EZ and the Intangibles Read online

  Matt O’Neil had gone to Blue Horizons with me too. Our mothers used to be good friends. In the summer we would all go, together with ZZ and Matt’s baby sister, to the reservoir behind Riverside Park. Matt’s eyebrows were bushy and they formed a V near the bridge of his nose that gave him a sneaky look. Matt was pretty sneaky—and quick on his feet. But he could not drive to his left.

  Roscoe Lunt was someone I used to spend a lot of time with in grade school. His parents were divorced and he was an only child. When his dad had him on weekends, he was always clamoring to find another kid to bring along to Lanes & Games, the craft fair, or a movie. I was that kid. Roscoe and I did not exactly click, but my dad kept prodding me to go. I think Mr. Lunt was in business with Dad—at least, that’s what it had said in the Gazette.

  I’d known Troy since Cub Scouts. He’d gone to a private school for first grade. Someone said he’d been kicked out of that school, but I didn’t really believe it. How many kids get kicked out of school when they’re only seven? Troy was mischievous then, and a lot of fun. I wasn’t a lot of fun. Maybe that’s why I’d wanted to be friends with him. But I didn’t know how to make that happen, and he didn’t seem very interested. Cub Scouts lasted less than a year. None of the den mothers could agree on when to schedule the den meetings or where they should be held.

  In the spring of second grade, I marched alongside Troy in my one and only Memorial Day parade. It was eighty-six degrees and the humidity that day was ridiculous. Why they required us to arrive a full hour before the parade even started, and why we had to march the entire length of Longview Avenue—from the library parking lot to Riverside Park—and why we then had to stand around in the sweltering sun while the high school band performed what was supposedly “This Land Is Your Land” was a mystery. And if that wasn’t enough, our state representative then stepped forward “to say a few words”—that turned out, as the day grew hotter, to be way more than a few about greatness and sacrifice. The need for all of this was never explained to us Cub Scouts.

  Troy Rutledge had a great sense of humor back then. Maybe he still did, although he always looked so darn serious, making a special effort to jut his jaw and harden his eyes. If he was still funny, I wouldn’t know. We didn’t hang out together. I didn’t hang out with anyone.

  That long, hot Memorial Day—about halfway through the parade route—Troy got it in his head to turn his blue Cub Scout cap backward. Then he turned himself around and began marching backward. The Brownies were marching right behind us. He’d yell out to them in the exaggerated whiney voice of a bratty kid—if I’d closed my eyes, I would’ve thought it was ZZ—“Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

  He would do this every few blocks—start walking backwards and complain at the top of his lungs, “Are we there yet?” I thought it was hysterical. So did the other Cub Scouts. So did the Brownies. Troy’s father, who was taking home movies from the curb by Town Hall, finally put a firm end to it.

  Troy was a real goofball back then, a cut-up who liked to get laughs and knew how. That’s probably why, back then, I’d wanted to be his friend. It had had nothing to do with sports. I thought he’d grow up to be a famous Hollywood movie comedian, like Jim Carrey, with facial expressions that twisted a dozen different ways and a limitless supply of hilarious slapstick nonsense. But I suppose basketball was a smart choice. Maybe he could skip college and go straight to the pros.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Pick-up basketball games are different than official ones. I always liked them better. A lot of kids do. With no coaches, no parents, no spectators, no scorekeeper, no clock, no referee, with just us kids on the court, we could decide for ourselves how we wanted to play.

  Sure, your teammates care that you make a good effort to guard the player you’re supposed to guard. But really, that’s about it. On offense, your teammates might like you to set a pick once in a while. They might like to get a pass from you if they’re wide open near the hoop. But they don’t care precisely where you position yourself, the way coaches do, and in fact, what they care about is almost the opposite. It’s fine with them, and often preferable, if you stay the heck out of the way.

