Racing the Rain

by John L Parker

  His answer came in another quarter of a mile as they turned for the home stretch. Mizner put on a sudden burst, and before he knew it, Cassidy was ten yards behind again. There must have been some Pompano supporters in the small crowd, because he heard a rousing cheer. But despite the strain and effort of the early going, Cassidy did not feel done in. In fact, he almost wished the race were longer.

  On the rare occasions when he peeked back, Mizner always looked over his right shoulder, so Cassidy worked his way up to just behind his left shoulder, being careful not to expend too much energy. Cassidy held there and waited.

  When they were two hundred yards from the finish chute, Mizner looked back over his right shoulder to see where Cassidy was. When he did, Cassidy instantly sprinted around his left side and went all out the rest of the way to the finish line. After he crossed it, he turned around and was surprised to see Mizner fifteen yards back.

  The crowd had grown silent during that last sprint.

  Cassidy had to grab his knees for only a few painful seconds. He straightened up to see Mizner stumbling toward him, hand extended.

  “Nice. Race,” he said. “Didn’t see you. At all there. At the end.”

  “You, too,” said Cassidy. “Guess that’s. My last time. Pulling that.”

  Mizner laughed but stopped quickly, still needing the air.

  Mr. Kamrad jogged over, holding his watch in front of him, huge smile on his face.

  “Quenton Cassidy,” he said, “I hope Coach Bickerstaff doesn’t give you too much grief for this, but you are now the south Florida class 4-A regional cross-country champion. And you have run two miles in 9:42.”

  CHAPTER 43

  * * *

  REPERCUSSIONS

  It made the Monday morning announcements.

  “Friday was another red-letter day for Edgewater,” Principal Fleming said in his gravelly voice. A stir went through his homeroom when Cassidy’s name was announced as the regional cross-country champion. Hardly anyone had any idea what cross-country was, but coming in first in a regional anything was apparently a big deal. Miss Waldron, beaming, offered congratulations. People came up after the bell rang and made a big fuss. Through the crowd Cassidy could see Demski sheepishly gathering up his books.

  “Hey,” Cassidy said, “don’t forget that guy! Demski finished fifth and ran the best time of his life.”

  While the little knot of people turned their attention to Demski, Cassidy slipped around them and was out the door heading for first period. He was red as a beet.

  * * *

  Coach Bickerstaff did exactly what he said he would do. Cassidy found himself, jersey turned white side out for the first time since jayvees, playing on the second team. It didn’t really mean anything during the warm-up or the drills. But when it came time to run plays in a half-court scrimmage, there he was on the taxi squad.

  The second team played defense while the first team ran their zone offense. Carroll Morgan and Drake Osgood were the guards, and since Cassidy knew them pretty well, he was able to anticipate their passing patterns and make a few steals.

  When the second team went on offense, Cassidy had a field day. Both Carroll and Drake were under five ten. At six two, Cassidy could shoot over them almost at will. And he knew the first team’s defensive weaknesses. Cassidy motioned to his other guard, Dougie Arbogast, to rotate down to the baseline and come up from behind to set picks on the corners; it gave Cassidy easy eighteen-footers. When the first team adjusted and started sending big men up to help out, Cassidy and Dougie Arbogast were able to lob alley-oop passes in to Phil Jones and Jacob Stuart behind them in the key.

  The first team was getting frustrated; the three big men started bickering among themselves. Cassidy just smiled and gave Stiggs a quizzical look, which he returned with a bird so quick and subtle no one else noticed. But the first-string guards were also irritated with each other. On the last play, Cassidy brought the ball down, motioned for Dougie to rotate down and take right wing, and for the wing to rotate to the other side. They were essentially in the same 1-3-1 they had used the previous year. They started passing the ball quickly around the outside of the zone, forcing the defense to adjust with every pass. The ball came back around to Cassidy at the top of the key, and as soon as it touched his hands he began the motion to pass it back. The defending guards shuffled quickly to make the next adjustment, so when they shifted prematurely, it left Cassidy completely open at his favorite shooting spot on the court, a little bit to the outside and a little to the right of the top of the key.

