Playing Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

easy to spot. Team 1 had Karl, Charlie, Olaf, Plotzke and Milo and wore the blue jerseys that matched our game uniforms.
    Milo, the thick-lipped Croat, was the choice that hurt. For a few days in that first week, I ran with Charlie and Karl, and Milo played the three spot for the second stringers. We sometimes guarded each other. One evening, Henkel was walking us through our offensive sets, and Milo had the basketball on the wing. I bellied up to him and propped my forearm against his chest. He held the ball at his hip with both hands, which he suddenlylifted up; then he swung his elbows round and caught me in the jaw.
    â€˜Easy,’ he said, as I staggered blindly back. He spoke always with the quiet watchful assurance of a thug on a street corner. ‘The coach was only showing us position. Give me a little room.’
    After that, we ran through the play and Milo got the ball a few feet inside the arc and went straight up for a shot, which he made. Henkel rounded on me. ‘This is fucking walk-through,’ he shouted, ‘and you are too stupid or slow to put hand in his face?’
    Milo said nothing, and the next day, Henkel switched him to the first team. After a while we settled into our jobs; mine was guarding Karl. Henkel thought of himself as an eccentric, an innovator. He wanted to teach the Kid, who was seven feet tall and weighed roughly two hundred and forty pounds, to play in the backcourt, which made him my responsibility. Karl owes him a great deal. If he has played his part in changing the role of big men in the modern game, it was Henkel, his first professional coach, who helped him to define it.
    Karl was a problem, though, and not just for me. Henkel wanted his first-team players to scrimmage together, to get a feel for each other, but they were so much better than the rest of us that practice became uncompetitive. Occasionally he’d give us Karl or Charlie for an afternoon and swap Darmstadt or me to the first team. But Darmstadt was just a kid, a real kid, a high school student with a milky moustache and arms as skinny asfresh pasta. He couldn’t run the offense, which defeated the point of the exercise; and Karl, when he switched sides, used to take us all on single-handed, which made for some close games, but not much progress. The truth was, and Henkel was beginning to admit it, that he had spent too little on his players. It’s up to the benchwarmers, guys seven, eight and nine on the roster, to keep the play sharp in practice even if they never make it on court in games. This was supposed to be my job and I wasn’t doing it.
    Not my first taste of failure, but something about that month left a deep print. I still feel its mark on me. OK, so we all guessed that Karl was something special, that he might become famous in time. But he wasn’t famous yet, and whenever he beat me to a rebound, or took me off the dribble, or casually lifted a jumpshot over my outstretched hand, he seemed to stand for all the other seventeen-year-old kids in the world who could whip me too. I just happened to end up in Karl’s hometown. There were probably a hundred other towns in Germany, I figured, where the local high school hero would give me the same treatment.
    Relativity is one of the miseries of the minor leagues. When you lose, it isn’t just your opponent who beats you, but everybody else in the leagues ahead of you.
    One day, after the morning session, Henkel led us outside to the soccer pitch, which was surrounded by a sandy track. It had rained overnight, and the red sand stuck to our shoes. Henkel divided us into groups, andwe began to run intervals, starting at twenty meters and building up to the full hundred before winding down again. After we’d warmed up a little, he offered to make a competition of it and stood at the end of the track with the whistle in his hand.
    A hundred meters is a long way; it only feels like a sprint if you’re winning. I came in