Losing Is Not an Option

by Rich Wallace

  One of the other refs walks over. “Calm down,” he says.

  “That sucker’s giving his players every call,” Curtis says. “What about those other guys who jumped in? What’s this bullshit with their whole team piling on one man?”

  “I don’t like your language,” the ref says.

  “Okay,” Curt says. “It’s bullcrap, okay? Same thing.”

  J.D. and Hatcher take Curtis by the arm and tell him to forget it. “It was my fault,” J.D. keeps saying.

  “No it wasn’t,” Aaron says. “Landers is an asshole. His boys got every call.”

  J.D.’s got patches of skin missing from his knuckles and under one eye, but he says he’s all right. There’s like a minute left and we’re down by six. Landers is still at midcourt. “Watch your mouths or I’ll kick out some more of you,” he says in our direction.

  Shifty is standing next to me, muttering, “Frickin’ Landers. Goddamn alcoholic scumbag.” Shifty also goes to Syracuse, where he’s studying communications. Ollie is just shaking his head, trying to hold back a smile.

  Landers waves his arms in a crossing motion. “Game is over. The score stands.” So we lose.

  We stand around, joke a little, pick up our wallets and shirts. Tony Hatcher grabs my arm and talks under his breath. “Can you believe these guys care that much about this?”

  “I know,” I say. “Get a life.”

  “Like it’s the NBA finals or something.”

  Suddenly Landers is yelling again, saying Curt’s got a one-game suspension. We all look around, wondering why, thinking Curtis is over here with us. But then we see him across the court, right in Landers’s face, giving him more shit. Landers has the ball under his arm, listening to Curtis but not backing up. He finally puts up his hand. “Curt,” he says firmly, “walk away or you’re out of this league.” Curtis walks away. Out the gate. Nobody on the other team would mess with him.

  We mill around for a few minutes. The guys from Pete’s Market are laughing. They had a few spectators, some girls and other guys their age.

  The teams for the next game come onto the court and start shooting. Stan DelCalzo—who is Aaron’s father, J.D.’s uncle, and my former Little League coach—is talking to J.D. Then Aaron, Mr. DelCalzo, me, and J.D. start walking off. J.D. says again to us that he’s sorry. He goes over to Landers, apologizes, says he just got off to a bad start with that earring thing. Landers tells him again that it’s not his rule. “We’re trying to develop some of the high school players in this league, so we play by those rules.”

  “Yeah? Those guys ain’t in high school,” J.D. says, waving in the general direction of the other team. “You let your boys get away with shit all night.”

  “Come here,” Landers says. He puts his hands on J.D.’s shoulders. “Let’s talk. You and me.”

  “You’ve always had it in for me.”

  Landers gives him a look like What, are you kidding me? “I don’t even know you, pal.” Which can’t be true, since J.D. played against Sturbridge twice a year for three years in high school and was the leading scorer in the conference.

  J.D. just looks away as Landers keeps talking, the way he talks to guys who screw around in shop. Controlling his little kingdom.

  Back under the basket, Mr. DelCalzo is telling me that this all goes back to junior high school, when J.D. started getting a reputation in football and basketball, started a long tradition of Weston South teams beating up on Sturbridge.

  A couple of girls call J.D. an asshole as we walk toward the cars. He looks over at the crowd and meets eyes with the guy he fought and says, “Where you gonna be?”

  The guy answers, but I don’t hear him. J.D. and Aaron get into Aaron’s pickup truck and start backing out. Mr. DelCalzo stops them. “Make sure you go straight to the house,” he says to Aaron.

  Aaron nods.

  “Hey,” Mr. DelCalzo says.

  “What?”

  “Aunt Joanie’s there,” he says, shaking his head, meaning She better not hear a word of this.

  That may be the last we see of J.D. this summer. You actually have to show up at a game for it to count toward the suspension, and I’d be surprised if he drove twenty minutes, twice, to watch our team in a league like this. Curtis I can see, since he’s local and he’s only got to sit out one.

