Strike Three You're Dead (32 page)

“Does he like drugs—cocaine?”

“Does the Pope have lips?”

“You mean there isn’t a clean player in the NBA?”

“What’s it to you?” Mallory said. “You dealing?”

“When I’m not running guns to the Salvadoran rebels. Does Terrell have a problem keeping foreign substances out of his system?”

“Well, right now he’s sure trying to convince the world he doesn’t have that problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Aren’t you reading the sports pages anymore, Harvey?”

“Who said I read them in the first place?”

“Look, Terrell was born again two weeks ago. UPI picked up the story. Terrell got religion, called a press conference to announce that he had sworn off drugs, alcohol, and everything evil, including double dribbling. To hear him tell it, he’s a clean machine. Filled with divine light.”

“You think he’s telling the truth, Al? You think he’s off drugs?”

“Sometimes getting religion’s easy compared to getting off drugs. Let me ask you a question, Harvey: Why do some people suddenly get religion?”

Harvey thought back to the handful of teammates who’d gotten it over the years. “Because they’ve been bad boys and girls,” he said. “Maybe Terrell got religion to get off drugs.”

“A cynic would take a different point of view. That he pretended to get religion to hide the fact he was doing even more drugs.”

“And that’s what you think?” Harvey said.

“Now when have you ever known me to be cynical? Why did you say you wanted to know about Terrell?”

“I didn’t,” Harvey said.

“Well, whyn’t you start now?”

“I’m just asking. Off the record.”

“And I’m just thinking. Maybe his aunt isn’t so sick.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You think I’m stupid?”

“Now that you bring it up.”

“If I were stupid, Harvey, I’d either be writing hard news here, or a syndicated column. But I’m not stupid, so when Tyrone Terrell leaves the team suddenly on a Saturday, and the Celtics tell us on Sunday it’s because his aunt is sick, and then I get a call from possibly my least favorite ex-major leaguer on Monday asking me if said basketball player, the recent recipient of a new birth, indulges in the recreational use and/or professional business of rock candy, then I think two things. First I think, the aunt isn’t sick. Then I think, if the aunt isn’t sick, what business is it of Harvey Blissberg’s? And there I’m stumped, Harvey, because to tell you the truth, when a ballplayer like you, who gave me maybe one quote in five years, retires from baseball, he ceases to exist for me, and so I have no idea what you’re doing with yourself these days, but it’s insulting to my profound lack of stupidity that you would think that I would think that your queries about Tyrone Terrell were strictly of an idle nature.”

“As far as I know, Al, the aunt is sick,” Harvey said.

“As I said, what business is it of yours?”

“You really want to know?”

“Let me ask around,” Mallory said. Harvey heard Mallory turn away from the phone and call out to the sports department, “Hey, Mike, Charlie, do I really want to know?” Harvey waited. “Harvey,” Mallory said into the phone, “the guys here say it’s true. I really want to know. So tell.”

“Okay, I’m doing a story for
Sports Illustrated
on Terrell.”

“You’re kidding?”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Harvey, I’m going to kill you. I’ve been writing sports for thirteen years and I can’t crack
Sports Illustrated.
You never wrote a goddamn sports story in your life, you never even made it easier for me to write one, and you waltz right in there and they give you an assignment? I don’t believe it.”

“Call Larry Levitz at the magazine,” Harvey said, naming the one person he knew on the staff. “He’ll tell you.”

“If it’s true, Harvey, you’ve got a hell of a lot to learn about professional courtesy. If one sportswriter wants some help from another sportswriter on a story he’s doing, the first thing the first sportswriter does is tell the second sportswriter that he’s doing a story and for whom. You understand? Because if the first sportswriter doesn’t do that for the second, the first thing the second sportswriter does is hang up on the first sportswriter. Have a nice day.” There was a clatter on Al Mallory’s end, then silence.

