Last Shot

by John Feinstein

  Feeley smiled. “Sure, absolutely.”

  Now it was Stevie’s turn. “Come on, Mr. Brill, let’s wait in the lobby,” he said.

  Brill was clearly a bit confused but unbothered by Susan Carol’s sudden boldness. “Susan Carol, don’t be long, I need to get back to the hotel and write.”

  They left Susan Carol alone with Feeley. Stevie and Susan Carol had decided it was better for her to talk to him one-on-one rather than gang up.

  “So, what in the world is that about?” Brill said after the security guard had led them back to the elevator.

  Stevie rolled his eyes. “She writes for some newsletter at her dad’s church. She wanted to ask him about religion and sports and the role the two of them play in college life.”

  Brill smiled at him as the elevator rocketed downward. “Religion make you uncomfortable?” he asked.

  “No, not at all,” Stevie said. “I’m just amazed by how much of it there is here. I mean, what’s the connection between God and sports?”

  “I think it’s partly insecurity,” Brill said. “Success in sports is so fleeting. And so tenuous. A lot of guys are looking for something to hang on to.”

  That made sense to Stevie. They had reached the lobby. Brill looked at his watch.

  “If you need to get going, Mr. Brill, I’ll just wait here until she’s done,” he said.

  “That would help,” Brill said. “I have to write some Internet stuff before dinner. You kids can get back to the hotel okay?”

  Stevie nodded. He watched Brill walk through the doors. It was almost five-thirty. Time to call his dad again even though he figured they would be going back to the hotel as soon as Susan Carol was finished with Feeley.

  “You know, Reverend Anderson isn’t thrilled with you kids being gone all day like this,” his dad said.

  “I know, I know, we’ve just been real busy,” Stevie said. “Would you call him and tell him Susan Carol’s finishing her story and we should be back soon?”

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” his dad said. “But no more gallivanting tonight. We should spend some time together.”

  “Absolutely, Dad.”

  Depending on how things were going upstairs, he thought, their gallivanting might soon be over.

  16: CLOSING IN

  IT WAS ALMOST SIX O’CLOCK by the time Susan Carol came back to the lobby. Stevie was extremely glad Brill hadn’t waited around for her. A couple of times he had thought about calling the room to make sure everything was okay, but decided against it. The story she was telling would take a while. And Stuart Feeley would have a lot of questions.

  For the first time all weekend, he thought she looked tired as she crossed the lobby from the elevator to where he was sitting reading the sports section of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

  “Everything okay?” he asked, standing up to greet her.

  “I think so,” she said. “Let’s get back to the Hyatt before my dad has a heart attack. I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

  Before she started her story, he told her he’d had his dad call hers. That seemed to make her feel a little better.

  “So, the good news is, I convinced him to talk to Jurgensen,” she said as a clap of thunder overhead reminded them that it was about to rain again.

  “Is there bad news?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “He doesn’t want us there. He thinks Jurgensen deserves the chance to explain in private.”

  “Explain? What’s to explain?”

  She held a hand up. “You’re preaching to the choir, Stevie. He was very skeptical when I first started to tell him the story. I gave him Chip’s cell phone number and told him he could call him to confirm. I think he finally believed me, but he thought Jurgensen would be more likely to fess up if he talked to him alone. He did say he wouldn’t allow Jurgensen to stay on the board if this is true. His offer will be to not go to the FBI in return for his resignation as soon as the Final Four is over.”

  “When’s he going to do this?”

  “I don’t know. They have this big deal dinner tonight for all their donors and trustees. He said it wouldn’t be tonight. Probably tomorrow morning. He’ll call us after he and Jurgensen talk. I think the one thing that may have convinced him is that he knew that Jurgensen had driven here for the weekend because he had business in Birmingham and decided driving was easier than flying.”

  “Or so he said.”

  “Right. We need to call Chip as soon as we get back. Their practice should be over about now.”

