Old Songs in a New Cafe (10 page)

A few months later the phone rings once again. A breathless voice asks if he’s talking to the guy who did the Cannonball thing
for Kuralt. Yes. He’s from Robert Kennedy’s campaign headquarters. The Senator saw the show and wants us to go with him on
an old-fashioned whistle stop tour in Indiana, for which they’ll take the Cannonball out of retirement. Will we go? Yes, but
it will cost $200. He doesn’t care what it costs. (I curse my inexperience.)

Small town in north Indiana. April 1968. On the train with journalists, TV crews, and lots of other people in nice suits just
running around. We are instructed to report to the last car, the Kennedy car. Bobby, Ethel, kids, dog. They need publicity
shots. Sixteen (I counted) cameras from around the world zoom in on the Senator, Wayne, and me—“Listen to the jingle, the
rumble and the roar…”

First stop. Secret Service types lead us onto the back platform, guns visible when they turn just right. Bobby and Ethel follow
them, then us. The Senator holds the mike for me. “… as she climbs along the woodlands, through the hills and by the shore.”
Thousands of people, screaming, holding up signs for and against the Kennedy effort, pushing to get close to the platform.
Men with cameras on their shoulders are fighting the crowd and trying to get a foothold on the slippery rails.

We go on, from town to town. The scene repeats itself. Guns, crowds surging, Bobby talking in his persuasive way about problems
and people. He holds the mike for me as we pull away. “Ridin’ along in safety on the Wabash CannonbalL”

Back in Iowa, I receive the check from Kennedy campaign headquarters the morning he is shot. Strange. Probabilities. I somberly
walk to the bank and cash it. Strange.

Bobby Kennedy is dead, Charles Kuralt is still on the road, and Wayne Schuman doesn’t play anymore. I get out the old Martin
guitar, late in the day, and once in a while 1 quietly sing, “Listen to the jingle…” Once in a while.

______________________________________

I
n a Dakota February, the wind never rests. Neither do the basketball fans. Both are howling as I bring the ball upcourt in
the North Dakota State University fieldhouse. Old patterns before me. Stewart shouting instructions from the sideline. Holbrook
loping ahead and to the right. Spoden, our ail-American center, struggling for position in the lane. Head fake left, and the
man guarding me leans too far. Dribble right. Double screen by Holbrook and McCool. Sweat and noise, smell of popcorn. See
it in slow motion now. Behind the screen into the air, ball over my head, left hand cradling it, right hand pushing it, slow
backward spin as it launches. Gentle arc…

The ball just clears the telephone wire and bounces off the rim of the basket as I land on hard-packed dirt in the silence
of an Iowa summer evening. Miles from the wind, years before the Dakotas. Bored with school and small-town life at thirteen,
I have decided to become a basketball player. Absurd. Five feet two inches tall, 110 pounds.

I am untroubled by the impossibility of it all. Day after day, night after night in the weak glow of the back porch light,
the ball goes up. One hundred more shots, and I’ll quit. Maybe 200. Can’t stop until I have five straight from twenty feet.

Freshman year. I try out for the high school team, which is just not done by freshmen. Freshmen are supposed to play on the
junior high team. That’s understood. I take a pounding, mentally and physically, from the upperclassmen. Yet, into the evenings,
wearing gloves in late autumn, I work jump shots around the telephone wire. Merlin, the school janitor, ignores the rules
and lets me in the gym at 7
A.M
. on Saturdays. I shoot baskets all day, with a short break for lunch.

The Big Day. Twelve will be selected to suit up for the games. I feel that I have a chance. I have hustled and listened and
learned. But about twenty people are trying to make the team, a lot of them are seniors, and there is the whole question of
whether a freshman even ought to be out there. At the end of practice, the coach has us informally shoot baskets while he
walks the gym with a list. Studying it, he begins to call out names, slowly, one every minute or so: “Mehmen” …“Clark”… “Lossee”…

Eleven names have been called; eleven have gone to the locker room to select their uniforms. I can hardly make my shot go
up, or dribble, or even think. The coach paces the gym, looks at his list. Three, four minutes go by. He turns: “Waller.”

