University policy expressly prohibited consensual relationships between “intercollegiate athletics coaches, affiliates, or athletics employees and student-athletes” unless “the person in the position of greater authority or power notifies appropriate University offices and a mitigation plan is put in place.” I guess in this case Megan was “the person in the position of greater authority or power.” She was thirty, Marcus was eighteen, although maybe they started going out when he was in high school.
Megan was only part-time at UT. The rest of the time she looked after her mother, who had MS. This meant she didn’t travel with the players but still treated or worked with Marcus’s teammates.
I never saw them kiss or hold hands, not once. But guys must have been aware. Sometimes I sat with Megan during games, she wanted somebody she could talk to about Marcus. Because this is what you want when you’re in love, and the person you love is going through a complicated transition—from somebody his friends know to somebody strangers stop in the street.
By the end of the season, Menzes had put him in the starting lineup. Steuben was working with him in practice. He taught a lot of European techniques, jump stops, two-dribble pull-ups … his heroes were guys like Drazen Petrovic. Eventually the tournament came along. Down one to Michigan with five seconds left, Marcus picked up a rebound and started pushing hard against the clock, like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit—people on both teams kept falling away. Then three things happened at once: the buzzer sounded, he fell down, and the ball dropped in.
Okay, so it was a meaningless first-round game, and Texas ended 313up losing to Wake Forest two days later. Just one of those highlights they save for One Shining Moment, where part of the poignancy comes from the fact that the kid probably went home that summer and made five bucks an hour mowing lawns and nobody heard from him again. Except that the kid turned out to be Marcus Hayes, and this was the first real imprint he made on the national consciousness—running, as if for his life, to put the ball in the basket before time expired.
*
At the end of the semester, Marcus got in touch. He still had a few bags of stuff in our garage and wanted to pick them up. Players kept their access to the rec center, and some of the guys planned to stick around and work out together. Marcus said he was moving out of Jester into an apartment; I don’t know who with and didn’t ask. Megan still lived at home, to help with her mother. That wasn’t a situation where Marcus could add himself to the mix. But maybe he also wanted a place of his own so she could come over. I never talked to him about Megan.
Anyway, one Sunday afternoon he biked over to my house, which used to be his old house. It was Jordan’s first full season back, game three of the Finals. Marcus left his bike on the porch and came in—you could see the TV through the picture window. The Bulls got off to a fast start, and Marcus, sitting next to me on the couch, said, “I can’t watch this. Man, I can’t sit here watching this. I need to play.” At halftime the lead was twenty-four. “Come on, man,” he said. “This game is over.” Michael had like twenty points, a couple of threes, he was tearing them up. Marcus kept saying, “He ain’t no glove,” talking about Gary Payton, who was guarding Michael.
When the commercials came on, I put on my Air Jordans and we went out to the garage to get the ball. It needed pumping up, but I found the pump. Marcus looked for his stuff, too, which was in a black garbage bag, and carried it inside the house. 314
“What the hell do you have in there?” I asked.
Mostly old basketball shoes, clothes, a 1985 Rolando Blackman jersey, from when his dad took him to a Mavericks game. It even had a few signatures on it, Blackman, Mark Aguirre, Derek Harper. “Blackman could play. He was nice,” Marcus said, his favorite praiseword at the time. “People forget.” He must have been nine years old when he saw that game.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Sell it.”
“What about the shoes?”
“Sell those, too.”
He read somewhere you could make money selling old Nikes and he needed all the money he could get. For part of the summer, Marcus was helping out at Coach Caukwell’s basketball camp. He also had a job washing cars at East Side Car Wash, three blocks away on San Bernard.
We walked across the park together, under the trees and past the swimming pool. School was out and the pool was full. Even the basketball court next door was occupied by a bunch of kids, messing around. They looked about twelve.
“You could do some stuff would make them tell their parents about it,” I said to Marcus.
“Let’s just shoot in your driveway.” So that’s what we did.
Marcus wanted to play one-on-one, so for a couple of minutes I let him beat up on me. He wore gray jeans and an Abercrombie & Fitch maroon T-shirt, and I tried to grab his shirt, which pissed him off, so I stopped. Anyway, it was ridiculous but not in a fun way, just dumb.
“Don’t dunk on the rim like that,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It’s old, it’s already a little messed up.”
“I’m not hanging on it.”
“Just leave it alone. My dad gave it to me. You’re really not supposed to dunk on it. He gave it to me for my ninth birthday, and there were these instructions, and that was one of the instructions.” 315
In the end I suggested we play H-O-R-S-E. “A dollar says I win,” which he couldn’t resist. I think we both felt, like, a slight uptick of intensity. His first two shots were jump shots from the grass. I made one out of two. Then he hit a three-pointer from the road, where you have to compensate for the dip in the driveway. I missed that, too, and he got a little cocky. He tried a hook from the free-throw line, from the same strip of Celtics green that my dad painted in ten years before. Over the years the front rim had bent a couple of inches, mostly from Marcus dunking on it. Anyway, his shot hit the backboard and rolled off the lip.
