We hit Lincoln Center with our bags and stuff and were looking around for Cal, and this white guy comes over and asks us were we the Alvin Ailey dancers.
“Yeah,” Ox said, “but only now we ain’t going to be dancing in no alleys anymore.”
The guy looked at Ox like he was crazy or something and put on this frozen little smile and backed away. We sat around the pool, checking out the chicks and just digging everything and digging everybody digging us. Finally Cal shows, and he’s wearing that jacket we bought for him. Breeze or Paul must have given it to him after he left the center. With our bags and that jacket everybody knew we were a team.
“Where we going, man? Paul asked.
“Back to school,” Cal said.
We went over to Ninth Avenue and a school called Haaren. I had heard about Haaren, they had a pretty tough squad, but I had never been in the place. We went to the office, and Cal met the principal, a white dude. I don’t know how he got to know all of these people, this principal, Sweet Man, or how he got the gym in the first place, but I was a little proud of him. I didn’t want to say nothing to him about it, but Paul ran it down.
“Hey, Cal, how’d you get this gym?”
“Me and Matt Lee used to play ball together,” Cal said. “He’s the principal here now. Guess you don’t know who your real friends are sometimes.”
We went into the visitors’ locker room, and Cal told us to change. The locker room was pretty nice, too. I dug some of the guys trying to act cool, and I could dig where they were coming from.
“Hey, coach, where do we put our valuables?” Breeze asked.
This guy, Matt Lee, got a strongbox and put it on the table and said that he’d lock it up until we had finished for the day. Breeze, who had already stripped and put his clothes in one of the lockers, took out his Afro pick and dropped it in the strongbox.
“You call that a valuable?” I asked him.
“When you’re as pretty as I am, it is,” he said.
We practiced every day that week. Except it wasn’t practice. We didn’t run any plays, we didn’t work out any strategy, nothing. Just simple stuff like going after loose balls. Cal had us going after loose balls so much that anytime a ball would fall to the ground five guys would want to jump on it. Then we practiced boxing out and rebounding until all the fun went out of even being in a gym. My hand was still sore, but it wasn’t that bad. Cal said that I was lucky it hadn’t got infected.
“Hey, Mr. Coach.” Jo-Jo was laying on the floor in a pool of sweat trying to catch his breath. “I just figured out something. This ain’t basketball, man; this is torture with dribbling thrown in to fool the public!”
“It won’t be like this much longer,” Cal said.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Jo-Jo said. “Because I think this is killing me.”
“It won’t be like this much longer,” Cal went on, “because we’re going to have to work harder from now on.”
Jo-Jo started rattling off something in Spanish. If I hadn’t been so tired, it might have been funny.
A day later Ox had to do something so he was going to miss practice, and Breeze said he had to miss, too. So Cal called off practice for that day. That is, he called it off for everybody except me.
Everybody had dug how Cal had been on my case. I’d do something the same way that everybody else did it, but he would find something wrong with it. Sometimes he wouldn’t find anything wrong with it; he would just tell me to do something else.
“When you get the step on the man anywhere from the key in,” he said, “just lay it up. Don’t jam!”
“Why not?” I asked. “That’s the best way to make sure you got the deuce!”
“Yeah, and the only way your man is going to recover,” he said. “Because you got to take that dip step to get up high enough to jam.”
I didn’t give him a lot of static because I knew he was trying, even if he was wrong in some of the things he was putting down. There’s nobody going to recover fast enough to stop me from jamming once I get the step inside the key. I knew how fast I was if Cal didn’t.
When Cal called the practice off for everybody except me, I figured he was just going to be on my case again, but I didn’t mind, really. In fact, I even dug it a little. But when we got to the gym, he was wearing his sneakers and told me to take the ball out. He was going to play against me, and right away I sensed that we were going through a manhood thing.
I took the ball out and went for the hoop as straight up as I could because I didn’t want to hear his mouth talking about how fancy I was trying to get. But he was all over me, pushing at me with his body and all. I figured okay, if he wanted to play manhood games with me, I could play them, too. He was always talking about playing the game to the bust, so that’s the way I started to play it, to the bust.
The first time I played against Cal he beat me, but only because he was hustling and I was cooling out. This time we both went at it. That was when I found out the sucker could play. I mean, he could definitely hoop.
