The Sidekick, page 25
Then Coach Caukwell ordered us into layup lines, and the clock overhead started ticking; I felt my breath shorten. You could see the Langham Creek guys on the other side of the court in their strawberry and cream uniforms. Los Lobos, with a wolf stitched into their jerseys. About six of them could dunk, the rim never stopped shaking. Afterward, we took turns shooting free throws, and I noticed that Marcus was missing. Apparently (this is what Breon said), he went to the bathroom to throw up. I made both of mine, then Marcus ran out and we huddled around him, touching hands. Lamont called out, Knights on one, KNIGHTS!, the horn sounded, and I wandered over to the bench to take a front-row seat.
It was the after-lunch crowd, people coming back from the concession stands with hot dogs or popcorn or 16 oz. sodas. But the Burleson High section was right behind us. Most of the students wore oversized Prussian blue GO BURLESON GO T-shirts, which someone must have handed out on the buses. They made a big bright block of color. From the tip-off, everybody stood up and didn’t sit down again until halftime.
The game seemed faster than normal, even Marcus looked puffed. At the first time-out, I saw a crust of salt around his mouth. His skin had that badly lit, pale muddy quality. I thought, thank God I don’t have to play.
Langham Creek doubled him every time he had the ball. If he passed off, he never got it back. We were down thirteen seven after one, and twenty-six sixteen at the half, but it didn’t really feel that close.
Five of us hadn’t played a minute—me, Blake Snyder, Tony Chua, Ben Silliman, and Josh Ramirez. Our sweat was nervous sweat and stank like old laundry. I could smell myself in the locker room. Caukwell’s idea was to let Marcus play point and make Gabe and Lamont set screens for him in the backcourt. “I want you to hurt some people,” he told them. “I don’t care if they call fouls. Make ’em feel you.” He had a smash-mouth football understanding of the game; Caukwell was an old SEC guy, after all. Hand off to your running back and block like hell. To Marcus he said, “Don’t give it up unless you have to. It’s your ball. It’s your game.”
Mackey was trying to do to us what Nolan Richardson had done to him, and everybody else the Razorbacks played against. Run ’em so hard that nothing else matters except how much you can run.
At halftime, Marcus took a shower. He had a spare pair of socks but not underpants, which he must have forgotten—they were so wet he had to wring them out. But he looked fresh, for about ten seconds, with the towel around his waist, and then the sweat started showing through. Caukwell had some clean shorts for Marcus, but no extra jersey. It was dripping when he put it on. The horn sounded when he was still tying his shoes.
It was our ball to start the second half, and Marcus beat the double team around the corner and drove the length of the court for a layup. Twenty-six eighteen. The next time down he did the same thing but dumped it off to Breon on the block for a six-footer. Then he pulled up for a three. Caukwell burned a couple time-outs in that third quarter just to give Marcus a breather, which is one of the things he got asked about afterward. What could I do, he said. The kid’s going all out both ends. I wasn’t gonna sit him.
With three minutes left, down two, Marcus missed an eighteen-footer and Lamont picked up the rebound. Lamont was giving up six inches, but he had an ass and could use it. Just wait till your man leaves his feet, and nudge—I don’t care how big or strong he is. If he’s in the air, you can move him. Then Marcus cut down the lane, took the backdoor pass and rose up one-handed with the bounce of the ball. When someone got in his way, he dunked on him.
It was a kind of fuck you. They’d been beating up on him all afternoon.
The building was filling up for the 6A Semifinal, and the noise level had started to thicken around us—you could feel the weight of the crowd in your ears, like the buildup to a summer storm. By this point in the game I was almost pure spectator … I say this, from a distance of almost twenty years, to explain what happened next. We traded misses, then Marcus released after a long rebound, streaked in for the layup, got fouled hard and lay there by the side of the court.
