by Josh Wilker
“My writer,” he said. He motioned to the scorer’s table. “In for Lundy.”
I went over to the scorer’s table. Is now a good time to admit that I never really understood what I was supposed to do at the scorer’s table? For years I’d been checking into games, and I never knew what I was doing. No one had ever told me, and at a certain point I became afraid to ask. I stood there trying to imitate everyone I’d ever seen check into a game. I haltingly lowered down to one knee. The buzzer sounded. I stood up. Rat intercepted me on my way onto the court. He leaned in close, his fists clenched at his sides.
“Gonna get you the ball,” he vowed.
He hustled off to take the inbounds pass from under the opponent’s basket and dribbled up-court. As I was about to make a move to get free along the left wing, Rat veered to the other side of the court entirely. He bumbled into a two-man trap and lost his handle, and the ball ricocheted around between various legs and hands for a while. I watched it all as if it were happening far away, as if it had already happened long ago. Through no doing of my own or anyone else’s the ball rolled toward me.
The idiotic luck. To live like I have and then to have you come to me, Jack. To have spent a life as a benchwarmer and wound up here, on this new bench, which doesn’t jaggedly abut a square of dirt so much as it skirts an almost unbearable happiness, this happiness that I continue to squander, this happiness that now will never go away. I know because if I try to pick a happiest moment of my life it will be something different every day and it will always include you, your arrival, your first smile, your laugh, your first wobbly steps into life. Beneath everything now this happiness abides.
With a second or two left the rolling ball found me in the deep left corner of the court, just inside the three-point line. I rose up and shot my jump shot. It wasn’t for the win. It wasn’t for anything. But I sank it just as the clock hit zero. No one carried me off on their shoulders. There were some handshakes, some milling around. You might think I was happy, or at least bemused, and in years to come when I told the story of my final shot when I was the worst player on the worst team in the weakest conference in the most obscure national scholastic sporting organization in the country, I tried to describe my shot with humorous exaggeration, as if it meant everything in the world, the ham-fisted joke being that it meant nothing. But the truth is, after I sank the shot I felt robbed. I didn’t want it to mean nothing, and I didn’t want to be moving from that nothing into some even more measureless aftermath. I found my metal chair on the sidelines and loosened the laces of my sneakers. I was seething. The English teacher came over. He was displaying a rare wide smile, like he’d had a joyful awakening.
“My writer! See? You can do it,” he said, as if he’d been encouraging me for months.
“I wanted to fucking play!” I barked. This jolted the epiphany from his face, which returned to its natural state: bafflement, apprehension, guilt, fatigue. I know that look. You would have to peer closely at me to see a muted glimmering, a guarded happiness, indicating that it isn’t the very same look I’m wearing right now, along with some bruises, on this absurd construction, this bench. That expression, of bafflement, apprehension, guilt, fatigue, that mark of the benchwarmer, has been with me for years. But now I’m finally where I always feared I’d be, at zero, beaten, but marveling, and there’s nothing left to do but rise.
Zidane, Zinedine
You still had on your wedding dress, and I was in a tuxedo. This was years ago, downtown Chicago. We were walking from a bar back to the hotel. Some drunks appeared.
“Where’s the par-tay!” one of them demanded.
He was looking through us, and neither we nor they broke stride. They didn’t seem to notice that we were bride and groom. It was the first moment all day that we’d been a bit player in someone else’s story rather than the spotlighted center of our own. It was disenchanting. I wanted everyone in the world to marvel at you.
The next morning you met your friends for Bloody Marys in the hotel bar. My friends had decided to go to Ditka’s a couple of blocks away to watch the 2006 World Cup final. I hung around with you for a little while then went to meet them. I walked up Michigan Avenue on a bright morning, the sidewalk crowded with people. All the impossible joy in every pop song my whole life had been aiming me toward that walk, to be alive and in love with you.
At Ditka’s my friends were all engrossed in the game and didn’t make much of a stink about my arrival. Where was my stink? Here’s the guy! That kind of thing. But the moment was already passing. I sat down at the table and watched the game.
I was rooting for France or, more specifically, for Zinedine Zidane, as I didn’t really care about France. Zidane had within him everything that drew me to sports in the first place. He seemed to be at the center of the moment in every game, the opposite of how I usually felt in life. He always knew where he was supposed to be and seemed able to extend this presence to a command of the entire field, rays of graceful influence beaming out from him in every direction. What’s more, he had retired from the game and had come back. This is the kind of thing that never works out. Even Michael Jordan was a sad, weirdly mustachioed Wizard by the end. And yet Zidane had been without question the best player in the tournament, the best player in the world. Here was greatness. I wanted France to win to clinch the clarity of that message, as if it might lock my world back into an order it hadn’t known since it began with Aaron, Hank. It felt significant that it was happening right after our wedding, as if it was happening to us, for us.
Of course, near the end of regulation, with the score tied, Zidane lost his composure and drove his head into the chest of an Italian defender who had been disparaging the French star’s family. The insidious provocateur (see an encyclopedia of winning if you want to know his name) dropped as if struck by a cannonball, and Zidane was ejected from the last official game he would ever play, greatness disgraced. In other sports, when a player is disqualified, a benchwarmer is brought in to take his place. In soccer the place of the exiled player is kept absent, and so the France side labored aimlessly, a gaping void in the center of its lineup, for the rest of regulation and into extra time before losing to Italy on penalty kicks. There was no benchwarmer there to blame.
That was our first full day of married life, years ago now, the day Zinedine Zidane fucked up and was banished to the bench. Clarity dissolves, narratives fall, encyclopedias grasp and blur. We’re still together. We have this boy. I’ll get up off this bench abutting a dirt square and I’ll walk toward you. I’ll walk in our front door. I’ll see you and our boy and my life will begin.
Acknowledgments
Without the love and support of my family and friends there’d be no book. I’m also very thankful to all the people who worked so hard to help this book take shape. My encyclopedia of gratitude: Ben Adams, Pete Beatty, Charles Bender, Susanne Byrne, Thomas Byrne, Jim Cotter, Nicole Counts, Fay Dillof, David Ebenbach, Pete Fornatale, Lindsay Fradkoff, Pete Garceau, David Gomberg, Kelsey Goss, Frank Iovino, Robert Kempe, Jaime Leifer, Jack Lenzo, Josephine Mariea, Kate McKean, Pete Millerman, Matt Pavoni, Clive Priddle, Melissa Raymond, Greg Teague, Abby Theuring, Patty Theuring, Samantha Theuring, Skip Theuring, Collin Tracy, Evan Wilker, Exley Wilker, Ian Wilker, Jack Wilker, Jenny Wilker, Louis Wilker, Theo Wilker, Bill Ziegler.
Josh Wilker is a contributor to FoxSports.com, Vice Sports, The Classical, Baseball Prospectus, ESPN.com, and more. His previous memoir, Cardboard Gods, was a featured book in the 2010 “Year in Sports Media” issue of Sports Illustrated, a 2010 Casey Award finalist, and a 2011 Booklist best book of the year. He also blogs on his own site, cardboardgods.net.
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