Coach drove through town, and eventually we ended up at Martin Luther King Park. He said that since I had cost him a half day’s worth of fares—the front seat wasn’t even all junky yet—I would have to make it up to him by putting in extra work at the track, which was fine with me.
Coach grabbed his whistle and clipboard from the glove compartment. “Okay, here’s how you’re spending your suspension. We got us three hours before practice. We’re going to use this time to get you caught up on the way all this goes.”
“How all what goes?”
“Being on my team, boy.”
I could tell he was still irritated, but not as much as he had been.
We headed over to the track, the bright white lines marking out the red lanes, the green field in the middle.
“Okay, so first things first. Where’s your practice clothes?” Coach asked.
“These them,” I said.
“You have on jeans and high-tops,” he stated the obvious.
I looked at myself. There was a stain on my sneakers. A new one. Maybe ketchup. Or chocolate milk. “So?” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”
Coach sat down on a bench, stretched his legs out. “You know what, don’t worry about it. We’ll figure that out later. Let’s just start with some stretching.”
Apparently there were a whole slew of different kinds of stretches, and Coach showed me how to do them all. Each one was for a different reason. This one for this part of the leg, that one for that part of the leg, another one for your back. Then jumping jacks, toe touches, push-ups. It all seemed silly to me, but not as silly as the next part—the two-lap warm-up jog.
Me and Coach bounced around the track, him telling me to keep my arms tucked, which was actually hard to do. He said form is everything when it comes to running, and that it has more to do with form than how fast your legs move. That didn’t sound right. To me, it seemed like if my arms were tucked but my legs weren’t moving fast, then I wasn’t gonna be beating nobody. Just common sense. But then again, I didn’t think a two-lap jog—as slow as we were jogging—would get me going, but by the time we finished I was pouring sweat.
“Good, good,” he said as we got back to the bench. He bounced around on his toes like a boxer before finally settling down. “Feels good, don’t it?”
I wiped my face with my shirt and took a seat. I was tired and energized at the same time, which was weird.
“I didn’t do it to make me feel tough,” I blurted out of nowhere.
Coach stopped bouncing. He sat down next to me and grabbed a towel from his bag.
“What you talking about?” he asked, wiping sweat from his bald head. More like buffing it off.
“What you asked me in the car? If beating up Brandon makes me tough,” I reminded him. “I said I didn’t know, but I do.” We locked eyes. “The answer is no, it don’t make me tough.”
Coach moved the towel from his head to his neck. “So what does it make you, then?”
“I don’t know, but not tough.” I thought for a second. “Because for something to make you feel tough, you gotta be a little bit scared of it at first. Then you gotta beat it. But I wasn’t scared of Brandon at all. He’s just a big guy with a big mouth. That ain’t really all that scary to me.” I had been thinking about this when we were running around the track, warming up. In between Coach’s tips about form and all that stuff, my brain was kicking that question around.
“Let me guess,” Coach said, now flinging the towel over his shoulder. “You’re one of these kids who ain’t scared of nothing or nobody.”
“Nah.” I chuckled just for a second because I knew the kinds of kids Coach was talking about. The kids who say they ain’t scared but really be scared of everything. Kids like Brandon. He talked all that trash and teased people because he was shook. A cupcake. But that wasn’t me.
“I ain’t saying that. I’ve definitely been scared of somebody before. Real scared,” I added, thinking about how loud a gun sounds when it’s fired in a small room. “That’s how come I know how to run so fast. But now, the only person I’m scared of, other than my mother . . . I mean, like, I do things I know ain’t cool, but even though I know they ain’t cool, like beating on Brandon, all of a sudden I’m doing it anyway, y’know? So I guess . . . I guess the only other person I’m really scared of, maybe . . . is me.”
A grunt seeped from Coach. He rubbed his right knee.
“I hear ya, kid,” he said, wincing, stretching out his right leg, bending it, then straightening it. Then he did the same to the left. “Trouble is, you can’t run away from yourself.” Coach snatched the towel from his shoulder, folded into a perfect square, and set it in the space between us. “Unfortunately,” he said, “ain’t nobody that fast.”
4
WORLD RECORD FOR THE WORST DAY EVER
I KNOW IT seems like this was the best suspension day maybe in history. And to be honest, it was. At least, at first. I got to punch that jerk Brandon in the face—I know, I know, not cool, but still!—leave school early, and hang out at the track with my new coach—because I was on a team now—who turned out to be a pretty cool dude. Me and Coach didn’t go no further into my life or nothing like that, which was a good thing because I never really told nobody about my dad. Instead Coach asked me who my favorite basketball player was.
“LeBron,” I said, like it should’ve been obvious. “Who else?”
“Who else?” Coach said, surprised. “Uh . . . let me think . . . Michael Jordan?”
“Jordan? Come on, man. Jordan is like somebody’s granddaddy. Jordan don’t wanna see LeBron on his worst day. LeBron could be sick from a bad batch of cafeteria chicken drummies and still give Jordan the business.”
Coach stood up. “See, that’s the problem with you kids. Y’all don’t know what a true champ is.”
“Coach, I hate to break it to you, but LeBron is a champ. He got rangs,” I said, holding up two fingers and wiggling them around.
“But Jordan has six.” Now Coach held up both his hands. All five fingers spread on his right, just his pointer finger up on his left. He wiggled them like I did. “Six!”
“Jordan got six?” Whoa! I probably should’ve known that, but I didn’t. Dang. I knew he won a few, but six? “Is that the Guinness world record?”
“The what?” Coach asked.
“The Guinness world record. Gotta be.” I put it in my head to check the book when I got a chance.
“I don’t know, probably. He was the greatest of all time.” Coach shot an invisible jump shot, his tongue hanging out his mouth. It looked ridiculous. Clearly he wasn’t a ballplayer.
Then I asked him about that guy I read about who was supposed to be the fastest man alive. Usain Bolt. Coach knew all about him, too.
“Usain ran a nine-five-eight,” Coach said.