Longshot (25 page)

We're now on the practice floor, ready to better ourselves as professionals.

“
Conduisez la boule par les cônes et marquez un seau
…” Coach Michel rambles off, pointing at all the cute traffic cones he has laid out on the basketball court. He then begins to translate: “I say, you'll drive the ball through the cones…” I nod my head, not needing an explanation of things, as common sense would articulate what the drill is—a stupid drill.

I play at being excited as I rip the ball from a teammate's hands and am the first to run up to the drill line. “Let's go! Let's do this!” I holler, which is my own way of pumping myself up when I'm about to do something I don't want to do. Today would be no exception as I stare down these petty little cones spread out in a fashion that recalls memories of Little League soccer practice, which was more productive than what I'm about to do. At first Coach Michel thought I was just an energetic little rookie who was eager to learn. But over time he has come to see that he has nothing to teach me and that I'm mocking him.

I stand, ball in hand, ready to master this prepubescent drill that Michel has devised as though he knows something that we don't. Michel gives me his glare—which has, since my arrival, begun to trigger a twitch in his eye. He leans over to Alexis, the unofficial translator, and whispers into his ear. Alexis tries not to smile as Coach Michel looks away and begins to clean out his whistle as though he is above all of this.

“Coach said for me to tell you to shut up.”

I take the first dribble and intentionally, but pretending it's by accident, kick the first traffic cone out of the way. Then I start to play but trip and fall on the floor. In the glum of December, this floor is so hard and cold it could pass for an ice-hockey rink. I reach for my kneecap and begin to rub it. This is no charade. I actually hurt this knee a week earlier in practice when someone fell on the ground and rolled onto my foot, blocking my path forward. When the knee popped back, I told myself it was just a simple hyperextension, and I kept playing on it. It was my rookie year, and I felt I needed to salvage my reputation after the debacle in Turkey. I didn't want to be known as injury-prone.

Massaging my kneecap, I struggle to stand, but everyone around me thinks I'm still playacting. The silence covering the gym is broken periodically by the sound of my ball, which is far, far away on the other side of the sprawling gym, which seats 334 people at maximum occupancy. My teammates do their best to contain their snickering as Michel stands there caught between shock and anger at what has just happened—a mutinous ridiculing of his authority.

He raises his hands incredulously in the typical European soccer way, as though he is a victim and has done nothing to deserve this. He looks around and sees the rest of my teammates red with muffled laughter. He then decides that this farce has gone on long enough and blows his whistle in a well-timed fashion—except that it's ten seconds too late.

“What is our attitude?!” Michel yells.

I stare at him, stoic and mute. I think of a few answers but choose to remain silent. My two months with this man have been long and unpleasant. I have only one week left on my contract before I fly home for Christmas.

“Well! What is it?! Why do you not answer?! Why do you Americans think you rule the world?”

He set himself up so perfectly that I cannot resist. I rationalize that this is the last week of my contract and that I thus have nothing to lose. I take a long, savoring breath, cherishing what is about to come as I make eye contact with this coach and answer, “Why do the French think they have a say in anything at all?”

Michel screams something in French, looking like he is about to cry, but it's just the French tongue and how they facially express their feelings. He walks away from me and blows his pacifier once again, and the rest of the team starts dribbling through the cones.

The drill finally ends, and we move on into half-court defense. The very first play of the drill, Jean-Emmanuel Le Brun, the team captain and a guy I really enjoy, accidentally head-butts me. Jean-Emmanuel shaves his big skull, and it's very big, so there's no hair padding the impact as my lip splits and my teeth puncture the skin. Michel laughs. I'm sure because it looks funny, but also because he is happy to see me hurt. His traffic cones shall not be mocked!

Playing for Rouen was a joy because there was no trainer handy, let alone a team doctor. Pascal escorts me to the doctor's house, where he will stitch my lip.

The black cat purrs, in French, as it weaves through my legs. The scent of crepes lingers in the air. I salivate, tilt my head back, and clench my teeth as the doctor needles my lower lip. No local anesthetic needed—more important, no anesthetic available—as I sit at the MD's dinner table while he applies two stitches. Never taking his eyes from my mouth, he speaks to his wife in the kitchen while his two children, one on crutches, shout back and forth across the house. The cat, the doctor, his wife, their kids—I'm surrounded by the French tongue.

Seven thousand miles away from home, having surgery performed in a dining room, with what looks like a fishhook gutting my lip, I calmly remind myself it's all part of the European experience.

When we part for the last time, Michel and I say nothing. We simply shake hands and lay down our arms.

