The Sidekick, page 34
My mother didn’t know what to do. Obviously, she had a very distressed young woman on her hands. But there might not be enough in Megan’s story for a prosecutor to work with, especially if the only witness was the other guy. The burden of proof for disciplinary action against the two students was much lighter. Maybe she could get them suspended, or even kicked out. Her job was to report to the vice president, who had his own team of lawyers to advise him. In other words, my mother’s actual influence was slight, she was just a link in the chain. But, being good at her job, and generally respected, she could shape her part of the conversation, which can still have an effect on many conversations down the line.
Megan herself didn’t want to press charges. Her relationship with Marcus Hayes violated university policy and would have to come out at any hearing, which could get her fired. She just wanted to pretend the whole thing was a terrible dream and forget about it.
So why did you come to me? my mother asked her.
Marcus wanted me to. He blames himself for what happened.
Because he wasn’t there to protect you? (It turned out he spent the evening at Gregory Gym, lifting weights and shooting on the empty court, and went to bed around eleven o’clock.)
No. He felt like, a lot of people resented him and knew we were going out, and didn’t like the fact that he was going out with a white girl. When he played so badly against Indiana … some of the guys at the party must have felt like, he was weak enough they could go after him like this.
They didn’t go after him, they went after you.
He says the only thing guys like that understand is power. They respect people who have more power than them. That’s the only thing that makes a difference. Because I’m white he thinks the police will be on my side.
If you want to go to the police, that’s your decision. That might be a long road. There are other things we can do but it’s up to you.
I don’t see how anything good is going to come out of it, Megan said.
My mother took me aside after dinner one night; she wanted to know what I knew about their relationship. She said, you can’t mention this to anybody, including your father. (After she died, when we cleaned out her office at the university, I found her notes from the conversation with Megan. She always kept meticulous records.)
Did you know they were together? she asked me. I said yes. For how long? I don’t know. Did it start when he was in high school? I don’t know. Are they still together? I don’t know. Marcus doesn’t talk to me about stuff like that.
One week later, at a ceremony at the Tipoff Club in Atlanta, Marcus Hayes was named Naismith Player of the Year. I saw him on TV, wearing the Men’s Warehouse suit my dad had bought him for our high school graduation. Three years older, it showed a little tight across the shoulders, which somehow added to the general impression of a very self-contained young man. A few days after that, in a press conference hosted by Coach Menzes and staged in the media room at the Erwin Center, Marcus announced that he had decided to skip his senior year of college eligibility and make himself available for the NBA draft.
40
Driving to one of my doctor’s appointments I was flipping through radio channels when the Brandenburg Concertos came on. My mother used to play them in the car on the ride to school. By this point I was in a state of more or less constant low-level anxiety but for some reason the music calmed me down.
Later I asked my dad if he knew where her tape collection was. He said, try the garage. So I spent an afternoon kicking around in there, with a light bulb dangling from the ceiling on a wire. There was a bookshelf at the back where he kept his handyman tools, shoeboxes of nails and screws, pickle jars filled with screwdrivers, old matchbooks, that kind of thing. One of the shoeboxes was labeled EILEEN. It had her cassettes in it, along with her old Sony Walkman, so I took them back home and replaced the batteries and started listening to her music. She didn’t just listen to opera but anything classical: Pachelbel’s Canon in D, Verdi’s Requiem, Vaughan Williams, Purcell’s Timon of Athens, many of these tapes she must have recorded herself, because they were labeled in her careful Catholic-school handwriting.
All through my childhood this stuff was going through her head. It was like wandering through empty hallways … My mother didn’t care about or value most of the things I was interested in. When I was younger we used to fight about this, but if she were still alive the things that mattered to me would be different, that’s undeniable.
What else did I do? I wrote this book.
At one point my editor emailed me for a progress report. Not my editor at ESPN, but the HarperCollins guy, Pete Morgentau—who was basically one of us. I mean a thirty-something sports nut from Bloomington, who played JV soccer in high school and realized he wasn’t good enough to make varsity so discovered books. His favorite sports book of all time was Season on the Brink, by John Feinstein. Which is also why he wanted to become an editor, because of Jeff Neuman, who published Feinstein and five years later bought The Jordan Rules from a general-assignment guy at the Chicago Tribune named Sam Smith.
Nobody at the time wanted to touch Smith’s book, but Neuman took a punt and it ended up topping the best-seller lists. Part of the reason was the tight turnaround—Jordan won the title in June and six months later the book was on the shelves.
These days, Pete said, the time pressure is even more intense. He wanted me to send him what I had.
It still wasn’t clear if the Sonics would make the playoffs; in other words, what kind of timeline we were dealing with. Marcus’s season could end in April or in June. It could be a triumph or a flop. Pete thought I should get something ready for the start of the playoffs either way—a teaser, which ESPN could run at the end of the season, to generate interest in the book.
