Ultimate Sports (16 page)

Meadow had been an irritating dynamo, picking up every shot Jessie was slow getting to, playing the back wall, both sides of the court, the ceiling, and up front.

“I could have brought my blankey and taken a nap,” Jessie said. Meadow only smiled.

The last game, it was Jessie against Diane and Meadow. She started with some confidence—after all, she wasn’t a bad,
bad
player. Besides, she had some of that I-wanna-win energy going for her right now, if only to show Meadow she could do it.

On her first serve, she stepped into the ball, used her wrist, and slammed it out of the serving box. “Ace!” she screamed. Too soon. Meadow killed it neatly against the front wall.

Unfortunately, that play was a prediction of things to come. Jessie served, Meadow killed. “This is getting monotonous,” Jessie complained halfway through the game.

“Come on, Jess, go for it,” Diane urged. “Get that killer instinct going.”

“I have it, I have it!” Jessie cried, but the final score was a humiliating 21-3.

“Your forehand is improving, Jess,” Meadow said kindly as they stepped into the showers. “Your big weakness is your backhand. You should really practice your swing at home.”

Was there anything worse than being given advice you hadn’t asked for? Yes. Being given advice you hadn’t asked for by the person who’d just beaten you thoroughly.

“You don’t always keep your eye on the ball,” Meadow went on. “That’s one of the most important things in any game.”

“Everlasting gratitude for the arcane information,” Jessie said, grabbing her towel.

“Oh, she’s mad,” Meadow said. “She’s mad about losing.”

“Hey, I am not. I love losing. It’s so much fun.”

“Whenever Jessie’s mad, Diane,” Meadow said, “she uses words no one understands.
Arcane
. Sounds dirty.”

Jessie turned on the hair dryer. “Relax, sweetie, it only means ’secret.’ “

“Oh, I know that,” Meadow said.

“Oh, sure you do.”

They were sneering at each other, but suddenly Meadow grabbed Jessie and mashed their noses together so hard Jessie grunted. “Pig! Pig! Pig!” Meadow said.

Now Jessie was supposed to say “Oink oink oink.” In grade school this had been their make-up-the-fight routine.

“Pig! Pig! Pig!” Meadow repeated forcefully.

Tying her sneakers, Diane gave a snorting laugh that sounded almost as piglike as the reply Jessie was supposed to have made. “Oink oink oink,” Jessie said finally, mortified that Diane was watching this.

But the truth was that, as soon as she said it, she felt much better and loved Meadow again and knew she always would. How could she not love her—they had been friends now for seven years, half her lifetime.

Yes, she would love Meadow and keep her for a friend, no matter what. Even if, she thought, she was beaten at cutthroat every week of her life, she would still love Meadow.

As a teenager Norma Fox Mazer rode a bike, roller-skated, swam, and walked, but thought of herself as unathletic. Coming from a working-class family, she says, she thought of sports as something for the rich or the rare female jock—most girls then were not encouraged to take part in sports. Years later, when one of her daughters suggested it was time for her to do something besides write and wash dishes, Norma Fox Mazer
took up racquetball and discovered she was well coordinated. Racquetball has become her favorite sport, and some of the details in “Cutthroat” come from her own experiences on the court.

The incidents described in “Cutthroat” appear in a somewhat different form in her newest novel—
Missing Pieces
—in which Jessie, Meadow, and Diane are characters.

Over the past twenty-four years Ms. Mazer has published nearly two dozen highly acclaimed books, including
When We First Met; Downtown; Mrs. Fish, Ape, and Me the Dump Queen; Babyface;
and
After the Rain
, which was a Newbery Honor Book. Winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Juvenile Mystery in 1981,
Taking Terri Mueller
is the story of a girl who discovers that her mother is not, as she has been told, dead and that her father kidnapped her after her parents’ divorce. That novel remains one of Ms. Mazer’s most popular. Another is
Silver
, a novel about friendships and secrets, which the American Library Association identified as one of the 100 Best of the Best Books for Young Adults published between 1967 and 1992. Another of those 100 Best of the Best is
The Solid Gold Kid
, one of three novels she has coauthored with her husband, Harry.

