Baller: A Bad Boy Romance
Read Baller: A Bad Boy Romance Online
Authors: Love,Amy
This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons--living or dead--is entirely coincidental
Baller copyright @ 2016 by Amy Love. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Quinn
“That’s your cue, Quinn,” the cameraman said to me.
I caught his warning at the same moment that somebody decided to bump into me, knocking me off balance and clean out of the frame. I had been straightening up, taking a deep breath and trying to poise myself to start talking. I stumbled to the side, catching myself before I fell to the ground. Wearing heels today, apparently, had been a mistake. I liked to wear them when I knew I was going to be talking to basketball players. They served the vain purpose of making me feel taller; I was already tall, but every inch counted and solved the practical problem of putting the giant, overgrown men and me on something of a more balanced height difference for the sake of filming. It generally helped in interview journalism when both parties, the interviewee and interviewer, were visible.
I straightened up and saw a young woman in a cheerleader uniform shooting me the same dirty look I was shooting her.
“Excuse me, we’re trying to film here,” I said to her.
“This is a court; athletes have first priority,” she said haughtily, before slinking off to join the rest of the gaggle of women who looked just like her.
Athletes
. She wasn’t an athlete. Maybe she was if you considered cheerleading a sport. I didn’t, but there was a part of me that knew it was partly because I had never made it onto any of the cheer teams when I was at school. There was some athleticism involved, and it was pretty dangerous sometimes, but still, an
athlete
? So there was no reason why all the cheerleaders were beautiful women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven? There was no reason why the majority of them did modelling and pageants on the side? Even if she was an athlete, she was not one of the ones I was there to see. I shook my head and straightened my clothes, moving back into the frame.
I had been at the arena for hours now, and the game was finally on. The players usually had a long time to themselves in the afternoons, so I wasn't able to talk to any of them then. I had had to wait until now to really get anything I could use. The beginning of the game was no good because the guys were getting ready for the tip-off and mentally preparing to dominate the other team. Their coach likely had words to say to them at that time, too. Halftime, now, was my first in. I wouldn't be able to talk to the players, that would be too much of a distraction, but I would be able to get a word in with the coach. At least a little something.
My network had been talking with him and other management heads of the team, and there weren't that many reporters there today competing for his attention.
“Did you see that, Tony?” I asked my camera guy.
"Huh?"
"That girl, she practically ran me down," I complained.
“What? Oh, yeah,” he said, distracted. He had been watching the girl who had just piledrove herself into me. The girls were getting ready to take to the court during halftime.
“Can we go again?” I asked. “I need to start with an introduction before we can talk to the coach. We’ll get that once the whistle blows for halftime.”
Tony nodded, getting back behind the camera, making sure the shot was okay. About a minute later, the whistle sounded for halftime. He gave me a couple seconds and counted me down. Trying to watch the game and be a part of the action was difficult when all I was working. I loved basketball, but the live-viewing thing didn’t really work for me. My dad had taken me a few times when I was a kid—and that was really when my interest in sports was born, but when you watched at home, you could rewind and be comfortable, it was cheaper and it was my true relaxation time.
Being on the court, the times that I was, it tended to be for work. Sometimes I would catch highlight reels or interviews and see myself in the frame. It was both amazing and embarrassing. Maybe it was stupid, but I thought of video footage as direct slices of the past that were saved into permanence, and it always felt strange to me to see a literal past-version of myself. It was like another level of this intense self-awareness. I began my speech while the players trooped off the court behind me and the crowd erupted into cheers seeing the cheerleaders take their place.
I had ended up a journalist because I was a nerd and loved to read. I had ended up a
sports
journalist because what I lacked in actual athletic skill, I made up for in theoretical and sports knowledge. Behind every sport that was played on the face of the earth was a history and theory. There were records of games and players. There were times, dates, and figures that were significant. There were names that were relevant and events that were legendary. My dad had planted the seed by taking me to games and having me watch with him. Of course, he had friends who he could have done these things with, but I think it was the only thing he could think of at the time to do with me that constituted some sort of bonding. I was his only child, and I had done him the disservice of being a girl. He never tried to play the games with me because I never wanted to, but he did let me sit with him and watch.
He had also been patient, answering all my questions—which I would ask during the games—interrupting it and making him pay attention to me when he would rather have been focusing on the players on the television. That was when he would tell me who was who and why this guy was considered better than this other one and for what reasons. He told me why the game had to stop whenever a player hit another guy and why the crowds seemed to have chants and all the intricate rules that came together to make organized sports work.
The first time I had watched a basketball game in an arena, I had been like six or so. I remembered feeling that it was very
loud
. The only thing I heard over the din of the crowd was the squeaking of the players’ shoes on the shiny court floor and the whistles sounding every so often. I remember the crowd being rowdy and the team that my dad had come to see ultimately losing, but I knew that I had had a good time and it was something that my dad liked and interested me, as well.
