Playing Days (23 page)

I've heard that the Spanish have a word for the time wasted before traveling; there should be such a word for the build-up to a big game. Around eleven o'clock the next day, we jogged lightly through the Saturday morning streets of Würzburg, a dozen tall men shaking off sleep. A few photographers followed, when they could, taking pictures of Karl. Pedestrians moved aside and stared at us, recognizing that we were people of some temporary local significance. Some of them wished us luck.

Afterwards, Henkel had arranged for each of us to have a session with a physio at the hotel, but there were only two physios and they called on us in order of significance. That is, I waited two hours. Thomas Arnold discovered an old set of Connect Four among the children's toys in the TV lounge, and Krahm, Arnold, Darmstadt and I played round-robin together. Krahm never lost; he was studying engineering, a stretched-out, skinny, clean-shaven young man with a very small face. All afternoon I took from him the comforting sense that these games mattered as much to him as anything else we expected to win or lose that day. There was money at stake, too.
I lost five marks and remembered my father's warning about gambling: ‘These aren't the kids you grew up with.'

Milo had begun his long pre-match retreat. He looked like a man coming down with a cold and sat in front of a television watching footage from Würzburg's recent games. Sometimes I joined him on the couch. It was odd seeing Hadnot in another uniform. It was also the first time I had watched him on TV. He looked shorter than in life, more dependent on others to clear out some room for him to work. The fury of his presence somehow failed to come across; also, what was muscular in his precision. He moved in short quick steps, but with an air of neatness and deliberation. You saw the textbook diagram behind each posture or gesture – he gave the impression of somebody who would line up the pencils on his desk.

Olaf spent most of the afternoon on the phone in the lobby, without saying much. He seemed to be trying to apologize or calm someone down. ‘Na klar,' he kept repeating, and ‘Was denkst du?' Of course. What do you think? It upset me, on this, the last working day of our season, that our friendship had come to so little. I wondered if he felt the same.

After an early supper, more pasta and salad and rice, we could finally make our way to the stadium. Already a few fans stood outside the entrance, watching the television crews prepare, but we went around the block and made our way in through a service door. About an hour before tip-off. Olaf, waiting to get taped up, asked me to help him stretch out on one of the gym mats lying on the
floor by the trainer's table. Perhaps his own quiet nod to friendship. ‘Trouble at home?' I said, lifting his heavy leg and pressing it down against his chest.

‘Just my sister.'

Then the other leg. I remember the physical intimacy of athletes – their easy relations with their own bodies and the bodies of others. All this heightened by the steadily increasing pressure of what awaited us outside. Later I said to him something like, It's a funny kind of year that ends in March, and when he didn't respond, I asked him, ‘Has it been a good year for you, personally, I mean?'

‘Ask me again in a few hours.'

‘Is it as simple as that?'

‘Of course, it's simple. If you win, you are a winner; if you lose, you are a loser. That's what all of this means.' After a minute, he added, ‘Sunday night I have a date with my sister's friend in Munich. I like her; I don't want to be in a bad mood.'

This seemed to me as good a reason as any to want to win. I found the idea that lives and careers might depend, in any significant way, on my performance increasingly awful as the game approached. My own life and my own career as well.

No one in the locker room had much to say for himself. The noise we got dressed to was the sound of Milo's music leaking out of his earphones. He sat on a bench, wearing nothing but his game shorts; his top was draped over his head.

As soon as we emerged on court, other sounds overwhelmed us. The sound of wooden stands on loose wheels filling with people. Disco songs, blasted from tall black loudspeakers at either end of the hall. The echo of basketballs. Then there were the hand-held fog horns, which a few of the fans had snuck past security. Boom boom boom: pure expressionless noise.

Four different television stations had set up their cameras on the baselines. I counted them during the layup lines. A local Würzburg station; then a crew from Munich; another one I didn't recognize; and several cameras, on wires and booms, bearing the Eurosport logo. I remembered something Anke once said about Hadnot. That most people change a little, helplessly, in front of cameras, but that they had no effect on him at all, and I wondered if this applied to the way he played basketball, too.

