True Legend

by Mike Lupica

  Coach D said he never actually saw Urban Legend play, that he hadn’t thought about him in years until he found out he’d died the way he had.

  “He’s the flip side of all the guys who made it,” Coach said. “The guys who made it to college, or the Final Four, or to their hundred-million-dollar contracts in the pros. Guys like—”

  “I’m gonna be,” Drew said, finishing his thought.

  “Yeah,” Coach said. “Like you’re gonna be. Guys like Legend, they’re not only the flip side in basketball. It’s more like they’re the dark side.”

  Coach said it was amazing how often Sellers’s name came up in conversations once he got to Sacramento. If a McClatchy kid put up a triple double in a game, they’d remind you in a game story that Urban Sellers had averaged a triple double for a whole season. If one of his kids went for forty in a game, they’d tell you how many times Sellers did it.

  Like that.

  “And by then,” Coach said, “nobody knew what had happened to him. It was like he’d fallen off the face of the earth.”

  “Maybe ’cause he had,” Drew said.

  “No matter how good a kid was in Sacramento,” Coach said, “there’d always be somebody to say, ‘Yeah, but you should’ve seen Legend back in the day.’ One year, my best player said he felt like he wasn’t just competing against the other best players in the league, he was going one-on-one with a ghost.”

  Drew and Lee just looked at each other when he said that.

  “Finally,” Coach said, “I went over to talk to his old coach, Fred Holman, about him. He’d retired the year before I got there, but he was a kind of legend himself as a high school coach, the way John Mabry is at Park. I had to know if a guy I’d never seen was as good as everybody said. If maybe he had some film I could watch.”

  “Did he?” Drew asked.

  “He did.”

  “And?” Lee said.

  “Let me put it in language you two will understand,” Coach said, grinning. “He was filthy. I sort of knew how the kid had gotten messed up, because people talked about that in Sacramento, too, but Coach Holman didn’t want to talk much about it. He said there was an old proverb that covered what had happened to Mr. Sellers, as he called him, the one about how the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. One thing he said that I’ll always remember: he started losing the boy when Sellers started believing he was a legend.”

  Lee said, “You know anybody like that, Coach?”

  “You mean a big star who’s bought into his own hype? Nope, not me.”

  “Funny,” Drew said. “You guys could have your own show on Comedy Central.”

  Coach said, “Seriously? If you want to do this paper right, you ought to talk to Coach Holman about Urban Sellers.”

  “Right,” Lee said. “Since I’ve become Drew’s personal driver, I’ll run him up to Sacramento this weekend.”

  “Who said anything about Sacramento?” Coach DiGregorio said. “Santa Monica. He’s got a small house there now.”

  Coach said Fred Holman was in his early eighties now, but still sharp. He even showed up for some coaching clinics in the area from time to time. And still full of opinions about everything, mostly how he felt the modern game of basketball had become more like some video game.

  Drew said, “But if he didn’t want to talk about this Urban Legend guy with you, why would he want to talk about him now?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t,” Coach said. “Or maybe it’ll be different now that Urban’s dead. Whatever. I’ll give him a call and see if he’ll talk to you. He must know who you are.”

  Lee grinned. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  SEVENTEEN

  Two nights later, Oakley played Christian Hills on the road, and compared to the Park Prep game, the Red Bull energy of that one, this felt like a preseason scrimmage.

  Oakley jumped out ahead 24–4 at the start, and Christian Hills never cut the lead under twenty points for the rest of the game, even after Coach DiGregorio had cleared the bench and it was officially garbage time.

  Cleared the bench except for Lee, who begged coach to let him stay in and play point after Drew was done for the night.

  He promised not to showboat or run up the score. Promised Coach he’d play the right way over the last six minutes.

  “Just let the offense run through me for a little while,” he said at a time-out. “Show you I can be a pass-first guy.”

  And he did, dishing out five assists the rest of the way, a couple of them beauties, after he broke down the defense like he was doing his best impression of Drew, penetrating inside before kicking the ball back outside.

  In the locker room, he said to Drew, “So that’s what it feels like to be you.”

  Drew put his arm around Lee’s shoulder and said, “Keep telling yourself that.”

  It was a Friday night, and they were all on their way to Lee’s house after the bus dropped them off back at Oakley. This time Drew went along. Mr. Gilbert hadn’t even been at the Christian Hills game, had said he had some business out of town. So Drew ate pizza with his teammates and got involved in one of those video games where you teamed up to kill aliens. All in all, one of those nights when he felt like one of the guys.

  Even though he hadn’t been one of the guys for a long time. Sometimes, at parties like this, he’d look over and catch Lee staring at him and wonder if Lee knew the exact same thing.

  Much later, when Lee was driving him home, Drew asked to be dropped off at Morrison.

  Lee sighed, making it like the saddest sound anywhere. “Man, you put those blinders of yours on, you don’t take them off, no matter what.”

  “I just want to know who this guy is,” Drew said.

  “What if it turns out he’s just some nobody?”

  “Then at least I’ll know that,” Drew said.

