Last Shot (3 page)

“Hoops, are these our guys?” Brill said.

“Yup. These are the winners.”

“Well, congratulations to you both. Susan Carol, you’re with me today,” Brill said. “I hope you’ll be ready to go by eleven.”

“Eleven?” Weiss said. “The first practice isn’t until noon and it’s a five-minute walk to the Dome.”

“True,” Brill said. “But we have to pick up our credentials
and the kids’ credentials.
And
we have to deal with all the new security checks.”

“And
Duke is practicing first,” Weiss said, laughing.

“Uh, true,” Brill said, reddening slightly.

“Don’t feel bad, Mr. Brill,” Susan Carol said. “All right-thinking people are Duke fans.”

“I can see you two will get along just fine,” Weiss said. “Come on, Steven. I’ll introduce you to Paul Hewitt. We’ll see you guys over at the Dome.”

Stevie breathed a sigh of relief as he and Weiss walked away from Brill and Susan Carol.

“God, I thought I was going to throw up with all that Duke stuff,” he said to Weiss, feeling he had found a comrade in anti-Duke arms.

“Did you read Susan Carol’s story?” Weiss asked.

Stevie grinned. “No,” he said. “Was it gross? Nothing but a Coach K love-in?”

“Actually,” Weiss said, “it was vurry, vurry good. Might even convert a skeptic like you. She’s a talented writer.”

Stevie groaned. Nine feet tall
and
a talented writer. Great. Just great.

ONCE EVERYONE WAS SEATED
, the breakfast didn’t take very long. Stevie calculated that the two acceptance speeches lasted about ninety seconds—seventy-five of them for Paul Hewitt; no more than fifteen for Raymond Felton, who thanked his teammates and his coach and sat down. Bobby Kelleher introduced both Stevie and Susan Carol, complimented them on the quality of their work, and then talked about how important the writing contest was because it was vital that older writers encourage younger writers.

“We’ve got too many kids today who want to grow up and be on television,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with TV work except that it’s shallow and requires that you spend most of your life screaming into a microphone about
how great every coach is. We need to encourage real reporting because it’s important.”

Stevie was relieved when neither he nor Susan Carol was asked to speak. They just had to pose with their plaques and Kelleher for a couple of pictures. It was almost eleven o’clock by the time the breakfast was over. Weiss found him as he and his dad were heading for the door. Stevie introduced him to his father. “Read you as a kid,” Bill Thomas said, shaking Weiss’s hand.

“You’re making me feel old, okay?” Weiss said, laughing.

He then suggested to Stevie that they meet in the lobby in about fifteen minutes. “Did you bring a laptop?” he asked.

Stevie said he had. The USBWA had made arrangements with twenty small-town papers that couldn’t afford to cover the Final Four to use Stevie and Susan Carol as their correspondents for the weekend. They were supposed to write features—one story each day, beginning today.

“Once you decide what you want to write about today, I think it will be easier to do it from the Dome than from back in your room,” Weiss said. “Have you ever written on deadline before?”

“Only when he waits until the last minute to finish a paper for school,” his father answered.

“I remember that feeling,” Weiss said. “You’ll be fine. I’ll be there to help and there will be guys all over who can feed you quotes if you need them.”

Stevie had already given some thought to what he would write. His first idea was a story describing his impressions—what it was like to be at the Final Four with a press pass for
the first time. But then he decided that would make him sound like a wide-eyed little kid. He had thought about profiling a benchwarmer, or maybe about how each practice that afternoon was different. Or maybe he would try to talk to some fans about what it meant to
them
to be at a Final Four. They were all decent ideas, but his secret wish was to do a feature on Chip Graber—you had to root for the short guy.

“One thing you ought to do,” Weiss added, “is talk to Susan Carol to make sure you don’t write the same type of story.”

Stevie nodded. He told Weiss he would go get his computer, then he and his dad headed to the elevator. The Andersons were standing there waiting. “I guess we need to bring our computers to the Dome,” Stevie said. “Mr. Weiss said it would be easier to write our stories from there.”

