Steve Pytel held the remote but he was not in control. Coaches-only film sessions before road games were a time warp; forty-minute basketball games morphed into four hours. Pytel had not yet called home. Although road trips were the norm, his wife seemed upset about his departure, like a soldier’s bride who feared the worst.
“Stop!” Jack Hood yelled. Yelling during film sessions was a head coach’s privilege. He ordered Pytel to rewind. Pytel thumbed the video of last year’s Fresno game to a halt. Moments later, State’s best player, Leonard Redmond, leapfrogged over a Fresno defender, legs splayed in an inverted V, and dunked.
Pytel ran the tape up and back several times. They’d forgotten about Leonard’s breathtaking jump a year ago, partly because they rarely watched film of victories.
“Goddamn,” said Tyrone Gage.
The three coaches were transfixed, reduced to fans, while Leonard Redmond soared, went back in time, and took flight again.
The team had flown west for a pair of games against Fresno and Long Beach, with a layover day in between. The players were safely in their rooms at the Fresno Marriott, supposedly asleep. The coaches were in Gage’s room because, Pytel suspected, Hood’s wife Vicky needed a quiet place to drink. The night before a game the team had an early curfew, and the lowest coach in their hierarchy, Ernie Lancha, was on bed-check duty.
The coaches had no curfew, and Jack Hood wanted to watch film. Pytel rarely thought of his boss anymore as Coach Hood or Jack, but always both names together—Jack Hood. Pytel had warned him when they scheduled the game that Fresno was a team they couldn’t beat, but Jack Hood had been blinded by the chance to appear on national television. Now they scrutinized last year’s game. Hood must have believed that if they rewound the tape often enough they might uncover a clue. Or a miracle cure.
Pytel let the tape advance, but soon they found another Leonard Redmond highlight. He seemed to have hydraulic springs in his legs—the inhuman ability to jump high and bounce back up quickly. When he missed a shot, he would often trampoline after his errant attempt to slam the ball home.
“We can watch game videos until our eyes bleed,” Jack Hood said. “But if we lose Leonard Redmond from this team, you guys are through.”
Gage smirked for Pytel’s benefit, then dabbed at the corner of one eye with his wrist as though he might really be bleeding. Jack Hood had his hands clasped on the top of his gray hair, which he kept combed straight back. Pytel switched from “pause” to “stop” and nodded appreciatively, as if Hood had given him the key to a fulfilling life. Here it comes, he thought, the Leonard lecture followed by the Leonard pep talk.
“We can’t outwork some mistakes,” Hood continued. “Losing our only all-conference player would be that kind of mistake.”
One scorching day the previous summer, Pytel had fielded a collect call at his home from Leonard Redmond’s mother. Leonard had been arrested for selling marijuana, she said. Miraculously, it didn’t hit the newspaper, the only explanation being that the daily arrests in Chicago might allow a black teenager to slip by unnoticed. Even the 6'8" ones. “Drug dealers wind up killed around here,” his mother said, and seemed at peace with that fact, perhaps relieved that his arrest would protect him from danger. Had the crime happened in their university town it would have been splattered across the front page. Still, the coaches held their collective breaths—the story could surface at any time.
Leonard’s trial was scheduled to take place in May, which meant he was playing the 2004 season with a possible prison sentence hanging over his shaved head. The team was enduring a bad year (9 wins, 15 losses, Fresno on deck), and the pressure was building. Long Beach State was next.
The team’s failure was a mystery, but Pytel understood what that meant: the blame was already being assigned to the coach. Soon, Jack Hood would assign that blame to his assistant coaches. He was already blaming the players.
Their religious kid, Jamal Davis, just a freshman, was playing well. Their troubled transfer, Nate Wilkerson, should have been the best center in the league. He was not. At 6'10", he could slice through the lane like a switchblade, but he couldn’t seem to get the ball in the basket, as if the trail of trouble and problems from his previous school jinxed him. In honor of his fresh start, Leonard Redmond had given Wilkerson a new nickname: “Smooth.”
Despite this talented frontline trio, the team had not meshed, which left the coaches stupefied. Maybe it was because all three were underclassmen? That could turn out to be good news, and the coaches already spoke of how Leonard would dominate next year—if he was not in jail. If they could survive this messy season, they’d finally field a team that would qualify for the NCAA tournament the following year.