“Fifteen baskets win,” he said.
“You ain’t going to last that long,” I said. “You’re gonna have a heart attack and die, old man.”
At first the gym was quiet, just me and him, the sound of the ball against the floor and the squeaking of our sneakers. I blew the first shot, and he took the ball behind the line and popped a jumper from about sixteen feet. Okay. Then he went around me for a lay-up, but the next time he tried it I threw it away. All the time he was running down this rap.
“Don’t lose contact. Keep your hand on me, so you know where I am, so you can feel me getting ready to move.… Don’t pull up if you get the step.… Why you backing off?… Where are your guts?”
We kept playing, and we were just about even when some students came into the gym. Some teachers came in, too. Two white chicks and an older black dude. They sat down and started watching us. Then that friend of Cal’s came in with some more teachers. They were sitting just off the court.
“Don’t switch hands on the lay-up,” Cal said.
I didn’t want him talking that stuff in front of people, so I went baseline, spun, and switched hands just to show him I could do it. When I did it, he slapped the ball away, but I got it back before it went out of bounds. I came back the same way, only this time I didn’t spin. I went straight up. I switched hands in the air and put the ball against the boards. It rolled around the rim and fell off.
We played for a while longer, and then I walked off the court. He had 11 to my 5, and I couldn’t get my game together. He watched me walk off the court, and then he went over and started talking to that Matt Lee dude. They were shaking hands and grinning like he was somebody.
A bell rang and all the teachers had to split and he came back over to me.
“You ready for a few more drills?” he said.
“I don’t need all these drills, man,” I said. “Last game I played I was high scorer. The game before that I was high scorer and MVP. You can save the Mickey Mouse drills.”
“That ain’t good enough.”
“Good enough for me,” I said.
“Guess it don’t take much to please you,” he said. “Shoot!”
He half passed, half threw the ball at me. I looked him in the eye, and he looked back at me. I was really getting bugged with him and he knew it and he didn’t care. I turned and threw a jumper. Nothing but net! He went over and got the ball and stood where I did when I made the shot. He threw a jumper, and I watched it float through the air. His shot wasn’t as pretty as mine, but he had a way of making the ball look like it was floating through the air. My shot rammed into the basket while his just sort of settled in. He got the ball again and threw it back to me.
“How deep you plan on getting into the game?” he said.
“I’d like to know that myself.”
“It’s a tough business in those streets when you get past eighteen,” he said. “You see things you were dreaming about start to curl up and die, and you want to curl up and die with them.”
“I’m out there on the streets every day, man,” I said. I threw a jumper from the corner, and it went in clean.
“You got to learn to use your talent,” he said, “really use your talent, and you got to cover yourself.”
“What’s your cover, coach?”
“You are, Lonnie. You’re my cover.”
I really couldn’t get next to that. I waited for him to go on, but instead, he grabbed the ball and started towards the hoop. He took off from the foul line, bringing the ball up from the dribble with one hand and hooking it in. It was a smooth move.
“That’s pretty nice,” I said.
“That was my shot when I was a kid,” he said. “Used to drive suckers wild with that shot. I was playing in this big game one time when I came down the court and all of a sudden I was just doing it. I tried to figure out later where it had come from. And the only thing I could figure was that it was what I needed when I used it. I needed it, and it came.”
He tried to show me the shot, how he controlled the ball from the dribble. His hands were bigger than mine, and half the time I tried it, the ball just went up in the air. But I could feel it. The way he explained the shot I could feel it. For the first time I felt that I had something that nobody else had. That maybe, just maybe, my game was a little deeper than a lot of other guys’ games. It felt good.
Paul was never alone anymore. I went by the center, and he was there with one of his la-di-da friends. We didn’t take people to the center unless they were okay. This cat had a big button on his jacket that said something about Justice for Native Americans. I didn’t dig cats that wore signs on themselves.
“Hey, Paul, where you been?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve been working with my friend, trying to get a book drive together,” he said.
“Lenny,” the cat said. “Lenny Travis.”
He stuck out his hand, and I shook it. He had soft hands, and I wondered if he was funny or something. I didn’t want to say nothing about his hands, so I asked him where he lived.
“Riverdale,” he said. “Not far from the Russian embassy.”
