Playing Days (9 page)

I could tell that Henkel didn't think we were ready. He had promised us the night off, to let us rest, but changed his mind after the morning session. So we spent the early evening walking through our sets in street clothes. This was followed by a compulsory appearance at what Henkel called the team sauna – a low dank room carved out of the steam tunnels, with rubber flooring and an atmosphere that smelt oppressively of peeling paint.

The sauna itself was nothing more than a kind of broad porcelain urinal set into the floor. A trickle of lukewarm water ran along the basin of it, which could be augmented by a single black hose. Olaf refused to undress. He stooped under the low underground ceiling with his gym bag strapped across his back and watched us disdainfully.

‘Markovits, Markovits,' he said, as I dipped a skinny foot into the water, ‘Du bist auch so einer.' You're as bad as they are.

The rest of us settled back more or less uncomfortably – the porcelain ribs dug into our rear ends, already sore from running. Henkel himself undressed in short quick movements. His little potbelly, tight as a drum, emerged from his training-top. He was anxious to sit between
Karl and Charlie, who had claimed the one hose for himself. From time to time he draped its loop of tepid water over Henkel and Karl, and I noticed with interest a strange little moment when the water rested on the younger man's private parts.

Nobody said anything, but Hadnot used the brief awkwardness to take the hose away. Closing his eyes, he ducked his wet head under its gentle pressure, and I remembered something that Olaf had once said to me: that Charlie was gay. Needless to say, I never got a turn with the hose.

I slept very badly that night. Around eleven o'clock, I dropped off briefly with the television on. NBC Europe used to broadcast the
Tonight Show with Jay Leno
at two-hour intervals throughout the night, and when I woke up, shortly after one, I found myself in the middle of the same show. A disconcerting experience; I was suddenly, unhappily awake. By morning I felt almost ghostly with insomnia – pale enough for the sun to shine through me. Walking down to the gym, at two on a bright afternoon, I pressed my fingers to squeeze the cold out of them.

The Sports Halle showed already the little agitations of a match-day. A travel coach had parked at an angle in the drive; two catering vans waited in the loading bay. A few fans, even, had begun to trickle in. Mostly young boys in oversized NBA jerseys, ball in hand, who hoped
to sneak a few shots on court before the players came out. Their fathers, with newspapers. I jogged up the steps to work off a sudden anxious rush of blood.

That first hour, before a game, is like the hour before take off – a nonhour, it rests in the shade of the event. You might as well not exist. In fact, the passage of time seems to involve a kind of coming to life: you emerge only at the end with your wits about you.

I discovered Hadnot in the locker room, flat on his belly, lying on a towel on one of the central benches. The fat man from the front office was winding a roll of tape around his ankles. Almost tenderly, with great concentration. I had noticed him vaguely before, a slightly pathetic figure we all called Russell. Officious, stubborn, useful: he wore a sharp fist of keys on a belt loop and guarded tightly the supply of energy drinks in the medicine cupboard. His face had the soft asymmetries of mental illness.

Olaf had told me the secret of his nickname. A few years before a sales rep from a sporting goods store had left the team a bagful of goodies to distribute amongst themselves. XXX jerseys, sweatpants, windcheaters, designed to fit obese young men and not the tall narrow frames of athletes. None of the players wanted them, so they gave them to the overweight assistant from custodial, whom they named, in fact, after the logo on the sportswear: Russell Athletics.

We watched him now, slowly rolling the strips of white adhesive around the arch of Hadnot's bruised feet,
across the knob of bone above the ankle, leaving bare only his heel and toes. There was something soothing about the little variations required, the gradual advance of tape on flesh; something disturbing, too. Russell had babyish pink hands and cheeks and a large head of gingery hair, combed back. It was beginning to thin on top; he looked like a child, preserved. Even the red bristle of moustache above his lip, carefully trimmed, suggested somehow a mother's anxiety to make her son presentable. He sat straddling the bench at Hadnot's feet, as if he had taken possession of them. Bo lay with his head turned aside and his eyes closed.