“We just need to survive this year,” Jack Hood had been saying since Christmas. Pytel would lead the staff in nodding solemnly. Hood called the tournament “The Big Dance”—a tired expression—but making it to the dance stuck in their collective minds during this February in which they had gone lifeless. They’d all but given up on 2004, but qualifying the next year would mean a roll-over contract extension for Hood. And a death-row reprieve for Pytel and the other assistant coaches.
Jack Hood’s main concern for Leonard was not jail time. Rather, it was how Leonard’s problem might play out in the newspapers. The last thing Hood needed with just a year remaining on his contract was to get his name sloshed around in the paper for building his high-post offense around an accused drug dealer.
Details of the charges and mandatory sentences had filtered their way to Pytel. Once he tried to explain to his boss: “The problem is he sold it to an undercover officer and—”
“Relax for once,” Hood said. He had a curious way of telling people to relax while radiating tension.
Leonard’s best chance, the public defender told Pytel, was to demonstrate that he was now a productive member of society—a scholarship basketball player, staying out of trouble at a state university very far from Chicago—and throw himself on the mercy of the court. In essence, Leonard would show the judge his fall and spring term grades and pray.
Hood told Pytel to read Leonard’s grades from last semester aloud. Again. Pytel carried Leonard’s transcript around for this exact purpose, although he pretty much had it memorized. “Read,” Hood said again when Pytel took too long.
Jazz to Rock. Minority Studies. Team Sports. Intro to Criminal Justice. Marriage and the Family. A perfect GPA.
“Fifteen hours of ‘A,’ which means a perfect four-point-oh.” Hood held up a palm to stifle Pytel’s reaction. “He’d better maintain it, or Leonard will turn out as useless to us as your Nigerian.” Hood crossed his arms as if he’d just beaten Pytel in a game of checkers.
The door popped open. Ernie Lancha, the low man on the staff, stood in the doorway, a sheet of paper waving dramatically in one hand, like an annoying kid in need of attention.
“We’re watching film,” Pytel said and pointed to the blank screen.
“One of the players got shot,” Ernie said. He quickly clarified. “Not one of ours. A Long Beach player.”
Jack Hood told him to sit down and shut the door. Ernie did, but then stood again to read the fax, as if auditioning for a role.
Keith French, a forward for the Long Beach State University men’s basketball team, was shot in the back while visiting his mother’s home in South Central L.A. The bullet appears to have glanced off his spinal cord and punctured a lung, but the extent of damage is unknown—possible head injury from the fall. French is now listed in critical condition and remains in a coma at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital. The shooting was described as a ‘drive-by,’ and appears to be a random act. The university offers its—
“Blah blah blah,” Hood said, splicing in his own conclusion. “We have the Fresno game to worry about. Fresno is good and it’s on ESPN. I could give a fuck about Long Beach until after Fresno. Don’t forget the first rule of coaching. One game at a time.” Each week the first rule of coaching seemed to change.
“Long Beach might want to cancel the game,” Ernie explained.
Jack Hood looked from Ernie to Gage to Pytel. When no one said anything, Hood got philosophical. “Against some things there’s no defense,” he proclaimed. “Was Keith French a foreign kid?”
“I think he’s the junior college guy from San Francisco City College,” Ernie ventured. He didn’t have a clue. Pytel’s own modest playing career was not impressive, but at least he had played. Ernie’s career, Pytel knew, involved sitting the bench at a small college and culminated in being team manager for Northern Illinois while in grad school. This background had only programmed Ernie to enjoy catering to the team’s stars. Jack Hood was a prima donna and a prick, but that didn’t annoy Pytel the way Ernie’s earnestness did. Working with Ernie was like working with a fan, and Pytel hated his posturing. “Keith French is the freshman they picked up late in the summer from Manual Arts High School,” Pytel said to Ernie. Junior college from San Francisco. Nice try.
“What was he averaging?” Hood asked.
Ernie flipped through papers. “Not much, filling in off the bench. Let’s see. Two and a half points a game.”
“Why the hell cancel the game if this Keith French isn’t even a starter?” Hood asked.
“If they forfeit we’d win, right?” Gage said.
“Not on a cancellation,” Pytel said. “Remember when we got snowed out on the way to Minnesota? Nobody got credit for a win.”
Ernie said Long Beach could play, but according to one news source they had not yet decided. The Long Beach team met in the Children’s Hospital parking lot just after they’d marched the squad in to see the wounded Keith French. Their administration wanted the game played, of course, because of ticket revenue.
“Figure seven thousand people, maybe more, now—times a twelve-dollar ticket,” Hood said. “Parking and concessions.”
