The Turnover

by Mike Lupica

  “The older you get,” she said, “the more set you get in your ways.” She lowered her voice. “Go easy with this tonight. He seems more tired than usual. Maybe that comeback took more out of him than you.”

  Gramps was at one end of the couch in the living room. There was a game on the television set. Lucas plopped down at the other end.

  “What are you watching there?” Lucas said.

  “Michigan State against Syracuse,” he said. “Curious to see how State attacks that Syracuse zone.”

  There was a time-out in the game, and a commercial appeared on the TV screen. Lucas’s mom called out from the kitchen, saying she was making a cup of tea and asking if Gramps wanted some. He politely declined.

  “You know, Gramps,” Lucas said, “I didn’t mean to spring the idea of my paper on you. But I really think it will be fun.”

  Gramps sighed.

  “You know what’s another sign of knowing you’re really old?” he said. “Talking about old times more and more. I see it with my friends. I sometimes get the idea that they think the best things that will ever happen to them have already happened.”

  “But you’re never like that,” Lucas said. “I just want to know more about stuff that happened to you.”

  Gramps turned now. He smiled, but looked tired.

  “Find a player you admire instead,” he said.

  “But it won’t be somebody I admire as much as I do you,” Lucas said.

  “I appreciate that,” he said. “But you know what else I appreciate with young people like you, son, especially when they look at sports? That you think the good old days are now. So learn up on LeBron, or Steph, or Kawhi. I’d help you with a paper like that, and maybe learn a few things about history myself.”

  “But we could work on one about you together,” Lucas said. “You always say that history makes you understand the present better, and not just basketball history.”

  “You understand me just fine already,” Gramps said.

  He reached for the remote next to him. The game was back on. Gramps muted it.

  “I’m a lot more interested in what you’re going to do next than in what I already did,” Gramps said. “You want to know who really keeps me going? You do. You’re the only one who can make me feel young, the way you and your teammates did in that game we played today.”

  “Maybe if I do this paper, it will jog your memory on some cool things,” Lucas said.

  “These knees of mine made me give up jogging a long time ago,” Gramps said.

  “Mom says that I never give up,” Lucas said.

  “Make an exception for me,” Gramps said. “It’s too late for me to get comfortable talking about myself. It’s another thing people my age do. They talk too much, and live too little.”

  He stood up now. When he’d been seated for more than a few minutes, it took some effort. Sometimes it would even take him a couple tries to get off a couch or out of a chair. But he never asked for help, and didn’t now.

  “I’ll see you at practice on Monday,” he said to Lucas. Then he raised his voice slightly and said, “Thanks for dinner, Julia.”

  Lucas walked his grandfather to the front door. But as he opened it for him, Gramps suddenly pulled him into a bear hug.

  “You had yourself a great day today,” he said to Lucas. “What you should be focusing on is that.”

  “We had a great day,” Lucas said.

  “Have it your way,” Gramps said. “Because all we’ve got is today.”

  He pulled out of the hug and stared at Lucas, and then looked down at him.

  “Love you,” Gramps said.

  “Love you more,” Lucas said.

  Gramps smiled.

  “No,” he said, “you don’t.”

  He closed the door. Lucas watched through the curtains of the front window as he limped toward his car. As he did, he felt his mom’s hand on his shoulder.

  “I heard some of that,” she said.

  “Did it make sense to you?” Lucas said.

  “He’s a sweet, proud, shy, stubborn man,” she said. “I always kid with him that he thinks people his own age are older than him. Maybe he really doesn’t want to act like them.”

  “I’m kind of stubborn too,” Lucas said.

  “Wonder where you get it from?” his mom said.

  “I want this to be a tribute to him,” Lucas said. “I’ve just got to figure out a way to make him see that.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want a tribute,” his mom said.

  “Why not?” Lucas said.

  “Because maybe he thinks it will sound like the kind of eulogy people give you when you’re gone,” she said.

  EIGHT

  On Monday in class, Mr. Collins said that the reason that he’d given them as long as he had to do the paper was because it was going to count for most of their first-semester grade.

  “I’m challenging you all to do your very best work,” he said. “But what I want you to do even more is challenge yourselves.”

  When he asked for a show of hands to find out how many of them had already picked their subject, Lucas only got his right hand up as high as his shoulder.

  Mr. Collins saw, and smiled.

  “Does that mean you’ve picked half a subject, Lucas?” he said.

  “Having some trouble,” he said.

  “Picking a subject?”

  “With my subject,” he said.

  “Can I help?”

  Lucas said, “It’s like the paper, I guess. I’ll have to figure it out myself.”

  “I want the reporting on this to be as much fun as the writing,” Mr. Collins said.

  “Same,” Lucas said.

  Lucas wanted Gramps to change his mind on his own. But his mom was right. It was early in the game. Lucas wasn’t giving up. That wasn’t him. In anything.

  On the way to the bus, Lucas asked Ryan if he’d picked his subject yet.

  “No,” he said. “I was glad that Mr. Collins was looking at you after he asked the question, because both my hands were on my desk.”

