What You Need

by Andrew Forbes

  “It was booked up,” I say. “I’m at the Comfort.”

  “Well, it’s got colour cable TV and a bed, right? They’re all the same.”

  “Sure,” I say. “A place to sleep.”

  “Right, right.”

  “Grainge is ours,” I say. “You don’t have anywhere for him to play.”

  “Oh, we’ll find somewhere,” says Bill from Duke. “Talent like that, we’ll find him room.”

  “It’s not a good fit, Bill.”

  “You have this locked up, do you? Fine. I guess I’ll head on home, then. That’ll mean a vacancy at the Hilton, if you’re quick.”

  “I look for a non-smoking room.”

  “Right, right. Look, Ed, I think this is going to be close. I sense that from him. I think you, me, and KU are in this. But in the end, you know, my guess is he’ll opt for the program with the best chance of winning a title. And with respect,” he smiles, “I think you know that’s us. At least for the next few years.”

  “That’s a lot to assume, Bill,” I say. “I wouldn’t concede that.”

  “Your frontcourt is weak, Ed.”

  “We expect some big improvement there.”

  “You’re not talking to your boosters here, Ed. You can drop the Cinderella line.”

  “Have you seen him yet this weekend?”

  “I have. Thirty-four and twelve last night, with eleven rebounds.” He says “eleven” as though it were three separate words.

  “I heard.”

  “He’s something, Ed.”

  “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

  Released from Bill’s moist grip, I float through the corridors of Harrisburg High, making my way toward the gym. Everything else is quiet, dark, still. Hallways, classrooms. 4:00 PM and the light is abandoning central Pennsylvania, leaving us all to huddle in the warm electric glow of an aging brick high school. At the centre of it all thrums the heart, bright and overfull. People straggle and stream toward and away from the heavy double doors. I buy a ticket, two dollars—Proceeds to the Prom Committee—and push through the doors into the gym.

  Banners, signs, boys and girls in sweatshirts, their faces painted. The aluminum bleachers are crowded but not full. Serious-looking men in fleece sweaters or windbreakers sit near the back, holding clipboards and tablet computers. I recognize a few of them. Mothers and sisters and fathers and brothers sit together, attempting to combine the force of their love and project it out to a certain boy, to make him able to do things he has never done before. They hope that their boy will do something remarkable or miraculous tonight, or this weekend, and so vault himself into the stratosphere of boys hunted by those men with their clipboards. A scholarship. A free ride.

  I take a seat on the end of a row, three quarters of the way up. I’m not taking notes. I’ve done my homework. I’ve talked to Grainge’s parents, talked to his coach, talked to his buddies, talked to the guy who covers high school sports for The Patriot-News. Talked to the folks from the scouting agencies. Talked to Coach B. Scanned numbers, pored over game notes. Most importantly, I’ve watched the kid play and I’ve asked myself: Does he look like a man among boys? Does he appear blessed with an extra set of skills and senses as compared to his teammates and opponents?

  Sometimes one or more parts of this equation are out of line, or untrustworthy. I have seen kids who lit up scoreboards for four years but weren’t even close to what we were looking for. I have heeded the alarm sounded by my instincts and passed on “can’t-miss” players from good high school or prep programs, and then watched them trundle off to other high profile Div I teams only to flame out before their junior year. Bottom line, you have to watch the kid play. Your eyes will tell you whether it’s a yes or a no.

  With Robert Grainge, everything points to yes. My employers are convinced, and so am I. So now I’m just here to watch and, if the opportunity presents itself, to pitch again. I’m always prepared to pitch.

  I scan the floor. The Harrisburg Cougars, in white, are playing a team from Altoona, the Lions, whose maroon uniforms are classically handsome. It takes me a moment to get acclimated to the game, to pick out the players and just what is going on. It’s right before the half and the Cougars are up 34-28.

