Night Hoops Page 2

  When Dad came home from work, he would ask if we'd played ball during the day, and when we said we had, he'd look over at Mom with an I told you so on his face.

  After dinner the three of us would go out and shoot some more. Dad was always looking to go one-on-one against Scott. "You think you can stop your old man?" he'd say.

  Scott would only half try, and Dad would barrel by him for the hoop. "Is that the best you can do?"

  I'd step up. "Try to drive on me," I'd say. And sometimes Dad would. But he never took me seriously, never came at me the way he went after Scott. No matter what I did or how well I did it, Scott came first.

  Take last season. I'd been the starting point guard on Canyon Park Junior High's team, and I was good, leading the team in scoring and assists. But my games were on the same day as Scott's. If Dad showed up for mine, it was only for a few minutes. He'd shout out that I should play hard and tough, and then he'd be off to Bothell High to watch Scott. I understand why he did it. Why watch a junior high game when there's a high school game going on? Still, I didn't much like seeing his back as he left the gym.

  While our court was new, we mainly played "Horse" and "Twenty-one" and "Bump." But little by little, and so slowly I could never say when it started, Dad began riding Scott, hectoring him to work on his shot, his rebounding, his dribbling, his passing. Scott would balk. "Can't we just shoot around?" he asked more than once.

  One day, after Scott missed a jump shot from the corner, Dad rebounded the ball and wheeled on him. "How many times have I told you to get some arc on your shot?"

  Scott didn't answer.

  "How many? Two? Six? Six hundred?"

  Scott still said nothing.

  His silence made Dad seethe. "Since that question is too hard for you, maybe you can answer this one. Do you plan on playing varsity basketball this year? Or are you going to do that jazz band thing I hear you whispering about with your mom all the time?"

  I knew Scott had been toying with the idea of quitting the basketball team so he could play with the jazz band year-round, and that Mom was all for it. But I didn't think Dad knew.

  "I'll probably play basketball again."

  "You'll probably play," Dad mimicked. "And how many minutes do you think you'll probably play? Or does that matter to you?"

  Scott didn't answer, but I could see his jaws grinding.

  "Listen, and listen good," Dad said at last. "I need to know what the score is with you. If you're not serious about basketball, fine. I won't waste my time trying to teach you anything. But if you're going to try to make something of yourself on the court, something other than a third-string bench-warming senior, then it's time to get busy. So what's it going to be? Do you want to be a player, or don't you?"

  Scott took a deep breath, exhaled. "I want to be a player," he said, almost in a whisper.

  "I didn't hear you," Dad said sharply.

  "I want to be a player," Scott repeated, this time loud and clear and angry.

  "So that means you're making a commitment."

  "Yeah."

  "Not a half commitment. A commitment. No quitting."

  "I'm no quitter," Scott snapped.

  For a moment the two of them glared at one another like boxers before a fight, and they looked so much alike it was scary. Dad's face relaxed ever so slightly. "All right," he said, "since you're making a commitment to me, I'll make a commitment to you. I promise to teach you everything I know about basketball." He paused. "You could be good, Scott. You could be very, very good."

  After that Dad was like a drill sergeant. He'd have Scott practice passing, dribbling, shooting. Once he was satisfied with Scott's basic skills, he moved on to more complicated lessons: footwork on defense, blocking out on rebounds, posting up on offense.

  Scott burned to prove Dad was wrong. You could see him trying, trying. But he couldn't keep up his intensity. He could play his trumpet for hours and never even notice time. But he wasn't that way on the basketball court.

  When Scott started to slack off, Dad would ride him. "What about that commitment? I thought you made a promise." Then, for a while, Scott would play with fire again. But only for a while.

  Me? I was the other guy. Dad would take me by the shoulders and move me to a spot and tell me what to do. Scott would practice shooting over me or driving around me, blocking me off the backboard or stuffing my shots. Not much fun. Some days I wished that Dad had never built the court. Bad as those games at Canyon Park Junior High had been, at least they were my games.

