I fell across my bed and closed my eyes. I was mad at Sherry because I didn’t know what to do with her, and mad at Sly for ripping off my two dollars, and getting pretty tired of hearing Colin’s guitar.
The phone rang and Sly got it, just as Juice came in the door.
“If that’s the president, tell him I’m too busy to talk to his butt,” Juice said.
Sly looked at me and asked me was I in.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Some girl named Sherry.”
“Yeah, I’m in,” I said.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Lonnie.”
“Hi, Sherry. Nice of you to talk to the little people.”
“Lonnie, please … I am trying … to get along with you.”
“Hey, don’t put yourself out, girl. What did you want?”
“They’re going to have The Island at the Quad this Friday. It’s an old Japanese movie I’ve been dying to see,” she said. “If you don’t think I’m absolutely terrible, maybe you’ll take me.”
“Yeah, why not,” I said. I had already taken Sherry to one of the old movies she had been “dying” to see and had hated the sucker.
“Fine, Mr. Jackson,” she said. “I’ll see you Friday.”
“Yeah, sure.”
I hung up the phone and lay back down on the bed. When Sly had said that it was Sherry, I felt good about it, but as soon as I got on the phone I just about blew it. I definitely did not know how to talk to the girl.
I got to practice and I dug that a few dudes weren’t there that had been there the day before. Before we ran through our drills Teufel got us all together and started rapping about how we were representing the school and how we had to keep that in mind and whatnot. Then we went into layup drills.
“Yo, Lonnie.” Sly was behind me in the drill. “You dig some cats ain’t here?”
“Yeah.”
“Leeds called them over this morning and told them they didn’t make the squad. Everybody here made it.”
“We did?” I looked at him and saw that he was serious. “How come he didn’t just out and say it?”
“Probably would have broke his heart,” Sly said. He cut in front of me, got the ball, and let it roll off his fingertips into the hoop. The dude was definitely smooth.
Our first game was at home against St. Louis, and they weren’t anything special. Before the game Teufel and Leeds were saying that we wanted to run as many set plays as possible and keep the game under control.
The coach started Hauser and McKinney as the guards, Neil and Larson up front and Wortham at center. No way St. Louis was going to keep up with them. They ran the score to twenty-four to ten before you could blink twice.
“Look, man, when we get in we’re going to have to show something.” Juice was sitting next to me on the bench.
“Teufel was saying he wanted to run the plays we practiced,” I said.
“Uh-huh, that’s what he said,” Juice said. “But Larson told me that he has to decide who’s on the traveling team before our first conference game. He said if the freshmen don’t show well, put the redshirts on the traveling team.”
I was pretty sure that I was going to make the traveling team. The redshirts were mostly big guys who could rebound a little but didn’t have much of an all-around game. One guy was on the football team and I thought he was on the squad just to say he got a letter in basketball and football. I wasn’t too sure how Juice was going to make out.
By the end of the first half the score was forty-two to twenty-six, but the game wasn’t even that close. St. Louis was a small school that didn’t have the kind of basketball program that Montclare did. In the locker room Teufel was saying that anyone that didn’t get in during the first half would probably get a chance to play in the second half. He talked some more about running the plays we had practiced, but I didn’t notice them running that many set plays in the first half.
In the second half I started with Hauser in the back court, and Juice and Larson played up front. This big white boy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, played center. He had just become eligible and was new to the squad. His name was Joseph Gogosky but everybody called him Go-Go.
We hustled the entire second half. Teufel put Sly, Skipper and some of the other guys in, but I stayed in for the whole half. Most of the hustle, though, came from Larson. During practice he seemed to loaf a little. Even when we had played the mill guys he wasn’t doing that much. But when we played St. Louis, he hustled every minute he was in. The rest of us went along with him. Cats were diving for loose balls, fighting for rebounds, the whole thing. At the end of the game I was really tired, but we had won ninety-six to sixty-three. Some of the guys from St. Louis were ticked off because we had pressed so hard even after we had the game in the bag. Their coach even walked off the floor without shaking Teufel’s hand after the game.
We felt good about the game. The only surprise, as far as I was concerned, was how well Go-Go played. He was a little awkward, but he was strong and took the ball to the hoop like he meant it. Wortham had a nice game, but he was a senior and Go-Go was only a sophomore. Also, Go-Go was only eighteen, while Wortham was twenty-three.
I put the game behind me, more or less, and tried to concentrate a little more on the books. I was getting by in class okay, but I knew things weren’t going so hot. Then the school paper, which came out twice a week, was sent around with a write-up about the game and I just about went crazy. They had two whole pages about the game with pictures and everything. I told myself that it didn’t matter what they said about me, it was just important that the team won, but I found myself going through the stories looking for my name just the same. I finally found it in the next to last paragraph.