The Würzburg players came in after us and the noise doubled. Tressell, shrugging his head from side to side like a boxer; Chad Baker in long striped socks, pulled up to his knees; Henrik Lenz; Hadnot.

I hadn't seen him since running off stupidly the last time we played basketball together. The sight of him reminded me of something else – one of those dusty corners under the bed that count for little in our lives but which we expose unwillingly. A few days before, while Anke was spending the night, I'd had a vague and in some ways not dissatisfying dream about him. Hadnot and I were alone and had somehow agreed,
reluctantly and without attraction, to a kind of expedient sexual exchange. Part of growing up, it seems to me, involves learning to dismiss such dreams more or less lightly. Naturally I didn't mention it to Anke, but the effect of this dream stayed with me and made his presence distasteful.

Henkel, just before tip-off, drew us in a huddle around him and made a speech. I remember his moustache moving over his lips but not a word he said. I don't think I heard him. Performance-deafness had set in. There was nothing in my head but the beat of my pulse and what the Germans call an Ohrwurm – an earworm. Sometimes a few lines from a song or a book or a recent conversation would echo around my mind during a game, not so much against my will as indifferent to it. This time the refrain was very simple: Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher.

Of course, I spent the first twenty minutes sitting down. Karl and Chad Baker jumped center together, and Karl knocked the ball to Charlie, who brought it slowly upcourt.

All week, during the build-up to the most important game of his career, Karl had been having a sort of subterranean argument with Henkel, but to the rest of us he presented a very easy face. If he was nervous, he was smilingly nervous. I said to Olaf at the time: he's like a man who has cut himself painlessly, and only realizes
later, so he shows you the blood on his finger with a kind of wonder. Look at me, nerves . . . But these had nothing to do with winning or losing. He had invited a prominent American agent to watch him play, a man named Neuwirth Dodds, whom I noticed myself in a front row seat wearing cowboy boots and a skinny tie. Dodds was well connected, especially among the West Coast teams, and Karl was anxious to impress him.

There's a story I heard about Dodds on the long ride home; I don't know if it's true. That Hadnot had approached him before the game and said something like, ‘How about I score more points than your boy, you get me into one training camp next year. I don't care which.'

They were both southerners, and Bo knew him vaguely from his first few years out of college, when he made a real push to reach the big leagues. Dodds said, ‘And what do I get from you, when you don't?'

It was a part of the story that he found his own remark very funny. I should add, Milo, Olaf, Plotzke, the rest of them, also found the whole thing funny, and not because they bore Hadnot any ill-will. Athletes just like to see people put down, they like shows of power – it's the business they're in.

What Henkel and Karl were fighting about had something to do with Neuwirth Dodds and the other suits like him lined up along the two front rows. Henkel had decided a few weeks before the game to wrong-foot Würzburg by moving Karl to the point. Karl resisted
him, for a few reasons. Partly, because it was likely to cut into his scoring, and he wanted big numbers to impress the Americans. Partly because he didn't think he could play point in the NBA, and he hoped to prepare himself for the transition. Both good reasons from a personal angle, but clubs and players, whatever coaches like to say, have very different interests at heart. Anyway, there was nothing Karl could do. He gave in, but Henkel's insistence might have cost him in the long run, too.

At the time, the guy who suffered most in all this was Charlie. After Karl tapped the ball to him, he crossed half court and motioned everyone into place. Motioned, I say, because there was no use calling out plays. The noise of a big game is most overwhelming right at the beginning, before the crowd has shouted itself out. There's a kind of tradition in some clubs of standing till the first points are scored, which produces, as soon as a shot goes in, a satisfying collapse and collective release of breath. Karl worked himself free at the top of the key, and Charlie swung the ball to him, then cut down to Olaf on the block and curled off. He had become a shooting guard who can't shoot. Karl still had Baker on him from the jump, but there was no way Baker could keep up with him outside the paint. Two hard strides to his right and the rest of the defense converged, leaving both Olaf and Plotzke wide open under the basket. Karl picked Olaf,
who lifted himself heavily off the ground and dunked. Two nothing. Everybody in the building sat down again; it was as if the stage curtain had been drawn at last.