After that, I just lined up free throws, calling “underhand, Rick Barry style.” He didn’t complain the first time, which set the precedent. I made the first one and he made the first one and started talking shit. Then I made eleven straight, and he missed five of them. Game over.
He didn’t want to pay up but eventually took a dollar bill out of the front pocket of his jeans, where he kept a small wad. “I should really get you to sign this,” I said. “Sign and date it—To Brian Blum, who beat me at H-O-R-S-E on this day, Sunday, June 9, 1996. So I can take it out and show people when you’re rich and famous.”
But of course I spent it a few weeks later, I just forgot. Before he got on his bike, I said, “Some of the guys are coming back this summer. Andy and Mike and Frank and Jim.” We could all get together, if he wanted to join us. Frank was talking about setting up a D&D campaign.
“Maybe, let me know.”
It was about ninety-five degrees outside and five o’clock in the afternoon, the mosquito hour. My shirt had stuck to my back, which was covered in sweat. Leaf dust or something had gotten in my eyes, which already stung with the salt and itched from hay fever. We stood in the driveway and didn’t know what to do; I think Marcus patted my shoulder. Then he rode off down the street with those live oak branches arching overhead, moving in and out of shade and carrying the black garbage bag over his shoulder like a sack. 316
*
The next couple of years we drifted apart. I heard about him the way everybody else did, by reading his box scores in the paper and watching him on SportsCenter. I still covered the Longhorns for the Daily Texan and even stopped by Gregory Gym from time to time. But our relationship was basically a professional relationship, and other reporters stepped in to take my place, guys from ESPN and USA Today. They knew his name, and he knew their names back. Even around campus he attracted a crowd. To get to him you had to push through hangers-on.
Almost every year there’s a Cinderella team that makes it to the Final Four. The schedule bounces their way, somebody gets hot. All you have to do is win four games. This year it was Texas, and Marcus was the guy.
He scored twenty-nine against Wisconsin in the first round, against a slow-it-down, pack-it-in Big Ten bully. You couldn’t score inside against them, so Marcus went outside and finished with five threes, including a twenty-four-footer with a minute left that put the Horns up six. Afterward, he kissed his hand and blew the kiss toward somebody on the Wisconsin bench. A reporter asked him about it in the press conference, and he said, “We just been having a little back-and-forth. All game long. I wanted to show him my appreciation.”
Against Coppin State, another Cinderella team, with the Horns down one and three seconds left, he hit a leaner from the left block with two guys hanging on him to win the game.
Billy Packer from CBS Sports asked him in the postgame show, “Can you talk me through that last play? Is that how Coach Menzes drew it up?”
Marcus leaned into the microphone and said, “Not exactly.”
He was figuring out that it isn’t hard, if you’re in control of a situation, to make people laugh. What matters isn’t being funny, it’s being in control. 317
Texas faced Louisville in the Sweet Sixteen, which had a week to prepare for him. Denny Crum, the Louisville head coach, started with a full-court press. Menzes let Marcus bring up the ball, because you couldn’t trap him in a corner, he was too quick. But that cut his scoring in the first half, and the rest of the Horns struggled, too. In the second half, he stopped passing. Sometimes it’s easier to attack a defense when you come from the backcourt with a head of steam. Even if they throw another defender at you, it’s a guy running toward you while you’re going the other way. He finished with thirty-six.
When the horn sounded, you could see Marcus pushing through the crowd toward the Louisville bench. Denny Crum put an arm around him and Marcus said something in his ear.
A reporter asked him about that, too. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him I always wanted to play for Louisville. They had the Final Four in Dallas when I was in fourth grade, so I got to stay up and watch. That was the year they won it. Milt Wagner, Billy Thompson, Pervis Ellison. Never nervous Pervis. They had some great players, I loved Milt. They beat Duke.”
“So how did you end up at Texas?”
“I guess Coach Crum didn’t want me.”
More laughter. You could see him becoming a public person, without giving anything personal away. Maybe that’s what it means.
By the time they faced North Carolina, Texas was Marcus’s team; they’d live or die by his sword. Even in the press conference afterward, in the layup lines beforehand, in the locker room, in the cafeteria, in the hotel, on the team bus, they deferred to him. This is the role he was comfortable in, with other people—it’s the role he played with me. In December, in Honolulu, when they met on New Year’s Eve, the Tar Heels beat Texas by six points. But Texas got their revenge and it wasn’t close.
The Final Four that year was in Indianapolis, but I didn’t have the money to fly out. Plus, I had class. So my dad and I watched the game 318at home—sitting on the couch where Marcus used to watch games, too. Texas faced Kentucky, the defending champs. Marcus played fine. He finished with twenty-two points, nine below his tournament average, and they lost.
One minute you’re on national TV in front of a hundred cameras, and the next day you’re back at school with all the other kids. There are five weeks left in the semester and you have homework and final exams.
Coach Menzes gave me an interview for the Daily Texan. He said the things you’d expect him to say. Marcus Hayes is a very mature young man, he really stepped up and accepted the responsibility. To be honest, he said, we’re a little ahead of schedule, I didn’t expect to make that kind of run. Next year there’s gonna be a target on our back.