The Sidekick, page 29
After the State Semis, for complicated reasons, I decided to come off the wait-list at Brown and accept the offer at UT. Maybe not so complicated. I went into a hole and couldn’t face the thought of a six-hour flight to start over again in a place where I didn’t know anybody. Also, if I went to Texas, I could live at home.
During this time, I entered into a more or less constant state of argumentation with my mom, who went to Brown herself and wanted me to go there, and suspected that my decision was somehow connected to my obsession with basketball and this idea I had of following Marcus Hayes. Which I denied. Why spend the money to go to some fancy Ivy League school when I can live here for free and get a first-rate state education? Don’t you want me living at home anymore?
“Of course, I want you … but that’s not the point. You’re not supposed to want to, you’re supposed to want to get out of here.”
My dad let it play out.
In fact, Marcus and I talked a lot about going to Texas together. Or I talked to him about it. When the season ended, we started going to the park again and shooting around. For fun, we used to practice alley-oops. The rim on the court at Shipe was a couple of inches low and Marcus could almost hit his head against it. If kids saw us coming they climbed out of the pool and lined up still wet against the chainlink fence. Marcus worked himself into a sweat. His hands were covered in calluses, with pixels of dark blood buried under the skin.
Sometimes he teased me into trying to dunk and stood aside, while I took a ten-step run-up and grabbed … fistfuls of net. Touching rim was the closest I got. Afterward, I said, Did you see that? I touched it. I totally touched it.
Naw, naw, I didn’t see it. Do it again.
Once after class, after the school bus dropped us off, we were messing around at Shipe and Marcus started rapping, I got no father, I got no mother, How come I got stuck with this white-ass brother? He was dee-ing me up, and every time I tried to shoot or drive past him, he knocked the ball away and waited for me to get it. Beating me at basketball was like an expression of affection, it made him happy. Anyway, he kept rapping the whole time, even though he really couldn’t rap. It was just one of those things kids at school did, sitting around the hallways with scraps of paper. Eventually he gave up looking for rhymes and started dunking. Let’s go to Texas! he shouted, hanging on the rim. We’re going to Texas!
The other reason was, I wanted to take control of this ridiculous process where people who didn’t know me, college administrator types, made important evaluations and decisions about my character and potential. Which I thought, screw that. So I wrote to the Brown Office of Admissions and said, no thank you. And I called up Texas and said yes.
For weeks my mom barely looked at me. She just couldn’t talk about it. Finally she said, “I feel like, about ten years ago, maybe when we moved here, I made this decision just to … accept that your father came first, which seemed fine at the time, because he’s a great dad, but I feel like now, this is the price I paid and now you’re paying it, too.”
The funny thing is, one of the best things about the whole setup turned out to be going to work with Mom. Her office was in the Sánchez Building and she could park in the lot outside. Most of my classes were a few blocks away. The first day we drove in together, she said, This is what I listen to, meaning, that’s how it is, and put in one of her opera cassettes.
We never played this stuff at home. It was another example of how her interests ran parallel to ours. Sometimes, while the rest of us sat on the sofa and watched TV, Mom retreated to her room and if you knocked on her door she wouldn’t answer. The lights were off, and she lay with the music in her ears. But every morning on the ride to campus she made me listen to it.
For the first time I had a sense of her as somebody with private thoughts, which her kids had nothing to do with. We talked about her job, about my professors, whatever was happening that day, and then ten minutes later got out of the car.
I didn’t see much of Marcus. For a while we discussed living together freshman year and even looked at a few apartments over the summer. But then he got a room at Jester East, near the stadium, where a lot of athletes lived. Including guys from the basketball team. So I stayed home and saved money. We didn’t take the same classes or know the same people, although sometimes I ran into him at Dobie Mall, where we both liked to eat at Subway. Usually when I saw him he was hanging out with other ballplayers.
At that time three or four senior classmen on the basketball team were brothers of Kappa Delta Nu, and Marcus told me he wanted to pledge in the spring. That was Jordan’s fraternity, too.