“Riverdale? Ain’t that where the rich people live?”
He nodded.
“Lenny, this is Lonnie Jackson,” Paul said.
“What’s the button for?” I asked.
“It’s in support of the American Indian,” he said.
“What you doing for the Indians?” I asked.
“Well, for one thing,” he said, looking around at Paul, “I’m wearing this button to advertise the fact that they aren’t getting justice now.”
“Why don’t you do for your own?” I asked him. “Or don’t you want to get involved with us?”
“What did you ever do for your own people?” Paul asked.
That got me mad because I felt I was being chumped off. I sat down in a chair and listened while Paul and Lenny talked about the book drive for the Native Americans. Then Paul started talking to Lenny about playing ball, and it was pretty clear that Paul had brought Lenny around to try out for the team. He looked too soft to be a ballplayer. But they were talking about how he played for some school, so I guess he must have had some kind of a game. I listened to their phony talk until I got tired of it. Paul was talking just like Lenny, like he had a mouthful of cornflakes he didn’t want to get any spit on.
“How long you going to be around, Paul?” I said. “I want to talk to you about something.”
“We’re waiting for my sister and her friend,” Lenny said. “Her friend just came to the city from Boston about two weeks ago. Paul and I flew up and helped her pack her things and shipped them, and then we all flew down together.”
I looked at Paul, and he looked away. He’d told me something about going to see his aunt a couple of weeks ago. He didn’t say anything about flying to Boston. I told him I’d check him out later and started to leave. Just as I was going out of the door these two chicks came in.
One of them had to be Lenny’s sister. She was thin and light-skinned like he was. The other one was light-skinned, too, almost white. It like to broke Paul’s face to introduce me, but he did. Lenny’s sister was named Joni, and the other chick was Leora.
The tournament, Cal explained, wasn’t so much to see who won or lost but was a showcase for scouts all over the country. They were supposed to be coming to New York to look at ballplayers who hadn’t been playing high school ball and who might have been overlooked because they weren’t on a good team.
“But the thing is this,” Cal said. “The first few games will be a round-robin practice round, and there won’t be many scouts around. Then, after the round-robin part is done, you get into the elimination part. That’s why they call it the Tournament of Champions. There’s all these divisions all over the city, and the champion of each division will get to play in the eliminations.
“Now check this out. Even though it’s supposed to be a showcase, the idea of winning or losing is important. Everybody looks at a winner and says that he’s good. And to be a winner in basketball, you have to have a team effort. If you didn’t come to play ball, then you might as well not be here at all. Is that clear?”
Everybody said it was clear. The first game we were supposed to play was against the Morningside Comanches. I had seen them play a couple of times. They weren’t much except for this guy they called Stealer John. Stealer John had a nice game. He was one of these guys that could stay high all the time and still keep his game together. He looked about forty-nine years old, but he was supposed to be the same age as me. I figured I’d be holding him.
Everything would have been cool except for Lenny. Cal put Lenny on the team and made Jo-Jo sit on the bench. Lenny’s game was a gym game. He was the kind of cat that could play okay with about nine referees watching that nobody touched him, but he wasn’t much in the playground. Cal said that he would help the team play together better.
When we got to the gym for the first game, there was a crowd there. I was surprised because mostly these tournament games didn’t amount to much. There were a few white guys there in suits—I figured they must have been scouts or something.
Stealer John got the opening tap and drove right for the basket. He went up and jammed, and everybody on the sideline started calling out his name. It was like a chant. STEAL-LER! STEAL-LER! Paul brought the ball down and tried a behind-the-back pass to Ox, and Stealer intercepted the ball and started downcourt again. He slowed the ball up when I got to it. Then he started moving to my right at the top of the key. He pointed to a spot on my right, and I thought that he was pointing to a spot for somebody to set a pick. I looked over, and he faked to my left. Then I jumped to the left and he went around me on the right side and I slipped and he jammed. That was his second jam in a row.
We went down, and Lenny fed me the ball, cutting across the lane. Stealer was on me, but I had half a step on him. I spotted Ox under the hoop, waving his arms. I could have either passed or went for the bucket myself. I went for the bucket. Ox’s man, he must have lost Ox, so he switched over on me, came up, and threw my shot away. They scored again.
