The Outside Shot

  I told him there wasn’t anything to it, that it was just a routine thing they probably did. But it bothered me a lot that they had talked to Colin and hadn’t talked to me. It bothered me even more that they had talked to Leeds.

  I thought about the hundred and fifty bucks that had been under the pillow. It came to me that maybe the Fat Man hadn’t left it, that the investigators had.

  “Lonnie, if you’re involved in anything and you need my help—” Colin looked at me.

  “I’m not involved in anything,” I said. “But you know, it’s strange stuff.”

  “You can say that again.” Colin shook his head. “I know I haven’t done anything and they made me so nervous I wanted to confess. For a while there I didn’t know what to do.”

  Neither did I. I went over everything that had happened again and again. I knew I hadn’t shaved any points, but I did help run the score up and I had taken some money from the Fat Man for the mill game.

  I went back to the cafeteria with Colin and we had greasy hamburgers and half-cooked french fries. We were supposed to have a practice the next day, a day off, and then the game on Saturday. Later, I went through my wallet until I found what I was looking for, a small piece of lined paper with a telephone number on it. I dialed it with my right hand while I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed. A woman’s voice answered the phone and I explained to her who I was. She told me to hang on for a moment. It seemed longer than any moment but then a deep voice spoke into the receiver. It was Sweetman.

  He listened to what I had to say and then asked me if I knew where the Holiday Inn was in Indianapolis. I didn’t know but I figured I could find it.

  “The Brotherhood is supposed to be meeting in Cleveland tomorrow,” Sweetman said, “but I’ll just switch the meeting to Indianapolis. You be there at three and ask for me.”

  “What’s the Brotherhood?” I asked.

  “Be there if you’re serious,” Sweetman said. “And you’ll find out.”

  There was a click and I held on to the phone for another minute before I realized that Sweetman had hung up. I didn’t know what was going on, or what the Brotherhood was, but I was going to find out.

  I got the bus to Indianapolis the first thing in the morning. I knew I was going to miss the last practice before the game but I also knew I could be in big trouble. I told Colin to tell Teufel that I had an upset stomach.

  I found the Holiday Inn in Indianapolis and asked the clerk for Sweetman.

  “You a ballplayer, too?” The clerk was a young guy but his hair was just about snow-white.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He gave me a room number and I went up and knocked on the door. Sweetman opened it. He was dressed in a pair of white slacks and a white silk shirt that was open at the collar. He was wearing gold chains around his neck the way he always had, but now there was some gray in the hairs on his chest.

  “Hey, what’s happening?” I said.

  “Look.” Sweetman stopped me by putting his hand against my chest. “You gave me a story about somebody investigating a point-shaving bit. I heard you and you’re here. Here’s what the deal is. I’m going to walk into that room over there and close the door. You think about this for a minute or two and you think about it strong.

  “Now, if you shaved any points, just one, what you do is turn around and walk out of here, because I ain’t got no use for you. If you wrong, you just wrong, brother. Don’t lie to me and don’t lie to the Brotherhood. Because if you lie to us, we’re going to see that you get messed up because you’re messing with the one thing we got going for us and that’s our integrity. You think about what you’ve done, and what you haven’t done. If you did what the man said, walk on out of here and nobody knows you were even here. If you clean, brother, and I mean squeaky clean, come on in that door.”

  Sweetman turned and walked through the door he had pointed to and closed it behind him.

  The dude shook me. I didn’t know what to do. I took a deep breath and held it for a minute. I hadn’t shaved any points, not even one. I had never played a game that I hadn’t done my best. I took another breath and went into the room.

  The room was small. There was a bed, a table, a television, and a telephone. There were a few cans of beer lying around and some glasses. Sweetman was there and four other ballplayers. Sweetman pointed to a chair and I went to it and sat down.

  “Don’t start into no light rap,” one brother said, “because this ain’t no social visit. Everything you tell Sweetman is true?”

  “Yes it is,” I said.

  “This Fat Man dude, he didn’t tell you to keep the score down in any games?” I recognized the toughest defensive guard in the NBA.

  “No, he didn’t say nothing about any of the games we played,” I said. “ ’Cept, you know …”

  “You know what?” It was Rashid Abdul, the premier center for nine years, speaking.

  “The last game, he said he didn’t like the other team and we should really put it to them.”

  “Run the score up?” Sweetman said.

  “Just … yeah, I guess so.”

  “Setting up the spread,” Rashid said. “You beat that team by a lot and he gets a break on the spread in the next game. Instead of you being a four-point favorite you got a rep for scoring a lot of points so now you’re a six-point favorite, maybe even seven. Now all he got to do is to keep the score within three or four points and he’s got it made.”

  “I ain’t doing nothing like that,” I said.

  “Don’t have to,” Sweetman said. “If the word gets out that it’s done, you’ll be the first one they suspect, especially since you already been fool enough to be around the dude. You knew Cal Jones, didn’t you? Cal didn’t tell you to watch out for dudes like this Fat Man?”

  “He said to watch out for guys trying to get me to fix games,” I said.

  “They probably won’t try to fix it if the word is out.” It was another brother, Jumping Joe Biggs, stretched out on the bed. “They probably gonna lay cool for a while.”