Harvey dialed
Sports Illustrated
in New York and got Larry Levitz on his way out to lunch. After pleasantries, Harvey explained his predicament: He needed to use—in fact, already had used—an assignment from
Sports Illustrated
to do a story on Tyrone Terrell as a cover for some other business that, regrettably, Harvey was unable to disclose.

“Harvey,” Levitz said, “if I wasn’t on my way out to lunch, I’d sit here and chew you out for ten minutes for having the gall to use me and my employer in this shameless manner, and then I’d tell you, okay, I’ll cover for you this once and ask questions later. But since I’m on my way out to lunch, I’ll forgo the chewing out and just tell you, okay, but don’t you ever do this again.”

“You won’t regret it, Levitz,” Harvey said.

“Of course I’ll regret it. But I’ll regret it a little less if, whatever you’re really up to and whatever you find out about Tyrone Terrell, if it’s got some news value, you bring it directly to me, and only to me. Do I have your promise?”

“You have my promise.”

“Good.”

“Have a nice lunch,” Harvey said.

He threw on his mountain parka and started downstairs. On the second-floor landing, he paused on the cauliflower-colored carpeting and peeked through the hallway window of the pen hospital. The young proprietor, who specialized in bladder operations on Mont Blanc fountain pens, was at his bench tending to an ailing Papermate. Harvey quickly moved on, afraid that the owner, who also specialized in a chronic shortage of customers, would invite him in again for a discourse on why writing instruments using erasable ink could never be marketed successfully in this country.

Out on the street, the odor of baba ghannouj from the Middle Eastern place downstairs cut a wide swath through the VapoRub. He had five hours to kill before his meeting with Todd Goody, and few weapons with which to do the job. For years, organized baseball had robbed him of the need to make all the small decisions of which ordinary lives were assembled. Having to arrange, manage, and fill time was a strange and irritating burden.

He headed across Harvard Square for the Cambridge Public Library and hunted down the UPI story on Tyrone Terrell in the February 11 edition of the
Boston Globe.

TYRONE TERRELL: ‘FROM NOW ON, I’M PLAYING ACCORDING TO JESUS’ GAME PLAN’

Boston, February 10 (UPI)
—At a press conference today at the Boards and Blades Club at Boston Garden, Boston Celtic forward Tyrone Terrell announced that he had finally found a way to rise above the pressures of a professional basketball career. “I’ve taken Jesus into my heart,” Terrell told a group of reporters. “I’ve found the right relationship with Him. Drugs isn’t the answer in this life, and neither is alcohol or pretty women or putting points up on the board. I’m through putting chemicals into my body. I’m beginning to put Jesus’ love into my heart. Only Jesus has the perfect game plan, and that’s the one I’m playing according to.”

Although drug and alcohol abuse has become a growing problem among professional athletes of all kinds, the graceful 6’ 8”, 26-year-old Terrell does not have a reputation for drug or alcohol abuse, nor has he undergone any drug or alcohol rehabilitation treatment in his five-year career with the Celtics. Nonetheless, he stressed the destructive influence of drugs on the lives of “many NBA players.” “I’m tired of keeping it all inside,” he said. “Like most people, I’ve done some bad things in my time, and I want to make amends. I want to live at peace with myself. I’ve spoken to Jesus about it, and now I want the world to know: Mr. Tyrone Antoine Terrell is coming clean.”

Terrell is having his best season ever as a Boston Celtic. His 16.0 point-per-game average has helped the first-place team to a five-game lead over the Philadelphia 76ers in the Atlantic Division of the NBA’s Eastern Conference.

Harvey walked back to the square. Lunch and a check on the new paperback releases at Wordsworth bookstore would get him to two-thirty; beyond that lay a forbidding idle expanse.

He passed a frosty store window and caught sight of himself. He stared back at his pale reflection. A haircut would get him safely past three.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1984 by Richard Dean Rosen

cover design by Connie Gabbert

ISBN 978-1-4532-9042-2

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