$3 Million Turnover

by Richard Curtis

  There it was: The Fantasy. Now I had my instructions and the path was clear. “They’re almost there now. All it will take is—well, a Richie Sadler.”

  “Oh, this is doing wonders for his humility,” Sis groaned.

  It was too bad, but for the moment Sis would have to be sacrificed. “Darling,” I said, “the day your kid brother dribbled his first basketball he sealed his fate. Unless he’s prepared to give up the game completely, there’s only one direction he can go, and that’s to the pinnacle. If I get to be his agent I’ll do all I can to keep his head from swelling, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to get used to his attracting more attention than Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.”

  Sadler studied me respectfully. I had spoken in terms that fulfilled his astronomical aspirations. But his eyes were still clouded with indecision. “Let me ask you a plain question, Bolt. Why should you be Richie’s agent instead of any of the fifty other people we’ve talked to?”

  I’d been afraid he’d ask that. I looked into my brandy glass for an answer. I found brandy in it. “You know what, Mr. Sadler? I don’t know why, myself. The best I can tell you is, I’m as good as anybody else.”

  There was an eerie silence, not just at the table but, it seemed, throughout the restaurant as if no one could believe I wouldn’t lay on just a little bullshit to land this client. Then Trish slashed the air with her hand. “He’s better than anybody else, Mr. Bolt. He can not only swing a deal as big as any of those other guys but he has something most of them don’t even know the meaning of.”

  “What’s that?” Sadler asked.

  “Compassion.”

  I gulped. “Come on, Trish, nobody wants to hear about that.”

  She talked right over me. “Would you like to know why Dave isn’t rolling in money? Because he gives most of it away. I can name ten of his clients who would be up the creek without a paddle if Dave hadn’t advanced them money, or loaned it, or simply given it to them. He cares what happens to his boys, Mr. Sadler. That’s something money can’t buy.”

  Trish’s peroration echoed in the well of silence that ensued, and I held my breath waiting for something to happen. Trish downed her brandy in one shot and looked at me nervously as Richie and mommy and daddy and sis exchanged searching glances and seemed to be determining something by that magical intuitive process that close families have.

  At length Mrs. Sadler made the only non-shopping reference she’d expressed during the entire evening. “I think that’s nice, that Mr. Bolt cares.”

  It was so ludicrous I almost laughed, but apparently it was an articulation of something much more profound than I had imagined, for the next thing I knew Davis Sadler was saying, “Is your office near here?”

  Trying to maintain some semblance of cool, I said, “A short cab ride away.”

  “Maybe we should continue this discussion up there.”

  “I’ll call for the check,” I said, trying not to sound delirious.

  Chapter II

  “Is there anything else I can do for you folks?” I asked, handing Trish the executed letter of agreement and directing her to put it in the safe. “Theater tickets? Or perhaps you’d like to take in a Yankee game?

  The women, content with the next day’s shopping spree, shrugged, and Davis Sadler said no thanks, he had some other business to attend to, but Richie scuffed the carpet with his size 475 shoe and said, “I have a kind of freaky request, Mr. Bolt.”

  No perversion is too vile for my new client, I said to myself. He likes little boys, I’ll fix him up with my nephew. “What’s that?”

  He gave a nervous staccato laugh. “Well, I brought my sneakers with me, and . . .”

  I gasped. “You want to play basketball?”

  “Up in Harlem.”

  “Harlem? Ah.” For connoisseurs of basketball, the finest games next to those on the professional courts are to be found in ghetto schoolyards. Almost every great black pro got his start in the half-court one-on-ones or three-on-threes played year-round in playgrounds in every kind of weather short of blizzard, and many pros play there for fun or practice or run clinics and tournaments during the off-season.

  “I’ve played with a lot of black guys in college, but they all say if I want to know what the game’s all about, I should try my luck in a Harlem schoolyard.” He looked at me apologetically. “There’s not much of a ghetto in Evanston...”

  “I’ll pick you up at 10 tomorrow morning,” I said. “Bring your sneakers and some Band-Aids, but leave your ‘white’ bag at the hotel.”

