Playing Days

by Benjamin Markovits

  Game over. Cameras flashed, and I could see in the morning paper what the look on his face had been. A barbaric yawp, I want to say – except that his eyes, which were stretched wide open, seemed anxious rather than joyful. I stared at this photo (there was another beside it, which I’ll come to) for several minutes in the course of my tired and almost hungerless breakfast the next day. Giant Steps, the caption read, but another came to mind that captured much better my sense of his odd look: Pretending to Roar. He was imitating the stars he had seen on TV, most of them black, and hadn’t yet learned to feel the anger or joy they felt at their own gifts, and which the game allowed them to express. Karl was whooping because it seemed expected of him.

  The newspaper was called the Bayrisches Bauernblatt, the Bavarian Farmers’ Page. Circulation: twenty thousand. I got up early the next morning to buy a pint of milk and picked it up from the shop at the bottom of the hill. Most of the stories had to do with the weather, the price of feed, the agriculture ministry, etc. It was printed in town at an old-fashioned press in the office itself, which was on the third floor of a nineteenth-century townhouse, just across the river from the theater. The floor below was occupied by the local radio station, which shared many of its employees with the newspaper. These pictures made the front page. After breakfast, I cut out the second photograph to send home to my parents. They kept it and framed it and gave it back to me, when I asked for it, a few years later. I’m looking at the photograph now.

  My younger self looks back at me, faded to nothing more than an outline on the cheap thin paper. A drop of spilled milk over somebody’s shoes has turned pale purple with the passage of time. It’s a team portrait, arranged in two rows. The front row is kneeling, and includes Charlie Gold, Willi Darmstadt (grinning like the schoolboy he is), Milo Moritz and Herr Henkel. The back row, made up of the taller players, are standing arm in arm; Karl has his hand on my shoulder. With a burst of affectionate presumption, I’ve rested my palm on Charlie’s head, on what’s left of his curly hair. ‘Playing Days,’ the caption says.

  The cameras made for happiness, that’s what I remember. I don’t just mean the photo itself, but the presence of the photographers. (The press never showed up to any other practice.) They turned the gloomy hangarlike court, at the edge of a small market town in rural Bavaria, into a scene of importance; they turned us into basketball players. Just a few lines of the article have survived the picture’s framing. Herr Henkel, it reads, has brought in several young talents to make a push for the first division. He says that Charlie Gold, last year’s star, is just the man to bring them into shape. The only question mark is Hadnot’s knee; whether he can recover from surgery in time for the season. In the event of the worst, they’ve signed a young American to replace him . . .

  5

  The Yoghurts was a division of the local sports club, and far from the most important one. Some of the ice hockey players, it was rumored, made six-figure salaries. We shared gym time with a dozen other sports and exercise classes. On Wednesday nights, for example, aerobics for the over fifties met before us. A dozen grey-haired ladies in their leotards stood aside to let us in when the bell rang. We often had to stack their floor mats before beginning play.

  Herr Henkel had big ambitions and thought that hard work was the way to realize them. He pushed for two two-hour slots a day and got them: from ten to twelve in the morning, and from eight to ten at night. There was a lot of grumbling about these night sessions. It was hard to know when to eat, and by the time we got home, aching and sweating, we were mostly too wired to sleep. I had to wait till eleven to shower or the sweat would break through again. After that, a meal, if I could face it – usually something cold left over from the afternoon.

  Breakfast and morning brought the same set of problems. I forced down some toast and a bowl of cereal around seven o’clock, then tried to catch a few more winks before heading to the gym. Strangest of all were the long dead afternoons, stretching from noon to eight, in which the only thing to do was muster up an appetite for lunch. I lost ten pounds in the first month. All I could do, all I wanted to do, morning, noon and when I woke dry-throated in the middle of the night, was drink.

  Some of the other clubs practiced only three times a week. They had a few full-time professionals; the rest of the guys squeezed in training around their other jobs. Henkel, it was Olaf who told me, one night at my apartment over cold leftover chicken, hadn’t paid much for his roster of players. He had negotiated a high salary for himself by persuading the boss that he could win with mediocre talent. Olaf gave me a look to say, no hard feelings. It was only then I realized what he meant: that I was one of the guys brought in on the cheap.

