Long Shot (6 page)

“The biggest stories in sports are really a bunch of small moments,” Coach liked to say. “Sometimes one moment.”

He even used baseball as his big example. He talked about how the greatest comeback in sports history—when the Red Sox came back from three games to none against the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series—started this way in the ninth inning of Game 4, when the Yankees were three outs away from the World Series:

A walk.

A stolen base.

A single up the middle.

“All that did was tie the game,” Coach Cory said. “And the Yankees were still up three games to zip. But they were done from that moment on, we just didn’t know it until a few days later. Hugest story ever, and how did it start? Walk, stolen base, a single up the middle.”

The point of this, he always told them, was that you’d better play every play as hard as you could, because it could be the one that changed everything.

Right now, Pedro couldn’t make a play to save his life. And that’s why he knew, without Coach Cory coming out and saying it, that when the season started against Camden on Sunday afternoon, it was going to start with him on the bench.

Didn’t mean he was going to stay there. Didn’t mean it was permanent. He was still going to get his minutes, and his own chance to shine this season. He was still trying as hard as he could, as hard as he ever had.

It was just that nothing was clicking for him right now.

His favorite season of the year wasn’t spring or summer or fall. It was
basketball
season. Now it was here and it had gone wrong for him before it even started, and he couldn’t get the idea out of his head that it had
really
started to go wrong when he made the decision to run for class president.

 

The day before the season opener was a Saturday, which meant soccer in the park with his dad.

His dad had been spending even more time than usual at Casa Luis as the date of the restaurant’s opening grew closer. Once again, Pedro had told him that he could skip soccer if he was too busy.

“Soccer with you keeps me fit,” his dad said on their way to the field. “Probably because it makes me so happy.”

So they played the way they always had, and for a couple of hours, Pedro was able to forget about basketball, throwing himself into his other sport, trying to keep up with his dad, trying to make sure he seemed as happy today as on all the other Saturdays.

But when they had finished, and were walking the length of the field toward the parking lot, Luis Morales said, “Something is bothering you today.”

Forget about reading his mind. Pedro’s dad was able to read his son’s heart.

“I’m fine, Papa.”

“No, you are not. Is it school, or sports?”

Pedro wanted to tell him it was both, wanted to tell him in the worst way. He didn’t want to hold back anymore, because he had never held back anything from his dad—at least not anything important.

But he still wasn’t ready to tell him about the election.

He thought of another one of his dad’s expressions, one from his job, the one about half the loaf being better than none. So he gave his dad half the story now.

“Sports,” he said.

“What about sports?”

“Things aren’t going so good with my team,” Pedro said.

He stopped now in the middle of the field, looking around him as he did, thinking that everything looked the same as it had the Saturday morning when he had made up his mind to run for class president. The sun was high in the sky, but still the air was a little cooler today. The feel of the grass underneath his soccer spikes was the same as it always was. And they’d run and laughed and chased the ball and each other the way they always did on Saturday mornings.

But Pedro knew that things had changed so much in a couple of weeks.

Even if he was the only one who actually knew how much.

“But it’s opening day tomorrow!” his dad said, clapping him on the back. “And in sports, opening day is always supposed to feel like a holiday, is it not?”

“I’m playing like
Cepillín
,” he said to his dad.

He was a famous clown from a television show in Mexico,
El Show de Cepillín,
which Luis Morales used to watch when he was a boy.

“This I do not believe,” his dad said. “Basketball is not just your favorite sport, as much as it pains me to say that. It is also your best. You have a gift, son.”

“Not this season.”

“There is no season yet, there is just practice.”

“Papa,” Pedro said, “I’m not starting tomorrow’s game.”

“But you started last year. You always start.”

“This isn’t last year.”

“What happened?”

“I stink now, that’s what happened.”

“You don’t stink at anything,” his dad said. “Not your whole life.”

Pedro thought:
In his eyes, I’m Ned
.

“You haven’t seen our practices,” Pedro said. “It’s like I’ve forgotten how to play.”

The other night, he even shot an air ball from the free throw line when he had a chance to win a scrimmage for his team.

The two of them stopped now, at the goal closest to the parking lot. His dad’s eyes were on Pedro now, somehow dark and bright at the same time.

“Is there something more that you are not telling me?”

Pedro put a smile between them, almost like he was using it to play defense.

“No, just that I pretty much stink.”

His dad said, “Why do you sound so beaten before an official game is even played? And I do not just mean beaten out of a starting job for now.”

“Dave’s playing better than me.”

“For now.”

“Papa, sometimes it’s like I can’t get out of my own way.”

“But you will.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

In a quiet voice, not joking now, his dad said, “Because you are my son. Because you are a Morales. And in the Morales family, we believe that anything is possible.”

He sounded so sure. As sure as Sarah had sounded when she told Pedro he was better than Ned. As sure as Joe had sounded when he said that Pedro was the coolest kid in class, that Pedro was the one who should be class president.

Then his dad was clapping him on the back, telling him again, for what felt like the thousandth time in Pedro’s life, about what it was like when he first set foot on American soil as a teenager. That if you set your heart and your mind to something, nobody could beat you, and that when you got knocked down you got back up, because that was the real measure of someone’s talent and heart and character and spirit.

“Nobody can stop you,” his dad said.

Nobody except Ned Hancock,
Pedro thought.

His dad was still talking when they got into the car and began to drive away from the school, like this was part of the same speech he had given that day about “President Morales.”

Only today, Pedro wasn’t listening.

 

 

 

Pedro wore No. 10.

It wasn’t because any of his favorite NBA players wore that number—Steve Nash, his main man, wore No. 13 for the Suns—but because his dad had worn No. 10 when he played soccer as a boy in Mexico, and wore it still in what he called his league of old men.