  “Maybe not,” Rashid said. “They might not know about it, because Sweetman says they didn’t talk to Lonnie and maybe they didn’t talk to whoever else is in on the deal. You remember back when they thought something funny was going on up in Boston, they didn’t talk to nobody except that one white dude?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then they came down on everybody. ’Nother thing, they may try to set the brother up to take a fall if it looks a little shaky.”

  “Who introduced you to this Fat Man?” Sweetman asked.

  “Guy from the team,” I said. “His name is Larson.”

  “Play forward?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He got a nice game,” Rashid said. “Auerbach was looking at him.”

  “Auerbach looking at all the white boys who can play,” Sweetman said. “But he’s the guy Lonnie’s got to watch.”

  “Yeah, and stay away from the Fat Man,” Sweetman said.

  “I’m going to tell him that I don’t want nothing to do with him,” I said.

  “Hey, what did Sweetman say?” Biggs got up on one elbow. “He say ‘Go tell Fat Man this’? No! He say ‘Go tell Fat Man that’? No! He said to keep your black butt away from the Fat Man!”

  “If he call you up and say he got to see you, just hang up the phone. Don’t say nothing to him,” Sweetman said.

  “And you got to check out the game when you play,” Biggs went on. “There’s two ways they can fix a game. They can play around with the ball at the end of the game, throw it away a few times, but that’s hard. Or they can play around with it at the beginning of the second half. You favored to win this game by how many points?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Look in the paper, Sweetman.” Rashid pointed to a paper on the small table.

  Sweetman picked the paper up and turned to the sports section and looked up our game.

  “The gambling line is five,” Sweetman said. “Y
ou supposed to win by five points.”

  “They got that right in the papers?” I asked.

  “They put it in the papers so the bookies and the fixers know what they got to deal with,” Rashid said. “Then the papers are the first one hollering if somebody wants to shave points.”

  “Okay,” Biggs went on. “You favored to win by five, so that means it’s going to be a pretty close game, but it ain’t that close. A real close game you can throw the ball away at the end and keep the score where you want it. You start talking about five points and you need to get your team behind sometime so you can catch up at the end. If your team is behind and you work hard to catch up, it don’t look like you’re shaving points because everybody sees how hard you working in the end. They don’t notice that when the game just started you threw away five or ten points to get yourself in that position.”

  “Yeah, you got to watch out for the first part of the game,” Sweetman said. “If the game is going to get funny, that’s where it’s going to have to be. Your team falls behind and then everybody hustling to catch up. And if it’s an easy game, the passes start going to you at funny times and you all of a sudden’s the one that missing the ball.”

  “Cats be shaking their heads at you like you doing something wrong.”

  “What they saying, young brother”—the guard looked me up and down—“is that you got to make sure the team plays together in the first half, don’t let the team fall behind. Then if somebody wants to pull some mess they got to come out in the open with it. You dig?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “We gonna have some of our people watching your next game,” Sweetman said. “If there’s any funny stuff, we’ll know it just as fast as everybody else, faster. We can pull some coats that you can’t pull.”

  “I really appreciate this,” I said. “I was really worried for a while.”

  “You ain’t out the woods yet,” Rashid said. “So stay worried.”

  “And we ain’t doing it just for you,” Sweetman said. “Every brother that’s out there playing gets jived around when one brother blows. You know that. Now, why don’t you get on back to campus.”

  “Hey, I really thank you guys,” I said. “You taking time out to—”

  “We don’t want your conversation,” Rashid said. “You really ain’t got that much to say.”

  “Huh? Yeah, well, okay.” I started out the door.

  “Yo, brother!” Biggs called me back.

  “I just wanted to tell you that not only is your conversation light, your game ain’t much either!”

  They all cracked on that, like they had made some big joke. I got a little pissed and walked on out. I didn’t think they had to crack on me like that. But I was glad there was a Brotherhood.

  We had to get to the gym an hour before the game. We went through our warm-up drills and everybody was loose. I looked around the stadium to see if I could spot anybody from the Brotherhood but the only black faces I saw were students. It made me a little nervous, but I figured maybe something would happen by the time the game got going.

  “What we’re going to do,” Teufel said, “is to give them their outside shooting, and take away their inside game. That’s our defensive style. They usually have a good balance of outside shooting and layups. But they don’t have that strong a rebounding team. Most teams that play them worry too much about their outside shooting. No team is going to beat you without an inside game. We’ve got to work on position from the time the game starts until you hear the buzzer.”

  Teufel went from man to man, patting us on the shoulders and telling us to relax. Franklin was the second toughest conference team we were supposed to face, and if we could beat these guys, we’d only have to worry about Wichita State.

  Bobby started at center and controlled the tip to Hauser. We got the ball, brought it down, and couldn’t get a shot off for a good thirty seconds. When we did get it off, it was a jumper by Bobby from the foul line which rolled around the rim twice before falling in. For some reason I thought we would control the game from the outset, but it was all sweat and struggle. We were falling behind, but nobody was screwing up. They were just all over us. Hauser hit a few shots from the outside and Bobby got a tap in and made two foul shots early but we were quickly behind, twenty to twelve.

