The gym at Claremont Middle was open after school on Friday, so Lucas and Ryan, and Richard and Billy, played two-on-two.
Lucas didn’t tell Ryan about Gramps. He hadn’t told Maria at lunch, as much as he wanted to, because she was smart and sensible about everything.
For now he just kept what he’d learned from his dad’s letter, and then from his own research, to himself.
When they’d lost track of how many games they’d played, Lucas told the guys he was going to stay in the gym and work on some of his stuff alone.
“You want us to find you a sleeping bag so you can sleep here tonight?” Ryan said.
“Just trying to get better,” Lucas said.
It was only four thirty. His mom wasn’t picking him up until five. Still plenty of gym time left. You never wasted that, even when you were feeling as hurt as Lucas did right now.
So he worked on taking outside shots without dribbling the ball, just catching and shooting, because in a real game, in real time, sometimes you just did the defender a huge favor by taking one more dribble. He worked as hard as ever on his left-handed dribble, working toward his ultimate goal of being as confident going to his left as he was going to his right.
He made himself knock down ten free throws in a row, as usual. So far this season all the work he’d done was paying off, because his free-throw shooting had been pretty solid. He still wanted to be ready when a game was on the line.
He stepped to the line and proceeded to make his first eight.
Then he missed.
He started all over again.
He was stubborn, and wasn’t ever going to cheat himself.
I’ll never cheat the game.
He got to nine in a row.
Missed the tenth, feeling like a choker.
Started all over again.
He looked at the clock as he did. Five minutes to five. But he pretended it was a game clock. Told himself he wasn’t trying to make ten in a row in the next five minutes.
Told himself that every shot he knocked down was with a game on the line.
He got to nine again.
Lucas went through his routine. Took one last look at the rim after one last bounce of the ball. Took a deep breath.
Knocked it down like a champ.
“Ten for ten,” the voice behind him said.
He didn’t have to turn around to know it was Gramps.
He was limping in Lucas’s direction from the other end of the court. He wore his faded black Celtics cap with the shamrock on the front.
He walked all the way to where Lucas stood at the free-throw line, ball on his hip.
“I let your mother know I’d pick you up and give you a ride home when she told me where you were,” he said. “Told her we needed to talk. All of us need to talk, now that I think about it. But first you and me.”
“Mom told you that we know about you?” Lucas said.
“She did,” Gramps said. “And you do know. Just not all of it.”
“You lied to me!” Lucas said, unable to control himself. “Everything I thought is a big fat lie!”
“No, son, it’s not,” Gramps said.
Even trying to keep his voice low, it sounded loud in the empty gym. Just not as loud as Lucas’s had been.
“I don’t even know you!” Lucas yelled.
He could never remember raising his voice to his grandfather, not one time. But he’d never had a reason, until now.
“You do know me,” Gramps said. “Just not who I used to be. Even if that dumb boy made me the man I am now.”
“You took money to cheat the game,” Lucas said.
“The person I really cheated was myself,” he said. “Now come sit down so we can have a talk we should have had a long time ago.”
There were two folding chairs set up at one of the corners of the court. Gramps walked toward them. Lucas followed.
“I’m not going to make excuses for what I did,” he said. “But I’d rather you heard the whole story from me instead of reading it.”
They both sat down. Gramps talked for a long time then.
Ocean State had been a pretty famous program in college basketball, starting in the 1930s, and had nearly made a Final Four during World War II. He’d gotten a scholarship there from Bakersfield High School. The Ocean State program hadn’t been great for a long time, but Joe Samuels decided he could be one of the guys who could restore its former glory.
“The tournament was a lot smaller in those days,” he said. “I thought we had a chance. This was before UCLA got great and started winning almost every year.”
Lucas just listened.
“It wasn’t just me who was a dumb kid,” Gramps said. “We were all dumb kids, most of us lucky to have a scholarship, because just about every one of us on the team came from almost no money at all.”
He didn’t even know his teammates were taking money at first. But slowly he started to wonder about some things he was seeing, especially at the end of games. Tommy Angelo would start throwing the ball away, and big leads would become small leads. There were a couple games that they shouldn’t have come close to losing, but nearly did. The two guys messing up the most were Tommy Angelo and the team’s center, Ed Dolph.
Finally one day Gramps asked Tommy Angelo why he seemed to turn into a different player in the last five minutes.
Tommy was from Las Vegas. He had uncles who worked in the casino business. He took Gramps out for a burger one night and explained that a couple friends of the family had shot some money his way and asked him to “manipulate” the point spread in certain games.
“That’s the big word he used for trying to do the same as fix a fight,” Gramps said. “Manipulate.”
Now Lucas spoke.
“Why didn’t you tell the coach?” he said.
“I told him I was going to,” Gramps said. “But Tommy said that Coach was in on it and that there were only five or six games left in the season and they could all make some extra money and never do it again.
“No harm, no foul, he said,” Gramps told Lucas.
Gramps told Tommy Angelo he’d rather quit playing basketball than do that. Tommy said that if he ever told anybody, Tommy would tell the whole world that Gramps had been in on it too.
That same night, someone threw a brick through the front window of the grocery store that Gramps’s parents owned back in Bakersfield. It was, he said, the same as a threat.
“It was a message,” he said. “I had to go along to get along.” He gave Lucas a long look. “And so I did.”
Until the whole thing blew up on all of them.
Somehow a reporter from the Los Angeles Times got a tip about what was going on with the Ocean State Bisons. The tip turned into a source in Las Vegas. The reporter went back and looked at the games that had been “manipulated.” He went back to Las Vegas and did some checking and found out that a lot of money had been bet on Ocean State in those games, way more than the usual amount.
“It wasn’t every game,” Gramps said to Lucas.
