The Sidekick Page 3

  *

  It was lunchtime before I had a chance to go back. Marcus was standing there, reading the list; he wore parachute pants and those red-and-black Air Jordans, and a green IZOD polo shirt buttoned up to the neck.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Brian Blum.”

  And he pointed his finger at it. “Top of the list.”

  I looked at it for a moment, waiting to feel what I was going to feel. “It’s alphabetical,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  And he pointed again: Marcus Hayes.

  “Congratulations. We made it.”

  “First cut,” he said. “I’m going for varsity.”

  For some reason, neither of us moved, we just kept staring at the sheet, reading the names. Gabe Hunterton. Ben Silliman. Isaac Brown. Lamont Melrose. Blake Snyder. Tony Chua. Josh Ramirez. Coach Caukwell’s handwriting was weird and tiny, like he could barely get the muscles of his hand around the ballpoint pen and had to make very small motions with tremendous effort.

  “Where’d you learn to shoot?” Marcus said.

  “My dad taught me.”

  “Next time, I’m gonna beat you.”

  Other kids came up and leaned over; a woman pushed open the doors, then pulled a cleaning cart behind her, with a mop handle sticking out that caught on the frame, and when the doors shut again, Marcus had gone.

  I turned around, too, and started running. We only had a half hour for lunch and I wanted to get to the cafeteria to tell my friends. They were all sitting around the table, fucking around, like there was nowhere else in the world you’d rather be, even if you pretend like this is the last place on earth … Mike Inchman, the DeKalb brothers, Max Strom and Andy Caponato, never any girls, and I dumped my packed lunch on the blue Formica and announced: “I made the cut.”

  “What does that mean?” Mike said.

  “I have to go back this afternoon.”

  *

  Frank DeKalb was a senior and the editor of the school literary magazine. Even though he was two years older than the rest of us, and in the process of applying to Swarthmore under their Restrictive Early Action program, we all treated him like his brother Jim treated him, like somebody you could make fun of in a friendly way. Frank had scoliosis. He wore a back brace that was visible under his shirt and meant that he always sat up extremely straight and turned his whole head when he moved, giving you his full attention, as if he were a very upright principled guy, a little stiff, which is also basically what he was like. I asked him if he wanted a story for the magazine about the basketball tryouts, and he said, “Write something and we’ll see.”

  This turned out to be my first published piece. My dad framed it and hung it in the kitchen. He said he was prouder of that than he was of me making the team, which I don’t think is true. The lit mag was called Excalibur (our school mascot was a knight for some reason) and came out once a month, on the kind of cheap glossy slightly hard paper you find in D&D adventure modules. Frank was also my first editor, and a good one. He pushed me to turn the story into something more than just a series of impressions, he wanted me to talk to some of the other kids, about when they started playing and what it meant to make the team; it was also important to interview the kids who got cut, and for this I needed Coach Caukwell’s permission.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that I’d found my subject. This is what I wanted to spend my life writing about, natural selection, the way people get measured. All the stuff we don’t like to think about, which is that everything we do we do on a scale, which can be graded, and some people are better and some people worse, but there’s actually always somebody better. And not just what we do, but who we are. Like, for example, some people are more attractive than others, that’s obvious, but not just more attractive, also more lovable. There’s a scale for that, too, and how do people put up with the fact that what we like to think of as our unique characteristics are really just a series of grades. If we’re unique it’s because we possess a large number of midrange qualities to different degrees. These are obviously the thoughts of a high school nerd, a grade-obsessed nerd, who hung out with a bunch of other nerds and couldn’t get a girlfriend, but I don’t know that I’ve outgrown these thoughts.

  One of the kids I interviewed was Marcus Hayes. His mother was a nurse at Seton Medical Center. His parents were separated. His dad worked in Killeen at Mission Auto Repair (he specialized in German cars) and used to play football for Cisco College. He was a linebacker, but Marcus looked more like his mom, who ran track for SMU, that’s where he got his athletic talent. The article was called “Making the Cut.”