Lonnie Jackson, a product of New York’s Harlem school yards, played the entire second half, mostly out of control, at guard. He combined poor shot selection with sloppy passing to reveal himself as a rank freshman. What he did do, however, was to crash both boards well and play good defense. Teufel might make a player out of him.
That ticked me off. I looked to see who had written it and saw that some guy named John Bowers had done it. I looked in the box score and saw that I had gone four for nine and had gotten three rebounds and one assist. I was down at practice the next day and couldn’t get anything right. It was a funny feeling. You go out and play a basketball game and then you have to wait until the papers come out to see how you did. I knew Leeds had read the paper, too, because he kept calling out for me to get myself under control.
We had a quiz in math and I messed it up pretty good. I knew as soon as I’d finished it that I didn’t do well on it. So when Mr. Gunther asked me to stay for a while after class one day, I knew what it was all about.
“Did you take any math in high school?” he asked.
“Yeah, but I didn’t do too well in it,” I said.
“I don’t understand what you were thinking about when you took this quiz,” he said. “Because you didn’t get a single problem right. Do you understand the work?”
“Some of it,” I said.
“Look, Jackson, I give a quiz around this time of the year not to find out what you know but to find out who’s doing the work I assign and who’s listening in class. This is the easiest part of the year. If you have trouble with this, there’s no way you’re going to pass this course unless you really turn yourself around. Now, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on you. You either have to get yourself straightened up or take the consequences. Do you understand me?”
I said I did and then left. I knew what the dude was talking about, and I had told myself that I was really going to get down with the math. But the truth was, I didn’t know a thing about the math. What he was saying just didn’t make any sense to me at all. I copied the stuff down that he put on the board and it could have been Russian or something. I didn’t even know how to start thinking about it. Teufel had said that if we ran into trouble with any of our courses, we should talk to him about it. I did
n’t want to talk to him about it, though. I hadn’t run into trouble, I had run into a brick wall.
The St. Louis game had been exciting because it was my first college game. During the week after the game one of the redshirts dropped from the team and became a manager and two were put on the nontraveling team along with Sly. A lot of people didn’t go for Sly. I think it was because he acted so black. I had never seen a white guy like him before in my life. He walked black and talked black, and at times I even thought he looked a little black. He was a good ballplayer, too, but I could tell that Teufel didn’t like him that much and Leeds hated him.
When I found out that me, Colin, and Juice had made the traveling squad, I wanted to finesse it off like it was no big deal, but I had to smile. Later, when I saw Sherry in front of the library with some of her white friends and this doofus-looking brother, I had everything under control.
“Hey, baby.” I spoke to her as I walked up to them. “Guess what Leeds ran down on me?”
“What?” she asked, looking like something good to eat.
“That they had been thinking about leaving me off the traveling team,” I said.
“They aren’t, are they?” she asked.
“You know better than that,” I said. “I didn’t come all the way out here to be watching games on television.”
Then I just bopped away, real cool-like. I know she had to go for it because I dug it so much, I could hardly walk straight.
At home we had maroon uniforms with white trim and white warm-up suits with maroon trim. They were really nice. For the away games it was just the opposite, the playing uniforms were white with maroon trim. Our next game would be the first conference game and the first away game. We were playing at Missouri and the team flew with the cheerleaders, coaches, and press people. Students who wanted to go to the game took their cars or buses. We stayed at a motel on the edge of the city and it was really like big-time ball. I mean, if the NBA was fancier, it must have been something else.
The hometown provided buses for us to get from the motel to the gym we were playing in. It looked big from the outside and we had to take elevators to get to the locker rooms. But when we changed into our uniforms and went through this long hallway onto the gym floor, it was something else. They had a band that was twice as big as ours, and as soon as we got onto the floor, they started playing their school song.
I looked up and there must have been twenty thousand people in the gym. Their cheerleaders, dressed in pale blue, gave us a halfhearted cheer as we came onto the floor. Our cheerleaders were in front of our bench and they were going crazy. I had seen most of them around Orly Hall and they were okay at the St. Louis game, but they were really doing their thing on the road. This was a league game, and it was, as Teufel kept saying, big-time college basketball. My stomach tightened up.
I was watching the game from the bench. The first half of the game was close. Teufel said we were supposed to beat these guys but they were playing us hard. Larson couldn’t get his stuff off at all. They had this brother on the floor who was all over him. Whenever they took him out, they brought in this other brother who was slow but was beating Larson to death. They played a two-one-two zone, which kept us away from the basket, but Hauser was hitting pretty good from the outside and we were up by two at the half. In the locker room Teufel got on Wortham’s case pretty hard.
“The trouble is you’re not making anything happen under the basket,” Teufel shouted at Wortham from across the locker room. “Anybody can stand like a statue and wait for the ball to fall into his lap. You’ve got to make something happen! If you don’t feel well, take yourself out of the game. They haven’t got one man with three fouls and they haven’t got one man who looks tired out there, so it’s going to be a long second half.”
