Playing Days

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘It makes me tired to look at him,’ Olaf said.

  Meanwhile, somebody had begun to warm up at the other end of the court. He wore a T-shirt and tracksuit pants and what looked like a pair of loafers (by the way he shuffled around in them) over white socks. Loafers are what old ballplayers turn to when their backs and knees go, but I didn’t know that at the time. I assumed some guy off the street had seen the open door and wanted to try his hand. He bounced the ball a couple times and lined himself up just outside the three-point arc. Then he put up a shot, not hard enough it seemed to me, but the ball went in. The spin drew it back and he waited for it to come to him, then shuffled a few more steps along the three-point line.

  Something looked wrong about the next shot, awkward or sidelong, but it also went in, and not till he had reached the top of the key did I realize he had shifted to his left hand. When he missed, he chased the ball with heavy steps and returned to the spot he’d missed from and knocked down three straight slowly, with great deliberation, before moving on. I watched him for a few minutes, drawn to the sight as we are to any private act in a public place: a man tying his shoelaces or crying; a boy and a girl holding hands. Then Henkel called us to order at the center of the court, and the stranger reluctantly collected his ball and walked over.

  I recognized him then – he had picked me up from the airport. Only Olaf came over to greet him and slapped him teasingly on his off-season belly. Hadnot made a fist. Then Henkel introduced him to the new guys and the fat young man from the front office took him inside to get his ankles taped.

  Bo had changed out of his loafers and sweats by the time he came out again, but he didn’t look much better. Whether or not his knees still bothered him, a summer on the couch hadn’t done the rest of him any good. He untucked his shirt to give his belly room and moved with the slow persistence of a man trying to find something he might have dropped earlier. Then we ran drills; for the first time all week Henkel took it easy on us. A lot of jumpshots, half court traps, free throws. Nobody talked much, and I had the strong impression of an imminent shift in the weather.

  Olaf told me during a water break that Charlie and Hadnot didn’t get along. The court had no fountain. Most players brought their own bottle, but if it ran out you had to wander through the bowels of the arena to fill up at the locker room sink. Olaf always added a tab of magnesium, which fizzed whitely and tasted of chalk, and made full use of these breaks, sometimes drawing me into his little truancies. Basketball players are ass-kissers, he said. They like to suck up to the big stars (this was his phrase), and Charlie had had the whole show to himself for about a month. Now Hadnot was back everyone had to work out who was boss. Don’t be surprised, he said, if Charlie makes a move on you. Olaf was very funny on the subject; he had no respect for the team mentality. He was also boasting about his own sullen independence, but I liked him for it, even if his account put our relations in an awkward light.

  Henkel spent most of the second hour walking us through our offensive sets. Practice was light enough, in fact, that I skipped the showers and made straight for the open air. It was a clear late summer’s day, as clear as autumn but a few degrees warmer, and I sometimes felt about the gym the way I used to feel about school: it was the window I leaned out of. Which was why my heart sank a little when Charlie caught up to me at the bike racks. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘young man, let me take you to lunch; you look like you need it.’ I saw Darmstadt walking off with his two friends – six hands in six pockets, three heads bent – and envied them briefly.

  7

  Charlie led the way to his apartment. The Sports Halle stood in the new section of town: lots of chunky sixties architecture, the sorts of buildings a child would design who had just been given his first ruler. Square and brightly painted. But the new cobbled streets gave way to old cobbled streets as we approached the river. The courthouse and the theater, overlooking the water, were equally simple but much more elegant; they showed to its best advantage the virtue of German order.