“Is that supposed to make it all better?” Lucas said.
“I was dumb and scared,” Gramps said. “That’s a reason, I know, and not an excuse. I wasn’t just afraid for me, I was afraid for my family.”
“You told me once that character was doing the right thing even if no one is around to see,” Lucas said.
“I know I did,” Gramps said. “I know.”
He went on with his story.
Maybe if Ocean State had been some big basketball powerhouse at the time, it would have been an even bigger story. It was still big enough that the story made news all over the country. The four players involved, including Joe Samuels, were arrested one day at the gym right before practice.
“Even that suspended sentence felt like jail,” Gramps said, “just without being in jail.”
They were all expelled from Ocean State on the spot.
“What did your foster parents do?” Lucas said.
“They took me in when I came back home,” Gramps said. “It’s what parents do, even after you break their hearts.”
But they closed their grocery store about six months later. It was because of the shame they felt in front of their friends and customers, Gramps said. They ended up moving to Vancouver, in Canada, thinking that no one would know them, or care about what Joe Samuels had done.
Gramps didn’t go with them.
“What did you do?” Lucas said.
“Getting to that,” Gramps said.
“First tell me how you became Sam Winston,” Lucas said.
He wanted to know all of it now. There was no going back, for either one of them.
“I legally changed my name,” he said. “It’s not as hard to do as you might think. After I did, I worked odd jobs here and there. Worked for the railroad. Worked at a radio station. Worked some construction. Then finally I joined the army, even shipped out and spent some time in the war in Vietnam.”
“You fought in a war?” Lucas said.
Gramps nodded.
“I guess that’s just one more thing about you I didn’t know,” he said.
“Even got shot right above the knee one time for my trouble,” he said. “My other knee just wore down over time from favoring the one that got shot.”
He was discharged from the army after that. He came back to California and got a job as a carpenter. He said he’d always been good with his hands. He met a young woman and fell in love and got married.
“Did Grandmom know what you’d done?” Lucas said. “Did she know who you really were?”
“She knew every bit of it,” Gramps said. “I told her one night just like I told you.”
They finally decided to move to the other side of the country. If they were going to start a new life together, they might as well make it a really new life. He’d changed his name. He’d gotten married. He thought of Claremont as a new beginning.
“I decided,” he said, “to live a life and not an apology.”
He went to work for the post office. He became a dad. He got into coaching, he said, because of his son, who loved all sports, but basketball most of all. When people would ask him about his life before Claremont, he was vague enough with his answers that people finally gave up asking the questions.
“They just came to know me for who I was,” Gramps said.
Lucas knew it was getting late. He knew Gramps had been talking for a long time. But he wasn’t ready to leave yet.
And there was still a big question he wanted to ask.
“How did Dad find out?” Lucas said.
His grandfather pulled his hat off his head and ran an old hand through his short white hair. Then he put his hat back on.
“That’s the thing,” he said. “I didn’t know that he had, until now. I didn’t know that I’d already let him down before I let you down.”
“You never saw that letter?” Lucas said.
Gramps shook his head.
“So he never asked you about any of it?” Lucas said.
“He died,” Gramps said.
Lucas looked down and realized he’d been holding his basketball in his lap the whole time Gramps had been talking. He could feel himself squeezing both sides of it now, as if trying to squeeze the air right out of it.
He was feeling himself breathing hard. Even though it had been Gramps telling the story, it was Lucas who felt worn out by it.
“I’m sorry,” Gramps said.
“Not as sorry as I am,” Lucas said.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” he said, “or even understand why I did what I did. I’m still not sure why I did everything I did. Or didn’t do what I know I should have done at the time. I haven’t told you all of it tonight. But I didn’t leave out anything important.”
All because of a school paper, Lucas thought.
He looked at his grandfather, slumped now in his chair, looking older than he ever had before, like the oldest man on Earth.
“At least now it’s out in the open,” Gramps said. “And I’m not making excuses for what I did. The things that happened, I let them happen.”
“What about the money?” Lucas said.
He had meant to ask about the money before. The stories he’d printed out said Joe Samuels had been paid five thousand dollars, and that Tommy Angelo had gotten more.
“I kept it in a pocket of a jacket hanging in the closet of my dorm room,” Gramps said. “I thought that when the school year was over I could take it home and give it to my parents and tell them I’d gotten a job when I wasn’t playing basketball.”
Lucas shook his head quickly now, from side to side, feeling the anger rising up in him again.
“You should have been brave enough to tell,” Lucas said.
“You don’t think I know that?” Gramps said in a tired voice.
“I want to go home now,” Lucas said.
He stood up and bounced the ball as hard as he could, then caught it, and bounced it again, even harder than before. The sound of the ball hitting the floor was very loud.
“Are you sure you haven’t told me more lies?” Lucas said.
“Everything I’ve told you is the truth, son,” Gramps said.
“It’s like you lied to me my whole life!” Lucas said.
“Until now,” Gramps said.
“Until you got caught again,” Lucas said.
Gramps stared at him. Lucas saw the hurt in his eyes. Then his grandfather said, “The worst part of all this wasn’t that everybody ended up knowing what I’d done. The worst part was that I knew.”
He started walking toward the doors at the other end of the gym. Gramps followed him. His whole life his grandfather had tried to be like his father, too. He’d coached Lucas the way he’d coached Lucas’s own father. All he’d ever wanted was to be in a gym like this with him. All he’d wanted to do was learn basketball from him and talk basketball with him. Gramps had been the only coach he’d ever wanted. Or needed. He’d even dreamed that Gramps would somehow get to coach him at Claremont High.
Now he wasn’t sure that he even wanted him to be his coach tomorrow.
Or ever again.