We had a lot of back and forth about it. In the end, I pitched something to Winnikoff about why Marcus quit—and why he decided to come back. A Rosebud story that involved the breakdown of his marriage and the arrival on the scene of Cheryl Dillard. Since the divorce announcement, J. P. had started talking to reporters. She was getting out her side of the story and gave me a great quote. I managed to reach her at the house on Mount Bonnell Shores.
“You know that joke?” she asked me. Her voice on the phone always sounded faintly out of breath. “What’s the hardest thing to do in the NBA … keep the smile off your face when you kiss your wife goodbye before a road trip.”
“I’ve heard it before.”
“Ten years, that’s how long we been married.”
“That’s a long time.”
“I never wanted a dog on the leash. You understand what I’m saying.”
“I understand.” (You say whatever you can say that keeps them talking.)
“I been around the game a long time. But you need a baby, to make this work. You need to give them a reason to come home.”
“I wondered about that,” I said.
“He thinks I knew but I didn’t. Anyway, it’s over now.”
All of this went in the piece, along with Shelley Vance and Megan Adez. At every stage, before going to the next stage, Marcus was pushed—in high school and college; at the end of his NBA career, when he fell in love with a seventeen-year-old girl and retired to get away from the publicity. But there is no next stage for him now; at least, nothing he wants. The only thing left is to do it all over again. After three years of retirement, he realized that the rest of his life was just going to get worse.
*
The Sonics went twenty-five and ten after firing Kaminski—third best record in the League since Christmas. In February, Marcus Hayes was named Western Conference Player of the Month, with a stat line of thirty, seven and seven, while shooting 42 percent on threes. If the playoffs had started then (I’m talking early March), the Sonics would have been the number six seed. Then Mickey broke his hand.
Apparently, this is what happened. Steuben had instituted half-court scrimmages in practice, to get the team ready for the playoffs, when everything slows down. But the real point was to show the guys that Marcus Hayes was boss, so Mickey would stop complaining.
Even at thirty-five, Marcus was an elite half-court scorer. He could pull up for three off the dribble, find the weakside shooters with either hand and keep you on his hip when he got in the lane. Mickey had a Eurostep, which you can’t really use in traffic anyway, and a baseline turnaround jump shot that was mostly for show. Other than that he just kind of scrambled points. You could pack the paint against him and dare him to shoot. There are guys who shoot worse the more you leave them open. What Mickey really liked was flying out on the break. It pissed him off, every time he grabbed a rebound in one of these scrimmages, to walk the ball out past the arc and turn around.
Steuben lined up Marcus and Stepanik and Roundtree against Mickey and Crawford and the other young guns. At the end of practice, Marcus liked to rub it in. Beat me at this game, if you want to make your point, but Mickey couldn’t.
Then one day Marcus curled hard off a high screen and drove to the basket. Roundtree tried to box off Mickey from the play and gave him a little hip-nudge in midair, which sent him tumbling. When Mickey got up, he punched Roundtree in the sternum and walked off the court holding his wrist.
In the news reports, this is what they call a heated exchange of views. X-rays showed a fractured metacarpal. Doctors said he could be out six weeks.
*
A few days later I got back to my apartment and found a message on my answering machine. Fred Rotha was coming to town, to work on a story about Mmeremikwu, and wanted me to pick a night so we could have dinner.
All week long, I had a weird kind of nervous anticipation about this evening. For the past two months, I hadn’t gone out except to see Betsy and the kids. You get a little inward, it’s hard to turn outward again. Also, I figured, I’d have to give some kind of account of myself.
But it’s easy talking to Fred, you forget how easy.
Mostly we talked about basketball. I feel bad for Mmeremikwu, he said, this should have been his breakout year. If you had told me at the beginning of the season that Marcus Hayes would not only win the alpha battle but get Kaminski fired, turn Mickey into a role player, to the point where, lashing out, he actually breaks his hand and has to miss the first round of the playoffs … while Marcus ends up third in the League in scoring, and first in three-pointers made … I wouldn’t have believed you.
“This is what he does,” I said.
Fred wanted to write about the legacy implications. I’ve been calling around the League, he said. Front office guys, scouts, some ex-players. What does this do to his final ranking? Can he leapfrog Bird, Kobe? And now Mickey is out, what if Marcus drags them to the playoffs, does that move the needle? If they make it into the Conference Finals? They can’t go further than that, can they? I don’t see them beating the Spurs.
But he was talking too much, and knew it. “What are you working on? How’s the book?”
“I’m writing something about why he quit,” I said.
“Was it the McConaughey thing?” He meant the NBA ref who took bribes.
“No, something else.”
And I told him the story. March 2008, his last title run. They had just lost back-to-back games, for the first time all year, including a tight one in Houston the night before, when Marcus went seven for twenty-three. So the next day he gets in a rented car and drives three hours to do a favor for his old high school coach and meets a girl who’s never heard of him. These windows open up in your life, where you’re vulnerable to new impressions. A few months later he wins Finals MVP and two weeks after that, he quits. Over the summer he starts hanging out in Austin.
“You have to be careful with this,” Fred said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not the kind of thing we write about.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s none of our business. Have you shown it to Marcus?”
“Not yet.”
