Racing the Rain Read online

  Stiggs and Randleman sat, sweating already, towels around their necks, staring down at their shoe tops. They both nodded solemnly.

  “This guy Genchi at forward is six two and he can jump. He’s also a decent shot. Stewart, you take him so Stiggs can take the weaker guy and help Randleman out with Stansfield. Drake, Houldsworth is a pretty good guard, I hear. He’s yours. He’s not afraid to shoot and he can get hot. He’s averaging ten a game, second to Stansfield, so you can’t lay off him too much. This other guy, Garret, is a good ball handler but that’s all. Carroll, he’s yours. See if you can slough off of him a bit and jam up the middle, make it tougher for Stansfield in there. Okay, I think everyone knows we’ve got our work cut out for us out there tonight, but Coach Cinnamon and I both feel like you guys can handle it. Just remember how lucky we are, boys, to be living in the greatest country in America! Let’s get out there and show ’em what we can do!”

  They all gathered up and did a hands-in huddle, breaking with a cheer and rushing to the door. Cassidy was at the back, waiting for the jam at the door to clear, when he heard his name.

  “Hang back a sec, Quenton,” said Dewey.

  Cassidy was puzzled. He’d never been singled out by Dewey for anything before.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Dewey waited until everyone left.

  “Stan hurt his ankle yesterday screwing around like an idiot with his brothers. Dr. Parr has given him a cortisone injection and Stan says it feels okay, but doc don’t want him playing tonight. I know you haven’t played much yet, but it looks like you’re the first guard in if we need to substitute. If we stick to a two-guard front, that is,” he said.

  Cassidy nodded.

  “It may not come up at all, but I just wanted you to be ready if you need to go in. Keep your head in the game and be prepared, okay? All right, get out there.”

  Cassidy was almost dizzy as he went back out for the last bit of limbering up before the tip-off. He could hardly believe he might actually get a chance to play in a game when it still mattered, and not just after the regulars had run up the score.

  He jogged back on the court and started taking free throws. Stiggs and Randleman kept eyeballing him, obviously dying of curiosity. Finally Stiggs joined him on the foul line.

  “So what’s up? What did he want?” he asked.

  Cassidy struggled to keep his voice casual. “Nothing, really. Stan’s not full speed, is all. I might get in.”

  “No kidding? Really? Hey, Randleman, get a load of—”

  “Shhhhh.” Cassidy grabbed his arm. “Keep it down! Nobody is supposed to know.”

  The klaxon sounded for the opening tip-off.

  After the last huddle, Cassidy returned to the bench without the usual resigned expression of a perennial sub. He would actually be paying attention to a game that he might be in.

  Stansfield was for real. He outjumped Stiggs on the tip-off, tapping it to Genchi who immediately flipped it to Houldsworth streaking toward the rim. In an instant it was 2–0.

  Cassidy glanced down at Dewey, who sat with his mouth agape. The play did not resemble any JV play he had seen before.

  Carroll Morgan brought the ball down the floor and took it to the right side of Riviera’s zone, holding up one finger to indicate the wheel offense. Stiggs cleared out along the baseline, and Randleman came up to the high post. Morgan faked him a bounce pass, then flipped it over to Osgood so he could whip it back around the horn to Stewart and then to Stiggs, who was setting up on the baseline for the shot.

  But Houldsworth was anticipating the pass to Osgood, and he jumped out and deflected it over to the other guard, Garret, who picked it up at full stride and went the length of the floor with no one remotely close to him. In fact, he slowed down at the foul line and casually jogged the last few steps before laying the ball gently against the backboard. It was 4–0 and the game was less than a minute old.

  Edgewater recovered somewhat and tried to adjust to Riviera’s quickness and aggressiveness, but halfway through the eight-minute period, it was 12–4, and two of the four points had been free throws. They had a single bucket, and that was an amazing hook shot Stiggs managed to launch over Stansfield.

  Dewey called time-out and made small adjustments to their offensive positions. He switched Morgan and Osgood’s men on defense, and put Stiggs on their big man. It seemed to Cassidy almost beside the point, more like window dressing.

