The Final Four (11 page)

He did not get a direct response.

“You were out here spying on me or something, weren’t you?” asked Hope.

“No, I was making deliveries, trying to earn enough money to buy that diamond engagement ring you had to have,” answered Crispin.

“It’s always going to be about that now, isn’t it? The money for the ring. You’re going to make me resent even wearing it,” Hope said, giving the door a little shove as she walked off, back into the apartment.

John followed after her, nodding in agreement.

Crispin stood there alone for a moment with the door still open a foot or two.

And after a few seconds, when he decided it was time to leave, Crispin reached for the knob and pulled the door shut.

Part of Crispin thought that Hope might come running after him. Only that didn’t happen.

He walked down the three flights of stairs to get his legs solidly beneath him. Outside, Crispin unchained his moped and took off on it. He drove fast, feeling like he’d been shot out of a cannon without any nets for a safe landing.

As Crispin finally started to slow down and circle back around in the direction of the restaurant, he thought about the first time he’d really talked to Hope. It was almost five months ago, after a basketball practice in the Troy gym, and the cheerleaders were getting ready to practice next.

She was sitting alone at the end of the bleachers, tightening the laces of her sneakers.

In the two years she’d been on the cheerleading squad, Crispin had noticed her plenty of times. He liked the way her hair framed
her face—like a gorgeous picture—and he could feel the energy jumping out of her body when she cheered. But he’d seen her around campus with other guys who looked to him like boyfriends. And she’d always worn a gold heart pendant hanging down around her neck.

As Crispin walked past the bleachers, Hope looked up and smiled. When he saw that the heart pendant was missing, Crispin finally made his move.

“Hey, your name’s Hope, right?” he’d asked, sitting down on the floor at her feet, trying not to look so freakishly tall. “I figure you’re an expert on the name, and I’ve got a question about it.”

“About
my
name? Hope?” she said, making her back straighter. “All right, what is it?”

“Well, you know how in that story about Pandora’s Box, the girl opens the box after she was told not to,” Crispin said.

“Yeah, she lets all of those plagues loose on the world,” Hope added.

“So how come the only thing left in the box was hope?” asked Crispin. “Hope’s supposed to be something good. What was it ever doing inside of there in the first place?”

“Are you trying to compare me to all of those terrible things?” asked Hope, with a grin. “Because that wouldn’t be very flattering.”

“No. No. I was just thinking you might know the answer,” said Crispin, with his eyes on hers. “I was thinking you might be as smart as you are beautiful.”

When Hope blushed a little bit, Crispin felt like he’d won
something. He’d felt the same way when Hope accepted his proposal on the court, after he made that game-winning shot.

But that feeling had turned on him now, like the wind slapping him in the face as he headed back to Flying Sushi on his moped.

“Pressure can burst a pipe or pressure can make a diamond.”

—Robert (Big Shot Rob) Horry, whose clutch late-game shooting helped win a combined seven NBA titles for three different teams

7:41 P.M. [CT]

M
J’s heart is still pounding from his last-second heave rattling out of the basket at the end of the first overtime. He’s breathing hard on defense as Troy moves the ball from man to man. Up on his toes, MJ dances around screens, reacting to the rhythmic
thpp
of each Trojan pass hitting its target.

Then, MJ hears the harsh slap of an open palm against the rock.

It was Malcolm deflecting a pass away.

The Spartans now have the ball, and MJ is on his horse, sprinting up court. Baby Bear whips the ball ahead to MJ, who spots Malcolm filling an open lane to the basket.

On one bounce, MJ delivers the rock into Malcolm’s hands
before cutting to the hoop himself. Malcolm goes in for a layup, purposely angling his body at Crispin’s, trying to draw a foul.

There’s contact but no foul call by the ref.

Malcolm’s driving shot doesn’t go down, and MJ outfights his man for the rebound. He can hear Malcolm barking at the ref over that non-call.

MJ pump-fakes with the ball, getting his defender off his feet. He goes up for the easy put-back, but misses at point-blank range.

Playing as if his name was on the line, MJ rips the rock away from another Trojan and lays it up again. This time, the ball spins around and out, as if there was a see-through plastic cover over the rim.