So Pedro was 10 this season the same as he had been on the fifth-grade team.

Back when he was still a starter.

But he wasn’t a starter today at Vernon High School. The gym looked exactly as it did for varsity games, with the bleachers pulled out from the side walls, new scoreboards brightly lit behind both baskets, and a scorers’ table set up at half-court, where one parent kept the official stat book and another one operated the clock.

Pedro’s mom and dad—and Sarah—were in the stands with the rest of the Vernon parents, behind the Knights’ bench. The Camden parents sat at the other end. Last season, Vernon had lost to the Camden Cavaliers in the league semi-finals, and Pedro recognized a lot of the kids on their team. The two best were Tim Barnicle, their starting point guard, and Alex Truba, a tall, skinny Cuban-American boy who played small forward the same as Ned did.

Alex didn’t have the all-around game that Ned did, but he was the best outside shooter Camden had, even from beyond the high school three-point line, and if you got up on him as a way of taking away his shot, he could put the ball on the floor with either hand and drive to the basket.

In the huddle right before the game, Coach Cory said to Ned, “You remember Truba’s philosophy about shooting. Guy thinks that the greatest tragedy in basketball is to be hot and not know it.”

Ned laughed along with everybody else. “I hear you, Coach,” Ned said. “If his hands are on the ball, his first thought is shooting.”

“And second,” Joe said. “And third.”

“Now as for my point guard . . . ” Coach Cory said.

For a second, almost like a reflex, Pedro thought Coach was talking to him.

He wasn’t.

“I’m here, Coach,” Dave said.

“You have to stay in front of that young man wearing number one for them,” Coach Cory said. That meant Tim Barnicle. “Because if he can break
you
down off the dribble, that’s gonna be the same as breaking
us
down.”

Dave nodded to let Coach know he understood. Then Coach Cory had them all put their hands together in the middle of the huddle, and told them the same thing he’d told them before every game last season.

“Before the ref throws the ball up, take a look in the stands, and know there isn’t an adult here who wouldn’t change places with you,” Coach said. “Who wouldn’t want to be eleven again and have a chance to be playing a game like this today? Now get out there and honor the opportunity.”

Pedro watched the starting five—Ned, Dave, Jeff, Jamal, and Joe—take the court, and thought:
It’s a lot easier to honor that opportunity when you’re starting.

He took the last seat at the end of their bench, not wanting to sit next to Coach and look as if he were too eager to get in there. He felt a little bit like he’d been told to go sit by himself in an empty classroom after school. He wasn’t going to pout. He told himself he was going to cheer on his teammates every chance he got. He had always been a fast learner at sports, the guy who picked up the new play faster than anybody else on the team—except maybe Ned.

So this was one more thing he would have to learn: how to be a scrub.

He didn’t even want to look across the court to where his parents and Sarah were sitting.

Pedro told himself that he’d only do that after he’d gotten into the game and actually done something.

The Knights didn’t miss him at all in the first quarter, because they came out flying. They couldn’t do anything wrong and the Cavaliers couldn’t do anything right.

The Knights played so well that Pedro, as much of a team guy as he was, started to feel even worse about being on the bench. It was like:
Do they have to make it look
this
easy without me on the court?

It was as if the Knights were pitching a perfect game. And the biggest reason was that the ball seemed to be in Ned Hancock’s hands as often as if he was the one pitching.

When the Knights ran their offense, they seemed to end up with layups half the time. When they ran out on the break, the Cavs were so slow trying to keep up, it was as if they were wearing their winter boots.

Dave was shutting down his man, Tim, staying in front of him the way Coach Cory had told him to. Ned was doing everything to Alex Truba except pulling his jersey up over his head to blindfold him.

When Jeff Harmon drove to the basket for yet one more layup right before the horn ended the first quarter, the Knights were ahead by the amazing score of 22-2. Before they even got to the bench, Coach Cory was out on the court to meet them, telling them not to go into their version of a touchdown dance, because there were three quarters left to play.

Then he turned back to the bench and said, “Next five, let’s go.”

Bobby Murray said, “Oh, great. How do we top that?”

“We don’t,” Pedro said in a voice only loud enough for Bobby to hear. “I think only Duke or Carolina could do that.”

Pedro was always nervous when he first got into a game. Not because he was scared of making a mistake, though there was always a little bit of that going on inside him. No. Usually Pedro had what Coach Cory liked to call his “good nerves” going for him. Nerves that Coach said you could always make disappear with your first good pass, good shot, or good stop on defense.

Today he couldn’t make them go away.

He wasn’t exactly playing badly. And the second unit—that expression had never bothered him before, but now he hated the sound of it inside his head:
second
unit, like it was a way of saying second class—would hold their own against the Cavaliers.

It wasn’t that.

It was that Pedro felt as if some stranger were wearing No. 10 today.

Pedro was the opposite of what he usually was, in soccer or basketball, which meant that he wasn’t playing to make something happen. Worse than that, he was playing afraid.

Afraid to make a mistake.

And if you were afraid like that, you shouldn’t even be out there.

He’d see an opening, a chance to thread the needle with one of his bullet passes. And he wouldn’t take it, because he was afraid he’d throw the ball away.

All of a sudden, a turnover felt like the thing that scared him most in the world. He was still seeing plays develop inside his head; he just wasn’t doing anything about them. And in a way, a big way, playing the game like that was worse than watching it from the bench.

With about two minutes left in the half, Pedro was on the right side of the court, just outside the circle, when Clarence set a perfect pick for Bobby over on the weak side. Pedro saw the whole thing developing, and even though there was some traffic between him and Bobby’s lane to the basket, the pass was there.