The Daily Texan is the student newspaper. They have a pretty good sports page, so I got in touch with the editor, Alex Barber, and sent him some of my clippings from the Burleson Round Table. He turned out to be a she, who said, the best thing you can do is just go to some games. Write ’em up and send ’em in; we’ll see if we can use them. So that’s what I did. UT’s first game was against the Mean Greens of North Texas (broccoli, kale, spinach?) in one of those walkovers they schedule before the real season starts. I hadn’t been back to the Erwin Center since the Semifinals. Hayes played nine minutes and scored three points—nobody watching had any reason to notice him, and I didn’t mention Marcus in the write-up. But I made a lot of pre-Thanksgiving detox diet puns and the piece got printed.
Ninety-five was a transitional year for Texas basketball. B. J. Tyler had graduated, and Terrence Huckabee took over most of his scoring. Not a bad time to be a freshman—Coach Menzes had minutes to fill. His motto was, let the players play. Guys know who’s got game and who doesn’t; they can sort themselves out. Which meant you could earn playing time by tearing up one of the starters in a scrimmage.
In those days, anybody could walk into varsity practices. Nobody had cell phones, nobody cared, and I used to go over to Gregory Gym in the afternoons and watch.
Years later they interviewed Huckabee about freshman Marcus Hayes.
After the first captain’s practice, we’re talking late September, it’s still high nineties outside and the gym was like a steam room. Huckabee had run them hard for two hours—it was his first season as captain, and he wanted to make them feel it.
I’m about to hit the showers, he said, when this kid comes up and challenges me to a game. Son, I tell him, we got a long season ahead of us. This is day one. But he doesn’t really say anything, he just looks at me like, whatever. Like I’m scared. So we start to play.
Did you beat him? (You can see the whole interview on YouTube, with Bob Costas.)
I beat him. Huckabee is laughing. I beat him. At that time Marcus was only like, hundred and seventy, hundred seventy-five pounds. I was two-thirty. In those days, it was two hundred thirty pounds of muscle. I beat him. He was too quick for me but I could back him down. Maybe I swung my elbows, maybe I caught him once or twice. He wasn’t gonna call foul. We played to eleven, win by two. You make it you take it. I think the final score was eighteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen, something like that. I beat him. But I tell you something else. (Still laughing.) I never played him one-on-one again.
You could see it in practice—nobody wanted Marcus to guard him. But he struggled on offense, he kept rushing. Spots didn’t open up on the floor the way he was used to. What you need is a few simple repeatable moves, which you can apply in recognizable situations. Turnaround from the block. Jab step jump shot. He didn’t have those yet, he needed to play in the flow. Sometimes he broke free for dunks off a turnover or pulled up for a three—or cut into the lane after a switch. But mostly he looked like a kid who had too much sugar, running around at someone else’s party.
Menzes said to him, “Slow down, Hayes. It’s not a race. You win by scoring points.” He said stuff like that to everybody.
Gregory Gym has a few bleachers courtside, and a low upper tier, with maybe fifteen rows of seats. I used to sit at the edge of the balcony, leaning over the rail. Nobody else was around; the floor squeaked, I could hear the coaches talking to each other on the sideline. It gave me something to do, if I didn’t have anything else.
Mom once said to me, “Do you ever see Marcus? You should give him a call.”
“Not much.”
“Why not, Brian?”
“He’s on the basketball team. He hangs out with basketball players.”
“He can’t play basketball all the time,” she said.
A few days later I actually ran into Marcus outside PCL. He was coming out of the library with a couple of teammates, I recognized them from the gym: Shay Gilmore, Bernard Meeks. Instead of introducing me, he sort of nodded at them and they kept walking, across the plaza toward 21st Street, and he strolled over. He dressed different now, even his walk had changed. His jeans hung down and his laces were undone. In high school he had kind of a preppy look and buttoned up his shirt all the way. First few months of college, I guess everybody tries to remake themselves. Or almost everybody. His cornrows hung down to his shoulders, and he carried a backpack by one strap.