  Chapter 5

  Scott and I were playing horse one afternoon toward the end of July when Darren Carver showed up at the back fence, Matt Markey and Carlos Fabroa trailing behind him.

  Carver was more than the best basketball player at Bothell High. He was the class president, the most popular with girls, an A student. He'd never come to our house before, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why he'd come now. "I heard you put in a new basketball court," he said, leaning over the fence and staring at it as if it were some gorgeous girl.

  "Sure did," Scott answered. "Come on back. We can play some." As Darren pushed the gate open, Scott turned to me. "Beat it, Nick."

  I looked at him, not believing what I'd heard.

  "Get lost!" His voice was commanding.

  "But I want to play."

  "Well, you can't."

  Furious, I stormed up to my room and flung myself onto my bed. I lay there, arms folded across my chest, listening to the basketball bouncing and Scott and his friends laughing. I tried to tune them out, but I couldn't. At last I slipped over to the window and peered down onto the court.

  They were playing a two-on-two game. Scott was matched up against Carver. I wanted Carver to eat him up, but all the stuff Dad had taught Scott was paying off. He kept good position on defense and he blocked Carver off the boards. On offense Scott's jump shot was falling, and if Carver came up and tried to guard him tight, he'd give him an up-fake and then drive to the hoop.

  But slowly things changed. As fatigue set in, Scott and Matt and Carlos started playing lazy. They'd throw up long jumpers, back off on defense. They stopped blocking out on rebounds, stopped hustling after loose balls.

  Not Carver. The longer they played, the harder he scrapped. More and more of the rebounds and the loose balls ended up in his hands. He kept taking high-percentage shots, and he kept sinking them. During the first ten minutes, Scott had played Carver even up. For the last half hour, Carver dominated him.

  You've got to want it more than the guy you're playing. I thought when Dad said that he was talking about pumping yourself up for the big game or the big quarter or even the big shot. But watching Carver made me realize "wanting it" means playing every second of every game as if it's the biggest moment in the biggest game of your life. You can't turn "wanting it" off and on. It's in you, or it isn't. It was in Darren Carver, but not in Scott. I had to find out if it was in me.

  Chapter 6

  The next day, after Mom and Dad had gone to work and Scott had finished practicing his trumpet, I challenged him to go one-on-one. He shook his head. "Carver's coming by."

  "It'll be a good warm-up."

  He considered for a while. "Okay."

  Once we were on the court, I pushed harder. "Let's really play. Winners outs, game to eleven, score by ones. No goofing around."

  He looked at me, a quizzical look on his face. "You sound like Dad."

  "Come on," I said.

  "I'll whip you."

  And he did. He took me 11–3 and 11–4, outrebounding me and muscling up short jumpers and lay-ins. I'd have played a third game, but Carver and the other guys showed up, and Scott shooed me away.

  I challenged him again the next day, and every day. Our games didn't change much. I wasn't big enough to mix it up with him inside, and I couldn't knock down enough outside shots to put a scare into him. The best I could do was 11–7, and I came that close only a couple of times.

  When I was alone,
I worked on my outside shot, figuring that to beat him I had to hit everything. But the next day Scott would crush me again, and I'd be back to square one.

  Then came another afternoon when I was chased upstairs so Scott could play with Carver and his buddies. As I stood at my window watching their game, the reason I was losing to Scott suddenly hit me. Carver was a couple of inches shorter than Scott, but he still took the ball inside, using his quickness and his moves to score, making Scott defend the whole court.

  That's not how I'd been playing. I'd given up the inside game, figuring I had no chance. Since I wasn't pushing the ball inside, Scott was all over me outside, hurrying my shots and forcing me farther and farther out.

  The next morning I challenged Scott again. It was just another game to him, at least in the beginning. But early on he found out that I was done heaving up twenty-footers. I moved my game inside. I took a few elbows, and I cut my knees up when he knocked me to the cement. But the games were tighter, 11–8 and 11–9. And I dished out a little punishment, too.