Pytel did the math in his head. Over six figures.
“I was thinking,” Ernie said, “we could let them postpone the game a few days. Come back out to Los Angeles next Sunday and play on Monday night. That would give everybody time to—”
“Are you insane?” Hood asked. “Give them a chance to regroup? We’re here in California and they’d better play. Those are our terms. They’ll be confused and exhausted.”
“Should I tell our players what happened?” Ernie asked.
Jack Hood said what Pytel was thinking: “What for?”
Leonard Redmond had arrived on campus two years earlier, in 2001. The day he moved into the freshman dormitories at State, he appeared in Jack Hood’s office doorway which interrupted the coaches’ meeting. Pytel remembered it because it was the same day the assistants would lock Ernie in the vault.
Leonard looked like a sleepy-eyed child on Christmas morning. Of course, none of them understood then how good a basketball player Leonard was going to be, not even Leonard. He wanted to know if there was a pet store near campus. He wanted to get a puppy for his dorm room. The coaches were stunned, as though Leonard had presented them with a complicated ethical quandary. Pytel stopped himself from blurting out that a puppy in the dorms had to be against the rules.
Jack Hood looked at Leonard as if he were an escaped lunatic. (Later, Hood blabbed the story, cruelly, Pytel thought, and the players mocked Leonard for weeks. Then the games began and the teasing ceased.) The only thing Hood could think of was to tear the pet store listings from the Yellow Pages and give it to Leonard, who dropped down in the middle of their meeting to study his choices.
Meanwhile, the three assistant coaches—a model trio of racial balancing, white, brown, and black—slipped silently into Ernie’s office. Pytel and Gage were laughing out loud, but Ernie didn’t seem anxious to bite into the moment. Ernie was soft. He had the kind of bubbling enthusiasm that you’d wish for in a mascot, but not a coach. For instance, he played intramural basketball Monday nights with a scruffy collection of teaching assistants. Despite this unnecessary exercise, he was puffy with baby fat, especially in his face.
Gage, a black bear of a man, pummeled Ernie’s shoulders and they laughed. Leonard wanted a puppy! They wrestled around until Gage hoisted Ernie in a bear hug and hauled him into the walk-in vault at the back of the office. The vault was a remnant from the days when the ticket office was inside the basketball arena. It had a door heavy enough to stop a car, and it took real strength to stop once it was set in motion. The coaches crammed uniforms, shoes, equipment, office supplies, and a library of game tapes in the vault. Because the secretary didn’t have access to it, the tomb-sized space was a mess of boxes and shelves. Gage turned Ernie over and held him on the vault’s floor, while Pytel got the door moving. Gage sprang free and left Ernie on his back, stuck in the vault. It was nearly soundproof, but it was obvious from Ernie’s tone that he was still laughing.
Then Gage got called to the phone by their secretary. “Let him out,” he said to Pytel before he hustled to his office.
That left Pytel alone to guard the muffled and imprisoned Ernie. Pytel knew he was fine, but after a few minutes Ernie’s voice took on an edge of anger.
Pytel perused the photos on Ernie’s walls. One was of Ernie with Michael Jordan at a kid’s camp. Pytel could imagine how he cut in front of dozens of children for that one. Pytel sat down at the desk, waited for Gage to return. He put his feet up and closed his eyes for a few minutes.
Leonard Redmond tapped on the door’s frame. He had his list of pet shops in hand, two of them circled. Leonard couldn’t make sense of the locations. “Where’s Ernie? He was going to help me,” Leonard said. Ernie was the only coach the players referred to by first name.
Pytel decided to end the fun before Gage got back. He twirled the combination and hauled open the vault’s stubborn door. Ernie turned from the shelves to face his liberator. Pytel held a finger to his lips and pointed to Leonard, meaning the game was over and they had work to do. Ernie brushed past Pytel and Leonard without saying a word.
The shelves had been organized into even stacks and tidy rows. It was as if Ernie had been locked into one vault but had been freed from another.
A week later, after the team’s physical exams, the trainer informed Jack Hood that Leonard Redmond’s pulse was forty beats-per-minute. Hood instantly dubbed him Leonard Deadman.
Pytel had gotten credit for uncovering Leonard when the kid was an unknown commodity in high school. Tired of the larger tournaments, Pytel had sat alone in a dingy southside Chicago Park District gym observing Leonard’s odd sense of devotion after some pick-up games were finished. Leonard at that time was obsessed with trying to dunk two basketballs simultaneously. After thirty minutes he still hadn’t done it, but Pytel was impressed.