There is silence; I remember it. A freshman? Wait a minute! I trot to the locker room with a feeling that comes only a few
times in a life. The locker room is silent, too. I am not welcome, for all those complex reasons having to do with tradition
and adolescence and the 1950s’ definition of masculinity. Even Clark, the thoughtful one, shakes his head.

The remaining uniform is the largest of the entire lot. The pants can be cinched in to stay up, but the shirt is so big that
the armholes extend down into the pants when it is tucked in. If it weren’t so funny, it would be grotesque. But nobody is
laughing.

Running through the darkness of a 1953 November evening, squeezing the neatly folded purple and white jersey, I explode through
the back porch and into the kitchen. My parents are stunned. They have humored me through all of this, knowing how sensitive
I am about my size. But they never expected success.

My dad is concerned for my safety. “Those big guys will make mincemeat out of you.” My mother is worried about my schoolwork.
But I care only about getting that damn suit to fit. Mother takes enormous tucks in the shoulder straps until the armholes
assume somewhat normal proportions. The armor fits. The warrior is ready.

Our yellow bus rolls through a midwestern winter with Hank at the wheel. St. Ansgar, Greene, Nora Springs, Riceville, Manly,
and on and on, through the Corn Bowl Conference. I ride alone in my jeans, green checkered shirt, and engineer boots, ostracized.
A good friend of the seniors has been left home because of me. On the bench, I watch closely. The season is not going well.

Gradually, and mostly out of desperation, the coach looks down the bench and says, “Waller, get up here.” Occasionally there
is a chance for the long jump shot that arcs into the bright lights of a dozen high school gyms, slicing the net on its way
through the basket. The other players are a little kinder to me. By the final game of the season, I am there. I start. We
pound up and down the floor at Nashua, winning. I score 12 points. Merlin lets me in the gym the next morning at seven, grinning,
with news of the game from the cafÉ. “Twelve points, huh?”

More time on the dirt in the summer. “Ya, I’ll be in for supper in a minute.” Can’t quit until I hit ten in a row from twenty
feet.

Sophomore year. It’s a winning season. I start every game. We upset Rudd, a powerhouse, in the county tournament, and the
world is colored good. Merlin shows up smiling when I rattle the gym doors on Saturday mornings.

The back-porch light burns late in warm weather. Can’t quit until I hit fifteen in a row from twenty feet. My dad has taken
an interest in the whole affair by this time and has the telephone wire moved out of the way. Mother worries about my schoolwork
and cooks as if I am a one-man harvest gang. I am five feet ten without warning,

Junior year, new coach. Paul Filter has a low tolerance for dolts. He smiles a lot, but his starched white shirts and neatly
pressed suits give him away. This is a serious guy. Serious about teaching history, serious about getting young boys in short
pants ready for basketball and for life beyond, a life I cannot conceive of.

We have lost most of our starters and struggle through a break-even year, improving as we go, while Filter lovingly calls
us “clowns.” But the jump shot is there, game after game, in the hot gyms. On some nights twenty of them go in from far outside.

Paul Filter begins to see what I am up to and designs a training program for me in the off-season. Roadwork and push-ups (no
high school weight-training programs around in those days). 1 do 140 push-ups at one time and grow to six feet. It’s getting
serious.

Something, though, is at work that I do not completely understand. This is more than a game. I think deeply about the art
and physics of the jump shot and ponder these while I practice. The search for perfection, the ballet-like movement, soft
release, gentle arc, the reward.

My last year rolls up, and I ride the momentum of years of steady practice. The jump shot floats through the Iowa winter nights.
The points mount up game by game—39, 38, 45, 34. I play with two people guarding me in most games, three one time. But the
roadwork, the push-ups, and, of course, the jump shot are there with enormous force. The other teams are not prepared for
someone training at a near-professional level. Mo Parcher and Bill Mitchell grab rebounds, Tommy Ervin sets screens for me,
and we win our first twenty-three games.

Filter keeps teaching. He has long conversations with me about getting athletics into perspective. He is aware that I will
have offers to play college basketball, and he is trying hard to get me ready for something more. I sulk when he takes me
out of the St. Ansgar game at the end of the third quarter. I have 39 points and have just hit nine out of ten shots in that
quarter as we bury the Saints. I want to stay in and break my own single-game scoring record. Filter moves me far down the
bench and refuses to even look at me as he coaches nervous and eager sophomores. The next morning he talks long and hard to
me about sportsmanship, perspective, and life.