  Things become still for the tiniest moment, and then there he is. Grainge—he’ll need to hit the gym this summer—all limbs and joints. He stands in for a free throw. The world spins at his feet. Watching him, in the clamour of a banner-festooned gym, I’m giddy. It might be the hours I keep, but I feel carbonated, the happiness rising off me like bubbles, the sense that I’m exactly where I should be: watching Robert Grainge sink bucket after bucket on a Friday night in a brightly lit high school gym in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

  Find me a kid who loves the fundamentals, that’s what I’ve always said. And Grainge is most definitely that kid, spending an hour on his free throws after practice, his dribbling drills, his picture-perfect passes. His drive to the basket off a screen is pure poetry.

  I should say, too, that he is indeed capable of flash. I’ve seen him uncork it at practice, squaring up one-on-one against a teammate during down moments, and even after Sykes has released them to their lives. Grainge is versed in a collection of jukes and ghost moves that shake an opponent until dizzy. So he has those skills, but he eschews them during gameplay in favour of a sound, unspectacular, but incredibly effective style.

  Frankly, I love him. He would be the absolute perfect fit for our team, for the culture of Do It Right that Coach B preaches, for the holes we’re facing on next year’s squad, for the campus, for the community—he’s just perfect.

  The Cougars win handily, and Grainge is the reason, putting in twenty-five with eight helpers and nine boards. Now another game is underway in the gym, but without the home squad to cheer for, or the prospect to see, the spectators have thinned. I have stuck around, riding a hunch that I might outlast the other recruiters, the ones who are still doing their homework. They’ll head back to their hotel rooms and pore over their laptops, send an email update to the AD, then maybe hit the hotel bar.

  I’m watching the doors, which I hope are the right doors, waiting for Grainge to emerge. He’s taking his time.

  Then he comes out. He’s guileless—I saw it right away the first time I met him, and it’s still true. All of this swirls around him, but he’s just living his life. Being alive, with so few designs, so few notions of responsibility and obligation that he might as well be an infant. It heartens me to see. This boy has no screens.

  “Hello, Robert,” I say, extending my hand.

  “Mr. Eddie,” he says, and he seems genuinely, though shyly, happy to see me.

  “Great game out there,” I say.

  “You watched?”

  “Most of it, yes.”

  “Yeah, they were playing tight. Pretty aggressive. We had to move it around a lot.”

  “They were never in the game, Robert.”

  “Haw, I don’t know. It was good to win.”

  I’m fifty-two years old, and it is my job to have conversations with teenage boys. It’s an odd arrangement from most angles, and I am never less than aware of the differences between us. But Robert doesn’t seem unhappy to be talking to me, just shy, as though he can’t understand all the attention. I’m lucky he recognized me as soon as he did, to be honest; this boy’s life is a whirlwind of middle-aged white men right now. He’d be forgiven for failing to match a name to a face, but the fact that he does fills me with hope that I have a real shot in this.

  His phone chirps, a muffled half-verse of a rap song.

  “Uh oh,” I say. “Bet that’s Bill from Duke.”

  He laughs, digs the phone from his hip pocket, and checks the screen. “Naw. My girlfriend.” Without answering he slides the phone back into his jeans.

  “Who’s your girlfriend?”

  “Monique.”

  “Monique. She nice?”

  At this his face breaks wide open and his teeth explode out into
the world, involuntarily. “Yeah,” he says, and his eyes twinkle. “The nicest.” He’s disarmed. A sweet kid with no toughened hide to show the world. He’ll have a hard time.

  “You sure it wasn’t Bill from Duke?”

  “Positive. Besides, I’d never go to Duke. Hate those guys.”

  “Music to my ears,” I say, and it is. “Play for us. You can beat Duke.” I’m quiet, earnest. I can feel my eyes begin to shine. This is a crucial, naked moment. It is the sort of exchange that can make or break this thing. I need him to feel that I am open and honest and have nestled in my aging, crusty heart only the absolute best interests of everyone involved.

  He smiles a deflecting smile. “Honestly? I’m worried about your defence,” he says. “That’s my concern.”

  “What is it about Coach B’s defence that worries you?”

  “You play that zone, that two-three.”

  “Almost always. Except when we press.”

  “Yeah, well, I have some skill on defence. You seen that.”

  “No question.” I know just where this is going because I’ve heard it before.

