Playing Days by Benjamin Markovits Read Free Book Online Page A

therapeutic. That was one of their theories, and it’s true, the kids loved it. He had been raised in Chicago in a tenth-floor apartment with a balcony just big enough for his mother to hang up the washing. It was always full of washing; there wasn’t room for anything else. What he meant was, he didn’t know anything about gardening until he got to Gelsenkirchen; but he was having a bad year, and among the best things to come out of it were some strawberries, which he had planted himself and was allowed to take home and eat. At the end of the season, Gelsenkirchen moved up to the third division – he had played his part in that, too. Later, he got a job in Hamburg for a second division club; then Freiburg and Nürnberg and Landshut. Everywhere he went he took his pots and his big TV.
    â€˜I guess you’re waiting for the point of this story,’ he said.
    â€˜You mean, if I don’t watch out I might be stuck here for another ten years.’
    But he shook his head. The point of the story was to tell me that he had won the league his first year. ‘Basketball is just like anything else. You can make out of yourself what you want to make out of yourself.’
    There was a moment of awkwardness as I left. ‘What are you doing,’ he said. ‘We got all afternoon.’ He planned to watch a video and then maybe have a nap, but I was welcome to join him for the movie.
    â€˜You only got one chair,’ I pointed out, making my way to the door, and he stood in the doorway watching me back down his narrow stairs.

8
    I arrived at the evening session early only to find that most of the guys were already warming up. There was a second court in the sports hall, on the third floor, which was much pokier than the first. It had wooden backboards, not glass; there was no room for a bench along the sidelines. On Wednesday nights, we were forced to make do with it: a ballet class had been oversubscribed and they needed the space downstairs.
    In fact, I preferred the second court, which was small enough that you could smell the heat of play after a few minutes. Everyone seemed happier there. Basketball felt more like a game and less like a profession, which isn’t to say that we took it easy. Walking in that night, I sensed something restless, fractious, playful in the air, and wondered how much of it had to do with the American’s return. He was quietly shooting free throws at a side basket.
    After a light warm-up, Henkel dragged the practice jerseys onto the floor. The first team had Plotzke, Olaf, Milo, Karl and Charlie. The second team was made up of me, Darmstadt, Krahm, Hadnot and another late addition, a big man brought in by Henkel at the last minute with a very English-sounding name – Thomas Arnold.Arnold was a large, pale-faced, fair-haired, amiable kid, who had just passed his music exams and was hoping to study choral singing. His basketball experience stretched no further than a useful role on his high school team in Berlin. To escape the army, he had enlisted for civic duty and been assigned to a children’s hospital in town. He got in touch with the Yoghurts mostly because he didn’t know anybody in Bavaria, which struck him as a barbarous place, full of backward people who spoke incomprehensible German.
    It should be clear by now how unfairly matched we were. Plotzke was the only weak link on the first team, but even he had been playing club basketball for the best part of a decade. He was physically ugly, a great complainer and dangerously clumsy, but also, and partly because of that fact, surprisingly effective. Milo had started in the second division, Olaf in the first. Charlie had done time in the NBA, even if he had never made it past the preseason camps. And Karl was already being publicized as the most exciting young talent in the league. On the other side, Arnold and Krahm were both, essentially, university students, who had taken up the sport as a