Playing Days (24 page)

He himself once told me the secret of intercepting passes. Work out the pecking order on the other team, he said. Most bad passes get thrown up the order – guys get bullied into it. When Karl crossed half court, he clapped his hands twice, calling for the ball, and I obliged him. Hadnot jumped the passing lane and made off the other way. Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher, Dolmetscher, I thought. There was nobody back but Plotzke, who was too tired to run, but Bo pulled up for a three-pointer regardless, which hardly shifted the net as it dropped in. Returning, he touched my elbow lightly – not in apology or anything like it, but just to make sure I was taking note.

Henkel sent Milo in to replace me, and I spent the rest of the half on the bench, getting colder and watching Hadnot go on one of his streaks. A fifteen-footer from the elbow off a double screen. A runner in the lane; another three. I'm trying to remember what I hoped for when he went up to shoot. I think for the first time I wanted him to miss. Henkel whispered to me, ‘Before it is over, I will need you again.' And childishly solemn and grateful to him, I nodded.

Someone had rigged up a large mechanical board in the place of the gym clock, which recorded points, rebounds, minutes played, etc. Instantly, the fluid living unfolding
of events was converted into a box score. At halftime, I looked up to check it. Hadnot led all scorers with thirteen points; Olaf had twelve, Karl ten, enough to give us a three-point edge. It occurred to me that Olaf's family might be sitting in the stands. I remembered his father especially, long-limbed, distinguished and balding, with curly hair. This seemed just the kind of experiment, regarding his son's character, he might be curious about, and as I jogged stiffly back to the locker room I scanned the crowd for faces.

Anke was sitting several rows up towards the visitors' end – on her own, in a plain blue dress that showed the brown freckled skin of her neck and chest. Since she wasn't looking at me I couldn't acknowledge her presence in any way, short of shouting. Instead I ducked my head under the doorway, feeling suddenly the flush of some emotion I found very hard to place. She hadn't told me she was coming and I hadn't asked her to. Probably it was only the strange nervous anxieties of the day, but the thought crossed my mind that she hadn't come to watch me.

In the privacy of the locker room, Henkel and Karl continued their argument. Karl, red-faced and restless with unspent energies, shouted at one stage, ‘You think it is all coaching. You don't remember what it is like any more.' Russell, looking blank, handed him a towel from a bag of cheap white overwashed towels he dragged around with him across the tiles. Karl folded it over his head like a shawl and strode large-footed back and
forth between our legs. ‘Out there, nobody cares about the coaches. It's always this way with you. You think too much.' And so on. I could see Henkel reminding himself, like a good father, it is not my job to respond to anger with anger; it is enough that I listen. He may also have felt that such reserve somehow proved Karl's point.

Eventually, he repeated the facts: that we were winning by three in spite of Hadnot's hot hand; that Baker, Lenz and Tressell each had two fouls; that Olaf and Plotzke had twenty points between them, because of Karl's unselfish play.

Karl bent down to him at last, less angrily. ‘You must understand. I can do everything I want out there, but for you. No one can stop me.'

Frau Kolwitz, the owner, walked in, wearing a grey mandarin coat buttoned up to her neck. Charlie was the shortest player in the room and he was sitting down; the top of her head came up to his eyes. She stood in the comforting shelter of Henkel's elbow and muttered something at us. Nobody could hear what – words of encouragement, I suppose. But somehow they had their effect. Karl fell quiet and the rest of us took the chance to unwrap and pass around bottles of water from the stack Russell had kicked into the room. At the end I could just make out faintly, Thank you, thank you, bobbing her head, thank you. She really seemed to belong to a different species, and we treated her with the suspicion and tenderness you would show a small animal.

‘Give me twenty more minutes,' Henkel said to Karl when she was gone. ‘And then you can shout at me as much as you like.'

When the second half started I found it very difficult not to turn my head and try to catch Anke's eye. There was no reason not to, except that I knew what she would be looking at: her husband. I had a seat on the bench; Hadnot was on stage.

Something else I meant to say about her feelings for me, something that had occurred to me in Flensburg. Anke was a girl who had a natural respect and admiration for good luck in men. I mean the kind of luck inherent in us, something we possess ourselves, like health or looks. Not the other kind, that rolls the dice for us and decides our chances. At my mother's childhood home, a short walk from the beach, among all those family associations and traditions, it was easy for Anke to consider me what my grandmother sometimes called ‘a good bet': she meant, a young man worth holding on to. Part of what soured their marriage was the fact that Hadnot seemed to Anke, increasingly, a bad bet. He had a kind of smell to him, the smell of somebody who doesn't get what he wants from life. And Anke, like a good, proper, fastidious girl, wished to avert her nose from it. But no one could sit in that stadium and compare the two of us to my advantage.

