Half Court Press

by A. J. Stewart

  “You don’t want him to be in any kind of pain. That’s not hate, that’s love.”

  “Is it?”

  I looked at her. She wasn’t tearing up. She wasn’t that kind of woman. Her first reflex was to toughen up, and I figured in her line of work you either did that or you quit.

  I put my drink down and I stood. She glanced up at me with a look that seemed to say does this mean you know what to do?

  “Put on your shoes.”

  She slipped on her sneakers, and I put out my hand and she took it. The truth was I didn’t know what to do, but I did know that little apartment was sucking the marrow out of my soul, and now I suspected the same had been happening to Danielle. So, step one was to get out of there.

  I dragged Danielle down to Little Havana. There were people everywhere—on the road, on the sidewalk, sitting on stoops and hanging around street stalls. The smells and the sounds and the music enveloped me like a life force, an energy pumped out by the people around us, and absorbed by us, as if we were all one great sentient being and the parts of us that were sick were being healed by the parts that were well.

  I started to feel alive again, and I could see in Danielle’s face that she felt it, too. It wasn’t going to cure everything that was wrong, but sometimes when you’re down, the best thing is to be reminded that the upside is infinite and within reach.

  We ate at a street stall and then drank from a window in a bar, and then we ate more and drank more and danced the tango with people we had never met.

  Then we went home and made love.

  The kind of loving that has the ease of familiarity about it, but also a sense of finality, as if decisions, although unsaid, have been made.

  I lay in bed afterward, eyes on the popcorn ceiling, thinking about sports agents. I thought about Kressic, toiling as I had in the minor leagues of his profession. How his end of the game wasn’t all champagne and parties. Which made me think of the movie Jerry Maguire, and how he tells the love of his life that she completes him. I realized that Danielle didn’t complete me. She wasn’t where I ended—she was where I started. Where the better me began. Without her I was rudderless, capable of floating but totally without direction.

  I thought of Cashman. Of doing whatever had to be done. Nothing less than full commitment earns success.

  And I thought of Danielle’s father, a man I had never met, sitting alone in Arizona, an educated man’s thoughts wafting away on the breeze, never to return.

  As my eyes closed and the popcorn ceiling was lost to me, I came to the realization that we were at the end.

  The end of Act I.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We ate breakfast at a Cuban café, pastries and rocket-fuel coffee. Danielle had a buzz about her that I hadn’t seen in a while, but I couldn’t shake the notion that it was a temporary rush. We drove over to South Beach and tried to walk along the sand. It was packed with spring breakers, which made a place that was usually busy but relaxed into a shopping mall on Black Friday. We hung around long enough to realize our mistake, then retreated to a fish place by the river for lunch.

  Then Danielle had to go back to work. I kissed her goodbye, but we didn’t discuss when we would see each other next.

  I didn’t hang around. I drove down into Coral Gables and into the past. I knew the University of Miami campus better than I knew any tract of land on the planet. I’d run every square mile of it over the course of my four years there, and most of the surrounding suburb, and a decent portion of Coconut Grove, too.

  I found a parking spot outside Alex Rodriguez Park, which, back in my day, had been called Mark Light Field, but by any name it was the baseball diamond on which I had spent the most time. I didn’t have a parking permit, so I left my vehicle in the hands of the campus gods and walked along the road past Cobb Stadium. I had sweated my fair share on the practice fields on the far side of the stadium as well, and even after all this time, I walked taller as I headed for the entrance of the athletic center.

  The center was buzzing. Spring break meant plenty of students were off-campus, but the student-athletes were hard at work. I had checked the staff list online, so I approached the reception desk and asked for Sue Parkinson.

  The girl behind the desk looked at me and asked if I was a student, with a fair degree of skepticism.

  “Alumni,” I said. “Class of 2001.”

  She offered me a smile and looked at a screen.

  “She’s in the basketball arena.”

  “I thought basketball was over?”

  “Oh, it is. She’s running a spring break camp for high school kids.”

  I thanked her and walked out. It was a long way to the multipurpose arena, but I knew a shortcut. I wandered around the tennis courts and in through the utilitarian doors at the back of the gym, past the basketball courts where Tania would have spent great swaths of her time, and out through the pristine front entrance of the Herbert Wellness Center. I walked across the footbridge over the canal that connected Lake Osceola on the university campus with Biscayne Bay, and found myself in front of the basketball arena.

  It was a large multipurpose arena that had opened after my time, and now held all manner of concerts and sporting events, but to the student community was the place where the Hurricanes basketball teams played.

  There was a lot more security in place than I remembered, and my alumni story didn’t get me far with the woman checking people in and out of the arena, so I just kept walking. I knew I could get in with a phone call or two, but that would take longer than I wanted to wait, so I just walked around to the loading bay and up the ramp where a truck was parked, and nobody asked me a damned thing.