  They were playing us as close as I could imagine anybody playing. The brother holding me was short but quick and kept slapping my wrists going for the ball, but the ref wouldn’t call it. Teufel called some set plays, but even they didn’t work and we were freelancing all over the place. We played tight defense, too, which kept us in the game, but barely.

  Everything that Sweetman and the others had said about the game getting away from us in the first part was coming true, but it looked as if they were just a better team than we were. At least it did in a way, but in another way it didn’t. They were playing fairly good defense but individually it looked like we should be able to take them. When I got the ball, the only shots I’d had were from twenty feet or more. I thought of going one on one—even though I knew Teufel didn’t like it. But I also thought I had to do something to get us back in the game, the way the Brotherhood had said. Then I realized what was going on.

  Hauser was bringing the ball down with me. Neil was being covered by a pretty quick dude who kept him outside. Hauser’s man was playing him close, too close, but Hauser was looking to pass. Wortham was being double-teamed, which left one man open, Larson. At least it should have left one man open, but Larson never turned toward the ball. Either that or he went into the low post with Wortham when the middle was already jammed up. He was taking himself out of the game. I got the ball at the high post from Wortham and put it on the floor. He moved away from me and Larson went with him. I took my man to the hoop and scored. But I knew I couldn’t do it all by myself. Larson, by his keeping away from the ball, gave us a four-man offense to their five-man defense.

  We scored as Wortham hit a hook. When they in-bounded the ball, I went for the steal and fouled a guy. I held my hand up as the ref pointed at me. Their forward missed the foul shot, we rebounded, and Neil hit on a short jumper at the buzzer ending the first half. I felt sick to my stomach. I glanced up at the scoreboard as we walked off the court. We were down by eleven, forty-nine to thirty-eight. We could make it up if things went right for us. If we all busted our chops; if Larson played like an All-American.

  “Wortham, what the hell are you doing out there?” Leeds was red and the veins in his neck stuck out. “You look like you’re sleepwalking! If you don’t get some movement in the center, nothing’s gonna work!”

  Teufel went over some plays, talking about overloading one side of the zone as if we didn’t know how to do that. He told Wortham that the game was in his hands. That all he had to do was to wake up and play up to his capability.

  “If you want us to, we’ll start Go-Go,” Leeds said.

  “Bobby will be okay in the second half,” Teufel said. “Won’t you, Bobby?”

  Bobby nodded his head. I knew what the scenario was. We would all go out and bust our tails in the second half, Larson would put on a big show, and the All-American would win the game.

  We went out for the second half. I didn’t feel like much, didn’t feel like anything really. I looked around the stands at a sea of white faces looking down at me, and the only thing I could think of was that I was going to screw up.

  We got the tap and Larson went in and made a three-point play. He looked good, putting a move on their center to make the point and draw the foul. Bobby hit a soft jumper and we were only behind by six. I thought back to what the Brotherhood had said. Don’t let a fixer hide, make him come out into the open. He has to fix the points in the beginning of the period or come out. Larson had made his show basket, and was going to start hiding again until it was time for us to take away the game. Maybe, I thought, maybe not.

  I didn’t like Hauser. I thought he was just like every other redneck I had met. He didn’t make any bones
about not liking me, either. But I knew he wanted to win. I knew he wanted to win as badly as he wanted to breathe.

  “Let’s overplay their guards,” I said as we came back down court on defense together. “If they get by us, let’s let our All-Americans handle them.”

  “Stop thinking, bright eyes,” Hauser said without looking at me. “It’ll give you a headache.”

  I felt like taking a swing at him, but all of a sudden he was gone. He took a chance, gambled that their guard wasn’t alert, and went after the ball. I trailed him down court but I didn’t need to, he made an easy layup. They brought the ball down again, I went after it, missed it, and scrambled back. I faked going after the ball again, didn’t go, and their guard threw it away. Hauser got it and we were down by one.

  Wortham began to control the defensive boards. They had one shot at their basket and that was it. In a matter of minutes we were up by five instead of being down.

  The game settled down, they sent in another forward, a guy who could handle the ball and help out in bringing it down. Me and Hauser backed off the steals and just tried to contain them. Wortham got hot and we were up by ten.

  Hauser tipped a pass to Larson, who led the break. Their guards scrambled after him but they wouldn’t have caught him. He passed anyway—at the feet of a surprised Hauser. The ball went out of bounds. Come on out, Mr. Larson.

  “Okay, settle it down,” Larson said. We were at the bench. I was wiping the perspiration from my neck and face. “All we have to do is to play it cool and we’ve got these guys. Concentrate on the ball.”

  I wasn’t sure what was happening or how it was happening, but we got into the same kind of game that we were in at the beginning. Only now we were calling it ball control and they were creeping up. Franklin got within one point when Larson snatched a rebound, took it all the way down the floor himself, and shot the softest jumper I had ever seen in my life. It didn’t touch anything but net. We were up by three. Larson picked off another pass with seconds to go, dribbled around until he was fouled, then made the first and missed the second. We won the game, under five points.