  We were sitting in my kitchen, which had no curtains. The dark country night outside made the lone lamp glare in the windows. Flies, big horse flies from the stables on the other side of the road, settled and resettled on the cooking tray; from time to time both of us waved our hands at them. Olaf was a grumbler – the fact charmed me a little. In spite of his great placid beauty; in spite of his obvious abundant physical gifts. What was charming was just his air of unhurried dissatisfaction with life. He could always find more to complain about, he was never in a rush.

  ‘I don’t mind if they’re tight,’ he said, ‘but Henkel shouldn’t brag about it.’ He had asked the owner, an old lady known to us all as Frau Kolwitz, what she wanted: an expensive coach or expensive players. ‘She doesn’t answer. He tells her, “There is only one coach, but there are twelve players. In your shoes, I would buy expensive coach.”’

  ‘How do you know this?’ I said. It was almost midnight, and Olaf had pulled out another chair to rest his feet on.

  ‘Because he tells me himself! That’s what I mean: he brags. He can’t help it. Twice he tells me this story. I don’t mind, it’s none of my business, but who has to pay for their meanness? In the end? We do: two-a-days in August. In the second division of the Deutscher Basketball Bund. I’ve never heard of such things. I tell you now, all the other players in the league are laughing at us. They are on the beach somewhere, with their girlfriends: that’s how other teams get ready. Hadnot is the one I admire. He is too smart for these games. At the end of every season, he hurts himself and has to spend the summer resting. Henkel is furious, but there’s nothing he can do. He thinks this year he will drop him, because of Karl, but it is a mistake. Karl is too young; a great talent, yes, but too young. And no matter how much we run in August, no matter how fit we get, we are still just OK cheap-ass basketball players. And he is not such great coach.’

  Olaf was enjoying himself. Such talk, in spite of itself, has a way of flattering. Even if you’re no good, he was saying, and they work us like dogs, at least you can say this much: you’re in the know.

  But I didn’t mind the running. It tired out the loneliness that might otherwise have filled my days. I was either resting, or eating, or drinking, or showering, or playing basketball. I didn’t have time for anything else, and though we had each afternoon to ourselves, it wasn’t just the rate of my pulse that slowed down. I expected a little less from each day than I used to. By the end of the month I could chase down a bus and pay for my ticket as if I’d been waiting at the stop. I began to walk differently. I have never been so fit in my life, I said to Herr Henkel one morning before practice, but I can hardly get out of bed, I can hardly walk to the gym. Yes, he answered (he had understood me), but you could run to the gym in a minute, is that what you mean? It is a wonderful thing to know what your body can do. Especially when you are young, before everything turns to fat.

  In spite of what Olaf had said, I was beginning to fall under Henkel’s spell. He was about my father’s height, that is, a head shorter than me, and his thick moustache reminded me of the men of my childhood – of my father’s friends at the beginning of their family lives. I used to see them at faculty picnics, throwing a Frisbee, or on the soccer field in the spring during the law school’s Sunday league. They smelt of aftershave and sweat.


  Theirs was a different generation. A colleague of my father’s, who happened also to be a fraternity mate, had gone on an athletic scholarship to Cornell, where he helped them make a run at the NIT semifinals in his junior year, 1958. I used to play basketball against him: a quick-handed, quick-witted, middle-class Jewish guy. Such a kid these days might not make it onto his high school varsity, but his was the success I measured my failure against, as my father followed the team bus around Texas to watch me sit on the bench. I wanted him to watch me now. He couldn’t, of course, but Herr Henkel could and did, and had the advantages besides of professional expertise and personal indifference. What I hoped to find out from him was an answer to the old question: what do you think? Am I any good?