Norma Fox Mazer’s most recent award-winning novel
is Out of Control
, the story of three highly successful high-school boys who find a female classmate irritating and commit a series of petty acts against her that escalate into harassment and then into violence, changing all their lives dramatically.

Roger
Martell staggered around the last turn and held out the baton in a shaking hand. I grabbed it and took off. On earlier laps people had cheered when a runner came in and the chart was turned to mark another mile finished. Gathered at the high-school track had been a crowd—the nine other runners, some parents, girlfriends, buddies, even a TV camera crew. Now everyone was gone but the ten of us on the relay team, and the other guys all lay in the shade of a tree, barely noticing my progress around the track. Only Danny Daniels stood at the finish line, clapping. “All right, Curt, one more mile. You can do it! Let’s go!” As soon as I was ten feet past him the cheering stopped and I had an entire lap to run in silence until I would hear his pitiful encouragement again near the finish line.

I was the eighth runner, the eighth often. After having run seven miles at top speed—or as close to top speed as I could drag out of my aching legs—I was already stiff, sunburned, and blistered. I ran the first four miles wearing
socks inside my shoes, took them off for a couple of miles, and now had on two pairs. I started with no T-shirt, eager for people to see the great shape I was in, but for the last few miles I had covered myself up, more concerned about my flaming skin than the glances of onlookers. Besides, what onlookers were there?

Each step drove bolts of pain through my calves, but I pushed on. I had smoothed my socks when I put on my shoes, but now with each step I could feel wrinkles beneath my toes that felt like razor blades. My shirt tugged across my burned shoulders and my back like sandpaper, but I knew that if I threw it off the sun would burn deeper.

Everyone looked wasted, stretched out on lawn chairs at the edge of the track. I was the only one moving. But if I stopped, I knew my dreams—and theirs—would end. The record we were seeking would elude us. I had to keep running, despite the pain.

•   •   •

We were fifteen years old and anxious to be famous. Unfortunately, we had nothing going for us: There was no genius among us, no superstar athlete, no child actor, no heir to a huge family fortune. So we turned to the same thing that most people without identifiable skills think of: the
Guinness Book of World Records
. Certainly we could be the best at
something!

Some records in the book demanded more talent than we had: doing 46,000 push-ups in a day, jumping 15 miles on a pogo stick, throwing a grape 327 feet to someone who catches it in his mouth. Those were beyond us.

So we tried to think of categories that weren’t listed. For example, we would unroll cassette tapes and measure
the length of an Aerosmith tape versus one of Mariah Carey’s. For a couple of weeks we went on a measuring binge—toilet paper, paper towels, duct tape….

Then for a while we counted: the number of raisins in Raisin Bran, chocolate chips in ice cream, Pringles in a tube, in a case, in a truckload. How many crinkles in a crinkle-cut french fry? We would go where no man had gone before. We would answer the questions that burned in everyone’s mind. One weekend we pooled our money and bought a whole truckload of watermelons. How many could fit into a phone booth, into my mom’s Toyota Camry, into a bathroom stall?

Maybe, we thought, we could collect our results into a book. We could write a column for a national magazine: “How Big, How Far, How Many?”

All our meetings were held at Bob Davidson’s house. His mom always kept it stocked with snacks and drinks, as if this were her favorite activity. We were glad to give her the chance to fill the refrigerator again. Davidson—Bobby D was what he insisted we call him—assumed that since we met at his house, he must be the boss of our group. He always sat in the same tall-backed chair with his baseball cap pulled backward, wearing shades even in the house. Although his arms and legs looked like pipe cleaners, he tried to act macho and talked like he was in a Spike Lee movie. The only place he needed to shave was a spot on his chin, but he let that grow—a dozen greasy black hairs, half an inch long—and it made him look younger and sillier than if he had just cut them off. He shouted out directions that we ignored. He claimed we needed a name.

