Summer Ball (19 page)

L
AMAR GOT AWAY WITH IT, OF COURSE.

“No nothin' for a know-nothin',” is the way Tarik described it.

When Jeff LeBow asked about Tess's camera, Lamar just said he shot baskets right up until he went to dinner with some of the guys from the Lakers and that if Mr. LeBow didn't believe him, he should go right ahead and ask them. Then he acted hurt that Mr. LeBow would even think to ask him about something like that, saying, “If I'm gonna be a suspect for every little thing that happens from now to the end of camp, maybe I should make a call to Hoop Stars right now, see if they still want me.”

Hoop Stars was an equally famous, competing camp in western Pennsylvania, Danny knew by now, fighting Right Way for the best players every summer, even though Hoop Stars started a couple of weeks later.

“Fortunately, I got him calmed down,” Jeff said.

Wow
, Danny thought,
what a relief
.

This was after lunch the next day. Danny was in his office, and Jeff was describing his meeting with Lamar, actually trying to tell them how much Lamar liked meeting Tess, how he was hoping to get what he called some Kodak-taking tips from her if she showed up again, just so he could have his own pictures to take home to his mom.

Knowing he was wasting his time, Danny said, “He did it.”

“If you don't stop saying things like that,” Jeff said, “I'm going to end up breaking up a fight a day between you guys.”

“I'm not looking to fight him,” Danny said. “I can see now that he's going to win any kind of fight between us.” Then he paused just slightly before saying, “except maybe on the court.”

“What do you want?”

“For you to see him for what he really is, I guess.”

“And what's that?”

“Another guy in sports who's a great player and a bad guy.”

“I'm just a guy running a basketball camp,” Jeff said. “Josh Cameron's camp. A camp Mr. Cameron is going to be showing up at any day now. And when he does, I'd prefer that he doesn't think the whole thing has turned into
Meatballs
or one of those other dumb camp movies. You say you want to beat him on the court, so wait and beat him on the court.”

Danny said he'd try and left.

He was trying. His dad called it grinding. That morning he and Ty had gotten up early and worked out on the bad court, just the two of them, for an hour. Danny had worked more on defense than offense, knowing that one of the ways to get more minutes from Coach Powers in the games he had left was to show he could handle bigger guys, that when other teams tried to use his size against him—gee, that had never happened before—he wasn't going to give up easy baskets.

So they played one-on-one, and Danny told Ty to post up on him as much as he wanted, kept stopping the game to ask what he was trying to do on every play, what worked against that particular move and what didn't.

Ty said that what he concentrated on the hardest when he had a mismatch was to
not
bring the ball down. “Like coaches always say,” Ty said. “Bring the ball down, and you turn a big guy into a little guy.”

Danny said, “I wish it were that simple.”

Eight in the morning and it was so hot already they were sweating buckets. “Coach Rossi talks about it every day,” Ty said. “He says, anytime that ball comes down, it's ours.”

So they worked on that. Your natural reaction on defense was to put your hands up when a guy was getting ready to shoot. But the key was making your move right before that, reading the guy, keeping your hands out in front of you, ready to flick at the ball or snatch at it as the guy went from his dribble into his shot.

Even against somebody as smart and good and long as Ty, Danny started to get the hang of it, getting his hands on the ball a surprising amount of the time. Every time he did, Danny told Ty not to make it easy for him. And every time he said that, Ty said he wasn't making it easy, Danny was actually starting to annoy him.

It was a good thing, they both decided, even if the long-range plan was annoying another guy Ty's size.

One who liked to go around in a Kobe jersey.

 

The Celtics were 6–6 with two games to play.

Danny was up to playing two quarters, without knowing if it was because Coach Powers thought he was improving or just because Rasheed was working on the coach every chance he got. But Danny was getting more of a chance, even when games were close in the fourth quarter.

The Celtics weren't the best team here, and Danny had seen them all by now. The two best teams were Ty's team, the Cavaliers, and Lamar's Lakers. That didn't mean the Celtics couldn't beat them in a one-game season. But in his heart—that old thing—he knew that could only happen if it was him and Rasheed in the backcourt, and not just for a handful of minutes a game.

Nothing against Cole. Danny liked him as a kid and as a player, and he especially understood why Coach Powers liked him. He played hard, ran the offense the way Coach wanted it run and hardly ever deviated. Even on fast breaks, he did something Coach Powers was always preaching: stopped at the foul line every time, passed to one cutter or the other, only shot the ball himself as a last resort.

He was just the wrong partner for Rasheed.

Danny never said it out loud, even to the other guys, mostly because he knew he wasn't playing well enough himself to be talking about anybody else. But Cole had no feel for the game. He had no imagination. Cole had tunnel vision. He could only see the offense or the defense they were supposed to be running. Like he was some kind of RoboGuard. He didn't know when it was time to forget about the play, just give the ball to Rasheed no matter what they were trying to run.

Danny did.

Danny and Rasheed were both point guards, but that never seemed to matter. When they got the chance, they worked together the way Danny and Ty had with the Warriors.

If you looked at them, you might think they couldn't be more different, and they couldn't have come from more different backgrounds.

But Rasheed had been right: They played the same game.

And in a camp full of big guys, Danny was convinced that the Celtics were at their best when they went small. That meant either Ben Coltrane or David Upshaw at center, Danny and Rasheed at guard, Tarik at power forward and Will at small forward. If Danny were the coach here the way he had been in travel—yeah, right, another in-your-dreams, Walker—those would be the five guys on the court when they were trying to win the game. Make the other team match up with their speed and shooting and ability to push the ball.

