Torsten was the only one back, but I could hardly see by this point. A dark edge, like a frame or a curtain, had begun to encroach on my vision, and I could feel the blood in my ear beating the drum in waves. Three long dribbles took me to the foul line, while Torsten gave ground before me. When he stopped, I shot. It was the only thing I could think of, and I felt a surge of relief as the ball touched rim before caroming strangely and out of bounds. Close enough. Henkel sent Karl in to replace me, and I sat down again and tried to breathe.
‘Calm down,’ coach said to me, and I remember thinking he had told Milo the same thing.
It seemed strange that the fluid haphazard passage of events had frozen so quickly into something unchangeable; that the ball would always bounce against the inside of the rim, away and out of bounds, at that peculiar angle. That it would never go in.
My head slowly cleared, and from the vantage of the bench the rest of the game emerged into focus. Ten men, moving in spurts, in groups of two and three, and dividing a ball amongst themselves.
I decided to follow Hadnot with my eye. He was puffing already. Once, after Charlie lost the ball on the break, I saw him lower his shoulders briefly and dig in before turning the other way and sprinting back. A boyish hesitation: the moment of regret a boy feels, at the effort necessary, before he wills himself to make it. He moved in general both suddenly and sparingly. Setting up on the block, he waited for Olaf to come all the way down to him, before sprinting hard to the wing. Then he stood there a few seconds doing nothing, while Charlie swung the ball around the arc; his hands were down, he might have been waiting for a bus. Olaf drifted up to the elbow and Hadnot cut in to meet him with his forearms crossed. The big man curled off him, and Jurkovich stepped out to slow him down. Bo turned, too, but on the outside pivot, and Jurkovich got stuck on his shoulder. Karl bounced the pass in and Hadnot used the lift of the bounce to send him into his motion. The Russian stood helplessly by as he rose in the air and dropped a soft shot in from fifteen feet.
I said to Milo, to spill off a little of my admiration, ‘He just needs two inches – of space.’ I wanted to prove to him that I had noticed, to boast that I had noticed. But Milo had his head bent under a folded towel and didn’t answer.
At halftime, we were down by nine. Henkel led us quietly into the locker room; we could smell the showers, rich with cold steam, in the air. ‘I think you are ashamed of yourselves,’ he said.
Nobody answered him. Russell stood in the corner, resting his hand on a box of Gatorades, but he didn’t offer them to anyone, and we didn’t dare ask him. Even he seemed to have acquired a kind of authority over us: he had a right to his disappointment. After a minute, Henkel brought out a piece of paper from the front pocket of his shirt and unfolded it. ‘Three hundred a month, no apartment. A car. Five hundred a month, no apartment or car. Eight hundred, with accommodation.’ He looked at us. ‘I think you know how much you get paid,’ he said. ‘Should I read that out, too?’
Our silence, as he no doubt intended, seemed an acknowledgment of guilt. So he went on. ‘Nürnberg have two full-timers. Ok, they make a little money. Shall I tell you what Jurkovich gets paid?’ He brought out another piece of paper and unfolded it. ‘How many points he make? Twenty-two. How many threes he make?’ etc. There was more of this sort of talk. Henkel, in his indignation, tended to rely on his bluntest ironies, his simplest idioms. ‘I think they think they get good money’s worth.’ He wasn’t a foolish man, and at other times managed a few gentle pokes at the expense of his profession, but bad play and the prospect of losing always brought out in him the soapbox moralist.
In response, I hung my head and let the appearance of shame cover up what I felt. A little embarrassment. A little anger. Public solemnity, like terrible weather, also provokes in me a quiet good humor. I hang my head to avoid catching someone’s eye – Olaf’s, Hadnot’s. There’s an ugly small smile my face sometimes breaks out in, which I don’t like myself and which is partly shaped by the attempt to suppress it. Tight in the cheeks; thin in the lips. Henkel’s locker-room speeches often brought it out.
Then I heard him again because he mentioned my name. ‘I don’t know where Ben thinks he is – what he do out there. Maybe I ask him. Back at home, I think, in his daddy’s big driveway, playing games.’
Hadnot said, ‘If you want to stop dicking around, why don’t you put me in.’