The atmosphere at games, when you were really there, just feet away from the players and watching the action unfold—next to people who were just as excited and tense and anxious as you were—was something everyone has to experience at least once in their life. It was like there was a charge running through you and it was running through all the rest of the people there who also wanted to see their team win, whether they supported the opposing team or not. You didn’t get the feeling of electric community when you were down courtside for work. You couldn’t get caught up in the action of your team performing because some of the time…a lot of the time…more often than not…frankly…your team wasn’t playing. You reported on whatever game was being played, and it was your job to stay on top of the action, to pursue the players and coaches, and to not miss anything.
The Charlotte Yellow Jackets were playing the Dockside Gulls. At the halftime whistle, the Yellow Jackets were down forty-three to fifty-one. The Yellow Jackets were my team, had been since I was younger, having been born and raised right here in Los Angeles. They played a mean game and usually led their matches right from the beginning, but today they were straggling. Not by much, but I wondered what the coach would have to say about that.
Being an athlete
myself
had never been in the cards for me. I didn’t have that sort of drive and the stomach for constant failure and pain. I was a nerd; I couldn’t play sports and that was why I had read so many books when I was a kid. I did like sports, however, the theoretical side of them. I liked the analysis of game plays and the development of the sports into what we now know of them from their inception years ago.
I playfully called myself a
sports historian,
but my job was reporting. I reported the sports news as it happened. I did sideline reporting, but the thing I preferred was interviewing and writing pieces based on the interviews. I liked to put together journalistic pieces because there was so much to say about a game or about a player than just the final team scores or a certain guy’s career stats.
I liked to think that the league had an asset when it came to me, and it was
true
. The people my age and younger working for my outlet were interns and personal assistants. My parents had suggested getting in early with a news network as an intern or a personal assistant when I was still in college, so that I could show my chops, learn a lot, and hopefully start in a writing position earlier than the people who didn’t. I had started from the bottom, and now I was a reporter and correspondent.
Yes
, the gig was my dream job, and
yes
, a lot of the players were surprised by the questions I asked them and the sports knowledge I had.
I had been on the sidelines for other sporting events, but I liked basketball the best. For one thing, the courts were covered, which meant we weren’t affected by incumbent weather. For another, we were indoors, which meant I didn’t have to worry about my heels digging up someone’s AstroTurf or special grass. I felt that the game, from the size of the court to the fact that it was played
inside
, was just tighter and more controlled than other games.
I smiled and shook hands with Garrett Trudeau, the coach of the Charlotte Yellow Jackets. He had finally gotten away from the team long enough to give me a few words. He was an older guy; they all were. He had coached basketball at every level, from high school to professional in the National Basketball Association. He was a legend in his own right, and I knew as much about the man as I did about the players. That was another thing. It was a little surreal, meeting all the players and sports figures that I had studied and heard so much about in person. It was a little intimidating when it was a person whom I respected—like Garrett. We were going to be on camera; I had to keep my cool and try not to make a fool out of myself in front of a legend.
“The Yellow Jackets are down at the end of the second quarter, how do you think they can rally and rebound from a possible loss?” I asked. Garrett looked a little surprised at the fact that I had suggested his team might lose. I wasn’t wrong. The game wasn’t over yet. Anything could happen between now and the next couple quarters. There could be an injury, there could be a foul. Anything. Of course, I didn’t want the Yellow Jackets to lose, but it was a possibility in every game, especially when they were against a team that was evenly matched with them.
“They don’t have many points on us. Their lead isn’t substantial enough to make us worry,” he said cockily.
“With a view of the season, the way it has been so far, what do you think you guys need to do to stay in the game?”
“We're on the right track, all we really need is for Dante to be Dante.”
He wanted Dante to be Dante
.
The
Dante
to which he referred was the Charlotte Yellow Jackets’ point guard. He was—as far as anyone in the league was concerned—a machine. He had been playing since his early twenties after he had gone to college the same place I went: UCLA. He had gotten in on his basketball playing, of course, and had had a full-ride scholarship. Wasn’t it cruel the way people like
me,
whose skills did not typically earn then full-ride scholarships, had mountains of student debt to pay back, and people like
him
, whose skills
did
earn them full-ride scholarships, made the entire sum of money that
I
owed in one or two months?
Dante Rock had the career stats of someone who had been playing for ten years, while he had only been at it for six. His backstory was one that people loved to repeat because fans ate it up. He had come from a single-parent home in a small Ohio town after his father had left his mother. He had picked up a basketball—and the rest was history. That was the come up that so many young men wanted but so few would actually get because of the sheer level of skill that was required to be an elite athlete in this sport, or any sport for that matter.
He had gone from living in a town that wasn’t even indicated on major maps, where the entire population could fit several times over in the arena we were in at that very moment, to living next door to directors and movie stars in Hollywood and having enough money to literally purchase the entire square foot area of land on which his home town sat if that was something that he felt he wanted to do.
To say that Dante carried the Yelowjackets was unfair to the rest of the players. He was, however, a
real
asset. He had been Rookie of the Year and the Yellow Jackets’ MVP not once but two times. Garret saying he wanted Dante to be Dante was implying a lot more things than just fantastic basketball playing.
