Old Songs in a New Cafe by Robert James Waller

Author:Robert James Waller [WALLER, ROBERT JAMES]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759524804
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Jump Shots

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In a Dakota February, the wind never rests. Neither do the basketball fans. Both are howling as I bring the ball upcourt in the North Dakota State University fieldhouse. Old patterns before me. Stewart shouting instructions from the sideline. Holbrook loping ahead and to the right. Spoden, our ail-American center, struggling for position in the lane. Head fake left, and the man guarding me leans too far. Dribble right. Double screen by Holbrook and McCool. Sweat and noise, smell of popcorn. See it in slow motion now. Behind the screen into the air, ball over my head, left hand cradling it, right hand pushing it, slow backward spin as it launches. Gentle arc…

The ball just clears the telephone wire and bounces off the rim of the basket as I land on hard-packed dirt in the silence of an Iowa summer evening. Miles from the wind, years before the Dakotas. Bored with school and small-town life at thirteen, I have decided to become a basketball player. Absurd. Five feet two inches tall, 110 pounds.

I am untroubled by the impossibility of it all. Day after day, night after night in the weak glow of the back porch light, the ball goes up. One hundred more shots, and I’ll quit. Maybe 200. Can’t stop until I have five straight from twenty feet.

Freshman year. I try out for the high school team, which is just not done by freshmen. Freshmen are supposed to play on the junior high team. That’s understood. I take a pounding, mentally and physically, from the upperclassmen. Yet, into the evenings, wearing gloves in late autumn, I work jump shots around the telephone wire. Merlin, the school janitor, ignores the rules and lets me in the gym at 7 A.M. on Saturdays. I shoot baskets all day, with a short break for lunch.

The Big Day. Twelve will be selected to suit up for the games. I feel that I have a chance. I have hustled and listened and learned. But about twenty people are trying to make the team, a lot of them are seniors, and there is the whole question of whether a freshman even ought to be out there. At the end of practice, the coach has us informally shoot baskets while he walks the gym with a list. Studying it, he begins to call out names, slowly, one every minute or so: “Mehmen” …“Clark”… “Lossee”…

Eleven names have been called; eleven have gone to the locker room to select their uniforms. I can hardly make my shot go up, or dribble, or even think. The coach paces the gym, looks at his list. Three, four minutes go by. He turns: “Waller.”

There is silence; I remember it. A freshman? Wait a minute! I trot to the locker room with a feeling that comes only a few times in a life. The locker room is silent, too. I am not welcome, for all those complex reasons having to do with tradition and adolescence and the 1950s’ definition of masculinity. Even Clark, the thoughtful one, shakes his head.

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