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  Kenny “Money” Cash played at Vanderbilt for two years, went to Italy and flopped in the European leagues. At practice, he wears his Vandy jersey—no way he’s going to walk around in the Italian one—someone wanting to get ahead never brags about failure.

  I watch him out on the court—he rains down jumper after jumper and it’s a beautiful thing to see. Going right, or squared straight-up. Money’s as good a shooter as there is on this planet. I watch him drop five in a row. Money’s the first on the court for practice; the last to leave. He mistakes extra hours for extra work. Work is playing to your weakness. Money? He comes an hour early and shoots jumpers going right, he stays late and shoots jumpers going right. I’ve tried telling him: You work your weakness, that’s practice—you work your strength, that’s validation. But he’s a kid. Never saw me play, never heard of me, so he thinks he’s got it all figured out and that I know nothing.

  He drops three more, bam, bam, bam. All three hit the back of the rim, slice through the net and come back to where he stands. The kid’s got the touch—the ball comes back to him like a loyal pet. Takes arrogance to shoot that well, that pretty.

  “Work left,” I tell him.

  Money drops two more. After the second, like the first, returns to him, he turns to me, ball cradled under his right elbow. “You been watching?” he says.

  “I have.”

  “What are you seeing?”

  “A big-league shot,” I say and he smiles. “Going one way. You get half as good going left, you won’t be here long.”

  “I won’t be here long, coach. Only here to get the call.”

  “Then work left,” I say. “And get someone to work with.”

  “I work alone,” he says. “Not here to make friends.”

  “Did I say make friends?” The same stubbornness that makes him tough on the court makes him a pain in the ass to coach. “Never practice under conditions you don’t see in a game. How many times a game are you wide open for a shot?”

  “Never,” he says and smiles. “If they’ve heard of me.” He turns, takes one dribble, squares up and drops a twenty-five footer. An NBA three, plus a couple of feet. Hits the back rim and plunks down in the lane. The backspin carries it back to Money.

  He shot it going right and I turn and walk away.

  6

  I meet Terry at the Hob-Nob. Monday’s his day off, he closes the Bunker, walks across the street and runs a tab outdoors.

  “How’s it going?” he says as I sit next to him.

  There’s a man singing at the street corner, his guitar case open, the acoustic strapped to his body by one of those leather weave belts that were popular in the 70’s. Singing is the wrong word, really. The guy’s lost most of his teeth and the words all come out sounding like a chainsaw played through a transistor radio. Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz. His playing is no better. The hand is an arthritically crippled claw and he doesn’t play chords so much as he just slides his claw up and down the neck like a flesh capo. On the felt inside the open guitar case, it reads:

  BILLY—LAST OF THE SIX-STRING OUTLAWS

  I turn back to Terry, wonder why the six-string outlaw is here. Me and Terry are the only people at the bar—other than the waitress, who paints her nails and sneers whenever you ask her to get something—and it must be a hundred degrees.

  “Been better,” I say. I tell him about my trouble with Money. Tell him I think I could help the kid get to the pros, which is true, if he’d listen to me.

  “Remember Dick Barnett?” I say.

  “Any black man over 45 knows Skull Barnett,” Terry’ says. “Played against him pre-season his last year with the Knicks. My first with the Stars. Salt Palace. He was an old man and he still torched me a couple times. Why?”

  “Money shoots like him. Tucks his legs, looks like an upside-down question mark when he lets it go.”

  “Can he hit it like Barnett?”

  I nod. “Better.”

  “And the rest of them?”

  “Some listen, some don’t. Hedda’s got a great attitude, so far. Latimore’s trying to stay straight.”

  “He’s banned for one more year?”

  I shake my head. “The ban’s over. The NBA could have him if they wanted but no one’ll touch him.” I order a club soda and lime, wipe my sweat droplets off the bar with my arm. “No one thinks he’ll stay clean.”

  Terry looks at me. “Will he?”

  I take a drink. “Hope so.”

  “Know what you hope, Bomber. Do you think he will?”