  A few of the sophomores made varsity—Isaac Brown, for example, who was later recruited by Ole Miss—but Marcus wasn’t one of them. JV was good enough for me. We were teammates.

  Marcus loved the piece. Frank sent a student to take photographs of all the kids who featured heavily, and he was one of them. He wore Dockers and loafers without socks, and his IZOD shirt; his hair was freshly cut, with a low fade, and he brought the magazine home to his mom and later I saw it framed in his kitchen, too. He already had a sense of himself as somebody who was going to end up in newspapers, and this was his first confirmation.

  4

  I hadn’t seen Marcus in three years. When he won his fourth championship, there was a parade down the streets of Boston and I drove up with my dad to watch it. He always got a kick out of this kind of thing.

  After the parade, which ended with a rally at the Garden, speeches, jokes, video montages, all of it about as much fun as a forced smile, the team threw a party at the clubhouse restaurant, and invited certain members of the press. Including me.

  By this stage our professional relationship had clouded or covered over much of our personal history. I was another sports reporter, one of the people he used or manipulated or had to defend himself against. His rules were pretty clear-cut and you played by them or he didn’t play—refused to answer or even acknowledge your questions at a press conference or pick you out among the scrum of reporters that surrounded him in the locker room after or before a game. He had his guys, and through them he released the information he wanted to make public.

  For years I was one of his guys, and then I wasn’t.

  A few months earlier referee Pat McConaughey had been sentenced to fifteen months in federal prison for betting on the games he officiated during the 2006–2007 NBA season. The general impression being, this was the tip of the iceberg. That McConaughey had not only bet on his own games, but had manipulated the outcomes to cover the spread—that he worked for a gambling syndicate, which made hundreds of millions of dollars from these interventions, and that the illegal activity stretched well beyond the previous year and probably dated back to 2002 or 2003. The period in question included two of Marcus Hayes’s four NBA titles, and even though there was no suggestion that any players had benefited from or in any way participated in the point-shaving scandal, McConaughey was a first-tier ref who officiated in several Finals—including the classic game six comeback against the Lakers in 2005, where Marcus scored fifty-three points (and shot twenty-five free throws, thirteen in the fourth quarter alone) on the way to his first Finals MVP.

  If you were one of Marcus’s guys, you didn’t write about Pat McConaughey, you let it lie. At that point nobody had proved he did anything worse than bet on his own games, but I wanted to write a piece about the complicated influence of NBA officials, their weird lives and often intimate relationships with some of the players. McConaughey grew up in the same Philadelphia suburb where a lot of NBA refs came from, and next door to the neighborhood where my dad grew up—their high schools used to compete against each other. I thought I had an in into this world, it was something I could write about. Guys went to the same schools, the same bars, they knew the same coaches, and helped each other get jobs.

  What really interested me wasn’t the idea of some widespread conspiracy of illegal activity, but something subtler and totally legal, the power of referees to change a game not for money but from other kinds of bias or sympathy. Just the fact that this was difficult to measure didn’t mean it didn’t happen. McConaughey used to play golf on the same Florida course designed by Tiger Woods, where Marcus was a part-owner. When McConaughey’s sister got cancer, Marcus visited her in the hospital; he signed balls for kids from the Sacred Heart School in Havertown, P.A., where Pat went to school. Are you telling me that when Marcus goes hard to the hole in game six of the NBA Finals, and there’s contact and the ball rims out, these factors don’t at least wet the lips of the guy blowing the whistle?

  I didn’t mention Marcus Hayes or any particular games, but I wrote the piece, and after that, Marcus shut me out. So I brought my dad to the after-party to smooth the waters.

