Longshot

by Lance Allred

  10:51 a.m.

  I try, but I am weak and muster only a feeble attempt to stay awake and alert during my Intro to Psychology class.

  Psychology, what a bunch of bullshit.*

  Briefly I’m awakened and notice this hot chick across the aisle. She probably wants me. After dozing off again for about ten minutes I’m zapped awake by the professor when, during his boring Ferris Bueller–style lecture, he says the magic word sex.

  To my dismay I realize he is only generalizing male and female. I slouch back down into my seat and doze off into never-never land, my only place of comfort, knowing that practice begins in only an hour and forty minutes.

  12:15 p.m.

  I’m tying on my basketball shoes when I have a powerful flashback, way back—oh, say, fifteen minutes ago: I should’ve asked the girl for her number.

  12:16 p.m.

  Why am I so lonely?

  12:17 p.m.

  As I walk onto the floor of the Huntsman, I stand on the out-of-bounds line. Then, before crossing that fine distinct line, I take a deep breath. I exhale. I then recite Psalms 23:4: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.” I’m comforted.

  12:31 p.m.

  Coach walks onto the court and says, “Run ten sprints to get loose.” Brilliant.

  12:55 p.m.

  During a drill of defensive conversion, I set a pick for my point guard and pop out to the three-point line for spacing. My man follows me up there to the three and ignores his duty of help-side defense. Coach stops practice and yells, “Phil! Why the hell would you hug Allred on the three? Is he going to shoot a three-point? Is he a threat?”

  “If left open, yes, Coach.”

  “Bullshit! Allred, come shoot five threes.”

  I’m stunned and shocked. I step up to the line and make two out of five. (The other three—I kid you not—were in and out.)

  “See, two out of five left open, that’s horrible. Sure, he made two, but did you like those ones he made? I sure didn’t.”

  I wonder what that was supposed to mean.

  2:18 p.m.

  During another session of conversion defense, I rebound a defensive board. Then my team breaks it up the court for offense, and my wing gets spaced for an open three and shoots it. It’s missed, but alas, I’m there for the rebound. I rip the board down but am off balance and can’t find an outlet bail-out pass. So I foolishly jump again and throw a prayer skip pass across the court to my guard, who in the first place should’ve come to me beforehand and helped me rather than just stand there. I knew as well as everyone else that it was a turnover as soon as I threw it. Immediately as it left my hands I saw the play I had predicted in my mind begin to form into reality. Rather than watching the rest of my apocalypse, I ran toward the baseline ready for the sprints that Coach was going to reward me with, for I knew well that I had performed one of the dumbest actions of my basketball tenure so far. But rather than just giving me the sprints, Coach had everyone come huddle around him.

  “Sit down,” Coach says to everyone. “Lance, that was just moronic; no, idiotic; no, I can’t even begin to explain. I could’ve sworn you were a smart kid when I was recruiting you out of East, but maybe East has lower standards than everyone else. That was just ludicrous, idiotic. Mr. Idiot Man is the only thing I can call you to even grasp a glimpse of how stupid that was. Mr. Idiot Man is the only thing appropriate for this action. What a sad, sad thing: Mr. Idiot Man. Mr. Idiot Man.” All the while Coach is talking to me, he has his right middle finger pointing at me in repetitious thrusts, just the way Dad changes the stations on his car radio with his middle finger. Thank you, Coach, I say to myself. Sprints would’ve sufficed, but this was just as satisfying.

  2:31 p.m.

  I fumble an outlet pass from my guard as I’m ahead of everyone else on a fast-break conversion drill, and the ball slips from my hands and out-of-bounds. “Well done, Mr. Idiot Man!” Coach hollers from across the floor. As I looked at him for that brief moment to listen to him from across the floor, I realize I have learned how to hate.

  2:47 p.m.

  Sweat gets into my ear canal, creating pressure between my eardrums and hearing aids, and I feel the incredible urge, nay need, to yawn. I do my best to refrain, but cannot. I yawn, and Coach sees me, drawing his undivided attention: “Am I boring you, Lance? Is this boring? I’m sorry. Let’s make it more interesting. Five sprints. Go!”