  He asks the question and I see Latimore ten years ago. We met at the Chicago pre-draft camps. A pro body at twenty, 6’10” 255 and quick as a guard. Best footwork I’ve ever scene on a big man, soft hands —hands that could cradle an egg dropped from the top of the Sears Tower. A first step that was an absolutely scary combination of power and finesse. A freight train that could pirouette. At that point, I’d been around the game for most of my twenty-three years, and I‘d never seen a player like him. Still haven’t. I was coming off my second major surgery and my second, and last, trip to the camps. I couldn’t pay anyone for a tryout at that point.

  Less than ten days after camp, I read that Darnell Latimore had tested positive for cocaine. His first, but not his last, slip. He would have been the first overall pick of the draft. I had science and hope holding together what was left of my knee and I hated Latimore.

  I look straight ahead. “No,” I say. “I doubt he’ll make it.”

  “You know he won’t,” Terry says. He sips his ice coffee. “I played against Hedda’s father, you know?”

  “Really?”

  “Charlie Davis. Strong forward. No Mel Daniels, but strong. You couldn’t kick the ball out of his hands once he got a board.”

  “She’s strong too,” I say. “Plays bigger than she is.”

  The last of the six-string outlaws keeps singing. The words, the chords and notes, they have nothing to do with the original, but I think it’s “You’re Right, I’m Left, and She’s Gone.” I could be wrong, but I think that’s the song I’m hearing behind his noise. Bzzz, twang, bzzz, twang.

  “Shit,” I say. “Doesn’t that noise bother you?”

  Terry nods, drinks his beer. “Every Monday it does, Bomber. You think I’m deaf?”

  7

  Put yourself in my shoes:

  Most of the years don’t matter. Most of the days don’t either. April first, 1980, you snap the anterior cruciate ligament of your right knee. Slice it badly enough that one side of your knee has nothing to do with the other side. April fools, but it’s no joke. You feel it let go; the sound is a stick breaking. You think you’ve broken a bone—you haven’t, it’s much different than that and much worse. It’s a ligament that you’ve never heard of and can’t, for a while, pronounce correctly.

  The first surgery rebuilds the knee. Twelve months of rehab and your whole life is shaped by numbers. You do more work than you’ve ever done. Every day is the end of the world. Every day is exhaustion. It’s all meaningless numbers for a year, every day. It starts with a wet towel—that’s all you can lift—and you in a chair lifting your withered right leg. Two pounds. Five. Ten. Six months go by and you’re up to eighty pounds, five hundred lifts a day.

  This is not to make you better. It’s to make you close—close, that’s all you ask—to what you once were. And every day you wonder if it can work.

  Another month and you’re up to six hundred lifts. After a year, the knee still wobbles, doesn’t support you laterally. A second surgery, cut deep and wide next to the other scars so that you now have five cuts to show off. Your doctor tells you your knee is as bad as Gus Johnson’s, as bad as Mickey Mantle’s. Could be as bad as Joe Namath’s. He tells you this as if he’s letting you into a special club, like it’s good news.

  Six more months go by. You support yourself by painting houses in the mornings. Afternoons, you go through more rehab—weights, runs and more leg lifts. Evenings, you shoot baskets and try to keep your tou
ch. Your agent calls less often. The only time you see your name in the paper is past-tense—it’s like you died. You’ll make it back, you tell yourself. Nothing can stop you. You work the leg for six more months and it pops out at a summer league tryout for the Knicks.

  Another year of rehab. No agent. You have to get your own try-outs.

  Add the leg work to the rest of it that you’ve done every day all your life. Add it to three hundred sit-ups, fifty reps a pop, three hundred push-ups, fifty a pop, a hundred pull-ups. Three years with the leg. Before that ten years filled with bench presses, curls, flies, road work—thirty-five hundred days of work and sweat—all of it meaningless.

  There are meaningful numbers that spin in your head and keep you awake.

  A basketball court is 94 feet long and 50 feet wide and a fast player can run the length of it in 3.3 seconds. You did it in 3.1 three years and two surgeries ago. 94 feet in 3.1. A good day now, you’re an arm hair under 4 flat. Three years ago you could take ten quarters off the top of the backboard—the top of the backboard is 13 feet even off the floor and it might as well be the Empire State Building now.