  Landshut had its heyday in the 1500s when some Prince of Bavaria settled there. It was the market town into which all the hills surrounding poured their harvests. The Isar connected it to Munich and the rest of Germany, and the place still had an air of commercial pride and prosperity, which only partly depended on tourists. Trains ran every hour from Munich. We got some of the spillover from Oktoberfest and even out of season attracted just enough Americans and Brits to support a few kitsch Biergartens on the High Street. Charlie, in fact, lived next to one of them, on the top floor of a sagging medieval townhouse, whose stairs were so short and narrow that I had to bend double and climb them with my hands on the steps in front.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked, when he showed me in. The apartment was lighter, more spacious than I had expected, but practically unfurnished. A chair in one corner of the room faced one of those cheap wooden rolling units on which you can stack a TV and VCR. Other than that, there was nowhere to sit, apart from the two bar stools pushed up to the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room. A row of cookbooks from the same Learn to Cook series (Italian, Thai, French, etc.) leaned against the counter wall. French windows at the far side of the living room gave on to a deep narrow balcony all but overgrown with flowerpots.

  ‘I don’t live here, I work here,’ he said. It was the tone he would have taken on the basketball court, where his motto was: always correct. And then, a little embarrassed, he added, ‘About four years.’

  We ate lunch on the balcony. Charlie had prepared it before practice: a cold pasta dish with chili and soy and fish. He offered me a beer, a local Pilsener, which I accepted but hardly touched; he nursed his bottle for most of the afternoon. Over lunch he showed me photographs of the house he was building outside Chicago, towards the Michigan border. That’s where he ‘lived,’ he said. He spent every off-season with a few buddies adding to it. His father had worked in construction, Charlie practically grew up on building sites, and his dad was doing a little job for him now, digging the foundations for a tennis court at the back of his yard.

  ‘Somewhere to retire to,’ I said, ‘at the age of thirty-five.’

  He thought he’d have to wait longer than that. His face seemed almost hidden beneath the rough scars of acne; it was capable of keeping a great deal back. He said, ‘I don’t suppose you’re in it for more than a year or two. You got other plans.’

  ‘What are those?’ I asked, smiling.

  But it seemed the wrong note, and he didn’t respond. I told him eventually that I wanted to be a writer, that I thought basketball might be an interesting way to pay a few bills. Besides, I could always write something about the experience.

  That’s right, Charlie nodded. ‘I guessed you had something else on your mind.’

  ‘What do you mean, something else?’

  ‘Something other than basketball.’

  In the course of the afternoon, he had quietly attended to his flowerpots, deadheading the late roses, looking for slugs, etc. and he stood up now to fill the watering can from a tap in the outside wall. ‘I’ve played with guys like you before,’ he said, ‘stuck inside they own head. So you let all these bullies push you around. I know, I’m one of them. You got to stand up for yourself.’ He lowered his voice a note or two and put on his angry face, his ‘black’ voice. ‘I’m talking about Milo,’ he said. ‘Don’t let him be teaching you nothing. You ain’t his A student. He ain’t your teacher. Next time he tells you what to do, I don’t care what it is, just cold cock him.’

  He slapped a fist against his hand. After a minute, he added, ‘You’re giving me that look again. Like you’re taking it all in.’

  The watering can was empty, so he returned to fill it. And began to explain himself, as he made his parade among the flowers. He had been in this country ten years now. The first job he took was in Gelsenkirchen, which reminded him of parts of Ohio, prosperous, industrial. At that time, the club was in the fourth division. They didn’t h
ave the money to pay him a full wage. Part of his job was looking after handicapped kids. He was twenty-two years old and had rarely been out of the Midwest. The homesickness was as bad as pneumonia; it all but put him to bed. He had never dealt with disability before, and the experience came at a difficult time: he was young and healthy and full of himself. And beginning to doubt himself, too – a bad combination.

  ‘I hated those kids,’ he said, ‘didn’t want to look at them. But I took them swimming, got them changed again. Cleaned up they poopy diapers. Some of them four, five years old. Most of them happier than me.’

  He had expected, if nothing else, that the basketball would be OK – he could put up with a lot so long as the basketball was OK. He figured on teaching the Germans how to play. Instead he discovered that there were a lot of guys who could shoot better than he could shoot, jump higher than he could jump, run faster than he could run. If someone had asked him back then, would he last till Christmas, he’d have said, hell no.