I caught a look of something like disgust in Olaf's face and felt ashamed. Yet we continued to sit there with our feet in unlaced hightops – Olaf Schmidt, Axel Plotzke, Michel Krahm, Thomas Arnold and I – until Henkel came in pushing a rack of balls.

Some of the boys who had made it on court were shooting desultory five-footers as we filed in. Quick anxious shots; they were waiting to be told, sit down. The irregular sound of basketballs: a noise like a workman's hammer on a bright suburban morning, beginning and beginning again, suggesting at the same time idleness and preoccupation. Plotzke shooed them away, but the boys returned, bearing pens and programs, and from time to time we stood aside to sign the small black-and-white photos of ourselves inside them. They didn't want to talk, they just wanted us to sign, but even so I felt powerfully for a second the distance I had come
since childhood and saw myself through their eyes: a tall silent stranger.

Nobody could find Milo (Darmstadt had seen him arrive almost an hour before), so Henkel sent me out to look for him. I discovered him in one of the bathroom stalls, sitting on the pot with the lid down, already in uniform. He was rocking back and forth with his hands over a pair of earphones and his elbows on his knees, as if he were praying. The bass-line had led me to him; I could hear it in my ribs.

I knew Milo wanted to win more than I did, but I didn't know that wanting to win looked like this: angry, almost crazy. His eyes were closed and he didn't look up when I pushed open the stall door. Twice I called his name, to let him know we were warming up, then I tapped against one of the earpieces. At first, he didn't recognize me – his eyes had the muddy, unreflective quality of an addict's. Then he nodded and lowered the headset again and I left him.

The stands had filled by the time I came back on court and a few men in overalls were preparing something under one of the baskets. Our opponents had arrived from Nürnberg; they looked more or less like us. Too tall, a little awkward, mostly pale. They loped through their layup lines and let the ball, its odd bounces and lazy getaways, force them to stretch their legs.

I recognized one of the guys from an earlier tryout, a stocky two-guard named Torsten – technically sound,
hardworking, a step slow. He saw me, too, and we drifted together at center court.

‘I'm glad you found a job,' he said.

We had shared a bed one night in Paderborn, a first division club we passed through in early summer. The management had been too tight to give the players their own rooms. Torsten slept on his back with his mouth wide open, noiselessly, and I spent much of the night watching him.

‘I thought they would make you an offer on the spot,' he continued. ‘There was a rumor that you wanted a lot of money.'

‘I played badly the next day in Odenthal. I think the word got back to them. One of those days I couldn't find the end of my leg.'

‘The main thing is to have a job, to play. It's terrible, isn't it, all this waiting around. We have been fighting like cats in practice.'

‘Are you any good?'

‘One or two of us. The fat one can't be moved from under the basket, not with a truck. And the little Russian is very clever. But most of us are just part-timers. We play when our wives let us. Not so hard: the wives don't much want us around.'

His answer put me in mind of something else he once said. After my sleepless night, I showered early and came down before him to breakfast, then decided to wait. It was lonely enough just sitting amidst the bright indiffer
ent glitter of the hotel tables. I wondered whether anything like intimacy would grow out of the close quarters in which we had spent the night. Perhaps it had. What he told me, over the cheese and sliced meats, probably seemed to him embarrassingly confessional. At least, it did the work of his life's story. He listed all the clubs he had played for, including a high school team in New Mexico, where he had done a year's exchange.

After breakfast we waited outside the hotel, among the flowerbeds and parked cars, for the team van to bring us to the station. A hot cloudy July morning that smelt of gas fumes and sprinkler systems. I asked him where he hoped to end up.

‘It doesn't matter to me,' he said. ‘I will never be very good, but if I work hard, if I don't get hurt, if I eat well, in the off-season, too, and train very hard all summer, I can be a useful addition to a second division club with not much money.' He never mentioned anything about a wife.

‘What are those men doing?' I said at last, pointing to the crew in overalls.

‘Getting the fireworks ready.'