He had not been difficult to recruit—his test scores were a disaster, and he hadn’t qualified by NCAA standards until his last attempt. His questionable grades meant he was rarely listed by recruiting services, despite being 6'8". Pytel only had to believe his own eyes and sign him. Naturally, there were rumors about Leonard’s sudden jump on the math portion of his SAT.
The coaches considered having Leonard sit out for a year to let him mature, but they were desperate. In fact, Leonard suggested to Pytel that the coaches red-shirt him, an unusual occurrence. Likely he had heard an upperclassman use the expression “red-shirt” and simply repeated the phrase. But Leonard took off like a 1990’s dot-com stock, was sensational from the first game, the coaches congratulated themselves. The team floundered, but Leonard broke some school rebounding records. Despite their sluggish finishes his first two years, he was twice awarded the league’s MVP—a fine player on a team fighting for their coaches’ survival.
The morning after the loss to Fresno found Pytel with a thumping hangover. He needed to help drive the team to Long Beach. “Git your ass up,” Gage had said when Pytel finally answered the phone. “We leave in ten minutes.”
It was 245 miles from Fresno to Long Beach, and the athletic department had rented three Dodge vans. Pytel knew if State’s record were 16-9, instead of 9-16, there wouldn’t be any money-saving van rentals. On a tour bus he could sleep and nurse his miserable head. Of course, if they were 16-9, he might not have a hangover.
Road losses sometimes allowed post-game anonymity—no one in the bar had recognized Pytel. No offers to diagram a better offense or recommendations to recruit a seven-footer.
They had taken a beating from Fresno, as he had expected, live, on ESPN. Television exposure was important, but not a televised ass-kicking. Late in the game, Jack Hood had stomped around the sidelines in a frantic dance that would have gotten him restrained in civilian life.
During Stephanie’s and Pytel’s nightly phone call, she had spun their defeat like this: “Who knows? Maybe a good prospect saw the game and figures he can help you guys immediately.”
“Nothing good can come out of a loss like that,” Pytel had said.
“You don’t know that.”
“Trust me,” he said, “I know.”
With their fertility issues resolved, she was now prepared to move forward, have his child. While his emotional lifeboat centered more on the following season, Pytel was satisfied that Stephanie was ready. She was even becoming more interested in his job. “If I have to be a coach’s wife,” she had said, “I guess I ought to be a good one.” Her phrasing had not thrilled Pytel, and her encouragement sometimes seemed more combative than supportive.
“You didn’t wear that shirt I bought you,” she said.
The shirt was pink, not a color for a coach on Jack Hood’s staff. “I’m saving it for the Long Beach game,” he said.
“Which isn’t on national TV, so how will I know?” she said. “By the way, how does a new tattoo appear on Leonard immediately after he plays a great game?” He’d been sensational against Fresno and, despite being on the losing team, he did a post-game television interview. His new tattoo seemed to be some sort of predatory bird attacking a snake.
“That’s not a new one,” Pytel said.
“He’s covered with them. Calves. Forearms. Shoulders,” she said. “And that’s just the places I can see.” She was from Santa Cruz, California, Pytel often reminded himself. She did not know the first thing about black city kids. But in this case, she was right. Pytel had locker room proof—Leonard had more tattoos than sense.
Pytel wandered the hotel parking lot for five minutes before he found his van. Gage and Ernie had saved a spot for him, second in line, at the hotel’s loop-around driveway. A simple task awaited him: fit his van into the vacant space. He rolled forward to take a stab at it. The driveway of the hotel was a semi-circle, which made parallel parking a challenge. His extra-large coffee mixed with the cool California air to fog a hoop-sized circle on the windshield.
The Nigerian player appeared in Pytel’s rearview mirror—raven-black skin, strapped-on glasses, rigid posture. The coaches called him The Nigerian because his name was so difficult to pronounce. The players called him all sorts of things. The Nigerian circled his arm and nodded as he attempted to guide Pytel into the parking spot. Pytel ignored him and twisted over his left shoulder to avoid clipping the fender behind him. But he misjudged the last cut of the steering wheel and bounced up on the curb. Coffee splashed onto his pants and his yelp seemed to kill the engine. The white players on a bench looked up from their shared newspaper and snickered. Now his tilted van was on a sloping stage. The Nigerian shook his head and went inside the hotel.