Henkel stared at him.
‘If you want to stop playing games, sit Milo on the fucking bench and put me in?’
Hadnot spent the first five minutes of the second half beside me on the bench, and then Henkel did what he was told. He pulled Milo and put Hadnot in.
The truth is, Milo had been playing better. He broke up a long pass, even if he knocked it out of bounds; drove and fed Karl for a baseline jumper; hauled in a rebound over Hans Muller’s shoulder. But his eye was still off. He tried a straight-up three and sent it long. When Charlie set him up with a little fifteen-footer on the break, he thought about it long enough for Jurkovich to make his way back to him. Then he head-faked and started to drive, got nowhere and pulled it back out again, pounding the ball hard flat-handed and shouting ‘Ruhe, Ruhe,’ to no one in particular. Calm, calm. When he picked up his dribble, Charlie had to fight his way round the arc for a dump off. Milo just stood there; he couldn’t find his place in the offense, until Olaf called down to him from the block, ‘Motion, motion!’
Even so, he was angry when coach took him out and kicked at something underneath the bench, which turned out to be a water bottle. It leaked and spread slowly under our sneakers until Milo told Darmstadt to clean it up. A sign that he was feeling better.
I couldn’t understand why Henkel had started him. There was no question: Hadnot belonged altogether to a different class. Sometimes coaches like to keep a sharpshooter back, they like to bring him on in the middle of the game, to change the flow. Mostly young guys, still trying to prove themselves, or veterans, without the legs for forty minutes. Maybe that’s it: Henkel was trying to let Hadnot play his way back into shape. But a good coach has that conversation with his player. Henkel was a good coach, but Bo didn’t act like a man who’d been talked to. To see Jurkovich running the show at the other end must have been painful. Hadnot had a good five years on him and would have considered himself a more complete player. A better shooter, too; Jurkovich ran hot and cold. There was a kink in his motion that wanted a certain amount of management: he pushed his elbow outside-in on the release. Hadnot was pure. Coach must have had some other reason for benching him, and as I sat there watching I wondered what it could be.
Charlie had complained that Hadnot was selfish. It’s also true that the younger players deferred to him. Karl began to drift. Muller had been pushing him off the block all day, and when Hadnot came on, he gave up the baseline, too: it’s where Bo liked to work. It turned out that Karl had the makings of a point man in him – he was a wonderful feeder of the post. Muller was too short to block his view of the lane and too slow to pressure him on the ball. Hadnot and Olaf exploited the foul line and that opened up Plotzke on the block, when the help came out. Charlie took over on the wing. He was never a very reliable shooter, but it stopped him from pounding the ball, and with the burden of the offense lifted from him, he could penetrate at will.
Karl ran the offense, but Hadnot put everyone in his place. We ran him through so many screens that the defense began to cluster off the ball. Even Olaf found room for a little drive and dish. Without Charlie running the show, the whole game slowed down, which suited Hadnot, too – he was beginning to tug at his shorts. The only guy who didn’t score was Karl.
With six minutes left, coach gave Hadnot a breather, and I didn’t have time to break out in sweat when he sent me in. Muller was on the line and we were down by three. He hit one of two, then Charlie pushed the ball on the break and set up Karl for a running one-hander crossing into the lane. First points he scored all half. Muller and Olaf traded baskets inside, then Torsten stepped back for a ten-f
ooter from the baseline and I just got a finger to it. It went in anyway. Charlie brought the ball up slowly and raised a right fist as he crossed half-court. The play called for the wings to come hard off the block for the pass, but Torsten was cheating on my outside hand and I couldn’t get free. Twice we had to reset.
‘Be there! Be there!’ I heard someone shout.
The third time, I cut backdoor and Charlie found me with the bounce pass. Muller came slow on the rotation and in a sudden fever of blood I rose among the crowding arms and muscled the ball in: my palm slapped glass on the way down. A horn sounded and we made our way back to the bench. I couldn’t hear a thing, and after the time-out Milo had to pull at my jersey to keep me from wandering on court again. Hadnot had replaced me. There were three minutes left and we were down by two.