  If the ball comes to you, you can’t go wrong by getting rid of it as quickly as possible—to a teammate, that is. Sure, a clever bounce pass threading through a tangle of defenders to a wide-open teammate under the hoop is always welcome. But in a pick-up game, you can’t go wrong on offense if all you do out there is get rid of the ball quickly and get out of the way.

  That was my game plan. I didn’t think it would be hard to follow through with it.

  They put me on Troy’s team. No surprise, since that team was one player short, and adding the worst player (me) to a team with the best player (him) would not significantly alter the balance.

  Or maybe they figured that the new player (me) would make Troy’s team worse and thereby make the game more competitive. In horseracing, in order to make the competition more even, the favorite horse is often required to carry extra weight. They accomplish this by stuffing lead weights in the jockey’s clothing.

  Why bother going to such lengths just to make a horse race more even? That puzzled me. But I guess that must’ve been the idea in placing me on Troy’s team. Slow the team down by putting EZ on it. Same thing. Extra weight.

  Nobody told me this was the deal. But I knew and didn’t care. I had a deal of my own. I had a story yet to be told. I’d been turning it over in my mind all summer. None of these kids knew what I was capable of—no one did except that old hobo-elf with the bandana. My story was this: I was good enough. But I didn’t feel the need to prove it. Not yet.

  That first afternoon recess game, I touched the ball only three times. Two of them were rebounds that bounced almost straight into my hands.

  However, one time I did consider making a move. Roscoe Lunt was on my team. He was short and scrappy and he’d gotten himself trapped by a double-team. In a panic, he flung the ball to me. I was alone at the top of the key—in fact, I was pretty much alone wherever I went on the court because they weren’t bothering to guard me.

  Before I grabbed Roscoe’s pass—actually while the pass was still in flight—I saw with stunning clarity how it might unfold. It was like waking up and instantly recalling the dream you’d had the night before, a pleasant one. A special move was available to me. I’d practiced it hundreds of times over the summer. Ball at top of the key. Fake right—which was precisely where all the Cheaters were expecting me to go. A swift crossover, and I’m dribbling with my left. Pick up a screen, if needed, from a teammate coming up to help. Accelerate past my man, drive off my right leg. With left hand cupped beneath the ball and right hand steadying it, plunk it high off the backboard, with just enough spin.

  In my mind, I watched it all unfold so vividly that I halfway believed I’d actually made the play. In reality, I stood frozen with the ball in my hands until Troy sprinted over and grabbed it from me. Troy didn’t hesitate. He took one dribble and launched a long one. It dropped straight through.

  Nobody talked to me much, and that was okay. I was part of the game, and that’s all that mattered. The first time Troy gave me a high-five, it was for setting a pick. He didn’t say anything but it was clear I was being thanked.

  That’s what I like about basketball, the all-important role of the intangibles. If you look for the right spots, you can be helpful even if you’re not scoring points or blocking shots or grabbing rebounds or doing a single thing that would cause a person to cheer. I liked the little things a player could do—screens and blocking out and switching on defense—that gave your team an advantage even though these moves were more or less invisible. Except to your teammates. And coaches. And your dad, if he happened to be in the stands watching. On the basketball court, you could be both invisible and invaluable. How perfect was that?

  Chapter Sixteen

  As the fall turned cooler, ou
r pick-up games grew more intense. We wasted less time before getting started. We moved more quickly to keep warm. The air was sharper. Our play was sharper. Trees along the creek that had been aflame with bright colors were suddenly leafless, gray limbs and branches. Flocks of migrating geese honked overhead.

  We kept score in these games, by ones. Score keeping was unofficial. Some kids cared more than others. A few, like Troy and Rudy, cared a lot. They needed to know who was ahead and who was behind. I don’t know why. “Whatever” was generally my attitude about the score. I kept that fact to myself.

  Every few baskets someone would take it on himself to announce the score, say, “4-3, we’re up,” for all to hear. If that struck everyone as essentially accurate, we’d keep right on playing. If there were disagreement about the score, we’d stop play and try to trace it back to whatever the score had been at an earlier point when all had been in agreement.