  Sure enough, as the horn sounded at the end of the period, the scoreboard read 22–8. When Riviera grabbed a defensive rebound, Cassidy caught himself actually admiring the Riviera Beach style of play. It was fast, efficient, and aggressive, with little time or attention devoted to setting up elaborate plays or making multiple passes. When they grabbed a defensive rebound, they cleared it out to a guard and brought it up fast, looking for an open man. If a shot presented itself, they took it.

  Even after Edgewater had scored on one play, Garret quickly took the ball out of the net and inbounded it to Houldsworth, who brought it straight up the sidelines, beating most of the Eagles back down the floor. Stiggs, the only one left between him and the basket, moved out to cover him, leaving the key completely open to Stansfield coming in from the right wing to make the easy layup.

  Although he was disturbed at the bludgeoning his team was taking, Cassidy was also fascinated. There was something familiar in Riviera’s style of play, something he recognized though it had little to do with anything his team had ever practiced. When Garret casually flipped Stansfield a no-look behind-the-back pass in the key, it struck Cassidy: these guys played like the guys at the base gym! They didn’t need elaborate plays or meticulous passing to work their way around to a decent shot, they just made a quick pass, set up a screen, took a dribble, and then took the shot. They shot with confidence bordering on arrogance. They shot like they expected to make every single one of them, and they weren’t far wrong.

  Cassidy’s reverie was interrupted by Phil Jones’s nudging. Carroll Morgan had bumped knees with Houldsworth on a fast break and was limping toward the bench in obvious pain. Cassidy started to pull his warm-up over his head, but when Dewey barked out a name, it was not his.

  “Phil!”

  Jones, blinking in surprise, pulled off his warm-up and checked in with the scorer. They were going to go with one point guard. Dewey called an additional time-out to get them organized.

  Cassidy, deflated, listened from the outer ring of the huddle.

  “All right, we’re going to a one-three-one. Stiggs, you move to the low post. Phil, you take his wing. Any questions?”

  It was a disaster.

  The Riviera coach had anticipated the change, and as soon as Edgewater brought the ball in, they ran into a full-court zone press. Osgood tried to dribble against it and was herded to the sideline, where he was trapped. Edgewater’s big men had little experience handling the ball and they panicked. Osgood tried to throw a soft looping pass over the trapping guards to Jones, but it was easily intercepted by Houldsworth and laid up on the backboard for an easy basket.

  This happened twice more before Dewey called time-out.

  “Cassidy!” he called down the bench.

  They went back to two guards. Dewey gave them all kinds of contradictory advice in the huddle, trying to diagram the way the trap worked on his green board. It occurred to Cassidy that their coach was essentially guessing.

  “Take it toward the sidelines but kick it back to me before they put the trap on,” Cassidy told Osgood as they walked back onto the court. “Then take off down the sidelines as fast as you can go. If someone comes to cover you after you get a pass back, look to the middle of the court for Stiggs.”

  Osgood wasn’t accustomed to taking directions from a benchwarmer, but Cassidy could see from the look on his face that he was scared enough to pay attention to anyone who sounded confident.

  Cassidy took the ball out-of-bounds and tossed it in to Osgood, who turned to face the three defenders spread across the court at
the foul line. It was a classic 3-1-1 zone trap and almost impossible to dribble against if the defenders were good.

  But Cassidy had the benefit of the advice of First Lieutenant Ron Lefaro, USAF, who had played ball at little Colby College, an undersized, scrappy, full-court-press terror of NCAA Division II basketball. He had shown Cassidy how easy it was to break the press with two guards and one halfway agile big man. Cassidy grabbed the front of Stiggs’s jersey and told him to loiter at center court and break toward the ball if someone got trapped with it.

  Osgood started to dribble upcourt and was immediately cut off and herded toward the sideline by the middle guard, Garret. Before the other guard, Houldsworth, could spring the trap, Osgood turned and flipped the ball back to Cassidy, who had not advanced at all. He was still very near the baseline and thus had not attracted any attention from the third man in the three-man front.

