by Mike Lupica
“Thank you,” Lucas’s mom said.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
Gramps turned and looked at Lucas now and said, “And I sure wouldn’t have had you in my life.”
Day after day, he said, he’d sit next to Tommy Angelo’s bed. Sometimes Tommy’s wife was there, sometimes not. Mostly it was just the two of them, with Gramps sharing most of the memories because Tommy wasn’t able.
“When it was happening,” Gramps said, “to all of us, you thought you’d never forget any of it. But by the end, Tommy had forgotten most of it. Which maybe was another blessing.”
One day last week he was holding Tommy’s hand when he closed his eyes, and the hand fell away, and Gramps knew he was gone.
He stayed around to help Tommy’s wife with the funeral details. She asked him to speak at the funeral, but Gramps politely told her no.
“I told her I’d already said what I came out there to say,” he said.
“What was that?” Lucas said to his grandfather.
“ ‘I forgive you,’ ” Gramps said.
THIRTY-THREE
Lucas would try to explain it later to his mom, how the minute Gramps walked through the front door, he was so glad he was back, it wiped out so much of what had been ripping him up inside since his dad’s letter had fallen out of that book.
He didn’t know if that meant he’d forgiven him. But it was like Gramps said: When he’d found out about Ocean State, he thought he’d think about it every day for the rest of his own life.
Now he was just glad that his grandfather was safe. He was safe, and he was back.
Before he went to bed his mom would say, “Priorities have a way of changing, kiddo. And can I tell you something? It won’t be the last time that happens to you.”
Before Gramps left, Lucas had tried to catch him up on what had happened with the Wolves while he’d been gone. The big thing, he said, was that he wouldn’t let Ryan quit against the Pelicans.
“Sometimes a good teammate has to tell somebody something they don’t want to hear,” Gramps said.
“Or maybe tell a teammate something the man had waited sixty years to hear,” Lucas’s mom said.
“You want to know the truth?” Gramps said to both of them. “Telling Tommy I forgave him was more important for me to say than for him to hear, if you can believe it.”
“I can believe it,” Lucas said.
Then he asked his grandfather if he wanted to coach the Wolves in the championship game.
“Sounds like you boys did just fine without me,” Gramps said.
“You always say what’s right is right,” Lucas told him. “It would be right for you to coach.”
“Probably doesn’t matter what we think is right,” Gramps said. “I figure they don’t want me. I figure they were just waiting for me to come back, if I came back, so they could tell me to my face that I was fired.”
They were standing by the front door by then. Gramps had his coat on, and his Celtics cap back on his head.
“But if they don’t fire you,” Lucas said, “you’d want to coach, wouldn’t you?”
“Would you want me to?” Gramps said.
The word was out of his mouth before Lucas knew it, almost as if it came out on its own.
“Yes,” he said.
“Guess that’s something I’ve been waiting to hear,” he said.
“They still might want to let you go, Sam,” Julia said.
“Not like I haven’t been let go before,” he said.
“But you’re not quitting,” Lucas said.
“I told you before,” his grandfather said. “I might screw up all over the place. But I don’t quit.”
He put his hand on the doorknob and started to open it, and then stopped, as if one last thing had occurred to him.
“You ever wonder how I came up with Winston as my new last name?” he said to Lucas and his mom.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” Lucas’s mom said.
“I borrowed it from old Winston Churchill,” he said. “I know you think I only read up on basketball history, Lucas, but I like to read about all kinds of history. And what I know about Mr. Churchill is that he got knocked down plenty of times in his life, especially when he was young. But England couldn’t keep the man down. If they had, he wouldn’t have been around when they needed him to save the whole darn country during World War II.”
Gramps winked at them then, and nodded.
“He said one time that he wore his defeats like medals,” Gramps said. “Said he learned more from them than he ever did from his victories.” He nodded again. “I always kind of liked that one,” he said.
He walked out to his car. But a minute later, he came back.
“I’ve been meaning to ask this,” he said. “But that letter your dad wrote—could I have it to keep?”
Lucas smiled. “You shouldn’t even have had to ask.”
He ran upstairs and got it out of the top drawer of his desk. When he came back down, he handed it to Gramps.
“This really does belong to you,” Lucas said.
Gramps accepted it as if Lucas had just handed him a trophy.
“After all these years,” Gramps said, “it finally got delivered.”
Then he left.
As soon as he did, Lucas’s mom got on the phone and called Mrs. Moretti and told her that Gramps was back in Claremont. Ryan’s mom said she would call the other board members and tell them. An hour later, she called Lucas’s mom back and told her there was going to be a board meeting, open to the public, the next night at Claremont Middle.
As soon as she told Lucas that, he went upstairs and started making some calls of his own.
THIRTY-FOUR
They held the meeting in the library.
They invited Gramps to attend. Mr. Dichard, the chairman of the board and Richard’s dad, told everybody in the library that Sam Winston had declined the invitation, saying that he didn’t feel the need to come to defend himself as if appearing at some kind of trial. But, Mr. Dichard said, he’d thanked them for offering him the opportunity.
