Basketball Disasters (4 page)

Mason looked up at the Taylors’ upstairs window. Sure enough, the curtain was pulled back, and he saw a glimpse of someone’s face.

Maybe Mason’s sign should say
NO SPIES
, with a bright red line through a picture of a pirate spyglass.

“Do you think she saw him?” Brody asked.

“Uh-huh.”

They threw a few more balls for Dog, but the fun had gone out of the game. Dog seemed to sense it, too. He started chasing a squirrel that scampered up a tree to escape him. Not that Dog would ever hurt a squirrel. Dog was the best dog in the world and would never hurt anything.

“Let’s go in,” Mason said.

Then they saw Mr. Taylor coming up the front walkway to Mason’s house. Ever friendly, Dog dashed over to greet him.

“Beautiful morning,” Mr. Taylor said heartily, stooping down to give Dog an awkward pat.

Mason knew Mr. Taylor hadn’t come out of his house to comment on the weather, speaking the only two words he had ever spoken thus far to Mason.

The boys nodded. Dog wagged his tail.

“Sure is,” Brody added.

“I just wanted to say—to ask you—if you’d make an effort to keep your dog—I’m afraid I don’t know his name—”

“Dog,” Mason said.

Mr. Taylor looked baffled, as people often did when Mason told them Dog’s name.

“To keep your dog in your yard. My mother is particular about things—like how the snow looks when it’s all fresh and new—”

Mr. Taylor gestured toward Mason’s well-trampled yard, where the snow was stamped down into dirty slush.

“And I think I mentioned the other day that she doesn’t—”

“Like dogs,” Mason finished the sentence for him wearily.

“That’s right.” Mr. Taylor sounded apologetic.

Mason decided against making any witty remark like,
What a coincidence! Dog doesn’t like old ladies!

“Sure,” Brody said. “Sure,”

Mason echoed.

With Dog trailing behind them, they trudged back inside.

Coach Joe’s class went to the library on Monday to find books for their Famous Figures of the American Revolution reports, the big language-arts project for the trimester.

Nora was looking discouraged. “I wanted to do a famous woman of the American Revolution, but all the ones I looked up on the computer at home aren’t real.”

“What do you mean, aren’t real?” Brody asked.

The three of them had grabbed some books from the selection the librarian had prepared on a cart and were looking at them together in the reading nook over by the windows.

“Like Betsy Ross. The thing I read about her said she didn’t really make the first flag. Or Molly Pitcher.
She didn’t really carry a pitcher of water to the wounded soldiers on the battlefield. I don’t think she even existed.”

“What about Martha Washington?” Mason asked. “She was real.”

“She was just famous because she was married to someone famous.”

“But maybe she helped him to become famous,” Mason suggested. “She sent him off to war with extra-wonderful pomander balls so he had the nicest-smelling uniform in the whole army, and that’s why they made him general.”

Nora laughed. “Anyway, I decided to do Benjamin Franklin instead, because he was a scientist as well as a politician, and I’m going to be a scientist.”

“I was thinking of doing him, too,” Brody said. “I saw his printing shop the summer before last when my parents took us to Philadelphia, and I have a hat like his that I can wear if Coach Joe has us dress up.”

Brody loved dressing up.

Mason didn’t.

Brody loved Halloween, which was coming up this weekend. This year Brody was going to cover himself with green and purple balloons and be a bunch of grapes.

Mason hated Halloween. For the class party he was going to wear his regular clothes and say that he was a werewolf but it wasn’t the full moon yet. He had been enormously relieved when he thought up that particular idea.

“Okay, I’ll do Ben Franklin, too,” Mason said. It might as well be unanimous.

“Is it okay if we all do the same person?” Brody asked.

“Sure,” Nora said. “So long as we write our own reports. Coach Joe didn’t say everybody had to do someone different.”

After they each found a Ben Franklin book, they stood in line for checkout. Just ahead of them in line, Dunk was also carrying a book about Ben Franklin. Well, it wasn’t as if Dunk could ruin Ben Franklin for everybody else just by writing a report about him.

Unlike the way Dunk could ruin basketball for everybody by being on their team. Or on a different team. Or on any team at all.

Mason might as well find out the worst. “Hey, Dunk, are you playing basketball this season?”

“Yeah, why?” Then Dunk seemed to answer his own question. “Don’t tell me you guys are playing basketball. Brody the Midget? And Mason the Klutz?”

Mason didn’t point out that he wasn’t the one who had tried to juggle pomander-ball oranges and failed miserably. He couldn’t remember ever having done a klutzy thing in front of Dunk. Except for that
time he had fallen over during the kindergarten concert while pretending to be a teapot short and stout. But that didn’t have anything to do with sports.

“Wait till you guys play my team,” Dunk chortled. “Do you know what the name of our team is?”

How could Mason possibly know the name of Dunk’s team when he hadn’t even known for sure that Dunk was
on
a team?

“The Killer Whales,” Dunk told him.

“I never heard of any whales that were especially
good at basketball,” Mason couldn’t resist saying. Fighting bulldogs had to be better at basketball than killer whales. At least they had feet and lived on land.

“That’s because you haven’t heard of these whales,” Dunk retorted. “But you will.”

He whacked Mason in the shoulder with his Ben Franklin book in a way that wasn’t very beneficial either for the book or for Mason’s shoulder.