I don't know that I ever saw him play better, given
the stakes and the intensity of the occasion. I had certainly never seen him in better shape. The summer fat he started the season with had burned itself off; he gave the impression of someone who had sloughed old skin. Most of the crowd, of course, favored Würzburg, and everything Hadnot did was attended by a chorus of general happiness. Milo spent much of the second half chasing him around. Even when the mist descended on him, Milo was an excellent defensive player, aggressive and long-armed. But Hadnot turned his aggression against him. He worked him so hard off screens Milo ended up with a bruise the size of a footprint running up the side of his chest. (He showed it to me in the morning with a kind of pride, hungover, contented, passing time on the coach ride home.) But then Hadnot was just as likely to fade off a screen and drift baseline, clearing out for himself that instant of space which was all he required to catch the ball, dip his legs and shoot.

Maybe what saved us was the fact that everyone else watched him, too. Sometimes a streak shooter can have this effect. Even Tressell, bullish, unflappable, began to pound the ball on the wing, beating time with his hand until Hadnot got open. It was like watching one of those intricate children's toys: you put a marble in the slot and waited for it to come out again somewhere else. Or a mouse in a maze. In and out, around, along the baseline and up, with his quick short steps. Charlie once called Hadnot selfish, and this is what he meant: for him to play well his teammates had to arrange themselves
around his performance. Baker and Lenz setting picks; Tressell feeding him. I won't say he didn't care about winning, but winning itself never satisfied him. After a certain amount of disappointment, you need more than a single victory to prove how much of it was undeserved. Losing might have been preferable in its way. Look, he could say, you see how well I've played and it's happened again. No, not preferable. Eventually you can't help believing you deserve it.

Karl, on the other hand, needed no help from anyone to please himself. He started the second half ignoring Henkel and everyone else and simply launching himself at the basket. Even if he missed, it didn't matter; Karl reached over the heads of Baker and Plotzke with his long arms and tapped the ball in. Then they began double-teaming him as soon as he touched the ball, Tressell and Lenz together confronting him from either side. Sometimes Baker, too, even twenty-five feet out.

‘I've never seen anything like it,' Henkel muttered. ‘Pass, pass.'

And Karl passed.

Milo had a shocking afternoon. He suffered from a kind of incurable impotence, which, like the sexual kind, was only made more painful by desire. Probably he was the second best shooter on the team, behind Karl, but nothing went in and after a while he stopped trying. You could see on his face a sort of childish resolution: since I can't, I won't. Since I can't, I won't – I imagined the refrain running through his head. Olaf, of all people,
began drifting into the open spaces and knocking down jumpshots. In his sullen, indifferent way, he lived up to the occasion.

As for me, I kept waiting for the nod from Henkel. But he decided to go big: Krahm and even Thomas Arnold got in the game. With Karl attracting so much attention, there were plenty of cheap points available under the basket. Nothing came cheap to Hadnot. I don't want to say he never missed, but some things the numbers fail to account for. After a while, everyone knew he was going to shoot, so every shot got harder. Still, he found ways to work himself free, and the way he found them was more remarkable than the simple outcome of a ball going in or not. With three or four minutes left and the score tied, Hadnot pulled up coming off a high screen and Milo fell into him from behind. He had fouled out. So Henkel looked along his bench, once and once more; then he looked at me. I was sitting on my hands to keep them warm.

‘Ben,' he said. I stood up, feeling stiff, and walked on.

The middle of a basketball court, like any stage, is brighter than the wings. The lights shine off the wooden floors; you emerge into light. Charlie said to me, resting a wet arm on my shoulder, ‘Take Hadnot. It doesn't matter who got him today.' And then: ‘If the ball comes to you, shoot it.'

What I remember from the next fifteen minutes of my life, for that's how long it took to play out the game, are mostly impressions. Hadnot's sudden nearness to me,
his familiar face. I could hear him breathing through his strong front teeth; he blinked constantly against the sweat running off his crewcut. All this time Anke was watching us – I wondered who she was rooting for. It occurred to me that this was a test of the affections you could feel in your gut, that you couldn't at all doubt. Hadnot didn't say a word to me, hardly noticed who I was, probably. But it would be fair to say that for the next quarter of an hour I hated him.

