Longshot (28 page)

“Is that uncomfortable?” the annoying woman a few rows up from you asks; she, of course, got to the airport early to claim the emergency-exit row and is now too self-absorbed for it to occur to her that she should probably trade you seats.

“Yes,” you answer as politely as you can in a strained voice as you adjust your knee to stop it from digging into your ribs. You give her a polite smile and take out your book, which is the only painkiller you have to help get you through the torturous flight ahead. The book also serves a second purpose: letting exit-row lady know that you're not in a chatty mood. She checks back periodically throughout the flight to see if you have put your book down, hoping for conversation.

If you make the mistake of putting your book down, she may force the issue and ask over the heads of the people between you, “How tall are you?”

“Five-one” is your default answer to that question, which you have been asked more times than a soap star comes back from the dead. It immediately lets you gauge a person's intelligence by seeing how long it takes them to figure out that you're lying to them. Exit-row lady lights up with duly noted and impressed eyes, nodding approvingly at you, and begins to turn away, her body language conveying her internal dialogue:
Five-one, that's really…Wait, I'm five-six. That can't be right.
…She turns back around with a look of amusement on her face, thinking you're being funny and playing with her when really you're hoping it will let her know, for the love of all that's holy, that you'd like her to please leave you alone.

When you land at the airport closest to wherever your final D-League destination may be, you're packed away in a caravan of minivans and driven for hours to where you'll be playing, because money is tight and the owner sees no point in getting a bus when vans are cheaper. As you stow yourself away along with your luggage, you listen to rap music
on the radio, because it's cool and cliché, while you munch away at your Fig Newtons, which you share with Coach Gates, because they're a white-man treat. You never have to worry about your teammates taking your Fig Newtons; they're black-man proof. Not because Randy thinks they're gross, but because he has no idea what Fig Newtons are, scared to try new things, choosing to remain on his steady diet of Big Macs and potato chips. You can eat only so healthy on a thirty-dollar per diem.

The pinnacle of your D-League experience will occur when you take that christening bus ride through the night along I–94 from Sioux Falls to Bismarck, North Dakota. As though it's an intro to a bad horror movie, the bus breaks down at two in the morning, thirty miles outside of Fargo. The frosty December winds that howl across the Dakota plains pound against the bus, rocking it, asking you to all come out and play. You sit there in the back of the bus with Randy, Cory, Ernest, and Berto, covered in blankets, your clothes layered, your beanie tucked to the lowest point possible, as you play poker through the night, doing your best to take your mind off the cold.

Randy will keep buying back in and playing every hand he has.

Ernest will sit and watch, because his girlfriend gets mad when he plays.

Cory will sit there and complain with food in his mouth that we're such terrible players and thus are impossible to read.

Berto will chew his fingernails in solitary frenzy.

And you'll look out the window, across the field, to see the ghostly silhouette of a Chippewa warrior riding his horse across the frozen Dakota plains.

This is my mantra, my goal list that I repeat every night before I go to bed and every morning when I awake. I repeat it every game while standing on the court, at the free-throw line, during the national anthem. This has been my mantra since I was seventeen years old.

I wrote a letter to my heavenly father at the start of the week of the annual NBA Development League showcase, which is here in Boise this week. It's the week of January 14, 2008. The showcase is a gathering of all the D-League teams, who play two games each in a four-day span. It's a convenient setup that allows all the general managers of NBA teams and European clubs to gather in one place and achieve all of their scouting in just four days in one place, rather than through weeks of traveling to various cities that they haven't the time to visit.

This is a big week for me. I am not oblivious to that fact. I tell myself and every reporter who asks me that the showcase is just another game, and if you're playing harder than you normally would just because someone
is watching you, then shame on you. You should play as hard as you can every night. While I tell the truth, I'm also lying.

This is more than just another game for me. It will be a manifestation. The wheels of momentum have finally begun to churn for me, as my name is now trickling through the phones of NBA front offices. “Lance Allred?” they ask skeptically. “The one from Portsmouth?”