Paul hit a jumper. Then I stole the ball and got ahead of everybody and went up for the jam and hit the rim. The ball bounced out to Stealer, and he was off. I went after him, and when he put a move on to go around Lenny, I caught up with him. He started a drive, only he dribbled the ball too high and I went for it and got a piece of it and he went into me and we both fell down. They called a two-shot foul on me, and then there’s Jo-Jo tapping me on the shoulder and telling me I’m out the game.
“What did you take me out for?” I asked Cal.
“You’re turning your head on defense—”
“I didn’t turn my head!”
“I saw you! That’s why he got around you!”
“I was going for the steal! You said to look for the ball!”
Cal started sounding off at me. His shirt collar was open, and the veins in his neck stuck out. I sat down on the bench and watched as the Comanches ran up and down the court. It was a sloppy game, and they were winning easy. No matter what Stealer did they were yelling for him. Cal put Lenny on him, and he styled on Lenny like he wasn’t even there. Even the referees were cracking on us. Ox was getting some respect around the boards, but Paul was so anxious to make Lenny look good he wasn’t doing a thing. At half time they were up 74 to 54.
We went into the locker room and sat down. Cal didn’t say anything. He just started getting his stuff together like he was going to leave. Everybody looked at him, but nobody said anything. Then Cal was standing in front of the mirror, picking out his hair, when Ox asked him what he wanted us to do in the second half.
“Do?” He turned around and looked at Ox. “What you asking me for? You playing your own game, ain’t you? Everybody’s playing for themselves, right? You ain’t passing the ball. I know about playing basketball, I don’t know what you’re doing out there. Maybe you like the way they are laughing at you.”
“You sitting Lonnie out don’t help none,” Jo-Jo said.
“Lonnie is sweet on Stealer John,” Cal said. “You see the way he keeps giving him everything he wants. ‘Go by me, Mr. John. Go on to the basket, Mr. Stealer. You want this rebound, Mr. John?’ ”
“Well, look, Cal,” I said. “You don’t want me playing, I won’t play!”
“That’s right,” Cal said. “Go on home. Because it takes a man to have enough pride to go out there and play the second half like he means it. And I don’t think you guys are men enough!”
I walked out and went back into the gym. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do or where I was going. I looked and Ox was with me and so was Jo-Jo. The others started out, too. I went down to the bench and sat on it.
“Where’s your coach?” the referee asked.
“He’s sick,” somebody said.
“Well, let’s get going.”
I went out on the floor and looked for Stealer John. He wasn’t on the court. I looked again. They were starting their scrubs!
Roy got the tap to Jo-Jo, who went all the way down the lane for the quick two. They came down and pulled a nice play with a couple of switches, but the cat that went for the hoop blew, and the rebound came out to Breeze. He brought it to the top of the key and then hit Paul with a bounce pass for another basket.
They went to inbound the ball and Jo-Jo jumped at the guy taking the ball out and the ball came in wild. I got it and hit a short jumper. Then their guy got jumpy and stepped into the court when he was taking the ball out, and the ref turned it over to us on the violation. We scored again, and they called time-out.
“Come on, we got to tighten up,” Paul was saying.
I looked over to the scorer’s table, and they were bringing their first five back in. I looked over to our bench, and I saw Cal standing behind some other dudes. Okay, he wanted to know what we were made of, he’d find out.
Stealer John brought the ball down, and I kept my hand on him the whole time. He passed the ball off but called for it right back. I was right on him. I didn’t let him breathe for a minute. Finally he backed himself into a spot where Paul could double-team him. I saw it and figured he’d move the ball away from Paul and I’d have a chance for it. Paul came over, and I saw his man start a cut towards the basket. Maybe Stealer John would have passed the ball to the cutting man or maybe he would have forced the shot up, but he never got the chance. I had the ball and started down the court. I couldn’t hear anybody after me, but I put the ball on the backboard anyway for another deuce.
They called another time-out.
“You gonna pay for that, sucker!” Stealer John pointed at me as he went to his bench. It made me feel good that he was mad.
The rest of the game went down like death in an old folks’ home. Not a smile, not a moment everybody’s mind wasn’t in it. They were playing ball like they were professionals or something. But we came back slow but steady. People watching got real quiet, and the game was being played by everybody just the way it was supposed to be. When we got six points away, the buzzer went off. We lost.