The first time down he curled off a screen I didn't see, and by the time I got back on my feet, with an ear ringing, everyone had run the other way. The sequence of events escapes me. They were up by two, and then it was tied, and then we were up by two. And so on. Lenz hit a fifteen-footer; Tressel made two free throws. Once, as Charlie predicted, the ball fell into my hands and before I knew what I was doing, I rose up to shoot. When I first came to Landshut there was a kink in my shot, a touch of left thumb inherited from my father, which I spent the next eight months ironing out. Well, it was ironed at last: the ball dropped in.

You think about the score much more when you're watching a game than when you're playing it. I remember being surprised, glancing up with thirty-odd seconds left, to see that we were down by two. Then Karl waved everybody away. Baker jumped out at him when he crossed midcourt, but he moved around Baker into clear space and knocked down a three-pointer from twenty-five feet. The reason it seemed nothing much
had happened was just that everybody in the building went quiet. Three thousand Würzburg fans forgot what they were cheering for. The old-fashioned jury-rigged mechanical scoreboard read: Landshut 81 Würzburg 80 Time: 00:15. I looked to see if the seconds would tick away, but Eberhart had called time out, so we all gathered dutifully around our coaches. I have no idea what Henkel said: we might as well have been under water. Then we drifted on court again and I tried to find Hadnot.

It seemed to me likely they'd run a play through him; I was almost relieved when they did. He held the ball on the wing, comfortably against his belly, while the time ran down. At least, I thought, I don't have to chase him around. Here he is. And then it occurred to me what he was going to do. There's a move he used to practice on the right baseline, sometimes against me. A Russian taught it to him, a very simple move, but the kind of thing Soviet-block players get drilled into them again and again. Hold the ball. Plant your right foot, take two hard dribbles right. Fix the defender against your left shoulder. Plant your left foot, then jump a little backwards with your shoulder still turned and shoot.

If you do it correctly, moving quick and hard, it's almost impossible for anyone to reach your shooting hand. Hadnot alone in the gym expected to make eight out of ten. I watched him do this a hundred times, counting aloud, one for one, two for two, two for three, three for four, and so on. Against a tall defender, who knew what was coming, his chances dropped to five out of ten;
he told me this himself. When we were working on the move together, one morning before practice, I asked him again what he thought about while going up to shoot – forgetting I had asked him before. But this time he gave a different answer. ‘I always think the same damn thing,' he said. ‘Go in.'

The phrase came back to me, in the heat of that moment, as phrases sometimes do – without meaning much. For a few seconds we stood there, amid three thousand people, on one of those strange, sudden islands that emerge from the flow of play. This is how I like to think of him: just as far away as the reach of my arm, with the ball in his hands and everything still undecided.

For several years after leaving Landshut, I had dreams about leaving Landshut. Like school dreams, full of anxiety. Often the train station featured, half buried in snow. In fact, when I did move out in mid-April, it was one of the first warm days of the year, overcast and very still. I look the long train north to Hamburg and stayed with my uncle for a few days, making in reverse the journey that had brought me from college in the first place.

But in these dreams, something always went wrong. The train stalled in the station or I missed it altogether. There were also cars that broke down. Franziska appeared occasionally: we had left her behind and needed to go back for her. Sometimes Anke and I were stuck together, but not always. And other people pushed their way in: Milo, laughing at me; Hadnot with his face in the window; Darmstadt offering very sweetly, if I needed a place to stay, to put me up at his parents' house for the night. Some of the dreams grew out of the violent dreams of my playing days, and I woke from them almost breathless, with a quickening heart.

It took me about two weeks to clear out. A few days after the playoff, once the celebrations were over and the long summer began to stare us in the face, Henkel sat
each of us down one by one. Hadnot was right. Only Olaf and Karl survived our promotion to the first division. It's a very different business, Henkel explained to me, and frankly he didn't think I was ready. If I wanted to sit at the end of the bench, year after year, all right, that was one thing. But what I needed was a chance to play, etc.