  I walk back to the court to get my water bottle. Tony Hatcher’s still up there, laughing with some guys from the other team. He comes over to me and says something about some jerks from Sturbridge jumping a Weston player on the street a couple of years ago when it was just the guy and his girlfriend. “The guy was a friend of J.D.’s, so he’s had a bad attitude about Sturbridge guys ever since then. It all goes back to that.”

  Like me, Aaron’s just finished his junior year at Sturbridge High School, but he’s the one who pulled this team together. Aaron works the front desk at the Y a couple of nights a week, so I played pickup games with him over the winter. Plus we’re on the track team together. The other guys he knows mostly from the weight room, and he figured he could build a team around his cousin.

  “I felt bad for J.D.,” he says to me when I run into him at McDonald’s the next night. “He’s not like that.”

  “He was getting yanked around pretty good,” I say.

  “Yeah. But when two guys start fighting you let ’em go,” he says. “You can’t have nine guys jumping in on ’em.”

  Aaron’s a good running back and a sprinter. He’s going to miss our next several games—he’s leaving Saturday for the Syracuse University high school football camp, then coming home for a day or two before leaving for one at Penn State. He wants badly to play for Syracuse like Curtis, who he’s idolized for years. Curtis has our high school sprint records and was the star running back before Aaron.

  Aaron is solid but short, and clumsier than you’d expect on the basketball court. He always seems to be ready to laugh, even when he’s talking about something serious. “I couldn’t believe Curt last night,” he says. “He was mad.”

  “Yeah. I’m surprised he’s even playing.”

  “He hates Landers. All the coaches. That’s why he wouldn’t play basketball for them. He wants to show them up in this league. Oh, man.”

  “You’re not too fond of them either, huh?”

  He shakes his head. “Man. Ever since Landers started his son over me on the JV team. It all goes back to that.”

  The most surprising thing about our first game was how ready these guys seemed to be to fight at the slightest push. They all have dislikes based on actual grievances or simply where somebody went to school or even when, since most of them went to Sturbridge. Several of the better players didn’t even play high school varsity, including Ollie, who now starts for an admittedly weak small-college team. There are tons of grudges and an extremely obvious lack of respect for the coaching staff. I knew all this, I guess, but I thought it was mostly unsaid.

  The biggest mark of honor in this league, I’m starting to see, is to not have played for the high school team, but to come back and kick the asses of those who did, even years later. Some people don’t grow up much. When I play in pickup games on Sunday mornings at the Y, the fights are at least as likely to include the doctors and lawyers and teachers as the plumbers and carpenters and road workers.

  We have a spectator tonight, a girl with short bleached hair. I can’t tell who she’s with. She’s kind of quiet but is maybe twenty and is wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt.

  Pete’s Market played the game before ours, and a few of them wished us luck as they walked off. Their fighter is gone for the summer. Took a job in Florida.

  Curtis and J.D. (without his earring) both show up to watch the game, but Aaron’s gone off to football camp. So we’ve got five eligible players: four small guards and Hatcher, who’s got a wrestler’s body, not a basketball player’s.

  We’ll run. Pressure the ball. These guys are older than the last team. Two big black guys who are pushing forty and some scruffy white guys
in their twenties. They show up late, about two minutes before we could have called a forfeit. We would have waited, though. They had to come down from Callicoon, New York, a good half hour away. They’re sponsored by Roto-Rooter of Sullivan County.

  Turns out they’re in good shape, too. They kick our butts in the first half. We rush our shots, get no rebounds. We decide at the half to abandon the zone and go man-to-man. Curtis says we should press full-court, but Ollie says no, they’ve got too many ball handlers.

  “At least trap the first pass,” Curtis says. “Catch them off guard.”

  It works once, but Ollie’s right. I get stuck guarding one of their big men, but they don’t take advantage of it the way they ought to. He keeps posting up on me, but they don’t get him the ball. J.D. is yelling from the sideline for guys to drop down and help me out.

  The only hint of an incident in this game comes as Ollie is bringing up the ball fast with one of their guys riding him close. Ollie throws an elbow and says, “Get off me, man,” and his forehead flushes as red as his hair, but it doesn’t develop into anything.

  We lose by twenty-two.