At first I thought he must have reinjured the ankle but mainly he was just exhausted. Dehydrated, too. The Erwin Center’s an old building and the air-conditioning had broken down. They actually brought out a stretcher to carry him off, but when it got there he waved them away. Eleven thousand people rose to their feet when he stood up, if they weren’t standing already, and watched, while he made the foul shot. With a minute sixteen on the clock, we were up by three.
Then they scored, and we missed, and they missed; there was a scramble for the rebound and one of the Langham kids knocked it out of bounds, under their own basket. You forget, these are high school games. A lot of what happens happens because things go wrong. Caukwell signaled to the ref that he wanted a substitution, then called out, “Brian!” from the far end of the bench. I pretended not to hear. He must have got up and started walking down the sideline, because eventually he stopped in front of me. “Brian,” he said again. “Check in for Lamont.”
I couldn’t look at him.
“Tell Gabe to inbound. Run stack two. Line up next to Marcus, they’re gonna double him, which means you should be free. Then hold on till they foul you. Do what you do.”
Nothing.
“Come on, son. This is your chance.”
The main thing that worried me, because I knew I wasn’t going out there, in the middle of that stage, under all those lights, to shoot free throws, was how many people could hear this conversation. It was pretty loud in the arena, but the Burleson section was right behind us, which is why I didn’t want to look up or give any sign that Caukwell was addressing me. Ben Silliman, who I knew from six years of Hebrew school, sat on one side; and Josh Ramirez on the other. They were the guys I talked to during games.
“Brian,” Caukwell said again but changed his mind. We were out of time-outs otherwise he might have had a chance to do things differently. “All right, Ben, get out there.”
Silliman was a decent shooter, a stocky six-foot point guard, who also played backup safety for the football team. Anyway, he came in, they doubled Marcus, and Gabe threw him the ball. Then Silliman missed both free throws. Langham got the rebound and someone released at the other end—for some reason, we didn’t have anybody back. Just one of those dumb things that happens if you don’t have a time-out. They got a layup and we had three seconds left to go the length of the court and score. Breon used to play quarterback in Pop Warner and took the inbounds. Marcus was running around like crazy at half-court but they put three guys on him. At least we got a shot off. Gabe Hunterton had a twenty-footer at the buzzer, which hit the backboard first and almost went in. And the game was over.
Afterward, Coach made us take the team bus back to Burleson. There were parents in the crowd who could have driven us straight home, but he said, we need another half hour, just us, to let this sink in. “They can pick you up from school. For most of you guys, for the seniors, this is the last time y’all will be together as a high school basketball team. This may be the last time you can call yourself a basketball player. You had a great run. It may not seem like that now, but there will come a point in your life when you wish you were back here again, so you could do it all over.”
Nobody wanted to shower. I didn’t know who knew about that inbounds play, apart from Josh and Ben, but I didn’t want to wait for anybody or walk with anybody, so I got to the bus first and sat where I always sit, front left. Coach Caukwell came in behind and didn’t look at me. Marcus usually sat with me, but he actually waited for Ben Silliman, who kept his head down, too, and they sat together a few rows back. Marcus had his arm around him. I felt so … jealous, until Dad met me in the parking lot and Marcus had to come with us.
30
After college I worked for a sports website called A Fan’s Notes, which was later bought out by ESPN. Danny Liebling dropped out of MIT to set it up. The office was basically his kitchen/living room in Central Square. It overlooked one of those neighborhood playgrounds that got used by the local Montessori a few blocks away. For an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, if you opened the windows on a hot day, all you could hear was the sound of screaming. Danny wanted us to remember what it was like to care about sports when we were kids. Like, when everything was a competition, and the point was to show that other kids were wrong, or dumber than you, even if you had to do dumb stuff to prove it.
Marcus Hayes was the reason I got the job. I spent three years at Texas writing about him, until he came out junior year, when the Celtics made him the third pick in the draft, like Jordan, like Len Bias. After he won rookie of the year, I sent the sports editor at the Boston Globe a stack of my articles about Hayes. A few weeks later he wrote back and suggested I get in touch with Danny. At the time, he really didn’t have any accreditation, or insider access; he just watched a lot of TV and wrote about what he watched. They talked about pop culture, too.
