The Sidekick, page 21
“What’s your name, son?” he said.
“Noah.”
“You wanna take them off?”
And Noah, because that’s the kind of kid he was, reached over and took off the Oakleys.
Marcus looked at him—his face was about a foot away.
“Is something wrong with my eyes?”
“No.” And then: “Can you put them back on?”
I reminded myself to tell this story to Betsy. Then it was over (Albert gave me a dutiful hug, with his arms around my belt) and Marcus, Amy and I walked back through the empty shiny corridors to the car. It was a suddenly ordinary Thursday morning in October. Plastic slides stood in the front yards; soccer nets and hoses; unclaimed newspapers. Marcus said, “Can I give you a ride?” And I said, “I live about five minutes away,” but for some reason I got in the Hummer anyway and sat in back with Marcus while Radko drove, with Amy up front beside him. The day darkened outside through the tinted windows.
“This where you went to school?” Marcus said.
“For about three years. They used to call me Cryin’ Brian.”
“What’s your nephew’s name?” He had forgotten already. It was no longer necessary information.
“Albert, Al.”
“Does Albert Al like it here?”
“Not much. He’s not one of those kids who fights back.”
“Well, he’ll learn.”
“I don’t know. Did I learn?”
But this part of the conversation was over. Marcus stared out the window in his sunglasses and didn’t answer. I guess this is where he grew up, too. For a year of his life, these streets were his home. Part of me thought, he’s got a game on Tuesday night against LA, his first professional game in three years. And you’re alone in a car with him. This is the time to ask questions. Instead what I said was, “You did a nice thing today,” and a minute later they dropped me off at my apartment.
25
The League scheduled the Lakers for opening night, maybe because that’s the last team Marcus beat when he was a Celtic, in the 2008 Finals. Shaq had retired but Kobe was still there. They were on the downhill but still good, still a big-ticket draw. The spread gave them three points, even on the road.
My dad wanted to come, so I contacted Amy Freitag, who arranged a guest pass. Even setting off an hour before tip-off, we got stuck on Red River in a bumper-to-bumper jam. In the end we had to crawl under I-35 and join the overflow parking at Disch-Falk, the baseball stadium, then walk back over the highway on MLK, itself a sixor seven-lane road, cars inching along, people pushing past each other on the narrow sidewalk … while autumn sunset shone directly in our eyes and the Erwin Center loomed like some concrete silo or windowless spaceship in the distance. And all of this traffic and all of these people had converged because Marcus Hayes decided to play basketball again.
A father and son stood in the shuffle ahead of me.
“You were too young when Marcus retired. You probably don’t remember.”
“I remember.”
“Anywhere he wants to get, that’s where he goes. Can’t get in his way.”
“Kobe’s gonna punk on him.”
“Like he did in oh five?”
“Come on, Dad. He looks fat. Somebody should’ve got in his way when he went to Taco Bell. Only time Marcus scores is if Kobe lets him, because he feels sorry.”
“Let him score fifty-three in game six.”
“That was, like, ten years ago.”
A press pass gets you access to the locker room—they shut the doors forty-five minutes before tip-off. It was hot inside, and Dad was already sweaty from the walk over. His face shone under the lights. We ran into Fred Rotha, who introduced himself.
My father said, “Have you ever seen my son shoot a basketball? He can really shoot.”
“Dad, come on.”
The Erwin Center was not built to host Major League professional sports. Laycock got a promise from the regents to upgrade the home locker room (let the other team sit in drafts and shower on moldy tiles), but it was still a work in progress and you could see construction tape blocking off an unfinished lounge area, and the carpeting underfoot was that temporary stuff they lay down to protect the floor. Even so, Marcus Hayes had a space to himself, with a black leather armchair and a massage table in front. Mmeremikwu had a similar setup at the other end of the room, while the rest of the guys had to arrange themselves on plastic fold-out chairs. Most of them had headphones on. There was a strong smell of manliness, and also a kind of collective impression of manufactured internal space.