Yes, Lance Allred. As of right now, Idaho is on a ten-game winning streak. We hold the best record in the league. I lead the team in scoring and rebounding. I lead the D-League in double-doubles and player efficiency per forty-eight minutes. I'm rated as the midseason MVP.

My nerves are so uptight that the night before our first game, my back flares into spasms. I spend the evening on the ground, staring up at the ceiling, holding my tigereye stone in my hand. The next morning we have a shoot-around at Boise State in their auxiliary gym. A front-office executive from one of our affiliate teams is there to tell Coach he should be playing their assigned player more, which incidentally means more time for him and less for me. Coach Gates pats me on the back reassuringly and says, “Everyone will know your name.”

Before the game I get a request to do an interview with Sports Illustrated, and since it has nothing to do with Rick Majerus, I agree. Ian Thomsen sits down with me in the locker room, three hours before the game. What was supposed to be a twenty-minute interview turns into two hours as Ian scribbles his notes and worryingly checks his recorder to make sure the battery is still charged. He asks me questions that range from polygamy and religion to sociological and economical philosophies and inquiries about my travels. John Greig comes in on the interview, introduces himself to Ian, gives me a hug, and wishes me luck. “Just go out there and have fun,” he says encouragingly.

Ian ends the interview and lets me know he wants to continue it later in the week before the showcase is over. He leaves the locker room, and I'm finally able to sit in silence for just a few moments before anyone else trickles in. I sit at my bench, curling my toes in the carpet as the voice on the PA vibrates through the walls.

This is my time.

My teammates begin to filter in, coaches coming back and forth, scribbling scouting adjustments on the board. Coach Lopes, one of my all-time favorite assistant coaches, stands in front of me and says, “No matter what happens, I'm proud of you. At this point, you cannot fail. You have already achieved so much.”

The game before ours finally ends. I look across the court and see my old teammate Britton Johnson walking off the court. He has recently come back from a shoulder injury that kept him out all season till this point. I want to say hello, but I also don't. I don't want to talk to anyone. I try not to look up, but even as I'm turning my head to face the hoop as I shoot my warm-up routine, my visual memory catches faces in the crowd that I recognize. Faces that decide whether or not I'm good enough.

The five-minute warm-up mark passes, and I go to the center of the court for the team-captain pregame meeting with the night's officials.

We run our layup lines, warming up our legs, as the home crowd files into the seats, making indistinguishable those faces that I want to pretend are not there.

The horn blows, and we walk to our benches as the starting lineups are announced. While waiting for the visitors to be called, I lie down on the floor in front of our bench. “Rebound and run,” I say as I lie on my back. “Rebound and run. Rebound and run,” I order, reminding myself to keep things simple. I stand for the national anthem. The lights go dark, and I begin to whisper my mantra, which I whisper every game during the national anthem:

The horn blows, and I step onto the floor.

I make my first six shots in the first quarter, recording fourteen points and seven rebounds before the buzzer sounds. I have to sit out the second quarter and split time with two assignments down from Seattle and Portland. I'm prepared for it. “Control what you can control,” I tell myself.

Scouts and GMs waste no time at all and began to trickle over to John Greig, who smiles back at them with an “I-told-you-so” look on his face.

“John, he is a completely different player. Night and day!”

“John, where has he been?”

“John, why didn't you tell me he was this good?”

When the final horn blows and the final stats are recorded, I have twenty-four points and twelve rebounds in twenty-four minutes.

I'm named to the all-showcase team.

 

It's cold out in Boise today. I can see this even through my window shades. A dim gray seeps into my room. It's 6 a.m. Mac is lying next to me, sound asleep, while I cannot sleep at all.

I stare up at my ceiling, a ceiling in an apartment that I don't own, a place that I cannot call home. I have no place to call my own, I remind myself as I mentally sift through all of my possessions, which are stacked away in either Jacob Beebe's house or Tara's house or other places that I have long since forgotten.