  “Wish I’d been in there,” J.D. says as we huddle up. “That’s the type of team I like playing against. Good players, nice guys.”

  I’ve gotta give him credit just for showing up. We walk off together and he checks his car carefully, kind of expecting Pete’s Market to have scratched it up or kicked in a headlight.

  “They do anything?” I ask.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” he says. “Most of those guys are decent, I guess.”

  I go to the Y three mornings a week after I run—mostly dips and pull-ups and some leg work. It’s quiet in there that time of day—a couple of regulars, a few women with a preschooler or two, and Augie. Augie’s a retired New York City cop who works part-time in the weight room. Knows everything about everybody who works out here. We talk about food and the Yankees. He keeps talking while you’re doing crunches, but I don’t mind.

  I tell him I took a good shot in the jaw last night trying to block a shot. Tasted blood.

  “You’d know it if it was broken, Ron,” he says.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You guys win?”

  “Nah. We don’t have it together at all yet.”

  “How’s Tony Hatcher doing?” he asks.

  “Good,” I say. “Nice guy.”

  “Yeah. Now he is. He’s come a long way, though. I seen him down here last week, but I guess he’s working a lot of hours now.”

  “Yeah. He’s doing drywall, I think.”

  Augie is in great shape for somebody in his sixties. He works out like three hours a day. It used to be just weights, but now his doctor has him on the treadmill an hour a day because of a cardiac scare last winter. I’m sure he knows about Hatcher. The kid was a wrestling star a few years ago, then just totally went to hell after his senior season. Got a new set of friends (including my brother, Devin), started using drugs and causing all kinds of trouble. Spent most of that summer in rehab for drugs and alcohol and blew his chance at a college scholarship. He finally started going to Weston Community College this spring and says he’s straight, not even cigarettes.

  “I’ll tell ya,” Augie says, “that son of a bitch once, when he was messed up back in high school, I was in the locker room here about to take a shower and Hatcher and this other little shitface, that Corso kid, what’s his name … Anyway, I go in the bathroom for like two minutes, then I come back to the shower and there’s this big pile of piss on the tiles. Hatcher and this Corso kid—Ernie Corso, that’s his name; football player—they’re out by the lockers and they’re laughing their asses off. I go out there and I say to them, I say, ‘You little bastards, what the hell is this?’ They’re like, “What?” And I say, ‘You know what. What the hell is wrong with you?’ I’m angry now, see? I say, ‘This is your Y, too. You do stuff like that in your house?’

  “So this Corso kid says, ‘What are you gonna do about it? Hit me? Come on.’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m not gonna hit you. I’m not frickin’ stupid. But you clean that piss up or that’ll be the end of your membership.’

  “Corso starts mouthing off and Hatcher leaves the locker room. Then he comes back with a couple of rolls of toilet paper and starts mopping up the piss. Corso just walks out. I don’t think he’s ever been back. But I’m like Hatcher’s best buddy ever since then. You know, he went into rehab right after that.”

  “Sometimes we all just need a kick in the ass,” I say.

  “Oh yeah,” Augie says. “We all been there. He’s a good kid. Smart. I mean, his father’s a frickin’ doctor, for God’s sake.”

  Our third game is against Shorty’s Tavern, which won this league a couple of years ago but has slipped a bit since then. They’re local guys, carpet layers and factory workers, mostly in their mid-twenties, slowly getting in worse condition and needing knee braces and more tape.

  Our T-shirts have finally arrived, dark blue with DELCALZO ELECTRIC in white. Curtis’s suspension is over, which should make a big difference inside. His hair is now about an eighth of an inch long. He says he wants it to be long enough to carve his initials into when he gets back to Syracuse.

  We jump to a quick lead, Ollie hitting a couple of three-pointers and Curtis and Hatcher getting some put-backs. Ollie is like a coach on the floor, telling me to pressure the point or back off, calling out screens, saying, “I’ve got two over here” when the zone collapses. He’s not the type who’d ever tell me I suck, but after I miss a long shot when he was open inside he says, “You gotta see me in there, Ron” as we run back.