It ends against Greene in the tournaments. We have beaten them twice before, but they dig in and go at us. My long jumper
goes in and out with no time left. Over.

A few days later, a letter comes from Bucky O’Connor, coach at the University of Iowa. Can I come to the campus for a visit
and see the Fabulous Five play?

My dad and I spend the day with Bucky, go to a game, and exist in the realms of the privileged. Bucky will recruit four players
this year, and he wants me to be one of them. My dad soars. He has spent a lifetime of evenings listening to the Iowa ball
games.

We sit at the kitchen table and fill in the scholarship forms. Dad and I laugh and talk about jump shots in the Iowa fieldhouse.
Mother says only one thing: “I think this boy should go to college to study something, not to play basketball” What? We verbally
abuse her, and she stops talking nonsense.

My first jump shot at Iowa is a memorable one, Early-season scrimmage, and I confidently move down-court. All the old rhythms
are in place. I stop, go into the air, perfect timing, great release, and the tallest person I have ever seen knocks the ball
back over my head to the other end of the court. Some adjustments will be necessary.

I don’t know much about playing defense or even team basketball. The kids from the cement playgrounds of Chicago and Louisville
do. “Okay, Waller, you don’t get to play on offense anymore until we say so. Whenever the ball changes hands, you go over
to the defensive side.”

The jump shot is silenced for a while. Nonetheless, the coach says I am the greatest natural shooter he has ever seen. I grin
at the word “natural” as I think of those seven o’clock mornings in the gym. Somewhere, Merlin the janitor also grins.

There is, however, something more going on in my eighteen-year-old head. The feelings are not clear, but they have to do with
the words of Paul Filter and my mother. I like Tom Ryan, my humanities teacher, and also a strange little man who teaches
literature. I do poorly in school, though, and blame it on basketball My freshman year drifts by. Everybody exclaims about
the jump shot while waiting for me to develop other areas of the game. And Bucky O’Connor is killed in an auto accident.

A ruptured appendix in the summer, a broken finger, and a nasty knee injury early in the fall get me off to a slow start the
next year. I am now haunted by these other feelings. I am close to falling in love with a young woman whom I will marry eventually.
And the old curiosities from my boyhood, when I read most of the books in the Rockford library, are surfacing.

Other things bother me, too. Somehow a boy’s game has been turned into something else. Grown-ups outside the university actually
care about our sprained ankles and the quality of our man-to-man defense. I cannot attach the level of importance to winning
that seems to be required. Practice and films and practice and films. Locker-room talk in which women fare poorly leaves me
cold. The special study sessions for athletes where amazingly accurate information about upcoming examinations is handed out
are repugnant. On principle, I refuse to attend these sessions and am laughed at for it. There is something wrong, deadly
wrong, and I know it.

I drop out of school. My father is disappointed and hurt in ways he cannot even express. A few months of menial work, and
Iowa State Teachers College takes me in. No scholarship, no financial aid. My parents send money, and I work at a local bank.
Good basketball in a lower key.

Norm Stewart comes to coach. He teaches me more about defense in three weeks than I have learned in a lifetime. Mostly, aside
from keeping your rear end down and staying on the balls of your feet, he teaches me that defense is pride and gives me tough
assignments in the games. I like that. It fits the way I am starting to think about the world,

The purple and gold bus rolls through the mid-western winters with Jack at the wheel. I stand up front in the door well and
gather images for the songs and essays to come. The jump shot is still there. But things are different now. I am studying
literature, playing the guitar, spending Saturday mornings reading Clarence Darrow’s great closing arguments to his juries,
and wallowing in all the things that college and life have to offer.

I am so deeply in love with a woman and with music that basketball becomes something I do because people expect me to do it.
Seldom do I reach the levels I know I can touch with the jump shot. Oh, there are nights, in Brookings, South Dakota, and
Lincoln, Nebraska, when twenty-five feet looks like a lay-up, the way it used to look in Riceville and Manly, and the baskets
are there for the taking. Mostly, though, the old magic is gone.