Summer Ball (22 page)

T
HERE WAS SOMEONE WITH
A
LI
W
ALKER WHEN
D
ANNY FINALLY SPOTTED
her Saturday morning in the crowd of parents walking up from the parking lots.

It wasn't his dad.

Just the next best thing on this particular day.

Tess.

Camera bag slung over her shoulder.

After Danny had broken loose from his mom, after a Mom hug that tried to squeeze all the oxygen out of his body, Danny said to Tess, “You're supposed to be home.”

“Change of plans,” she said. “It turns out that I'm hitching a ride back with you guys.”

It had been arranged when they'd gone off to camp that Ali Walker was the designated parent from Middletown and would drive Danny, Will and Ty home. Ali had brought her Suburban, so there was plenty of room for Tess.

“So you get to see the big game,” Danny said.

“I guess,” Tess said, smiling at him. “I mean, as long as I'm here.”

Ali didn't want to talk about the big game, she wanted to tell him that he needed a haircut as soon as he got home and was he packed and if he was packed, was he sure he had everything? Danny said yes, to all of the above. She said, prove it, so he and his mom and Tess walked down to Gampel.

Zach was sitting on his bunk when they got there, his parents having left a message that they were stuck in traffic somewhere on the highway between Boston and here.

Ali said, “Is this the budding superstar I've been hearing about?”

Zach stood, looked up, shook her hand and said, “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Walker.”

They all stayed in Gampel while Danny proved to his mom that he hadn't forgotten anything major, and then they all went outside so Tess could take some pictures before lunch.

The game wasn't until seven-thirty, which meant there were still almost eight hours to wait. But Danny was fine with that. It was a great feeling, the sense of anticipation and the nervousness you got before a big game, as long as the day of the big game had finally arrived.

The only thing better was actually playing the game.

That never changed, no matter where the game was, no matter who it was against.

Even at camp.

 

There was a barbecue for the campers and parents that began a little after four o'clock. Things were set up that way so the players from both the Celtics and Lakers would have time to not only get something in their stomachs but actually digest it before the opening tip. It was at the barbecue, after Ali Walker and Danny and Tess had taken a quick trip into town so she could see Cedarville, that she finally got to meet Tarik and Rasheed.

“My son tells me you're even better than he thought you were in North Carolina,” Ali said.

Rasheed grinned. “He means how good he thought I was until he flopped on me.”

“I didn't flop,” Danny said.

Ali said to Rasheed, “You're both probably talking to the wrong parent on this.”

Danny looked at her. “How's Dad doing?” It was the first time they'd talked about him all day.

“I'm under strict orders to call him the minute the game is over.”

When they sat down to eat, his mom was between Will and Tarik, which meant she spent the whole barbecue laughing her head off. It was funny, Danny thought now, watching her, seeing her as comfortable as she'd always been with his friends. Sometimes you didn't even know what you were missing when you were away from somebody until you were back with them. And one of the things he had missed most being up here at camp was the loud, happy sound of his mother's laughter.

He still wished his dad were here, for a lot of reasons, one of them being that this reminded him of all the other games his father had missed when his parents had been apart all those years, all those years when Danny had pretty much convinced himself that his dad was never coming back.

It also brought him back to the start of camp when he felt lower than dirt.

He looked up then, all the way across the mess hall, like this was some kind of weird cue, and saw Lamar Parrish, already dressed for the game in his Lakers jersey, glaring at him.

Lamar pointed to himself first, mouthed the word
Me,
then pointed at Danny.

You.

Danny turned and said to Will and Tarik and Rasheed, “You guys wanna go shoot?”

His mom said, “You hardly ate anything, not that a person would consider that any kind of breaking news.”

“Mom,” Danny said, “I can't sit here anymore, I gotta move.”

She smiled at him and said, “Like a streak of light.”

All Danny heard from Tess was the click of her camera.

 

Danny thought there was an outside shot that he might start, but Coach Powers went with their normal starting five, which meant Cole was with Rasheed.

Before they went inside The House to warm up, a few minutes after seven o'clock, Coach Powers took them all over to the lake side of the building, and sat them down in the grass. There were no locker rooms at The House, just bathrooms, so all pregame meetings like this always took place out here. It was a perfect night, not too hot, not too muggy.

The Celtics were stretched out in one long line. Coach Powers got down on one knee, so he was facing all of them.

“You get only so many games in your life when you play for a championship,” he began. “I read in a book one time, I forget where, the writer asked, If there were only three or four sunsets you were going to see in your whole life, how valuable would they be? So if I told you that tonight was only one of the three or four times in your life when you might play for the title of something, how dear would you hold this one game of basketball?”

There was something in his eyes now Danny hadn't seen before, a light in them, some kind of spark.

Without looking around at his teammates, Danny knew the coach had their attention.

“It doesn't matter where the game is, or who it's against,” he said. “But you know the feeling inside you is different today. You know because that feeling has been inside you since you got up this morning.” He paused. “Because today
is
different, that's why. Today is different because you're playing for something today. Not a trophy. Or to prove something to me or the parents who are here or the counselors or the other coaches, or even Mr. Josh Cameron himself. You're here to prove something to yourselves tonight—that you're the best of the best.”