We got in the locker room, and I was so tired I couldn’t even sit down straight. Cal was handing out towels. He gave us some Gatorade and salt tablets, too.
A guy who had been hanging around the gym came in and started congratulating everybody.
“You got a nice team, coach,” he said, handing Cal a card. “You got some real classy ballplayers. You don’t mind if I tell them how good I thought they were?”
“I mind!” Cal looked at the guy like he had said something about Cal’s mama or something. Then he threw the guy’s card on the floor.
The guy shrugged and walked out.
Paul picked up the guy’s card and looked at it and then handed it to Ox.
“Hey, coach.” Ox was holding the guy’s card. “That cat was a scout!”
“I don’t want any of you guys talking to nobody without clearing it with me first!” Cal said.
“I don’t know what you talking about, man,” Ox said. “You said this tournament was about having coaches see us, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, that’s what it’s all about,” Cal said. There was sweat around his mouth, but the rest of his face was dry. “They all come on like Big Daddy, too. But just like every daddy, they got their own family to feed. He’s going to tell you anything you want to hear as long as he can get you to play for his team. That’s how he gets paid, by delivering the right flesh to the right team. Then, if they can’t get what flesh they want, they get a whole lot of backups, just so they can justify their expense accounts.
“I’ve seen guys like you thinking that some big school is interested in them because they’ve talked to a scout. You know for every guy that makes a team some scout has talked to twenty or thirty guys around the country and said the school was interested? You turn down five real chances for some fabulous school and go there to find you going up against a hundred guys just to make the junior varsity. Now can we talk about the game?”
“Yeah, go ahead, man.” Paul was already getting into his street clothes.
“Let me ask you guys something.” Cal was stuffing all the towels into a bag. “You guys win or lose out there today?”
“You know we lost, coach,” Paul said.
“Did you have to lose?”
No one said anything.
“Who here thinks you lost because the other team was better than you were?”
No one said anything.
“Then let’s all have two minutes of silence.” Cal stood up and bowed his head. “We got young black men here who choose to lose instead of winning. That’s something we should all have a moment of silence for. That’s an opportunity we let die. Just give me two minutes of silence.”
It was a long two minutes. At first it was uncomfortable, then it was embarrassing, and then I started to feel just a little ashamed of myself. After the two minutes were up, Cal told us how proud he was of how we had played the second half. It was too bad, he said, that we didn’t think enough of ourselves to win when we had the choice.
By the time Joni and Leora got to the locker room, we were all dressed and ready to go. We went down to the center and drank some sodas and a little wine that we had stashed there.
“What you guys celebrating?” Cal said.
I thought he was going to get into the thing about us losing again. Ox said he wasn’t celebrating nothing, just having a few drinks.
“I’m just trying to relax after the game,” Paul said.
“You go tell that to somebody who never played this game,” Cal said. “You celebrating what you found out on that court this afternoon. You got yourselves a good team. You know it, the team that beat you know it, and everybody that saw the game knows it. You guys can play some ball, and that’s what you’re celebrating! Now somebody pass me a cool drink!”
When he said that, when he let it all out, we just tore loose. Because that’s what we were thinking to ourselves. We were thinking that we played us some ball. I mean, we played us some B-A-L-L! We might have blown the game, but when we had our stuff together out on that court, it was together! Hearing Cal say it just put the icing on the cake.
“I think we could have beat the Knicks tonight,” Paul said.
“Depends on whether or not Cartwright was hot,” Cal said.
I took a look at that sucker, and he was really getting off on us having played so well. He was enjoying it as much as we were. He danced around with Joni and Leora until they split, and then one by one everybody left until it was just me and him left. We joked around until I was just about high, and then we locked up the center and split, too.
“Where you going, man?” Cal asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’ll follow you home. We can’t be letting our coach out too late.”
“Well, you are welcome to accompany me to my abode,” he said. “And when you get there, you rest your load or use the commode, or you can just tip your hat and hit the road.”
Cal and I walked toward his place. I wasn’t sure when we started out if I was going to go in with him; I just wanted to drag out the day as long as I could. We rapped as we went uptown to where he lived, mostly about basketball and about the way the neighborhood had changed.