  He didn’t tell Lee that he had been in the park the last two nights, both times waiting until two in the morning for some sign of Donald before giving up and walking back home. He was starting to feel a little bit like one of those celebrity stalkers. But then he told himself Donald was the one who’d come to Drew’s game, admitted he’d seen Drew shooting around at Morrison late at night.

  So, what—they were stalking each other?

  It was around midnight when they pulled into the parking lot at Morrison, and the police cruiser, with Archey behind the wheel, was just pulling out. Drew told Lee he didn’t have to stay this time.

  “Forget it,” Lee said. “A wingman is a wingman, even on some dopey stakeout.”

  No sign of Donald or anybody else.

  This time Drew didn’t hang around until two; he gave up a few minutes after one, telling Lee it was his own dang fault, maybe he’d chased the guy off for good.

  When they pulled up in front of Drew’s house, Lee said, “Can I ask you something?”

  Now Drew was the one who groaned. “Please don’t ask me again why I’m so interested in this guy.”

  “Wasn’t going to.”

  “Good.”

  “But if I ask you something else, straight-up, will you give me an honest answer?”

  “I don’t lie to you, you don’t lie to me,” Drew said.

  “And you promise you won’t take it the wrong way.”

  “Dude, it’s late,” Drew said. “You know how long it takes me to fall asleep.”

  Lee took a deep breath, then he said, “I’m just wondering if the reason you won’t give up on this guy is because he hated on you a little bit after the Park game. And nobody ever hates on you, unless they’re playing against you, the way King was.”

  Drew turned in the front seat so he could face him, his hand still on the door handle, and said, “What are you now, Coach, worried that I’m starting to believe my own hype? That I think of myself as some kind of
legend?”

  “Do you?” Lee said in a soft voice.

  Drew didn’t get mad.

  “No.”

  “You sure about that?” Lee Atkins said.

  “You’re supposed to be my best friend,” Drew said.

  “I am,” Lee said.

  Drew said he’d talk to him in the morning, got out of the car, walked into the house, knowing as he did that he’d never answered Lee’s question.

  EIGHTEEN

  Coach DiGregorio called Drew late Sunday morning and told him he’d just talked to Fred Holman, who said he’d be happy to talk to Drew if he could get himself to Santa Monica.

  Drew called Lee right away, even though he knew that on weekends, Lee Atkins could sometimes sleep until the middle of the afternoon if he didn’t have anything better to do.

  “You gotta get up. We’re going to Santa Monica to meet Urban Legend’s old coach.”

  Lee mumbled something in his sleep-croak that Drew didn’t understand.

  “What?” Drew said.

  “I said the scavenger hunt continues,” Lee said. “Be over in an hour.”

  “Don’t go back to sleep,” Drew said.

  “What, and miss all the fun?”

  The ride to Santa Monica was no fun, not because of what Lee had said to Drew when he dropped him off Friday night and not because Lee was wasting perfectly good sleep time driving Drew over there.

  It was because Lee had somehow found out what Drew had done on Saturday afternoon: snuck over to Oakley to watch the girls’ team play. Done that even though Callie had laid him out in the hallway the other day.

  It meant the twenty-mile drive to the address near the Santa Monica pier felt like about two hundred miles to Drew, especially since the traffic for a Sunday afternoon was more like rush hour during the week.

  So Drew had to hear about Callie Mason for an hour and twenty minutes, most of it spent crawling along on the 405 and then I-10, the Santa Monica Freeway, as the GPS woman’s voice directed them to the address that Coach D said was just down from the pier and from the hotel called Shutters on the Beach, on Pico.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” Drew said. “I got no interest in Callie Mason. And, just for the sake of us conversating, if I ever did, why would I after the way I acted like a donkey in the hall that day?”

  “It would be better for everybody,” Lee said, “if you’d just admit it. Maybe even to her.”

  “Why? So she can laugh at me again?”

  “Dude,” Lee said, “it’s not like she had a choice. It would have been like trying not to laugh at The Hangover.”

  “Why are we still talking about this?” Drew said. “Didn’t we agree this would be off-limits?”

  “For a day,” Lee said. “I think I might have agreed to that one day. But it would be selfish of you to deny me the pleasure of busting on you. Besides, all you got to do is change your attitude.”

  “Did you say something to her?” Drew said, whipping his head toward Lee. “Did she say she doesn’t like my attitude?”

  Lee grinned wide now and said, “Got you. Took you to the iron and threw one down on you.”

  Drew didn’t care.

  “Did somebody tell you that for real?” he said.

  Lee pointed.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  • • •

  Fred Holman met them at the door of a tiny house that didn’t look anything like the other, bigger houses on the block, almost like it had been shoehorned in.

  Or like the old man was just living in a shoe, Drew thought.

  Coach DiGregorio had said Holman played in the original NBA, back in the 1950s, but even with that, he was smaller than Drew expected, maybe five eight, tops, with thin white hair and bright blue eyes that seemed young to Drew somehow. Even in his mid-eighties, the man seemed to carry himself young, not shuffling around the way you saw old guys do at Morrison in the daytime, the ones who sat around on benches and drank their coffee and just watched the world go by.