“What up, Big Baby,” he said.
“You didn’t want to introduce me to your friends?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Those guys you were with.”
“They’re not my friends.”
Something about the whole business had annoyed me. Maybe I was still sore about the apartment.
“Why do you only hang out with black kids?” He just looked at me. “Every time I see you it’s with a bunch of black guys.”
“Man, you don’t even know. I just hang out with guys on the team. That’s all we do. Play basketball.”
“Mom says hi,” I said.
But then the season started, and things got better. I began to stop by the Daily Texan office in the basement of HSM, two blocks from the Drag. The editors went to Thundercloud for lunch or drank at the Crown & Anchor Pub, if they were old enough to drink. Even if you weren’t, you could eat. I liked these kids, they were real news brats. Most of them came from out of town or out of state. I attained a certain street cred just by being native Austin. They let me write food reviews, too.
A couple of weeks after this conversation with Marcus, I tried to make it up to him—in print. The Horns had just beaten UT-San Antonio in a shootout. Marcus scored twenty-one, coming off the bench, and the copyeditor let me write the headline: “Freshman Phenom Has Breakout Game.”
The next day in practice I sat in my usual seat. Some of the guys were ribbing Marcus, calling him phenom. Everybody was in a good mood. Wednesday morning, after an early season win. Watch out for the phenom. Don’t let the phenom shoot. Some of the coaches, too, including Steuben. I think it actually started to piss Marcus off. At one point, Steuben looked up at the stands in my direction, squinting a little, with his hand over his eyes. “Who’s that guy who always sits up there? Is that a reporter from the Daily Texan?” He knew who I was.
Marcus looked up. “Aw, he’s all right. That’s just my sidekick.”
*
A week before Christmas Mom baked a loaf of zucchini bread, which she said Marcus loved. She carried the pan to the car and told me to give it to him. “Do you know what his holiday plans are? Because I want him to know, he can always come here. He’s very welcome. I want him to know that.”
“Where’s he gonna sleep when Betsy comes home?”
“He can sleep in your room.”
“What am I supposed to do with this zucchini bread? Carry it around all day?”
“You’re supposed to give it to him. You get home-cooked food every night. Not everyone’s so lucky.”
“Yeah, lucky.”
“Don’t start this conversation again,” she said. “I’m delighted to have you at home but you know perfectly well what I think about that.”
“All right, whatever.” Later, when we got out of the car, I said: “I really don’t see him that much.”
“Brian, it’s not five minutes on foot from here to his dorm.”
“He’s probably at practice.”
“So leave it by the door, with a note. And don’t forget to invite him for Christmas.”
“His mom lives in Dallas. You can get a bus.”
“I imagine his situation at home is not easy. There’s a stepfather now, and other children, who may take priority.”
“Whatever,” I said again but figured I may as well get the cake off my hands and walked away.
The only time I’d been to his room was when he moved in. I had to drive his stuff over from the house. He didn’t have much, just a suitcase, but my mom gave him a couple of towels and some sheets and pillowcases and a microwave that we never used anymore, that kind of thing. It was now mid-December, gray and mild. To get to his dorm you pass the Clark outdoor basketball courts, and the playing field, with Waller Creek at the bottom, which is the same creek that runs through Shipe. At every gap in the buildings, the football stadium looms above you.
When I knocked on his door, a woman answered. It took me a minute to remember her name—Megan Adez, his physiotherapist. She wore short red nylon running shorts, the kind girls sleep in, and a PROPERTY OF TEXAS LONGHORNS T-shirt. She had long pale legs.
“Marcus is in the shower,” she said. “He’ll be out in a minute.” Then she recognized me. “Brian Blum.”
Marcus came out with a towel on. It was nine in the morning. His body had already started to change with the college weight program. You couldn’t see his ribs anymore; they were covered in muscle.
Megan said, “I’ve been helping him study for finals.”