  "Let's play one more," I said after I'd lost the second game.

  Scott shook his head.

  "Why not? Afraid you're going to lose?"

  "Don't be stupid. You can't beat me."

  "You're scared to play because you know I will."

  I was trash-talking him, though I didn't plan it. And it worked. "All right, Nick. You want a lesson; you'll get a lesson."

  He came out on fire, nailing his first three jumpers. "I thought you were going to eat me up," he jeered after his third shot went down.

  "I am," I shot back. "You'll see." He laughed, then took one dribble, raised, and drained another jumper to go up 4–0.

  I was down 6–0 before Scott missed and I touched the ball for the first time. I took it to the corner, and he was slow getting out to cover me. Instead of going up for the jumper, I drove to the hoop and kissed the lay-in off the backboard. 6–1.

  He didn't guard me tight on my next bucket either, a little eight-footer I swished after he went for a head fake. On my next possession I got off another good shot, an uncontested pull-up fifteen-footer that missed off the back rim. Scott rebounded, took the ball back, and nailed a long set shot, pushing the score to 7–2.

  Five buckets is a big lead, but every one of his scores had come from outside. Lazy man hoops. He thought he could win easily; I knew I'd have to work.

  I stuck a hand right up in his face on his next shot, another long-range bomb that fell short. I was on the rebound like a hawk. I took the ball back, then worked my dribble in close, finally blowing by him with a crossover dribble for a lay-in.

  That's how the rest of the game went—Scott casting off long jumpers while I scored my points in the key. I closed to 8–5, then 9–8. He missed a twelve-footer, I shagged the rebound, raced to the corner and—for the first time—let an outside shot go. Nothing but net! We were tied.

  He grabbed the ball as it went through the net and bounced it to me. I faked another long jumper. He lunged out to try to block it, and I drove past him for my tenth hoop.

  Scott carried the ball out and shoved it into my gut, trying to intimidate me. But I wasn't backing down.

  He crouched low. I swung the ball in front of him, tempting him. Finally he swiped at it, but his hands were too slow. As his body moved forward, I took two hard dribbles to the left. He was a half-step behind me, and when I pulled up for the jumper, he stumbled a little. I had a good look at the hoop, and knocked down a twelve-footer for the victory. "Yes!" I shouted, making a fist and pumping it. "Yes! Yes! Yes!"

  I'm not going to say I won every game after that. But I won more than my share. Sometimes down at Golden Gardens, you can actually see the tide come in, see each wave claiming more and more of the beach. I was like those waves. Every day I felt my game growing stronger. Scott could push me aside when his buddies arrived, but when tryouts came, there'd be no sending me to my room.

  Chapter 7

  Then it was September and school. I thought I'd be going in with Scott, but he had band during zero period, and I didn't start until an hour after that. So I was on my own.

  My last year at Canyon Park Junior High I'd pretty much had the run of the school. All ninth graders did. We ate lunch up on a patch of grass that we called the ninth-grade island. Unless there was a fight or something, not even teachers ventured there. In the school hallways, the little seventh-grade girls looked up at us as if we were gods, while the seventh-grade boys—the "sevies"—cleared a path for us. If we barked at them even a little, a terror-stricken look would come to their faces as if they were afraid we were going to wait for them after school and then chop them up into little pieces with a hatchet.

  In the halls of Bothell High that first day, my world was suddenly upside-down. I was the little kid; the senior guys, especially the football players, towered over me. I found myself hugging the walls, nervously moving out of the way for them, praying that no linebacker would pick me out and start riding me the way some guys at Canyon Park had ridden seventh graders, making their lives hell for a year.

  It wasn't just fear of being tortured that made Bothell different. At the junior high most of the girls looked like little kids; here lots of them looked like grown women. And the school was huge compared to Canyon Park. I had a class in Room 303, then my next class was in 107, and I finished the day with geometry in 705—which turned out to be a portable behind the gym.

