by Melissa King
He paused, creating a pregnant-with-meaning vibe.
“But I’m gonna call some,” he said. “I’m gonna call my share.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll keep it in mind.”
“And another thing, if you have a question about a call, you can ask me, but when I say I’ve heard enough, then I’ve heard enough, and I don’t wanna hear no more about it.”
What in the world did this guy think I was gonna do, throw chairs?
“I understand,” I said. “I really do.”
Then I told him I liked to run around a lot and get on the court for instruction during the games, and I asked him to just let me know if I got in the way.
“Oh, I’ll let you know, so you go on ahead and you do your runnin’ around.”
We started playing, and after a couple of periods, the note on the wall told me to take Tonya out. “Good job, Tonya,” I said as we huddled before the third period. “It’s your turn to come out now. Be sure to rest up and get a drink, because you’re back in in four minutes.”
In the face of my unmitigated cruelty, Tonya stomped into the bleachers above our huddle to sit by Allison’s grandparents, who had been kind enough to hold her jacket. She sobbed into her hands while the grandmother rubbed her shoulders.
The game resumed, and with a minute left in the period, I walked over to tell Tonya to get ready, it was almost time to go back in the game. To this, she replied, “I don’t want to go back in! I’m not going to play basketball anymore!”
“I think her feelings are hurt,” Allison’s grandmother whispered carefully. “We’ve been telling her, ‘There is no ‘I’ in team.’”
I resented the old woman unreasonably.
“Listen, Tonya,” I said. “I don’t have time for this. It’s your turn to go in, I want you to go in, but I can’t force you to go in. Make up your mind and tell me right now, do you want to play or not?”
“No,” she snapped.
“Well, come on, Allison, I know you’re ready.”
When Tonya saw I wasn’t going to get down on my knees and beg, she hopped down out of the bleachers and ran in front of Allison onto the court.
“Allison, you’re in at four minutes,” I told her, furious at Tonya for making not only me but also Allison feel foolish.
Two periods later, the score was still close and Beth was coming out. This would be our toughest piece of the game, and I was hoping we wouldn’t get too far behind to catch up when Beth got back in.
As we huddled and I talked to the team, I felt some sort of sarcastic energy going on beside me, and I looked over just in time to see Tonya mouthing “Little Miss Perfect” at Brittany. Never one to suffer disrespect, Brittany came across the circle of girls and hit Tonya in the face. Tonya hit her back, and before I knew it, they were slapping furiously at each other.
I stood there stunned for a few seconds, doing nothing, like those two middle-aged Park District employees in Chicago, the ones with the ID tags who had said, “Gentleman, gentlemen.” Only when Beth jumped in the middle of Tonya and Brittany, looking at me like Why aren’t you doing something? did I get involved, telling Tonya and Brittany to stop it, stop it now, I mean it. I hated my voice, which had the quality of a cop talking to two drunks, trying to sound authoritative instead of disgusted or afraid.
They stopped slapping, and with the ref waiting on us, I quickly finished the now-ironic point I’d been making, that we needed to be more aggressive. “Remember our second game,” I said, “the one after we lost, when we were playing so hard and really going for the ball and getting rebounds? We need to get back to that, okay? Got it? Everybody ready?”
The girls nodded and headed onto the court. They found their matchups, and everything was sane until Tonya and Brittany, standing at center court, became stimulated by the sight and proximity of each other.
Unthinkably, Tonya extended a kick to Brittany’s shin. Brittany kicked Tonya. They kicked some more, creating a scene that looked less like a fight than a formal exchange of prissy blows.
In the few seconds it took me, again, to stop watching the train wreck and move, the ref was hollering, “Okay, Green, okay now! Let’s settle down now, Green!” He scanned the court, finding me and giving me a look similar to Beth’s: Would you do somethin’ about this, coach?
