Hook Shot Hero (7 page)

T
im’s palms turned sweaty. He took a moment to hand the paper the kids had given him to Billy.

“You’ll do great,” Billy whispered. “Trust yourself, man!”

Tim returned to the floor and took the microphone. He cleared his throat a few times and wet his lips.

“Hi, everyone, I’m Tim Daniels,” he said at last. “I’ve been working with Red, Peter, and Keanu for the past week. Although, um, I guess it’s really been more like a couple of days because like they said, I spent the first few days just yelling at them.

“I might have gone on yelling at them, too,” he continued, “if I hadn’t remembered something Dick once said to me. He told me that if I could show the kids that basketball is fun, then they’d want to keep playing. That made a lot of sense to me. I mean, let’s face it—if they hate the sport, they’re not going to want to keep playing it, right? And it would stink if they gave it up because if you ask me, they all have the ability to be really good players.”

He glanced over at Keanu, Red, and Peter. All three were beaming at him. Suddenly, any nervousness Tim had vanished. He turned off the microphone and put it aside. Then he gathered the boys into a huddle.

“Okay, are you guys ready to show ’em what you can do?”

The threesome nodded eagerly.

“Should we keep our capes on?” Red asked.

“Of course!” Tim replied, ruffling the boy’s bright thatch of hair. “You’re superheroes, right?”

“Right!”

They broke apart. Tim faced the audience again and explained that to make the basketball sessions fun as well as informative, he’d devised different activities to help the boys learn defensive and offensive skills. Then he had the boys demonstrate each activity while he described each drill and its goal.

“The first one is called dribbling without dribbling,” he said as he handed basketballs to the boys. “The boys held ice cream cones in their free hands on a really hot day. As they dribbled the ball, they watched their ice cream for signs of melting. The drill taught them to keep their eyes up instead of watching the ball and to hold their free arm up to block defenders.”

“And we learned to lick the ice cream fast so it wouldn’t drip onto our hands!” Peter added, drawing a laugh from the crowd.

As Tim went through the rest of the drills—the potato-passing games, hang time, shield, laser vision, and take off—he told the audience where he got his inspiration for them.

“Keanu was my superhero, so it was with him in mind that I made the capes,” he said. “Peter always seemed to be hungry, so the ice cream cone drill was for him. And Red, well, he didn’t like the heat—and neither did I! So that’s why we practiced in the water sometimes.”

When he was finished, the audience applauded long and loud. Tim ducked his head, suddenly shy, and took his seat in the stands next to Wanda and Billy. Wanda gave him a big hug, and Billy punched him lightly on the shoulder.

“That was awesome!” Billy whispered.

“You were awesome,” Wanda added, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and smiling into his eyes.

Tim’s face reddened again—but in a good way. Then he turned his attention back to the court to watch Mike.

Mike flicked on the microphone. “Good afternoon, parents. That sure was entertaining, wasn’t it? Well, I’m going to take things in a more serious direction now, because I take basketball very seriously. It might be just a game to some”—he cut his gaze at Tim, eyebrows raised—“but to me, it’s nothing to laugh about.”

He jabbed a finger at his mentees. “All right, you three, come out here.”

The small boys hurried onto the court. Mike passed them each a ball. “Dribbling drill one,” he ordered.

Obediently, the boys dribbled the balls from the center line to the end line, switched to their other hands, and dribbled back. As one, they stopped, held their balls under their arms, and looked at Mike expectantly.

They’re waiting for the next command,
Tim realized with a touch of envy.
Mike’s really got them under control. Pretty impressive.

Yet as Tim watched the boys demonstrate their skills, he began to wonder if it was that impressive after all. Sure, Mike’s mentees performed each task better than his had. But the expressions on their faces were so blank that they looked like robots going through programmed motions. There was no energy, no life—no fun!

Mike finished his demonstration fifteen minutes later to a smattering of polite applause. Dick said a few final words, thanking both Tim and Mike for their efforts and inviting the parents to the dining hall for refreshments.

Tim had barely gone a step when Red bounced up to him and grabbed his arm. “Come on, you’ve got to meet my mom and dad!” he said, tugging Tim excitedly toward a young couple. Tim would have picked out Red’s mother in a second, for her son had inherited her bright hair.

“My folks want to meet you, too!” Peter echoed.