Which is what they were doing now against Ty's team, the Cavs, at the end of the first half.

The game was originally scheduled on one of the outside courts, but the refs for their game had ended up someplace else. So it was being played in The House after the regular four o'clock game in there, and there were a ton of kids in the stands, even though it was getting close to dinnertime.

Danny thought,
It's the same with everybody
. If there was a game going on, you stopped to watch it. You couldn't help yourself.

Jack Arnold and Ty had scored most of the points for their team. Rasheed was carrying the Celtics, doing it today by scoring and rebounding. The Celtics were up four points with the ball, holding it for the last shot of the half. Danny had been in the backcourt with Rasheed for the past five minutes or so, playing at the Indy 500 speed that Coach Rossi and the Cavs always liked to play.

They had been in a time-out when Coach Powers told Danny to go into the game. He looked at Danny and Rasheed, pointed one of those bony fingers at them and said, “I want you to find a way to slow this game down.”

Rasheed just shook his head.

“Coach, we can try,” he said. “But it would be like trying to ride a bike in the fast lane. We can beat these guys at their own game.”

“You're sure?”

“Yeah,” Rasheed said, in that confident way he had. “I'm sure.”

Now they were down to the last play of the half. The play Coach Powers had called from the sideline was simple enough: “Spread.” It was one you saw the real Cavaliers use all the time for LeBron James, at the end of a quarter or half or game.

Give him the ball, give him some room, tell him to make something happen.

On their team it meant giving the ball to Rasheed a few feet inside the half-court line and giving him so much room it looked like he and his man were playing one-on-one.

Jack Arnold, the Boston kid, was guarding him. But Danny could see Ty hanging off Tarik, his man, ready to cut Rasheed off if he tried to go all the way to the basket when he finally made his move. Danny was on the right wing, knowing he was nothing more than a place for Rasheed to dump the ball off if he got jammed up on his drive.

Will, who'd made a couple of threes earlier, was on the other wing, just to give the defense something else to think about.

With fifteen seconds to go, Rasheed took the ball off his hip. He was always saying that it drove him crazy watching the NBA, he always thought guys waited too long to make their move. He started his now. Left-hand dribble, then right. Then left and right again. Two lightning crossovers that did exactly what they were supposed to: staple-gun Jack's feet to the floor.

He was past Jack then.

Ty came up on his right, the Cavs' center took away any room he had on his left. When the center moved up, Will's man dropped down to guard Ben Coltrane.

Nowhere for Rasheed to go. He gave a quick look at the clock and then, to the surprise of everybody in the place, Danny included, he wheeled and put the ball over his head and fired a screaming two-hand pass to Danny.

Kicking it over to him the way he had that first time they'd really played together in the backcourt, the day Danny had shot the air ball instead of passing it back to him.

He was wide open, about twenty feet from the basket, having pinched in. Ty ran right at him, waving his arms, thinking Danny had to be shooting.

But Danny wasn't shooting, and not just because he couldn't even see the basket over Ty's long skinny arms.

He wasn't shooting because of this:

He wasn't making the same mistake twice on a last shot.

This time he was getting the ball back to Rasheed.

The clock above the basket said five seconds.

There was no way to get the ball over Ty, and way too much traffic on either side of Ty to try a bounce pass around him.

Only one opening Danny could see:

Between Ty's legs.

Danny put the ball on the floor and rolled it along the floor, rolled it through his legs as hard as he could, before Ty had a chance to react.

All Rasheed, wide open himself now, had to do was lean over and grab it, and he had a layup.

But he took his eye off the ball for a split second, like a baseball infielder taking his eyes off a routine ground ball—Rasheed was probably as shocked as everyone in the gym that a pass was coming to him this way.

The ball went through his hands as easily as it had gone through Ty and rolled out of bounds as the horn for the half sounded.

Rasheed banged an open palm against the side of his head in frustration, then looked at Danny and pointed to himself. Like, My bad. Danny just smiled. It would have been one heck of an assist.

When he turned from Rasheed, Coach Powers was already on him.

“What was that?” he said.

Not talking in his mean-quiet voice now, talking loud enough for people already in the mess hall to hear him.

He pointed the finger of death at Danny and said, “Did you think you were bowling? Are you ever going to learn?”

He's acting like I lost the game
, Danny thought,
because of one stupid pass.

Except it hadn't been stupid, that was the thing.

Nothing else was happening in The House. He could feel everybody just watching him and Coach.

“Are you
ever
going to learn?” Coach Powers repeated.

Danny just stood there with his head down, taking it again, good at taking it by now, when he heard the sound of the applause.

The guys in the stands were clapping because he was getting yelled at by his coach?

But then Danny heard something else, something much more amazing than applause, heard a calm grown-up voice saying, “Hey, take it easy there, Ed.” Heard the voice saying, “That looked like something I'd try, to tell you the truth.”

Danny turned around, feeling himself smile as he did, somehow knowing who the voice belonged to before he even put a face with it.

Josh Cameron.

Josh Cameron himself: in a Rolling Stones T-shirt and cut-off jeans and unlaced green Nikes, a baseball cap turned backward on his head, shaking Danny's hand and saying, “Cool pass, kid.”