“Mickey” liked to talk though. He got his juices going by making fun of the reporters. He said to one of them, a Sports Illustrated guy: “You been working out? You look like you had a good off-season. You lay off starchy foods. Got to keep away from those complimentary muffins.” (There was a buffet table of free food pushed up against the wall, with breakfast muffins and grapes and melon slices and a coffee urn.) “Can you do a one-hand pushup? Come on, you look like you can do a one-hand pushup. You want me to show you how?” By this point in his pregame process he wore only undershorts. His almost painful-looking stretched-out body was all muscle and bone. So he got down on his hands and knees and started doing one-hand pushups, and every muscle stood out. “Come on, Kenny Albrecht. It’s your turn.”
And Kenny, in his Perry Ellis suit, slowly bent over.
All of this is just the brief occasional release of air in a situation that is trending heavily toward greater and greater tension, like one of those blood-pressure straps that tightens and tightens then releases a little and then tightens again.
Mickey came late to basketball and part of what made him scary is that he still seemed to be learning and growing. In high school you get major college or NBA-quality prospects who make the rest of the league look like … teenagers, and Mickey had done the same thing to the NBA. He was a kid, he moved like a kid, gangly and high-energy, not totally in control, but somehow next to him other NBA players, big powerful highly skilled veterans, looked like the junior varsity. If on top of the physical tools he developed a working jump shot, the feeling was, forget about it. Put four guys around him who can shoot, space them out along the three-point line, and let Mickey go to work. Then if he learns to pass out of double teams, it’s game over. Marcus could shoot but nobody expected him to accept being one of those guys.
I don’t know what it does to you where your basic experience of growing up is that everybody else, at every stage, is like your kid brother. You’re bigger and faster and stronger and better than they are. Even when you reach the NBA, the elite league in what might be the most relentlessly competitive human activity in the world, you look around and think, why can’t these guys do what I can do? Why can’t they keep up? Maybe you try to tell yourself every day how lucky you are. But that luck is you, it’s who you are, and after a while even gratitude turns into self-gratitude, and counting your blessings is just another kind of showing off. Mickey came across as a nice guy, but that’s partly because he treated everybody like his kid brother. He put his hand on your head, he liked to joke around. It was important for him to think of himself as easygoing, which sometimes made him a tricky person to deal with.
Not that Mickey had it easy. His parents were immigrants from Enugu, and Mickey grew up stateless for most of his childhood. He used to sell watches, cheap Rolex knockoffs, at the Marché du Prado in Marseille.
At some point I should say something about the other guys sitting between Marcus and Mickey along the locker room wall. A basketball team is fifteen highly ambitious and successful young men who for complicated reasons are willing to accept a rigid social hierarchy. But the hierarchy also has to be enforced, game after game and day after day—in the locker room, too. Eddie Roundtree sat closest to Marcus. About six eleven, he had the kind of fat on his shoulders and arms that he knew how to use, although Eddie was actually pretty chilled out. Before games he liked to eat a couple of candy bars, so people (fans, staffers, reporters sometimes) gave him unusual candy bars to try, and he always had a big selection to choose from.
Mickey’s best friend on the team was this mixed-race German kid, Dieter (Diet) Crawford. His dad was US Air Force, stationed in Ramstein, but they moved back to Florida for high school. He was a sort of jitterbug two-guard, a streaky shooter, and one of those basketball players who didn’t totally define as a basketball player. He wore dreads and hats and David Bowie T-shirts. There were two other foreigners on the team: Jan Stepanik, a big from Slovenia, who showed up to training camp thirty pounds overweight. But he knew how to play, could handle and shoot from anywhere so coaches let him get away with it. And Tony LaMarca from Argentina, skinny as a beanstalk, seven foot one, who could run and jump but not much else. A project, in other words. Also, an extremely unhappy homesick kid, as we later found out.