  He faked the pass, kept the ball, and flexed his knees slightly, going up into a relaxed jump shot, which he buried.

  Drake and Carroll were just about to get into it with each other when Bickerstaff’s shrill whistle ended the practice. He didn’t say anything, but as he was walking toward the stairway, a ball rolled into his path. He took one quick step and booted it into the corner of the gym where it hit the concrete wall with a thwack.

  The next day Cassidy was back on the starting team, but he knew some damage had been done. He just didn’t know how much.

  CHAPTER 44

  * * *

  DISASTER

  The first game of the season was at Palm Beach High. Their gym was small, packed, and intimidating, and the game went downhill from the opening tip-off.

  Stiggs got outjumped by a kid named Bobby Segal who was barely six feet tall. And they pulled the same play that Edgewater usually pulled on everyone else: Segal tipped it to their tallest guy, who immediately flipped it to one of the guards breaking for the basket. It was two–zip Palm Beach and the game wasn’t ten seconds old.

  They weren’t big at all, but they were cagey and well coached. And they kept changing their defense from zone to man-to-man and back again, all on some invisible signal that Cassidy couldn’t figure out. Not only that, but they disguised both defenses so that their man-to-man appeared at first to be a zone, and vice versa.

  Bickerstaff had not bothered to designate either of the guards to be in charge. The team captains were Stiggs and Randleman, so that didn’t help. Whoever brought the ball down was supposed to recognize the defense and start the offense. But Carroll Morgan was especially confused by the shifting defenses and several times started the wrong offense, resulting in total confusion and turnovers before any shots were taken.

  Palm Beach also pressured the ball coming upcourt. Cassidy had dealt with that many times the previous season. If it was man-to-man pressure, one of the wingmen threw the ball in and cleared out, and Cassidy brought the ball up by himself. He had practiced full-court dribbling at the base gym until he was blue in the face, and he could shift directions instantaneously by dribbling behind his back, or between his legs, or by crossing over. He could dribble with either hand without looking at the ball and he could control the ball at nearly full speed. He not only didn’t mind pressure, he enjoyed punishing teams that tried it.

  But Bickerstaff seemed to interpret this as showing off, the product of individual skill rather than teamwork. During a time-out, he insisted that Cassidy and Morgan work together getting the ball upcourt, which gave Palm Beach’s guards—who were very quick—opportunities to trap and double-team. When Morgan got trapped for the third time and they lost the ball on a ten-second violation, Bickerstaff called another time-out. Cassidy was amazed when he had nothing tangible to offer in the huddle. He just said, “Work the ball up together. Set screens for each other. Protect the ball.” Basketball wisdom as penned by fortune cookie writers, Cassidy thought.

  At that point they were down ten points only two minutes into the second quarter. Walking back to set up, Cassidy grabbed the side of Carroll’s jersey and pulled him over.

  “Listen, inbound the ball to me and clear out to half-court. If your guy doesn’t go with you right away, look for the pass back. Otherwise just clear out and let me bring the ball up. This is ridiculous.”

  On the next play, Carroll inbounded the ball to Cassidy and took off do
wn the sidelines. The other guards hadn’t seen this before, and his man hesitated before following him. Cassidy hit Carroll immediately with a baseball pass and he sped up the court to take advantage of the four-on-three situation. Stiggs’s man left him at the foul line to pick up Morgan, who bounce-passed it quickly to Stiggs, who very nearly dunked it two-handed. The only reason he didn’t was that Bickerstaff disapproved of dunking as another example of hotdogging. But the effect was almost the same, as Stiggs held the ball over the rim with both hands for what seemed like several seconds, then simply dropped it straight down. It brought the small Edgewater crowd to life for the first time in the game.

  The next time, Carroll’s man stuck right to him, so Cassidy began to bring the ball up alone. The smaller guard on him was new, a transfer from Key West named Gonzales, called “Gonzo” by his teammates. Like a lot of guards Cassidy faced, Gonzo assumed that a tall guy playing guard wouldn’t be very quick. On Cassidy’s third dribble to his right, Gonzo made a lunge for the ball, expecting to get a steal and a quick layup. The ball wasn’t there. Cassidy had whipped it behind his back and was now going to his left at full speed, leaving Gonzales flat-footed.