  Still, all that stuff was minor compared to the biggest problem: Trent Dawson. He was in my English class, my gym class, and my geometry class. We had the same lunch period, too. Every time I turned around, he was there.

  And he was no different. Nobody fools around on the first day at a new school. Nobody except Trent. He saved his best—or worst—for last. He was late for geometry, talked while Mrs. Glandon was giving us the rundown on her rules, and on his way to the water fountain in the back of the room, he knocked the books off three kids' desks. When Devin Klein told him to cut it out, Trent stuck his face right up in Devin's and sneered: "Yeah, and what are you going to do about it?"

  The walk home takes about thirty minutes. For the first fifteen I replayed the day in my mind. But once I reached my own block, my thoughts turned to basketball. I hoped I could get Scott to play, even if it was just horse. As I opened the front door I heard the trumpet coming from the downstairs den. I walked to the doorway. "You want to shoot some hoops?"

  "No," came the answer.

  "Why not?" I asked as I headed down, but before I reached the bottom step I knew the reason. Sitting next to Scott on the sofa, clarinet in hand, was Katya Ushakov, back from her summer vacation in Russia.

  Mom had met the Ushakovs at the grocery store a couple of years earlier. They'd come to America after the Soviet Union had broken up. Both of Katya's parents played for the Seattle Symphony. Every time you walked by their house, you'd hear music leaking out the windows and doors.

  Katya's brother Michael had been in some of my classes at Canyon Park. They hardly seemed as if they could be brother and sister. She was beautiful, long and lanky, with red-blonde hair and blue eyes. She spoke English with an accent that made her even more attractive. Michael was dark, had little pig's eyes, and was so fat his flesh jiggled when he walked. When he talked to you, he stuck his face right up into yours, so close you could see the yellow on his teeth and smell the garlic on his breath.

  For months he did terrible in school, but everybody figured it was because he didn't know English very well. Then one day in the cafeteria Trent called him a "retard." That got a laugh, so after that Trent ridiculed him all the time, especially after school, when no adults were around. On weekends Zack would join in. They'd follow Michael down the street, taunting him, "Michael, buddy, you need a bra? There's a sale at K mart."

  This went on for a couple of months, until one day Michael was gone from school. Somehow we heard that he'd been transferred to Sherwood, which is a school for kids who can't learn in a regular class. But he wasn't go
ne from the neighborhood. The symphony's performances were at night, and that's when he'd wander around singing songs in Russian or feeding the ducks along the Burke-Gilman bike trail. Seeing him out at night worried Mom. "I don't like it," she'd say. "I don't like it at all."

  "Don't worry. Bothell's safe," Dad would answer. "Besides, what can the Ushakovs do? They've got to work."

  That afternoon I said hello to Katya, and then asked her about Michael. "He's okay," she replied in a way that made it clear he wasn't okay at all. "You should come by, Nick. He'd love to see you."

  "I will. Once school settles down."

  She nodded, but I knew she didn't believe me, and for good reason. Feeling guilty, I turned to Scott. "How long are you going to practice?"

  He laughed. "Every spare minute I've got."

  "Oh," I said. As soon as I left, they started playing again, and their music followed me to the back yard.

  I had the basketball court to myself, but for a while all I could hear was their music. I thought about how angry Dad would be if he came home day after day and found Scott playing the trumpet. Then I pictured Mom, and how she'd take Scott's side, and how they'd all argue, and my head started to pound.

  Basketball. That's what matters, I thought, shaking my head. I practiced dribbling with my left hand and then my right, behind my back, between my legs, crossovers, stutter steps. I practiced shooting pull-up jumpers and finger rolls, sweeping hooks and reverse lay-ins. I practiced my defensive footwork and blocking out on rebounds. I practiced that day and every day, the rhythm of my basketball nearly, but not quite, drowning out Scott's trumpet and Katya's clarinet.