  The next morning, Saturday, was a gorgeous May Day, the sycamores that shade the city’s sidewalks glowing a bright chartreuse in the full flush of spring.

  The St. Regis Hotel was rather scandalized as Richie and I ambled through its gilded lobby dressed in faded jeans, T-shirts and sneakers. We could have taken my car or a taxi but that would have been inappropriate, so we walked down 55th Street to Madison Avenue and caught a No. 2 bus uptown. I pointed out some of the more elegant shops along the way, but the closer we got to 96th Street, the dividing line between “downtown” and “uptown,” the shabbier things looked. We passed Mount Sinai Hospital and plunged into teeming, garbage-strewn East Harlem. The bus turned up 110th Street, skirting the northern boundary of Central Park and redeeming us from squalor for a short while. Then it made a right at Seventh Avenue. “Welcome to Harlem,’’ I said.

  We got off the bus near 130th Street and walked toward a large blacktop schoolyard on the corner. Needless to say, Richie was the object of many stares and whispers. I wasn’t particularly uptight, but I thought Richie might be. “Walk tall, son,” I said.

  “It would be hard for me to walk any other way, Mr. Bolt,” he said under his breath.

  Richie seemed visibly to relax as the drumming of basketballs and the sproing of vibrating hoops and the blare of rock music grew louder. We came to a chicken wire fence with torn gaps wide enough to drive a taxi through. At the moment the yard was occupied by half a dozen scrappy half-court games played by twelve-and thirteen-year-olds, but in one corner some very tall and muscular adults were warming up and a knot of spectators was forming around them. Many heads turned as we stepped through the fence, and in the ensuing buzz I heard Richie’s name mentioned several times. But our only greeting was a collective stare of curiosity. I searched the yard for some face I knew, and after a moment spied the one in particular I’d been hoping to find. My eyes caught his and he gave me a big smile as he pushed through the little crowd.

  “That’s Tatum Farmer I was telling you about,” I said to Richie as we met my friend halfway. Tatum was a tall, well-built dude, almost bald but with a ruff of shiny black hair around his head and a fulsome brushy mustache that hadn’t been affected by aging the way his head had been. He was wearing orange shorts and a faded blue-and-orange sweatshirt that said, “Property of Syracuse University.” When he grinned he displayed a bright gold cap on one of his front teeth. Tatum was one of my oldest friends, going back to college days when we’d beaten the other’s brains out in the 1960 Cotton Bowl, Syracuse winning over the Longhorns, 23-14. He was a terrific all-around athlete, but after a couple of years in professional football and a few more with the old American Basketball League, he’d dropped out and gotten involved in community work. Aside from being one of the nicest and most dedicated men you’d ever want to know, he’d introduced me to a lot of prospects who eventually became my clients.

  “What’s happenin’, Lightning?” he said, slapping my palm and referring to me by one of my many nicknames. I’ve been called “Thunder,” “Blue,” and the other inevitable nicknames that combine with the last name Bolt. I was also called “Sleeper” when I was in high school, and “Bum” when I left the Dallas Cowboys for a two-year plunge into the bottom of a bourbon bottle.

  “How you doin’, Tatum?”

  “Come to play some basketball with the
brothers, have you?”

  “I thought I might if you got some burnt-out cases I can keep up with.”

  “Aw, bullshit, Dave, you can hold your own with any teen-age hot dog out here.” He looked up at my companion. “Here’s a kid looks just like Richie Sadler.”

  “That’s who it is,” I said.

  “Hello, Wings,” Tatum said, extending his hand. “You sure were something else in that North Carolina semifinal. Next day I had six or eight kids down here trying to imitate that left-handed fadeaway you done in the third period.”

  “I’m not sure I could do it again myself,” Richie said. “The fact is, I was off-balance and somebody was clinging to my right wrist... Any chance of my getting into a game?”

  “Are you kidding? It would be an honor. Too bad you weren’t here last week. We had Hawk and Clyde down here. Good God Almighty, they made the asphalt smoke!”

