Ultimate Sports

by Donald R. Gallo

  “No—they’re outmuscling us,” Coach retorts. “Position! We’ve got to get position and stay planted. Like Sun did right away when she came in—get planted and draw the foul.”

  I play it very cool and do not change expressions.

  The coach heads to the chalkboard and begins to draw X’s and O’s. “They might be big, but they’re slow. In the third quarter I want us to run, run, run—fast-break them until their butts are dragging.”

  “Or ours,” Rachel mutters.

  “You don’t want to play hard, we’ve got people who do!” Coach barks.

  Rachel zips her lips, stares at the ceiling.

  • • •

  During the halftime shoot I scan the crowd. Still nobody. I feel something inside me harden further, and center itself; it’s a flash of what life will be like when I go away to college, when I’ll truly be on my own. Just me. No family whatsoever. Just me shlumping along through life.

  On the bench as the third quarter begins, for some reason I finally get focused. I sit next to the coach; I chatter out encouragement. Our fast break begins to work. After they score or we get a rebound, Rachel rips the ball to one side or the other while Jenny, our point guard, breaks up the center. She takes the pass at the half-court line, then does her thing—either driving the lane or dishing off to the trailers. We miss some easy layups but still pull within one point.

  Big Falls calls time-out. Our subs are ecstatic, but the starting five stand bent over, hands on knees, wheezing.

  “Let’s try to keep the fast break working through the end of this quarter,” Coach Brown says, “and then we’ll figure out something else.”

  Our starters manage a weak “Go Fliers” and trudge back onto the floor.

  In the final two minutes of the third quarter I watch as Big Falls shuts down the fast break like… like a bicycle lock. Simple, really—just some pressure on the out-of-bounds first pass, plus coverage on the sides—and we do not score again. But I have been watching them on offense. Nearly every time down the court, Pimple Shoulders rears up inside, then looks for the pass from the point guard—who has taken very few shots from the perimeter, including zero three-point attempts.

  “Zone,” I say to myself. “In the fourth quarter we should go zone.”

  Coach Brown looks to me. Then back to the action. He strokes his chin.

  At the final quarter break he kneels on the floor. “Take a load off,” he commands, and the starting five slump into chairs. He points, one by one, to the next five, and we check in. Back in the huddle, Coach Brown has drawn some scrawling maps of X’s and O’s. “Zone defense,” he says, with a wink to me. “Let’s collapse inside and make them shoot from the perimeter. Make them prove they can hit the jumpers. But box out and get that rebound,” he adds. “We’ve got to have the ball to score.”

  We fire up and trot onto the floor. For some reason I look to the middle of the bleachers—and see my father. His briefcase rests beside him and his gray suit coat is folded neatly over it.

  “Zone! Box and one!” the Big Falls point guard calls out immediately, and begins to move the ball crisply side to front to side. It’s clear they’ve had a zone thrown at them before. Still bench-stiff, we have trouble keeping up with the passes, and their point guard takes an uncontested shot from within the key—but bricks it. Wendy rips off the rebound and we move the ball cautiously upcourt. Our second-team guards have no future with the Harlem Globetrotters in terms of ballhandling, but we do know how to pick-and-roll.

  I fake to the baseline, then break up and set a screen for Shanna. She rubs off her girl—who hits me, blindside, hard—as I roll to the inside. I’m looking for the ball, and suddenly, thanks to a nifty bounce pass, it’s right at my chest. I clamp on it, take one dribble, brace for a hammer blow from Pimple Shoulders, and go up for the lay-in. I feel the oncoming air rush of a large-body (the image of a 747 jetliner on a crash course with a seagull flashes through my mind) but don’t alter my flight path. The ball feels good off my fingertips. As my feet touch down and I open my eyes, the ball is settling through the net and Pimple Shoulders is skidding along the hardwood runway and there is major cheering from our bench. Me? I am just happy to be heading upcourt with all my feathers intact.

  The Big Falls outside shooting continues to bang hard off the rim, and we continue to box out and get the rebound play and score on basic pick-and-rolls. We go up 42-38, and our bench is screaming and bouncing up and down in their chairs.