  A forty-two inch vertical leap cut to twenty and no one needs to tell you the difference is more than twenty-two inches. The difference between 42” and 20” is the difference between the New York Knicks and painting houses with your brother-in-law for a living. It’s planes instead of a Toyota Célica. It’s two million a year or five hundred a week.

  Numbers that add up. It’s three years and two surgeries since you could trust your body. Trust your right knee. It’s ninety-four feet that got longer and a backboard that got farther away and all the sit-ups and push-ups and rehab don’t change that fact that what you were is not what you are. You’re a thousand days older, half a second slower and twenty inches shorter.

  You play for two days at the Chicago camps hoping to catch onto a European roster and no one will touch you. Every face at the camp looks at you with pity. You’re one of those old men at the grocery store that pisses his pants in line. You’re the reminder of what they might become with just one bad break. Eyes drop to the ground every time you look into them. Feet shuffle. Everyone has an excuse to not be around you. Three years, two knives, one ligament and you give up.

  You paint houses, your wife finally leaves you and, for five years, you do little except drink and work. One day you quit drinking. You think it must’ve been some deep survival instinct, because it wasn’t a choice. You didn’t care. For seven years, you haven’t cared about anything, and now you have a second chance and you care and you’re scared.

  You walked like a zombie through seven years of your life. The piece of you that cared was that truck tire you see on the side of the highway, blown off and dead.

  You’re in a hotel south of Sarasota bordered on three sides by chickenshit and the smell of burning manure and there is no way you’ll sleep tonight. You’ll stay up listening to Folsom Prison Blues and you’ll hear the prisoners cheer every time Johnny Cash sings about shooting his woman down, sings about his Cocaine Blues, about shooting that man in Reno just to watch him die. The inmates, they’ll cheer.

  8

  I get to the gym early and walk around the court, dribbling every few feet, checking for dead spots. The bad news is that half of the court—the side away from the benches—is full of them, the wood puckered and bulged like blisters, which means Money will have to run off weak side screens for first half—strong side for the other. Put him on the bad side, it’s like dribbling on the beach. The court’s terrible. Welcome to the bush leagues.

  For three quarters, neither team plays worth a shit and I’m embarrassed we’ve charged people money to see this. Latimore’s rhythm looks off—he’s thinking too much and it looks like he doesn’t know what he wants to do or where he want to go. In basketball, there is no decision time; you do things. The defense reacts, you improvise. Latimore looks like he’s taking dance lessons. He looks down a lot, stumbles, chases his brain all over the court. Mike Morris, our center, is a canned ham. Too slow to run, too small to play a power game. All night, he’s slopped around like a dishrag by Tommy McClendon—a big kid from some junior college in Arkansas. After three, McClendon’s got twenty points and eighteen boards. Five blocks. He’s killing us. Two minutes into the fourth, Morris picks up his sixth foul and he’s out of the game.

  The only player I have doing anything is Money. He runs like a greyhound, comes off screens like Reggie Miller and he’s been open all night. And open, he can’t be stopped. Anything inside of twenty feet is a lay-up to Money. Seems like every play I call for him, he hits a shot. On offense, the kid makes me look like a genius. The down side is his man, a CBA re-tread named Teddy, or Terry—I forget which—Carlton, drives by him play after play, gets to the hole, and racks up fouls on my big men. With five minutes left, we’re down three and I signal for a time-out.

  “You’re out,” I say to Money when he starts to take a seat.

  “What?”

  “Get out of my huddle,” I say. The other players stand around, looking back and forth, me to Money and back. I let him walk on me here, and the season’s over. “Gates—play the two spot. Hedda, take the point.”

  “This is some fucking joke, right?” Money says.

  “Darnell?” I say to Latimore. “How many fouls you have?”

  Darnell holds up his hand, all fingers out.

  “Five—and Morris is sitting next to me with six. I can’t afford six on Latimore.” Money is fuming—you can see that he’d like to kick my ass. “You’re hurting the team.”

  “I got half the teams points,” he says.