  What am I supposed to say? Coach, I have a funky inner-ear condition that’s caused by the combination of my hearing aids and sweat. I have a yawning problem, people; however it isn’t due to lack of oxygen, attention deficit, or lack of sleep.

  As I run my sprints, Coach hollers at me from his seat behind one of the sideline hoops, “Up till late partying last night?”

  Me? Party? Adding to the fact that my hearing impairment makes me pretty much a vegetable in large gatherings—as I cannot decipher what someone is saying to me if there’s too much background noise or more than one person talking, because the tone shifts get tangled up and I lose the rhythm of how the person is speaking—is the fact that I’m also freakishly tall. Can you imagine what it’s like to be six-eleven, go to a party or a club, and have people just stare at you and gawk or wait for you to do some circus trick? Yeah, it’s no fun. No, Coach, I was at home reading a book last night. I remain silent.

  3:07 p.m.

  Twenty-three minutes till practice ends. I set a pick for my point guard and roll toward the lane. I receive a pass from him and am able to finish strongly with a dunk. “Hell of a play, Mr. Idiot Man!” comes Coach’s voice. Don’t know how to interpret, but don’t care.

  3:24 p.m.

  Coach stops practice, has us all huddle around him, and gives us his thought of the day: “Allred, I hope this is your only day that you have to carry the title of Mr. Idiot Man. Hopefully, you never have that embarrassing title again. That would be tragic, Mr. Idiot Man.” He shakes his head at me.

  3:30 p.m.

  Coach has a creed he lives by: The film never lies.

  Coach and I are in his office. He is berating me for a missed block-out, one that I couldn’t get to because of a defensive responsibility while covering for my teammate. He sees in my eyes that I want to attest my innocence. “Oh really?” he asks. “Should I have Eric come down and take you into the film room and show you? The film never lies. Are you sure? If I’m right, then you’ll have double sprints.”

  Seeing that there is so much more to lose than to gain and that it isn’t worth it, I decide to just accept my sprints, bitterly reflecting upon the injustice of it all but knowing that, inevitably, life in general isn’t fair.

  Coach sees that I’m still not happy and calls out, “Eric, bring down that last clip and show Lance what he did wrong and what I want from him next time. And when you two are done, Lance can run his ten sprints.”

  Coach Eric Jackson, affectionately referred to as Coach E or simply Eric, quickly obeys, takes the tape from one of two cameras that are always recording, and sprints down the steps. Why two camcorders? For this distinct purpose: while Eric and I are in the film room, another camcorder will be running unattended, and film from both camcorders will be edited, after practice, by Eric, who will then deliver the final copy to Coach at his hotel room, where Coach will watch practice from that day and pick up on any subtle things that he missed or overlooked, and then drill us about them the next day, usually before practice begins.

  Coach E shows me the film, and I was right, but it’s a lost cause. We walk back out to the court just in time to hear Coach holler, “In the film room.” We filter in and take our seats, Coach in his padded reclining chair in the middle of the room, the rest of us seated on cold metal. Coach has milk and cookies awaiting us. This is his way of showing affection. He truly does love us.

  I make the mistake of dipping an Oreo in my milk just as Coach singles me out in the film and asks, “What play is this, Lance?” And I have
no idea, because my attention is singled in on the Oreo. It’s a deadly game of indulgence versus discipline in the film room.

  But the war of indulgences is never as hostile as the one between Coach and his laser lights. Today is no exception as Coach repeats the same routine he always does. “Where is the red thingy—you know, the pointer?” Coach calls out. He has never learned to call it a laser light.

  Coach Strohm hands him the light over his shoulder. Coach fumbles with the light, and then gets irritated and hisses, “This doesn’t work.” That’s because he is pointing it in the wrong direction, but no one dares say anything. He extends his arm toward the projector screen as though this will somehow help, but all he really needs to do is turn the light around.

