Longshot

by Lance Allred

  I walked back up the steps I had walked so many times before, and looked back down to the floor, imagining the band’s songs that rang out come game time, and the rush I felt so many times when the crowds roared. I did love that place.

  Then the voices in my head came and cackled at me, telling me the crowd had never cheered for me and that I, like my time at the University of Utah, was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

  18

  “Laaaaance, this is Joe Cravens, coach at Weber State.” I have always wondered how a man from Indiana, a state bordering the Great Lakes, somehow managed to have a southern drawl. Coach Cravens in the early 1990s had been an assistant for Coach Majerus at the University of Utah and had a number of horror stories to share with me. He wanted me to play for him, but I was concerned about the fact that Weber State University was only thirty minutes from the University of Utah, and from Coach Majerus.

  I wanted to be far away from my problems and ignore them, somehow believing that if I ignored them long enough, they’d go away. I was emotionally unwell and traumatized, and I felt that some change, albeit just a change in proximity to home, would help me escape some of the demons in my head. I didn’t know yet that it makes no difference, as it’s all in your head and your head goes with you wherever you do, as far as Timbuktu.

  I visited Weber a few times and played pickup with the team. I played well when I was there, and my strengths worked well with the strengths of the other guys there. But I made an effort to push these things out of my mind, propelled by my irrational thoughts that I needed to be far, far away.

  In my effort to run away from my troubles, I thought about going to the University of Montana, Dad’s alma mater. I wanted to move back up there, live with Pax and Sam, and be far away from Utah. But the coach of Montana didn’t think I was worthy of a scholarship.

  One night when Andy Jenson, the assistant coach at Weber, called me just to check in, I panicked and “dumped” him: with my wits gone, I insanely told him that I was turning down their scholarship—the only Division I scholarship that was being offered to me—to pay my own way and walk on at Montana. It was a ridiculous decision, one that only an unstable and unhealthy person like me would have made.

  Mom and Dad held their breath as I hung up the phone. I walked out of their house sobbing, knowing it was the wrong choice. But I was terrified of going to Weber because it was only a half hour away from the U. From Coach Majerus.

  I drove to a friend’s apartment, and just as I arrived, Coach Rupp called me on my new cell phone—my very first cell, which I had bought on impulse; I had no idea how I was going to finance it once my scholarship checks ended.

  “Lance,” he said sternly, without any intro. “You need to go to Weber. Your parents just called me and told me you turned down the scholarship. They’re a good school, a good team. And they want you. And you’ll play. And you’ll play a lot. Get back on the phone, call them, and accept the scholarship.”

  He hung up, and I, forever his soldier, complied.

  “’Bout damn time,” Coach Cravens said with his southern drawl.

  I never filed a complaint of discrimination or a lawsuit against Rick Majerus. And although some people have reported otherwise, Majerus was never absolved of his treatment toward me; he was only cleared of any wrongdoing.

  As I mentioned earlier, my mother was getting her master’s in special education, learning about the rights and laws protecting those with disabilities. This led her to file a letter of complaint with the U about Majerus’s behavior. She took this action apart from me. I chose to not have any part in the process. I wanted to stay far away from Majerus, as I had studied enough history to know that coups d’état rarely succeed if you try to carry them off in-house, relying on the processes of the very institution that is supporting the ruler.

  Mom even mailed a copy of the letter to Jon Huntsman, the generous philanthropist whose very name adorned the arena I played in at the U. Jon Huntsman has a son who is challenged in many ways. His name is Markey, a great guy. He is very active and has a lot of hobbies. He holds down a job and is very responsible, considering his challenges. The fact that Jon Huntsman, who had a son who has battled and overcome limitations throughout his life, would have a friend in Rick Majerus, who belittled one of his own players to hide his own deficiencies, was too much for my parents. When the whole incident erupted, Huntsman’s silence, as Mom said in her letter to him, was deafening.

  Word was spreading around that summer and early fall as I prepared to go to Weber about some of the things that had been said and done to me, by people in the know. Despite several interview requests, I kept my silence.

  The athletic director at the U, after receiving my mother’s letter of complaint, invited my parents up to his office. He said he understood and empathized with my mother and her plight, and that he was sad to see me go. But the truth of the matter was that Majerus won basketball games. As long as the team won, most of the fans were happy and didn’t want to concern themselves with the tactics he used to get those wins.

  Within my first month at Weber State, I received a phone call from the investigative committee at the University of Utah in regard to possible harassment and discrimination. After all the rumors going around, the university wanted to officially put it behind them.

  I at first refrained from answering any inquiries, but finally Coach Cravens agreed to accompany me and I decided to see the investigator. I answered her questions.

  I never expected anything to be done, because it wasn’t an investigation into Majerus or his actions, as they knew what he was like. It was an investigation to see whether the school was liable for a lawsuit. It was farcical to say the least—apocryphal would be more like it—and very well crafted. The university’s fears of liability allayed, the athletic department could release a statement, to whoever might ask about the incident, that Majerus was “cleared of any wrongdoing.” He was by no means absolved of misconduct.