“Sam said that we all know who he is,” Mr. Dichard said, “even if we didn’t know who he used to be.”
Mr. Dichard was the president of the Claremont National Bank, and had played high school basketball with Lucas’s dad. He and Mrs. Moretti were the only parents of seventh-grade players on the board.
There were seven board members in all. They were the ones who would vote on whether or not Gramps got to coach in the championship game. A few of the other board members briefly spoke. They all agreed that not only shouldn’t he coach the game, he shouldn’t be allowed to coach at any level of Claremont town basketball ever again.
“I understand Sam’s sentiments,” Mr. Dichard said when it was time for him to give his opinion. “But without sounding too harsh, the fact is that Sam committed a crime against basketball, no matter how long ago that happened. And I frankly don’t see as how someone like that should be teaching our kids values, about basketball or anything else.”
Lucas and his mom were seated in the front of the library. Mrs. Moretti sat next to them. After Mr. Dichard finished his remarks, it was Jen Moretti’s turn. She stood and addressed the other grown-ups in the room. And Lucas.
“I’ve played a lot of basketball in my life,” she said. “I played some of it at a pretty high level, and when I got to UConn, I was lucky enough to play for Geno Auriemma, one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time, for men or for women. And I just want everybody in this room to understand something: I would have my son, Ryan, play on a Sam Winston team any day of the week.”
She paused and looked around the room.
“By the way?” she said. “Which one of us in this room didn’t do something dumb when we were young?”
Mr. Dichard got back up. Lucas thought he looked more annoyed than he usually did, which was saying something. Lucas hadn’t been around him all that much, but he’d bee
n around him enough to think that Mr. Dichard went through life looking annoyed.
“Dumb is taking your parents’ car out without permission, Jen,” he said. “It’s not conspiring to fix college basketball games.”
Now Mr. Dichard was the one looking around the library.
“Does anyone else have anything to say?” he said. “Because if not, we should go ahead and vote.”
Lucas felt his phone buzzing in his pocket, and smiled.
Just then the library doors opened, and the rest of the Claremont Wolves came walking in.
Now Lucas stood up.
“We’ve got something we’d like to say,” he said.
THIRTY-FIVE
Sharif’s dad had brought some of the guys in his van. Mrs. Chen had brought some, along with Maria, who’d told Lucas she wasn’t missing this for anything. Billy’s dad had brought the rest of the team.
The players stood in front of the library, as if they were getting ready to play a big game. In a way, that’s exactly what they were doing.
Or maybe they were about to hold a board meeting of their own.
Lucas had thought about reading the speech he’d written the night before. But he knew he didn’t need notes. He knew what he wanted to say by heart. Maybe because he was speaking from the heart.
“Since my grandfather isn’t here to speak for himself,” Lucas said. “I guess it’ll be okay for me to speak for him.”
He looked at Mr. Dichard, who nodded, but didn’t look very happy about it. Then Lucas gave a quick look at his mom. She just smiled. He’d told her his plan about his teammates the night before. He’d shown her his speech before they’d made the ride over here. After she read it, she told him that if he even changed a single word, he was grounded.
“It’s an even better paper than you wrote for Mr. Collins, if you ask me,” she’d said.
Lucas began by thanking all the board members for everything they did for their team, and all the other boys’ and girls’ teams in town basketball. He thanked his teammates for being there because, he said, that’s what teammates did, they were always there for one another.
He thanked Mrs. Moretti for everything she’d done while Gramps had been away.
Lucas took a deep breath.
Time to get to it.
“What I really want to say, for myself and for my teammates, is that for everything the grown-ups have done for our team, it’s still our team,” he said. “If there’s one thing my gramps has stressed over the last two seasons, it’s that it’s the players’ game. And these games are about us, not you.”
He had teammates on both sides of him. He looked to his left, then his right. Now they were the ones nodding approval.
“My grandfather is a huge part of our team,” Lucas said. “We know that better than anybody in this room. We wouldn’t be where we are, and who we are, without him. It’s why all of us on this team don’t think it should be up to you whether he finishes the season out, or not. We think it should be up to us. We’re here because we think the ones who should get to vote tonight are us.”
“Now hold on a second,” Mr. Dichard said.
“No,” Lucas’s mom said, standing in the back of the room, “you hold on, Ed.”
Lucas said to his teammates, “All those in favor of my gramps getting to coach the championship game, raise your hand.”
One by one, in formation, the Claremont Wolves raised their hands.
Lucas raised his last. “There’s one more thing I want to say.”
He cleared his throat. He wished he had some water. Bad time to get dry throat.
“Nobody would ever say that my grandfather didn’t make a huge mistake a long time ago, one he’s regretted ever since. But the last time he was with us, he talked to us about second chances. I heard Mr. Dichard talk about a crime before. Now I’m just a kid. But to me, the biggest crime would be if you all don’t give my grandfather a second chance.”
No one heard the door open again. The only one who saw Gramps standing in the back of the room was Lucas, because he was staring right at him.
They smiled at each other.