  “You’ll come up with somebody good,” Lucas said.

  “It doesn’t matter whether I do or not,” Ryan said. “I’m no good at writing.”

  “You can write,” Lucas said.

  “Not like you.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to write like me,” he said. “You just have to write like you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Ryan said. “My dad told me last night that I’ve got to do better this semester than I did second semester last year. If I don’t, I can’t play sports second semester this year.”

  “What does ‘better’ mean?”

  “No more Cs,” Ryan said.

  “For real?”

  “For real,” he said. “Dad said he’s not asking me to be an A student. But that he knows I’m capable of better work. My mom agrees with him. So if any of my grades tank, I won’t be able to finish the season.”

  “So we won’t let them tank,” Lucas said.

  “They’re not your grades,” Ryan said.

  “We’re a team, remember?”

  “I can’t write!” Ryan said.

  “And I used to think I couldn’t shoot from the outside,” Lucas said.

  “You practiced and got better,” Ryan said.

  “So can you.”

  “The difference is that you love basketball,” Ryan said. “I’ll never love English.”

  “Just think of the class,” Lucas said, “as a game you refuse to lose. Or a match in tennis.”

  Ryan had gotten even better at tennis than he was at basketball over the last couple years, and was probably the best player their age in Claremont by now.

  “I know I need a better attitude,” Ryan said.

  “I can help you with that, too,” Lucas said.

  “A for attitude?” Ryan said.

  * * *

  Ryan’s mood had improved by practice that night. But then everybody’s attitude seemed to improve once the
y were inside the gym at Claremont Middle. It wasn’t just the sound of the gym, the bounce of the ball and the squeak of sneakers on the newly polished floor, and the swish of balls through the net, and even balls clanging off the rim. It was the sound of the chatter, too. Maria told Lucas how the music she played on the piano, or just the music she listened to, always made her feel better.

  The sound of the gym was Lucas’s music.

  Lucas hadn’t seen Gramps since Saturday night. Lucas didn’t mention his paper. Neither did Gramps. It was all basketball tonight. They were back on familiar ground. Gramps just talked to the team about turning the page and getting ready for Saturday’s away game against the Sheridan Sonics, before walking them through the new play he’d been diagramming on his napkin during the pizza party at Gus’s.

  Lucas knew that Gramps’s plays always made perfect sense to him when he was drawing them up, on a napkin or piece of paper or even a newspaper. And when he’d finished drawing it up and began explaining it to Lucas, his eyes would light up and his hand would start going in all directions as he told Lucas that the point guard was supposed to go here and the screener there and what he thought the defense would do in response.

  At first all the lines and arrows and Xs and Os would make no sense to Lucas. But finally Gramps would look at him, eyes still bright, and say, “See?” as if the whole thing were as beautiful to him as a rainbow.

  The new play tonight was a double high screen for Ryan and Billy. It didn’t matter whether Lucas triggered the play from the right side of the court, or the left. Ryan would run up one side of the lane. Billy would run up the other. Then it would be up to Lucas where he would go with the ball. If he threw the ball to Ryan, Billy would immediately spin, then cut for the basket while Lucas was making his own cut, using Ryan as a screen.

  Lucas would keep going to the basket, or pop out as Ryan turned with the ball, surveying the defense himself. He might end up with an open shot, or put the ball on the floor and head back for the basket himself. He might throw it to Billy. Or to Lucas.

  What Gramps really wanted was to create as many distractions as possible for the defense.

  “I call this one of our ‘shiny object’ plays,” Gramps said.

  “In this case, the ball is the shiny object. The other team worries so much about what the guy with it might do, they forget to watch for the open man. Or two open men, in this case.”

  There was that light in his eyes again. He was Gramps again. Maybe Lucas’s mom had been right. Maybe everybody had a bad day, or night, once in a while. Lucas told himself that he still wasn’t giving up on his paper, not by a long shot. He imagined that he was the one drawing up a great play, one that might just take a little extra time to develop. Then once he got started, once he started writing it, Gramps would see that all Lucas was doing was finding a new way to respect him, and even honor him.

  Then the play would make sense to both of them.

  But he wasn’t going to bring it up tonight. They were having a good practice. They were coming off a good win. They had another game on Saturday, against a tough opponent. It was all ball tonight.

  Gramps left enough time at the end for one of their practice games. He said they were going to do things a little differently tonight: All he was going to do was keep score, and run the clock. He made Lucas the coach of one team. He let Neil coach the other. As always, he didn’t talk about the first unit or the second unit. He never did that, and was always telling Lucas he hated it when college and pro coaches used those expressions.

  “The team is the unit,” Gramps said. “You’re either in, or you’re out.”

  Each team could run as many or as few plays as it wanted. They could fast break as much, or as little, as they wanted. And press when they wanted. The starter wore blue mesh pinnies. The other guys wore red.

  “Play like it’s the playground tonight,” he said. “But if somebody calls a foul, it sure as sugar better be a foul.”

  It was as if somebody had turned up the volume in the gym. The game was close. Every time Lucas or Ryan or Billy or Richard would get the blue team ahead by a couple baskets, the red team would come right back at them, riding the hot hand of Neil from the start.