  After a week of practice, Henkel split us into two teams – for the purpose of drills and scrimmages. Team 1 and team A, he called us, to cover up his preference, but his preference was easy to spot. Team 1 had Karl, Charlie, Olaf, Plotzke and Milo and wore the blue jerseys that matched our game uniforms.

  Milo, the thick-lipped Croat, was the choice that hurt. For a few days in that first week, I ran with Charlie and Karl, and Milo played the three spot for the second stringers. We sometimes guarded each other. One evening, Henkel was walking us through our offensive sets, and Milo had the basketball on the wing. I bellied up to him and propped my forearm against his chest. He held the ball at his hip with both hands, which he suddenly lifted up; then he swung his elbows round and caught me in the jaw.

  ‘Easy,’ he said, as I staggered blindly back. He spoke always with the quiet watchful assurance of a thug on a street corner. ‘The coach was only showing us position. Give me a little room.’

  After that, we ran through the play and Milo got the ball a few feet inside the arc and went straight up for a shot, which he made. Henkel rounded on me. ‘This is fucking walk-through,’ he shouted, ‘and you are too stupid or slow to put hand in his face?’

  Milo said nothing, and the next day, Henkel switched him to the first team. After a while we settled into our jobs; mine was guarding Karl. Henkel thought of himself as an eccentric, an innovator. He wanted to teach the Kid, who was seven feet tall and weighed roughly two hundred and forty pounds, to play in the backcourt, which made him my responsibility. Karl owes him a great deal. If he has played his part in changing the role of big men in the modern game, it was Henkel, his first professional coach, who helped him to define it.

  Karl was a problem, though, and not just for me. Henkel wanted his first-team players to scrimmage together, to get a feel for each other, but they were so much better than the rest of us that practice became uncompetitive. Occasionally he’d give us Karl or Charlie for an afternoon and swap Darmstadt or me to the first team. But Darmstadt was just a kid, a real kid, a high school student with a milky moustache and arms as skinny as fresh pasta. He couldn’t run the offense, which defeated the point of the exercise; and Karl, when he switched sides, used to take us all on single-handed, which made for some close games, but not much progress. The truth was, and Henkel was beginning to admit it, that he had spent too little on his players. It’s up to the benchwarmers, guys seven, eight and nine on the roster, to keep the play sharp in practice even if they never make it on court in games. This was supposed to be my job and I wasn’t doing it.

  Not my first taste of failure, but something about that month left a deep print. I still feel its mark on me. OK, so we all guessed that Karl was something special, that he might become famous in time. But he wasn’t famous yet, and whenever he beat me to a rebound, or took me off the dribble, or casually lifted a jumpshot over my outstretched hand, he seemed to stand for all the other seventeen-year-old kids in the world who could whip me too. I just happened to end up in Karl’s hometown. There were probably a hundred other towns in Germany, I figured, where the local high school hero would give me the same treatment.

  Relativity is one of the miseries of the minor leagues. When you lose, it isn’t just your opponent who beats you, but everybody else in the leagues ahead of you.

  One day, after the morning session, Henkel led us outside to the soccer pitch, which was surrounded by a sandy track. It had rained overnight, and the red sand stuck to our shoes. Henkel divided us into groups, and we began to run intervals, starting at twenty meters and building up to the full hundred before winding down again. After we’d warmed up a little, he offered to make a competition of it and stood at the end of the track with the whistle in his hand.

  A hundred meters is a long way; it only feels like a sprint if you’re winning. I came in fifth: Karl, Charlie, Milo and Krahm, our skinny backup power forward, outpaced me by at least ten yards. Olaf would probably have beaten me, too, if he hadn’t pulled up lame after twenty paces, holding his hamstring, and trotted the rest of the way with a great show of pain. Afterwards he explained to me that they didn’t pay him enough to make him run horse races. A horse race is just what it felt like. Basketball is a team sport and the nuances of the game leave you room to blame what happens on other people. But that sprint left no such room. I felt afterwards that my flesh had been weighed and valued. If I hoped to make a name for myself in that league I would have to make do with inferior qualities.