  Before he notices that the laser is pointing on his shirt, he impatiently tosses the device over his shoulder without looking: “Get me a new one.” This time when Coach Strohm hands him the light he is holding it before Coach in a demonstration of how to properly handle it. It’s all too reminiscent of a parent teaching a child how to hold a fork for the first time.

  To make things even more painful, Coach Majerus is also narcoleptic. Since he stays up so late watching film, he loses out on much-needed sleep. As I look over from time to time in the dark film room, I can see his eyes rolling up in the back of his head, which is tilting back, slowly, slowly. It hits that point where it lobs, jerking Coach awake. He sits up stern and rigid, at immediate attention. “Who is this!” he calls out, shining the laser light onto the projector.

  “That’s me, Coach. Lance,” I admit, always saying my name in the dark so he isn’t confused.

  “You see your stance here, Lance? You like it? Hmm? I don’t. Do you?”

  “No, Coach.”

  “That’s why I can’t play you.”

  Well, Coach, I think to myself, maybe if you hadn’t been sleeping the last two minutes of film, you would’ve seen the great defensive play I made the sequence before.

  Thursday, October 19, 2000

  12:59 p.m.

  “Jason! If any of the bigs take their eye off the ball, throw it at them!” Majerus barks as we run a team defense drill to protect a weak-side down-screen.

  Jason Shelton, a great guy, naturally upbeat and positive, is in the precarious position of harming us and is hesitant to throw the ball whenever one of us turns our head.

  “Throw it!” Majerus barks.

  He flips a ball at me, and Majerus calls Jason’s manhood into question and sends him, an assistant coach, on sprints.

  1:02 p.m.

  Jason is growing irritated that he is even in the position that he is, with Majerus barking at him from the other side of the court. His irritation soon turns to impatience, as he is no longer able to channel his anger and is now throwing rockets at us.

  1:03 p.m.

  Jason throws one at me, and I instinctively turn and catch it. Majerus tells me to now catch the ball and redo the drill. All fun and games until someone loses a hearing aid.

  This time my head isn’t turned completely away from the ball, but neither am I looking at Jason, only staring straight in front of me. Whack! The ball smashes right in my ear, perfectly, so that it compresses my hearing aid deep into my ear canal. I drop to the ground like a bag of potatoes and dig into my ear to yank my embedded hearing aid out.

  1:04 p.m.

  Practice has stopped, and Majerus barks from the other side of the court, sitting on the back weights of one of the side baskets, “What now?!”

  Jason, holding a ball against his side, his other hand gesturing toward himself, sheepishly calls out, “This was my fault, Coach!” He kneels down to whisper to me, “Lance, I’m so sorry,” his southern accent dragging the sorry out a good two seconds. I’m not mad at Jason, mostly because I’m too dazed. If anything, his error has gotten me out of this ridiculous drill.

  It turned out I received a concussion from the hit, and my hearing aid was severely damaged. The university would in turn fund me a new set of hearing aids—my first-ever digital ones. They were so nice. They opened up a whole new world to me, a world of sounds that I never knew existed. The jump from analog to digital was euphoric. All it took was for me to take one in the noggin.

  15

  Following a preseason tournament in Puerto Rico, the team was called in for a meeting with Coach Majerus. He hobbled into the film room and sat on the table, wearing his usual cotton shorts, displaying his Kodiak calves, his knee wrapped up in an Ace bandage. He announced that his mother had cancer and he would be taking a leave of absence. Coach Hunsaker was to be the interim coach.

  I didn’t play much that year—sparingly at best, for maybe five minutes a game if at all. My best game that freshman year was against Washington State, when I scored eight points and fouled out in ten minutes. And I was OK with that most of the time, except for when Hunsaker would use me as motivation against my other teammates, threatening to bench them and play me, though he never did.*

  Things got under way quickly in the off-season when Majerus returned. He had scheduled us for a European trip during the summer. Once finals were over, we were practicing, preparing for the trip. We practiced two times a day for ten straight days. On top of all of this, there were only eight players. And with eight players, it means more reps, more activity, fewer breaks.