It was hard to enjoy
the Christmas break once I got home, as I had no idea where I was going next. John had hinted that I might be headed to Boise to play with the Idaho Stampede of the CBA (Continental Basketball Association). And so I waited. And waited some more, just doing my best to stay in shape while I was home, watching some movies, unable to get a job because no one would hire me knowing that I could leave at any moment. And it was the dead of winter, so there was no lawn work available.

When I finally fetched a job application in late January at a nearby 7–Eleven, John called to tell me I was headed back to France, once again for an injury replacement. The team was JL Bourg, in the tiny town of Bourg-en-Bresse, about an hour west of Geneva and the Swiss border.

When they signed me for a month, Bourg was in third place in the league standings. John admitted he didn't know how much I'd be playing, as they were a good team and had good chemistry as it was. Seeing this, I approached the job as a job, telling myself that I wasn't going to be much more than a practice player. But hey, it was a $5,000 paycheck for a month's work.

As I packed to fly back to France, Mac hid behind the door, peeking out slightly, revealing one eye to let me know he knew I was leaving and that he was pouting. Court stayed home and got a new job. I flew back to France and left Mac with Mom and Dad. I was picked up in Paris and met Coach Frédérique Sarre.

Oh, Sarre. How do I describe him? He looked like a fifty-year-old Mr. Burns from
The Simpsons.
He spoke English well, but he was incredibly intense, and everything had to be done his way. He had full control of his team, and there was no discussion. He ran the show, and his players respected him or feared him, or both. In his defense, he knew the game. He was the best coach I had in Europe in terms of knowledge
of the game. He knew what he was talking about when drawing up the
X
s and
O
s of the floor, and he held everyone accountable. He had no favorites. It was nice to be on a team again where everyone had their job and everyone was held to the same standard and treated equally, albeit harshly.

The next morning, I had the haunting realization that I was indeed playing for a sadomasochist. He handed me the week's schedule. I thought maybe he had mistakenly handed me an old copy of the fall preseason practice schedule when I saw that there were two-a-days for the entire week until game day.
Unreal.
I began to panic.

I turned to Kelvin Torbert, a fellow rookie who had played at Michigan State: “Kelvin, is this normal? All of these two-a-days?”

“Yeah, man,” he said without passion or life, all of the joy of basketball sucked from his veins.

The gym we played and practiced in had without a doubt the hardest floor I ever played on. It was the coldest time of year, as we practiced in the dead of January and February, and the tiny town was perched on the plains of France, with no mountain range to block the wind chill. It was so damn cold. Just running up and down on the floor for warm-ups, you felt like your kneecap was going to fall off.

As expected, I didn't play much for Bourg; I was mostly there just to make sure they had ten bodies for practice. If I did get in, it wasn't for much more than five minutes. In practice I had a hard time not smiling at Coach Sarre when he would suddenly burst up from the sideline, resting on his haunches, and yell, “What the shit!” when someone made a bad play. It was the first time I had ever heard
shit
used in that syntax: in the place of either
fuck
or
hell.
Since my time with Sarre, “What the shit?” has become my favorite turn of phrase when expressing my own incredulity.

Whenever I tried not to smile, I'd bite my lip or try to cover my mouth with my hands. “Look at me when I'm speaking, Lance,” Frédérique would bark. He soon figured I was looking away because I was trying not to smile. Whenever he caught me, he would make the official referee's hand signal of a substitution, and while all ten of us stood there in silence, he would walk over, grab me by the arm, and then escort me to the sideline: “You're done. Have a sit until I call you.”

Had I not been so worried about my long-term prospects and career, I might have enjoyed my time in Bourg more. Instead, I just went back to my hotel and worried over what this was all for, pondering different
options and scenarios. I began considering just going back to America and becoming a schoolteacher and high school basketball coach.

I began to have these doubts again not only because of the uncertainty burning me out, the lack of play and the two-a-days, but because my knee was in pain. When I injured it in Rouen, I thought it would heal with time and rest over Christmas break. But it didn't. Over time in Bourg, after the grueling two-a-days, it was beginning to be quite painful. It got to the point where my knee hurt whenever I would jump, slide, or even walk. But since I was simply there as an extra to have a functioning practice and was there only for a month, would it make sense for me, an injury replacement, to sit out of practice with an injury? Sarre would just look at my knee and say, “You can run, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then I'm sure it's fine.”

Before the last game in Bourg, John called to tell me he had found a job for me in Spain that would last until the end of the season. I was hesitant to tell John my knee wasn't doing well, because I needed the money. I went to Valencia.

