She's Got Next Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Warm Up

  Away Games

  Visitors’ Side

  Home Court

  Training Camp

  Sidelines

  Overtime

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2005 by Melissa King

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  King, Melissa.

  She’s got next : a story of getting in, staying open, and taking a shot / Melissa King.

  p. cm.

  “A Mariner original.”

  ISBN 0-618-26456-6

  1. Basketball—United States. 2. Urban youth—Recreation—United States. 3. King, Melissa. I. Title.

  GV885.4.K56 2005

  796.323’092—dc22 [B] 2004062756

  eISBN 978-1-328-72944-6

  v1.1016

  This is a book of nonfiction. However, readers should be aware that the author has made an effort to arrange these contents artfully. Overall, as nearly as possible, the particulars may have been disguised to protect anonymity but have not been otherwise altered.

  Portions of this book were published previously, in slightly different form, in the Chicago Reader and Sport Literate.

  For Jackson

  Acknowledgments

  WITH THANKS to my editor, Susan Canavan, for her high standards, and my agent, Stella Connell, for her unwavering loyalty and professionalism. To friends and family members Scot Danforth, Andy King, Deb King, Lee King, Garry Powell, Kevin Pritchett, Adam Ritchey, and Steve Wilson, who read drafts and always encouraged. To the members of the Northwest Arkansas Community Writers’ Guild, for their readings and friendship. To Laura Hohnhold of The Editor’s Room, for her thoughtful comments. To Glenn Stout and Richard Ford, for including the Chicago stories in Best American Sports Writing 1999, and to Alison True, for publishing these stories in the Chicago Reader. Finally, and most of all, I want to thank the players.

  Warm Up

  STRANGE, how it is with some things you always look for, how you can go around with your channels set. Me, I pick up a flash of orange roundness, a repetitive bouncing thunk so purely noticeable whether it’s disappearing quickly into the sky or echoing off walls and ceilings. I keep looking for that orange, that thunk, because finding it feels like a dive into forgetting.

  A new ball, its leather smooth and aromatic, or an old junker with skin as rough as carpenters’ hands, it doesn’t matter, whether the nets are ragged or missing altogether or rainwater rests in the dips of the concrete or your dribble comes off funny from the floor’s hollow spots, doesn’t matter.

  Basketball. I’ve played anytime, anywhere, with anyone I can, until I was too tired to stand or everyone had gone home. I’ve played because I need to move, forget myself, prove that the world can be different. I’ve played because, when the game is good, when everyone is doing, not thinking, it happens, little stillnesses in the moments when you see your open man and nothing else, or you feel your shot going in the hoop as it leaves your hands, or you share a laugh with someone you’ve never spoken to. Race, money, gender, age, they’re still there. But the junk we’re all saddled with is gone. You can see its absence in the other players’ faces, hear its sorry ass departed in their voices, feel it leaving yourself, if only for a few blessed moments.

  When the game ends, the world that’s called the real one is back, a lot more suddenly than you’d ever think it would be. You go home and come to play another day with whoever’s around, their channels set like yours, ready to dive.

  I think it matters, all those ragtag games.

  Away Games

  IMAGINE a gangly and freckled Arkansas girl, spending her abundant free time picking wild blackberries along dirt roads, cursing the chigger, and perfecting a toad catch-and-release program.

  That was me. Sometimes I’d throw cats in my grandparents’ pond, just to see if they could swim. They could, but I still feel bad about it.

  There were no flute lessons or gymnastics classes or swimming at the park or YMCAs in my world. Most families’ social lives revolved around church, but ours didn’t. Instead, I had intimate knowledge of wild fruit and invisible parasites and toads stained the same rust color as the sharp, rocky ground no match for the soles of my bare feet. And a basketball hoop at the edge of our driveway, where my younger brother Andy and I spent hour after hour in an area of concrete the size of an El Camino and a Grand Prix parked side by side. Sometimes Andy’s friends or my dad joined us. We played two-on-two, three-on-three, two-on-three when we had to.

  Hands on a ball, ball in a net, one body blocking the way of another: things were good in the driveway. You fouled, that was a walk, good defense, way to hustle, you’re out, nice rebound. It was the pleasant talk, the rules, unchoreographed yet somehow synchronized movement, the desire to find your teammate’s strengths, anticipate what he might do next, and help him do it. And there was my dad’s smile, too. I relaxed when I saw it.

  It seemed important to make good grades and go to college, and so that’s what I did until I found myself graduated and working as a copywriter at a land development company. By most standards, this was a relatively unremarkable setup, but it was a big jump for the gangly girl whose parents had married at nineteen, quickly had two babies, and spent the next twenty years recovering.

  It was a good job, with a desk and air conditioning and everything. But, ignorant and college-educated as I was, I was burdened by the idea that it was all supposed to mean something. When my vision began to blur at the sight of my blank computer screen, I nurtured a dream of being somewhere else, anywhere else, doing anything other than using the written word to convince midwesterners that what they needed more than anything was a half-acre retirement home site nestled in the majestic beauty of the Ozark Mountains.

