Playing Days

by Benjamin Markovits

  Hadnot was the highest paid player on the team. He made three thousand marks a week in season, without taking into account the company car, the family apartment for his daughter and separated wife, and the bachelor studio for himself. Charlie came next, at about two and a half, car included, though he had a special clause in his contract allowing him to pick his own apartment. Olaf had first division experience and took home a grand a week, about twice what I made, with a few incentive clauses thrown in. Then there were a bunch of guys on more or less the same contract: Milo, Plotzke, me. Karl. He had signed up at fourteen for five years and never bothered renegotiating. Money didn’t matter to him: he was the son of a millionaire.

  Landshut had him under contract for another two seasons. They hoped to ride him into the first division and then establish themselves in the European league, where the real money is. Of course, any NBA team could compensate Frau Kolwitz financially for his loss, but money might not be able to buy the kind of influence Karl could have on the club fortunes. If she wanted to turn Landshut into a serious European player, Karl was her best shot.

  In other words, there was no reliable correlation between what we got paid and what we contributed, both measurable quantities. Karl and I made the same money. As Mel ran down the income-list, I started feeling uneasy and said to him, ‘Probably I shouldn’t hear these things. Money is private.’

  But this had nothing to do with my reluctance. I had been assessed at a certain value and had failed to live up to that assessment. It was almost as if I had been caught lying. Mel, with characteristic blindness and bluntness, said, ‘No, Henkel only made a mistake. The fault’s his. What are you getting so worried about? They have to keep paying you.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. It’s just that I’m not worth what I seem to be worth. At first you can’t tell, but then it becomes pretty clear.’

  ‘Oh quit being so subtle. Call it a rough start. Think of yourself as an investment, if you want to. A long-term investment.’

  Something else turned up in his inquiries. Hadnot was on a three-month contract; it ran out a few weeks into the new year. According to Mel, this was unusual but not unheard of. Clubs, ambitious clubs, sometimes invested more than they had up front at the start of a season, hoping to win a few games early and attract the sponsorship that would see them through. It was a gamble, but small-town outfits had to gamble if they wanted to grow, and such practices explained why so many of them ended up going under. What was unusual, maybe, was just that Hadnot had been around at the club so long. Mostly they signed up new players to these short-term contracts. Guys had an incentive to go along with it only if they were trying to move up a league, or over a league, and wanted to prove themselves against stiffer competition. Athletes are basically delusional human beings. Every one he ever met, worth his salt, figured on winning whenever he stepped on court. They see it as a pay raise and forget they’ve only cut their salary into fewer slices.

  ‘So what does that make me? You think they’ll re-sign him?’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Sure.’ Then the personal implication struck me.

  In fact, I heard shortly after from Anke something that seemed to bear on all this. Bo had asked her whether she might consider, in the new year, taking him in again and giving their relationship a shot. She seemed shocked by his suggestion, though I wondered whether she also had her reasons for telling me about it. ‘And you say this comes completely out of the blue?’ I said.

  ‘How can you ask me that, when you come here every night?’ But it seemed to me some of her anger was worked up in advance.

  ‘I only ask you. And what did you say to him?’

  ‘What do you think I said?’ Then she changed tack. ‘You take it very easy.’

  ‘How should I take it? A minute ago you accused me of distrusting you.’

  This also didn’t satisfy her, but I decided to keep from her what I knew, that Hadnot had no guarantee of work after the Christmas break. In this light, his question sounded less strange and abrupt. Maybe he was considering going home and wanted to know his chances before committing himself. I wondered even whether he thought of approaching the club with an offer of economizing: a pay cut, and only one apartment, etc. Getting back together would make his life less expensive.