“Team pay for that too?”
Then my face went red. I just wanted to break the ice, but maybe she didn’t hear me.
Marcus said, “Let me put on some clothes,” and went out again. He had one of the rooms at Jester with a private bathroom.
I gave the cake pan to Megan, because we were just standing around. “My mom baked it. She said Marcus likes zucchini bread. I don’t even know if that’s true.”
“We can have it for breakfast.”
A table stood under the window, which looked out on the street and Waller Creek Park. Megan rolled over the desk chair so three of us could sit, and I sat, butting my knees against the drop-leaf.
The cake was actually pretty good; you could hardly taste the zucchini. I had a couple of slices and told Marcus what my mom told me to tell him. “She says you’re welcome to stay with us for Christmas, if you don’t have plans. Betsy’s coming back but you can sleep in my room.”
Megan looked at him, and he said, “I told my mom I’d go home.”
“Well, that’s what I said to her. I said he’s got a family he can stay with. His actual mother.”
“I told her I’d go.”
Megan said, “If you stayed here …”
“What?” He wasn’t angry, he wanted her to finish the sentence.
“I could see you. On Christmas.”
“I told her.”
“You should go,” Megan said. They were very gentle and polite with each other.
Eventually I stood up to leave. Megan said, “Let me clean out the pan for you,” and ran to the bathroom, which left me and Marcus alone. You could almost hear the clock tick. Every time you stood alone in a room with Marcus you felt, like, his physical self-restraint. Just the way he moved. He said, “It’s good to see you, Brian. We don’t really … see many people, usually. We just kind of do our own thing.”
“You know I don’t talk about your business,” I said.
Then Megan came back with the pan.
35
When the Celtics drafted Marcus in ’98, they hired Steuben as assistant coach. Almost certainly because Marcus asked them to; he liked having familiar people around, people who were also grateful to him. You can see Steuben sitting on the bench as the Celtics won the title, that first strike-shortened season—a young white guy in a suit, already getting fat, with the paychecks, with life on the road, and wondering, how the hell did I end up here?
I don’t know where he’d be today if he hadn’t knocked on our door in high school … to recruit Marcus Hayes. He was another one of those guys that Marcus carried along on his coattails. But that doesn’t mean he was lightweight or hadn’t somehow internalized his success. Because if you met Steuben now, you’d think, don’t mess with him. He’s been around powerful people for most of his adult life and figured out how it works. You identify the boss in any situation, you identify how much pushback that guy wants, and give it to him; and everybody else can kiss your ass. Anyway, Steuben was now a head coach in the NBA again, because Marcus Hayes wanted him back.
There was no question, then, who ran the team. And you could see it in their first game after Christmas, an eighty-one to seventy-eight loss to the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. Marcus had thirty-one, he hit five three-pointers. Mickey almost had a triple double. They put him in the post, where he hated playing, as a kind of point forward; or shifted him to the dunker spot and isolated Marcus at the top of the key. Dieter Crawford played seven minutes, mostly in the second quarter. Ty Jones started, because he muscled up on D and did what he was told on offense—bring the ball up court, so Marcus doesn’t have to. Set the offense. Slow it down. If you can hit a few open shots, that’s gravy.
For the first few games, Mickey did what he was asked to do but didn’t look happy about it. One of his nicknames was the Beast … and fans started showing up at games holding signs that said Unleash the Beast. There was always something uncomfortable about the way people talked about Mmeremikwu, like he was some freak of nature, instead of a talented guy who worked harder than other people. But Mickey played up to it, too. I think he liked the idea that he had this raw force that couldn’t be contained … Anyway, the Sonics tried to contain it.
Already the basketball commentariat had started to sharpen their knives, middle-aged white men were shouting at each other across TV-studio coffee tables. This is the kind of thing they love, an argument where you can give, like, names to the data, and turn a technical question into a fight between personalities. Here’s what they said. Marcus is telling Mickey, this is my team, and you can get in line with everybody else.
