Playing Days by Benjamin Markovits Read Free Book Online Page B

hobby. Darmstadt was a school kid, and I hadn’t started for an organized team since junior high. That left Hadnot to pick up the slack, and he was fat, hurt and out of shape. Even so, as Krahm said to me, pulling the mesh jersey over his T-shirt, ‘It can’t be worse than before.’
    The second unit, in the course of a month of beatings, had become demoralized; the whole team had suffered. We were going through the motions, of losing, on the one hand, and winning, on the other. Everyone was flat. Failure gets to be good and comfortable, like any other habit. But Hadnot took us aside for a minute before tipoff and said without any sort of introduction, ‘You and you [pointing to Arnold and Krahm], keep your shoulders wide on the block. And look out for me; I like to come hard off screens.’
    Then, to Darmstadt: ‘What’s your name, kid?’
    â€˜Willi,’ he said.
    â€˜All right, Willi. I want the ball to my right hip. The pass should get there same time I do. Every second counts; I’m old and slow. Who’s got Karl?’
    I raised my hand. ‘I’ll take him,’ he said. And then, with an air of practical kindness: ‘He’s lazy on defense and I want to get a few shots in. You guard Milo. I don’t care if you have to knee him, keep him out of the baseline and off the boards.’
    Hadnot had rearranged us all around him. Not that I minded. He had conveyed nothing so forcefully as the fact that this game mattered, a Wednesday night preseason scrimmage on a half-sized court, in a small town forty-five miles outside Munich, where the only sports that anyone really cared about were ice hockey and soccer. ‘Let’s beat these sons of bitches,’ he said. ‘I hate losing.’
    They say you get one good game, coming back, before your legs give way and you have to build them back up. Maybe that was the game Hadnot had. Nobodybenefited from the smaller court more than he did. It was easy to get up and down or track back on the break; the hard part was finding a wrinkle of space in the half-court to maneuver in. The weight he carried on him served a purpose, too; it demanded room. He warned us that he liked to come hard off the pick. I could barely move my right arm the next day: that was the shoulder he curled off, coming up from the block. Didn’t matter how many screens it took to set him free, after a while that’s all we looked for. He hit from the baseline, from the elbow, from the top of the key. He knocked down little ten-foot floaters that may be the toughest shot in basketball: letting the high slow arc of the ball take back the force of the drive. When the angle was there, he went glass; otherwise, his shots dropped through like he’d been standing over the rim.
    To an unfamiliar eye, there must have been something very gracious and gentle about the way he scored. He seemed to preach self-restraint, the shots floated so quietly in. But boy was he pissed off. Not that he talked much. Charlie liked to keep up a flow of conversation with everybody on court. Hadnot said something only if he wanted something. ‘Ball!’ he shouted, ‘ball!’ every time he snapped off a screen. Karl spent about a half hour trying to fight his way through, until Charlie instituted a switching defense. After that, Hadnot was everybody’s business. They ran double-teams at him whenever the switch was made, they had him covered both over and under, but Hadnot found a way to work through them.He used headfakes to get the help defenders in the air, then planted a shoulder or elbow in their jaws to force the foul. ‘Foul!’ was the other thing he used to shout, clapping his hands for the ball. After a few of his elbows, even Charlie tended to switch a little slower off the high screens, and Hadnot had his inch of space.
    We took the first game with something to spare – the first game we had won all year.
    Why he was angry, I