  Palm Beach was in a man-to-man, so when Cassidy brought the ball into the front court, several players made lunges at him, but no one wanted to leave his own man completely to pick him up. Gonzales was still scrambling to get back upcourt. Cassidy did a stutter step at the top of the key, and the guard who had halfheartedly picked him up dropped off to pick up his own man, fooled by the stutter step. And there it was, right in front of Cassidy: an open lane to the hoop without a soul on him. Cassidy dribbled straight in and made a plain vanilla, missionary position, right-handed layup whose only distinction was that he was up so high that when he went to slap the backboard on the way down, half of his forearm brushed the glass, too.

  The Edgewater fans went wild and Cassidy could see the Palm Beach players exchanging worried looks with each other. It was their turn to be confused. Their lead was down to six points, and the change of momentum was so palpable you could have caught some of it in a butterfly net. Palm Beach called time-out and Cassidy jogged over to the bench, expecting a few high-fives and butt slaps. Instead, he saw downcast, worried looks from the benchwarmers, and a livid coach.

  “What did I tell you about how I want you to bring the ball up?” Bickerstaff was jabbing Cassidy in the chest with his index finger. Sweat was stinging his eyes, so Cassidy was trying to towel off, but when he looked at Bickerstaff he had a hard time understanding the question.

  “Uh, carefully?” Cassidy said. Bickerstaff slammed his clipboard to the floor. But Cassidy didn’t know what Bickerstaff was driving at, or why he was so angry that his team was suddenly back in the ball game.

  “Together! You are one member of a team, mister, and there is no ‘I’ in team.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They went back to the tandem approach and it was a disaster. Carroll kept trying to set screens, but all it did was bring his man closer so he could double-team and trap. They lost the ball three times in a row bringing it up, twice for quick layups. By halftime they were down fifteen points, and the Edgewater crowd was silent again.

  Bickerstaff was upset when they lost the ball, but not nearly as upset as he was when they were bringing the ball up successfully using their own technique. Cassidy was baffled.

  In the locker room, Bickerstaff paced back and forth, uttering platitudes and generalizations. “We’ve got to do a better job of protecting the ball” was one. “Keep your hands up on defense,” another. There was nothing about dealing with Palm Beach’s shifting defenses, nothing about how they were supposed to get the ball up when the opposing guards were trapping and stealing them blind.

  The year before, Coach Cinnamon would have had five or six specific things for them to work on in the second half: “Joe, your man isn’t hurting us long, so try sagging back to help Randleman out with his big guy—he’s killing us in the key,” or “Cassidy, your man can’t go to his left for love nor money, so overplay the hell out of him.”

  With a sinking heart, Cassidy began to realize something. Bob Bickerstaff had been successful in junior high school, where the challenge had been to motivate players, develop basic skills, and emphasize organization and teamwork. But the next level up required something else. Everyone was already motivated, already had the basic skills, and was used to working as a team. At this level you had to be able to read different situations and adjust to them. Bickerstaff not only didn’t understand this, he didn’t even realize that he didn’t understand it. As far as he was concerned, the problem was that his players were not listening to him.

  Bickerstaff’s approach was almost the opposite of Coach Cinnamon’s, his predecessor. Bickerstaff thought of players as more or less interchangeable, that the important things were running the plays correctly, paying attention to fundamentals and, of course, not hotdogging or showing off. And to Bickerstaff, showing off could mean almost anything that wasn’t a fifteen-foot set shot or a straight two-handed bounce pass. He seemed to barely tolerate the most common shot in the modern game because when he played in college in the ’40s, the jump shot didn’t exist. He wasn’t crazy about underhanded layups either, though Cassidy knew for an absolute fact that they were easier to control and far more accurate than the old-fashioned overhand method.