“We gotta have our colors,” he said, tossing his closed pocket knife from hand to hand. The gesture lost some of
its dangerous effect, as it was a Swiss Army knife. “Every gang got a name and colors. If we don’t have ’em, people be dissing us.”

“Bobby D,” I said. “We’re
not
a gang. We’re barely even a club.”

“Oh, may-an!” He shot me a glance that suggested he was embarrassed to be in the same room with me.

He proposed naming us the Counting Crows, after the band, but no one except Bobby D really liked them—their lead singer always sounded constipated—so we dropped the
r
and made it the Counting Cows, whatever that meant.

We had a name. The Counting Cows. We would be famous soon!

“This is awesome,” gushed Bobby D. “The Counting Cows!” “Awesome” was his favorite word. We mocked him pretty bad whenever we left his house. “Awesome!” we’d roar about a fly buzzing around our heads. “Awesome!” for a crack in the sidewalk. He thought he was buying our friendship with chips and root beer. We let him think that.

Bobby D complained whenever he could about Danny Daniels being in the group. Danny didn’t belong, he’d say; he was fat, he was gross, he wasn’t as cool as Bobby D. We let Danny stay partly because it pissed off Bobby D. And it was Danny who came up with our ultimate idea. The most incredible project imaginable: a hundred-mile relay.

•   •   •

A mile relay was common—four guys who each ran a quarter mile. And Danny, who knew every track record ever set, gave us figures for the American record, the
Olympic record, the high-school record, the world record—every year since 1950. We had heard of four-mile relays, one runner per mile. Danny had the figures for that, too. In 1981 a hundred guys from Baltimore ran a hundred miles in a little less than eight hours. This would be more of a challenge. Much more. This would be more than anything in the
Guinness Book of World Records
. Ten miles per person, one mile at a time, a hundred miles total. Whatever we ran would be the world record, but we wanted to get as good a time as possible, so we wouldn’t find out in a month that the record had been broken. We didn’t want to have to do it again. This would be a record for the ages.

We wanted the fastest guys possible: Matt Feldman, the best miler on the team, even as a sophomore. Jim Luther, the best sprinter, who could run any distance. Since Daryl Wagner’s accident, I was the best half-miler. Some of the guys—like Bobby D—weren’t the best at anything, but they were willing to try, and we needed ten guys who would knock themselves out in hopes of getting one line of recognition in an eight-hundred-page book. We set the date for the first weekend after school let out. We called it The Assault on the Record, though it was a record that didn’t yet exist.

Danny wouldn’t run. He said he’d be the timer, the recorder. I thought he should run, since it was his idea, but some of the other guys were relieved, since his times would slow down our total. Bobby D, of course, made a big deal of it. “Good idea, Danny boy,” he said. “You just keep your hand on the clock and leave the hard work to us. Keep that thumb loose so you can click the stopwatch, that’s all you need to do. Think you can handle it?” Danny didn’t pay him any mind. Bobby D was a distraction
that deserved no attention and Danny gave him just what he deserved.

•   •   •

Most of us could run a mile in under six minutes. During the season, Feldman had done it in less than 4:30 in all of the meets, but we knew he couldn’t continue that pace for each often miles. Eventually even he would slow down to six minutes, and the rest of us would be up around seven minutes or worse. We tried to figure how long this would take. Say we averaged seven minutes for a hundred miles; that would be seven hundred minutes or—we all scratched wildly on paper—more than eleven hours of running. We looked at each other anxiously.

“We could plan it so we ended at midnight when the clock strikes twelve,” suggested Luther. His mother was a librarian and he sometimes got lost in all the books and stories that he read.

“What clock?” I asked. “There’s no clock around here that strikes twelve. You’re thinking of some Sherlock Holmes story.”

“Oh, man, I got it!” shouted Bobby D. He slapped his head with both hands as if he had to hold back the brilliant ideas. “We could run all night! Start about eight at night, end right after the sun comes up in the morning. We’ll light up the track with spotlights! Carry torches! It’ll be like the twenty-four hours of Le Mans, like the start of the Olympics!”