The other bigs were Jason Mulroney from Duke, a solid backup player, very low ego, who only did what he was supposed to do: rebound, set screens, swing the ball. He wanted to go into coaching afterward. And Alfonso Jenks, a rookie out of Louisville, the number sixteen pick, who wasn’t expected to play much. Before the game it was his job to fill the water bottles. Also, he had to carry his stuff around in a pink My Little Pony backpack, with the words I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS written in diamond lettering across the back. The other rookie was a white kid from Gonzaga, Zach Ballatyne, a real bouncy kid, good-natured, who got on everybody’s nerves. His backpack said SPECIAL PRINCESS and he had to bring Krispy Kreme donuts to every practice.
But for the veterans it wasn’t a game anymore, just business. Ramon Neves had bounced around the League because he signed a long-term contract that underpaid him, which basically turned him into a trade asset. He got lumped in with a lot of other deals. But the contract was about to run out, Neves was thirty-one years old; if he wanted to cash in, this was his chance. Ty Jones was another gym rat. He once got recruited to play running back for Michigan but chose basketball instead. At six one, he could bench more than anyone else on the team. Very Christian, very upright, very disciplined. But his confidence came and went. Sometimes he could shoot, sometimes not. You had to start him because otherwise his game went to pieces.
In addition to the players, you had twenty or thirty journalists milling around, making small talk, drinking coffee, and eating the muffins. From all over the world: China (CCTV), Germany (RTL and Die Zeit), the BBC. The atmosphere was vaguely like a convention center, apart from the steadily growing sense of … not disaster, but something as sudden and significant as disaster. It’s a weird scene. These big dudes, most of them black, who show up in five-thousand-dollar suits, are slowly getting changed around you, going through their routines, listening to music or playing Beat Sneak Bandit on their phones. While at the same time a bunch of middle-aged reporters (mostly guys, mostly white) are having a kind of office party or conference.
Marcus lay on the massage table getting a rubdown and then sat back in the leather armchair and let them tape his ankles. When someone from El Pais started taking pictures, Radko stepped in.
“No photographs,” he said.
“Come on,” the photographer said to Marcus. “For your fans in Spain.”
“What paper you from?” Marcus asked, without lifting his headphones off his ears.
“El Pais.”
“That’s Madrid, right?”
“Yes! Yes!”
Marcus had a lot of interactions like this, where what counted as intimacy from him or curiosity about other people was just these very basic informational transactions. Sometimes he might say something like, “You can have a good time in Madrid,” and the response would be eager and flattered. Even dumb comments like that were an invitation, so he had to be careful.
“I like your headphones,” the photographer said. Marcus didn’t answer, and eventually the guy went on, “Focal Utopia,” and took another picture.
“Don’t make me the bad guy here.” Radko stood between them.
“Come on, man! I’m just doing my job.”
“Me, too.”
These things happened all the time.
At one point, Marcus noticed my father at the buffet table and called out, “Mr. Blum, I didn’t see you,” and my dad walked over to him with a slice of cantaloupe dripping in his hands.
“Please,” my dad said. “You used to call me Arthur.”
“Brian still causing you trouble?”
“He’ll grow up eventually. You look good, Marcus. It’s good to see you back.”
“Time to get real.” Then he said it again, louder. “Time to get real.” Then he shouted across the room: “Hey Mickey, what time is it?”
“What?”
“What time is it?”
“Six …”
Mickey was getting taped up now, lying on his belly with his legs sticking off the end of the massage table. He had a watch on his wrist but had to reach his arm out to see it.
“Time to get real. I said, What time is it?”
Mickey didn’t answer.
“What time is it?” Marcus said again.
“To get real.”
“Time to get real.” Each time louder, and this time Eddie Roundtree joined in. “Time to get real. Time to get real.” It was embarrassing, like drunk guys at a bus stop. A few minutes later Coach Kaminski walked in, one of these short tough gray-faced ex-military ex-point guards, and they kicked us out of the locker room.