The season was launched in a burst of soft flares that rose against the metal rafters and blew up in a shower of sparks that settled and turned grey and disappeared. Everyone stood up to cheer – about two hundred locals, bunched irregularly on the pine bleachers rolled out
from one of the walls. I turned to count them, the pink thumbprints of a crowd in rows. The face that kept appearing before me was my father's. He had watched from the stands at dozens of my high school games, waiting for the coach to send me in. I wanted him to see me now: standing in uniform with my hands clasped behind my back, as if a photographer had lined us up to take our picture.

Anke had not come; it was almost a relief. After the show, two boys pushed wide brooms between the lines to collect the scattered shells. Then the brief, almost ceremonial gathering at midcourt. Ten men waiting, a sharp whistle. Karl jumped center for us. His heart must have been racing like mine: the inaugural act of his professional career was to tip the ball six rows into the crowd. Torsten put it in play, and the first five minutes of the game passed in a drift of smoke. I sat on the bench next to Hadnot, who was quietly, intensely angry.

By the time the smoke cleared, we were down ten points. Henkel had also warned us about the ‘little Russian,' a guard named Jurkovich, with a quick, flat-footed, left-handed release. Balding, with a drinker's vague beard just curling over his lips. He must have been thirty-five: Nürnberg was one of his stops on the way down.

Our league was full of guys like Jurkovich, trading on the difference between talent and youth. They played out their careers in small market towns a medium-haul plane flight from their wives and kids – until their knees finally gave way, and they moved into manage
ment or went home and entered whatever business their brothers-in-law had built up while they were shooting hoops. Jurkovich had made it to the C squad of the Russian under-18 world championship team in 1986, the one that didn't get to travel. That was the kind of story people told about him – that was the level he might once have aspired to. He spent a few years in the nineties playing for Livorno in Serie A, and when they dropped down, he began to bounce around second-tier teams in Europe till he ended up here. Nürnberg probably paid him ten thousand marks a month during the season, most of which he sent home; and Olaf didn't suppose he practiced with the team more than twice a week.

Still, whatever he had left was too good for us. Milo was guarding him, and maybe this is the time to say a short word about him. He had beaten me to the two spot, which was enough to make me dislike him. I had other reasons: there was something ugly and thick-skinned about him, in a physical sense, too. Bruised lips, a crooked nose. He smoked twenty a day, ostentatiously, and made a point of winning every drill, no matter how meaningless. He had the fastest hundred-meter time on the team. I know, Henkel measured us. After his sprint was over, he trotted to the side of the sandy track and pulled a pack of Marlboros from his gym bag. Then he stood next to Henkel smoking and watching the other times come in.

If he didn't win, he complained, first angrily, and finally in a childish pout: people were always trying to
take him down; they cheated. (Once it was true: I skipped ten feet on a suicide and beat him to the baseline. No one else noticed.) In spite of all this, Milo charmed me. I hadn't known anyone like him since junior high: a real operator, a bullshitter, a ropepuller, a brownnoser, a tough guy.

He ended up in Germany after his Zagreb youth team toured Bavaria, and one of the club coaches offered him an apartment, a car and a first-string job. His grandfather, I believe, was German; at least, he had a German passport. I think it suited him, too, moving out of home, making his way as a stranger. His charms are of the kind that run their course – people grow tired of Milo.

I remember the first real conversation I had with him. He was rating various European countries, most of them former Soviet satellites, according to the prettiness of their women and the brutality of their police. Bulgaria had the best and worst of both. A typical underhand boast: about his virility, his sexual experience, his rebelliousness, his knowledge of the world. I once stood three lines away from him at our local bank and overheard something of his conversation with the teller. There was a problem with his checkbook. He was trying to explain to the woman behind the glass partition that he had changed his legal name a few years ago. Just his last name, Moritz; I couldn't hear from what. It seemed an odd, unhappy sort of thing for a young man to do and made me distrust everything else I knew about him.

Except for what I had learned first hand: how much
he wanted to win, how much it mattered to him. When I saw him in the bathroom stall, davening with the music loud in his ears, I supposed that it was some kind of focusing technique. That he knew what he was doing. But he came out to play all hopped up.