Now Lucas wasn’t talking to the other grown-ups in the room, or to his teammates.
He was talking to Sam Winston.
“I kept thinking that my gramps was the one who owed me an apology when I found out what he did,” Lucas said. “But I’m the one who owes him an apology. For not accepting his when he offered it to me.”
He walked to the back of the room and hugged Gramps, who hugged him back. No one said anything in the library until Mr. Dichard did.
“I guess Lucas is right,” he said. “One vote tonight is enough.”
The Claremont Wolves cheered.
THIRTY-SIX
Gramps drove Lucas and Ryan to the big game on Saturday morning.
They were the first ones to the gym. It gave them a chance to work more on the help defense they’d practiced on Thursday night, as a way of getting ready to play the Jefferson Jazz, and particularly Corey Tanner.
“We’re not gonna use this scheme of mine the whole game,” Gramps said. “Who knows, maybe we won’t need to use it at all if things go our way. But even if we just get one chance to use it, we better use it right, because the championship might ride on it.”
Maybe because it was just the three of them for now, Gramps’s voice sounded really loud in the gym, as if he were shouting, even though he never did that.
“By now,” Gramps said to Lucas and Ryan, “I guess we’ve figured out that we can all use a little help sometimes.”
They had rolled out bleachers on both sides of the gym for the championship game, as a way of accommodating the biggest crowd, by far, Lucas and the guys had seen all season.
The championship trophy was somewhere in the building. They didn’t know where. But it was here, and so were they.
“Still a long way to go between us and that trophy,” Lucas said to Ryan when they were in the layup line.
“Dude,” Ryan said. “I’m just glad we’re all here. Because it wasn’t all that long ago that I wasn’t sure I’d be.”
“Or Gramps,” Lucas said.
“You still keeping that basketball journal?” Ryan said.
Lucas told him it had turned into more of a project than their English papers, because of everything that kept happening.
“Let’s go write a good ending,” Ryan said.
“How about a great one?” Lucas said.
Not for the first time, he was glad Mr. Collins had suggested he keep a diary. Mr. C. had been right. Someday when he read it, he still might not believe everything that had happened, even though he’d lived it all.
When Gramps gathered them around him right before the start of the game, he kept his remarks brief. As usual.
“Everything under the sun that needs to be said has been said,” Gramps told them. “I’ll just build on something my grandson said the other night. You all know who you are. Now all that’s left to do is show everybody one more time.”
Lucas looked up into the bleachers behind their bench. His mom was sitting next to Maria and her parents. Even Maria’s grandmother was there. At the end of the row was Mr. Collins, sitting next to Ryan’s dad.
Corey Tanner was still getting his shots against Lucas in the first half. He just wasn’t making as many as he had in the first half, the last time the Wolves had played the Jazz. And Lucas was using just about every defensive trick he knew to slow him down. He was overplaying when he could. He was picking him up full-court sometimes. He was willing to try anything to get him off his game, and away from his favorite spots.
And the Wolves were making Corey work as much as they could on defense, running one pick-and-roll after another. They didn’t all result in baskets, of course. But they were working that play, working their stuff, the way they had all season, and working the other team’s best offensive player as hard as they possibly could, looking to tire him out.
Gramps was running his pl
ayers in and out, using his bench, almost like a hockey coach sending his players over the boards for shorter shifts than usual, telling them he wanted everybody on the team to have fresh legs by the fourth quarter.
“You boys got the rest of the school year to get your rest,” Gramps said during one time-out.
“What if we make the state tournament?” Ryan said.
Gramps turned and stared at him, as if a snake had just crawled out of one of Ryan’s ears.
“What tournament?” he said. “All’s we got is today. All’s we ever got in sports is today.”
Just like that, what felt like such a long season when they were starting out, had become a short season. Just like that, it was a two-point game with two minutes left in the fourth quarter.
And two minutes would feel like a long season all by themselves.
Corey came down against Lucas, and began backing him in on the left side. Lucas tried to force him toward the baseline, knowing he preferred wheeling to his left when he went up and into his shot.
Didn’t work.
Corey scored over him.
The game was tied.
Lucas brought the ball up the court. He shot a look at Gramps.
“We’re fine,” Gramps said.
They passed the ball around on the outside until Ryan, who had made a couple three-pointers already in the second half, had a wide-open look from the right. This time he missed. But Billy fought off two of the Jazz big guys for a huge offensive rebound, then kicked the ball back outside to Lucas. They had a new shot clock. Ryan was back in the low blocks, and made a move toward the free-throw line, as if they were going to run another pick-and-roll. But then he stopped suddenly, and was spinning back toward the basket. Lucas had read him all the way. Sometimes you just know. Maybe because they knew each other’s games so well.
Lucas lofted a pass over Max. Ryan banked his shot home.
They were ahead by two again.
Just over one minute left.
The Jazz didn’t rush. Corey chose the right side now for his isolation against Lucas. He checked the clock over the basket. But this time he didn’t try to back him in. This time when Lucas gave him just enough room, dared him to take a three in this situation, he did.