  “I hear that teams, when they’re drafting, don’t pick your guys too high because they feel like that defence doesn’t get them ready for the pro game, for man-to-man. I want to play man, I want to get those steals, block some shots. I want those numbers. Feel like they’d up my draft position.”

  I smile, fold my hands together. “Where was Waiters picked?”

  “Fourth.”

  “Carmelo?”

  “Three,” he says, and then that smile comes back, all the teeth. He starts to chuckle.

  “What?”

  “You know I love ‘Melo,” he says, “But the man can’t defend.”

  “That’s not the zone’s fault,” I say.

  A wave of people—the last of the Harrisburg players, managers, hangers-on—emerges from the locker room doors and overtakes us. They bounce and laugh and I turn my head to watch them go, and that’s when I see Marvin Grainge, father of Robert, swimming against their current and straight toward us. And I see immediately, in the disrupted air between his face and his son’s, that I have tipped the apple cart, that Marvin is angry and Robert is guilty, presumably due to an understanding that, though we’ve had our share of talks, him and I, one-on-one, in bleachers, across tables, in locker rooms, the boy isn’t to speak to the likes of me without his father present.

  Marvin’s a sturdy man, though in six feet of water he would need a straw to breathe. His youngest boy ended up in the position he’s in now partly by fortunate natural fluke and partly because, in order to give his two sons every chance they might have, Marvin has driven a bus for twenty-two years, occasionally holding a second job as a custodian.

  “Robert!” he barks. “Time to go. Come on, now. You know better than this. Do I have to write it on your arm, boy? So you don’t forget?”

  “Mr. Grainge,” I say.

  He looks at me, wiggles his full moustache, seems to need a moment to decide what to say. Finally he gives me a terse, “Goodnight to you, Mr. Eddie,” and they are out the door, out into the ashen December night.

  Some of them present themselves as men until a crack shows, a betrayal of their age. They’ll get giddy over a new video game, or miss their mother so acutely that tears come over the breakfast buffet. Some of them assume silence is the best way to be taken seriously. They glower at you. “I let my game speak for me.” I’ve heard more than one young man say these words. Others, like Robert Grainge, are so very obviously still boys that it nearly breaks my heart to pry them from the nest and drop them off a cliff in the hopes that they’ll suddenly learn to fly.

  But you also have to learn to let them surprise you. I assumed Dallas Carmody was an innocent hick, the sweet-faced, blond-headed son of a farm insurance salesman who said “ma’am” and “sir,” soft blue eyes and ears like pitchers of milk. Then he told me about what crystal meth had done to the young population of his small Indiana town. “I’ve had two friends die, and I’ve known sixteen-year-old girls, pretty as you can imagine, who’d trick themselves out to the nastiest men alive. All my friends are screwed up,” he said. “Get me the fuck out of here.”

  What you can’t forget, no matter how composed or stoic or strong they appear, no matter how close to being ready for the pros, is that they are children. Sometimes you have to lie to them, and sometimes you have to stay up all night talking to them, and sometimes you have to bail them out of jail. You have to know that they will need their egos stroked, their chins wiped, their shoes tied. You have to remember that they will follow a girl across two upstate counties on a stolen bicycle the night before a nationally televised game against a top five team because he and the girl are “meant for each other.” You have to remember that they will cry. You have to expect them to fail. And you have to know that someone has to be there to catch them.

  My thinking? It might as well be us.

  Back in my room, before my fatigue catches up with me, I snare Pam on the phone. She’s awake, but barely. I can hear it in the corners of her voice.

  “How’d today go?” she asks a bit distractedly.

  “Oh, good. Yeah, okay.”

  “But no commitment.”

  “You can tell.”

  “You’d have told me by now, Ed.”

  “Yeah, I would have.”

  “Talk to him, at least?”

  “Him and Grainge Senior, yes.”

  “Oh.” The echo tells me she’s in the kitchen, which means she’s curling the long cord around her fingers. She does this without knowing she’s doing it. We still have a corded phone in the kitchen, ivory-coloured, the cord long enough to walk from one end of the room to the other. Pam doesn’t trust cordless phones, says they’re always cutting out at inopportune times. When you’re talking to your mother or your insurance agent. “The hard case,” she says.