  Anyway, his question had its effect on me. Anke, one afternoon, complained about the prospect of her first Christmas since Franziska was born stuck at home with her parents. They used to go over for dinner on the twenty-fourth, but it was only dinner, and this year her mother expected them both to stay the night. By this point in the year it was mostly too wet and cold to go out for any stretch of time, and the three of us made do, as well as we could, with the entertainment possibilities of Anke’s sitting room. Cheerless days, and Franziska’s fits of temper expressed only what we all felt: cooped up, tied to one another by affection and fear of loneliness.

  ‘What’s wrong with Christmas at home?’ I asked, partly provoking her.

  ‘I’m not such a daddy’s girl as you,’ she said.

  Later, relenting, she added, ‘I thought when she was born my life would change. But nothing has changed, really. Instead of going to school, I look after her. You don’t know what it’s like to be an only child. Your parents can’t be happy without you, so you spend every holiday with a sick old married couple who are not even happy for more than an hour when you do come home.’

  Franziska had discovered she was tall enough to reach the toaster in the kitchen; I noticed her trying to pull it out of the socket by the cord. Anke moved quickly to lift her away, and the girl slapped her mother’s face, not hard but deliberately. Usually, at such displays, Anke sent her to her room, but this time she let herself be slapped, only averting her face from side to side with her eyes closed. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, my love.’ I wondered for a minute if she was trying to goad herself to tears, but Franziska gave up after that minute and the atmosphere remained unrelieved.

  We had a two-week break for Christmas, and my mother had been angling for me to come home; she offered to buy the plane ticket. But I asked her instead if the house in Flensburg was empty – the house she grew up in, a few hours north of Hamburg on the Danish border, and to which we returned most summers in my childhood. I had been there in winter only once before. The sun appeared for no more than a few hours each day, but the view of the sea from the terrace was unobstructed by leaves; you could see, across the grey fjord, a stretch of Denmark as wide as your arms. The house itself, built shortly after the war, was plain and comfortable, and the glasshouse in the garden had an old-fashioned space-heater that was rusty but powerful enough. You could spend every mealtime surrounded by trees and water.

  My mother, with a catch of envy in her throat, exclaimed how much she loved being there in winter, with nothing else to do all day but shop and cook and walk to the harbor in the morning and the pier in the afternoon. By the end of the conversation, with some reluctance, she agreed to let me spend Christmas there, with my girlfriend and her daughter. And when I invited Anke I was touched and surprised by how pleased she seemed. Bo was spending the two weeks off in Mississippi, and she could do what she liked with Franziska until new year. For the next few days she kept bothering me about plans: what train should we take and how long should we stay? Was there a cot there? And so on.

  I never mentioned our affair to Mel, though sometimes Anke came up when we were talking about Hadnot. I asked him once what would happen to his wife’s apartment if the team let him go. ‘What do you know about his wife?’ he said, but the conversation turned easily enough to other subjects.

  Sponsorship money was beginning to come through, though Mel doubted Frau Kolwitz would spend it on her fattest contract. Hadnot had struggled to get court time since Karl’s emergence; meanwhile, we continued to win. By mid-December, our record was seven and three and we sat comfortably third in the league tables: within reach of the playoff. In the last game before the Christmas break, we beat Nürnberg on the
road by seventeen, revenge that left Henkel in expansive spirits. Karl had scored thirty for the fourth time in five games, and Bo had put in what was becoming a typical performance: ten points in fifteen minutes, five for eight from the field.

  ‘A super sub,’ Henkel called him on the bus ride home, to placate him. ‘What is it they call him? The microwave. Very quick hot . . .’

  Hadnot didn’t look up. I sat in the aisle opposite, with my winter coat bunched against the window, and pretending to sleep. From time to time I allowed myself in the dark of the coach to stare at Bo through half-closed lids. He rested a leather jacket on his lap and kept his hands warm inside it. At one point he said, vaguely in my direction, ‘Man, I ain’t tired enough to sleep.’ A two-hour ride back to Landshut.