He paused again and said, “People who don't play sports will never have this feeling for one day in their lives.”

He's right, Danny thought. He hated to admit it, especially about a guy he'd hated from the first day. But Coach Powers was right. For the first time, Danny at least could see why he might have been a great coach in the first place.

“Every pass, every shot,” he said, once more in that voice of his that made you strain to hear, pointing his finger at them. “Play every play as if the whole game is riding on it. From the time you step on that court in a few minutes, you keep one picture in your heads: You picture what the faces of the other team will look like if they beat you.
And then you do whatever it takes to make sure they don't.
”

Now Coach Powers was standing up, raising his voice at the same time, like he was giving a sermon in church.

“Are you going to let them beat you?”

“No!” they yelled back at him.

“Are we going to win the game?”

“Yes!”

“Then let's do this!”

They ran back inside.

They got back into layup lines for a couple of minutes, then shot around until the horn sounded. Will always waited until everybody else on the team was finished shooting and then stayed out until he made one more three. Danny always waited with him, and did now. So they were the last two back to the Celtics' huddle, Will a few feet ahead of him.

Before they got there, Danny got popped from his blind side like you did when somebody on your team didn't call out a pick in time.

He should have known who it was.

“Sorry,” Lamar Parrish said to him. “You're so little I didn't see you.”

For the whole first quarter, neither team was more than a basket ahead. Lamar was taking most of the shots for his team, Rasheed was doing the thing he did best for the Celtics, letting the game come to him, doing everything he could to get everybody else on his team involved. They had come out in a man-to-man, Coach Powers putting Rasheed on Lamar. The Lakers were in a zone because they were always in a zone, because as talented as Lamar was, there was no place you could hide him in a man-to-man—he was that lazy when the other team had the ball.

He didn't care about defense the way he didn't care about anything except shooting.

And himself.

The Lakers scored three quick baskets to start the second quarter, extending their lead to eight. That was when Danny got into the game. It did more to hurt the Celtics than help them. The other Laker guard, a redheaded kid named Tommy Main, was as tall as Lamar and impossible for Danny to guard. With Lamar taking a rest—because nobody at Right Way, not even him, was allowed to play all four quarters, not even in the play-offs—Tommy Main started posting Danny up almost every time the Lakers had the ball.

By the time Coach Powers realized what he was watching and put the Celtics into a zone, the Lakers were ahead by fourteen points.

With two minutes to go before the half, Coach Powers got Danny out of there. As Danny went past him to take a seat at the end of the bench, Coach snapped, “In a championship game, defense wins.”

The Laker lead was still fourteen at the half. Coach Powers hustled them back outside, sat them down and immediately laced into the whole team, his voice a raspy whisper somebody even twenty feet away wouldn't have been able to hear.

This was
his
kind of trash talk, that voice you had to strain to hear, those blue-looking veins trying to pop right out of his forehead.

“I thought you wanted this as much as I do,” he said. “I thought winning a championship still mattered in sports, as long as it was the championship of something. But apparently I was wrong. You're all playing like a bunch of quitters.”

They all just sat there, some of them with their heads down, just taking it from him. He didn't allow for one second that the Lakers might just be playing better, that the Lakers might want to win the game, too. As usual, Coach Powers was putting it all on them, calling them the worst thing in the world:

Quitters.

What Richie had called Danny.

All Danny could think of was getting back inside, doing whatever he could do to help his team win, and then leaving this one gym knowing that this guy was never going to be his coach ever again.

He would try to win the game for himself and for his teammates, and then he was gone. In the language of Tarik Meminger, he was taillights.

“Am I making myself clear, Mr. Walker?”

Danny knew he'd missed something. He just didn't know
what
he had missed, the way it was in class when your mind wandered and then you realized the teacher was talking to you. So he just said, “Yes sir.”

Coach Powers said, “For the rest of this game, if you don't guard, you don't play.”

He was standing over Danny now.

“But between you and I,” Coach Powers said, “you haven't guarded anybody yet, have you?”

Danny heard his mom before he saw her.

“Between you and me,” Ali Walker said.

Coach Powers turned around. Danny's mom was standing right there, a bottle of water in her hand, Tess at her side.

“I beg your pardon,” Coach Powers said.

“It's not between you and I,” Ali said. “It's between you and me.” She was smiling pleasantly, but Danny knew the look, it was the same as if she was hitting him right in the teeth.

“And you are?”

“Ali Walker.”

“Oh,” Coach Ed Powers said. “Mr. Walker's mother.”

“Danny's mom,” she said. “Richie's wife. I'm sure you remember my husband.”

There was something about her body language, the way she was looking at him, that smile fixed in place, that let Coach Powers know he shouldn't tangle with her, not here. “I'm not too good with words sometimes,” he said.

She said, “So I'm told,” and walked away.

Coach Powers took a couple of steps away from his players, as if he wanted to say one more thing to her, but didn't. Tarik took the opportunity to whisper in Danny's ear, “Oh, baby. Your mom…from
downtown
!”

Coach Powers came back to them now, trying to act as if nothing had happened. He talked about what they were going to do on defense and offense to start the second half. All the while Danny kept thinking,
However much I thought I was buried before with this coach, this time they're going to need heavy equipment to dig me out.