  But Big Falls gets smart: They throw a zone defense at us. Not great passers, and worse outside shooters, we turn the ball over three times; barely fifty seconds later, Big Falls is up by two, 44-42, and Coach Brown is screaming for a time-out. By the time the ref stops the clock there is less than three minutes left in the game.

  “Okay, good job, second team,” he calls, pointing for the first team to check back in. “Stay with the zone defense, but let’s run the fast break.”

  We all clap once, together, and send the starters back onto the floor.

  “Nice work out there,” the coach says to me, and motions for me to sit by him. “Stay ready.”

  The first team, refreshed, runs a fast break for a quick bucket and knots the score at 44 all. The teams trade baskets, then settle into solid defense, and suddenly there is less than one minute to play. Both the score and my gut are knotted. The Big Falls point guard launches a three-pointer, which goes through, but we come back with a fast break on which Rachel does some kind of wild, falling, 180-degree, dipsy-do finger-roll shot—which falls! We are down by one point, but Rachel is down, too, with a turned ankle. There are thirty seconds left.

  We help her off the court. Done for the day, she cries with pain and anger.

  “Sun—check in and go to forward,” the coach says.

  As I pause at the scorer’s table, everything seems exaggeratedly clear, as if magnified: the black and white zebra stripes of the officials, the seams of the yellow wood floor, the orange rim worn to bare, shiny metal on the inside. I stare at the ball the ref is holding and can imagine its warm, tight sphere in my hands. I want that ball. For the first time in my basketball career I want the ball, bad.

  The Big Falls girls are slapping high fives like the game is over; after all, they have possession with a one-point lead. The ref calls time-in, and Big Falls bounces the ball inbounds handily and pushes it quickly up the floor. There they spread the offense and begin to work the ball around the perimeter: side to front to side to front. It’s too early for us to foul, so we stay with our zone defense. Their point guard, still jazzed from making the three-point basket, is loose and smart-mouthed. As she receives the ball she automatically passes it to the opposite side.

  Which is when I suddenly see not Big Falls players but garbage cans and a sawhorse. To the side, on the bench, I see Coach Brown rising to signal it’s time to foul, but I have been counting off another kind of time: the Big Falls passing rhythm. On the far side, away from the ball, when orange is flashing halfway to the point guard, I begin my break. Smart Mouth receives the ball, turns, and passes it. Her eyes bug out as I arrow into view; she tries to halt her pass but it’s too late. I catch the ball and am gone. There is only open floor in front and sudden cheering from the sides, and, overly excited, I launch my layup at about the free throw line—but the ball goes in anyway. The Hawk Bend crowd goes crazy.

  Down by one point, Big Falls calls a frantic time-out at the five-second mark. Our players are delirious, but Coach Brown is not. “Watch for the long pass, the long pass!” he rants. “They have a set play. Don’t foul—especially on the three-point shot.”

  But we’re only eighth-graders; at times we don’t listen well.

  Sure enough, Big Falls screens on the inbound pass, which Pimple Shoulders fires full court. There the point guard takes an off-balance shot—and is fouled by Shanna as time runs out.

  Shanna looks paralyzed. She can’t believe she did it.

  “Three-point attempt—three foul shots!”
the ref calls.

  We clear off the free throw line and watch her make the first two—to tie—and miss the third. The game goes into overtime.

  Back in the huddle we try to get pumped again, but I can tell it’s not going to happen. We are stunned and flat. We lose in overtime by four points.

  • • •

  Back home we have a late supper: broccoli, fish sticks, and rice. I stare at my plate as my father finishes grace. Then he looks up. “Well,” he says.

  “A very deep subject,” Luke replies, grabbing the bread. His team won, of course, by twenty-six points.

  I just sit there, slumped and staring.

  “You should have seen it,” my father begins, speaking to Luke. “We’re down by one and your sister is low on the weak side. The Big Falls point guard is not paying attention….” Slowly I look up. I listen as my father tells the story of my one and only career steal. He re-creates it so well that Luke stops eating and his mouth drops open slightly. “Rad!” Luke says at the finish, then asks me more about my game. I shrug, but end up giving him a virtual play-by-play of the last two minutes.