  ‘I’m hoping to make it to Hanukkah,’ I said.

  He looked up at me then. ‘Oh, you’re not that bad,’ he said. ‘That just shows how much you know.’

  There was a garden attached to the clinic, and he used to help out the nurse responsible for keeping it up. Gardening was supposed to be very therapeutic. That was one of their theories, and it’s true, the kids loved it. He had been raised in Chicago in a tenth-floor apartment with a balcony just big enough for his mother to hang up the washing. It was always full of washing; there wasn’t room for anything else. What he meant was, he didn’t know anything about gardening until he got to Gelsenkirchen; but he was having a bad year, and among the best things to come out of it were some strawberries, which he had planted himself and was allowed to take home and eat. At the end of the season, Gelsenkirchen moved up to the third division – he had played his part in that, too. Later, he got a job in Hamburg for a second division club; then Freiburg and Nürnberg and Landshut. Everywhere he went he took his pots and his big TV.

  ‘I guess you’re waiting for the point of this story,’ he said.

  ‘You mean, if I don’t watch out I might be stuck here for another ten years.’

  But he shook his head. The point of the story was to tell me that he had won the league his first year. ‘Basketball is just like anything else. You can make out of yourself what you want to make out of yourself.’

  There was a moment of awkwardness as I left. ‘What are you doing,’ he said. ‘We got all afternoon.’ He planned to watch a video and then maybe have a nap, but I was welcome to join him for the movie.

  ‘You only got one chair,’ I pointed out, making my way to the door, and he stood in the doorway watching me back down his narrow stairs.

  8

  I arrived at the evening session early only to find that most of the guys were already warming up. There was a second court in the sports hall, on the third floor, which was much pokier than the first. It had wooden backboards, not glass; there was no room for a bench along the sidelines. On Wednesday nights, we were forced to make do with it: a ballet class had been oversubscribed and they needed the space downstairs.

  In fact, I preferred the second court, which was small enough that you could smell the heat of play after a few minutes. Everyone seemed happier there. Basketball felt more like a game and less like a profession, which isn’t to say that we took it easy. Walking in that night, I sensed something restless, fractious, playful in the air, and wondered how much of it had to do with the American’s return. He was quietly shooting free throws at a side basket.

  After a light warm-up, Henkel dragged the practice jerseys onto the floor. The first team had Plotzke, Olaf, Milo, Karl and Charlie. The second team was made up of me, Darmstadt, Krahm, Hadnot and another late addition, a big man brought in by Henkel at the last minute with a very English-sounding name – Thomas Arnold. Arnold was a large, pale-faced, fair-haired, amiable kid, who had just passed his music exams and was hoping to study choral singing. His basketball experience stretched no further than a useful role on his high school team in Berlin. To escape the army, he had enlisted for civic duty and been assigned to a children’s hospital in town. He got in touch with the Yoghurts mostly because he didn’t know anybody in Bavaria, which struck him as a barbarous place, full of backward people who spoke incomprehensible German.

  It should be clear by now how unfairly matched we were. Plotzke was the only weak link on the first team, but even he had been playing club basketball for the best part of a decade. He was physically ugly, a great complainer and dangerously clumsy, but also, and partly because of that fact, surprisingly effective. Milo had started in the second division, Olaf in the first. Charlie had done time in the NBA, even if he had never made it past the preseason camps. And Karl was already being publicized as the most exciting young talent in the league. On the other side, Arnold and Krahm were both, essentially, university students, who had taken up the sport as a hobby. Darmstadt was a school kid, and I hadn’t started for an organized team since junior high. That left Hadnot to pick up the slack, and he was fat, hurt and out of shape. Even so, as Krahm said to me, pulling the mesh jersey over his T-shirt, ‘It can’t be worse than before.’

