Playing Days (8 page)

Olaf was asked to testify, not only on the subject of these remarks but about the overall atmosphere of Hatton's locker room. This put him in a tough spot. Most of the team had rallied around their coach, who was well-liked across campus and admired in the media as an old-school disciplinarian with a talent for getting his
players to graduate. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a big feature on Wally Thrupp, which painted him as the spoilt child of privilege, trying to win in a court of law the recognition he had failed to earn on the basketball court. Olaf was caught in the middle. If he refused to testify, he had a chance to salvage his relations with the coach and the rest of the team; he might be able to start over. Wally, on the other hand, was his only friend in the locker room, and one of the few he had made on campus since arriving in September.

His girlfriend, to whom he was engaged, had taken a shine to Olaf. The three of them used to have a regular pasta date before game days, to load up on carbs. She had promised to set him up with one of her sorority sisters.

Olaf, though he never admitted as much, must have been terribly lonely – for female company as much as anything else. What he said was this: that the white girls on campus were scared of him for being big and black, and the black girls thought of him simply as a foreigner. In Germany, he had always been the black son of a white family – there never seemed to be a contradiction in that. But in America, he was neither white nor black; he was nothing. The Hatton case gave him a chance to take sides, but the fact was, the coach had said what Wally claimed he had said. It was a simple question of telling the truth.

‘Most of the coaches I know,' I said, ‘shout things like Get that white boy on the bench, but they would play him, too, if he deserved it.'

‘If he deserved it, maybe. But sometimes it is hard to deserve something in the wrong situation.'

‘So what did you do? What did you say to the lawyers?'

He hesitated a moment, and I wondered if he was leaving something out. ‘It was an impossible situation (unmöglich). I did the only thing I could do. I went home at Christmas and didn't come back.'

‘I think you were homesick, darling,' Katrin said.

‘No.' And then, surprisingly: ‘Sometimes you have to stand up for what you think is right.'

‘It was hard for you; your English wasn't very good.'

But Olaf ignored her. ‘When Charlie came, he made a few comments, about the brothers, all of that, which I think he considered a great compliment, as if every black man secretly wants to be American. But I put a stop to it, and he hasn't forgiven me.'

‘That doesn't sound like Charlie to me,' I said. ‘He's come a long way in life, too.'

The phrase gave Katrin another excuse to mother her son. ‘You were very young; it was a long way to go for someone so young. I think you might find it easier now.'

‘You have to be black to understand.'

There wasn't much we could say to this, so I tried joking: ‘I suppose Henkel thinks you're a problem character, too.'

‘No, you're the problem character,' he said. ‘Everyone can see that you're in it for yourself.'

He never got the chance to say what he meant by
that. The oven bell rang, and Katrin stood up to retrieve dessert, a sort of casserole made of applesauce, jam and breadcrumbs, which we ate with cream.

It was only later, in the long months ahead, that I learned what Olaf had been keeping back – for the sake of his parents, perhaps, or simply out of shame. We spent so much time together, empty time, on buses and bleachers, between games. There was nothing to fill it but conversation: boasts, mostly, and a few confessions.

Something had happened between Wally and him. As the season wore on and the tensions in the locker room mounted, something unpleasant had happened, though Olaf refused to tell me exactly what. I guessed that it had to do with the fiancée, that there had been either an improper approach or a jealous accusation, or a little of both. Maybe one of the sorority sisters was involved. In any case, Wally had accused him in terms he must later have regretted himself. There's nothing that brings out, in your average respectable white American male, the racial feeling quicker than sexual jealousy. Afterwards, Olaf's situation really had become ‘impossible.' There was no side he could decently take. Thrupp and the university eventually settled out of court, but by that point Olaf was long gone.

The whole episode, which took up from start to finish no more than a half-year of his life, had become a sort of bruise in his memory, which he couldn't leave alone.
But the real source of his regret surprised me. Olaf kept coming back to the fact that Hatton had promised him, before the season went sour, a significant role. He had passed up the chance to test himself against America's best. What he wanted to learn from me was whether, at the age of twenty-five, he was too old to play college basketball; whether the incident might still count against him, even after all this time; whether I had any connections among American college coaches. Olaf had read about an Israeli player who came to the States after doing a stint in the army, by which point he was already in his late twenties. Even so, he had a wonderful college career. Perhaps, Olaf wondered, Jewish coaches were more accustomed to taking mature players because of the military service requirements in Israel.