  The next morning Mel found me at home in bed and offered to buy me lunch. He had seen what he needed to see. There was no point coming back in the new year, and he wanted to ‘take his leave’ of me – sometimes his conversation showed an old-fashioned, bookish turn. He spent a lot of time on the road reading bad novels. I stood in my boxer shorts and invited him in, showered and then dressed in front of him, feeling how strange it was, such familiar proximity with an older, professional man. We walked down the hill and through town, along the High Street as far as the river, until we reached Sahadi’s.

  It was spitting rain, but we made it in before the heavens emptied and sat just inside the door by the window, in the green shade of a potted plant, watching the water come down. Early lunch, and nobody else was around. Mr. Sahadi himself waited on us, and I was embarrassed by the fact that he mistook Mel for my father.

  ‘I guess all Jews look alike to him,’ Mel said quietly to me. This also displeased me.

  Over lunch I asked Mel whether Hadnot didn’t deserve more court time, given his ‘efficiency.’ It seemed to me just a question of numbers. ‘He banks one point two, one point three a shot,’ I said. By such talk, technical and brief, I hoped to impress the big-shot scout. ‘Very high for any kind of player, especially a guard. Higher than Karl.’

  ‘What does it matter, when you’re winning ball games?’ Mel said. ‘If you ask me, they’re easing him out. It’s a question of numbers all right, three grand a week. Bo just costs too much. At his age, to take a three-month contract – he should have known better.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that. You know, he held out a couple weeks at the start of the season. I think he wanted to quit – he got fat over the summer and needed a month to play himself into shape. Hadnot told me once he only came back because of Karl. He figured already Karl would attract the attention of guys like you, and it was his last chance to get noticed. Then Henkel benches him.’

  ‘You mean, I guess, what do I think of him professionally?’

  He stubbed out a cigarette; the smell of it mixed with the plant smells and food smells.

  ‘I scouted him out of Mississippi ten years ago,’ he went on. ‘OK, he can shoot, and he knows how to play. But he’s three or four inches short for a two guard, and a step slow. On defense, against top-flight talent, all he can do is hack. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for that, too. With the right club, a dominant big man or slasher, he can work himself open off the double-teams and knock down jumpshots. Coaches like shooters like chess players like chess pieces: they can draw up plays around them. But then you look at his character. Some kids can’t afford to be selfish, they don’t have the talent. Maybe you like the guy personally, I don’t know, but there are people who make every situation they’re in a little more difficult, and he’s one of them. Don’t pretend that isn’t a part of what’s going on here. But let’s imagine he isn’t a headache; let’s imagine he’s twenty-two years old. If he counts for a good soldier and some small-market club like Cleveland or San Antonio can claim him for a local boy, maybe they draft him and he spends two or three years at the end of their bench. He’s white, after all; at least he’s white. Then someone gets injured and he has a chance to prove himself, and takes it. A lot of these guys don’t, by the way. They get scared. This way he stretches out some kind of NBA career. But at his age, coming into the league? Ben, I’ll be honest. This is delusional, this is unhappy thinking.’

  Mel’s assurance offended me, as it sometimes did. I felt a little of what Hadnot might feel about him, the righteous anger of the school bully. Listen to this skinny-chested kid talk big! ‘You mean,’ I said, making a joke of it, ‘that if he was taller, faster, sweeter and younger, and didn’t come from Mississippi, he might have a shot?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  ‘How about the rest of us?’