  For my father, this is still one of the great nights of his life. Security guys and front office guys exchanged awkward but basically happy high-fives in the hallways, the floors were sticky with popcorn and spilled booze, streamers lay like autumn leaves on the ground. There’s an office next to the clubhouse lounge with leather sofas and chairs, and Marcus Hayes and a couple of suits were sitting inside, away from the scrum, smoking cigars. I recognized Bob Storey, the owner, and Terry Andaluz, the GM—you could see them through a glass panel in the door.

  At the other end of the lounge, somebody had rigged up a stage with a karaoke machine, and when we arrived Damon McElmore and Andrea Boroni were singing a duet, “Summer Nights,” from Grease, where Boroni took the part of Travolta and McElmore played Olivia Newton John. (McElmore was a fresh-faced first-year guard from Murray State with a little goatee; Boroni had the kind of big-man’s body that might have been stitched together by Dr. Frankenstein.) Stacey Kupchak, a beat reporter for the Globe, had pulled of
f his tie and was waving it around to the music.

  It took me a few drinks before I could face that office door. My father is not a drinker, the only thing he likes is champagne, but that’s what there was—an iced bathtub full of celebration-edition bottles of Krug Grande Cuvée, with a green-and-white banner draped around the sides of the tub that said, 2008 NBA Champions, and the team slogan underneath, History Repeats Itself.

  Waitresses came around with glasses on a tray but you could also just take a bottle and swig from that. Dad went in first, and Marcus called out “Mr. Blum,” and sat up in his chair, he tried to get up. But the leather was soft and deep, he was happy and bone-tired, slack from end-of-season slackness, drunk already and fell back. “Hey, Baby,” he said, when he saw me, which is what he used to call me, or Bee-Bee, for my initials, and this time managed to escape the chaise lounge and put his arms around me.

  He was still wearing the oversized goofy team shirt they printed for the parade, which had the same logo as the bathtub full of Krug. It smelled of sweat and alcohol. Normally he left the house in a fresh Armani suit and Hermès tie. His cornrows looked sticky to touch, but I gave his head a rub (and felt the loose hairs; he always let it grow after the season was over) and he bent his neck to the collar of my jacket. He was three or four inches taller than me, but I’m a pretty big dude, it’s not like some of the reporters who cover these guys. I’m fat and out of shape but you don’t have to adjust your sense of scale, I’m in the picture.

  “All you need now,” I told him, “is one for the thumb.”

  “Listen,” he said. “My mom’s here, Pop, too. Make sure they don’t have to talk to each other.”

  So I drifted away and looked for them. Marcus had mixed feelings about his mother. Selena was young when she had him, just a sophomore at SMU, which meant she was still pretty young and didn’t mind at all being Marcus Hayes’s mother. I saw her on the dance floor in something gray and fluffy, I think they call it tulle. It showed a lot of arm and leg.

  My dad was watching me watch her. He said, “If you got it …”

  Then I saw Marcus’s father by the champagne bathtub—an old black man in a soft cap. When I went over to him, he said, “Travis is here.”

  “Where?”

  And he pointed. “I’m worried he might have brought something to the party.”

  Travis was Selena’s son by her second marriage, Marcus’s half-brother. He had a history of minor brushes with the law: speeding tickets, a DUI, they stopped him once and found a two-ounce baggie of weed in the glove compartment and a few pills. (Marcus paid the legal costs.) Don had no one to talk to and kept shifting his attention from Travis to Selena, until my dad came over and they shook hands and I went to get them both a plate of food from a table laid out with cold cuts and fried mozzarella balls and sushi and potato chips and soft white rolls. This is how the party went on.

  I ran into J. P., too, Marcus’s wife.

  Her face was flat, kind of vague-looking but also like, I’m in control, and she wore big flat sunglasses, even inside; there was a woman from Nike she got along with, who hung out with her at public events, made sure she had somewhere to sit and introduced people to her so she didn’t have to approach them herself. Her name was Angie and when you talked to J. P. you sort of addressed yourself to Angie.

  “He did it again,” I said. You say this kind of thing to these people, it’s like talking at a wedding, you can only say the obvious thing.