  It was insulting, really, that the university thought I didn’t know what they were doing. But they were not the first, nor the last, in this world to pass me off as a naive deaf jock.

  Shortly after I committed to Weber, I was invited to take part in the World Deaf Olympics in Athens, Greece. Coach Cravens felt it was a good idea, since I was ineligible to play the next season and would have to sit it out as a redshirt, due to NCAA rules about transfers.* I finally agreed to go to Greece, being the historian that I am, intrigued by the possibility of seeing Athens. Because I could speak and read lips properly enough to survive in the mainstream, I was unsure how this group of deaf athletes would accept me, as most of them depended on sign language to communicate—something I wasn’t gifted at.

  But six-foot-eleven transcends language and culture barriers; they were happy to have me on the team. They helped make me comfortable and kept telling me to just relax, that I would pick up on all the sign language eventually, which I did. So much so that I stopped wearing my hearing aids after the second day.

  It was so liberating not to have to wear my hearing aids or wonder whether someone was speaking to me or if I heard them properly. Instead, I could sit in my natural state of silence and just read the body language of my teammates and coaches. Of all languages, body language is the greatest form of communication, whether people realize it or not. Living in silence, I learned to read people and their body language. People will tell you a whole story without saying a word if you just watch them.

  It was a whole new experience to just stare down at my hearing aids in the morning and spitefully leave them behind when I walked out the hotel door. I spent my days happily letting things happen around me. For the first time in a long while I was able to sleep easy, free from anxiety. I hadn’t realized just how much each of my days, even a simple one, was a big stress inducer for me. Just having to put my hearing aids in, and daring to interpret the verbal world, was a huge source of fear and stress. I was so used to it that I no longer recognized it as such
. Now that I do, I better understand why I struggle with insomnia and the fear of another day on the morrow.

  We held the best record going into tournament play, and for the first time in a long time, I was enjoying playing basketball again.

  Then I tore my medial collateral ligament, or MCL.

  It was hot and humid in Greece, and there was no air-conditioning in the gyms. While I was blocking out a guy on the Lithuanian team, he pulled me back and we both fell to the floor. My teammate got the rebound, and my team began running to the other end of the floor. I quickly got up and turned to pivot, my foot stepping on the wet spot my opponent and I had just created on the court.

  You can imagine what happened next. As I put all my weight on my back foot to launch out on a sprint, my foot slipped on the wet spot, sending all my weight onto my knee. It buckled, and I felt it tear. I screamed but then got up to finish the play and actually scored on a lob pass for a layup. Right after, I had to call a time-out as my knee was burning with searing pain unlike any I had ever felt. I had been privileged up to this point to have never had, aside from your basic jumper’s knee, an injury to my knees.

  The next day I tried to stretch and warm up the leg, and the trainer tried various taping jobs to alleviate the pain or channel the weight elsewhere. None of her methods worked. When game time came I couldn’t run or jump, no matter what I put on my knee. And so with teary eyes I watched my teammates lose to Greece by four points. I sobbed as I took the silver medal on the stand. I had let my new friends down.

  We flew home in coach, my bad knee locked up in the corner against the window. I didn’t even have the comfort of sitting in an exit-row (not aisle) seat, as it seems there are always other people who have the luxury of having nothing more to do with their time than arrive at the airport early enough to assure they have these roomy seats. The Ace bandage did a little to help, but the knee finally went numb and blue with the swelling and the change in cabin pressure, sending my leg to sleep.

  The team doctors at Weber State evaluated my knee and graded it a high level-two MCL sprain—nearly, but not quite, needing surgery. For, as much as I sprain my ankles and other joints, I’m blessed in that for some reason I heal very quickly. But I have not healed from the sorrow of not sharing a gold medal with my friends.

  19

  My redshirt year at Weber State was one of the most productive years in my basketball career. Coach Cravens sat me down at the beginning of the year and said, “I’m not going to say one word to you the entire season. You have been overcoached to the point where you don’t know how to play anymore. Just have fun each day, work hard, and teach yourself how to play again. Since you can’t play in any games, as you’re redshirting, make each practice your game, and just have fun.”

  And I did just that. I enjoyed going to the Dee Events Center for practice each day, shooting any shot I felt like shooting without consequence. Launching up three-pointers, even one from half court in a defensive conversion/fast-break drill, because I damn well felt like it. On game days Coach Cravens would have shooting competitions and games that only those who were playing that night could participate in. This didn’t hurt my feelings, as I’d sneak into the tiny weight room down the tunnel and get in a quick lift. Fifteen minutes later I’d be back and the games would still be going. I completed my shoot-around session by walking over to the bench, having myself a seat while reading USA Today, catching up on current events.

  “What’s going on, Easy Money?” Coach Cravens would say as he looked over at me, observing my casualness. To which I only shrugged and continued reading.

  When it wasn’t game day was when I came to play.

  Weber ran the table in conference, winning seventeen straight.

  Coach Cravens was named the coach of the year.

