Captive Audience

by Dave Reidy

  The first morning of camp, the coaches led the young players through a stretching regimen while an Iowa assistant talked my ear off about a new zone defense he had come up with. I could feel the kids looking at me as they stretched, then looking away, then looking back again. I knew what they were thinking: that’s him? He doesn’t look tall enough or strong enough. Such opinions had dogged me throughout my career, and I had treated every possession as an opportunity to prove them wrong. I didn’t know quite what to do with them now.

  The coaches ran the campers through their drills. They dribbled around cones, flashed to the basket after setting picks, and shuffled the length of the court with their heads up and their hands out. When I thought it would do some good, I pulled a player aside and tried to help him by changing the position of his guide hand or demonstrating the proper way to front a man in the post. I found myself most eager to help the players who worked the hardest and I knew exactly why: they reminded me of me.

  By the middle of the second week of camp, I could feel the kids bucking under the constraints of the drills. They wanted to get in the flow of a game. But even their half-court scrimmages were halted repeatedly by coaches intent on teaching the proper way to move without the ball or defend the pick-and-pop.

  At the end of that week, James Macon stood at center court and addressed the boys, who were seated around him on the floor. “You fellas have worked hard these last two weeks,” he said. “And it’s a good thing you have, because tonight the coaches will be breaking you into teams for tomorrow’s round-robin tournament.”

  Many of the boys clapped at this announcement. Those who didn’t nodded their heads.

  “And as you know,” Macon continued, “Tim Vilinski will be rotating on and off your rosters, playing at least one game with every team.” The clapping was louder this time. One boy even whooped. Standing on the sideline, I kept my eyes on the floor and hoped the heat in my face wasn’t turning it red. If playing in the camp tournament was among my partnership obligations, I didn’t recall Macon saying so.

  That night I went to my file cabinet, looking for the contract I had signed. I found the camp brochure first. Alongside my photo on page three was the carrot that had been dangled in front of the campers: “Play with former NBA guard Tim Vilinski!”

  I walked into the sports complex the next morning to find the campers warming up with stone-faced seriousness. Many of them, I noticed, were back to the bad habits we had spent the better part of two weeks trying to correct. I realized then how badly it would have hurt me just to watch this tournament. Even if they played the best basketball of their young lives—and even if I played with them—these kids would butcher the game, and my playing would make me party to the travesty. The only way to get through, I decided, was not to play as a player, but to think of these games as teaching opportunities—controlled scrimmages with a little less control. As a player, I would expect nothing less than the best performance I could muster. As a teacher, I would be free to do what referees do—keep up with the ball and try to stay out of the way.

  I started that first game at about half speed—teacher speed—facilitating good ball movement and helping teammates who got beat on defense. Though most interested in teaching by example, I gave a few one-sentence seminars on topics like dribbling without a purpose and talking back to the refs. I also reinforced some good habits. On our fourth possession, my team’s tiny point guard dribbled into the lane, drew my man to himself, then kicked the ball out to me for an open seventeen-footer. After I knocked down the shot, I pointed to him and said, “Good look.” He acknowledged my compliment with a cool nod, as if he set up former NBA guards for jumpers all the time. I smiled.

  At about the five-minute mark, our opponents gave up on the perimeter passing the coaches had taught them and reverted to playground tactics, isolating defenders on the wing and trying to beat them to the rim off the dribble. Even at half speed I was able to help defend the basket, changing would-be layups into low-percentage scoops and blocking a couple out of the air. But one kid, a wiry athlete with dark wispy hair on his upper lip, drove the lane and scored over my outstretched arm. When I turned around, he was skipping backwards down the court with his arms hanging limp at his sides, staring at me and shaking his head.

  From that moment on I went full speed and all the lessons I taught were wordless. I set picks that would’ve stood up an NBA power forward. I ran the baseline without mercy, waiting for the young player guarding me to tire then demanding the ball and knocking down whatever shot I had. I even drove right at the kid who had tried to show me up, and when I’d made my layup and sent him sliding across the floor on his backside, I immediately turned and ran back to play defense. I couldn’t have put that lesson into words if I had tried.

  At the end of the game, I had missed only one shot—my signature baseline three, as it happened—and the portable scoreboard at mid-court read 47 to 17 in our favor. I congratulated my teammates and wished them luck in the next game, which they would play without me. They each touched a fist to mine, but a few of the kids seemed to shy away a bit, as if they were afraid of me or embarrassed, somehow.

  As I grabbed a towel from the laundry cart behind the basket, James Macon called my name and waved me over. When we were on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling tarpaulin that divided the camp from women’s volleyball practice, Macon said, “What are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got to take it easier on these kids.”

  I nodded, looking over his shoulder at the dozens of volleyballs scattered across the far end of the court.

  He leaned into my field of vision. “We understand each other?”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking at him now.

  Macon walked past me and around to the other side of the tarpaulin, where he greeted a camp sponsor. I understood that the majority partner in my business had given me an order, but I didn’t know how to follow it.