  As Osgood took off down the sideline, and Houldsworth turned to herd Cassidy toward the opposite sideline, Cassidy took one dribble and lifted into the air off one foot. He hit Osgood with a leading baseball pass that the guard caught at full stride. Riviera was well coached, however, and Osgood was immediately picked up by the first 1 in the 3-1-1, who had left his spot at center court where he had been shadowing Stiggs. Osgood saw that Stiggs was now open at center court, and he hit him immediately. Stiggs turned and was amazed to see one lone Riviera defender at the foul line and two Edgewater forwards spread on the baseline. And Cassidy had been sprinting down the right sideline after his initial pass. They had gone from having a guard in a two-man trap to a four-on-one fast break. Suddenly the press didn’t look so invulnerable.

  Stiggs took the ball straight toward the hoop, pulling up just inside the foul line. When the lone Riviera defender came out to pick him up, he dumped it off to Randleman underneath, who took it up for the bunny shot, getting so high up he slapped the backboard on the way down.

  The small crowd of Edgewater fans who had come early for the JV game erupted. It was the first thing they’d had to cheer about in a long while.

  Just as they were quieting down, a shaken-looking Riviera guard was inbounding the ball to the other guard, Houldsworth, who casually waited for it just inside the foul line. Cassidy, appearing to keep his eyes downcourt, was actually watching them in his peripheral vision. He was more or less jogging in place, giving the appearance of heading upcourt with his teammates but without actually going anywhere. As soon as the inbounding pass left the guard’s hands, Cassidy whirled around and stepped in front of Houldsworth and took the ball waist high. He tapped it once for a single dribble and laid it up high on the left side of the backboard with his left hand and, like Randleman, got so high up on the backboard that he lightly slapped the glass on the way down.

  The guard who had thrown the careless inbound pass, seeking to quickly redress his error, rushed over just in time to foul Cassidy. His foul shot hit nothing but net.

  But it was the next play that changed Cassidy’s life forever.

  Riviera tried to force the ball in to Stansfield and Stiggs got a hand on it and deflected it over to Osgood, who shovel-passed it out to Cassidy, already at full stride down the court. Houldsworth was defending, running backward, but when Cassidy got to the foul line, Houldsworth dropped back, expecting Cassidy to pass it to one wing or the other, since they had a three-on-one advantage. Instead, Cassidy went straight up into his pull-up jump shot. As he began to lift off the hardwood, he realized how easy it would be to miss this completely uncontested shot. And the reason for that was simply that he wanted so badly to make it. He had made the same shot hundreds—thousands—of times practicing on his own, but now that it really mattered, he felt the implacable forces of nature—of the universe—that wanted that shot not to go it. There were an infinite number of ways to miss such a shot but only a handful of ways to make it. He realized that the more he absolutely, positively, more-than-life-itself craved to see that ball drop through the net, the more likely it was he would miss it. Not by much, but miss it nevertheless. The sheer intensity of his desire would cause a tiny bit of extra lift, an imperceptibly more vigorous flick of the wrist, but something, some tiny flaw. And that would be that.

  So as he rose for the shot he concentrated on trying to do something he had learned skin diving: not to care. Underwater he had learned to be detached, because to be in a constant state of concern was to be using oxygen. You have to make yourself not care, he would say when people asked how he did it. Not caring was why it was so easy to make these shots in practice when it didn’t matter and so easy to miss them in games when it did.

  So now, at this very moment, it mattered. It mattered a lot. He would have this one chance to make this shot and it would never come again. So as he lifted off the floor, he began willing himself not to care. This shot would go in or it would not, and the earth would still turn on its axis. Children would still starve in Africa and armies would clash by night. No matter what one skinny teenager’s existential investment in it might be, nothing in the larger scheme of things was riding on this shot.