  When I am done, Luke lets out a breath and looks squarely at me. “Wow—I wish I could have been there!”

  I stop to stare at him.

  “What—what’d I say?” Luke says warily.

  I just smile, and pass my little brother the broccoli.

  Will Weaver

  Because he has a son and a daughter, both of whom are good athletes, Will Weaver understands the need for dividing his time between them equally. But like the father in “Stealing for Girls,” he admits, he sometimes finds that hard to do.

  As a teenager Will Weaver played basketball and baseball and ran cross-country. He grew up on a farm in Minnesota, learning firsthand the joys and pains of the form life he describes in Striking Out, his first novel for young adults. In that novel, thirteen-year-old Billy Baggs has a hard and unrewarding life until he starts playing baseball with the town team one summer, at the same time that his mother decides she needs to do more than be a form wife. Readers can follow Billy Baggs’s additional accomplishments, in sports as well as with his girlfriend Suzy, in Farm Team and other books Weaver is working on for future publication.

  In addition to these books for teenage readers, Mr. Weaver has written two novels for adults—A Gravestone Made of Wheat and Red Earth, White Earth—and has won prizes for his writing from the McKnight Foundation and the Bush Foundation. In 1994 Red Earth, White Earth was made into a CBS television movie.

  Currently Will Weaver teaches creative writing at Bemidji State University in northern Minnesota, where he enjoys outdoor activities with his wife and children and, to keep in shape, “plays softball, shoots buckets, and works out.”

  Being a crew member in a four-hundred-pound racing canoe is part of a long Hawaiian tradition. So what does this haole—this white kid from the mainland— think he’s doing?

  Shark Bait

  Johnny Bias and I were lounging in the spidery shade of a coconut tree watching the haole kid from Arizona. The sparkling turquoise cove beyond winked back at us under a blue sky and burning Hawaiian sun. Johnny was eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells on the sand.

  Dad thought Johnny looked just like his father. They both had storms brewing in their eyes, he said, only Johnny still had time before his eyes grew watery and turned bloodshot and yellow like his father’s. Now, at fifteen, Johnny’s eyes were bright white around midnight irises. I believed he could keep them that way, but Dad said not to count on it.

  To me, Johnny was more like a brother than a friend. And I thought I knew him pretty well. One thing I knew was that he didn’t trust many people. But if he liked you, if he respected you, he would do anything for you. Anything. And if he didn’t respect you, you’d be lucky to get the time of day.

  Except if you were his father.

  Mr. Bias was… nasty, you could say. Johnny didn’t trust him, and didn’t respect him. Even a blind man could’ve seen that. But even so, Johnny did everything for him—dragged him home from Rose’s bar when he was too drunk to do it himself; skipped school to take his father’s place as the maintenance man at the Kona Dolphin condos when he was sick with a hangover; did all kinds of stupid things around the house—whatever his father demanded. And even after Johnny did all that, his father still beat him up.

  And Johnny never fought back.

  “How come you just take it?” I asked once when he came to school with a Band-Aid over the corner of one eye. “How come you don’t run? Like James?”

  Johnny’s icy glare shocked me. “You don’t know nothing about nothing,” he said, snarling the words. And I never asked him that kind of stuff again.

  The kid from Arizona rolled his bike down from the road and leaned it against a coconut tree. He looked up and glanced around the beach. He saw us watching him, and for a second he stared back. Then he turned away.

  He was in our class most of last year. He moved to the islands with his parents about a month after school started. They bought old man Gouveia’s place down the coast by Banyans Beach. The kid disappeared from school for a few weeks in April, but showed up again in May. Johnny heard he ran away from home, hid in the engine room of a coast guard cutter, and didn’t get caught until somewheres off Molokai. But that was just a rumor.

  All any of us really knew about him was his name—David Ford. And that his father was an electrician who liked to drink at Rose’s bar. Johnny knew about the bar because his own father had been camping out in there since caveman days. Mr. Bias had it all figured out. He told Johnny that the Ford guy was just a loudmouth bozo who moved over here to make some easy money off us Hawaiian hicks—put a couple of electrical outlets in our grass shacks and sell us TVs. But Johnny said his father was drunk when he said that.