Sometimes I wonder, if we had lost that game and stayed in the old league, would I have stuck around? Franziska will be fourteen years old this summer. Anke is approaching forty. Laziness and stubbornness, I told her, account for most of my decisions. It really would have taken a fair dose of one or the other to keep me in Landshut without a job. Henkel offered to let me stay on in the apartment till July, but I said to him, ‘If I'm going to go, I should just go,' and the way he accepted my answer suggested he knew a little about my personal situation, too.

Anke blamed the club bitterly for its disloyalty. ‘If only you had lost,' she said. It was easier for both of us to blame the club, but the truth is, I was ready to leave and I don't think losing would have made much difference. Even for Olaf and Karl and the rest of them.

Nothing, of course, could have kept Karl in Landshut very long, and the first division failed to. One year later he made his way to the NBA, and the rest is not my story to tell. You can watch him a few times a week from October to June on national TV, looking more or less as he looked when I knew him. Although these days his large flat face is partly hidden by a beard. He earns
fifteen million dollars a year for doing our old job – we used to make the same money.

Promotion didn't mean much to Olaf, either. Recently, I looked up the names of my former teammates on the internet and was stunned to see how little their lives had changed. Henkel did not follow Karl to a coaching job in the NBA, and Landshut subsequently dropped down a division. He got fired and ended up at Langen, one of the clubs we used to play against. I scrolled down their roster and found a few familiar names: Olaf, Milo, both in their midthirties; even Krahm and Darmstadt still play for our old coach. I felt a brief chill, as if the forces preserving them there, so perfectly, in the distant past of my own life, had leaked out of the screen. Maybe Anke was right. Sometimes it's very easy for nothing much to happen.

Charlie proved harder to track down; there are a lot of Charles Golds. But then I remembered he had a sister in Peoria. He got a job coaching high school basketball there, and a few years later his name came up in the Journal Star, a local newspaper. One of his players had accused him of making what was referred to as ‘improper advances,' and Charlie lost his job. He sued the school on the grounds of discrimination. What he was really fired for, his lawyer claimed, was being a gay, black high school coach with access to a locker room of young men. The boy's story would have been laughed out of any court of law. He had recently been cut for repeated violations of team rules; various students and teachers
testified to the fact that he was a problem kid. There was no evidence of any advance. The boy's father had seen a chance to get his own back and played on the anxieties of some of the other parents to put pressure on the school principal. The case settled out of court, and Charlie returned to his job.

Mel Zweigman had dismissed him as a third-rate talent and a bully. ‘At least he knows what he is,' Mel said. It struck me that the real test of his personal qualities had nothing to do with the eight months I played beside him.

As for me, I spent the summer at home and then moved in with a high school friend, who was finishing up a PhD., and began a masters in literature. A few years later I married the daughter of one of my father's colleagues, an English girl, and we ended up in London following a stint in New York. My first novel,
The Syme Papers
, came out in 2004, after several draftings and redraftings. Some of the work I did in Landshut survived these.

I never saw Anke again. On the eve of my departure, we fought stupidly. Franziska was ill at home, running a fever, and though we went out for a quick meal, Anke refused to spend the night in my apartment. It wasn't fair, she said, to let her mother do everything. She spent all week taking care of children, at her age, and her father was worse than useless and needed looking after himself. You have done it a hundred times before, I complained. But she only shook her head, contracting her face, the way Franziska used to when she refused to eat. As if to
say, I am all sealed up and self-sufficient. I said, This is very reasonable and mature. You are withdrawing from me already so that I can't withdraw from you. You want to land the first punch. Punch, punch, punch, she repeated angrily, picking up as she sometimes did on one of my English words. But so childishly, that there was nothing I could say to her. And we parted this way, Anke silent and stiff-necked, and me with the air of someone who says, I wash my hands.

In the morning, she came with me to the station, not because we had made up, but because she was going into Munich for one of her haircuts. Franziska was feeling a little better; the fever had passed. We waited on opposite platforms with a train between us, and I stared at that train, bound for Bielefeld, for five hard minutes, hoping it would rumble off. With Anke out of sight I felt very suddenly the fact that she was gone. Something casual had become permanent; her brief absence had taken on a hundred pounds of weight. I told myself, she's still standing there, not twenty feet away. Thinking who knows what thoughts. She is still within reach.

Only she wasn't. When the train between us pulled out the platform behind it was empty. I consoled myself with the fact that we planned to meet up later in the summer, when my family made its annual trip to Flensburg. But then my mother became ill and the trip was postponed. By the time I returned to that trim post-war house on the beach, where we had once spent Christmas, Anke and I had dropped out of touch.