“Yeah,” Cal said, “it’s gone down a lot, you know. When the white folks found out they weren’t welcome, they made sure they weren’t going to leave anything up here that anybody would want. Close down the hospitals, close down the schools, they’d probably close down the streets if we’d let them.”
“Yeah, it can be a ratty place to live,” I said.
“On the other hand.” Cal looked at me with a big grin. “Harlem ain’t Paris, and Harlem ain’t Rome. It may not suit you, but I call it home.”
“Where you get all them corny sayings?” I asked. “The first time I saw you you were talking something about big feet. You probably don’t even remember that now.”
“Your feets too big …” He started singing that song again. “I really hates you ’cause your feets too big.”
“That is one crazy song,” I said. “I never heard that song before.”
“Me and my woman, that was our song,” he said. “Here’s where I live. That’s an old Fats Waller song. I went up to see Aggie one day, and well, she was something special to me. I asked her if she could really go for a guy like me, something like that. She came over and sat next to me and started singing that song.
Your feets too big.
Don’t want you ’cause your feets too big.
“That was the night we fell in love. Or at least the night we both knew it.”
“What is it like being married?” I asked. He had gone in this apartment, and I waited until he had found the light switch and turned it on. It wasn’t nothing to brag about, that was for sure.
“What’s it like being married? Really married?” He looked at me. “I don’t know. I always had one foot out the door and one foot in.”
“Yeah, that’s the way I am, too,” I said. “I can’t see getting next to a broad but one way, you dig?”
“You want another taste?” Cal asked. He was fumbling through a closet.
“Yeah, we ain’t playing tomorrow.”
“You sure played today,” he said, “for a half anyway.”
“You really dig this tournament thing, huh? I mean, what are you getting out of it?”
“Told you,” he said. He held two glasses up to the light to see if they were clean. He wiped one on his shirt and then held them both up again. “You’re my cover. You get the dirty glass, too.”
“Cover for what?” I asked.
“You just want to play mysterious, that’s all,” I said. “Talking about me being your cover … acting all funny when that Casey dude came in the locker room.”
“That Casey dude?” Cal stopped pouring the whiskey and looked at me. “How do you know his name is Casey?”
“I saw him before,” I said. “He said some of the kids at Haaren who had seen you and me playing told him about me.”
“What else he say?”
“You going to pour that drink or what?”
“I asked you what else did he say, and what did he offer you?” Cal’s voice got cold, and he looked at me as if I had said something wrong. I started to shrug it off, but he just stared at me.
“He said that maybe he could get me into a college,” I said. “Or something like that. Anyway, I figured I’d try out for one of the eastern leagues. He said that if I wasn’t interested in college, maybe he could help me work something out.”
“What did he offer you, and did you take it?”
“He gave me his card and a twenty-dollar bill. He said it was money to make the call with,” I said. “Say, look, what are you getting so uptight for? The dude laid twenty dollars on me. I didn’t kill nobody. I didn’t steal nothing from nobody. He just gave me the money for nothing.”
“When’s the last time somebody gave you something for nothing?”
“Man, cut this lame stuff,” I said. I was really tired of it. “Who made you the white knight all of a sudden?”
“Hey, maybe I am the white knight, or maybe I’m Little Red Riding Hood or somebody,” he said, putting the glasses down. “How’s that: Cal Jones, also known as Little Red Riding Hood?”
“If you getting this way from that stuff you drinking, you don’t have to pour me none,” I said. “In fact, it’s getting kinda late, so maybe I just better get going.”
“No, wait a minute,” he said. He got down on his knees in front of an old trunk and dug in a pile of clothes until he came to one of those books that people keep their family pictures in. He handed it to me.
“It’s a scrapbook.”
“Yeah. I’m going to let you look at it, Lonnie,” he said. “I don’t want you to say nothing to nobody about it, you understand?”
“I ain’t mouthy,” I said. “You don’t want nobody to know about your scrapbook, ain’t nobody going to know.”
“You’re right about one thing,” he said. “It is scrap. That’s my life you got there in your hands. Scraps. Pieces of things stuck in an old book that nobody knows about.”
I opened the book, and it was like one of those old black-and-white movies you see on television sometime. The pictures were almost all cut from newspapers, and were turning yellow. They were all about basketball games.