  Surely it had something to do with living in the state whose informal motto was “Thank God for Mississippi.” Surely any person could become depressed and have her eyes glaze over all the time when success meant coming in next-to-last in national poverty, teenage pregnancy, education, teeth per capita, or just about anything else you’d care to measure. Surely this was the explanation for my disinterest in implementing and organizing and going forward at my job. Or much of anything else everyone seemed so wild about, while I was on the subject. It was Arkansas’s fault.

  In another state, a real city, work would be interesting and worthwhile. My boss would be a gifted leader who made it impossible not to be enamored with my job. In this place, women who were my friends would definitely not have pet horses in their yards, jumping like gigantic dogs to greet the mistress of the house as she drove up in her pickup truck. In the city, I would spend my time with liberated, sophisticated females who were much like Dorothy Parker in appearance and demeanor. And the men! They would be everywhere, a buffet of colors and types. Surprisingly, given the fascinating diversity of this group, every single one of them would have in common a preference for the Dorothy Parkers of the world and would not describe opinionated women as smart-alecky or a royal pain in the ass.

  I began looking for somewhere cold, expensive, and the setting for at least one violent television show, and after a few months of searching, I found a new good job at a natural foods company in Chicago. When I backed my overflowing Honda out o
f the driveway and pointed it north, my grandmother’s plaintive “Oh, honey, why?” was still fresh in my ears.

  And the answer was, at twenty-seven years old, I craved a new intimate knowledge of reality as defined by me. And “real” wasn’t any Chicago neighborhood where shirtless young clean-cut guys jogged tanly in pairs down the sidewalk, where people watched ball games from rooftops, or where signs protected empty street parking meant only for those cars bearing the neighborhood sticker. Such sights gave me a powerful feeling of loneliness, from the outside, where the good life of the young professional seemed so self-conscious and proud of itself, like a machine that took in twenty-somethings, mixed them all together, and spit them out paired into suburbs.

  Arkansas had its version of that. Everywhere must have its version of that.

  My Chicago was walking up the street to get a slice, because I’d seen that in a Spike Lee movie, never mind that this was Chicago and not New York. It was knowing where to put the money when I got on the bus. It was getting yelled at, and yelling right back. Had I been shot at going in the front door of my ancient, destined-for-demolition walkup on the near West Side, I would have ducked the bullets and started humming “If My Friends Could See Me Now.”

  It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed.

  When I returned to Chicago after visits to Arkansas, I was always glad to be back when, walking through a subway tunnel to catch the Blue Line at O’Hare (and you know you can’t get through the movie credits of any Chicago story without a shot of the El), I’d hear a saxophonist playing for tips. I’d walk by him with my practiced nonchalance, and his lonely, echoing sounds in the middle of all that concrete and motion made me feel like I was on the set of a play, a human drama about squalor, danger, and indifference. This, to me, was authenticity.

  Chicago. There were songs, television shows, movies, and books about this place, and it seemed to me there could be no excuse for not having whatever you needed in a city so well known and likable it went by five or six nicknames.

  When a familiar emptiness tried to creep up on me, I sprinted for a copy of the Reader, a fat weekly at the forefront of the town’s possibility trade. Here was where you found the people, the jobs, the apartments, and the activities that could change the rest of your life, or at least the rest of your weekend. There were roughly five million ads in every issue, each a tiny beacon of hope in a sea of endless options.

  I’d been in the city for several months when I saw, in the Reader, an ad for Sports Monster, a company that ran basketball leagues for adults. For sixty-five dollars, you got to play in six games plus a tournament with officials and score clocks, and you could go to league parties. There was a T-shirt, too.

  And it hit me, sitting there with a highlighter in my hand, staring at so much possibility, that I wanted to play, bad. I didn’t have a team put together, or a single acquaintance who would consider playing basketball in front of people. I myself hadn’t played much at all since the days in the driveway. Sports Monster said that was no problem, and they signed me up as an independent on a coed team. They were very accommodating.

  I forced my feet to move up the sidewalk to the gym that first Sunday we were scheduled to play. Inside, games were running one after another, and the bleachers were crowded. I looked around until I found some of my obvious teammates, three thirtyish single women congregating on the sidelines, each, like me, a long-ago high school player signed on as an independent. We introduced ourselves and chattered, saying lots to each other but avoiding the desperate-sounding articulation that Sports Monster would be a good way to meet men or at least lose a few pounds.

  We found the guys on our team, a group of rogue hockey players from a Sports Monster league that had been canceled that year. Our team name, which had been chosen by Will, leader of the hockey guys, was Nothin’ But Net. The name would prove to be appropriate only in an ironic sense.

