Since he was all the way up there anyway he decided to steal the inbound pass and do it again, and we suddenly had a four-point lead.
But Elwood was tired, and at the wrong end of the floor. They sent Vanilla Dunk up. I tried to stop him alone; we both jumped. I landed what seemed like a couple of seconds before he did. His jam was a poster shot, I heard later. I sure didn’t see it.
We came up again and sent Early in to try and answer. He got caught in traffic and bailed it out to me, and I shot from where I stood all alone, in three-point territory.
That made four in a row for me and a five-point lead for the team.
They answered with a quick basket. So quick that I glanced at the clock; we were in a position to run the clock out. I brought it up slow, dribbling with my big body curled protectively around the ball.
“Nobody foul!” I heard Coach Wilder yell from the sidelines. Thanks, Coach. I passed it to Elwood. He passed it to one of our guards, who passed it back to me. Flynnan lunged for the ball, and I passed it away again. It got passed around the circuit, everybody touching it except Early, who wouldn’t have known what to do with it. He only existed in two dimensions, up and down. Time was beyond him.
The ball came back to me with two seconds on the shot clock. What the hell, I thought, and chucked it up.
Swish.
We’d won. Five points up with 16 seconds. No way for them to come back. The Knicks milked it, of course, using two time-outs, scoring once, but two commercials later we got official confirmation. When the final buzzer sounded we had a nice, healthy three-point edge.
The locker room was mayhem. All the Disney executive people I’d managed never to meet wanted to shake my hand. The media swarmed, medialike. Some beer company exec gave Early Natt an award for series MVP and they stuck a mike in his face and Early just grinned and made this sort of bubbling sound with his lips, ignoring the questions. Another bunch of TV people isolated me and Elwood by our lockers, and I readied myself to do the talking once again.
“Well, Elwood, care to break your media silence for once?”
Elwood paused, then grinned. “Sure, asshole, let’s break some silence. What you wanna know?”
The reporter clung to his pasted-on smile. “Uh, you were a real leader out there, Elwood. Some would say the MVP belongs to you. You took an unconventional mix of talents and made them work together—”
Elwood stuck his big finger against the reporter’s chest. “You wanna know who the star of this team is?”
“Uh—”
“This dude here, man. He’s taught himself to play without sampling, man, ’cause the skills they gave him sucked, and he didn’t even tell anybody. Me, Early, Vanilla Fucking Dunk, all them other dudes are playing with exosuits, but not my man Lassner, man. He’s a defensive star. He can hang with the exosuits, man, and that’s a rare thing.” He laughed. “He’s also got this funny jump shot ain’t too bad. Big white elbows stickin’ out all over the place, but it ain’t too bad. No suit for that either.”
They turned to me. I nodded and shrugged and looked back to Elwood.
“How does it feel beating Michael Jordan?” The question was directed at either one of us, but Elwood picked it up again.
“Didn’t beat Michael Jordan,” he said angrily. “Beat Vanilla Dunk. If that was Jordan we wouldn’t have beat him.”
“What’s going to become of your feud?”
Elwood’s face went through a quick series of expressions; first angry, then sarcastic, then sealed up, like he wasn’t going to talk any more. Then he went past that, smiling at himself for a minute before answering the question.
What came out was a strangely heartfelt jumble of sports clichés. I don’t mean to be insulting when I say that I don’t think I ever saw Elwood speak from a deeper place within himself than at that moment. I really do think he was the last modernist in a sport gone completely postmodern.
“There ain’t no feud. Alan Gornan is a rookie, man, and you got to give him time to put it together. I was honored to play alongside the man in New York and I’m honored to face him now. I hope we meet many times again—after the Heat wins this championship, that is. I’m sure he’ll grow into the suit. Ain’t no feud. I plan to beat the man every time I can, but when he beats me it ain’t gonna be Michael Jordan then, neither, man. It’s gonna be Gornan, or Dunk, or whatever he wants to call his ass, and when he does I’ll shake the dude’s hand. Here, you oughta ask the big white dufus some questions now.”
* * *
That should be the end of the story, but it isn’t. Elwood and I were in a bar two hours later when the sports channel switched to a live broadcast of Vanilla Dunk’s press conference, his last with the big Knicks logo on the wall behind him.
His agent spoke first. “Mr. Gornan has reached an agreement with United Artists Tokyo, regarding his motion picture and recording career—”
“What about the Knicks?”
“UA Tokyo has purchased Mr. Gornan’s contract from Gulf + Western. This is a binding, five-year agreement that guarantees Mr. Gornan eight million a year before box-office—”
“I wanted to wait till the end of the season to make this announcement,” said Dunk. “Didn’t think it would come this quick, but hey”—he paused to sneer—“that’s the way it goes. Look out, America, we’re gonna make some movies!”
“Dunk—what about basketball?”
He smirked. “That’s a little rough for me, y’know? Gotta stay pretty.” He rubbed his face exaggeratedly. “You’ll see plenty of action on the screen, anyway. Might even dunk a few.” He winked.
Elwood and I sat watching, silently transfixed. The implications sank in gradually. The Jordan skills were gone; league rules stated that they were retired with the player. The occasion that Elwood had so slowly and painfully risen to had vanished, been whisked away, in an instant.
“Tell us about the films,” said a reporter.
“Ahh, we’re still working out my character. Called Vanilla Dunk, of course. Gonna do some fightin’, some rappin’, some other stuff. Not like anything you’ve ever seen before, so you’ll just have to wait.”
“The contract includes album and video production,” added the agent. “You’ll be seeing Vanilla Dunk on the charts as well as on the screen.”
“Your whole sports career is over, then? No championships?”
He snorted. “This is bigger than a sports career, my friend. I’m bigger. Besides, sports is just entertainment, anyway. I’m still in the entertainment business.”
“Your decision anything to do with Elwood Fossett?”
He cocked his head. “Who?”
I turned away from the television. I started to speak, but stopped when I saw Elwood’s expression, which was completely hollow.
And that is the end of the story.
* * *
I’d like to say we went on to win the championship, but life doesn’t work that way. The Hyundai Celtics beat us in the next round of the playoffs. They seemed completely ready for our defense, and we were lucky to win one game. Elwood faded in and out, tantalizingly brilliant and then god-awful in the space of five minutes. The Celtics went on to lose to the Coors Suns in the final.
I myself did win a ring, later, after I was traded to the Lakers. That led indirectly to a fancy Hollywood party where I got to drunkenly tell Alan Gornan what I thought of him. I garbled my lines, but it was still pretty satisfying.
Elwood I mostly lost touch with after my trade. We partied when the Lakers went to Miami, and when the Heat came to L.A., I had him over for dinner with my second wife—an awkward scene, but we played it a few times.
When I think about what happened with him and Vanilla Dunk, I always come around to the same question. Assuming that it’s right to view the whole episode as a personal battle between the two of them—who won? Sometimes I drive myself crazy with it. I mean, who came out on top, really?
Other times I conclude that there’s something really pretty fundament
ally stupid about the question.
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