“And mine!” Keanu put in.

“Okay, okay!” Tim said, laughing. A moment later, he was surrounded by six adults, all of whom were telling him how happy they were with his mentoring job.

“They made it easy because they were so enthusiastic,” Tim confessed. “They’re great kids. I’m going to miss them.”

And to his surprise, he realized it was true. He wouldn’t have believed it a week earlier, but he was going to miss spending time with the three little guys!

B
efore they made their way to the dining hall, Red, Peter, and Keanu’s parents insisted that Tim pose for photos with their children.

“We’ll send you copies the minute we get home,” they promised. Then they all went together to share in the refreshments.

Mike was already at the dining hall, helping himself to cookies and juice. A few parents nodded to him, but no one approached him with a camera and none of his kids asked him to sit with them. When Tim looked for him again, Mike was gone.

Tim would never have thought it possible, but he found himself feeling sorry for Mike Gruber.

The feeling didn’t last long. The Eagles Nest campers played a pickup game that afternoon. On the first possession, Tim was bringing the ball down the court when Mike jumped in front of him and tried to swat the ball out of his hands.

He failed miserably because Tim knew from experience that that’s what he’d do. So when Mike came at him at the top of the key, Tim turned his shoulders to the hoop as if setting up for a hook shot.

“Don’t have any other moves, huh, Daniels?” Mike taunted as Tim jumped.

“Oh, don’t I?” Tim responded—and instead of shooting at the top of his arc, he fired an over-the-head pass to Donnie, who converted it into two points.

Mike clamped his mouth shut in a tight line and gave Tim a dirty look. But he didn’t say anything else to him for the rest of the game.

The stony silence between them might have continued indefinitely if Tim hadn’t decided to break it.

“Listen, you don’t like me, and I don’t like you,” he told Mike at a campfire a few nights later, “but it looks like we’re going to be in the starting lineup together for the next inter-camp game. So, for the good of the team, let’s keep our differences off the court. Deal?”

He stuck out his hand, half expecting Mike to snort and push it aside.

After a moment’s hesitation, though, the other boy shook it. “Deal,” Mike said.

Their truce was an uneasy one, but in time, they began to play together better. Their improved communication made the team better as a whole, allowing them to win their third and final inter-camp game by more than ten points.

And as the days passed, a funny thing happened. Their camaraderie on the court spilled into their lives off the court. While Tim knew he and Mike would never have the kind of friendship he and Billy had, they were no longer enemies—at least for this summer.

Whether they would pick up where they left off next summer remained to be seen!

Tim and Billy returned home two weeks later. Billy had earned his junior lifeguarding certificate. On the car ride home, he talked about returning to Camp Wickasaukee the next summer so he could go for his senior certification.

Tim had burst out laughing. “Next summer? We haven’t finished this one yet! There’s a whole month left to go, and I’ve got big plans.”

Those plans included plenty of basketball, plus pool time, video games, and going to the movies with Wanda—with other friends along, too, of course. After all, he insisted when Billy teased him, it wasn’t like they were boyfriend and girlfriend!

But before anything of those things, Tim had something important to do when he got home. First, he mounted a wooden shelf he had made at the arts and crafts center on the wall in his room. (Now that Gruber the clown puppet was no longer there, he found he didn’t mind spending time at the center. That Wanda liked to go there had nothing to do with it.)

Then he bought a big picture frame with lots of openings for photos. He filled the smaller openings with the photos his mentees’ parents had sent him. He added a few of his own photos, too, including one of Billy jumping off the end of the dock.

In one of two bigger openings, he put the letter Keanu, Red, and Peter had read at the demonstration. The second big space was for his favorite photo. It showed him kneeling and hugging his mentees. The boys had their capes to the camera, so the message tim we’ll miss you! was clearly visible.

Dick Dunbar was in the shot, too, standing to one side with a huge smile on his face. He had written a note across the bottom of the picture.

To my buddy Tim,
his message read,
Never forget: Take that pizza one slice at a time!
He’d signed it in a big loopy scrawl.

Tim set the frame onto the shelf and stood back to admire it. Then, with a smile playing about his lips, he pretended to shoot a hook shot.

“Swish,” he whispered. Then he posed for a free throw and shot that, too. “And one! Tim Daniels is a hook shot hero!”