The Turnover

by Mike Lupica

  He told her what he’d been doing.

  “Slow going?” she said.

  “The slowest,” he said. “I can’t find anything that tells me that Gramps ever even played college ball.”

  “I know this is going to shock you,” she said, “but Google doesn’t know everything about everybody.”

  “You probably found that on Google,” Lucas said, grinning at her.

  “In the world of new information,” she said, “a lot of stuff can still slip through the cracks.”

  “I don’t want new information,” he said. “Just looking for old news here.”

  She came in and rested a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

  “Eventually you might have to do it the old-fashioned way,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Go to the source.”

  “Gramps,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But what if he hasn’t changed his mind?” Lucas said.

  “Then,” his mom said, “as important as doing this paper on him is to you, what he wants will be more important.”

  TEN

  They lucked into some free gym time after school the next afternoon, so Lucas and some of the other guys from the Wolves got to play some three-on-three. Even when the game ended, Lucas stayed on and worked on his game alone, because there was still forty-five minutes before his mom was going to pick him up. Mr. Collins had supervised the three-on-three game, sitting in the bleachers as he graded papers. Before he went back to his classroom, he gave Lucas the key to the equipment closet, telling him to put the ball back when he was through, lock the closet, and drop off the key with him.

  “I promised your mother I wouldn’t let you just wander around the school by yourself,” Mr. Collins said.

  “When I’ve got the gym all to myself?” Lucas said. “Yeah, like that’s going to happen.”

  Today Lucas went to all the spots on the court where Gramps’s offense was likely to take him, and shot the ball from there. He worked on his left-handed dribble, going end to end using his left hand exclusively, finishing each trip up the court with a left-handed drive to the basket. He shot free throws until he could make ten in a row. If he missed, even on the last one, he’d start all over again. Even after having played a hard three-on-three game, he didn’t feel tired. He was exactly where he wanted to be.

  When he finished, he still had a few minutes before his mom was scheduled to arrive. Lucas put his ball back in the equipment closet, locked it behind him as he’d told Mr. Collins he would, and headed down the hall for Mr. C.’s classroom.

  Before he got there, he heard the piano music, and knew it had to be Maria in the music room.

  He had no idea what song she was playing. It sounded like something serious. But it was good. Really good.

  Sometimes when Lucas’s mom would watch basketball with him, she would freely admit that she didn’t appreciate the subtle aspects of the game the way Lucas and Gramps did. But she always knew which players were doing things that the other players weren’t.

  It was that way for Lucas when Maria was playing the piano. Maybe someday he’d appreciate the music she could play. He’d heard other classmates in the music room. What Maria was doing was different. Better.

  He quietly pushed the door open, so as not to disturb her. He had a perfect view of her face, and could see that as serious as the music was, she was smiling.

  This, he thought, is her court.

  This was Maria alone with her music the way Lucas had just been alone with basketball.

  When she finished, he couldn’t help himself. He started to applaud. The sound didn’t startle her. It just made her smile get bigger as she turned on the bench to face him.

  “Sneak,” she said.

  “Am not,” he said.

  “You snuck up on me, one hundred percent,” she said.

  “You’re not supposed to make noise when you’re in the audience,” Lucas said.

  “Well,” she said, “clearly you snuck in without a ticket.”

  “It’s not free?” he said.

  “Just for today,” she said. “Next time I’m charging you.”

  “I know I’ve told you this before,” he said. “But you’re really good.”

  “I can do better,” she said.

  “It sounded perfect to me,” Lucas said.

  “I could explain why it wasn’t and the places where I messed up,” she said. “But it would be like you trying to explain all the things that happened in your game the other day.”

  Maria said her mom was on her way to school to pick her up. They agreed to wait together out front.

  “How’s your paper coming?” she said as they walked toward Mr. Collins’s classroom.

  “I was afraid you were going to ask me that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not coming.”

  She waited while he knocked on Mr. Collins’s door. Mr. C. was working with Cissy Sullivan, another seventh grader. Lucas just showed him he was leaving the equipment key on a back desk, and said he’d see him tomorrow, and left.

  “What do you mean the paper isn’t going anywhere?” Maria said.

  “My grandfather doesn’t want me to make it about him,” Lucas said.

  “Why not?”

  “He hasn’t really made that clear,” Lucas said. “What he has made pretty clear is that he wants me to find another subject.”

  “Are you going to find another subject?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “If I have to, I might ask Mr. Collins if I could do it about him. But I’m not ready to give up on Gramps. I still think it’s a cool idea. It’s my way of putting down the feelings I have for him in my heart down on paper.”

  “He’s such a cool guy,” Maria said. “I was watching him watch you during the game on Saturday. He looked like the happiest person in the world.”

  “I want this paper to make him happy,” Lucas said.

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “How do you figure?” Lucas said.

  Maria smiled again. Lucas would never admit this to Ryan, or even his mom. But he thought she had an amazing smile.

  “Hey,” she said. “You’re the writer.”

  ELEVEN

  The Sheridan Sonics hadn’t been one of the better sixth-grade teams last year, but had certainly been the biggest.