  But I had good days, too, when my shots fell and Karl was too lazy to come out and challenge them. And other things on my mind. Sometimes I skipped the banter of the locker room and got cleaned up at home. Then I’d shower in the dark, bowing my head beneath the flow of water. The darkness kept out, from my own thoughts, the stares of other people. I felt the day drain from me; I closed my eyes against the rising heat. Afterwards, drying off, I liked to look out the little bathroom window above the sink, at the lights of the complex – which dotted the night air according to one of those intricate changing patterns that seem both human and mathematical. But the truth is, I spent most of that time looking out for one window in particular. The window where the long-haired girl had stood.

  Around half past ten at night, she tended to show her face. Probably it was her bedroom window, and she liked to look at the view a minute before turning in: the horse farm across the road and the land falling away behind me into the darkness of the countryside. She might have seen a few stars. Landshut grew very dark at night. The luminous hum of Munich did not reach it.

  When her hair was down, her silhouette seemed simpler and whiter. I guessed that she wore it up in the day and loosened in the evening, that she slept in a nightdress. Sometimes, though the light was behind her, I could see the details of her day clothes: black cardigans with bright buttons, square-cut blouses in strong primary colors. She was very thin. Her waist seemed no broader than my thumb. The fact that she stood there with the curtains wide open at the same time each night struck me almost as an act of communicated intimacy: we shared a ritual.

  Not that she always looked out. Sometimes I watched her going about the slow quiet business of putting herself to bed. Folding clothes away, applying night creams, combing out her hair. I worked out the faint top edge of a standing mirror against the wall, above the line of the windowsill. Beside it, a low skyline of bottles and jars and boxes. Her dressing table. Once in a while something or someone called her out of the room: a telephone? a boyfriend? Though she always reentered the stage framed by her bedroom window, after a few minutes, alone again and without a phone in her hand.

  Even at the time the racing of my heart gave away the fact that my interest was not quite wholesome. On the other hand, the desire I felt for the world within those rooms, warmed by her presence, seemed to me also a decent and natural desire – for a normal and less lonely life. And on those few occasions when I saw her unbuttoning her cardigan or throwing her hair over her head to pull up a blouse, I rarely lingered for more than a few seconds before turning away to get dressed for bed myself.

  6

  Two weeks before the season began, Bo Hadnot showed up to practice. I can’t say I recognized him. Henkel, for once, was late, and most of the guys had gathered at the far en
d of the gym to watch Darmstadt fooling around. About ten o’clock in the morning. It seemed a sign, and I muttered this to Olaf as we sat on a bench lacing up our hightops, of what being professionals had done to us. After a month of training, we lay around waiting for Coach before picking up a basketball.

  Only Darmstadt, a schoolboy, was out on court, grinning the broad uncontrollable grin of a kid being looked at, and trying to prove to us that he could dunk. For him, practice was just a small part of an ordinary life, maybe even an escape from it. He was sixteen years old and about to begin his final year at the Fachschule. His father was a pharmacist; his mother grew up on one of the smallholdings outside Landshut and still spent most of her days at the family farm, helping out. Darmstadt was a real local; he didn’t expect to make it out of town. Henkel had drafted him as a part of his economy drive, after somebody from the club spotted him in the youth league and figured he could fill out the practice squad. The team paid him a few hundred marks a month for showing up: a windfall, from Darmstadt’s point of view. Every day after the morning session, two of his high school friends met him at the bike racks outside the sports hall, and he took them out to lunch at McDonald’s. Later it would probably seem to him the best summer of his life.

  Not that he couldn’t play. He was skinny and pimply, with long arms whose elbows almost knocked against his hips. Size fifteen shoes don’t suit many people; they look especially awkward on a teenage boy still growing into his length. But he had a quick first step and a cheerful indifference to every aspect of the game that didn’t involve getting off his own shot. With a decent run-up and a lucky grip on the ball he could just about squeeze a dunk over the front rim. Whenever he did, we cheered him, with a loud irony that made him blush – out of pleasure and embarrassment. In any case, it gave him an incentive to try again, and again.