  Now another puzzling thing began to make sense: Cassidy had noticed that Bickerstaff was thrilled that their twelfth man, Dougie Arbogast, still shot an old-fashioned two-handed set shot. It wasn’t all that accurate, and he didn’t have a prayer of getting it off against an opponent who was half paying attention, but Bickerstaff seemed to light up when the kid was out there practicing this completely outdated, useless shot. Strangely enough, though the kid barely made the team, he seemed to be Bickerstaff’s favorite player.

  Cassidy had to face facts: Robert Leroy Bickerstaff wasn’t a very good basketball coach.

  * * *

  Nothing improved much in the second half. Sensing vulnerability, Palm Beach put on a full-court zone press, so at least Cassidy didn’t have to worry about who was going to bring the ball up and how he was going to do it. The whole team was now involved in the process, and since that was something they had had to deal with the previous year, they were fairly adept at it. But the offense continued to sputter until Cassidy had finally had enough. During a break while Stewart was shooting a pair of foul shots, Cassidy pulled Morgan and Stiggs over to him.

  “Enough of this shit. Carroll, you go to the wing on Stiggs’s side. Stiggs, you go to the high post and tell Randleman to go to low post and roam the baseline. Tell Stewart to stay put.”

  “Like last year? One-three-one?” Carroll said, brightening.

  “Exactly. Clue Stewart in.”

  The next time up the floor, after studying the defense for a few seconds, Cassidy signaled for a zone offense. He dribbled to the right wing, where Morgan released and went baseline. Randleman came from low post out to the right corner and Cassidy passed it to him, but the zone adjusted and he was covered. He passed back to Cassidy, who whipped it out to Stewart, top of the key. He passed it down to the opposite corner where Stiggs had set a screen that Morgan used to hang up the baseline defensive man. He was just turning toward the basket when the ball arrived. The zone didn’t adjust fast enough and he buried the short jump shot.

  Bickerstaff immediately called time-out.

  “What the hell in God’s green earth was that?” The veins were standing out on his forehead, his skin color now approximating his hair.

  “Coach, it’s just the wheel offense, but starting from one guard in front,” said Cassidy.

  “The wheel offense is a zone offense. They are in a man-to-man!”

  Cassidy could see the looks being exchanged around the huddle, but clearly no one was going to speak up.

  “Coach, it’s a matchup zone, so it starts off looking like a man-to-man,” Cassidy said. “Didn’t you see when Carro
ll released and went backdoor? His man didn’t go with him. It’s a zone, but disguised. They’ve been doing this to us the whole game.”

  Now Bickerstaff was mad for an entirely different reason. He was mad now because he was being shown up in front of his entire team. Cassidy knew this, but he also didn’t know what else he could do but point out the obvious. They were in the process of losing to a team they had beaten twice the year before, by twenty-two and twenty-six points, when Palm Beach had been a considerably better team. Edgewater was just plain beating itself. It was the most frustrated Cassidy had ever been playing sports.

  Bickerstaff looked around the huddle, still furious. He put his finger back into Cassidy’s sternum.

  “Run the offense the way we practiced it,” he said. “And don’t take the fast break if it isn’t there!”

  Cassidy stumbled back onto the floor, wondering what the hell that meant. How could you tell if a fast break was “there” if you didn’t bring the ball up the floor quickly and look for an opening? Stiggs had connected with Cassidy several times for easy buckets by hauling down the rebound and immediately looking downcourt. Cassidy or Morgan would run a post route to the basket and Stiggs would hit them perfectly with a leading baseball pass. But how would they know if that fast break was “there” if they didn’t make the attempt in the first place?

  Cassidy’s head was spinning, and he would have been the first to admit that he played terribly for the next several minutes. But then, so did everyone else. They were used to looking to Cassidy for direction, but he didn’t have a clue now. Carroll tried to take over, but he was inexperienced as well as equally baffled by the situation.

  Finally, after another confusing huddle before the last quarter started, down by eighteen points, Cassidy threw caution to the wind and just started playing the way he knew how to play. He motioned Carroll down to the wing again and took over as point guard and brought the ball up himself. As soon as the other team put up a shot, Cassidy and Carroll flared out on opposite sides of the floor and took off for the opposite goal, looking for a long pass. They were playing like the team they had been the year before. Everything started flowing naturally as they all reverted to something they knew well.