  We awkwardly readied ourselves to play. The buzzer sounded, the jump ball was tossed, and after a few trips up and down the court, it was clear the hockey guys understood that the general aim of basketball is to move the ball forward and keep the other team from it, and to get the ball in the hoop, preferably your own, but you could say many of the sport’s finer points escaped them. The hockey guys might have caught an NBA game on television once, but they played the way you would expect hockey guys to play, and after a few Sundays, our only distinction other than remaining winless was having the most fouls.

  One of the league’s advertising partners was a sports bar that gave free pizza certificates to the winners every week. The teams that trounced us into the ground often gave us their certificates, saying they didn’t have time for the sports bar. We’d always take the pizza. It seemed we were usually looking for things to do and free food.

  Postgame, we women chatted about classes being taken, stints with the Peace Corps, or our impressive jobs. We were all good catches with no boyfriends in sight, the kind of straightforward, low-maintenance women that meddling mothers try and fail to convince their sons to date. The sad truth was, the majority of males—easily intoxicated by the delicate way an unfathomable woman might apply her lipstick—declined to ponder our Sweaty Betty hearts as we dove for balls and cut neutral figures in our baggy shorts and T-shirts.

  The hockey guys navigated the social waters with a good number of adult cartoon references and debates over who was hotter, this movie star or that one. They didn’t have significant others either, perhaps because, just as we women were neglecting our preening and subterfuge, their economic incentives remained underdeveloped. Dave, who had chronic trouble coming up with league fees, worked part-time in a sporting goods store and lived in his parents’ basement. His chick magnet status was not enhanced by being a cruel brand of skinny assembling an extra-large Adam’s apple, bad posture, and general wimpiness.

  Even though Dave was our only player over six feet, the lane was, for him, foreign territory not to be entered without backup forces. He saw himself as a shooting guard, and he could be relied on to take it up just about every time he got the ball, like he wanted to get his money’s worth, or rather the money’s worth of whoever had floated his league fees that season.

  Our standard offense was to come down court, leave the lane entirely empty, and pass the ball around the perimeter until it got to Dave, who would shoot and miss. If the shot took a wild bounce off the rim, we might luck into an offensive rebound and the chance to miss again, but usually Dave’s attempts simply fell into the wide-open lane for the defense to catch like a bounce pass. Then Dave would hang back and cuss while the rest of the guys took off at full sprints to knock down the man with the ball before he could score. After the offense had been sufficiently subdued, my male teammates would thrust two victorious fists into the air and look over at the bench, anticipating cheers.

  An infrequent variation happened when Amy, our best girl, posted up in the lane. Her athletic instincts sometimes got the better of her good sense, and she’d put her hands out and ask for the pass. We’d get the ball in to her, and she’d square around and shoot, undoubtedly feeling like her old high school self for a lovely, fleeting moment. But all the other teams actually had their guys playing in the lane, leaving the women on the wings like hood ornaments. Inevitably, a six-foot dude batted Amy’s effort into the stands so suddenly and with such force that it was as if the ball, no longer willing to suffer the violations of our athletic fiasco, had hightailed it under a bleacher to hide.

  As the ref hopped up into the stands to fish the ball out, the other team’s bench hooted and hollered, shaming the blocker for rejecting a girl’s shot like that. Things pretty much went as usual from there.

  Another guy on our team, Matt, had the overbite, thick glasses, and sharp facial features of a born nerd. Throughout the season he systematically attempted to date all the women on the team, calling us on Friday evenings and asking could he pick us up in two hours to go to Navy Pier. He proposed the same outing to each of us, and we all said no.r />
  Matt often tried to chat one of us up before a game. His chosen victim would bounce a ball around and take shots, and Matt would stand too close and hover. She’d dodge him, braying with nervous enthusiasm at his various inanities, then shooting the ball and running like hell to get her own rebound. Matt took these distracted niceties as green lights for his affection, trailing his bachelorette-of-the-day through timeouts, halftime, and donated pizza and beer. If only his defense had been so hard to shake.

  The leader, Will, worked at his father’s landscaping company and made self-deprecating jokes about “mowing yards for a living.” I thought his work sounded pretty cool, myself. I admired that he could tell people what he did in a day without saying “implement” or “reorganize” or “going forward, our key takeaways are.”

  Over time we discovered there had been a brief, doomed engagement in Will’s past, and the shadowy details of his broken heart gave him an air of maturity and a certain dark mystique, compared to Dave and Matt anyway.

  Every team in the league had its own identity. One group was all attorneys and doctors and called itself Everyday People. The North Siders were a bunch of Polish Catholic brothers and sisters and cousins from the same family.

  We didn’t win a single game. A girl on our team who could shoot a little left Nothin’ But Net to play with a more promising bunch of professionals who talked about the progress they were making on their MBAs. It was a better place to meet the right kind of people than our ad hoc ensemble of a not-knowing-anybody mess. I started calling the girl’s new team the Corporate Clones, and Will laughed a little too hard when I said it.

  One of the girls and I stayed on for the next season. The guys stayed, too, playing in both the basketball and hockey leagues. Every Sunday they brutalized their bodies on the field before limping over to have their pride traumatized on the court.