Alana Sissons was there when I arrived. We overlapped for about six months. Somehow her presence turned the whole thing into a kind of debate team boondoggle, where the nerds were delighted to have in their presence a fellow girl nerd, until she got hired by the Times and moved to New York.
I lived on the first floor of a rundown building three minutes from Porter Square. My first job, my first grown-up apartment, my first taste of real life. At the other end of the street, among the grand old Cambridge colonials, was Raymond Park, which had a couple of basketball courts. I heard Larry Bird liked to shoot around there but never saw him. Sometimes, after work, if it was still light out, I put on my high-tops and grabbed a ball from the house and walked over to the courts.
In those days, Marcus didn’t need an escort to go out in public. Once or twice he even came over for dinner—we’d order pizza and watch a ball game on TV. Or wander over to the park and shoot around. Then the kids would figure out who he was and ask for autographs, and he’d dunk a little, just to show off, and I’d stand on the side seeing the whole thing unfold and finally take a ball and shoot over on the other basket by myself, until he got bored. My landlady called him, “That nice young man with the interesting hair.”
*
Quinn and I actually saw him that first night in Boston. There was a crowd outside the Daily Catch on Hanover Street, which is one of the places I thought of taking her to dinner. But there’s always a line, and it seemed a pretty cold night to spend an hour inching along the sidewalk. Then when we got there we realized it wasn’t a line. The restaurant was closed for a private party, but you could see what was going on through the window. Marcus and a young black woman sat at one of the tables, lit by candlelight, eating pasta from a pan.
She wore a long black evening dress, which was just … I mean, you shouldn’t eat spaghetti, looking like that. Marcus had on a brown suit with oversized lapels, and leaned over the table, all elbows and arms, because he didn’t really fit in the chair. Other people were there, too. Rajon Rondo and Kevin Garnett. Maybe also Kendrick Lamar and Mark Wahlberg and … Casey Affleck? Mila Kunis and … I don’t know. Famous people who don’t play basketball are not my field. There was a rotation of rubberneckers. People saw the crowd and went over to check out what was going on, maybe take a few pictures, and then move on. It was twenty degrees outside, and you could feel your face because you’d kind of stopped feeling your face.
Quinn said, “I know that girl.”
“Which one?”
“The one sitting with Marcus. She’s in my psych lecture.”
“What’s her name?”
“Cheryl something. Cheryl Dillard.”
“What’s she like?”
“I don’t know, she’s in my … we have these seminar groups, and she’s in mine. Kind of stuck-up but smart. Smarter than me.”
In the morning, the papers were full of Marcus Hayes. I asked at hotel reception to get the Globe and the Times and picked them up outside my room while Quinn slept, then climbed back into bed and read them while she lay beside me.
It was front-page news in the Globe: “The Prodigal Returns,” by Stacey Kupchak. The last time Marcus suited up in Celtics green he lifted the Larry O’Brien trophy over his head, and then, which is what he always did, laid it against his cheek and seemed to slow dance with the cold gold metal against his face. They had a photo of that, too, on court at the Staples Center after the Finals. But the article itself was mostly about the Sonics’ current struggles. They were eight and thirteen coming into the game; Marcus was shooting the lowest percentage of his career. Stories about locker room tension had started to emerge, with Marcus on one side and Mickey on the other. Every minor game-time interaction between them, caught on camera, had become a subject of minute analysis. There were rumors that Coach Kaminski was about to get fired.
Meanwhile, the Celtics had their own problems. Garnett was getting too old to carry a lot of minutes—on the downslope, hanging on. Sometimes big-body guys can stretch out a career long enough for you to forget what they were like when they were actually good. They look great on the lineup sheet, but there’s a difference, and eventually it shows. Young guns like Avery Bradley hadn’t broken through yet and maybe never would. The Celtics were twelve and nine, just keeping their head above water. This is the kind of game that can make or break a team, in the long dead stretch of season between Thanksgiving and the All-Star break.