  They agreed to try to convince their dads that the four of them should have dinner together. “I just think we should stick close,” she said.

  Stevie wasn’t sure if that was absolutely necessary. But, he decided, it was fine with him.

  Chip sounded relieved when Stevie reached him and told him about their meeting with Feeley. He was back in his room by then and said he was planning to go to sleep as soon as he’d had dinner.

  Going to bed sounded pretty good to Stevie. He told Chip about their concern that Feeley had insisted on meeting privately with Jurgensen. “It’s okay,” Chip said. “He sounds like a pretty up-front guy. I can understand him wanting to confront Jurgensen alone.”

  “Well, we gave him your cell phone number just in case he wants to confirm any facts or details,” Stevie said. “Susan Carol thinks he’ll meet with Jurgensen in the morning. We should hear from him after that.”

  “We’re going over to the arena for our last walk-through at about eleven o’clock,” Chip said. “I’ll be back in the room after that, trying to rest. Call me whenever you hear something.”

  “Should we come to the arena if we get word while you’re over there?”

  “I don’t think so. You’ll never get in; the walk-throughs are closed to everyone. And that NCAA guy really let my dad have it after the press conference. My dad was pretty ticked. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing running around with a couple of teenagers.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  Chip laughed. “I told him the truth—sort of. That you guys won the basketball writing contest and I had told you I would give you some time on Sunday before the press conferences.”

  “He buy it?”

  “Maybe. I don’t think he wants to get into any long arguments with me until this is over.”

  Stevie was nodding his head, forgetting that Chip couldn’t see him on the other end of the phone. “We’ll call you as soon as we know something,” he said.

  “Sounds good. Get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  Stevie was about to hang up when he heard Chip say, “Hey, Stevie?”

  “What?”

  “Thanks.”

  He hung up and walked back to the main lobby area to meet Susan Carol, who had come down five minutes ahead of the fathers so he could fill her in. Bill Thomas and Reverend Anderson showed up just as Stevie was finishing, and they walked two blocks to a Morton’s steak house where Stevie’s dad had been able to make a reservation. Dinner was quiet. Stevie’s mind kept wandering to what was going to happen next. He found himself creating the meeting between Feeley and Jurgensen in his head. Susan Carol wasn’t saying very much either.

  “You kids are both pretty quiet,” Bill Thomas said, finally.

  “Just tired, Mr. Thomas,” Susan Carol said. “We got up early this morning and spent the day running around, getting quotes from people and then writing our stories.”

  “Being a reporter is hard work,” Stevie said.

  Reverend Anderson smiled. “But you are having fun, aren’t you? Is it all as exciting as you hoped?”

  Susan Carol and Stevie looked at each other.

  “Beyond our wildest dreams,” said Stevie.

  Stevie was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. His body had finally run out of both energy and adrenaline. He woke up once in the middle of the night, after dreaming that Steve Jurgensen was chasing them in his big black car and they’d run out of road at th
e beach near Dean Wojenski’s house in Bay St. Louis. He got up and drank some water, trying to shake the vision of the dream.

  He woke up again at seven-thirty and found a note from his dad saying he’d gone for a walk and would be back for breakfast at eight. He had left the newspaper behind and Stevie picked through the sports section until he got to “News and Notes from the Final Four.” The third item down caught his eye: “Chip Graber arrived for his team’s Sunday press conference seven minutes late, explaining that he had gone sightseeing and then got stuck in traffic. NCAA media official David Kiley said MSU would be subject to a fine from the basketball committee because of Graber’s lateness. ‘We make no exceptions,’ Kiley said. ‘Rules are rules.’ ” Stevie could almost hear Kiley, who he assumed was the guy with the bad toupee, repeating that mantra. The next sentence was a surprise, though: “Kiley’s boss, Bill Hancock, who is responsible for all working media during the NCAA tournament, was more sympathetic: ‘Sometimes we forget these are still kids,’ he said. ‘Considering what Chip Graber has done for college basketball the last four years, and especially the last three weeks, I think we can give him seven minutes of leeway.’ ”

  Wow, Stevie thought, an NCAA official with common sense and a heart. “He must be new or something,” he said aloud, laughing as he put down the paper.

