16

On the flight from LA I wrote a first draft of the piece:

For Jabari Moore, it started out as one of the best days of his life. You show up at Pauley for a summer workout, and guess who’s warming up, Marcus Hayes. You’re a nineteen-year-old kid, and you don’t know what’s what. You want to guard Marcus, you want to be able to tell people afterward that you guarded Marcus Hayes, that you held your own. You want to call your mom. And the first time down-court, you see him come off a high screen and plow into the lane. You slip your man and meet him at the rim, and when the shot goes up, you pin it against the glass. Goal tending, Marcus says, and because he’s Marcus Hayes that’s what it is. But now you’ve got his attention. You want to show him what you can do. So when he picks you up at half-court, nobody calls out the back screen, and you cut hard and the ball is where you need it to be, and the next thing you know, you’re hanging on the rim. It’s going to be the best day of your life.

But it’s like the man said in Blazing Saddles, the old Mel Brooks’ movie—if you shoot him, you’ll just make him mad. Marcus calls for the ball, and he calls for you, and dribbles slowly up court. Just to show he doesn’t have to break sweat, he pulls up from twenty-five feet and the shot touches nothing but net. And then the next time down he does it again. And the next time down he does it again. Welcome to the big time, kid. Now get off the court. Game over. Who’s got next?

131When I pulled my wheelie suitcase up the porch steps it was six o’clock in the late summer afternoon and Dad and the boys were sitting on the couch and watching Sesame Street. Because of the angle of the sunshine you had to close the curtains over the side window, otherwise you couldn’t see the screen. They were sitting in semi-darkness.

I was entering again the cocoon, airless, lightless, where real life happens and things matter. The contrast struck me, because what I was doing in LA was messing around with people who play games.

Later Betsy came home and roped me into making dinner. I have a limited repertoire but it’s mostly kid friendly. Hot dogs and beans, which my dad used to make; meatloaf … spaghetti with tomato sauce … I cooked spaghetti. After the kids went to bed, my sister and I sat on the porch while she smoked a cigarette and I drank a beer. My dad was inside, watching TV. You could hear the television from the porch. He didn’t like to see Betsy smoke, it upset him, otherwise he might have sat with us. But he also basically preferred the television—the Astros were playing.

“Do you feel like maybe we haven’t exactly grown up yet?” I said to Betsy.

“This for me is a nice break. I’m not such a fan of growing up anyway. What’s wrong?” she said, after a while.

“Nothing. I found the whole experience in LA … I snuck into the gym where he was working out and Marcus watched the security people take me away. He didn’t say anything, he just watched.”

“He’s not the kid who slept in my bed anymore.”

“I thought, what am I doing, why am I chasing around after this guy?”

“Because you’re a sportswriter.”

At night, to save on electricity bills, Betsy let the air-conditioning go off, and the whole atmosphere changed. The AC unit (a big brown metal box) sat in a pile of leaves between the house and garage, about five feet below us. It was like turning off a car, the engine shuddered and went quiet.

“I feel subservient.” 132

“Look at you, what are you talking about.” There was a Frisbee on the porch she used as an ashtray; I could see her stubbing out the cigarette. “Magazines fly you out to LA, they put you up at a fancy hotel, thousands of people read what you write. When I tell people we’re related, they say, I know that guy, I’ve seen him on TV. My big-shot brother.”

“Yeah, well. That’s not what it feels like.”

“Whereas I come home and argue about whether the broccoli touched the tomato sauce. I haven’t had a date in ten years. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Nor me,” I said.

Afterward, Betsy walked down the steps and emptied the Frisbee on the asphalt by the curb. All of this was part of her ritual.

Dad was asleep on the couch when we came in; Betsy turned off the television. “Should we wake him up?”

“Come on, Dad. Let’s go to bed.”

“All right, all right.”

Everybody had lights out by ten o’clock. Except me—it was like being a teenager again, where you live in the small hours, because when people are asleep they leave you alone. Anyway, I was still on LA time; my dad and I shared a room, I couldn’t even read at night without keeping him awake. So I sat on the couch with the TV on mute and watched SportsCenter roll over into the night. Before going to bed, I sent the piece to Joe Hahn.

A few days later I got in touch with Quinn—I didn’t even know her last name. But the semester had started; you can find these things out. She played on the volleyball team, which made her easy to track. There’s a roster page on the website, you can click on her name, Quinn Riley, and look up her bio and stats. Highland Park High School in Dallas … rated seventh on PrepVolleyball’s top-ten senior aces … led the Lady Longhorns with 204 kills last season. That kind of thing. 133

To sit at the computer in a dark house where your sister, father, and two nephews are already sleeping, clicking on various links, involved a deep dive into male shame, where going deeper was also an attempt to overcome it, like one of those dark underwater tunnels or caves you can only get through by holding your breath. The first email I drafted said, I see from your volleyball page that your birthday is coming up, you’re about to turn legal. Can I buy you a drink? But this struck me as creepy so I deleted it. In the end I wrote, Quinn, is this you? We met at the Palace on a weird night a few months ago, with Marcus Hayes. I’ve moved back to Austin but don’t really know anybody anymore. So I thought I’d look you up. Let me know if you want to hang out.

I closed my eyes and sent it.

Marcus had bought a house in Austin, in the Mount Bonnell area, one of those lakefront properties that seem to be computer-generated at the edge of the water. The Statesman described it as a Venetian villa modeled after the historic Grand Canal. J. P. moved in while Marcus was in LA—to oversee alterations. Who knows what two people are supposed to do in eleven thousand square feet, maybe avoid each other? But that’s not quite fair, there were always people around. Lawyers, agents, shoe reps, guys like Jerry de Souza. J. P. also came with a large entourage. But you can’t write about J. P., that’s rule number one.