  He was wearing a V-neck sweater over some kind of golf shirt, jeans on his skinny legs and an old pair of Basket sneakers from Puma. White with a blue stripe.

  Holman shook hands with Lee first, then turned to Drew and said, “So you’re the hot kid, huh?”

  Motioned them into the house with a wave of his hand.

  Small as the house was, there was a cool view of the ocean from the back patio. Way down to the right, Drew could see the famous Ferris wheel, part of the amusement park on the pier.

  Holman was telling them as they made their way to the patio that his daughter was a casting agent in the movies—“divorced,” he said, “aren’t they all in Hollywood?”—and that she’d wanted him to move with her to Brentwood after he fell and broke a hip a couple of years ago.

  “If you’re in the motion-picture business,” the old man said, “everything’s a big drama. She pictured me falling the next time and not being able to get up.”

  Drew didn’t see any signs of him limping, thought what he saw instead was a pretty nice bounce in the old guy’s step. A bounce to his whole self, really.

  There were small pitchers of lemonade and iced tea waiting for them on a table on the deck. Without asking, Coach Holman poured a little of both into each glass, stirring it up with a spoon. It was a drink that Mr. Gilbert liked, iced tea and lemonade, what he called an “Arnold Palmer,” named after a man who, he told Drew, had been a famous golfer.

  “It’s really an honor to meet you, sir,” Lee said.

  Coach Holman said, “You said that at the door, son.”

  He was grinning. But Coach D said Fred Holman didn’t win more than seven hundred games by being warm and fuzzy, that he was still a hard case.

  “Sometimes he just repeats himself until he can think of the next thing he wants to say,” Drew said.

  “I coached more than a few like him,” Holman said, taking the chair with the best view of the water. “Sometimes I’d finally ask them when they were going to stop talking so I could start.”

  They all sat there for a moment now, Lee acting like he was afraid to talk, looking out at people walking on a path set back from the beach, or jogging, or skateboarding.

  “Couldn’t afford this house if I wanted to move here nowadays,” Fred Holman said. “Like I was here and they built all the nice houses around me. People keep asking, do I want to sell it? But where would I go?”

  Then he said, “What were you thinking with that shot against Park, you don’t mind me asking?”

  Even him, Drew thought.

  “I thought it gave us our best chance to win,” he said, not wanting to get into it. “Just didn’t work out.”

  “You think?” Fred Holman said.

  “All due respect,” Drew said, “I didn’t come here to talk about myself.”

  Fred Holman said, “Why are you so interested in talking about Mr. Urban Sellers?”

  Drew and Lee looked at each other, and Drew nodded, as if telling him, “You take it.” So Lee, talking fast, the way he did when he got nervous, told Coach Holman about the paper Drew was writing, and how they’d found out about Sellers almost by accident.

  “So it’s his paper,” Holman said, giving a nod at Drew.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’re here as, what, his coauthor? Ghostwriter?”

  Ghost. The word kept popping up.

  “I guess you could say,” Lee said. “Me being a senior and all, and us being teammates and all . . .”

  The words just drifted toward the beach.

  The old man focused on Drew now and said, “He’s just another guy taking care of you, isn’t he?”

  “We’re friends,” Drew said.

  “I can see that,” Holman said. “You
ever help him out with any of his papers?”

  “No, sir,” Drew said.

  “So it’s a give-and-take relationship,” the old man said. “He gives, you take.”

  “Not on the court,” Lee said, smiling. He believed he could make anybody like him. “Out there, he gives, and I take.”

  “Not against Park,” the old man said.

  It got quiet again, except for the sound of music playing from the beach, the sound of the gulls in the air, some kind of maintenance jeep on the sand out near the water.

  “Why don’t you boys tell me what you know about Mr. Sellers?” Holman said. “Or what you think you know.”

  Lee rattled off what they’d learned from the Internet about Sellers’s career. How he was supposed to be on his way to Nevada–Las Vegas to play for a coach named Jerry Tarkanian, known as a guy who’d take any kind of outlaw player, a good coach who won a national championship at Vegas.

  Lee didn’t tell Urban Sellers’s story in any kind of order, just jumped around, trying to recite what he and Drew had found. How the NCAA accused Sellers of having somebody take the SATs for him, even though they could never prove it.

  How Coach Holman finally kicked him off his team his senior year of high school, halfway through, by which time he wasn’t going to class at all, had given himself no chance to qualify for any four-year college anywhere because of his lousy grades.

  How six months later he had some high school diploma nobody believed was real, and ended up in junior college. But he couldn’t last there, because he got caught paying somebody to take his tests for him.

  Drew picked up the story then, told how they’d read that Sellers couldn’t get a tryout in the NBA, even though they were taking high school kids in those days, because he let himself get fat and out of shape after busting out of junior college. So he went to Europe, played in France and then in Greece, but got into all kinds of trouble—including jail trouble—for drinking and drugs.

  Then hurt himself falling down a flight of stairs in a bar fight in Greece.

  After that, he just disappeared, Drew said, until he died in that fire in Los Angeles.

  “And what is it you’d like me to tell you?” Fred Holman asked.