Despite the echo of boos in his ears, MJ has more fight in him. He bats at the ball, desperately trying to keep it alive on the glass, until suddenly, off of MJ’s fingertips, the ball hangs on the iron without any spin at all and then falls though the net.

MJ emerges from the crowd beneath the basket like a battered prizefighter who’s just landed the punch of a lifetime. The Spartans now lead 75–73, with a little more than four minutes remaining in double overtime. And with those jeers having turned into a shower of applause, MJ heads back up court pumping his fist at Malcolm.

NOVEMBER, FOUR MONTHS AGO

As they wrestled on the floor, MJ got his hands free from Malcolm’s and fired three or four clean punches into his grill. But
there was no quit in Malcolm. He fought back like a wildcat, and his nails took a small patch of skin off of MJ’s chin.

Other players in the athletes’ dorm heard the ruckus.

They tried to come busting into the room. Only MJ and Malcolm were tangled up in front of the door, blocking it. And when Baby Bear lowered his shoulder to force it open, MJ saw a flash of white light as the door slammed into the side of his head.

A bunch of guys, including Baby Bear and Grizzly, separated MJ and Malcolm.

A senior on the football team sniped at Grizzly, “
Our
freshmen know their place. You let that McBride kid get away with thinking he’s all that and a bag of chips. That’s your fault for not setting his ass straight.”

Grizzly exploded at Malcolm, shoving him backward at the shoulder with a stiff arm. “You hear the shit I have to take because of your attitude!”

Then Baby Bear stepped in between and said, “I feel you on this, Grizz. Believe me. But don’t dent our scoring machine.”

“Man, I belong to me, not any of you!” said Malcolm, pulling himself free of people’s grasp. “I’ll act the way I want!”

“Not in my face, you won’t!” countered MJ. “I just proved that!”

“The two of you, shut up,” warned Grizzly. “And nobody else here better breathe a word of this outside the dorm.”

But out of spite, one of the football players had already called security, and within a few minutes, campus police arrived at Malcolm and MJ’s door.

It was Sergeant Dixon, a five-foot-nothing black woman in her forties whose attitude was bigger than any other cop’s on campus.

“Everybody back to your own rooms! Move! I won’t tell you all again,” Sergeant Dixon ordered. “I only want the two in the altercation to remain here!”

She had a pair of officers with her who were large enough to play football on the Michigan State offensive line. But she didn’t need them.

“Nothing happened. I must have cut myself shaving,” answered MJ to Sergeant Dixon’s question about the mark on his chin. “I’m just no good at it.”

“That’s why we shouldn’t give razors to children,” replied Dixon without a stitch of humor.

After that, MJ wouldn’t say another word. He just kept rubbing the growing knot on his right temple.

Malcolm wasn’t in a talking mood either, especially with a swollen lower lip.

“I’m not sure what happened,” Malcolm told Sergeant Dixon, raising the bottom of his shirt up to his mouth to dab the blood. “I must have walked into the damn door.”

“Don’t blaspheme in front of me,” she demanded.

“Sorry, ma’am,” said Malcolm, as if he was suddenly talking to his own mother.

“You expect me to believe it was the door?” she asked, with her penciled-in eyebrows raised.

“What did you think I was going to say?” added Malcolm. “I’m no snitch.”

Sergeant Dixon was tight with Coach Barker. So instead of
writing up a report and filing it with the dean’s office, she called Barker on his cell.

MJ could hear Barker’s irate voice on the other end, and when that short conversation was over, Sergeant Dixon said, “Both of you boys are coming with me to the gymnasium.”

The two walked on either side of her, and she did all of the talking.

“You can take that grim look off your face,” Dixon told MJ. “Seeing the coach is better than seeing the dean. It’s like the judge being your stepfather.”

But MJ was concentrating more on Malcolm. He was jealous of the swagger the freshman was walking with.

Dixon escorted them as far as the gym door, and the pair entered on their own.

Barker was standing at the foul line beside a rack of basketballs, shooting free throws.

MJ and Malcolm silently took up places a few feet to his left. Barker drained a half-dozen shots in a row before taking his eyes off the rim to look at them.