So my dad and I wandered behind the home basket and waited for the players to come out.
“Do you think I can sneak out and take a shot?” he asked. Carts or racks of balls stood at various intervals around the court.
“Better not.”
And then three or four Lakers ran out in T-shirts or warm-ups and started working through various routines. It’s like an OCD convention. All these guys going through the reps, anxiety protocols, and other guys, lower-tier coaching staff, facilitating or enabling—passing the ball back, standing in certain positions, pretending to play defense. Sometimes two or three stooges for each player. It’s all very low-key but at the same carefully orchestrated. You have to bounce two balls back and forth ten times. You have to make a shot before you move on. Just … a hundred different tics and comfort habits on display. And all for what? So you can face going out there later under the lights in front of sixteen thousand people and act out a play where the lines keep changing and other guys are trying to stop you from saying them anyway.
My dad said, “Can we stay down here the whole game?”
“Probably not. It’s more comfortable upstairs anyway.”
Tip-off was a half hour away, so we walked up to the press box to see what was going on. Already the floor was tacky with spilled soda. As the arena filled, so the tension increased. Noise, lights. It was like a high-pressure front moving in. You could feel it like a headache. Cheap tables or desks were lined up inside a cordoned-off section of the stadium, with electrical outlets underfoot so reporters could hook up their laptops and file and watch at the same time. Before each season, the team puts out a kind of program guide (there’s a whole publishing and media-production side to running an NBA club) and you could pick up a copy from the stack on one of the tables. Most reporters ignore it but my dad was in free-grab mode. Marcus and Mickey were both on the cover, under the title “Different Journeys.”
What made me look is the picture of Su Casa apartments. The article said he grew up with his mom in East Austin and went to Burleson High, but the truth is, almost half of that time he lived with us in Hyde Park. Selena was part of the story, too, a single mother who sacrificed her life and career so that Marcus could become what he became—which on some level was obviously true. But I was also like, she moved back to Dallas when the married guy she was going out with got divorced. It was my dad who picked us up after school and dealt with recruiters and everything that happened senior year.
After a while, if you get famous enough, your life takes on the quality of cliché. It becomes less real. The slightly intense high-school kid who’s new in town and spends his lonely single-parented hours shooting around at the parking lot hoop of his local church and dreaming of becoming a professional basketball player … is a person it is possible to sympathize with. But somehow if he actually becomes a pro basketball player, if all of that self-imposed loneliness turns out to be … efficient behavior, the kid becomes … a little harder to like.
By tip-off, the stadium was full. A capacity crowd of sixteen thousand seven hundred and thirty-four may be the second smallest in the League, but that’s still a lot of people. At a certain point the background noise becomes foreground. Every conversation you try to have is peppered with what, what? My dad doesn’t hear so well these days anyway. He held the program rolled up in his hand and waited for the performance to start.
All the players had come on court now, running through layup lines and last-minute shooting drills—Marcus worked his way around the three-point arc, while Coach Steuben stood at the free-throw line and fed him balls. Somebody said, “What do you think he’s gonna shoot?” and somebody else said, “You starting a book?”
“Give me an over under.”
Kenny Albrecht asked, “What did Michael shoot his first game back?”
“Which first game?”
“Both.”
Everybody has phones these days; such questions are answerable. We sat in rows like kids at school, so the conversation bounced around without anybody looking at anybody else. The stage lay thirty rows below us, and part of our attention was occupied by watching the flight of balls, and thinking, in, out, in, in, in, out.
Stacey Kupchak, the guy from the Boston Globe, got there first. “Seven for twenty-eight.”
“What about with the Wizards?”
A minute later: “Seven for twenty-one.”
“So how should we do this?” Kenny said. “Do we want to go by shooting percentage or points or what?”
