“No, I was just telling him that I didn’t think that the Madison team was all that good,” Dad said. “I heard the kids saying they were great. They’re okay, but they’re not great. I’m going to talk to him again at practice tomorrow.”
“Oh,” Mom said. I could see the surprise in her face and felt it in my stomach.
The next day zoomed by. It was like the bells to change classes were ringing every two minutes. I hadn’t told any of the kids about my father coming to practice. I wasn’t even sure he was going to show up. He had made promises before and then gotten called away to work. This time he had said he was coming to practice, which was at two-thirty, in the middle of his day.
He was there. He sat in the stands and watched us go through our drills and a minigame. I was so nervous, I couldn’t do anything right. I couldn’t catch the ball at all, and the one shot I took was an air ball from just behind the foul line. We finished our regular practice, and Mr. Evans motioned for my father to come down to the court.
“Your dad’s a giant!” Kwame whispered as Dad came onto the court.
“That’s how big Chris is going to be,” Nicky G said.
I couldn’t imagine ever being as tall as my father.
“I was watching the teams play the other day.” Dad had both hands jammed into his pockets. “And I saw that neither of them were running baseline plays and almost all the shots were aimed for the rims. Shots off the backboards are going to go in a lot more than rim shots if you’re shooting from the floor.”
Dad picked up a basketball and threw it casually against the backboard. It rolled around the rim and fell through. He did it again. And again. He didn’t miss once.
“I happen to know that you played pro ball,” Mr. Evans said, “and you’re good. But I think shooting from a wheelchair is a bit harder.”
“You have another chair?” Dad asked.
Mr. Evans pointed to his regular chair sitting by the watercooler. Dad took four long steps over to it, sat down, and wheeled himself back onto the floor. He put his hands up and looked at me. I realized I was holding a ball and tossed it to him. He tried to turn his chair back toward the basket, and it spun all the way around. For a moment he looked absolutely lost, as if he didn’t know what had happened to him. He seemed a little embarrassed as he glanced toward me.
“That happens sometimes,” I said. “No problem.”
He nodded, exhaled slowly, then turned and shot a long, lazy arc that hit the backboard and fell through.
“The backboard takes the energy out of the ball,” he said. “So if it does hit the rim, it won’t be so quick to bounce off. Madison made about twenty percent of its shots the other day. That doesn’t win basketball games, no matter how good they look making them.”
There are six baskets in our gym, and we spread out and practiced shooting against the backboards. At first I wasn’t good at it. I was hitting the underside of the rim.
“That’s because you’re still thinking about the rim,” Dad said when he came over to me. “Start thinking about a spot on the backboard. When you find your spot, really own it, you’ll be knocking down your shots on a regular basis.”
Nicky G got it first, and then Kwame, and then Bobby. I was too nervous to even hit the backboard half the time, but Dad didn’t get mad or anything. He didn’t even mumble. He just said it would come to me after a while.
Baseline plays were even harder. Dad wanted us to get guys wheeling for position under and slightly behind the basket.
“There are four feet of space behind the backboard,” Dad said. “If you can use those four feet, you have an advantage.”
We tried wheeling plays along the baseline but just kept getting in each other’s way.
“That’s the point,” Dad said. “When you learn to move without running into each other you’re going to have a big advantage over a team that’s trying to keep up with you.”
Okay, so most of the guys are pretty good wheeling their chairs up and down the court. But our baseline plays looked more like a collision derby. Dad shook his head and Mr. Evans laughed.
We practiced all week. Dad came again and said we were improving.
“I thought you were terrible at first,” he said, smiling. I didn’t believe he actually smiled. “Now you’re just pretty bad. But I think you can play with that Madison team.”
Madison had agreed to come to our school to play, and when they arrived they were wearing jackets with their school colors and CLIPPERS across the back.
We started the game and Madison got the tip-off. The guy I was holding blocked me off so their guard, once he got past Nicky G, had a clear path to the basket. The first score against us came with only ten seconds off the clock.
I looked up in the stands to see where Mom was. I found her and saw Dad sitting next to her. I waved and she waved back, and Dad just sat there with his arms folded.