“You will,” Dunk repeated.

On Tuesday night, Mason and his dad arrived at the first basketball practice twenty minutes early. The team practices were held not at the Y but at the elementary school. Mason’s dad was clutching his coaching book, which had indeed arrived yesterday as promised. Already the book bristled with sticky notes marking the most important pages.

“The book said I need to figure out my coaching philosophy,” Mason’s dad said. “I need to decide the most important thing I want my players to learn.”

“How to get the ball through the hoop?” Mason thought that was a good one, for starters.

“Not things like that. What
values
do I want you to learn?”

“Perseverance. Giving 110 percent. Striving for our personal best. Sportsmanship. Teamwork.” Mason rattled them off. He must have been paying more attention the other night than he had realized.

“But which of those values is the
most
important? Do you want to know what I’ve decided? Which one I’ve picked as the core of my coaching philosophy? Sportsmanship. ‘It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.’ ”

That was probably a good choice, given that Mason was expecting their team to lose every single game.

“We may not be the winningest team,” Mason’s dad said.

An understatement, if Mason had ever heard one.

“But we can excel in sportsmanship. Unless—do you think I should have picked teamwork?”

“Sportsmanship is good,” Mason reassured him. He was confident that just about any team could beat the Killer Whales on sportsmanship. “But aren’t we also going to have to learn stuff like how to actually play the game?”

“Of course. Tonight we’re going to work on”—he checked his notes—“layups. And dribbling. And different kinds of passes. But I’m hoping most of the
kids will already have some of those basics down from P.E.” His brow furrowed with worry. “We’re not going to have to start from scratch, are we?”

Mason felt sorry enough for his dad that he said, “Nah. We did a lot of that stuff in P.E.”

For three weeks.

Almost a year ago.

Toward seven o’clock, the rest of the team began trickling in. Brody was first, of course, followed by Jeremy, also from Coach Joe’s class, and three boys Mason didn’t know from the neighboring town. Was that going to be the whole team? Six kids, all of whom had probably never played team basketball before or they’d be on a team already?

Mason thought his dad did a good job of welcoming everybody and making his speech about the importance of sportsmanship. He didn’t talk too long, and he said the positive, encouraging things Mason’s mom had wanted from a coach for Mason.

“I know each one of you has a unique contribution to make to this team,” he concluded. “And I’m here to help you make that contribution.”

Mason wondered what his own unique contribution
was going to be, or if he even had a unique contribution. He suspected that his father might have taken that line directly from his coaching book. Still, it was a positive, encouraging line.

“Okay, team!” Now his dad sounded like Coach Joe. In fact, perhaps inspired by Coach Joe, he had asked the kids to call him Coach Dan. “Coach Dan” and “Coach Dad” sounded enough the same that if Mason called him Coach Dad, no one would be likely to notice.

They started with some stretches to warm up their muscles, and then did a dribbling drill back and forth across the gym. One chubby, red-haired kid, Dylan, kept losing control of his basketball and having to chase it across the gym. Then Mason was partners with Dylan for a passing drill. Dylan could neither catch a ball thrown to him nor throw a ball so that anybody else could catch it.

Maybe Dylan’s unique contribution to the team was going to be making everyone else feel better about himself in comparison.

Mason’s dad stepped in to offer Dylan some pointers. “Good job!” he praised, after Dylan finally caught
the ball one time instead of throwing up his hands to shield his face.

Mason could only imagine what Dylan’s parents had said to coax him into trying basketball. If he himself had been the coach, he would have suggested that Dylan reconsider this choice. But if Dylan quit the team, they would have just five players—the bare minimum for a team, without a single substitute.

In his opening remarks, Mason’s dad had urged the players to try to find a friend or two to join. But Mason’s second-best friend was Nora, and the fourth-grade teams weren’t co-ed. And Brody’s second-best friend, Sheng, was already on a team.

During the layup drill, Mason was gratified when a couple of his shots went through the basket. He wished his mother had been there to see that her son was more talented at basketball than she seemed to think.

“Water break!” Coach Dad announced.

Mason thought it might be a good idea to end the first practice a bit early—or a lot early—so that the players wouldn’t get overtired and strain their muscles. A little bit of basketball practice went a long
way, in Mason’s opinion. But after the quick water break, his dad put the players back to work, practicing one-on-one offensive and defensive strategies.

This time Mason wasn’t stuck with Dylan. Instead, he was paired with Brody, the king of hustle. Scrappy little Brody kept knocking the ball out of Mason’s hands and diving after it. For a moment, Mason felt the tiniest flicker of dislike for Brody. Why would a
friend
try so hard to take the ball away from another friend?

“Mason, you’re not trying,” Brody complained after he made the next basket.

“Maybe you’re trying too hard,” Mason shot back.

“That’s what hustle is,” Brody explained, grabbing the ball away from Mason and aiming it at the hoop.

Mason was glad when Brody missed, but then, too busy smirking, he forgot to go for the rebound. Brody snagged it and shot it again; the ball went in this time.

“Twelve to two,” Brody announced.

Oh, put a sock in it
, Mason wanted to say.

Finally, practice was almost over.

“One more practice—one!—and then we have our first game!” Coach Dad told the team as they did their cool-down stretches. “Remember to try to
find some friends to join us. We could really use a few more kids.”