  As I said, “whatever” was fine by me. But only when it came to the score.

  My game did not change as the air grew chilly. Passing, setting picks, helping out on D—those “intangibles” that the sportscasters like to praise, usually about a player who is not the obvious star. Intangibles were aspects of play that were not usually quantified with a statistic. That’s what the announcers pointed out. There were no good stats for the intangibles. Star players, it seemed, did not need to place an emphasis on intangibles. They had plenty of stats to prove how important they were.

  Try-outs for the sixth-grade team were scheduled for the week before Thanksgiving—maybe it was the looming pressure of the try-outs that fueled the decision to take scorekeeping more seriously at recess. Now, we kept a running score and it was announced loudly and clearly after every single basket. The first team to get to eleven won. That’s how we played. If there was additional time remaining until the end of recess, we’d play an additional game to seven. Why use peculiar odd numbers? Why not ten or eight? Troy just declared that’s the score we were playing to, and that’s the way it was. He had an older brother on the Longview High varsity team, and his dad was the travel team coach. These were like sacred numbers from the Bible, passed down through history, one generation to the next.

  If we didn’t reach seven or eleven, whoever was ahead when the recess bell rang was the winner. Fair enough?

  Keeping score with such precision had the effect of making us play even harder. Rafael Ott dove for a loose ball, ripping a hole in his jeans and bloodying his knee. We didn’t stop the game. Roscoe Lunt and Joey Rudolph collided going for a rebound and for a few seconds it looked like a fistfight would erupt, which was weird because they were good friends. Roscoe reached out to shake hands, to make peace, and Joey snarled, “Just play.”

  This game—the one with the near fistfight—was what announcers might call a “see-saw affair.” We were up by one. Then down by one. Then tied. Then down by one. It was the coldest day yet and the sky to the west, toward the river, was low and ominous, with dark clouds sweeping our way. There were no snowflakes yet, but it felt like snow was possible. Nobody wore jackets. Our fingers were freezing.

  The wind was picking up. It was blowing hard enough to have an impact on any shot from the free-throw line or beyond. I had no intention of shooting, not with the score tied at ten, but I did make a mental note of the weather conditions. The wind was gusting from the northwest, from the left corner of the basket. Being mentally prepared was one of the “intangibles.”

  The erratic wind velocity was a factor I’d need to take into consideration if I did take a shot, or if for some strange reason I had no choice but to take a shot. I’d have to use more oomph to buck the blustery gale if I shot from the right-hand side; less oomph would be needed from the left; if I had to take one from the key, I’d have to allow for a rightward drift. Truthfully, I could not imagine such a scenario. But it was good to be mentally prepared.

  Our games were self-policed. Sometimes a kid would call a foul when someone did something to him. But there were a lot of times when the kid who did something wrong—like knocking into someone’s elbow when he was shooting or accidentally tripping someone while he was driving to the hoop—called the foul on himself.

  It was not a perfect system. Let’s face it, some kids were more honest than others. Troy, who was unquestionably the best player, never called a foul on himself. If he missed an open shot or threw a wild pass, he invariably called a foul on someone, anyone.

  I knew what this was about. Troy’s dad was training him to be a star. The great ones never admit defeat. You hear that all the time from the announcers on TV. Troy was not raised to call fouls on himself, simple as that.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Snowflakes started fluttering down. Our game was tied, 10–10. We shared the afternoon recess slot with the second graders who started squealing about the snow, scampering away like frightened mice to get under the concrete archway of Highcrest’s back door. What a bunch of babies.

  Roscoe Lunt shot from the right corner. He’d ignored the wind factor and came up short. Troy grabbed the rebound and, for a brief second, looked like he wanted to pass it to me. I glanced away—I didn’t want it.