Tyrone Gage stepped from the Marriott’s sliding doors, approached the van, motioning for Pytel to lower his window. The plan was to stop to eat halfway to Long Beach, Gage said. He passed him a set of directions with a hand-drawn map. Pytel lifted his sunglasses.
“Keep those glasses down,” Gage said. “Your eyes look like fishbait.”
Pytel set his sunglasses back on the end of his nose. Fuck you too, he thought. Instead he thanked Gage for the morning call.
“Like waking the dead,” Gage said.
Besides being away from Stephanie and marathon film sessions, road trips meant constant complaints from the players, bad buffets, and Jack Hood’s unpredictable sleep patterns. Hood liked to break down postgame videotape until he was convinced that his own players were awful. Then he’d march the team in to rub their noses in it, replay their mistakes in slow motion.
Chauffeuring between games wasn’t Pytel’s idea of fun, either, but he appreciated any time away from the larger group. If he was lucky, he got Jamal Davis in his car. Sometimes the players slept. Leonard, for example, often dropped off instantly. “I’m not a coach,” Pytel had bitched to Stephanie. “I’m a chaperone.” His job was less about game-preparation, more about seeing to it that Leonard ate breakfast. Or he’d check with the tutor to make sure Leonard and Nate Wilkerson were in their mandatory study hall. Pytel might appear between classes to ask Leonard a trivial question, then walk him to his next course without saying a word. Like a mute nanny.
That night, Stephanie interrupted Pytel’s bitching with her usual question. “What’s the point of staying on this job if you hate it?”
Pytel came clean. “The point is that I love basketball,” which sounded stupid, made him feel like a kid at summer camp. Did she understand, Pytel had continued, that he’d wept before the last game he’d ever played in college? She hadn’t known him then, and she hadn’t known him two short years later when he was the youngest high school coach in the state of Michigan. After winning the conference title, his all-black team (nearly every team was all-black) carried him across the locker room to ceremoniously toss him and his camel hair sport coat into the showers. Pytel still had the scar from from when he slipped in the frenzy and bashed his forehead. He kept a great photo of that celebration, with blood and what looked like sweat trickling down his face, above his office phone until recently. He took his basketball photos down because they made him feel too much like Ernie.
Stephanie said she hadn’t known any of that, although she’d seen that photo.
It occurred to Pytel that if Stephanie didn’t know he loved basketball, then she didn’t truly know him—a jarring realization after four years of marriage.
“It’s a shame that you’ve lost that…” She seemed to be searching for a word but never came up with one, and that had pretty much ended the phone call. Perhaps, Pytel thought now, she was right: he had lost something that was hard to name. His wife’s concern led him to a decision. He would no longer deliberately gloss over his troubles. He would reveal to her his true feelings about the job and even admit his aspirations. He wanted to be a head coach at a big-time program. Why should he be ashamed of that? Just because Jack Hood had the ethics of an executioner didn’t mean that the job required it. Yet, there was no point in rehashing his career goals after the loss to Fresno. Instead, he’d let their conversation dwindle away and headed for the bar.
Leonard came straight to Pytel’s van, followed by Nate Wilkerson, who now insisted on going by “Smooth.” Smooth had attempted just two shots and hadn’t been much of a factor. Pytel flipped the radio to a news program in hopes that it would somehow discourage them. They piled in anyway. Leonard grunted at Pytel as he climbed aboard. The ice bags wrapped around his knees were already dripping.
The Nigerian reappeared, news magazines in hand. He was older than the others, spoke several languages, and his father was a diplomat. The Nigerian had his headphones ready in case the conversation was not stimulating. He liked his native Juju music. “That Zulu shit,” Smooth called it. The Nigerian often rode with Pytel, but Pytel was not in the mood that morning for political debate. When the Nigerian opened the side door, Smooth—for once in sync with Pytel’s needs—quickly reached behind and yanked it shut. He hammered the lock with his fist. Smooth popped open the side window two inches and leaned his mouth close to the gap.
“We ain’t going on safari,” Smooth said. “Find another ride.”
“The other cars are filled,” the Nigerian said. “Allow me inside, please.”
“Listen to this sorry jungle motherfucker,” Smooth sneered over his shoulder to Leonard. The Nigerian came around to the driver’s side window to ask for help, clasping his hands together as if in prayer. Pytel was too weary to intervene. Behind them, Gage leaned on his horn for three full seconds. The Nigerian shuffled over to Gage’s van, a homeless man hustling a handout. He spoke with Gage before returning to Pytel.