  “The very one. Hustled Robert off before I could get my spiel out.”

  “Protective.”

  “Hostile, very nearly.”

  “Did you get to see him play, though?”

  “Oh, he’s something, Pammy. He’s really something.”

  “The next big one?”

  “I’ve really fallen for this one,” I say.

  “Remember rule number one, Eddie,” she says. Then we sign off in our private language of memory and affection, the unique patter we’ve spent twenty-eight years inventing. I sleep like a log, and I’m near certain she does the same.

  In the morning I grab a muffin and a coffee at the hotel’s continental breakfast bar, take a chair at a wobbly table, watch a reel of sports highlights on the screen nearest my head. The Lakers look terrible. The Bulls are missing a wheel. The Knicks, as always, are ridiculous.

  Saturday morning rolls on. The Harrisburg Invitational Tournament games start at ten o’clock and I have to tell you it’s a lovely and novel thing to watch basketball so early in the day. By nine-thirty I am fed and caffeinated, looking for parking in the snowy HHS lot.

  Inside, the dry electric heat induces a thick drowsiness in me. The day’s first two teams are warming up on the court. The Cougars aren’t one of them, but after a few minutes I spot Robert, head and shoulders above those around him, and next to him is a girl who must be Monique. They are laughing and needling one another. I don’t want to interrupt, so I sit a few rows away.

  After the buzzer sounds to end the first half, though, Robert stands and stretches, turns toward me. I don’t mean to but I catch his eye, and he smiles, waves, and beckons me with one of his big hands. I stand and work my way toward him.

  “Mr. Eddie, this is Monique,” he says, and she puts out a smooth hand for me to shake.

  “Mr. Eddie, nice to meet you. I’ve heard about you from Robert. You’re the Duke man, right?”

  There’s a nervous chuckle. “Naw,” Robert says, “He’s the other one, baby.”

  “Oh, right, of course. Sorry. Nice to meet you, Mr. Eddie.”
r />   “Happy to meet you, Monique,” I say. “And I’ve heard of you. Robert’s eyes light up when he says your name.”

  “They better,” she says, and gives him a mock-serious face. He chuckles.

  “Robert,” I say, “I wanted to apologize for last night. If I overstepped—”

  “No sweat. That’s just Dad,” he says.

  “He was riding you pretty hard,” I say.

  He shrugs his large, angular shoulders. “He’s just trying to do what’s best for me. I let it roll off,” he says. It’s a lie. He’s been told he must be tough, he’s seen it and been fed it since infancy. Some cloistered, pink, human part of me wants to tell him, Don’t get tough, don’t get tough. Don’t lose that openness. Hold tight to your wonder.

  But he can’t, not if he’s going to have any success at what he’s chosen to pursue. Or been chosen to pursue. Most of us have just one thing we’re truly good at, and we best serve the world by doing it. That was true long before Dr. Naismith ever hung his peach basket. But part of me wonders if Grainge’s duty to his own tender humanity outweighs the responsibility he has to his wondrous talent. If it’s more important for him to protect his glass heart than to follow it. Not that he’d ever make that decision, and I sure as hell wouldn’t suggest it. He’s got basketballs for eyes. He’s married to the game. And provided he can gird himself, he’ll do whatever he wants. He’ll do marvellous things with a basketball in arenas in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Miami. On a billion HD television screens. At the Olympics. This kid has talent we sometimes describe as generational. As in once-in-a-. If he can find a way to steel himself, if he can graft in that toughness, he’ll do it all.

  Picking a school is the first step. He must walk right between the crooked teeth of the rabid beast that is the spirit animal of college athletics. He’ll entertain me and fifty other recruiters, hear from alumni and boosters, be offered the sun, the moon, and the stars, the plushest campus jobs—as pretext for payments, he could stand next to a program stand at football games, or show up for an hour a week at the campus bookstore—and then he’ll choose. With heavy input from Mom, Dad, and, unless I miss my guess, Monique. He’ll choose, and commit, and there will be fanfare surrounding that, and more hoopla the day he shows up on campus, and at his first practice.