Meanwhile, he was looking for a way out of small-time club basketball; maybe he could still go to med school. He didn't suppose Landshut would ever make it to the first division, which entailed a very different lifestyle: more money and travel, the European super league, etc. Once, when he was nineteen, Olaf had played for a first division club. Coach Hatton discovered him by watching a game on TV while on holiday in Spain. A blind piece of good luck. At the time he thought, that's it. Everything is beginning. But here he was, back again where he had started. Nothing had changed, except that he had gotten older, and his store of useful years (there are about ten of them for a basketball player) was reduced by half.

None of this came out at dinner. Brigitte rose first. She was meeting a friend on the other side of town and promised to do the washing up when she got home. She gave Olaf a look; he had been invited along, too. Katrin offered me the spare room in case I wanted to stay over. She was sure Olaf wouldn't mind sleeping on the couch. I thanked her but said I had already made plans to see someone and couldn't be sure where the evening would end up. A line that provoked, unintentionally, a ripple of polite amusement. But by the time I made it down the five flights of stairs and into the street, I felt much too tired and sleepy with food to do anything more than catch the last train home – I never made it to Anke's club for middle-aged ladies.

Monday morning I showed my face early at the gym and found Bo Hadnot and Willi Darmstadt warming up. And felt a little jealous – that he had recruited the unshaved high school kid to work out with him. Also, I figured Hadnot could teach me something about how to shoot.

Darmstadt was feeding him baseline jumpers, just inside the three-point line. They always had two balls on the go, but even so Hadnot knocked them down faster than Willi could fetch them. There was the sound of him catching the ball; then the sound of his feet touching ground; and the sound of the ball going in. Darmstadt scrambling around to keep up. It was like watching a kid trying to keep dry in the rain. The rest of our shots seemed to be governed by luck or chance: we were two out of four, three out of five shooters. Hadnot on his own was nine out of ten.

The real surprise was when he did miss. It happened so rarely that you couldn't help but read into it to some strange and tiny flaw in the machine. After each miss, a few more misses, while the machine reset itself; and then the steady return of his natural rhythm. Boom boom boom. There's something about the alignment of
eye, hand, elbow and foot that resists being bent into a straight line. Hadnot had it bent pretty good. For the rest of the year, he spent about a half hour before practice and a half hour after it working on his jumper, and some of the guys used to show up early just to watch him.

Karl was one of them. He had got his first taste of what might be expected of him in his great career, the work-rate necessary – and didn't shy from it. By Wednesday he had asked me to stay back fifteen minutes before hitting the showers. He wanted to improve his midrange game and needed someone to set him up. ‘We can take it in turns,' he said. So I agreed.

Not that I liked Karl. Many years after all this was over, I was eating ice cream at a pavement café with my wife and baby daughter. A girl in a red summer dress was eating ice cream at the next table and being chatted up by a young man in a thin striped woolen shirt and fashionable sandals, and I suddenly thought of Karl. The girl had been upset by something, and the young man commiserated, with great sweetness, while eating up spoonfuls of her ice cream. His sympathy seemed only a piece in the general arrangement of his hair and the expensive disfigurement of his jeans and the casual untidiness of his footwear. I don't mean to say that he seemed insincere – he certainly seemed in earnest about his clothes. It's just that he didn't make any distinction between his sympathies and his looks.

Karl, during one of these sessions, told me that he played basketball because he was good at it. ‘This is why
I do most things,' he said. A perfectly sensible reason for playing basketball, but it's not why Hadnot played, and it's not why I played. I wanted to see him doubt himself. He was one of those guys whose self-confidence is as natural and obtrusive as a big chin.

Hadnot, at least, made him worry a little. Once, while the American was shooting, Karl wandered over to Darmstadt to help him feed the balls back out. After a while, he pushed the kid aside and took over, with a broad smile on his face and a kind of showy humility: he bent his full weight into the chest pass back. Hadnot kept shooting. I don't think he even looked down. After a minute or two, Karl got bored and (it might have been on a whim) jumped up and caught the ball over the mouth of the basket. Hadnot waited for him to pass it back, patiently, but without any expression of amusement. On his next shot, Karl did the same: lifted a long arm skywards and plucked the ball from the air one-handed. He was laughing by this point, he wanted everyone to share in the joke. Most of us couldn't help smiling with him. Hadnot walked off to the showers.