  The second unit, in the course of a month of beatings, had become demoralized; the whole team had suffered. We were going through the motions, of losing, on the one hand, and winning, on the other. Everyone was flat. Failure gets to be good and comfortable, like any other habit. But Hadnot took us aside for a minute before tipoff and said without any sort of introduction, ‘You and you [pointing to Arnold and Krahm], keep your shoulders wide on the block. And look out for me; I like to come hard off screens.’

  Then, to Darmstadt: ‘What’s your name, kid?’

  ‘Willi,’ he said.

  ‘All right, Willi. I want the ball to my right hip. The pass should get there same time I do. Every second counts; I’m old and slow. Who’s got Karl?’

  I raised my hand. ‘I’ll take him,’ he said. And then, with an air of practical kindness: ‘He’s lazy on defense and I want to get a few shots in. You guard Milo. I don’t care if you have to knee him, keep him out of the baseline and off the boards.’

  Hadnot had rearranged us all around him. Not that I minded. He had conveyed nothing so forcefully as the fact that this game mattered, a Wednesday night preseason scrimmage on a half-sized court, in a small town forty-five miles outside Munich, where the only sports that anyone really cared about were ice hockey and soccer. ‘Let’s beat these sons of bitches,’ he said. ‘I hate losing.’

  They say you get one good game, coming back, before your legs give way and you have to build them back up. Maybe that was the game Hadnot had. Nobody benefited from the smaller court more than he did. It was easy to get up and down or track back on the break; the hard part was finding a wrinkle of space in the half-court to maneuver in. The weight he carried on him served a purpose, too; it demanded room. He warned us that he liked to come hard off the pick. I could barely move my right arm the next day: that was the shoulder he curled off, coming up from the block. Didn’t matter how many screens it took to set him free, after a while that’s all we looked for. He hit from the baseline, from the elbow, from the top of the key. He knocked down little ten-foot floaters that may be the toughest shot in basketball: letting the high slow arc of the ball take back the force of the drive. When the angle was there, he went glass; otherwise, his shots dropped through like he’d been standing over the rim.

  To an unfamiliar eye, there must have been something very gracious and gentle about the way he scored. He seemed to preach self-restraint, the shots floated so quietly in. But boy was he pissed off. Not that he talked much. Charlie liked to keep up a flow of conversation with everybody on court. Hadnot said something only if he wanted something. ‘Ball!’ he shouted, ‘ball!’ every time he snapped off a screen. Karl spent about a half hour trying to fight his way through, until Charlie instituted a switching defense. After that, Hadnot was everybody’
s business. They ran double-teams at him whenever the switch was made, they had him covered both over and under, but Hadnot found a way to work through them. He used headfakes to get the help defenders in the air, then planted a shoulder or elbow in their jaws to force the foul. ‘Foul!’ was the other thing he used to shout, clapping his hands for the ball. After a few of his elbows, even Charlie tended to switch a little slower off the high screens, and Hadnot had his inch of space.

  We took the first game with something to spare – the first game we had won all year.

  Why he was angry, I don’t know. But anger had something to do with the show he put on. It wasn’t just the fact that he singled out Karl to score his points on – although he did that, too. It was the way he played the other side of the ball. Hadnot was giving away more than ten years, six inches, and fifty-odd pounds to Karl. The Kid also had the quickest first step on the team and I didn’t see any way that Hadnot could keep in front of him. Keeping in front of him, in fact, was all he did. As soon as Karl crossed half-court, Hadnot bellied up to him, and Karl never got the chance to stretch his long legs. A certain amount of grabbing, shirt-clutching, knee-banging were all part of the American’s plans, and a strict-constructionist referee might have fouled him out of the game inside ten minutes. But there was no referee, and Henkel didn’t trust himself to whistle any of Hadnot’s tricks. You had to call everything or nothing, and everything is usually too much.