I'm not sure what happened to Hadnot. When his final shot drifted wide, I knew he had missed by the way he turned his head. But I didn't see the shot till later, on the coach-ride home; Henkel had already got a copy of the video. You can watch me at the end of it, carried forward by momentum, falling into Hadnot's shooting arm. For a moment we have to hold each other up. Most of the guys on the bus were still a little drunk from the night before, and as the ball caromed away, off the inside rim and over Karl's head, they shouted again – as if there had been any doubt about the outcome, second time around.

Würzburg stayed put in the second division, and Hadnot probably stayed put with them. Most of his sporting achievements, such as they were, pre-dated the internet, and whatever he's doing now isn't the kind of thing to get a mention online. There's a black kid called Bodie Hadnot who transferred out of Nashville State Community College to Chattanooga in 2006. He averaged 3.7 points a game his junior year. The alumni network for the university is particularly strong and runs a number of fan websites. Even bench players have columns devoted to them. Whenever you type Bo Hadnot into Google, Bodie comes up.

For five months after coming home I didn't touch a basketball. Instead, I learned to drive stick, surging around the shaded streets of my childhood in the old family Subaru, a second car, for the sake of a little independ
ence. By September, I still had no plans. My father said to me, ‘You can't sit around the house all day. What are you going to do with yourself?' But he didn't press me. Instead, he kept me busy with small tasks – rarely more than one or two a day. For example, he asked me to pick up my sisters from school, my old high school. While you're at it, he said, why don't you look in on your coach. He'll be pleased to see you.

So I set off early on a late September afternoon. Under a clear sky the heat had dropped to the tolerable levels of high summer anywhere else. Five years after graduation, the route had already become unfamiliar. But I found my way eventually, off the sun-bright strip mall (one of the arteries running through town) into the low curbless suburban neighborhood that surrounds the school. The main campus differs from the rest of the house-plots only by having a wider lawn. There is also a stretch of undeveloped green opposite the car park, where the school has no jurisdiction, and some of the older kids go to smoke and drink between bells. The present class of dropouts looked no different from the kids I used to stare at from the portico, waiting for my father to pick me up after basketball practice. Though I had more sympathy for them now. One year out of college I had no idea what to do with the rest of my twenties.

I found my old coach in his office, an old storage closet next to the training room, and near enough to the gym you could hear the echo of basketballs. He was chewing peanuts when I walked in, reaching into his
pocket and spitting the shells vaguely in the direction of the gray standard-issue bin. Possibly part of an attempt to get off tobacco, I don't know: among the odd life facts he once explained to us, from the pulpit of his health class, was the right way to pronounce Pall Mall. I was a little worried about what to call him – I had never called him by his name. This turned out not to matter. I called him coach.

Six years makes a great difference in a young man's life, but he looked more or less unchanged. The same muscular bald head and trunk-shaped arms; his light-skinned humorous black face had heavy-lidded eyes. It's often hard, even for a cynical kid, not to attribute to his high school coaches sharp moral vision. They see you every day for what you are: lazy, shirking, selfish, scared. In fact, I was still a little scared of him and remembered again my strong, childish desire
not
to disappoint him.

He was shorter than me – I noticed that when he stood up to take my hand. What I wanted to tell him is that I had made it, in a small way, that I had overcome whatever it was that had held me back before.

‘Is that so?' he said, when I gave him my news. ‘Is that so?' Pleased; not especially surprised. He didn't often meet my eye. It struck me that now we were equally shy of each other.

Coming home, I nudged my shoes off and switched on the TV set – as I used to, coming home from school. Then, after a minute, stood up again and went outside looking for a ball. There was often one lying around,
under a tree, in the bamboo fence, by the bicycles. Afternoon shadows had just begun to stretch out. The concrete of my father's court was still too hot for bare feet, but I took a couple shots anyway and chased them down quick-footed. Then a couple more, counting out the tally of makes and misses. Feeling the roughness of the paint on my soles. Remembering Hadnot's advice: bend your legs, jump straight in the air, and keep your elbow in. Follow through.

For the next two hours, while the sun descended behind the car park wall next door, and the ground cooled, I worked on my jumpshot. Some of the shots went in and some of them didn't, but I tried to repeat each motion faithfully regardless. When I was a kid on that court I used to imagine some future in which all these shots would matter.