The Outside Shot by Walter Dean Myers

Author:Walter Dean Myers [Myers, Walter Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-53954-0
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2014-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

That Saturday we didn’t have a game or practice. I told myself that I was just going to the Italian team tryouts to see what they were like. But I took my sneakers and some practice shorts that I had in the room. I took the bus to Muncie and then I took a cab to the Y where they were holding the tryouts. It was like a circus or something. It looked like anybody that had a pair of sneakers showed up. A good half of the guys were black. Some were young, some were old. One guy was about six nine. He had gray in his beard and he was losing his hair in the back of his head.

You had to sign a sheet, saying how old you were, who you had played for, that kind of thing. They also asked if you spoke Italian, I hung around where they were signing up for a while, and then I went up in the stands without putting my name down. I wouldn’t have used my right name, anyway. If you tried out for a pro team, you lost your amateur standing and couldn’t play for a college.

I saw Ray once I had reached the spot in the stands where I wanted to be. He had on gray cutoffs and a sweat shirt. There were a lot of guys on the floor, maybe fifty or sixty, trying to warm up. The guys that were running the show were Americans, not Italians, as I thought they would be.

When everyone had been signed up, they announced that there were sixty-eight players altogether. They were going to have a game and put people in and take them out as the game went along.

The game started out with guys I had never seen or heard of. They each had a number that they wore and went out on the floor as the guy running the show called the number.

“Teddy Liston, Muncie Junior College, Danny Moses, Our Lady of the Mysteries College, Jack Lapham, Carroll Street Devils …”

It went on like that, with the guys who weren’t being called giving a hand to the guys about to play. When they got ten guys on the court they just let them play. It was pitiful. There wasn’t any coaching, and so guys just ran up and down the court, all trying to impress whoever was watching with what they could do. One guy was screaming for the ball at the top of the key and they didn’t seem to want to pass the ball to him. He got into an argument with his own team guy when the ball was turned over. It was funny in a way; in another way, it was pathetic. Then when they brought the ball back down he got the ball and heaved up a shot from far enough away to need radar. The only thing the ball touched was the top of the backboard before it hit the clock on the wall.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.