  During this year, my obsessive-compulsive disorder began to leak out away from the basketball court. I saw a counselor on campus for a few visits and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Certain words or phrases that Coach Majerus liked to use would trigger panic attacks. Plus, I was having recurring dreams, mostly of being late for practice, missing a game, or being left alone in a room with him. When I awoke in a cold sweat, I’d sit up and breathe heavily in the dark, counting to ten. I’m now at Weber State, I told myself. I play for Joe Cravens. At first this little mantra would suffice in calming me in that moment of awakening. But the dreams became more frequent, more intense, with each passing day. I had the dreams two, three, even four times a night, each time awakening and repeating, I’m now at Weber State. I play for Joe Cravens.

  By January it was a full-blown disease, rotting away my mind. If I dared to sleep, by the second or third recurring dream in a night I’d wake up, repeat my feeble mantra, and break down in tears. I was exhausted. I was so tired that I wished I could just sleep for a thousand years.

  In addition, Coach Cravens wasn’t nearly as demanding or time-consuming as Majerus, and I found myself with so much free time that I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was used to Majerus being the center of my life, this man on a pedestal whom I had to please.

  When I arrived at Weber, instead of restructuring my life, I simply looked for a replacement. I found it in the form of women. I would quickly place a girl on a pedestal and overwhelm her with my insecurities and how much I needed her approval. But for the most part, these were the wrong kind of girls—with year-round tans and baggage from past relationships that I could in no way handle.

  I was such a wreck that even if I had found a girl who was emotionally stable, she wouldn’t have been able to help me. I assumed a passive-aggressive role when dating women, intentionally overwhelming them in hopes that they’d dump me so I could stop thinking about what I needed to do to make the relationship work.

  I’d call a girl or send her a text, and when I didn’t immediately hear back from her I’d start to obsess: Should I not have called? Did I leave a bad message? Should I have left a message? Was it too short? Too long? Why hasn’t she called me back? Is she screening my calls? Do I need to call back and correct the last message? Did I do something wrong? Did I do something wrong by not doing anything at all?

  One girl I was dating had called and left me a message late at night. She said she was sad, that she missed me and was going to bed. I called her back; she didn’t answer. Was she sleeping? Yes, most likely. But my mind would begin to churn. Is she mad at me for not answering the phone? Is she screening my calls? I knew I was being ridiculous but couldn’t stop thinking about it. To calm myself, willing to risk it all for peace of mind, I went over to her house, which was dark, and woke her up by ringing the doorbell, only after I had tried throwing pennies at her window lest I wake her roommates. It scared her.

  I analyzed these situations to the nth degree, burying myself in a hole of scenarios and subscenarios that would make any normal person crazy with overload. I’d stay up all night running these scenarios in my head, recapping them and checking them again, over and over, to make sure that for every possible scenario that could go wrong, I had an out to correct it. I even drew out maps of scenario webs and kept them in folders in my closet, learning from the Russell Crowe film A Beautiful Mind that you should never leave your schemes up for anyone to see. Interesting that this was the lesson I took from the movie and not the obvious one—that if you start drawing up schemes and conspiracies, you really should get some help.

  I was so used to everything being my fault at Utah that I was stumped while at Weber when I didn’t have a problem to fix. I looked for problems that weren’t even there. As I tried to fix a problem after I had created it, I did everything within my power to solve it, to the point of lying and telling little tales that were not even worth telling and led only to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  When I was dating a girl, I wrote down scenarios of how the relationship could go, and like a stage director, I chose the script I wanted, the dialogue, the setting. It’s creepy to me now as I look back and see how nearly perfectly I m
anipulated poor, unfortunate girls into a setting that I had drawn up. So many times it went according to plan. I had a solution for everything.

  I hope you can appreciate my honesty at this moment, as it isn’t easy for me to describe just how sick and manipulative I had become. It gives me chills to realize just how effective a puppeteer I can be.

  I sank lower and lower into this world of self-inflicted perfectionism, seeking problems to fix. I began telling little lies to my family and friends. When my mom asked me what I had done that day, I, not wanting her to know I was thinking about a girl or had spent the afternoon plotting and scheming how I could single-handedly make this relationship work, would instead tell her I had gone to the store. If she then asked if I remembered to get some random thing she needed, I’d say, “Oh, yeah! It’s in my car. Just a second.”

  I’d run out to my car, race to the store, and buy whatever it was Mom was asking about. I often stopped in the middle of these episodes and just shook my head. I was finding myself in these ridiculous situations too often, because I was so paranoid that I felt I had to lie about anything and everything I was doing. I wasn’t well.

  I was exhausted mentally at practice, and my teammates, especially John Hamilton, would tell me to chill out, as I’d spaz over the slightest mistake and wouldn’t move past it. They thought I was just superintense when I was truly mentally ill.

  Schoolwork was another issue. I obsessed about making my papers perfect and would look at them and see all their flaws and finally give up, trashing them altogether. I would willingly trash a paper simply because it was never going to be perfect. Even though I knew there was no such thing as a perfect paper, that it was all in the eye of the beholder, I knew it wasn’t perfect in my eyes. And rather than receiving criticism on it, which I couldn’t handle emotionally, I opted to have no criticism at all and instead take an F.