“That’s forty-nine straight,” said Barker, picking another ball up off the rack and spinning it between his hands. “It doesn’t matter that I’ve put on twenty pounds since my playing days. I never lost my shooting touch. How many do you two geniuses think you can make?”

Malcolm didn’t give an answer, and neither did MJ.

“Well, if I miss this last free throw, I’m going to run those bleacher steps from the bottom to the top, ten times,” said Barker.

The coach buried his final shot, barely jiggling the net.

“Hooray, no running for me,” he said, barely cracking a smile. “Now it’s your turn. Twenty-five shots apiece to equal my fifty. Add your scores up together. For every shot either one of you misses, you’ll each run ten sets of steps. So I guess you’ll be rooting for each other, if you’re smart.”

Malcolm stepped to the line first, and MJ watched as he sank all twenty-five, even with that busted lip.

Then it was MJ’s turn.

He missed the first three shots, with Malcolm chasing down the ball for him, and scowling over every one.

“Don’t worry about it, Mr. Jordan. I’m sure you’ll find yourself a rhythm soon,” said Barker. “That’s what you search for in pressure situations—a rhythm or a flow.”

MJ hit his next nine shots before the feeling left him again.

In the end, MJ made just fourteen out of twenty-five.

“Eleven misses. That’s one hundred and ten sets of steps the two of you owe. But I guess that’s better than being suspended two games for fighting. Better for you, better for the team, better for me,” pronounced Barker. “Before you begin climbing, you boys want to tell me what brought this fight on?”

“He put his hands on my sister’s tattoo,” Malcolm blurted out quick.

“He said something I didn’t like about me and my dad,” said MJ with just as much gas.

Barker studied them for a few seconds, and then he said, “You two need more common ground. Maybe you should visit a junkyard together sometime. I’ll give you each a sledgehammer
and you can beat on abandoned cars, instead of each other. That’s what you should both hate, right? Cars? Jordan’s father was killed in a traffic accident, and Malcolm’s sister in a drive-by.”

MJ looked over at Malcolm, who was staring back at him.

Then MJ’s right hand, which was hanging down at his side, suddenly balled up into a tight fist. Only it wasn’t Malcolm who MJ was pissed at now.

“But you two
will
share common ground,” demanded Barker. “You’ll run those steps together, side by side. No leader. No follower. Now get moving.”

It was five sections up, and five back down, with forty concrete steps in each section and the smell of stale sweat everywhere. After climbing the first couple of sections, MJ started singing to himself, trying to find a rhythm.

He tried a bunch of songs before eventually settling on something his mother always played on CD, Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown.”

It was a tune Malcolm knew well, one of his parents’ favorites.

“Hey, American Idol, remember that song from the old Gatorade commercial? ‘I Want to Be Like Mike’?” asked Malcolm. “Why don’t you sing that one for a while?”

But MJ let that remark go.

Then, on their fifteenth set, MJ asked Malcolm, “You think Coach said that nasty crap about junkyards and cars so we’d hate on him and not each other?”

Barker was beneath one of the baskets, talking on his cell phone.

“I don’t really care,” answered Malcolm. “If he didn’t have the keys to the NBA kingdom, I’d tell him to take all that sneaker company money he gets for the kicks we have to wear and run these damn steps himself.”

Two sets of steps later, Malcolm said, “By the way, you should be saying thank you to me, benchwarmer.”

“Why the hell is that?” asked MJ.

“If you’d gotten into a fight with anyone else, you’d have been suspended for sure,” said Malcolm.

“Oh yeah?”

“That’s right. I’m too valuable to lose. This team’s not winning without me at the point.”

“Wow, that’s some favor
you
did for
me
,” said MJ. “Thanks.”

“I’m not a role model… Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”

—Charles Barkley, Hall of Fame basketball player and TV analyst

7:42 P.M. [CT]

“
Force him left! Make him use his off-hand!” Malcolm hears an assistant coach screaming from the sideline, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, with the near voiceless Coach Barker anchored at his shoulder.

Meanwhile, Malcolm’s thinking,
Damn it, Coach. Don’t scream it out loud for this Euro-boy to know, too.