In the evening scrimmage, after a hard screen, Karl switched out on Hadnot at the top of the key, and the older man, without skipping a beat, launched the ball two-handed into his face. They were standing about three feet apart. The ball caught Karl in the nose, and he
bent down at once to catch his breath. When he stood back up he had a handful of blood beginning to drip through his fingers. Hadnot, by this point, had retrieved the basketball and offered to open play.

It was our ball, he said; Karl had touched it last.

Coach Henkel sent Karl to the showers to get cleaned up and, being a man down, stepped in himself to take his place. For the rest of the afternoon, Henkel and Hadnot went at it like cats, and nobody else dared to say a word till it was over. Even Karl kept quiet. He sat on the bench holding an icepack to his empurpled cheek. His eye had the white, glazed look of an afternoon headache.

Henkel astonished everyone. Sweating, potbellied, two years into retirement, he controlled the flow of play and snatched rebounds over the heads of men a foot taller and half his age. Over me as well. When he sat down again it was because he was too tired to stand up. His moustache hung dripping over the rim of his mouth. Furious during the game, he remained for several minutes afterwards almost too angry to speak, red in the face, which gave him an air of disgust, as if he thought, you bums. Even Olaf was impressed. Only Hadnot stood up to him; they almost came to blows.

Afterwards, in the shower, I could still see Karl's blood darkening the grouting in the floor; some of it washed over the tiles. ‘When something isn't fair,' Olaf said to me, ‘you get anger on all sides. Even you were angry. What happens when the coach loses control of
his team. A bad business. Bo wants to prove he deserves to start, which he does. Henkel wants to save face. I'm glad you won.'

In the morning we learned that Hadnot had broken Karl's cheekbone. He spent the rest of the month wearing one of those see-through plastic masks whenever he stepped on court. But I'll give Karl credit: all he did by way of revenge was play hard.

The truth is, Hadnot was out of shape. Ballplayers get one good game after a layoff, and Bo had had his game; but for the rest of the month, he struggled to find his wind. It's one thing to make nine out of ten in the cool of the morning with fresh legs and a willing lackey feeding you the ball. It's another thing to do it with sweat in your eyes and your legs shot and a kid with a seven-foot wingspan crowding your release. It pissed Hadnot off, I'm sure, that Karl had made a joke of his warm-up routine, but mostly he was mad that Karl was beating him to the ball, beating him off the dribble, putting him off his shot, and scoring at will. Karl's real sin was being better, and Hadnot may have been embarrassed by the fact that most of us knew it.

We weren't a close-knit locker room and didn't have the makings of one, but if there was a subject we could gossip about, Hadnot and Karl was it. Somehow it had become a question of taking sides. Charlie liked to argue that you can't teach what Karl had, and if you didn't have
it, none of the other things you could teach counted for shit. He lumped himself, with Hadnot, among the mass of mediocrity whose abilities were of the acquired kind. Plotzke wouldn't hear it. His antipathy to Karl was partly and mysteriously German, class-related, and inexplicable to outsiders, but the sum of it was simple and obvious enough. Karl was the golden boy; Plotzke was the smart, oversized butt of children's jokes. Hadnot, though shorter and better-looking, bore a kind of fraternal resemblance to the man Charlie called ‘Frankenstein.' They both seemed to be badly, almost painfully put together. Plotzke was getting old, too, in basketball terms; they had begun the rapid and long decline that sets in at thirty.

Most of us had a stake in believing that Hadnot's brand of perfected and bloody-minded mediocrity would trump Karl's talent in the end. Milo, for example, used to watch Hadnot warm up with an almost religious attention: if he had any hope of making it up the basketball foodchain, it was because that kind of dedication paid off. Yet people don't always believe what their self-interest tells them to. Olaf had more raw ability than anybody on the team barring Karl. But he didn't like Karl, and he did like Hadnot, and when their names came up in the pockets of gossip that develop in any community of rivals, he used to promise, with a mocking appropriation of Charlie's slang, ‘That Karl would get his.' Others are charmed by talent as people are charmed by money. They just like to see it being used. Thomas Arnold was
one of these. If Karl had a friend on the team, it was the pale-faced, fair-haired music student, who was always offering, to anyone who would talk to him, one of his selection of cream-biscuits that he carried in his sports kit. Both of them, in an odd way, cared less about basketball than the rest of us. One, because he wasn't much good at it; and the other, because he was too good.