  I ended up herniating a disc in my lower back, the L5 vertebra, halfway through the training camp. I was undercut in a drill while going up for a rebound and landed on my butt, but the pain wasn’t sudden. It was later in the night that I felt the swelling come. My whole left leg was numb, my pelvis was swollen, and my genitals ached constantly. I could neither lie, sit, nor stand.

  That final week of training camp, Chris Burgess’s recurring back issues flared up as well. Even Majerus went down with a back problem. He was working all of us, even himself, too hard. It was quite strange to be lying on the table next to him in the rehab facility.

  When it came time for us to pack up and leave, the doctors said my back might heal in time for me to at least play in the latter part of the European tour. I was relieved, as European history is my favorite field and I’d never been to Europe.*

  Majerus didn’t make the trip. Not only was his back bothering him, but he had suffered a large gash on his lower leg. Instead of risking serious infection to the wound while flying, Majerus opted to stay back, leaving Coach Hunsaker in charge once again. This time it ended up being quite a pleasant experience. I daresay that if Majerus had gone on the trip, we would’ve practiced more. Instead, we had a great time.

  All that really needs to be said about the trip is that I won the karaoke contest at a local club in the Canary Islands one night with my rendition of Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me,” and that I also had my first screwdriver.

  There’s a European custom that the hosting team will hold a banquet and feed the visiting team. After our game was over, we went to the banquet. The problem was that I was so thirsty and just dying for a drink, waiting impatiently for liquid to come out, and then voilà! A huge pitcher of orange juice! Yay! I ran up to it and poured myself a big glass and downed it like a camel. I quickly began to pour myself another, but then I slowly started to feel a tingle in my throat, which soon turned into a burning sensation, as though Bengay had just been stuffed down there. Thus I had my first screwdriver. I was nauseous the rest of the dinner.

  Even if I wasn’t LDS, I still wouldn’t drink alcohol. I actually suffer from hyperhidrosis, which means that I sweat too much. I sweat from my head and neck more than anyone I have ever met. I don’t really sweat more in my armpits than the next person, but my head is a geyser. And with my lifestyle—always training, conditioning, and playing basketball—I sweat, and sweat some more. My shirt will be soaked when I’m done with a workout, and seven-eighths of it will be from my head, which I will wipe with my shirt. I’m getting lost in the gross details of my physiology here, but where I’m getting is that I get dehydrated very, very easily. And, being a big man at
six-eleven, I need a lot to keep me hydrated.

  I enjoyed my first European trip, but not so much the hepatitis I brought back with me.

  A week after we returned from Europe, camp season began at the U. The dreaded Big Man–Guard Camp was coming up, and this would be my fifth straight year either attending or demonstrating. The mere thought of the camp inspired fear and a cold sweat in me. The camp was preceded during the week by a team camp, where various high school teams from across the country would come to gain tutelage from Majerus as well as gauge their own progress for the upcoming fall season. The only good news was that Coach Rupp had been hired onto the staff as an assistant coach. I was so thrilled to get to work with him again, but sadly, we really never saw a lot of each other, as Majerus usually had him busy with film or working out other guys.

  The very first day of camp, Majerus was right on me. I actually appreciated it: as the saying went, “Coach Majerus rides hardest those he thinks will be good.” Majerus walked out and called me out to the court.

  “Post position, Lance. Arm bars high.” I obeyed. “Throw him the ball. Call for it.”

  “Ball!” I yelled. I caught it, meeting it with two hands.

  “Always meet the ball,” Majerus said, turning to his audience. “Check over your shoulder to see what the defense and your other teammates are doing. Drop step.” I obeyed. “Eyes not up soon enough. Five sprints. Go!”

  I ran over to the sideline to begin my sprints as Majerus talked to his audience: “We run sprints here, down and back being one sprint, not only to help discipline, but as a form of conditioning as well, as we spend so much more time learning than we do running in the flow of practice. Lance will run them hard, or else he will run some more.”