I trotted out to center court, stood between the two contenders, pointed at each of them and said, “No” and “No.” I gave them slight shoves in opposite directions and headed back to the sidelines. The ref blew his whistle, and then, I’ll be damned if Tonya didn’t start making points, grabbing the ball, getting rebounds, and generally playing, for the first time all season, like there was a heart under all that brattiness.
And Brittany was just as powerful. The fight had made her fast and wily, and she was stealing passes with the cool poise of a sniper.
Tonya and Brittany were rolling around on the floor after loose balls, and the ref called the jumps, blowing his whistle and saying, “Okay, okay, girls, easy now, this ain’t a street fight.” But I liked what the girls were doing, and I said to them, trying not to let the ref hear my subtle contradictions, “It’s okay . . . way to be aggressive.”
When the period was over, we were ahead by eight, with four minutes to go.
For once, I hated to take Tonya out, but it was her turn. She left the court all peaceable-like and stood by me on the sidelines, perfectly lucid, as we watched the end of the game.
“Listen,” I said to her. “Look at that scoreboard. Your team is going to win this game, and it’s largely because of you. Doesn’t that make you feel kind of proud?”
She nodded, and I hoped that feeling good about herself would seem more appealing than continuing to be such a sizable pain in my ass.
After the game, the girls hung around for a while, giggling and talking to people they knew on other teams. Brittany and Tonya, with their arms slung around each other, begged Brittany’s mom to let them have a sleepover.
Brittany noticed me staring at them with my mouth open. “Tonya and I just had that fight to get attention,” she explained happily.
Beth’s dad stood nearby. I pointed at the two maniacs and looked at him with a question mark.
“Girls,” he said, shaking his head.
The ref approached me again, and I readied myself for an exposition on how to handle on-court fights.
“I have two questions for you,” he said, “and the answer needs to be yes to both. Are you single, and do you date referees?”
It was a nice, corny way to ask someone out, and I was a little charmed. I noticed details about his appearance for the first time: that he was tall and muscular with a flat stomach, and his teeth were straight and healthy, though yellow with tobacco stains.
I laughed a little and told him I had to admit I wasn’t quite single. I asked his name and said he’d done a good job, suspecting that reffing was important to him, and he talked about it a lot, like I talked about volunteer coaching to anyone who would stand still.
That’s the trick right there, girls: giving yourself permission to do something noticeable for a purpose other than getting noticed. Take it from someone who has been around long enough to have lost a step: forget what people are thinking about you, every chance you get, every way you can.
Coaching changed the way I played. During a game or just shooting around, I’d find myself thinking about somebody’s attitude and what he could do to improve. Once, I went to the Jones Center, and I was matched up against a girl who was five inches taller and much stronger than I was. She was also about twenty years old and, as I’d seen while we warmed up, a good outside shooter. And she had unshaven armpits. She was pretty intimidating, and I prepared to play and get my butt kicked in a two-on-two game with the girl’s boyfriend and another guy.
But the girl was too cool to move faster than a saunter, too badass to play defense or get a rebound, and I scored on her more than she liked and more than I shoul
d have.
She walked off the court after the game without a glance in my direction. Her boyfriend looked at me and said, “She’s got an attitude. I don’t really take her out in public much.”
This, I thought, could be Tonya in a few years, ruined, a prisoner to the romance of wasted potential.
One night, sitting in the bleachers with Patty and Brittany’s mom after a particularly bad practice with Tonya, I’d just made a joke about acquiring one of those Wild Kingdom tranquilizer guns to subdue certain of my players when Patty said, “Felicia gets in the car after practice and says, ‘Mom, Tonya disrespects the coach.’” She said it in Felicia’s tone, shocked that such a thing could be possible.
“So I said to Felicia, I said, ‘Let me tell you something. You ever pull some stunts like that, and the coach won’t have to pull you out, because I’ll do it for her, and then I’ll beat you.’”