I don’t really want to either. But I drove out to Mount Bonnell to check out the neighborhood and failed. Once you reach the island, which is what they call it, you have to pass security. In the middle of a country road, at the foot of a hill, with nothing visible in the distance or the immediate foreground aside from trees, there’s a guy sitting in a security booth between a couple of gates. So I got out of the car and looked at the booth and got back in the car. If you really want to see the neighborhood you need to take a boat along the Colorado. 134

This is how I spent my time. Driving around, talking to people on the phone, checking Twitter. These days the NBA season, from a reporter’s point of view, ends in mid-July after the Vegas summer league and begins again in late September with training camp and preseason. Just following social media is a thirty-hour-a-week job. I spent a lot of afternoons sitting on my computer in the kitchen and trying not to let the kid noise bother me.

Joe Hahn emailed to suggest some cuts. Basically, the first paragraph. He didn’t want any reference to Jabari blocking Marcus’s shot or cutting backdoor and dunking on him. So I wrote back: You understand these are things that happen all the time. There’s no shame in getting back-screened at a pickup game in late August, when you’re running with college kids who don’t know what they’re doing. Anyway, from what I know about Marcus, it’s the kind of story he likes, since it involves cold-blooded payback. Look, Joe emailed, you asked me my opinion so I gave it to you. Cut the graph. We had a little back and forth. Is that what Marcus told you to tell me? Does this come from him? Marcus pays people like me to look out for his interests in ways that he does not want to bother with—he also expects people who benefit enormously from their association with him to understand what his interests are.

So I figured, let him stew for a while and didn’t respond.

Fred Rotha broke a story—that free-agent Eddie Roundtree had signed with Austin. It was a win-now move. Eddie would turn thirty-three in December, and though big men like him, savvy, heavy-footed, strong as an ox, age pretty well, even the first year of the deal was over market price. The League had shifted away from guys like that. But Eddie used to play for Boston, and Rotha thought Marcus was repeating the mistakes that Jordan made in his second comeback, surrounding himself with former-glory yes men.

In other news, he added, tongue in cheek, Todd Steuben has resigned from UCLA to take a job with the Sonics under Coach Kaminski. Battle lines were already being drawn in the locker room, between the 135Hayes camp and Mmeremikwu’s guys. Fred wrote, this isn’t a battle Marcus can win.

I also got in touch with Lamont, Coach Caukwell’s nephew, who still lived in Austin and worked for ACC—the community college near House Park. We met in his office and walked along the side of the football field to the Tavern on North Lamar. House Park is where Burleson used to play; we could see it behind a chain-link fence, the green-green grass, carefully lined and numbered, stands rising up like the wings of a spaceship, floodlights at the corners. Lamont was on the football team, too. He said, “I loved basketball, but I was only really good at hitting people.”

We sat at the bar, and he showed me pictures on his phone—two kids, a younger wife, and a ranch house in Round Rock. He was digging out a swimming pool in the backyard, putting in the work on weekends.

Eventually I said, “Marcus told me he gave your uncle some money. For a hip replacement. Do you know anything about that?”

“He had a hip replacement, but I didn’t know about the money.”

“Was anything going on between them? Marcus asked me not to write about him. He said Mel used to play the ponies.”

“He liked to go out to Manor Downs. Sometimes he took me along, when I was a kid. But he usually made money, Mel knew what he was doing. Why are you asking me?”

There was a baseball game on TV, above the bar, and the sound of the ball game was part of all the other bar sounds. I had finished my beer but Lamont was nursing his. He had a long drive home through rush hour traffic though the longer he waited the shorter it got.

“Did they keep in touch?”

“Look, I don’t know. Marcus Hayes is not a big part of my life, I got other people to worry about. A few years ago Uncle Mel invited him back to Burleson. And Marcus came, they named the gym after him. I went along to that; it was a nice day, he gave out a couple of scholarships. Some us went out afterward for pizza, we played a little pool, too. That’s the last time I saw him, until the funeral.” 136

“What do you think about Marcus Hayes?”

“What do you mean, what do I think?”

“You must have some kind of opinion about him.”

“He’s a good basketball player. But if you ask me, do I want to be like Marcus. No.”

“What about in high school?”

“I mean, what did you think of him then?”

“Look, Brian. In high school I was like, I just wanted to have a good time. I figured everybody grow up soon enough. And Marcus was like, he had a stick up his ass. I thought basketball was fun. I don’t know what Marcus thought it was. But I was like, where do you think you’re going, the NBA? Wake up. I guess he’s awake now.”

He finished his beer and put his wallet on the bar.

“I got this,” I said. For some reason I didn’t want him to leave. “What did you think about me? Do you remember?”

“Just what everybody thought.”

“What’s that?”

“That you was Marcus’s whipping boy.” But he said it like he was kidding around, he laid the accent on pretty thick.

Dad was asleep on the couch when I got home. Al and Betsy were already in their rooms. Sometimes she dozed getting Troy down and didn’t bother getting up again. Or lay beside him reading on her phone. Anyway, I woke Dad up and pushed him off to bed, like a toy boat on a quiet lake, toward shore …

By ten o’clock I had the house to myself and sat computer-on-lap in front of SportsCenter (on mute). I made some notes about the conversation with Lamont, then rewrote the story about Marcus Hayes at Pauley the way Joe Hahn wanted me to write it, and sent it to Joe Hahn. Ten seconds later, an email came through … from Quinn. She said, I remember you. You’re the guy who doesn’t like 137naked women. Why don’t you come to my birthday party—everybody will have clothes on. And she sent me the details: somebody’s house on Nueces Street, behind the Drag, a few blocks from campus.