By this stage the hundred-odd people in the stands were all standing up. It wasn’t a big place, nothing like a real stadium, and the warmth of their bodies had begun to make itself felt in the atmosphere. Sounds thickened in it; lights glared. Jurkovich felt the heat, too. The last few shots he made came flat off the palm. They scooped out the net on their way down, and you figured, once he missed, he might keep missing. Muller scored on a put-back, then Charlie drove hard with a low shoulder, spun off it and laid the ball left-handed in. Karl blocked Torsten on a switch, and the ball fell to Charlie who streaked the other way with Hadnot and Olaf behind him. Only Torsten was back and Charlie charged him, then dumped the ball back to Hadnot at twenty feet. It was like watching a man pick his shirt off a washing line: there didn’t seem any question he could miss.
With a minute to go we had our first lead of the game. Muller put down his head at the other end and kept pounding the ball till a path cleared. On the way up, he caught Olaf with an elbow in the eye, which spent the next week going from black to purple to brown, but nobody was going to call it at that stage in the game and nobody did. The shot hit the rim twice, going up and down, first on the outside and then on the inside, and we were trailing by one with thirty-two seconds to play.
Then everything stopped. Henkel called the boys over and we stood around them, feeling their heat in the smell of them, while coach got down on his knees and drew up a mess of lines on the green floor. I was grateful that none of it applied to me.
He said, ‘I want you to take the shot, Karl.’
Karl nodded. The features of his face seemed too large for expression, except when he squinted against a run of sweat. He might have been indifferent or terrified. We were going to run the play for Hadnot in the corner. Karl would set the screen for him, then peel off baseline and come off Olaf’s backpick hard at the rim. Charlie would show towards Hadnot then float a pass to Karl at the basket, who was supposed to climb up and get it and ‘do whatever you call it what you do.’ And that’s more or less what happened, except that Charlie made the pass to Hadnot in the corner, and Hadnot rushed it just enough to beat the stretched arm of Hans Muller roaring at him, and rattle the shot home. ‘No no no no no good,’ Henkel said, and slapped his hand against his clipboard.
Nürnberg still had time to run a play, and Jurkovich, as soon as the shot went in, fired a quick inbounds to Torsten, who was just as surprised as the rest of us and let it bounce off his fingers. Charlie tracked down the loose ball and after that all they could do was foul. Torsten wrapped him up in two arms.
We couldn’t hear ourselves shout and Henkel hid a little smile under his moustache. He was very relieved and couldn’t stand still anymore, but paced up and down in front of our bench, so that I didn’t see Charlie miss his first free throw. There were two seconds left. Then Charlie missed the next one, too, and Muller pulled it in and sent a long pass football-style down court to Jurkovich, who was standing just outside the center circle, about thirty-five feet from the basket. He caught it and turned and shot, in one motion, and the horn sounded loudly just as the ball went in.
After that the silence was sudden and almost meteorological. Something irretrievable had happened, and even though it didn’t matter terribly to most of the people there – who would go home talking about it, then prepare for another Saturday night – the sadness of that fact made itself felt. What was done couldn’t be undone now. We had lost, quite against the grain, and for a minute nobody knew what to say.
Then Olaf picked up a chair at the scorer’s table and threw it against the wall.
In the locker room afterwards, a low sullen anger prevailed. I wondered at Olaf – caring too much was never his public style. But he made a great noise about everything he did, flinging his bag down, kicking off his shoes, etc. until he hit the showers, which he turned on very hard. Charlie sat with his back against the wall and sucking on his lip. He looked puzzled, with an air of concentration: he looked like a man who might have left his oven on. Hadnot, as he passed by him, rested his large-fingered hand on Charlie’s bald head. Thomas Arnold and Darmstadt hadn’t played and were uncomfortably dry and restless; they chattered to relieve their pent-up energies. Darmstadt wouldn’t shut up about Jurkovich, and then, with a sudden contrition almost comically transparent, began to apologize to Charlie, who ignored him.
There was something unpleasant about the whole scene – I mean, more than unhappy, though it was that, too. And I wondered if top-flight players, in their air-conditioned locker rooms, dressing after a game for a night on the town, would take losing so hard. Maybe not. The truth was, most of these guys weren’t where they wanted to be, and every loss reminded them of the fact that they belonged where they were.