Henkel chased Karl along the sidelines, applauding earnestly with his hands just under his chin. ‘Auf geht's!' he cried, an almost untranslatable phrase, because it has no real meaning, like a lot of encouraging words: just a kind of vector of meaning. I don't think Karl heard him or cared.

Charlie had a hard time at the other end, too. Tressell was cartoon strong and pushed through him into the lane then jumped full-chested against Olaf's ribs and laid the ball underhanded in. Darmstadt whispered at my side: ‘He's bullying the bully.' The teenager had suffered all year long at Charlie's hands; it gave him real pleasure to see the tables turned.

There's a lot of talk in the sporting news about the love of underdogs, but it shouldn't be confused with an attraction to failure. Really what we like to see is people winning and beating others – the bigger the victim, the better. Darmstadt had no chance of getting in this game and knew it. He could look on as coolly detached as anyone else in the crowd. Also, Hadnot had been decent to him; his loyalties were divided. I won't say I felt for Charlie exactly, though it turned out to be his last professional game and one of his worst. (At halftime, sitting by himself on a bench bone-tired, he said not a word – of complaint or anything else.) Most of what I felt was wonder. My first few weeks in Landshut Char
lie seemed to me just about the canniest and completest point guard I had ever played against. Now he was getting whipped by a kid I never heard of coming out of college who couldn't land a job in the NBA. What a world it is to strive in.

Karl, on the other end, kept forcing double teams and finding the open man. Würzburg adjusted, but even Lenz, six foot five tall and two hundred thirty pounds lean, was too small and weak to keep him out of the lane. A few minutes in we went up four, five, seven points. Eventually they started cheating inside, leaving Charlie and Milo free at the three-point line. Charlie even tried his hand at a few long bombs. The first one corkscrewed off the front rim and over the backboard; the second landed two feet short. After that, he gave up. He chased Tressell like a dog up and down court, trying to entangle him and draw cheap fouls, but on offense he more or less resigned himself to a bit part.

This shifted the pressure onto Milo, and Milo coped badly with pressure. He knocked down his first three pointer in a red mist and the look on his face had so little pleasure in it and so much relief I almost pitied him. It gave him a kind of license, though, and his next two shots barely drew iron. A minute later, he lowered his head and bulled into Lenz standing his ground at the low post block. When the ref whistled him for charging, he began to shout: obscenities, I suppose, but I heard nothing comprehensible. Then Henkel touched me on the shoulder and the red mist descended on me.

Entering a game is like entering a new atmosphere. The old rules of breathing don't apply; you have to learn new ones. For the first two minutes on court I don't know what happened, then Hadnot came on. He sent his first shot long before I noticed I was meant to be guarding him. I never thought of him as a nervous player, but the last time he wanted to win so much, against Würzburg half a year before, he also rushed his shots. And this time he was on an even shorter rope. His new coach, a nephew of Eberhart's named Oscar, tended to pull him quickly if he missed a few shots. Tall as his uncle, with the large stiff tender knees of an ex-athlete, Eberhart paced gingerly in front of his bench all game like a man trying to put off going to the bathroom.

The next time down, Charlie switched over and Hadnot pushed him into the post. Karl snuck behind them both and knocked his turnaround almost as far as half court. I picked it up on the run, but Tressell was back, so I waited for the help to come. Maybe if the ball had gone out of bounds, Oscar would have taken the chance to pull him. ‘There are other people on the court besides you!' I heard him call: the kind of prim, vague, correctional coaching patter Hadnot despised.

‘How about passing to Karl?' Neuwirth Dodds suggested, and there was a shout of laughter in the stands that made its way even to my deaf ears.

In general, the presence of the crowd was as powerful as summer heat, pervasive and just about bearable. You felt the fact that you were being watched. You felt
it on your skin. Meanwhile, I was dribbling myself into corners – and about to do Hadnot a good turn.