  Their center, Robbie Marino, had been the tallest player in the Twin Lakes League, by a lot. And when they showed up at the gym at the Sheridan YMCA, they saw that Robbie had just continued to grow.

  “I was hoping that he’d gotten shorter somehow,” Ryan said to Lucas.

  “Don’t worry, you showed last season you can guard that guy,” Lucas said. “And I know you can do it again.” He paused. “If the refs allow you to stand on a chair.”

  “Is that your idea of a pep talk?” Ryan said. “Seriously?”

  “No,” Lucas said. “That was just me trying to lighten your mood. Or your load.”

  “That guy is a load,” Ryan said.

  “I’ll try to do better,” Lucas said. He grinned. “But that sounds like a pretty tall order.”

  “You’re not funny,” Ryan said.

  “You know I’m funny,” Lucas said. “It’s just that right now you don’t think I’m funny.”

  Ryan was still staring at Robbie, shaking his head slowly and sadly.

  “Don’t worry,” Lucas said. “You just stay between him and the basket as much as you can. And I’ll drop off and help out whenever I can, same as we did last year when we shut them down.”

  “I don’t know why I even have to guard him,” Ryan said. “He’s their center and Billy’s ours.”

  “Gramps told me he likes your quickness staying in front of him,” Lucas said. “And how long you are.”

  “You know what’s really going to be long?” Ryan said. “This day.”

  “You want my real pep talk?” Lucas said. “He’s bigger. You’re better. End of speech.�
�

  He thought that Gramps had been quieter than usual on the twenty-minute ride from Claremont to Sheridan. But Lucas had to remind himself that Gramps did tire sometimes, that he did act his age, especially if the pain in his knees had prevented him from getting a good night’s sleep.

  He just hoped that the closer they got to the game, the more Gramps’s disposition would improve. And that’s exactly what had happened by the time he gathered the Wolves around him in front of their bench, a few minutes before the ref would hand Lucas the ball.

  “Just gonna give you boys one thought before we start today,” Gramps said, smiling his Santa Claus smile. “You all can handle one thought, right?”

  “Unless we count that question as a second thought,” Ryan said.

  Gramps raised an eyebrow and looked at Lucas.

  “The truly amazing thing,” he said to Gramps, “is that he actually thinks he’s funnier than me.”

  “I’m just trying to keep my mind off guarding a guy who looks as big as Zion Williamson,” Ryan said.

  “Anyway,” Gramps said, “here’s the thought: Let’s not wait until the second quarter to start playing our best ball this Saturday the way we did last Saturday.”

  The Wolves didn’t.

  This Saturday they came out hot. Smoking hot. And it all started with their defense. Ryan made it his mission not just to stay in front of Robbie, but to bother him in every way he could, whether he had the ball in his hands or not. Every chance he got, he forced Robbie into one of Lucas’s double teams. He boxed him out on missed shots at both ends of the court, beating Robbie to his spot time after time as a way of beating him to the ball.

  Every once in a while Robbie would reach over him and come out with the ball.

  Not very often.

  Ryan had told Lucas that he didn’t care if he scored a single point today. He wasn’t going to let the big guy beat them. But Ryan did get his points, mostly because of the outlet passes he was making, and the way he kept busting it to fill lanes on the fast break.

  The Wolves were ahead by ten points at the end of the first quarter. They were ahead by fifteen at halftime. Up and down their lineup, no matter which five was on the court at a particular time, they looked exactly like the team Lucas had imagined they would be coming into the season. It wasn’t just Ryan on defense; they were all D-ing up, all over the court. They were sharing the ball on offense, and making their share of shots from the outside, starting with Lucas, who’d even made one over Robbie when Robbie had his arms in the air and looked as tall as a Christmas tree.

  Lucas had a pretty good idea about how many assists he had by halftime. But in the end, he never cared about his own stats. Gramps had always drummed into his head that the only stat that mattered for a point guard wasn’t a number. It was a letter:

  W.

  For wins.

  He still knew he had a boatload of assists today. And also knew that at the half, everybody who’d been in the game for the Wolves had at least one basket.

  All Gramps said to them at halftime was this:

  “Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re making me look like a genius.”

  The Wolves slowed things down in the second half once it became clear that the Sonics were never going to cut into their lead. They stopped fast-breaking. They ran more set plays on offense, and worked more clock. Nobody wanted to embarrass the Sonics. Gramps always told them to imagine what it would feel like to be on the other side of a beatdown like this. By the start of the fourth quarter they had proved, in just about every way, that they were the better team today. There was no need to rub it in.

  Gramps always talked about playing the game right. This was what that felt like. He always said if you did enough things right, the results would take care of themselves. And so they had against the Sonics.

  The best result? They walked off the court 2–0.

  If last Saturday had been a great day because of the way they had come back, this one felt ever sweeter. They hadn’t just shown the Sonics the kind of basketball of which they were capable.

  They’d shown themselves.

  You couldn’t ask for more than that, especially this early in the season. Couldn’t ask for a better day.

  Until dinner that night.