“Oh, well, I guess you should,” Susan Carol said. “But I’ve already written my story for today.”

“You have?”

“Yes, well, the people at Duke were so nice to me when I did my story on Coach K, so I called on Monday and asked if there was
any
way at all to get an interview with Coach Boeheim from Syracuse to find out how he feels being here after finally winning the championship a couple of years ago. Well, Coach K is a friend of his, and he actually called him for me, and I met with Coach Boeheim yesterday afternoon at his hotel! He could
not
have been nicer. So, I wrote my story last night.”

“Knowing Coach K was certainly a big help,” said Mr. Anderson.

“I guess the key to success is knowing Coach K,” Stevie said.

His father gave him a sharp look. The Andersons said nothing. Fortunately, they had reached their floor and were able to escape into the hallway.

“That was a snotty thing to say,” Bill Thomas said.

“Yeah, I know. But Dad, how much of that Coach K stuff can you take?”

“Well, it
was
nice of him to help her out. And give her credit. She got an interview with Jim Boeheim because of him. It was a good idea.”

Stevie groaned. This fair-and-unbiased-reporter thing was harder than it looked.

Things got better once he and Hoops began their walk over to the Dome. It was a perfect early-spring day and the ramp leading from the hotel to the Superdome was filled with people: fans in the colors of the four teams were everywhere; vendors hawked “official” Final Four memorabilia; and every few yards they would walk past someone with a cell phone in one hand and tickets in the other. “Anybody selling?” they would ask.

“Why are they trying to buy tickets?” Stevie asked Weiss, who laughed at the question.

“They’re not trying to buy tickets,” Weiss answered. “They’re scalpers.”

“Then why are they asking if people are selling?”

“It’s a code they use in case there’s an undercover cop around. It’s illegal to solicit someone to buy a scalped
ticket in Louisiana. But not to ask if someone wants to sell
them
a ticket.”

“But you can see they’ve got tickets in their hands.”

“Right. So if someone is looking to buy, they just stop and say, ‘I’m buying.’ Then they go off someplace quiet and make the sale.”

“How much are people paying for the tickets?”

“Someone told me yesterday the scalpers were getting twenty-five hundred bucks a ticket downstairs; closer to fifteen hundred upstairs.”

Stevie’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my God! My dad was going to try to get a ticket—what’s the lowest price? How much do they normally cost?”

“I think it’s two hundred and fifty bucks for downstairs. Of course, most people who get the chance to buy tickets paid a lot more for the
right
to buy those tickets in the first place.”

“Huh?” People paying for the right to pay for something?

“Most people who get tickets go through the schools that make the Final Four,” Weiss explained. “Even though there are sixty-five thousand seats in the Dome, most of them are so far away from the court, you can barely see. The really good seats go to the coaches’ association, the NCAA for its sponsors, and to the schools. The way the schools decide who gets to buy the tickets they are allotted is by how much people contribute to their athletic department.”

“How much do you have to contribute to buy tickets?”

Weiss shrugged. “Usually at least fifty thousand dollars.”

“Each?”

“Yup.”

Stevie shook his head in wonderment. “Must be some rich people.”

“At the Final Four,” Weiss said, “there are no poor people.”

“What about students?” Stevie asked. “
They
can’t pay fifty thousand dollars.”

“No, they can’t,” Weiss said. “Which is why each school usually only sells about seventy-five to a hundred student tickets.”

They had reached the ramp leading up to the walkway that, according to the signs, would take them to the media entrance. Another cell-phone-carrying man approached. “You guys selling?” he asked. He was wearing a white cowboy hat, black leather pants, and cowboy boots.

Weiss smiled and stopped. “If we were selling, how much would you be paying?” he said.

The man eyed Weiss suspiciously from under the cowboy hat. “You a cop?” he asked.

“No, not a cop, a reporter,” Weiss said. “I’d just like to know how much you guys are getting.”