Outside, through one of the high windows built into the bathroom stalls, we could hear the Nürnbergers climbing onto their bus. They weren’t singing, or anything like that. I guess they were tired enough, with a two-hour bus ride ahead of them. But I could hear in their voices the sweetness of the summer evening. Some of them might have picked up a few beers from the canteen on the way out – that’s what they sounded like. Like people who had heard some good news. The contrast must have struck Charlie, too, for he shook his head and rubbed his thumb against what might have been a smile. Quiet but very public demonstrations: it was important for him to look the part. Rueful, surprised. In control.
Russell came in dragging a couple of laundry sacks. He began to pick up wet uniforms from the floor. This took him no more than a minute, and he stood in the doorway waiting for the rest of us to undress. Obediently, feeling a little childish, I stripped off jersey and shorts and stood up in bare feet. Eventually he said, ‘Die Schwarzen können eh’ nicht gerade aus schiessen.’
Olaf was still in the shower or he wouldn’t have said it. Charlie looked up at him and suddenly my vague sense of unpleasantness had sharpened to a point. ‘What’d he say?’ Charlie asked. ‘What’d that fat fuck say?’
He looked at me, and I guess my eyes got wide and I shook my head, because he tilted his own, as if to wait me out. ‘He said,’ it was Karl who broke the silence, in English, in an accent deeper than his native tone, but perfectly clear, ‘the blacks never could shoot straight.’ Then, by way of apology, ‘That’s what he said.’
Charlie raised his right hand, in a gesture of disgust, but Russell was on his knees again, pulling shorts off the floor. Then Henkel walked in, glancing over his notes. He looked set for one of his speeches, so Charlie picked himself up and headed for the showers. It occurred to me for the first time that there might be something wrong with our team, something unhappy about us. But maybe that’s what everybody thinks, after losing.
13
I met Hadnot around noon the next day, outside the McDonald’s on the High Street. He came out, a few minutes late, carrying on his hip a small girl, who had her hands around a paper packet of fries. ‘We were early so I got her some lunch,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a kiddy-seat, whatever you call it.’ I must have stared at him, because he continued, ‘I thought you wanted to go for a bike ride.’
‘We can do that, or we can do something else.’
‘Well, I guess we can drive.’
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He had come by foot into town, so I followed him back out again, off the High Street and into the hills. The girl wanted to walk some of the way, so he set her down, but she stopped and picked things up from the ground and turned back as much as she went forward. Patiently, he lifted her in his arms again, over her protests, which were mild, and we managed to progress a block or two, before he relented and the whole business started from scratch. Her name was Frankie; at least, that’s what Hadnot called her. Franziska, I guess.
She had the skinniness of small girls, very touching, which is reproduced in some women after motherhood in middle age. Stringy little legs, a long neck. Someone else had dressed her, I supposed: she was wearing quiet yellow stockings and a blue summer frock. Only her face was plump, with the blurred, rounded look of something not quite awake yet or softened by sunshine. Eventually I had the bright idea of setting her on my bike, which I was pushing beside me. She let me pick her up, and we went along much better.
Not since I was a kid myself had I spent much time with kids. My mother, rather late in life, gave birth to twin girls. As the youngest son, I spent a lot of time looking after them. There’s a photograph of me on my mother’s desk: I’m wearing shorts, a red raincoat and a fireman’s helmet, with a girl on each brown bony knee. I thought of it suddenly, pushing Frankie up the hill. You spend your whole life living inside of a family and then you get to college and have to get used to living outside of one. Then you get used to that, and after a while you get married and have kids and have to get used to the other thing again.
After a short walk we arrived at his car, one of the blue two-door Fiats most of the team drove. It was parked outside a large apartment house with the kind of new glazed windows that look like they’ve never been opened. Grey smooth walls. A large grey concrete drive in front. A flowerbed beside it containing some evergreen municipal bush. Hadnot didn’t bother going in. I chained the bike to a lamp post and he strapped Frankie in her car seat, leaning over with the seat-back down. She seemed very docile; maybe she was just shy of me.
Playing Days Page 9