  That freed his mind to deal with the important details: squaring his body to the rim, feeling the pebble-grain surface of the ball on his fingertips, getting the exact rhythm of the motion of whipping the ball up from his waist to a point just above his forehead, holding it there until the exact moment he reached the apex of his jump, launching it ever so softly into its perfect arc, with the ball spinning slightly backward, his hand and forearm continuing on and collapsing into the perfect “dying swan” follow-through of all good shooters. And, as with all good shooters, he knew the second the ball left his fingertips that it was a dead-center perfect shot. He knew it so completely that he could not help disobeying a cardinal rule of basketball: follow your shot. Instead, he simply bounced happily there in place, content to watch the arc of the ball as if it were a separate entity, a thing of beauty totally unrelated to himself.

  The ball cut the net so cleanly that it popped through the cords and hung momentarily in space, still spinning backward, before dropping to the hardwood floor.

  And, just like that, Cassidy understood the real secret of shooting a basketball.

  Stiggs, who had been expecting the pass, had to change his tune in mid-invective. It went like this:

  “Cassidy! What the hell . . .”

  Swish.

  “Nice shot.”

  * * *

  The bus would have been pretty rowdy but for the varsity players, whose loss easily trumped the elation of the jayvees. They seemed particularly vexed at Cassidy, who had always been an object of special derision for them, either because he was too cocky, too skinny, or too uncool generally. That is, they acted that way when they acknowledged the existence of a JV player at all, which was rare.

  Cassidy sat, alone as usual, in the seat behind Stiggs and Randleman. He would like to have felt bad for the varsity, but it was all he could do to suppress his joy. He had scored twenty-two points, leading both teams, but more than that, he had clearly engineered a five-point victory out of an impending drubbing.

  Still, the varsity had lost, and Cassidy was obligated to project a glumness that he did not feel.

  Coach Cinnamon came aboard last, trying to act chipper but not succeeding very well. He went down the aisle, saying a few words of encouragement here and there to the varsity players. When he got to the middle of the bus where Cassidy sat, he stopped for a moment. He stood and smiled at Cassidy, who finally looked away in embarrassment.

  Coach Cinnamon put his hand on Cassidy’s shoulder and, without saying anything, continued down the aisle.

  CHAPTER 30

  * * *

  ARGUABLY A STAR

  The most ardent cares of his former life fell away.

  Worrying about being noticed in practice, or whether he would get any playing time, or whether he would, by some miracle, start a game—all of that went away. He left his reversible jersey red side out at scrimmage time instead of automatically turnin
g it to the white side, the second-team color.

  Dewey Stoddard still hardly spoke to him, but Cassidy detected a grudging respect instead of the usual studied indifference. Coach Cinnamon must have talked to Dewey, Cassidy thought, because Dewey was just dense enough to think that what he saw during the Riviera Beach game was some kind of fluke.

  In the next game, Pahokee came to play the Edgewater jayvees in a solo afternoon game while the varsity was away at a holiday tournament in Fort Lauderdale. Forty-some people, mostly parents and siblings, showed up to watch in the stuffy Edgewater gym. The big overhead fans were going full blast as the late-afternoon sun streamed through the upper windows. Even December had some miserably hot days on the Gold Coast.

  Drake Osgood started at one guard, Cassidy the other. Stiggs was jumping center against a smaller player, so when Cassidy got his attention he pointed to Stewart, the tallest guy on the team. Stiggs nodded. When Cassidy got Stewart’s attention, he pointed to his left, letting him know which way he was going to break for the basket. Stewart nodded. It was the play Riviera had pulled on them.

  It worked perfectly. Stiggs was a whole forearm above their poor opposing center, easily tapping the ball to Stewart, who flipped it nonchalantly over his shoulder to Cassidy, who was already halfway to the rim. Two dribbles took him too far under the left side of the rim, so he crossed under and did a reverse layup on the right side, laying the ball gently in with his right hand and turning in midair so his back would bounce off the safety pad when he landed.

  It happened so quickly the Pahokee players had barely figured out which basket they were going for. Now they were down two points.

  In their first game of the season, despite their smaller size, Pahokee had played them tough. They challenged the ball all the way up the floor and they were in constant motion on offense, trying to wear down their bigger opponents. Now they brought the ball down and started the same tactic again, working it around to the corner, then back out and around to the other corner, where their wing hit a nice shot from the baseline. Their guards immediately set up to contest the inbound pass.