  My next team, wearing red mesh pinnies, won the tip-off, and as I ran down the floor, it occurred to me that I could spend our offensive possessions setting picks—good picks, but not jawbreakers—that would give my young teammates a half-step on their defenders. The first possession, which ended with our point guard running his man into my chest and converting a ten-foot jumper, felt good. The next one felt even better. I was playing hard, I was contributing, but with my wrists crossed at my waist I was managing to keep the ball—and the game—out of my hands.

  But leaving defense to the kids didn’t work. Repeatedly, players in blue pinnies cut to the basket, leaving my teammates in red scrambling to catch them, too late to do anything but swipe at the air behind the ball. I could have blocked those shots—or made them tougher to take, at least—and every part of me demanded I do exactly that. But I didn’t. I stayed with my man and boxed him out from rebounds, but the blue team didn’t miss enough shots for my boxing out to matter.

  By the ten-minute mark, every defensive possession was a humiliation—and not just for me. My teammates wilted, seeming to realize as they played that if they weren’t good enough to win with a former pro, all their hard work had come to nothing. And every bullet pass, every breakaway layup, every fall-away jumper made by a member of the blue team was tainted because I hadn’t done all I could to prevent it. The kids in blue should’ve taken my half-effort as an insult, but they didn’t. They seemed somehow immune to everything.

  With seven minutes left to play and our team down by seventeen, the blue team’s best player, a small forward with a child’s energy and a man’s body, beat his man off the dribble again. Without thinking, I stepped in front of him as he careened toward the rim, my fists laid one over the other at my groin. His eyes opened wide and then, just before impact, shut tight. I absorbed the blow from his forearm with my chest, and heard my teeth click as his elbow struck my chin like an uppercut. The whistle blew just as I hit the floor.

  He might have called the young player for charging, but the refe
ree, probably a local high-school official earning a little cash on the side, gave the foul to me. I didn’t mind. The collision had satisfied something in me, like scratching an itch or emptying my bladder would have done.

  The next time down the floor, the young forward drove the lane again. I rushed into his path, knowing I would be called for another foul, and felt the release as his shoulder pressed the air out of my lungs and my right hip hit the floor. I made it to my feet first and extended my hand to him. He made a point of getting up without my help.

  The blue team’s next possession began with the young forward snapping a rebound out of the air, turning, and dribbling headlong down the center lane. I beat him down the floor and stood in front of the rim, bracing to embrace the impact, and when it came, I felt both pain and satisfaction. This time the foul was called on the kid, and when I looked up from the floor, three of my teammates—proud and unsmiling—offered their hands to help me up. They thought I was doing this for them.

  When I was called for my fifth and final foul, our team was down by twenty-seven, with twenty-two seconds remaining. I sat in a folding chair while boys in red pinnies rushed up the court to narrow the margin of our defeat by a meaningless two points. And when the buzzer finally sounded, my first thought was how grateful I was that my son hadn’t been born in time to see this.

  Before he died, my father made a point of telling me that I would find something worth doing when I was finished playing ball, and that when I had a child of my own, I would love that child from the very beginning. He was half right.

  I’m still trying to figure it out, actually. Does a man’s brain chemistry or blood pressure change when he holds his child? When I held Matthew, whether he was gurgling, sleeping or crying, I would lower the volume and timbre of my voice without thinking and move with a fluidity I’d never had off the court. And Matthew didn’t cry much. When he’d been changed or fed or given his pacifier, he generally quieted down. It gave you the feeling that if he could have asked politely for what he needed, he would have.

  I often looked in on him while he slept. Even turned all the way up, those baby monitors don’t always pick up the sound of breathing which, to my mind, makes them close to useless. You can hear a baby cry from blocks away. What you need is to hear him breathing.

  When I stood at the rail of Matthew’s crib, watching his chest rise and fall and feeling his warm breath on the back of my hand, I would have some variation of the same waking dream. Matthew is asleep in his car seat, which has been placed on a table. Suddenly, a projectile—a rock or a baseball or a dumbbell—is fired directly at him from an unseen machine. I rush into the projectile’s path and let it hit me. As I get to my feet, another projectile is fired. I manage to block it with my face. Then, peering out through the pain, I get up and wait for the next one.

  By the time Matthew was a few months old, I was spending my weekdays at the offices of an old college class-mate who had become Iowa City’s biggest developer. I sat in on meetings and spoke up when I thought I had something sensible to say, but mostly I shook the hands of old Hawkeye fans with farmland to sell. The work wasn’t much, but I could get through it, and when I got home, what I did for a living—or what I didn’t do—didn’t matter much, even to me. All the same, when the NBA season started up that fall, I didn’t watch any games. I felt all right for the first time in a long time and that feeling, I knew by then, was fragile.

  When winter’s grip on Iowa City began to loosen, I made it my routine to wake up when Matthew did and walk him to the bagel shop in the strip mall a few blocks from our house. We would eat our breakfast—two bagels with cream cheese for me, oatmeal for him. Then I would read the paper in my sweatshirt and tearaways before heading home to change into my new uniform—a golf shirt, khakis and loafers.

