch said, looking up at me. “Hope you can tell me that at the end of the year.”

Fletch is one of those quiet guys who know the game and leave all the rah-rah stuff home. They said he could rock it back in the day, but he didn't run his mouth about it.

I knew my game was deep enough. Ball is me and I'm ball. It doesn't make any difference to me what people talk about when they say that all brothers want to do is hoop and rap.

I found Ruffy and asked him what he thought about the team, and he said he was surprised that House didn't have us scrimmage with the white boys.

“I need to find out if I got any competition,” he said.

We walked down the street together with me thinking that if House was serious and Fletch was serious, maybe they thought it was going to be a big year for us.

The way I figured, the Chargers were just a little short on D and about four points shy of Big Time, which is cool for a public school that doesn't recruit like some of the prep schools in the area.

When I got home, my father was talking about how he needed to join a gym and get into shape again.

“It's about time you tried losing some of that belly,” I said.

“That's what I've been trying to tell your mother,” he said. “She's talking about me walking to work. Now, how would I look walking all the way from here down to 128th Street and Amsterdam Avenue?”

“Richard, you know if you join a gym, you're going to go for two weeks and then all the money you invested in it is going to be lost,” Mom said.

“How are you going to feel if I die of a heart attack because I'm out of shape?” Pops came back.

“You can die of a heart attack looking like
Superman,” Mom said. “Then all the people will just be saying how good you look in your casket.”

Twenty-two blocks, which was how far our house was from the bus garage, wasn't that far a walk, but I knew my father wasn't going for it. He needed to do something, though, and he knew it.

 

The principal of Baldwin Academy is Dr. Cornelius Barker. Everybody calls him Dr. Doom because once a year he shows up in a white suit, white socks and shoes, white shirt, and white hat, and you know that is the day when he is going to call anybody who's really been messing up into his office and give them the bad news. Right after Christmas it had been my turn.

I got into the outer office and had to sit on the bench with Stringy-Hair Patty Thompson, Don't-Give-a-Crap Charles Stover, Don't-Take-a-Shower John Poole, and Sean Conway, who was too busy selling bootleg videos seven days a week to even come to school half the time. When it was my time to go into the office, Dr. Barker gave me five and asked me how I was doing.

“I'm all good,” I said. “I'm not failing anything.”

“Hey, I know that.” Dr. Barker leaned back in his chair. “You know I keep my eye on you. I know my buddy Steve Joyner down at Johnson C. Smith called you about signing a National Letter of Intent. He said you weren't too interested.”

“Yo, Dr. Barker, if I sign, it means I
got
to go to Johnson C. Smith or I can't play anywhere else for a year,” I said.

“It also means an athletic scholarship,” Dr. Barker said. “Where else did you apply to?”

“University of Washington,” I said. “That's my dream. Then Kean University over in New Jersey, 'cause their coach—he used to be at St. Peter's—likes my game. Arizona, because I like their game. And Virginia Union is my fallback because a friend of mine said that a lot of people check out their actions. Plus I'm going to hook up a few last-minute applications when my folks get the money.”

“Okay, two of your picks are checking you out because of me,” Dr. Barker said. “That's J. C. Smith, where I went to school, and Kurzinsky at Kean, because I knew him from Jersey City. Let me tell you this, young brother: The world keeps spinning whether you're ready to make a choice or not. Be
careful what you're walking away from.”

“I know where you're coming from, and I'm heavy on it, sir.”

“I hope so,” Dr. Barker said, standing up.

Dr. Barker was for real, and his looking out was serious. I knew he was talking about maybe hooking me up with some black college. He had done it before, but I also knew that all the heavy ballplayers, black or white, were going to the big schools. I didn't just want to go to college, I wanted to play ball in college. Okay, maybe I wanted to go sit on some campus and read about myself in the paper. What my dream really was—and I didn't want to lay it out in front of Dr. Barker—was to play in the NBA and then maybe do a commercial for a smoking car. I'd probably have to learn to drive, but I knew I could hook that up.

