Playing Days Read Online Free PDF

the owner, anold lady known to us all as Frau Kolwitz, what she wanted: an expensive coach or expensive players. ‘She doesn’t answer. He tells her, “There is only one coach, but there are twelve players. In your shoes, I would buy expensive coach.”’
    â€˜How do you know this?’ I said. It was almost midnight, and Olaf had pulled out another chair to rest his feet on.
    â€˜Because he tells me himself! That’s what I mean: he brags. He can’t help it. Twice he tells me this story. I don’t mind, it’s none of my business, but who has to pay for their meanness? In the end? We do: two-a-days in August. In the second division of the Deutscher Basketball Bund. I’ve never heard of such things. I tell you now, all the other players in the league are laughing at us. They are on the beach somewhere, with their girlfriends: that’s how other teams get ready. Hadnot is the one I admire. He is too smart for these games. At the end of every season, he hurts himself and has to spend the summer resting. Henkel is furious, but there’s nothing he can do. He thinks this year he will drop him, because of Karl, but it is a mistake. Karl is too young; a great talent, yes, but too young. And no matter how much we run in August, no matter how fit we get, we are still just OK cheap-ass basketball players. And he is not such great coach.’
    Olaf was enjoying himself. Such talk, in spite of itself, has a way of flattering. Even if you’re no good, hewas saying, and they work us like dogs, at least you can say this much: you’re in the know.
    But I didn’t mind the running. It tired out the loneliness that might otherwise have filled my days. I was either resting, or eating, or drinking, or showering, or playing basketball. I didn’t have time for anything else, and though we had each afternoon to ourselves, it wasn’t just the rate of my pulse that slowed down. I expected a little less from each day than I used to. By the end of the month I could chase down a bus and pay for my ticket as if I’d been waiting at the stop. I began to walk differently. I have never been so fit in my life, I said to Herr Henkel one morning before practice, but I can hardly get out of bed, I can hardly walk to the gym. Yes, he answered (he had understood me), but you could run to the gym in a minute, is that what you mean? It is a wonderful thing to know what your body can do. Especially when you are young, before everything turns to fat.
    In spite of what Olaf had said, I was beginning to fall under Henkel’s spell. He was about my father’s height, that is, a head shorter than me, and his thick moustache reminded me of the men of my childhood – of my father’s friends at the beginning of their family lives. I used to see them at faculty picnics, throwing a Frisbee, or on the soccer field in the spring during the law school’s Sunday league. They smelt of aftershave and sweat.
    Theirs was a different generation. A colleague of my father’s, who happened also to be a fraternity mate, hadgone on an athletic scholarship to Cornell, where he helped them make a run at the NIT semifinals in his junior year, 1958. I used to play basketball against him: a quick-handed, quick-witted, middle-class Jewish guy. Such a kid these days might not make it onto his high school varsity, but his was the success I measured my failure against, as my father followed the team bus around Texas to watch me sit on the bench. I wanted him to watch me now. He couldn’t, of course, but Herr Henkel could and did, and had the advantages besides of professional expertise and personal indifference. What I hoped to find out from him was an answer to the old question: what do you think? Am I any good?
    After a week of practice, Henkel split us into two teams – for the purpose of drills and scrimmages. Team 1 and team A, he called us, to cover up his preference, but his preference was