The scalper smiled and looked behind him for a minute. “What we’re asking may be different than what we’re getting,” he said. “I got seats in the lower bowl, twenty rows up from midcourt, that I’m hoping to get three grand apiece for.”

Stevie almost gagged. Three thousand dollars? For one ticket?

“People paying it?” Weiss asked.

“Not right now,” the scalper said. “But it’s early. By Saturday morning, I’ll get it. Maybe more. If you know anybody, tell ’em to look for Big Tex. They’ll know me by the hat.”

“Big Tex” was about Stevie’s height. He wondered how Susan Carol Anderson would react to meeting Big Tex and vice versa.

“I’ll be sure to tell them to look for you,” Weiss said.

“You do that,” Big Tex said. He reached into his pocket, produced a card, and handed it to Weiss, who looked at it, smiled, and passed it on to Stevie. There was a big white cowboy hat on it with the words “Big Tex” in red letters. At the bottom was a phone number. “That’s this,” Big Tex said, as if reading Stevie’s mind, holding the cell phone up. “I got it on all the time.”

Stevie stuck the card into his back pocket and they moved on.

“If you want to do a piece that’s a little different, you might talk to some of these scalpers,” Weiss said. “I guarantee you they’ve got some stories to tell, okay?”

Yeah right, Stevie thought. Susan Carol would be sending an exclusive Jim Boeheim interview, and he would respond with a Big Tex interview. That would really impress people.

“I’ll give it some thought,” he said.

Weiss laughed. “No you won’t. You’re going to want to write about the people inside this place, not the ones outside.”

Stevie breathed a sigh of relief. He had thought for a
second Weiss was going to push him to chase down Big Tex. They made it to the door labeled
MEDIA ENTRANCE
without any further encounters with scalpers or anyone else dressed in loud colors or cowboy hats. They had to wait in line for a few minutes because the security people were checking everyone’s bags and wanding people the way they did in airports. Weiss sighed as they waited.

“Not like the old days,” he said.

“What was it like in the old days?” Stevie asked.

Weiss laughed. “Where to begin? I’m old enough that I remember when games were played in about ninety minutes,” he said.

“Ninety minutes?” Stevie repeated. “How could they possibly have done that?”

“Easy,” Weiss said. “There weren’t five TV time-outs in every half, and when there was a time-out, it lasted one minute, not three. And halftime didn’t take twenty minutes.”

Stevie couldn’t imagine a college basketball game only taking an hour and a half. To him, anything under two hours and fifteen minutes was a fast game.

The security check didn’t take long. Getting their credentials did, because the guy handing them out kept saying he had to see Stevie’s driver’s license. “It’s right in the handbook,” he said, producing a phone-book-thick booklet. “You see, it says right here in section eighteen, paragraph three, line four: ‘To receive a credential, one must produce a government-issued ID, i.e., driver’s license or passport.’ ”

Weiss rolled his eyes. “Come on, Mike. He’s thirteen
years old. He doesn’t have a driver’s license and probably doesn’t have a passport, right?” Stevie nodded to confirm that Weiss was correct. “He’s one of the winners of our writing contest. You have a pass there for him. And I’ll vouch for him.”

The NCAA guy, who was wearing a blue blazer complete with a name tag and a pass dangling around his neck that said “All Access,” eyed Stevie and Weiss suspiciously, shaking his head as if to say,
No can do
. “Just because I have a pass for Steven Thomas doesn’t mean
he’s
Steven Thomas.”

“I have my school ID card,” Stevie said. “It has a photo on it. They accepted it at the airport.”

“Not government-issued,” the blue blazer said.

“Hang on a minute,” Weiss said. “Stevie, give me your ID.”

Stevie pulled out his wallet and handed Weiss the ID. Weiss looked at, turned it over, and smiled. “Look here at the bottom. It says, ‘Issued by Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.’ He goes to public school. The IDs are issued by the county. That’s a government. Hand over his pass.”