  The morning passed as slowly as any Stevie could remember in his entire life. Toward the end of breakfast his father finally said to him, “Stevie, why do you keep looking at your watch every single minute?”

  Stevie tried to sound as casual as he could. “It’s just a big day. I need to do some pregame research and there’s a lunch that Susan Carol and I have been invited to. The board of the basketball writers meets with the board of the coaches’ association.”

  The lunch was real and Stevie and Susan Carol had been invited. And Stevie did want to go. Whether they would get to go depended on what they heard from Stuart Feeley. They were hoping he would call before noon to tell them that Jurgensen had backed down, that Whiting and friends would be called off, and that Chip could play tonight with no worries.

  “Who’s going to be there?” his dad asked.

  “Supposedly guys like Rick Barnes from Texas and Skip Prosser from Wake Forest and Tommy Amaker from Michigan and Mike Brey from Notre Dame.”

  “That sounds like a good group.”

  “Yeah, it should be fun.” Without thinking, he looked at his watch again, causing his father to laugh.

  “It’s one minute later than it was last time you looked,” he said.

  After breakfast, his dad announced that he was going to the recently opened D-Day museum. Stevie had seen signs for it around town. His dad made the mandatory father’s plea that Stevie go with him, knowing it wasn’t going to happen. He’d given up his visions of this as a father-son bonding weekend. “Just be sure to tell your mother I tried to get you to go,” he said.

  “I will, Dad.”

  Stevie killed time watching TV, waiting for the phone to ring. Vitale was saying that Chip Graber’s performance Saturday was “the single most stupendous, spectacular, sensational performance I’ve seen at a Final Four since Bill Walton went 21-for-22 against Memphis State in 1973.”

  He was right, Stevie thought. Chip had been sensational. He hoped he would have the chance to be equally good tonight.

  The phone rang—at last. He looked at the clock on the desk. It was 10:40.

  “It’s Chip.”

  “Hey, Chip,” he said. “We haven’t heard from Feeley yet.”

  “I know. I did.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, he said you had given him my cell phone number.”

  Stevie had forgotten about that. “Yeah, that’s right. In case he wanted to verify our story.”

  “Well, he didn’t call to verify anything. He said he talked to Jurgensen.”

  “And?”

  “And Jurgensen told him to go ahead and call the FBI. He said if we did that, he and Whiting would go straight to the NCAA with my transcript and I would be declared ineligible to play tonight.”

  “Oh God. They would do that without investigating further?”

  “Oh yeah. The way the NCAA works is if they think a player is ineligible for any reason, they suspend you immediately, and then you have to apply to be reinstated.”

  “If you have to do that …”

  “It’ll be way too late. There would be nothing to be reinstated for.”

  “Well, at least we know for sure now that Jurgensen’s guilty.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Chip, you there?”

  “Yeah. I was just thinking that knowing Jurgensen is guilty doesn’t do us a lot of good at the moment.”

  He was right—unfortunately. “What do you think we should do now?”

  “I’m not sure. I have to go to shootaround right now. We’ll be done at noon. I think we should meet.”

  “At your hotel?”

  “No, the place is swarming with people. Plus, Whiting’s bound to be watching me like a hawk.”

  “Where then?”

  “Come to the arena. I’ll meet you outside that media entrance they wanted you to go to. I’ll be able to find it.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “I can tell him I just need a walk by myself to clear my head. I do that sometimes on game days.”

  “Okay. Noon?”