  I found Sue Parkinson on the court floor. She was talking to a group of kids who looked like baby giraffes. They were sitting on the floor, listening to her describe some kind of play or another, and their legs and arms were all folded around them as if their torsos had yet to grow to match their limbs. But their focus on Sue was absolute. They clearly weren’t just a random bunch of kids at camp, but rather kids serious about pursuing basketball as a path to college, if not as a vocation.

  I sat in the stands and watched for a while as Sue Parkinson and one of her coaches showed what looked to my untrained eye to be a zone defense. One of the other assistants glanced around and noticed me so I nodded. He casually dropped away from the group and ambled over to me.

  “Help you?” he asked.

  “I need to speak with Coach Parkinson.”

  “As you can see, she’s busy, and this is a closed—”

  “Do you know Tania Bryson?”

  He frowned. “Of course.”

  “I’m a private investigator. I’m working for Tania. She’s received a threat.”

  “A threat? What kind of threat?”

  “The kind where someone gets hurt. I need to speak to Coach about it.”

  “Is Coach in any danger?”

  “No.”

  The guy looked at me in my shirt and shorts. “You got a card or something?”

  I fished one out and handed it to him. He looked at it and then at me, and then he nodded like I should stay put. He wandered back over to Sue Parkinson but didn’t interrupt. She was explaining a defensive strategy and had the group’s full attention.

  “Another reason to run a full-court press is when you are trying to get the ball out of the hands of the opposition’s best playmaker. Most teams will pass the ball to their playmaker and let that player dribble the ball down to half-court. They have time to set up the play and assess where they want to go. However, if you double-team the playmaker, the opposition will often pass the ball to someone else, someone less capable. That’s a win for the defense.”

  Coach Parkinson walked back and forth in front of the group.

  “We would also run a full-court press on a team that has great half-court offense. Defending the full-court causes the offense to speed up play, which often makes them shoot before they are set up properly. And th
at’s another thing: Against teams with poor decision makers, the full-court press can cause the offense to make poor choices, to feel rushed into making bad plays, and turning the ball over.”

  The kids were all nodding like this made perfect sense. I didn’t know a whole lot about basketball tactics, but I did know that most basketball was played in the offensive half of the court. Most times the offense got the ball after their opponent had scored and simply passed it in to a teammate who walked down the court as easy as you like, while the defense ran back and set up their defensive zone. Defending right from backcourt didn’t happen a lot in the NBA, but it did happen, and she was right—it did seem to speed things up against lesser players or lesser teams, and that did sometimes cause turnovers.

  “There’s one more reason for using a full-court press that we haven’t discussed, and it has to do with you, the defense. If a team is looking sluggish, low on energy, a coach might call a full-court press to get her own team playing with more vigor. The full-court press is energy basketball.”

  A lanky kid thrust his hand into the air and Coach pointed at him.

  “Coach, if it’s this good, why don’t we defend full-court all the time?”

  “Excellent question. Why do you think? Think about the opposites of what I just said.”

  A girl sitting with her legs crossed shot up her hand and said, “The other team might have good decision makers, so if they beat the press, they could end up in a better position than us.”

  “Right. If the offense passes or dribbles the ball well and through your full-court press, they can end up strolling up to the basket for an easy layup. Another reason?”

  “It’s fast,” said another kid.

  “Why does that matter?” asked Coach.

  “It takes a lot of energy, so it’s hard to do it well for the whole game.”

  “Yes it is. As the playing standard you’re up against gets higher, the harder it becomes to use a full-court press consistently well. That’s why we depend on our half-court press, and use half-court traps.”

  “So, we let them wander up the court and just set up to defend the hoop?” asked another girl.

  “Sometimes. But the half-court press isn’t about letting them wander up the court, it’s about directing them up the court, so you position yourselves to direct the offensive play into the sidelines and into the corners where they have fewer options. Sometimes the full-court press is overplaying your hand, and it can come back to bite you. A good half-court press leaves the offense with only one choice, and it’s one that—if you’ve set it up right—you can easily defend. That can turn your defense into offense, even without the ball.”

  Coach Parkinson clapped her hands and told the group they should give it a go. She and her assistants got the kids into teams and starting working on positioning and angles and other things I didn’t know and couldn’t hear.

  About fifteen minutes later, the assistant coaches took charge and Coach Parkinson stepped back and watched the groups running drills and then resetting their positions to do it again and again.

  Then my guy stepped over to her. She turned and looked toward me. I thought about waving or something but decided that would make me look like some kind of weirdo groupie, so I sat still and she turned back to the guy, who handed over my card.

  Sue Parkinson was a tall, lean woman, athletic in her movements. She wore her hair short but styled, and had close-set eyes that held the kind of determination I normally associated with long-distance runners.

  I stepped down to the floor and waited for her to come over. She was frowning, which was to be expected.