  Johnny handed me the bag of sunflower seeds and I took some. More guys showed up at the cove for practice, drifting down to the water, standing around ankle-deep, mumbling to each other. At four o’clock, Coach Freitas drove his Jeep onto the sand and parked in the small slant of shade off one side of the canoe shed. He crawled over the gearshift and got out on the passenger’s side.

  It was almost just like any other day, with me and Johnny and the rest of the guys in the canoe club waiting around for paddling practice to start. Yesterday was girls’ day, today us. We had to alternate because we only had three practice canoes. The fiberglass kind. Our koa wood racing canoe stayed in Coach Freitas’s garage until the day of the races, a four-hundred-pound, forty-three-foot speed demon called Iwalani.

  Anyway, it was just like always, except down walks the Arizona kid pushing this old one-speed girl’s bike I never knew he had. Then he sits down on the sand… like he was one of us. Like he was there to practice. Like he even had a chance to join Kai Opua Canoe Club. Three months already we’d been working out. We’d even had a couple of races. The state meet was only five weeks away.

  And suddenly this guy David Ford shows up.

  Which is why we were watching him.

  “How come he don’t take off his shirt?” Johnny said, spitting out shells.

  “Maybe he had an operation and has a scar across his stomach.”

  Johnny snickered. “Or maybe got acne back.”

  Once at school, when the guy first showed up, Johnny made a special effort, which was unusual for him. He said “How’zit” to the kid, opening up like maybe they could be friends. And the kid ignored him. Or seemed to ignore him. He just walked past, brooding about something. But he was always like that, always deep in thought, like he was getting F’s in every class. But Johnny took it personally. He squinted deadly eyes at the kid’s back as he walked away. “I don’t think he heard you,” I said. Johnny slugged his fist into his other hand. “The punk heard, all right.”

  I felt sorry for the kid. I mean, to be on the wrong side of Johnny Bias.

  David Ford was going into tenth grade, like we were. And he was about the same height. Five-ten, five-e
leven. But that’s as far as any similarities went. First of all, he had blond hair and was as white as coconut meat…looked out of place… one white face in a sea of brown paddlers. And second, he had a flattop and looked like a marine. I had to admit he had plenty of muscle, but he didn’t swim, or fish, or bodysurf, like the rest of us had been doing every day of our lives since we were two. And not only that, he always wore long pants and never took off his shirt. How could you live in that heat and never take off your shirt?

  The kid did go barefoot, though. Which was something.

  Johnny suddenly stopped chewing, his eyes pinned on David Ford. It was kind of weird how Johnny seemed so caught up in the guy, watching everything he did, like he still carried a deep hate for getting snubbed at school.

  David Ford unzipped his jeans and pulled them off, still sitting. He had red swimming shorts underneath. Then, he actually pulled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it on top of his crumpled jeans.

  “Hoo, shark bait, yeah, the guy?” Johnny said.

  “No kidding. Looks like a squid.” The kid was white, all right. Like a tourist.

  “That sun going make him sorry tomorrow,” Johnny said. “How come the punk’s here, anyway?”

  I shrugged.

  The thing about David Ford was that he didn’t talk to anybody, even at school, unless a teacher asked him a question or something like that. He just went from class to class looking at the ground, like a robot. We all said, Forget it, if he’s going to be like that.

  “The guy dreaming if he thinks Coach Freitas going let ’urn in Kai Opua,” Johnny said.

  “He’s got some muscle, though. Check out his shoulders.”

  “Sshh… fricken pansy.”

  But later we discovered that Coach Freitas had a different opinion. Not only did he let David Ford join the club, but he put him in our crew, in place of Reggie Hoang, who we’d been borrowing from the fourteen-and-unders.

  Johnny went crazy. “Fricken coach stoopid” he said after Coach Freitas walked away. “We don’t need no shark bait sissy. We don’t need no white man. We need somebody big, somebody good! Jeez…the coach got no brains. He just put another nail in the coffin, man.”