  Ollie goes nonstop, lifting the rest of us, and our lead is double figures by halftime.

  Second half I’m standing on the sideline with Curtis and J.D., watching Shorty’s chip away at our lead. Ollie has the ball at the top of the key and starts to drive. “Take it to the closet!” Shifty yells.

  I give him a quizzical look. Shifty laughs. “We call him the closet masturbator.” The thin girl with bleached hair laughs, too. Maybe she’s here to see Ollie. Tonight she’s wearing a shirt that says FORT LAUDERDALE. She brought two gallons of water for us and some paper cups.

  The ball gets slapped away by their head-shaved point guard, and Shorty’s goes on a rare fast break. Ollie fouls the guy on the layup and he goes to the line with a chance to cut the lead to six.

  “Bad call,” says Curtis, who’s kept his temper in check despite the fact that Landers is refereeing again. Curtis told me before the game that he’d wanted to beat the shit out of Landers last week but just barely held back. He wasn’t sure why.

  They continue to wear us down, getting the ball inside, and our shooting goes cold. We’re up a point in the final minute and they’ve got the ball.

  The shaved-head guy’s been quiet all night, but he takes over now. He dishes it inside, they kick it back out, and he nails a three. They pressure the inbounds pass and Ollie makes a rare mistake, throwing it away. They play keep-away for thirty seconds until we have to foul. They hit both ends of the one-and-one, and we’re down by four.

  Ollie dribbles up in a hurry, shoots a long three, and incredibly gets fouled on the all-time stupid defensive play. But the shot rolls out. He hits two free throws, misses the third on purpose, and they get the rebound as time runs out.

  Saturday Aaron’s back at the Y, the only day he’s home between camps. He says he did well up at Syracuse, got some attention from the coaches, ran a 4.4 forty.

  “Yeah,” he says, “but don’t say nothing about this, but I got bad news about Curt.”

  “What?”

  “He flunked out.”

  “Shit. Really?”

  “Yeah. The coaches said he never came in for help or anything about getting into summer classes or nothing.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. Don’t say anything, okay?”

  “I wouldn’t. Can he get back in later?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.” He
shakes his head. “Man, he’s smart, too.”

  Thunderstorms roll in late Monday afternoon, so the games are moved up to the high school gym. I get there early and sit on the floor against the bleachers with Ollie and Shifty, watching Roto-Rooter blow out Pete’s Market.

  Shifty’s in his standard game outfit—baggy team shirt with the sleeves ripped off, knee-length shorts, and a tight necklace that looks like BBs strung on a wire. He’s the scrawniest guy on the team; never works out except a bit of basketball. I ask him if he hangs out with Curtis up at Syracuse, fishing around to see if he knows anything about Curt dropping out.

  “Not much last year, with his football schedule and everything, but we’re rooming together this fall. We found an apartment off campus. Should be great.”

  Landers is refereeing the game. “Did you play for him?” I ask.

  “Just freshman football,” Shifty says.

  “I played JV for him for a year,” Ollie says. “He’d put me in with like thirty seconds left, behind by forty points, and say, ‘I want you to make something happen.’ Like, come on. He wouldn’t let us pressure the ball anyway. I couldn’t stand it.”

  One of Pete’s players, a very tall thin guy with a ponytail who didn’t play in the game against us, misses a layup, gets the rebound, and misses again.

  “That’s one of Landers’s boys there,” Ollie says.

  “Who is it?”

  “Darren Brogan.”

  “Oh.” I remember him now. “Didn’t recognize him.”

  “Two years and a lot of drugs,” Shifty says.

  It’s very humid in the gym and we’re sweating heavily just sitting there. I can’t even get the tape to stick to my ankles. We play the Sturbridge Building Products team tonight. They’re huge but slow, the oldest team in the league on average, and the heat’s going to be a problem for them. We start wondering why we’re the only three players from either team in the gym.

  “Shit!” Ollie says. “We must be playing at the middle school.”

  We get up and see that the rain is coming down in torrents, but we race out the door and run the two hundred yards to the other school. Most of our guys are in there warming up. We go to the locker room to dry off with paper towels.