  “And you gave that many back,” I say. “Sit.”

  He turns and walks to the end of the bench, sits for a second, and stands. He kicks a water cooler, walks away from the bench and heads to the locker room.

  Without Money, we fall behind by ten with a minute left. A total collapse. Hedda gets her pocket picked twice in a row. On the second, she hacks the guy that stripped her and they get a three-point play out of the deal. Three possessions in a row, we turn it over—three in a row, they score. Gates can’t guard Carlton either, but at least he tries. With about thirry-five seconds left, Latimore fouls out on an over-the-back call. He comes toward the bench.

  “Next time Darnell,” I say.

  “Right.”

  The game ticks away. Ten seconds. Five. We lose by sixteen.

  Coach Ben Thompson. 0-1.

  I sit. From behind the bench some fan is shouting at me. You suck, Thompson, he says. You’re no coach. You’re a drunken has-been. Without Money, you would have lost by fifty. I turn and look at the guy. Mid-thirties, about my age. Dressed nice enough. And I wonder: what did I do to deserve this? I must look like I’m going to say something, because Darnell grabs my arm and takes me away from the bench.

  “Don‘t,” he says. “It doesn’t do any good.”

  I look at him. He’s had ten years of these nuts yelling at him. Screaming at him like he’d killed people or something.

  “I just wanted to know what possessed him to do that,” I say as we leave the floor. “I’m not angry.”

  He walks by me, ducks at the door and heads into the locker room.

  “You will be,” he says.

  Money’s dressed and gone. I tell the team I’ll talk with them tomorrow. No speeches tonight. When I announce that I’m not talking, Hedda gets up and heads to the women’s locker room.

  “Tomorrow,” I say and walk out and head to the parking lot.

  I get back to The Palms, and there’s a note on my door. In a finger-paint kind of smear, it reads:

  Ben—Uncle Chicken wants to see you tomorrow. My sympathies—Bone.

  9

  “Ben Thompson, you look terrible,” he says.

  “Team looked worse,” I say.

  “You’re too damn hard on yourself. Time to jell, son. That’s what they need.”

  “We’ve only got twenty-seven more games,” I say.
“Sometimes, it takes longer than that.”

  “And, shit, boy—sometimes it takes shorter. You are the most negative young man I have ever run across.” He lights a cigar. “Look,” he says. Parcell points to a large white cylinder on his desk—it’s the color of an industrial toilet, the size of an import’s hubcaps. He flicks a switch on its side and it starts to whirl like a small fan. Cigar smoke gets sucked down into the center “New toy,” he says. “Powerful. I lay this fucker down in Piccadilly Square and poof, London ain’t foggy no more.”

  “Nice,” I say.

  “It’s not nice,” he says. “It’s downright amazing, negative Ben Thompson. It’s enough to sit in fucking awe at what human beings can achieve. An ashtray is one of the least important things on this planet, and look at that. The amount of thought and precision in a plastic piece of crap. Sit in awe, Ben Thompson. How in the hell did you ever become a great ballplayer?”

  Ballplayer? The word throws me. No one says ballplayer—no one has for over twenty years. It hits me that Parcell might be older than I’d originally thought. “I wasn’t always negative,” I say. “I’ve grown into it.”

  “Well snap the fuck out of it. It’s bad Karma for the team.”

  “Karma?” I say.

  “What goes around comes around. Earthly balance and shit like that. Zen, son. I thought you did more than play ball in college. You haven’t heard of it?”

  “I have,” I say. “I just wasn’t aware that you were up on your Zen.”

  “I know very little Zen which, if I understand my Zen, means that I know a lot.”

  “I dated a Buddhist once,” I say.

  His intercom buzzes. Parcell’s secretary announces that his cleaning service has arrived.

  “Send her in,” he says to the black box. He turns to me. “Don’t make small talk with me, Ben Thompson. Tell me about my team.”

  “Your teams sucks.” I say. “No center. No quality point guard. I’ve got Childs out of position at point—he’s a two guard. Hedda’s a power forward and I’ve got her backing up Childs. I’ve got a hunch of tween-ers.”

  “Bunch of what?”