Playing Days by Benjamin Markovits

Author:Benjamin Markovits
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

17

While all this went on we played basketball, twice a day and a game on the weekends. Sundays off, and Sundays seemed, for the contrast, to belong to a different world, in which other things mattered again. Unemployment, weather, foreign wars. There was a kiosk in town that sold the weekend Herald Tribune, and on Sundays I bought it and sat with a pot of tea over it, looking out the glass door to my balcony and on to the fields across the road.

We won our second game on the road against Augsburg. Hadnot, who had found his legs by this stage, scored sixteen points off ten shots. Milo played well too, under control, and managed to tease and harass their top scorer, a kid fresh from Michigan State, into throwing punches at him; he got sent off. But I was glad to see some of the punches land.

Afterwards, Milo was so happy that he smuggled a girl onto the team bus, who had to be kept hidden from Henkel. She claimed to be at vocational college, training to be a floor manager, but looked no older than seventeen. This seemed very funny for about twenty minutes, until it became clear to her that she would simply have a late ride home again, and Milo and she spent the rest of the journey negotiating how to get her back. In the end, he drove her; it was only an hour and a half. I felt for the moment a part of the whole stupid setup, laughing at Milo and trying at the same time to keep the girl hidden; maybe I felt this because we had won. I scored three points.

There were ten teams in our league, and everybody played each other twice. At the end of the season, the second place club traveled to the first place club for a playoff that determined promotion to the first division. That was the prize: one game, winner takes all. The first division meant more money, more travel, the European league. National television exposure. Magazine interviews. A different life.

It’s hard to describe what matters in sports without resorting to the banality of numbers – which is all that you’d see reported, the day after a game, in the Munich newspaper:

Samstag, 5 Oktober.

TG HITACHI Landshut – TV AXA DIREKT Langen: 83: 85 (49: 41).

A wet thundery night at home; the crowds stank of heat and dampness. Karl played especially poorly and for the first time vented his anger on court. Still, we were up at the break, thanks to the big men, Olaf and Plotzke, who played dirty under the boards and got their way. In the second half, Karl more or less refused to pass. Whenever he got the ball, he launched himself into a shot, until Henkel had to pull him and put me or Milo in. Hadnot played forty minutes. One of those games I’m not sure how we lost. We ran around until our legs gave way and after it was over somehow they had come out on top.

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