  Richie’s eyes widened. “Connie Hawkins and Walt Frazier? Oh wow!”

  Tatum smiled. “You’d best quit oh-wowing, son, you’re gonna be playing against the likes of them next year. Anyway, ain’t nobody here today. Just some good amateurs. Should be sittin’ ducks for the Great White Hope.”

  The way Tatum said it, with a warm, teasing smile, no one could mistake it for antagonism. But it did serve to remind Richie he was in for more than his usual quota of thrown elbows, knees and hips as some of the bloods tried to make their reps by taking him down.

  “I don’t see any sitting ducks,” Richie said, surveying the men warming up.

  “Oh, they’ll make you sweat some,” Tatum replied.

  “Got anyone interesting you want me to see?” I asked him as we walked onto the court.

  “As a matter of fact, there is. We’ll be playing with him today. Name of Timmie Lee. That’s him.”

  He nodded at a sullen kid with an extravagant natural and a tall, beanpole body. With his huge hands and feet he looked like an awkward puppy, but if he grew into them the way a puppy grows into its oversized paws, this was going to be one heckuva big human being. As it was he stood out strikingly against the several adults practicing under the backboard.

  “How much of him is hair?” I asked Tatum.

  “Everything but 6-4. Look at him move, Dave. Lookit, lookit.” Timmie had just sliced through an imaginary crowd of defenders, faked a left-handed layup and caromed a right-handed shot.

  “I like him,” I said.

  “Damn right you like him, and you’ll be happy to have 10 percent of him one of these days. But I wish you’d talk to him.”

  “That’s not ethical.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean, well, I’m worried about him.”

  “Drugs?”

  “No, thank God. But he’s fallin’ in with the wrong type of people.”

  Before Tatum could explain, his friends got on him to get the game started. We wedged through the crowd of spectators, which was now considerable, and Tatum did the introductions. A couple of the guys I’d played with before, but most of them I didn’t know. Richie was greeted respectfully but not overenthusiastically. He may have been a national figure, but up here, as the saying goes, that don’t mean shit. A man has to prove himself all over again when he plays in a Harlem schoolyard, and every one of these guys could boast of having outscored or out-rebounded or outfought or outhustled men making as much as $100,000 a year playing professional basketball. It was common to hear cocky ghetto ballplayers boast, “Maybe he leads the league, but he didn’t show me nuthin’ out here.”

  Sides were chosen and Richie and I ended up on opposing teams. Timmie Lee, the kid Tatum was so high on, was on my side. He seemed incapable of standing still. He paced and shuffled and jitterbugged nervously waiting for the game to begin, like a boxer anticipating the bell. “Take it easy, my man, you’ll wear out your sneakers before we begin,” I told him. He looked at me humorlessly and said nothing.

  It was a full-court, five-on-five, 21-point game. No referee, of course. Disputes were to be settled by a combination of the honor system and rough justice. Oddly enough, it works most of the time. People who think of the ghetto as a hotbed of lawlessness ought to watch a schoolyard basketball game.

  The game started off a little pokily, with the two sides cautiously feeling each other out, finding the range and getting a sense of what the opposition could and could not do. Timmie Lee was assigned to guard Richie and came on like a fighting bantam, covering him with flailing hands and ever-shifting feet. Richie played woodenly for the first few minutes, and in fact seemed dazzled and intimidated by Timmie. He passed off a lot and preferred to shoot from the outside rather than risk a drive. On offense Timmie very decidedly outhustled my new, client, using his needle-sharp elbows to barge past Richie for layups. We jumped out to a 7-3 lead, two of our points the contribution of yours truly on not-half-bad jumpers from the corner over the outstretched hands of Tatum Farmer.

  Richie, sweating heavily in the close, climbing late-morning heat, threw off his shirt, revealing a number of nasty red bruises on the fair skin of his chest and arms. He’d taken a lot of licks already and the game was still young. Yet he’d refused to call even flagrant fouls or get overly physical himself, I think because he was loath to win on chickenshit calls or cheap shots. I admired that, but when he continued holding, back I began to wonder about him. His teammates began feeding to Bubba Norris, their captain, who was a head shorter than Richie but unafraid of plowing through a gauntlet of angry hands. Norris kept them almost on a par with us and after about 10 minutes we were ahead by only 2 points.