“Man,” Leonard said, “let him in.”
Smooth unlocked his door and jerked it open.
Pytel set the cruise control to a conservative sixty-seven and took a deep breath. Smooth climbed up front from the back seat, all 6'10" of him slipping through the middle into the shotgun side. A hijacking of sorts. He turned off the news program and flipped through a CD case. He jammed in a CD, twisted the volume, then the bass. The windows vibrated. Occasionally Smooth would shout out a verse accompanying the rapper, then sink back into a bouncing silence, bobbing his head. Smooth grinned at his coach, not so much because he was enjoying the music, but likely because he knew for certain that Pytel wasn’t. Each time Smooth looked away, Pytel nudged the volume down.
The Nigerian was oblivious, lost in his headphones and what appeared to be a copy of The Nation. Leonard wasn’t asleep yet.
Something smelled bad. Pytel peeked at Smooth, then sniffed at his own armpit. Perhaps Smooth’s practice jersey hadn’t been washed. Or was it the Nigerian? He popped out the CD and cleared his throat. “Did one of you guys forget to turn in your wash?”
“It’s me,” Smooth said.
Pytel kept his eyes on the road.
“It’s me for real. I decided not to shower.”
“Seriously. You need to,” Pytel said, assuming someone would give the gag away.
Smooth was straight-faced, as if he were standing for a police lineup. “I’m serious as cancer. Been three days. I needed to do something to get the coaches’ attention.” He sounded proud almost.
“You might think about getting our attention by rebounding.” Pytel offered a smile, willing to believe it was all a joke. Just what a losing team needed, a shower strike.
Smooth looked out the side window and, as if reading from the pavement, said, “When y’all recruited me, I said don’t bring me to no school where I won’t get at least ten shots a game. I’m not showering until I get the shots you all promised me, even if we only got a few games left.”
Pytel cracked his window an inch. “Have you told anyone? Besides me? What do the fellas think?”
“We behind him,” Leonard answered for Smooth. “Although we not necessarily next to him.” They laughed, and Smooth turned back to knock knuckles with Leonard. Pytel lowered the window on the shotgun side.
Smooth had an audience now. “I saw that movie on Home Box. Bout those cats in Northern Ireland, the ones who starved themselves, wouldn’t eat nothing. I’m a political prisoner, too. But I can’t starve and keep playing. And I can’t transfer again. I had to do something political to get treated equally. It’s a political world,” he concluded. “Ain’t that the story, Jungle Boogie?”
The Nigerian took off his headphones. “Equality cannot be achieved without an assault on those with economic privilege,” he said.
Leonard said, “Where’d you get that?”
“Malcolm X.”
“I got a Malcolm X hat,” Smooth said in agreement.
“Put the music back on,” Leonard called.
“We talkin’ bout politics,” Smooth said.
“Fine, man. I’m not showering anymore either,” Leonard said. “But I want to know when our new Nikes get here. We on ESPN last night looking like Northwest Lutheran Teacher’s College.”
“You got new Nikes three weeks ago,” Pytel said. “For the Arizona State game.” The new shoes had not helped that night.
Smooth shifted in his seat to whisper to Pytel, “Those are the old style, Coach. We had the same model last spring. They dumping reject shoes on us.” Smooth spoke gently, as if Pytel were one of Stephanie’s kindergartners. “You all got to tell Nike to quit taking us for granted. We want the latest, the LeBron James model.”
“Maybe if we won more, Nike would do it. But what difference does—”
“All the difference,” Leonard said.
The players would always be nineteen, Gage liked to remind Pytel. Gage would say, “If we can’t outsmart Leonard and those cats, we don’t deserve our jobs.” These days it was getting too easy to tune the players out. Pytel had quit battling them, which was what talking to them amounted to.
“How are we supposed to feel,” Leonard called out, “wearing dusty old Nikes? Don’t the coaches think about our self-esteem?”
Smooth squinted and did his impersonation of Jack Hood. “You have to understand human nature!”
Leonard and Smooth howled. The Nigerian sat as still as a judge. Soon Leonard and Smooth were both mimicking Jack Hood.
“You’re a selfish sonuvabitch!”
“The show must go on.”
“Let’s get some concentration.”
Pytel shoved the CD back into the console, jerked the volume up high, and the pounding hip-hop drowned them out. It seemed to soothe them. By the third song, Leonard and Smooth began to nod off. The Nigerian sat erect, head nearly touching the roof, as though he’d been sent along to watch over Pytel.