“They foulin’ plenty.” Wortham had a towel over his head and his voice came from beneath it. “Referees just ain’t calling them, that’s all.”
“The refs are calling the game okay,” Leeds said. “They’re letting you play ball instead of making it a foul-shooting contest, only it don’t seem like you want to play any ball.”
When I played ball back in Harlem, things were usually pretty cool in the locker room at half time if you were even or ahead. But we were winning and things were really tense. Wortham was playing okay, but okay wasn’t good enough in college ball. When it was time to go back out on the floor, my hands were sweating. It was the first time in my life that I felt I had to win because someone else said so.
They jumped out in front before we could get back into the game, going up by five. Hauser got us back to within three with a short jumper, then stole the ball, but Wortham got called for standing in the lane three seconds and they got the ball back. Teufel turned red and threw a towel down on the bench. When we got the ball back, down by five again, Teufel called a timeout and put Go-Go in the game in Wortham’s place.
There are dudes who are strong, and some who are strong and quick, and others who have shots that you can’t seem to stop. There’s also another kind of dude who has a feel for what’s going on in the game that’s different from anybody else’s feel. Sometimes, when my game is on, I get a sense that I’m magical, that I can float through the air and reach out from anyplace on the floor and just stuff the ball through the hoop. When Go-Go went in, something like that happened.
He came down the floor the first time and moved into the center, near the foul line. Hauser threw the ball in to him and Go-Go turned, his body leaning into the guy holding him, and released the ball to Larson, who was cutting underneath. How he knew Larson would be at that exact spot, I don’t know, but it was a beautiful play, so smooth that it didn’t look at all spectacular. The second time down Hauser shot off a screen and Go-Go pushed in the rebound.
Neil’s man started double-teaming Go-Go, and Teufel took him out and put me in, telling me to keep my man off Go-Go. I was anxious to get in. The first time I got my hands on the ball was on a break. Go-Go was trailing and Larson was headed down the other side of the floor. I could feel Go-Go’s presence behind me and I went up high, faked a jumper, and laid it off to the big man cutting past me. He put it up softly against the backboard and we were suddenly tied.
For the next two minutes we played as if we were one person. For two minutes it was what basketball is all about, muscles working, bodies barely touching other bodies, passes just getting past straining fingertips to your man. We were living fast and strong and just beyond the reach of the rest of the world. Their coach called time out, and it ended. It wouldn’t be that way again in that game.
We outmuscled them for most of the remainder to stay a little ahead. Then Larson came back in, got hot, and put the game away.
In the dressing room we felt pretty good. It’s always good to win, you can talk about how good you did this and how good you did that instead of talking about who blew the game.
“Hey, Jackson.” Leeds was standing near the locker where Skip was dressing. “On the play where you made the tap—you remember that play?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I caught the cat trying to overplay me and hooked him with my elbow.”
“And where the hell were you supposed to be for that play?” Leeds asked. “You didn’t see Hauser hold up two fingers?”
I had seen Hauser hold up the two fingers. I was supposed to move through the low post, giving Go-Go the option of turning and shooting or turning and passing off to me. But when he got the ball I had forgotten.
“When are you going to learn the plays?” someone asked.
I looked up and there was this guy standing there with a tape recorder. “Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m Bowers, John Bowers,” he said, as if that was supposed to mean something great. “I’m with the Eagle.”
“Yeah,” I said. I turned and started putting on my clothes.
“Is that the way they play ball in Harlem?” Bowers asked. “You do what you want to?”
“No, man, that’s not how they play ba
ll,” I said. “But I’m going to show you how they punch people in the mouth in just about one minute.”
“Yeah, sure thing, fellow,” Bowers said. I watched as he walked away. I figured that would be in the school paper the next time it came out.
We got back to Orly Hall and there were pizzas and Cokes waiting for us. They were from the Fat Man’s place; and he was right, his pizzas were good. We ran down the game among ourselves. Teufel had taken off and everybody was talking as if Larson had won it by himself. I thought that Hauser had controlled the game for us.
“Go-Go played a good game, too,” Larson said. “He took charge of the boards like he owned them when he was in.”
“We’ve got to build around him,” Leeds said. “By the end of the season we’ll probably have to rely on him more and more.”
I looked over at Wortham and he was looking away. It wasn’t right for Leeds to talk him down like that, because good as Go-Go was, he still couldn’t carry the team at center like Wortham could when his game was together. The most important thing, though, was why Wortham didn’t speak on it.
After everybody had left, I went on up to the room. Colin was reading the Bible, which he did every night. I asked him if he wanted a Coke and he said he did. The Coke machine on our floor was empty and I went down to the day room. Neil was there.
“Hey, nice game,” I said. I must have said that to everybody on the team at least twice, that’s how excited I was.