Brittany’s mom piped in. “What’s it going to be like when Tonya’s thirteen? I tell you what it’ll be like: The Jerry Springer Show, that’s what. I always say, God, just don’t let my kids be on Springer.”
“Okay?” Patty said, by way of agreement.
Avoiding Springer seemed a safe bet for Felicia, sane and cheerful as she was, but I wasn’t so sure about Brittany. At the last practice, I’d overheard her threaten her mom, as she stood above Brittany trying to get her up off the floor, with a “kick in the privates.”
A few days later, I ran into Brittany outside the gym. She was walking into practice with her head down, muttering something about “witnesses” and “proof,” and I asked her what was up.
She started talking fast, saying she was being threatened at school by Tonya and Tonya’s best friend, Danielle, who had a boyfriend, supposedly. According to this Danielle, Brittany had flirted with the supposed boyfriend, kicking him one day at lunch.
After hearing about Brittany’s problems at school, I was more relieved than usual to see that Tonya was absent. We only had five players that night, and we began a one-on-one drill. The way the drill worked was, if the offensive player made a shot, it was a point for her. If the defensive player stole the ball or got a rebound or forced a travel, it was a point for her. If the offense got the rebound, it was another chance to score, and if the defense fouled, it was a point for the offense.
We’d been running the drill for five minutes when Brittany sat down on the floor and started crying. Her outburst couldn’t have been basketball-related, because I’d been telling her she was doing well on the drill. She wouldn’t say what was wrong, so I told her if she needed a break, that was fine, but she had to move off the court so the rest of us could continue. She scooted over approximately one inch, a move that reminded me very much of her nemesis Tonya. I tried out Patty’s mother-look on her, and to my surprise, Brittany scooted her narrow behind out of bounds.
Brittany’s mom had stepped out of the gym and missed all of this, but when she came back in, she made a beeline for her daughter. I don’t know what the mom said, but Brittany was back playing in a few minutes.
Amanda was displaying her characteristic defensive footwork, which might have been appropriate for a boxer, but it had no business on a basketball court. She hopped, and what’s more, she hopped backwards. For every inch her girl moved toward the basket, Amanda gave two.
My continuous preaching about planting feet and holding position hadn’t stuck with Amanda. She was cooperative, I was sure of that, but I just hadn’t found a way to make sense to her. Finally, I stopped the two girls and said, “Look here, Amanda, I want to show you something. Here’s what you’re doing on defense.”
I had Emily try to score on me as I started hopping and moving backwards in what was a very accurate impression of Amanda’s defense, if I do say so myself.
“Amanda, you’re saying, ‘Oh no, Emily, never mind me, you go on ahead, be my guest, don’t let me hold you up.’”
I was a little relieved to see that Amanda could laugh at herself, especially if we all laughed at me.
“Now here’s what you do instead,” I said, planting my feet widely and signaling Emily to start over. “Emily’s dribbling, she’s moving to the hoop, right? She’s working the ball, and Amanda’s gonna say, ‘You think you’re gonna get by me?’” (I was incredulous at the idea.) “‘I don’t think so!’”
Amanda and Emily laughed.
“You just say, ‘No ma’am! You’re gonna have to work harder than that. This is my house!’”
They were all giggling by then.
“Yeah, this is my house!” Beth hollered, jumping into the act like she was guarding me. “You get outta here, lady!”
She bumped me a little, stood back to gauge my response, stopping short of grabbing her crotch. “This is my property! You gotta pay me some rent!”
I was losing control of practice again, but that wasn’t my primary concern. All I could think of was: lady?
I shook it off like a jammed finger.
“Yeah, that’s right, Beth’s got the idea.” Lady.
Beth jumped back swaggering among the group, and maybe it was my imagination, but they all seemed to be standing a little taller.
The thing was, I didn’t expect Amanda or Emily to talk like that. Hell, Amanda would barely talk at all, and Emily wouldn’t look you in the eye. But they could think it, and that’s all they really needed to do.
