Dunk Under Pressure by Rich Wallace Read Free Book Online Page A

pool. They tried to talk Dunk into coming, but he begged off. “I’m tired,” he said.
    “You ain’t tired,” David replied. “Look, we all win or we all lose. Nobody’s mad at you.”
    “ I’m mad,” Willie said. “Not at you, Dunk. Just that we lost. I felt like kicking out the windows on the bus I was so mad. But you ain’t the enemy. Like David said, we ain’t mad at you .”
    “Thanks,” Dunk said. “Maybe I’ll come out later. Let me be alone for a little while, you know?”
    “Sure,” Willie said. “I ain’t gonna twist your arm or anything.”
    Dunk turned the TV to an old sitcom and lay back on the bed, barely paying attention to the show. He was hungry, but he still didn’t want to eat.
    After a few minutes there was a knock on the door. Dunk opened it to find Krystal waiting there.
    “Your coach said I could take you for a walk,” she said.
    “I don’t feel like walking.”
    “It’ll do you some good to get out.”
    “Okay,” he said. “Gotta find my sandals.”
    They walked up to the Boardwalk but didn’t say much.
    “Everybody okay?” Krystal asked.
    “Yeah. Nobody blamed me.”
    “That’s good.”
    “They should have,” Dunk said. “They should be playing for the championship tomorrow, not in some worthless consolation game.”
     
     
    They sat on a Boardwalk bench, their backs to ocean, which was crashing a hundred yards behind them. Lots of people walked by—couples on vacation, groups of kids Dunk’s age and younger, packs of teenagers, college kids. Everybody was having fun.
    Except Dunk. He was still as down as could be.
    “It cooled off,” Krystal said. “Nice breeze coming in off the sea.”
    Dunk nodded and said, “Yeah,” without any enthusiasm whatsoever.
    Krystal turned to look at the water. The lights from the amusement pier illuminated some of the waves, and the red lights from a couple of boats could be seen way out near the horizon. Four teenage boys were noisily playing touch football in the dark on the sand, knocking into one another and laughing.
    “Big ocean,” Krystal said.
    Dunk looked, but then turned his gaze back to the boards beneath his feet. He folded his arms and held his chin in his hand.
    “You remember a race I ran during my senior year in high school?” Krystal asked. “The county championships, remember?”
    Dunk thought about it. “That time you lost?”
    “That’s the one. I got caught on the final straightaway of the four-hundred by that girl from Lincoln and I just folded up; finished fourth !”
    “Yeah. Only race you lost the whole season, wasn’t it?”
    “Right. So you remember three weeks later in the sectionals, same situation, same girl? Remember what happened?”
    “You smoked her,” Dunk said.
    “I did. I stewed about that collapse for three weeks, Cornell. I thought about it when I went to bed and dreamed about it all night. Woke up every morning in a sweat and carried that with me all day. And I ran with it in my head during every workout, fought twice as hard as I ever did to make sure it would never happen again.”
    Dunk nodded slowly. He wiped a tear from his eye with his thumb. “You’re lucky you had a chance to make up for it,” he said. “This one’s gonna haunt me for a long, long time.”
    “It’ll go faster than you think,” Krystal said. “It hurts like crazy right now, but I’m telling you the truth. That hurt is what’s going to make you a better basketball player than you’d ever be without it. It’s going to drive you, Cornell. I can see it.”
    He stared across the Boardwalk at a stand where players were lined up to shoot water guns at targets that would propel small mechanical horses toward a finish line. The barker was calling to people in the crowd, trying to get two more players for the race. Sixties rock music was blaring from the speakers.
    “You’re right,” Dunk said. “When that game ended I thought I’d never want to play basketball again. Forget it ever