  TWELVE

  Lucas couldn’t have drawn things up better if he were drawing up a perfect play: win over Sheridan, mom’s meatloaf for dinner with banana splits all around for dessert, then the Warriors vs. the Thunder on television, which meant Steph Curry against Chris Paul at point guard. Gramps said it would be like taking a master class in playing the position, at least when James Harden wasn’t dribbling the darn ball.

  At dinner they went over all the highlights of the Wolves and Sonics game. The conversation nearly taking them all the way to banana splits because there had been so many highlights. Gramps said the thing he’d liked the best was how disciplined Lucas and his teammates had stayed even after the game became a blowout, none of them slacking off, all of them still looking to make the extra pass, and sometimes one more pass after that.

  “When it’s like that,” Gramps says, “teamwork never feels like work.”

  “Maybe it’s because of all the work we put in at practice,” Lucas said.

  “It’s got a chance to be a special group,” Lucas’s grandfather said.

  Julia Winston smiled. “I hear that it might have a little something to do with a pretty special coach.”

  “Wouldn’t matter who the coach was if they didn’t want to listen, and these boys listen,” he said. “Not a chowderhead in the bunch. Certainly not the kind of chowderhead I was when I was young.”

  “Not possible,” Lucas said.

  Gramps was quiet for a moment, with a faraway look that he would get sometimes, like a cloud passing across his face.

  “Least I learned from my mistakes,” he said. “When the boy finally did become a man.”

  “Or when a girl becomes a woman,” Lucas’s mom said, smiling again. “Glad I learned from all the mistakes I made when I was young.”

  After dessert, and after they’d all cleaned up the kitchen, the three of them went into the living room to watch the game. Lucas’s mom said that even she was excited to see Steph Curry and Chris Paul get after each other.

  “Though,” she said to Gramps, “after watching our boy this morning, I bet those guys could pick up a few pointers from him.”

  “Now you’re talking crazy talk,” Lucas said.

  “Someday,” she said to him, “people will be watching you on TV on a Saturday night.”

  “In your dreams,” Lucas said to her. “Or maybe mine.”

  “I’m good either way,” she said.

  The Warriors and Thunder were tied at the half. Lucas’s mom said she was going into the kitchen to make popcorn. When she’d left the room Lucas said to his grandfather, “Ask you something?”

  “Ask me anything except to explain how the Thunder could possibly have left the best shooter in the game wide-open for that three right before the buzzer,” he said.

  Lucas took a deep breath, let it out. Slowly.

  “I want to ask you again to help me out with the paper about you I want to do for school,” he said.

  “Back to that, are we?” Gramps said.

  He grinned.

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. “We are.”

  “I’d still rather you wouldn’t,” Gramps said.

  “I don’t understand,” Lucas said.

  “And for a good coach,” Gramps said, “I’m not doing much of a job at making you understand.”

  “I want to know what kind of player you were,” Lucas said.

  “Just one who didn’t get the most out of his potential, the way you do,” Gramps said.

  “Well, that’s pretty hard for me to believe,” Lucas said.

  “Believe it,” Gramps said. “And thinking about it makes me sad, even though I don’t think about it very much.”

  “I’d never want to make yo
u sad,” Lucas said.

  Gramps had his back to the kitchen. Lucas saw his mom quietly come into the room with a big bowl of popcorn, then just as quietly turn and go back into the kitchen. Even though she’d offered to help, it was as if she understood that this was something between Lucas and his grandfather, at least for now.

  “I don’t even know where you went to college,” Lucas said. “I don’t even know for sure whether you played point guard or not.”

  “I was a guard,” Gramps said in a soft voice. “In those days, you weren’t a point guard or a shooting guard. You were just a guard.”

  “See!” Lucas said, excited all of a sudden. “See right there! That would be a great point for me to make in the paper.”

  “I never say no to you, son,” Gramps said. “Just let me do it this one time, and we can just devote ourselves to the season you’re playing, and not ones I played a million years ago.”

  “Maybe you need to respect your grandfather’s wishes on this,” she said, “as much as they might disappoint you.”

  Lucas understood what his mom was saying. He understood that she was right. He knew he was being more stubborn than ever. And he didn’t want Gramps to think they were having an argument about this. They’d never argued about anything.

  “I just wanted to know more about you, Gramps,” Lucas said.

  “But that’s the thing,” Gramps said. “You do know me.”

  “Didn’t my dad want to know more about what you were like when you were younger?” Lucas said.

  A sad look came across Gramps’s face, but then it disappeared as quickly as it had come.

  “I just used to tell him what I’m going to tell you now,” he said. “That he was seeing my best self, and that’s all that should matter to him.”

  Gramps stood up. It only took him one try this time to get off the couch. He came over and patted the top of Lucas’s head and said, “Time for me to go. If the weather’s warm enough tomorrow, maybe the two of us can go to the park.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said.

  In that moment there was nothing else for him to say. The park was a way for his grandfather to change the subject. Lucas’s mom told Gramps to drive carefully. He thanked her again for dinner. A couple minutes later they heard his car pull out of the driveway.