  They were finally a few minutes past when practice was supposed to have ended. The game was tied again. Gramps finally got up from the scorer’s table where he’d been working the clock and said that since they couldn’t play all night, he was going to flip a coin to determine which team would get the last possession.

  Lucas got to call. He called heads.

  Heads it was.

  “Blues get one shot at this,” Gramps said. “If they score, they win. If the reds get a stop, they win.”

  Lucas called his guys around him.

  “Shiny object,” he said.

  Sharif inbounded the ball to Lucas at half-court. Lucas immediately cut all the way across the court to his left. Ryan and Billy came out from underneath the basket as he did. Ryan was closest to Lucas. Billy was over to Ryan’s left.

  Lucas still had his dribble. But now he crossed over, went to his right hand, and headed for Ryan. As soon as he did, Billy reverse-pivoted, headed down the right side of the lane, waving his right arm for the ball. Lucas passed it to Ryan. Ryan passed it right back. Lucas was at the free-throw line. Billy was down in the low blocks. Lucas was open. Billy was more open. Liam, who’d been guarding Ryan, was now guarding Lucas.

  Lucas had enough space to shoot, even over Liam’s long arms.

  Just not enough.

  Ryan cut down the left side of the lane, with a clear height advantage over Neil. Lucas eyeballed him the whole way. Then, at the last possible second, he turned and fired a perfect pass over the top of the defense to Billy.

  Not the only open man.

  Just the one who was most open.

  Billy had squared himself up as the ball was in the air. All he had to do was catch and shoot, banking the ball softly off the backboard, then through the net. The sound the ball made was the last music of the night.

  NINE

  Gramps had been invited over for a late dinner after practice. He didn’t really need the invitation. There was always a place for him at the table if he wanted it. But he said he was having a burger with his friend Ben, who’d just retired as the golf pro at Claremont’s public golf course.

  “But he’s still giving a few lessons to some of his old students, just to keep a hand in,” Gramps had told Lucas. “Once a teacher, always a teacher.”

  “You’ll never stop teaching, either,” Lucas said to him.

  “One of these days,” he said. “I just hope I don’t have to be told when it’s time for me to stop.”

  At dinner Lucas told his mom that he hadn’t mentioned his writing assignment to Gramps tonight.

  “Maybe next time you do, I can help,” she said. “Soften him up a little, even though I know he’s an old softie at heart. Maybe we can both make him see how important this is to you.”

  “I’m really kind of interested in what kind of player he was when he was young,” Lucas said. “Did he ever tell you the name of the college he went to in California?” Lucas said. “Or did Dad?”

  She made a helpless gesture with her hands.

  “It never really came up that much,” she said. “It’s not like I spent a lot of time talking to your dad about his dad’s basketball career. The few times the subject came up, Gramps would just say that it was a school that went out of business a long time ago.”

  “Did he finish college somewhere else?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Julia said.

  “Dad must have known,” Lucas said.

  “It was just never a big topic of conversation with us,” she said. “Your grandfather never really changes in this particular area. He only wants to focus on your career now. Back in the day, he only wanted to focus on your dad’s, at least until your dad got hurt.”

  “Aren’t you a little bit curious?” Lucas said.

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p; His mom grinned. “Not as curious as you obviously are,” she said.

  Most of the time after dinner when he wasn’t doing homework or working on his basketball journal, he either wanted to watch a game, or read a book.

  “I can’t believe you read when you don’t have to,” Ryan had said to him one time.

  “It’s fun,” Lucas said.

  “Dude,” Ryan said, “you have some weird ideas about having fun.”

  Tonight, though, he was online, trying to get into what his mom called the way-back machine, and see if he could get any information about Sam Winston’s basketball career. He didn’t think of it as going behind Gramps’s back. But his mom was right. He was curious.

  So he typed in “Sam Winston” and “basketball.”

  There had been plenty of basketball players with the name “Winston,” first or last, but no player with that full name. There were a couple baseball players, and a football player.

  Nothing for a basketball player with Gramps’s name.

  So Lucas took a deeper dive. He typed in the name and typed in “basketball” and then “California” and “1960s,” which is when Gramps would have played college ball.

  Still nothing.

  It occurred to him that Gramps had played so little, wherever he had played, that there wasn’t a record of him having played at all in the way-back machine, especially at a school he said had gone out of business. Lucas was starting to think that maybe he wasn’t working on a biography at all, but a mystery.

  But Lucas wasn’t giving up, not yet. He pictured himself in the gym or at Westley Park, and all the hours he’d spent putting in extra hours on his shot.

  For now, he took one last try.

  He typed in “California colleges that closed.”

  Except that just made him even more confused, because of the long list that came up, not just including colleges that had closed in the past, but some that had merged with other colleges over time, becoming brand-new schools with new names.

  He sighed and closed his laptop. His mom happened to be walking past his doorway when he did. Lucas heard her laugh.

  “I thought a gust of wind must have just blown into your room,” she said. “But then I realized that sound had come out of my son.”