All of my immediate possessions and a few of my many beloved books are with me. I reach over to pet Mac, who starts at my touch and stretches sleepily, only to fall back asleep.

It has been a month since the showcase.

“You're going to be called up real soon,” they told me after the showcase was over.

Soon. Soon. You're going to be called up real soon. You're this close. You're so close.
How close is close? How soon is soon? I'm still here in the D-League, and my play has deteriorated. Not drastically. But I'm not as sharp as I was two months ago. I'm thinking too much. I'm analyzing every game. I trick myself into fearing that each game is make-or-break. That I have to uphold the buzz I created for myself, which I fear is as capricious as the business I work in. Tomorrow they could all just forget about me. Or have they already done so? Did my buzz go as fast as it came?

We're on an eighteen-game winning streak. Last week, on the night of my twenty-seventh birthday, we broke the D-League record for longest winning streak, at sixteen games. It was a great birthday. I was proud of my teammates; I was proud to call them my friends. I will remember that moment forever.

Though we're winning, and will continue to win, I'm tired. I'm burned out. I have gone as high as I can go here. I don't know of anything else or anything more I can do. I have climbed this ladder to this level, from the
very bottom rung to the very top, and I'm ready to keep climbing, but I cannot, as there's a ceiling blocking me.

Jaded. Jaded is the only way I can describe how I feel on this cold, gray-sky morning here in Boise. I'm not depressed. I'm not angry. I'm not bitter. I'm jaded.

I'm disheartened. Tired. Exhausted. Weary. How much more do I have to fight? Is this as far as it goes? Was the comeback dream a train of steam that could go only so far? Was I just another tragedy? Was I just another sad, sad story of life, and how it's never what we want it to be?

Is my lesson in all this simply that I had to learn to validate myself? That only I can validate myself? Yes, I have learned that true validation comes only from within. It was a beautiful lesson that has carried me across the globe, to faraway places that most can only dream of. I'm thankful for it. But I want more. I need more. I didn't come this far, so close, down and back and around again, every which way, trying to find my own way in, just to walk away.

We have practice today. Some more defensive slides that Gates has us do every day. I don't want to go to practice. I want to sleep. But I can't sleep. I'm void of all emotion except for exhaustion. I'm so exhausted that I can't even rest my eyes without the fears of falling short startling me back to my senses.

I don't want to practice today. What if this leads to nowhere? What if I don't get the call-up? Why should I keep going?

Why do I keep fighting?

“Because I choose to.”

I nearly fail to recognize that it's my own voice that has startled me from my inner dialogue.

I sit up out of bed and stare at the claw scars on my hands and wrists that have accrued over the years of basketball. I put on my shoes.

“Because I choose to,” I say aloud one more time as I stand up to take Mac outside on his morning walk.

Just another cold, gray-sky morning in Boise.

 

All-Star Weekend 2008, February 15–17, came, and Cory, Randy, and I were chosen for the all-star team. Coach Gates and Coach Lopes were coaching. Randy was excited for us to come down and see his hometown of New Orleans and give him the chance to show us around. When we landed, the bus picked us up, and I watched the city as we drove by,
noticing the water lines on the freeway walls that showed how high the flooding had reached in the city during Katrina. From the freeway I saw houses by the sea, boarded up, with giant
X
s marked across them to show they were still abandoned. I saw lots that had been sheared clean of everything; they were empty and lonely.

But to my surprise, downtown New Orleans was incredibly clean and presentable. I'd later learn that while the downtown area and the French Quarter had been hit, the French Quarter had not been dealt as hard a blow as other parts of the city. And New Orleans had made a smart move in cleaning up the main downtown area. Between downtown and the French Quarter, the city was attracting tourists again, and it needed the tourist revenue to help fund the rebuilding efforts in other areas. I was so impressed with all the history and the architecture in the old districts. I was even more impressed with how much the people loved their city, how proud they were of their heritage, and how warm and welcoming they were and eager to share their stories with outsiders.