  That day, Matthew and I were up at about six. As I dressed him, he stared at the long shadows on the pale yellow walls of his bedroom. Except for a few gurgles and grunts he was silent, as if he sensed the morning stillness and was unwilling to disturb it.

  But once inside the bagel shop, emboldened by the music and the bright lights and the chatter of cashiers and customers, Matthew spoke up. His sounds weren’t words, but he was talking to me, and as I carried our breakfast to our usual booth and stirred the heat out of his oatmeal, I did my best to hold up my end of the conversation.

  When we had finished eating, I turned my attention to the sports page, and Matthew, seated in his stroller, began identifying things in the shop. First he pointed his tiny hand at a freestanding display of pre-ground coffee. “Da,” he said. He looked at me.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Coffee.”

  The fountain-drink dispenser, to the right of the coffee display, was next. “Da.”

  “Uh-huh. Pop machine.”

  Matthew scanned the shop for another interesting object, and I returned my eyes to the paper. The first words I saw were my first and last names. I tried to absorb the surrounding words all at once—I saw “San Antonio” and “retired” and “playoffs.” I took a second to calm myself, then read the blurb. An unnamed source in the San Antonio front office had reportedly expressed interest in signing “retired sharpshooter Tim Vilinski” for the final weeks of the regular season and the playoffs. That was it. One sentence.

  My mind leapt to the possibilities. Maybe they wanted to spread the floor by adding a three-point shooter. Maybe they wanted a veteran defensive presence or a way to limit their young players’ responsibilities and mistakes. I saw myself shaking hands with San Antonio’s coach and claiming an NBA locker again. I felt the cool mesh of the jersey sliding over my face and settling on my shoulders. I heard the snap of a three-pointer plunging through the net and a whistle granting our bewildered opponents a timeout.

  When I looked over at him, Matthew was staring at me. He blinked, then aimed his arm at something over my left shoulder. I turned to find a badly framed watercolor of a single potted flower.

  “Painting,” I said.

  Then my cell phone started vibrating and Matthew pulled his arm back, startled and captivated by the rumble on the table.

  The call was from Perry. “Did you see the USA Today?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can you believe it?”

  “I think I know who the source is and I’ve got a call in to him. They’re not open for business yet down there. Will you play for the minimum, prorated?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. I’ll see if I can get more but I won’t push it.”

  “Tell them I’ve been working out.”

  “Have you?”

  “No, but I’m in good enough shape to make them believe it.”

  “OK,” Perry said. I could hear a smile in his voice. “I’ll call you back.”

  When I flipped the phone closed, Matthew was staring at me again, as if waiting for my next move. I put my index finger in his palm and his hand closed around it. Though I had always appreciated that fans were paying their hard-earned money to attend our games, I had never played for them. If we had competed in empty high-school gyms, the games would have meant just as much to me. But the idea of playing in front of Matthew, even before he had any idea what he was watching, made the back of my throat tighten. I imagined walking from the floor to the sideline, looking up into the cheering crowd behind the San Antonio bench and finding him, my arena of one, a little bigger but still perched on his mother’s arm, seeing me as I was for the first time.

  On the way home, I called the office and told the receptionist I wouldn’t be coming in. The idea of spending another day glad-handing farmers seemed ridiculous. I spent the rest of the walk wondering how I would convince Liz that even if Matthew remembered almost nothing of his next few months on earth, knowing that he had seen his father play in the NBA would mean something to him. When he was older, he would look up the box scores of the games he had attended and try to piece together my contribution from the raw statistics. Then he would imagine himself as a baby, distracted b
y the whistles and the shouts and the scoreboard lights, and catch a glimpse—maybe imagined, maybe real—of his father playing ball. He would know something more about me then, and maybe something more about himself.

  Turning the corner onto our block, I was sure that Liz would understand—maybe not right away, but eventually—how important it was that Matthew see me play. These games would be different for her, too, in the same way they would be different for me: we would see them through Matthew’s eyes.

  As I pushed the stroller up the shallow incline of our driveway, I felt a vibration against my thigh. I pulled the phone from my pocket and flipped it open with one hand. “Hey,” I said

  “They were bluffing,” Perry said.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “They wanted to light a fire under their guards so they went to a local beat writer with a story they thought would get their attention. They never expected the wires to pick it up.”

  With one hand still on the stroller handle, I turned and faced the street. “They said that?”

  “No,” Perry said. “They said they’re very interested in working you out, in getting you in to talk to you. I said great, and asked them what their calendars looked like tomorrow. Then the guy mentioned a two-week timetable.” Perry snorted. “If they signed you today, you’d have barely enough time to learn their system before the playoffs.”

  Perry gave me a chance to say something. I let it pass. Matthew, hidden beneath the stroller’s canopy, made a chirping sound.

  “A move like this is all about impulse,” Perry continued. “It’s a wake-up-one-morning-and-realize-we-don’t-have-the-horses move. Nobody waits two weeks to do something like this.”