What the guys knew was that my game was money. All I needed was to show proper and we would come in either first or second in our division. We were already six and one with just a fall to Bryant. Bryant was seven and zip with half the season over. We were going to play them one more time, and if we could beat them, we had a shot to
be numero uno. The trouble was that Bryant had a monster squad, and in the first game they caught us napping and beat us even without Boogie, their best player.

James “Boogie” Simpson had game and then more game behind that. The sucker was unreal. He was six four, midnight black, laid-back, and always smiling like he knew something you didn't. And what he knew was what he was going to do to your game if you brought it onto his court. Bryant had beaten us when Boogie was out with some kind of infection. When he got better, he just resumed busting every team he faced.

The word was that Duke and Marquette had been asking about Boogie. When they faced us, the dudes with the pads and measuring tapes would be watching him, and that was going to be my chance to show what I could do. If Duke tapped me on the shoulder, even Dr. Barker would sit up and take notice.

There were three reporters and a photographer at practice the next afternoon.

“They're interviewing that white dude,” Sky said.

“What for?”

“I guess because he's that white dude,” Sky came back.

They were talking to the new guy, Tomas. When Sky said they were interviewing him because he was white, the other white guy, Colin, gave him a look, but he didn't say anything.

We shot around a little, and Fletcher had us doing layups while we were jumping over a heavy punching bag, which nobody liked.

“Yo, coach, suppose we fall on the bag and ruin our whole career?” Abdul asked.

“If you can't even avoid a punching bag, you're not going to have an NBA career,” Fletch said.

“They don't do this in the NBA,” Ruffy said.

“Yeah, they do,” Fletch said, “only they use those expensive bags. They call them assistant coaches.”

House and the new white player finally finished the interview and called us together. We ran wind sprints for ten minutes while some guys took photos, then we did calisthenics with dumbbells for ten minutes, then more wind sprints. All the players were into the sprints, but Ruffy and Abdul were doing some serious heavy breathing.

The drills running backward were usually fun, but House had his serious face on and was yelling at everybody, so we played along. Then we did some sidestepping and some more wind sprints. After the newspaper guys left, Ricky asked the coach why they had shown up for a practice. He got put off big-time.

I dug the newspaper guys being around. What I knew was that if I didn't get any press and the college coaches didn't know about my game, I wouldn't be getting any phone calls. The real deal was that you either got onto a Division I team, the big schools, or the National Basketball Association didn't want to talk to you.

“Hey, man, which is my good side?” Needham Brown came real close and put his face near mine. “I don't want no lame pictures over my stats in the paper.”

“Square business, man,” I said. “You don't have a good side.”

Needham looked at me as if I were crazy. The thing was, the dude thought he was good-looking, which was like a bad joke. Needham looked like one of those little jumpy dogs with big eyes that can't get
their bark straight. The thing was the guy could pull some serious chicks, though. I couldn't figure it.

We did another drill, jumping with one-pound weights in our hands, and then House sent us into the locker room.

“It goes like this,” he said. “You saw those reporters out there. This year the papers are going to be doing more stories on high school ball. Those newspaper reporters are going to keep coming around as long as we're winning. We start losing and nobody is going to pay us any attention. And we're going to keep winning as long as we understand what we're doing on the court and play the kind of ball we're supposed to be playing.”

What I was wondering was if the reporters were interested in the team, as House said, why were they only talking to the white player? What was that supposed to mean?

On the way out Tomas came over to me and asked me why the team was called the Chargers.

“They call us the Chargers because we buy our own uniforms,” I said, feeling stupid even as I said it. “We don't pay cash, we just charge the uniforms and then take them back at the end of the season.”

Tomas didn't go for it, I could tell. Meanwhile, Needham cracked up the way he did every year when we told that to a new man. It wasn't even funny, but we did it every year anyway.