 

People often ask if I took time to learn the language in these various countries. I did. I really did try. But with my hearing impairment it took me fifteen years to learn to speak proper English, a process in which I would read a word, then watch how someone pronounced it with their mouth, and then have the sound corrected for me by a speech therapist. Picking up a new language and its rhythms isn't easy for me. The guys in Spain at least appreciated my effort to try to learn their language. I knew how to count to ten and order from a menu. And that was a lot more than most Americans even attempt to learn.

My first game with my new team was recorded without benefit of a scoreboard or clock due to complications at the scorer's table. It's a frustrating experience—playing a game when you have no idea of the time or the score. All we could do was play our little hearts out and wait for the judge's results at the end of the game, as though it were a boxing match. We lost. I had eighteen rebounds. The owners were pleased with the performance but not with the coach. He was released the following day, and the team hired a new coach, giving me my fifth coach in five months.

Five coaches in five months. Five different schemes and strategies to learn or take in and adapt to. Five different coaches who talked to me like I was a rookie who had no idea what he was doing, despite the fact that I had played six years of college basketball with some of the best minds on the planet.

My knee continued to get worse. It hurt so bad I could no longer dunk the ball. I couldn't even walk up the two flights of stairs to my apartment and had to use the slow elevator to beam me up. The Spanish physical therapist, like the PTs in France, simply said it was tendonitis. But I knew something was seriously wrong. My kneecap burned at the top and underneath. The quad muscles reaching to either side of the knee were in constant tension no matter what position I put my leg in. They wouldn't relax. And the inner side of my knee snapped and popped when I flexed it. But in order to protect my reputation, I kept playing and practicing.

I went to physical therapy every day. But the therapist knew that because I wasn't a citizen of Spain, I wasn't covered by the government health-care system, and the team didn't have the funds to pay for an MRI or surgery for me. There was only one month left in the season, and they simply wanted to keep me up and running and intact for as long as they could and then wrap me up in duct tape and send me home, leaving someone else to deal with my injury.

I hold no grudge toward them and how they handled my knee. They were a poor club and money was tight, and yet they always paid me on time.

I loved Spain. It was my favorite country of all the ones I visited that year in Europe. The landscape is unlike anything I ever saw growing up in America. Sure, I was used to big rocky mountains, but with smooth valleys and basins between them due to glacier formations. But in Spain there's no rhyme or reason to the geography. You can be at sea level, and then before you know it you're staring at towering, snowcapped peaks with valleys and orchards nestled away in their far confines. You'll be traveling through valleys and orchards of gold and green and then will be driving through the thick, beautiful hills of León, above Portugal. It's a beautiful place.

And the Spanish know how to relax.
¿Qué pasa,
Lance?
Relájate, mi amigo.
I can't tell you how frustrating it was to have two-a-day practices with Coach Fede—to come home after the morning practice, take a nap,
and then wake up, wanting some lunch, only to realize there isn't a thing open in the afternoon. Nothing. In Spain, between the hours of 1200 and 1400, you have a better chance of becoming pope than you do of getting a meal. These guys take so much time off to just chill and
relájese
that you can't help but understand why Spain is now no longer simply “the sick man of Europe” but the rotting corpse. At least once a week they have a national holiday. Each day I had a one-in-seven chance of popping my head out the window to see a little parade or carnival coming down my street with poppers being set off, children in gay splendor tossing firecrackers into crowds as their parents smiled at them proudly for their demonstrative patriotism.

When I flew home, Mom, Dad, and Mac met me at the airport. My knee ended up requiring surgery—arthroscopic debridement, as the cartilage on the back of my kneecap had ripped away and some of it had floated into the joint, blocking the knee and pinching the meniscus. The knee had been in this state for seven months. For seven months I ran around with floating cartilage blocking my knee, pinching the tendons and nerves—all because I feared for my reputation.

Although Dr. Cooley would perform surgery on me free of charge, the HMOs would still get their fee, depleting what little funds I had accrued during that long and tumultuous rookie campaign. I paid to have my knee fixed, using the very same money I had earned playing on that very same bad knee. I'd like to say it was a wash, but in truth it wasn't, as I was now well in debt.

I spent the next month recovering on Mom and Dad's couch, unable to move anywhere without crutches, passing the time by finally deigning to read the Harry Potter books. I devoured them all in one week.

I never would have predicted I'd end my first year of professional basketball in the red column. No one tells you these stories as they fill your head with fantasies of the fame and fortune that await you at the next stage. No one cares to tell you these stories, because basketball is fun. It must be fun as we run around putting a ball in a hoop while happy and merry fans applaud us for our boyish endeavors. It must be fun to be suicide machines that feel no pain. It must be so much fun to just play basketball, and not to have to worry about anything else.

I'm sure it is.