Tossing the ball to Emily, I said, “Okay, Amanda, let me see you plant your feet and hold your ground.”
And she did it, just like I told her. But Emily was so much bigger, she used her behind to move Amanda even with her feet planted. Instead of hopping backwards, Amanda was being scooted backwards. We all laughed again, and I promised Amanda that it would work better in games, when she wasn’t so outmatched in size. And I knew it would. I’d been scooted before myself.
Later, Amanda was on offense, dribbling with her eyes focused on the ball to the exclusion of all else, like she was playing the piano, which I’d been told she was very good at. I stopped her again and talked to her about keeping her head up, about maintaining a sense of her defender’s position and taking advantage when her girl moved too far one way or the other. I took the ball and showed her, dribbling and waiting for my defender to go just a little too far, then switching hands and going the other way toward the hoop.
“Let’s see it again,” I said, tossing Amanda the ball. She started dribbling and moving around, doing a little better at keeping her eyes up, and I stood close. I watched, watched, watched until I saw Amanda’s chance: her defender with a little too much weight on a foot, a little too much distance in the wrong direction. “Now!” I hollered, and she switched hands and went for the hoop. She looked astonished as she got close, and then she picked up her dribble and hesitated, giving her defender the split-second required to catch up. I explained that you had to shoot fast.
We stopped practice again after a few plays to show Amanda exactly how to execute a rebound. I described the minutia of movement as another girl shot: turning around, getting my back on my girl, watching the ball to anticipate its direction, then going after it. When Amanda tried it, I kept my voice in her ears, saying, “Turn to the hoop, find your girl with your back, box her out, watch . . . watch . . . now run!”
With Amanda, you had to break things down, describe individual movements and tell her exactly what to do with different parts of her body. I had to do it the right way and the wrong way myself, tell her how to think even, then have her repeat a specific action several times, hoping she’d remember later when I wasn’t talking her through it anymore.
Which she usually didn’t. Even though she was bright, her brain just didn’t operate that way. Working with her was like teaching a dyslexic person to read. It could be done, but it wasn’t very easy.
After having spent half the season in athletic darkness, Amanda was pretty psyched about the lightbulbs going off in her head that night. When I told the team to go take a water break, Amanda said, “Can we keep going and
do this some more? Please?”
It was impressive that the weakest player on the team wanted to keep doing an individual’s drill that inevitably had her coming out last. When the other players said, “Yeah, let’s do this some more,” I told them we’d do it first thing next practice, but for now I wanted them to play some two-on-two, so we could work on passing.
Beth had to go home early, and when the others came back and we started to get teams together, there was a standoff. Allison, Emily, and Amanda stood beside each other, three against Brittany, making it clear they didn’t want to play with her.
“Here’s how we’re going to do it,” I said. “Tallest and shortest against the other two.”
Allison, who was now on Brittany’s team, said, “I don’t want to play with someone who calls us all idiots.” I hadn’t heard Brittany call anyone names, so I didn’t say much. I just told them that’s what we had, so let’s get going.
As we played, Brittany treated everyone with a mixture of haughty disdain and illogical cruelty available only to those with very good bone structure. She was putting the smack-down on Amanda, standing too close, doing her best to tower and look down on her, bumping chests a little, acting like some kind of beautiful thug.
Once, Brittany got Amanda stuck dribbling with her head down at half-court. I had my fancy whistle out, playing ref, and I watched closely, dying to call a foul and help Amanda out. But Brittany wasn’t fouling, just driving Amanda nuts.
All of a sudden, Amanda picked up her dribble and looked over at me, shouting, “Brittany said she was prettier than me!”
I had the two of them stop the play and come back to the top of the key, and before they started again, I said, “Brittany, is that true?”
She hesitated, looking at me and visibly debating with herself about whether or not to tell the truth. “Yes,” she finally admitted, a little ashamed and exceedingly miserable.