“If you write this thing,” Fred said, “people may stop talking to you. I mean people in the League, players, coaches, everyone else. I don’t see how you can keep going.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Come on, Brian.”
“I’d rather talk about this stuff than whether Marcus Hayes is the ninth or thirteenth best player in NBA history.”
“That’s fine. But if you’re gonna do it, do it with your eyes open.”
The bill came and I paid. This is my town, I said, and he let me, even though it was a couple hundred bucks. I think he figured, Let Brian feel like the big shot, if that’s what he wants. What he said was, thank you.
Afterward, I didn’t join him for drinks at the Driskill Hotel. Some of the people he was meeting were people I knew—Alana Sissons, Kirk Bohls from the Statesman, other reporters. It was a crowd, basically a nice crowd. Not that different from the guys I hung out with in high school. Fred Rotha was like a 2.0 version of the DeKalb brothers, smarter about basketball, probably more popular with girls. A nice guy, too. In the morning he called me from the airport to say hello, just checking in. The friendship I had with him was like these other friendships, but it was also missing something. That feeling of sitting at the back of the class, which is what I missed. When the world was far away and didn’t matter.
41
I used to be a Celtics fan, like my dad. For the first twenty years of my life. Sometimes I forget that fact. They won the championship in ’76, the summer before I was born, which is why my middle name is David, after Dave Cowens. Dad used to call me Big Red, too. They won again when I was four and too small to remember. But then in ’84 they beat Pat Riley’s Lakers in seven games and I was allowed to stay up late and watch—that was the last year we lived in Boston. It pissed my sister off to see me on the couch past my bedtime, in pajamas, nestled up to Dad. Larry Bird was Finals MVP.
They won again in ’86, the year after I got the Rawlings hoop over the garage door. On a Sunday afternoon, against my home-state Houston Rockets, which made the prospect of going to school the next day, and rubbing it in, all the sweeter. I’m really a Boston kid, that’s the point I wanted to make. I don’t really live here, I’m just passing through. Six hours after the whistle blew, I was still banging away on the driveway, pounding the ball under the garage light.
Come on in, Brian, my mother called. It’s a school night. People are trying to sleep.
I just have to make five straight.
But I didn’t actually stop until my dad came out to get me, hauling me in by the neck of my shirt, in a sweaty hug.
Then they lost to the Lakers the next season, and after that, my teenage years were lean years—the Pistons came along, and then Michael came along, and that was that.
So when the Celtics drafted Marcus in ’98, part of what I felt was, that’s my team. But what does it mean, my team. Just because I grew up watching them and rooting for them, just because some of the most impassioned three-hour stretches of my life involved staring at their highly paid employees on a little backlit screen—does that make me a sad human being? Okay, then that’s what I am. Marcus was just another employee.
*
Senior year in college I finally moved out of my parents’ house and shared an apartment with a couple of guys from the Daily Texan, on Pearl Street, four blocks from the Drag. We never had a working TV. After the cable guy failed to show the first few times, we just gave up.
This didn’t bother me much because of the NBA lockout. Over the summer, the owners opened up the collective bargaining agreement … and the whole thing dragged on. It must have been a weird time for Marcus, sitting around in Boston, a town he didn’t know where he didn’t know anybody, trying to stay in shape, waiting to play, with money in his pocket for the first time in his life. Once you start this kind of us-and-them the only way out is to let it go on until everyone gets sick of it. Anyway, on February 5, the season opened, and I used to wander over to the Crown & Anchor to watch the games.
One night the Celtics were on TNT, playing the Pacers, and when I walked in I noticed Megan Adez sitting on the veranda with a few friends. Mid-February, not particularly warm, but they had those gas burners attached to some of the wooden posts giving off waves of heat. Megan was smoking a cigarette, which surprised me. I’m slow to react to this kind of thing and just walked on, but when I sat down at the bar and asked the barmaid to change the channel to TNT, the whole time I kept thinking, go over and say hello.
Of course, I just sat there and ordered a burger and cricked my neck looking up at the box. It was the middle of the second quarter. Just a dead time of the game, at a dead time of the year, amid the neon cheerlessness of an almost empty bar. But some of the rookies were getting action, including Marcus Hayes. There he was, in Celtics green and white—I could spot him by the way he moved.
Then Reggie Miller checked in for Indiana and Marcus switched on to him: pointy-out ears, alien bald head, grasshopper arms. Marcus always loved watching Reggie, another six-seven wing, but guarding him was something else because he never stopped moving. He could catch, turn and shoot on a dime, and used to kick out his legs to trick the defense into fouling. Marcus was actually a better athlete, bigger across the shoulders, stronger and more explosive, but Reggie was one of those guys … where everybody on the other team had to scramble like crazy to stop him from taking shots that nobody else on the court even wanted. I Love Being the Enemy, Reggie’s memoir, came out during our senior year in high school, and Dad bought a copy, which we all read. Anyway, when Marcus caught the ball on the wing, there was Reggie, standing in front of him. Crouched a little, with his hands on his knees, waiting for him to do something.