  We took a break at 11 points and I listened to the murmurs in the crowd. They were distinctly critical and even contemptuous of Richie and I felt embarrassed for him. I knew he was holding back, but putting myself in his place I could easily see how a white giant playing in the most physical game of his life in front of a rabid and racially partisan crowd might feel more than a little at sea. One remark floated out of the perimeter of spectators and I know Richie heard it, for he jerked his head as if stung by a hornet. “Timmie Lee’s blowin’ the white dude away.” It was followed by unsuppressed chortles and handclaps, and Richie’s face reddened. He looked at me with bewildered eyes.

  Timmie Lee heard it too and darted a look of triumph at his supporters. When play resumed he came out doing a kind of Ali shuffle, clearly intending to humiliate his opponent.

  That was a mistake.

  Richie’s lips pursed angrily and his eyes narrowed with indignation. I realized that he’d been dogging it out of fear of taking advantage of amateurs and kids. It had just dawned on him that they had no similar compunctions. He had just discovered the difference between the game they play in Evanston, III and the one they play on Seventh Avenue and 130th Street, New York City. In the former, you want to win, in the latter, you have to. He’d learned what he’d come here to learn, and now he was ready to play basketball.

  He took a deep breath and gave a sharp shake of the head, and I could almost hear the hang-ups clattering out onto the blacktop. He said something to his teammates.

  They brought the ball down and after working it around for a while Bubba Norris fed it high to Richie. In just two gigantic strides he roared into the keyhole like the Santa Fe Chief and stuffed the ball so hard and true it bounced right up through the netless rim and soared into the sky like a pop foul. With cool disdain, not so much as glancing at the awed crowd, he trotted down the court and waited for Timmie.

  We worked the ball down but unexpectedly, Richie came up and aggressively held Timmie far outside, and no matter how the kid wriggled and doodled and feinted and faked, he couldn’t get in and even had trouble passing the ball off with Richie’s arms surrounding him like a wraparound windshield. He finally got off a bounce pass but it was poor and Tatum stole it. Tatum looked up and there was Richie on the fast break, under our basket faster than thought. Tatum hit him high with a baseball
pass and in one motion he spun and stuffed the ball so hard you’d have thought it would shatter.

  We tested Richie on defense again, just to make sure the last time hadn’t been a fluke. It hadn’t been. He absolutely smothered Timmie, and was so overwhelmingly big he blocked over picks as if they simply didn’t exist. On one play he slid off Timmie to guard me, and I found myself enveloped in his shadow feeling like the hare who’s just realized he’s about to be an eagle’s afternoon snack. I passed off to a teammate but now the rest of Richie’s team was pumping adrenalin and they muffled us like a velvet curtain.

  We started shooting—and missing—from the outside, and rebound after rebound went to Richie. His team kept funneling the ball into him and he scored practically at will. It was a breathtaking display. Faking a broken shoelace, I called time out.

  “That ain’t no ballplayer,” one of my teammates said shaking his head, “that’s an act of God.”

  Mike Gilchrist, our captain, said, “We’ll have to triple-team him.”

  “He’ll just pass it off,” I pointed out.

  “No he won’t,” said Timmie.

  “Why not?”

  “Cause he out to prove somepin’.”

  I had to hand it to the kid. He had a lot of smarts.

  “Let’s try it” Mike said. “And on offense we just gotta keep shootin’ from the outside—but sharper. And set up deeper picks, dig?”

  I “repaired” my shoelace and we brought the ball down, trailing by a score of 17-14. I’d been having some luck, four baskets’ worth, from the corners, and when the ball came to me I set up fast and dunked a jumper. We rushed down and Timmie, Mike, and I captured Richie in an unyielding pocket 15 or 20 feet from the basket. Now we’d see if Timmie’s psychology worked.