Of course, reporters have to say stuff like that, to keep selling papers. The art of sports journalism is to combine the memory of an elephant with the attention span of a goldfish—what they really care about is the next six seconds. Which doesn’t mean they’re not right, some of the time. Kupchak wrote, “This may turn out to be one of those classic late-career encounters, where all of the drama ends up being unconnected to the real implications going forward: Mmeremikwu is the future of the League, but this isn’t his moment.”
There was even an article about me, which I pushed across the table when we finally went down to brunch. About the sportswriter who grew up with Marcus—it called me the Hayes Whisperer. I knew it was coming because the journalist asked me for a quote.
“I’m having such a good time already,” Quinn said.
“What makes you say that? I mean, I’m happy you’re happy. Me, too.”
“I’m sitting at the Ritz Carlton in Boston with this famous guy who used to live here and is gonna show me around.”
The truth is, I don’t know how much I showed her. The game sat like a big lump in the middle of the afternoon. But we walked around the Common and little specky snow began to fall. Not enough to stick but enough to … blur the cloudy sunshine, like an etching … to make it look like what was happening had already happened and wouldn’t be forgotten. I showed her the metal ducklings waddling out toward Beacon Street. They were already wrapped up for the season in Santa hats and red-and-white scarves, but Quinn didn’t know the story, so I had to tell her. What I could remember. Some cop helps them cross over from Beacon Hill. My mom used to read it to me. Now I read it to Betsy’s kids.
“And later, when we get back to the hotel, you can read it to me.” But she was kidding and looked kind of filthy when she said it, which was part of the joke.
*
Amy Freitag managed to get me a comp for Quinn, which she described on the phone as an A1 favor, because tickets were hard to come by. You owe me, she said. The things I do for other people’s sex lives. It was one of Amy’s long-standing jokes that she couldn’t get a date, a way of flirting with you and putting you off at the same time.
We had lunch in Chinatown and afterward walked to the game. It’s a nice thing; I always like walking to a ballpark and seeing the city converge, like ants on a watermelon rind. Everybody in a good mood, the way you tend to be when you’ve already spent the money on something you’re about to enjoy. I saw kids wearing Marcus’s old Celtics jersey, the famous 11, and even a few Sonics green-and-gold number 4s.
A few minutes before tip-off, the lights brightened and the heat increased, and I noticed an ABC crew setting up on the sidelines to interview somebody sitting in the front row. It was Don Hayes, Marcus’s dad, who wore sweatpants and loafers, and a Bat City Sonics sweatshirt. You could see his face reproduced in quadruplicate on the jumbotron in eight-foot by eight-foot pixelated lights. Some people in the crowd must have recognized him because there was a scattering of applause, and then he stopped moving his mouth, the camera shifted, and Selena said something, because she was sitting next to him—brightly made up, in kiss-me red lipstick.
When she heard the clapping she sat back smiling and clapped back, and I thought, I guess he knows they’re here because Amy must have gotten them the tickets, but when Marcus walks on court to play basketball this kind of thing will be going on, whatever this is. So far as I knew Don and Selena were barely on speaking terms.
But then they killed the lights, and the screen showed a picture of Marcus Hayes rising up to shoot over Derek Fisher in the ’08 Finals … “My Time” started playing over the sound system: My life has been a movie all the time, every single night … while Eddie Palladino, the Celtics PA announcer, crooned … At guard, six six, from the University of Texas, Marcus Hayes … and out of nowhere the spotlight chased him on court and it was like a snarl of high-voltage wiring blew up, the place exploded in static sound. For a full minute Marcus stood shifting from foot to foot, singled out by a beam of light, while a montage of his Celtics highlights flashed overhead.