“It’ll be like a hospital ward,” said Feldman, who was always so cautious he seemed boring. But this time he was right. There were no lights on the track, and we all knew the odds were pretty great that in the dark we would kick the inside border and stumble all over the track. Not to
mention that we’d fall asleep at three
A.M.
, waiting for our turn to run.

We’d have to do it during daylight. So we planned on starting about seven in the morning—during summer vacation, when we should have been sleeping!—and ending about six
P.M.
People could come and cheer for us throughout the day, we’d make the evening news, and we’d get home in time for dinner. It would achieve the maximum audience. The time was set.

“I’ll check with the Guinness people,” said Danny, “to be sure no one has a previous record.” He took out a sheet and began plotting the order of runners. Feldman would be the anchor.

“I’ll be the leadoff,” announced Bobby D.

Danny didn’t even look up. “No, we should save you for a later spot,” he said, penciling him in for the number nine position. “Between Curt and Feldman. We need you there for a strong finish.”

“Well, anyway, you need me,” agreed Bobby D. He had the refrigerator open and was handing out cans of pop. “As long as you remember that. You need me.”

•   •   •

The day of the race, I got to the track half an hour early, but lots of the guys had already arrived. Andy Berlinsky was the first runner, and he was already stretching. I saw Bruce Hecht, a junior wrestler who really wasn’t much of a runner but who wanted in on a world record, and Roger Martell, the number two quarter-miler, a rich guy who wanted you to know he had money. We weren’t all best friends, but for this goal we’d work together. There were about a half dozen parents. People had brought lawn chairs, coolers, a sign with hooks to hang numbers on for
each mile finished, and, of course, a red, white, and blue ribbon to hang across the finish line for the end. The night before, we had met at Bobby D’s to paint a sheet:

We had each signed it in marker, ten runners and Danny.

Bobby D saw me as soon as I started to walk up. “My man! My man!” he shouted, like a big-city hipster. “Now The Assault can begin!” He held out his fists for me to slap.

“How you doing, Bobby D?” I asked. “You got all the media here?”

We had given him that job, and he and his dad, who ran a restaurant in town and knew lots of reporters, had spent days on the phone. I doubted anyone would come. I mean, we were only ten high-school kids running around a track. It couldn’t be
that
slow a news day, could it?

He nodded with his usual smug look. “At least two TV stations, and the paper is sending a photographer.” A wide grin split his face.

“No CNN, huh?” I shook my head. “Pm disappointed, Bobby D. Disappointed.”

“Some damn summit in Geneva,” he said. “I don’t know what the big deal is. But, you know, I wonder if we did this like a walkathon—you know, pledge so many dollars for each mile, raise money for starving kids or homeless shelters or some other crap—I think we could get them. I thought about delaying the whole thing a week, but then I thought, ah, the guys are ready; I don’t want to let them down. Besides, my dad’s gonna videotape a lot
of it. He’ll be able to sell the tape to CNN for millions. You know how much that guy got for taping that beating in L.A.? We could all go to college, thanks to this.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “Good, Bobby D. Get me a dorm room with cable and a view.” I walked away. I wondered how much of his hype was real. TV camera crews? For us?

Luther arrived with three pairs of shoes—long spikes, short spikes, and sneakers. Feldman was rubbing sunscreen on his legs and arms. Danny was lecturing to a group on the closest comparable races that he had discovered. He had posted a notice on an Internet bulletin board and people everywhere were now aware of it.

I pulled Danny aside. “Why’d you announce our race like that,” I asked, “before we even do it? What if someone sets the record before we do?”

He looked up at me and smiled. “No one would set this record but you, Curt,” he said. “No one’s crazy enough!”

Danny had a starter’s gun in a leather bag. It looked like the real thing. He pulled it out of the bag, slipped in the blanks, and held it down as if it were loaded with slugs. Everyone gathered around the starting line. Andy was ready, with a big paper “1” pinned to the front of his running jersey. A picture of a cow cut out of a magazine peeked around the side of his number. Andy scowled for the video cameras four of the parents held, but redheads with freckles have a hard time looking tough.