  Troy dribbled across half-court and began emphatically

  waving his off-hand, his left. He was signaling his teammates—me included—to clear out of the way. The weather was worsening. Up until this point, the little flurry of snow was sort of cute, a picturesque preview of the holiday season. Now it intensified, sweeping across the court in thick white gusts like a mini dust storm.

  Nearing the top of the key, Troy slowed his dribble. He wanted to give me and the other teammates a few extra seconds to get out of his way. He was being guarded by at least three kids from the other team. There was no mystery about what was going to happen, or about who was going to make it happen.

  Still dribbling, Troy took a step back to create space for his move to the hoop. Then, like a tough old rhino preparing to charge in one of those educational TV nature shows, he lowered his head and bulled past two of the kids helplessly trying to play defense. Elongating his stride as he neared the hoop, Troy picked up his dribble with a firm grip, and launched upward.

  Rudy was right there, and he didn’t back down. He had a square head with blonde hair that was chopped slant-wise across his forehead. He had deep, dark Jack-O’Lantern eyes that could make him look scary. Rudy was new to Longview, didn’t speak much English, and probably didn’t know any better. He hadn’t yet learned that there’s not much you can do to stop a bigger, stronger, ferociously determined Troy Rutledge who already has half a step on you and has that fierce look like he’d slam down a vicious dunk if he could.

  The only chance that a defender has in that particular situation is to thrust out a hand and hope to get lucky by slapping the ball away. Even then, the refs will probably whistle a foul. The benefit of the doubt always goes to the star player on that kind of play. Announcers always point that out. “Hey, maybe he did get all ball,” you’ll hear them declare before pointing out, “But nine times out of ten you are not going to get that call.”

  My guess is that Rudy hadn’t watched a lot of games on TV. Did they even have TV in Germany? I wasn’t sure. Even if he did watch, I doubt if his English was good enough to understand the finer points the announcers were making. Basketball commentators all speak pretty fast and use a lot of slang. Half the time I didn’t know what the heck they were talking about.

  Rudy lunged—he reminded me of a first baseman stretching the outer limits of his physical capacity to snag a wild throw while keeping his foot on the base. With a sharp smack of flesh upon flesh, Troy’s lay-up was suddenly cancelled. Deleted. Nullified. Nothing doing. Not only had Rudy tied him up, but Rudy’s hand now clutched the ball, as if it belonged just as much to him as it had to Troy.

  I was glad it wasn’t my hand involved—on the receiving

  or the giving end. Curiously, Troy Rutledg
e hadn’t gotten fouled very much in our recess games (travel team games were a different story). Kids gave him a lot of space because he was strong, because he had a temper, and because it seemed a waste of time going for a steal against him since he would probably call a foul anyway—whether, in fact, there was one or not.

  Troy didn’t feel the need to call out “Foul!” the way other kids did. He simply frowned, grabbed the ball, and walked it back to the top of the key to re-start the play. It was like he assumed that if a play did not go exactly as he wanted it to, then a foul committed against him was the only possible explanation for what had gone awry. So why bother saying it out loud when it was completely obvious to everyone? That seemed to be how Troy thought.

  Which is exactly what Troy did. He shot Rudy a nasty look and, without saying a single word, carried the ball right back to the top of the key to start the play over.

  Rudy did not understand. He was new to Longview, as I’ve said, and new to the U.S. “What is problem?” he bitterly complained. “Good play. Me.”

  “Ya, problem,” Troy barked in a clumsy mockery of a German accent. Cradling the ball, he made a chopping motion with right hand across his left forearm. “Ya, you foul. Problem.”

  “No, no, no,” Rudy protested. “Hand. Ball and hand. No foul.”

  “Talk American, Rudy.”

  I understood what Rudy was saying. He was correct. I’d had a clear view of the play, and, most importantly, I knew what the rule book said. When the offensive player is holding the ball, his hand is considered, for all practical purposes, part of the ball. If a defender grabbing for the ball comes in contact with the offensive player’s hand while it holds the ball, it is not a foul. I’d heard an announcer say it once: “The hand is part of the ball.”