  “Like ten after.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  He hung up. This was not the twist in the story they had been hoping for. Jurgensen had called their bluff. Chip was now back where he started: if he helped his team win the national championship, he would be the subject of a full-blown academic investigation that would land his school on probation, have his team stripped of every win this season, and potentially ruin his dad’s career. Not to mention what it would do to his sneaker contract. He was pretty certain good old Bobby Mo would not have Chip’s back if he thought he was tainted in any way. Dean Wojenski might be able to convince some people that Chip’s spring transcript had been changed, but there was still Whiting’s F in the fall. A tough case to win and the publicity would be brutal regardless of the outcome. But if Chip did throw the game, he would have to live with what he had done for the rest of his life.

  Stevie called Susan Carol. She was as stunned as he had been by the news that Jurgensen hadn’t caved. “Now what do we do?” she said.

  He told her that Chip wanted to meet them after his shootaround, and they agreed to meet in the lobby at eleven-thirty to walk over to the Dome.

  The weather had finally turned gorgeous—the sun was out and the temperature was in the mid-seventies. If anything, the streets were more packed than they had been earlier in the week. The only difference, Stevie noticed, was that all the fans were in purple and white or blue and white. The UConn and St. Joe’s contingents had, with a few exceptions, gone home.

  As they made their way through the throngs, Susan Carol said quietly, “Stevie, I think we’re all in over our heads here.”

  Stevie nodded. Things had gone so well since they started investigating that his thought until Chip’s call had been “We can do this.” Now that seemed almost silly.

  “If we are in over our heads, what can we do now?” he said. “Who can we go to?”

  She thought about that for a minute. “I guess it’s up to Chip. This is his life we’re talking about. But I think we need to convince him to go to the FBI or at least Bobby Kelleher.”

  It was 12:05 when they walked across the bridge and around the now-familiar concourse to the media entrance. There was almost no one around, so they stood and looked down to the street level, which was teeming with people. They could see several police cars and motorcycles leading the Minnesota State bus out of the parking lot and into traffic. That bus would be back in about six hours and, Steve figured, in about ten hours a national champion would be crowned. Ten hours and it would be over one way or the other.…

  �
�You guys been waiting long?”

  They turned and saw Chip dressed in disguise—gray sweatshirt and pants, untied sneakers, and a black cap that said US OPEN—BETHPAGE BLACK 2002.

  “Chip, I’m so sorry it’s turning out this way,” Susan Carol said, giving him a hug.

  He smiled. “Never over till it’s over, right? I almost told my dad about the whole thing after I talked to Feeley this morning,” he said. “But then I thought, this is supposed to be the greatest day of his career. I just couldn’t put something like this on him right now.”

  “So instead you carry it all by yourself,” Susan Carol said.

  “Not exactly,” Chip said. “You guys have been helping me carry it the last few days.”

  “Yeah, big help we’ve been,” Stevie said. He was feeling terribly sad and helpless at that moment.

  “Well, here’s what I’ve decided to do,” Chip said. “I called Feeley back and asked him for Jurgensen’s cell phone number because there’s no answer in the SOB’s room at the hotel. I left a message but he won’t call back. Feeley said he didn’t have the cell number but he thought he could track him down over there. I told him I wanted to meet with him myself.”

  “Now?” Stevie said. “Today?”

  “Sooner the better.”

  “But what are you going to say to him?”

  Chip smiled. “I’m gonna tell him he can go ahead and release the damn transcript to the whole world as far as I’m concerned, and that I’m going to play the game of my life tonight. I’m gonna call his bluff. Because if he does release the transcript and I’m suspended, the game goes off the board and no one can make a bet on it.”

  “What if that’s not his motive?” Susan Carol said. “What if he just wants Duke to win?”

  Chip shook his head. “Hell, I could score forty tonight and Duke might still win. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’re pretty good. Money’s involved here, I’m sure of it.”

  Stevie suddenly felt better. Yeah, he thought, that’s the way to do it. Tell the guy to go to hell.

  Susan Carol brought him back to earth. “And what if he says, ‘Fine, go ahead and play, but the transcript will be in the hands of the media and the NCAA before the trophy is presented,’ ” she said.