  Angie said, “Even after all this time I still can’t watch. My husband watches for me. If I’m not working, I stay in the kitchen, I make dinner, the kids do their homework, and at halftime he comes in and eats and tells me what’s going on, and then he goes out again. That’s all I can do.”

  “I don’t worry about him anymore,” J. P. said.

  Her real name was Josephine Patrice, she grew up in Natchitoches. Before she dated Marcus, she dated a couple of other players—she used to be one of the Celtics Dancers. When young guys came into the League, she showed them the ropes. Agents liked to deal with her, they thought it was a good thing if J. P. took you in hand. She upcycled till she got to Marcus.

  “If he loses,” she said, “it puts him in a bad mood, but we have a rule, you don’t take your bad moods home.”

  “Does that work?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, he always wins.”

  You couldn’t see her expression under those glasses, and it was too loud in the clubhouse to keep a conversation going. Everybody sort of realized this and gave up.

  At one stage, Bob Storey walked over to the stage, and someone shut off the karaoke machine and passed him a mic. He had a fat red face and thin blond hair on top of it, big shoulders, he looked like the chair of the Chamber of Commerce in Bedford Falls. He was having a good time and it didn’t make him nervous to talk because everybody always had to listen to him anyway. So he talked, he thanked people. He talked about the city of Boston and Celtic basketball and Marcus Hayes, and Marcus stood around with everybody else, still smoking a cigar and smiling and clapping like everybody else.

  Afterward they got the dance floor going again. It was seven o’clock on a summer evening, but the clubhouse was windowless, bright with artificial light, and it felt like two in the morning. Marcus can’t dance but he danced anyway, first with J. P., it was something they went through, like a wedding dance, then with his mom; he was touching all the bases, this part of the evening was mostly for show. There was a DJ now, sitting on a high stool in the corner, messing around with whatever they mess around with. People came up to him and made suggestions. He wore big furry headphones and nodded the whole time like he could hear. Somebody must have suggested “Only God Can Judge Me” and Marcus started singing along.

  “Nobody else,” he said, “nobody else” but didn’t really know the words.

  I danced for a while, I cleared a little floorspace, then went to sit with his dad on one of the fold-out chairs. We stared at happy people and the music was loud enough we didn’t have to talk. Everybody looked the way they look on these occasions, sweaty and like they’re fighting for their lives in some thick substance. I said to Don, “Your boy done good,” and he said, “What?” and I said, “He did it again,” and Don lowered his ear to my mouth, and I repeated myself, and he nodded.

  “Listen,” he said, “if you get a chance, maybe you could put in a word. There’s a business opportunity I want to discuss with Marcus. I’ve been talking to some people about sausage.” When I looked at him, he added, “Sometimes it works out better if the idea comes from somebody else.”

  A few hours later I ended up following my father into a limousine and stumbling somehow into one of the seats and feeling the deck sway underfoot as the car with its tinted windows pushed through traffic toward Beacon Hill. The sun had set but the streets were still twilit gray, people were eating outside, crowding the sidewalks, and we stopped on a side street, and I stumbled out again. A door in the wall opened onto stairs, it was the back entrance of some private club, the kind of club with oil paintings on the walls and gas fires and chesterfields in front of them, and I followed more bodies to a landing and through a door to a private room, where the long oak table was laid with platters of lobster and steak and oysters and frites. Joe Hahn was there, Marcus’s lawyer, Coach Steve Britten, a couple of other players. I nodded at Stacey Kupchak, the Celtics beat reporter, who looked like Vizzini from the movie, what’s his name, Wallace Shawn, bald and crinkle-eyed. There were several women around the table, I started eating.

  At some point in the evening Marcus had put on a suit. He wore Ferragamo moccasins with gold buckles and no socks, I noticed this when we went up another set of stairs. We were in another room, playing cards. The gas fire was lit, my dad was still there. “I thought you were mad at me,” I said to Marcus.

  “What should I be mad about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What should I be mad about?”