“This you?” I asked. “Spider Jones?”
“Used to be … what game you on now?”
“DeWitt Clinton.”
“I scored fifty points that game—”
“Says here forty-eight!”
I went on and saw that he had played for City College. The more I read, the better he was getting. The first few pages were about high school games, and maybe there would be a paragraph or two or just a few lines. Then there were tournaments and college games. They had pictures of him holding a Most Valuable Player award over his head. He looked different then, skinny, with long arms and legs. I could see why they called him Spider.
The magazine pieces were the best. They had him on an All-American team. He was in color, too. The picture made him look darker than he was, but you could still tell it was him if you looked close.
“I ain’t taking nothing from you, man, but how come you didn’t turn pro?” I asked.
“Mostly because you didn’t turn enough pages,” he said.
I turned a few more pages. There were pictures of him playing in the NIT and the Rucker Tournament. And then there was a headline that said: “Big O burns rookie!” There he was, holding Oscar Robertson! I didn’t believe it! Cal had played pro ball. I couldn’t read fast enough. He had played with the best in the world. I kept looking up at him to see if it was the same guy.
“You played pro!”
“I played pro!”
“What happened?”
“You heard about Davey Blue?” He reached over and got the bottle again. “Same thing happened to me.”
He turned a couple of pages and pointed to a small article. He had underlined some words: “associating with known gamblers and behaving in a manner detrimental to the interests of the National Basketball Association …”
“You do it?”
“Yeah, I did it.”
“Man …” I couldn’t think of anything to say. “At least Blue was innocent.”
“Dave Blue was used, and I was used,” he said. “The only difference was that he didn’t know he was being used because he didn’t see it. I didn’t know I was being used because I didn’t want to see it.”
“White cats do it to you?”
“Ain’t nobody did anything to me,” he said. “I did it to myself. A man come up to me with a fistful of money, and I took it. Nobody gives you something for nothing, and I knew it.”
“What did you do, throw a game?”
“I was what they called a shaver. The gamblers figure out how much a team should win by. They figure you should win by five points, maybe seven. Then that’s the spread. Somebody want to bet some money on you they got to give up the points in the spread. If we were supposed to win by five, I’d see to it that we only won by three or four. If we were supposed to win by three or four, I’d try to cut it down to a deuce.”
“That don’t sound so bad, man; you was still winning.”
“Walking down the street naked don’t sound too bad either until they put your behind in jail.… I knew what I was doing. It wasn’t about the money either. I was making more money than I ever had. I was on top of the world, looking down from a silver cloud. The money the guy gave me was chump change. But he told me I was being slick, and I listened to him. The only thing I ever had in life was my game, Lonnie. It was so sweet, people who didn’t know a thing about it would come to see me play. You know how women come to the games sometimes. They want to see your body in the air doing things that other cats can’t do. You know how that feels to you when you’re doing it. I would touch the ball and I would know something was going to happen.… It was a kind of magic. It made me something that a million other guys would pay to watch.
“That’s what I sold for the chump change. I sold my game! It got so that I hated to play. I’d go out there and warm up with the other guys, and all I could think about was what I was going to do. I still had a game, but there would come times when I had to pull it together, when I had to play it to the bust to keep from losing, and I just couldn’t do it.
“I told the cat that gave me the bread that I couldn’t do it anymore, and he looked at me and he just laughed. We were sitting in the lobby of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. He looked at me when I said I wouldn’t shave any more points for him, and then he ordered a bottle of liquor and acted like he had never heard what I said. I had already sold my game.
“You know what you love in this life? You love what makes you stand the tallest. It can be your woman, your country, your job. I loved basketball, Lonnie. It was what I had. I had it, and I threw it away. Hey, can you dig it? The one thing that I had, the one gift, and I threw it away, can you dig it?”
Cal was really upset. His whole body was shaking. I stood up and started to put my hand on him, and then I walked away. I didn’t want to see him like that, but I didn’t know what to do. There was a record player on the bureau and a record on it. I turned it on and put the arm on the record as it started to spin. It was a chick singing.
Give me red lipstick …
And a shot of good booze
It was a slow blues. I listened to it as Cal got himself together. I didn’t think about anything, mostly because I didn’t know what to think about. I sat down in an old rocking chair he had and put my feet on the table.