  “What’s happened to Tania?” she asked as she approached.

  “Nothing yet.” I held out my hand. “Miami Jones,” I said.

  “Sue Parkinson. Drew said she’s received a threat.”

  “Three of them, actually.”

  “Three? Is she all right?”

  “She’s been better.”

  I told Coach Parkinson about the letter and the locker and the text message. Of all the people I had spoken to, she seemed the most concerned.

  “Poor kid,” she said. “I should call her.”

  “I think she’d appreciate it, but it would be best not to overplay the situation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she’s preparing for her debut in the WNBA. She needs to focus.”

  “Focus? She needs to be safe, that’s what she needs. I can assure you, when Tania hits the court in Atlanta, she’ll be focused.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning she knows what she has to do on the court. She’s the most hardworking player I have ever coached, but she’s also a natural talent. She’ll be ready.”

  “Everyone around her seems to be treating her with kid gloves, as if she’s too fragile to know the truth.”

  “She doesn’t know?”

  “Oh, she knows. She’s way ahead of pretty much everyone.”

  Coach Parkinson smiled, like this didn’t surprise her.

  “So why are you telling me this?” she asked.

  For a moment I wondered that, too. I had come on the suggestion of John Cashman, who didn’t know Tania at all, but who knew a thing or two about these situations.

  “Why didn’t she declare for the draft last year?” I asked.

  “She wanted to finish college.”

  “That’s what I keep hearing, but I’m not buying it.”

  Sue looked at me with her laser focus. It was a touch intimidating.

  “Last year’s first pick was with Chicago,” she said.

  “Tania doesn’t like Chicago?”

  “She doesn’t like where it is.”

  “Meaning?”

  Sue shifted her feet. “Has her agent gotten her an international deal yet?”

  “He’s got something lined up but she doesn’t seem eager to sign.”

  “Where?”

  “China. You think she doesn’t like China as well?”

  “Last year the talk was Europe. That didn’t happen, either.”

  I shrugged. “Okay, so she doesn’t like Chicago or China or Europe.”

  “She doesn’t like where they are.”

  “What does that mean? She doesn’t like the makeup of the tectonic plates, or is it a geopolitical distinction?”

  “They’re far away.”

  “Compared to West Palm, not compared to the moon.”

  “She wouldn’t play on the moon. She gets homesick.”

  “Homesick? You’re serious?”

  “Very.”

  “She deferred getting paid to play, and now she won’t sign deals because she gets homesick? That can’t be it.”

  “Trust me, that’s it. You know she could have gotten a scholarship to UConn. They were very eager. Now, I love it here at Miami, and I think we have things to offer that those programs don’t, but a great program like UConn is tough to turn down.”

  “The weather’s better in Miami, I can tell you that. I’m from Connecticut.”

  “We play basketball indoors. So I didn’t get it at first, but I didn’t ask myself too many questions. That’s on me, but I was happy to have such a great player in the fold. But soon enough I noticed that every weekend we didn’t play, she would go home to West Palm. Most weekends when we did play she would head home right after the game or when we got back from on the road, and be away for Monday at least. In their final years, most student-athletes arrange their class schedule around training and game commitments. Not Tania. She arranged her schedule so she could go home and be off-campus for Mondays and Tuesdays, back in time for training. She wanted to fit in training, games, and home leave and not miss classes. That takes a hell of a lot of juggling.”

  I nodded but let Coach Parkinson continue.

  “So I wasn’t surprised when she rejected the idea of Europe, and I was only a little surprised she didn’t declare for the draft. Like I said, I didn’t push it, because I was more than happy to have such a
great player on my roster for another year.”

  “That’s something I don’t get. How could she declare early if they can’t enter the draft until they’re twenty-two?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “She injured her knee in her freshman year. Missed the season, so she got that year of eligibility back at the end. The draft rules allow a player to declare if they turn twenty-two any time that year, or she could use the extra year of eligibility to play on in college, which is what she chose to do.”

  “And you got to the NCAA finals?”

  “Sweet Sixteen. Best result for the school in thirty years.”

  “So if she was so against nominating last year, why do it this year?”

  “College was over. She didn’t have another option. Plus, to be honest, I think it was because the number one pick was with Atlanta.”

  “What’s so great about Atlanta?”

  “It’s the closest WNBA team to Florida.”

  “So what if it had been Chicago again, or Los Angeles? You saying she wouldn’t have gone into the draft?”

  Coach Parkinson shrugged. “I don’t know. It might have brought things to a head and forced her to confront whatever it is that’s causing her to feel this way. But if she’s still balking at overseas teams, my guess is she might not have played at all this year.”

  “You really think she would have missed an entire WNBA season because she’s homesick?”

  Coach Parkinson frowned at me. “You said you’re from Connecticut.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “Here, Miami.”

  “Is that something to do with your name now?”

  “Plenty.”