Henkel was harder to read. Professionally, he had backed Karl. I liked him and trusted that his conscience, in the final analysis, would override his obvious ambition, but he must have realized the chance Karl offered him – to make it out of the bush-leagues on the young man's coattails. I didn't know this at the time, but the scouts were about to swarm over us like ants at a picnic. Anybody who wanted to talk to Karl would have to talk to his coach first. The kid was just an oversized visiting card with Henkel's name on it. I have no doubt that he planned to slip it into the Rolodexes of a dozen NBA general managers. If Karl liked him well enough (and why not?), he might insist, if only for comfort's sake, on taking his old coach with him. Stranger things had happened.

As Olaf pointed out to me, Henkel thought of himself as a coach's coach. He had big ideas but needed big-time players to work them out. ‘Not you or me, little one.'

‘But he is right,' I said. ‘Karl is already a more dangerous player.'

Whether I believed that or not, I don't know. Conversation for us was also a form of competition. It hadn't
taken me long to learn that every time you open your mouth on a basketball team, you should have something to argue or prove. Which was just what I admired about Hadnot: the way he insisted on his superiority. All week long, game after game, he talked Karl down. ‘This kid is nothing but a bully, nothing but a photo-opportunity.' Etc. In spite of the fact that he was almost a foot shorter; could only shamble along in loafers after playing, because of stiffness; was ten years older. And whenever the plain facts of what was happening on court contradicted him, he repeated, ‘That's all right, that's all right. We're just getting started here.'

On the Friday before our season opener, I ran into Hadnot for the first time outside the confines of the Sports Halle. More than a few of my free afternoons I spent fixing up my apartment, buying pots and pans from the High Street, bookshelves, a rug, and it often surprised me how rarely I bumped into my ‘colleagues.' It's not a big town; we were easy to spot.

I think most of them spent their days resting, lying back on the job-lot two-seater couches provided by management, watching videos, playing video games. Twisting the blinds until the sun went away. Microwaving frozen food. But that Friday I saw Hadnot with his arms full outside the Spar near the bottom of my hill – our local market. Spar leaves used fruit-boxes by the cart-rack and customers can take them instead of plastic bags. He was
carrying one of these, with a bag of Kinderschokolade and a German brand of ice cream sandwiches resting on top. I made a joke about fueling up for the big game, but he had been staring at some long-haired skinny kid, who was horsing around on a skateboard against the curb. Hadnot said something like, ‘I had my day with that,' and I wondered if he meant the skateboard or the kid's T-shirt, which advertised the Nine Inch Nails.

‘You look more like someone who used to be the kid who beat that kid up.'

Then the boy came up to me and requested my autograph. It surprised me and I laughed, and pointed at Hadnot and said, ‘His, his' – my German sometimes comes slowly when I'm surprised. ‘You should get his autograph. Have you seen him shoot?'

But the boy didn't move. He was holding out one of the little grey notebooks that are standard issue in the schools, and a pen. I saw pages of messy numbers in it that looked like algebra homework and signed the first page underneath his own name, which he had dutifully inscribed. ‘You don't want me,' I kept repeating, worried that Hadnot might be offended when the boy pushed off on his skateboard – down the hill, with a happy air, as if released from supervision.

In fact, Hadnot said to me, ‘When they ask for your autograph, just sign. They don't care who you are. They want you to be the big man.'

His apartment took him closer into town, away from mine, but I followed him anyway. I liked being seen with
him and mentioned the farms that lay just the other side of the hill: a string of hamlets descending into the valley. I had got in the habit, I said, of bicycling through them on my free days, knocking on the farmers' doors and buying whatever they had to sell that would fit into the basket on my bike. I added, trying my luck, ‘You should come along some time.'

At first, he didn't answer me, but just before we passed under the arch of the abandoned tracks (at which point I had really decided to turn back), he asked if I meant to go Sunday afternoon. He had his daughter for the day – the day after our first game, that is – and she might like to see some of those farms. The truth was, he added, he didn't speak much German; she was almost three years old and didn't speak much English. They got along fine but ran out of things to say to each other. We had stopped before the shadow of the railway bridge. ‘I guess you could help me out,' he said.