  He tapped his cigarettes against the table and pulled another one out. Then lit it, collecting his thoughts. His answer, when it came, had the quick cadence of a professional opinion. Olaf was also three or four inches short. Bad hands, too, small and what coaches call ‘hard.’ Decent ups, a respectable shooting stroke, but no inside moves. His rotational quickness was poor, which is what big men depend on in the pivot. Then he was lazy and didn’t care. The rest might be overcome, but sometimes the psychological was harder to fix than the physical. Probably he was the second best talent on the team, but uncoachable. Milo had moderate quickness, moderate ups, moderate hands, but at his position he’s competing against athletes like you wouldn’t believe. Unless you’re a freak you don’t get to play, with two exceptions. You’re very smart and you don’t miss. Milo played dumb and used too much elbow on his follow-through – it might take a good coach two years to correct it, and Henkel showed no inclination. Then he’s a head-case, and who needs it? Charlie at least knows what he is. A third-rate talent and a bully. Small European clubs can use a guy like him to lick the rest into shape. He’s smart and under control, but two steps slow, a half foot short. Also, he holds the ball too long and drives too deep, shoots corkscrews, and cheats on defense to make up for lack of foot speed. Plotzke isn’t worth talking about. This is a guy who doesn’t suit up in any other league in Europe, to say nothing of the US.

  And what about me, I asked when he was finished.

  ‘My professional opinion?’ he said.

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  ‘You’re twenty pounds underweight. That’s fixable, with a serious regime, though it might take two years.’

  Then he did a strange thing. He left his cigarette smoking in the ashtray and took one of my hands in the palm of his own. He had fine-boned fingers, though dirty under the nails; and my skin, at his touch, seemed to me as soft as a woman’s.

  ‘Your hands are too small,’ he said, and let go of me again. ‘You jump off the right foot. As a right-handed player, that leaves you unbalanced in the air. Again, this is fixable, though such instincts die hard. You’re one of those guys who’s easy to push off the ball. I don’t know the reason. High center, low center of gravity, one of the two. Some guys are up-and-down guys: they don’t take up much space on the floor, so it’s easy to strip them, it’s easy to box them out. You’re one of those guys.’

  He picked up his cigarette again.

  ‘On the plus side,’ he went on, ‘you’ve got a quick first step, especially going left, because you plant with your right, and other idiosyncrasies that make you hard to figure out the first time around. That counts for something, but there’s always a second time. Your lateral footwork is terrible, and you end up reaching on defense and catching cheap whistles. Then there’s a kink in your shot I haven’t seen in twenty years. I don’t know where you picked it up, probably the fifties. Your left thumb pushes on the ball, which makes you unreliable anywhere inside of twenty feet, including the foul line. Another two years to fix. As I say, some of it can’t be helped, some of it can. If you put in the sweat, you might turn yourself into a decent second division player in a mid-level European league, a fourth or fifth man. Honestly, though, I don’t think you’ve got the heart for it, the stomach, what you will.’

  He looked me in the eyes with a challenging, humorous air. The meal was over, but the rain continue
d to spread itself thickly against the window. We wouldn’t shift ground any time soon. Some conversations, however, also give us the chance to stretch our legs, and I had the feeling, as we sat there, of ranging indiscriminately. Look, I seemed to say, as if pointing out a landmark, that’s me, some way below . . . Mr. Sahadi came hovering to remove our plates, but I explained to him that my friend was leaving town shortly and this was our last meal together. The food was so good, I could happily pick at it for hours, if he didn’t mind; it seemed to me the kind of meal to be picked at.

  ‘What about Karl?’ I asked, when he had hustled off to bring us mint tea. I get cold easily, sitting still, and wanted to warm my hands around something.

  ‘Karl’s all right,’ Mel said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Karl.’

  ‘What do you mean there’s nothing wrong with him?’

  ‘What I say. Somebody will pay what it takes to bring him over, and maybe I’ll have something to do with it and maybe I won’t. Either way, he’ll be fine.’

  And just at that the muddle of strange feelings acting together (loneliness, friendliness, coldness, wounded pride) produced in me a very simple one, a rush of blood. That a prodigy like Karl, seven feet tall and the best athlete on the team – quick, strong, balanced; technically perfect; clear-headed, confident – should belong to some kind of normal! In the first few weeks of that long summer, which I spent on trains and in corporate hotels, measuring myself from day to day against strangers, I wondered if I was any good at basketball. Suddenly, I had a glimpse of what being good meant.