Basketball Disasters Read online

  “Hey, kids,” the man said. “Whose dog is this?”

  “Mine,” Mason and Brody answered together. Dog belonged to both of them equally, and they both loved him equally, and if someone was going to get in trouble because of Dog, they would both get in trouble equally.

  “Are your folks around?” the man asked.

  Before Mason could stammer out an answer, his dad was there, coming down the front walk.

  “Hi, I’m Dan Dixon,” he introduced himself. “Is there a problem?”

  “One of your neighbors called us about an off-leash dog running wild,” the animal-control man explained. “Said it was this fellow here.”

  “But surely you can have a dog off leash in your own yard,” Mason’s dad said.

  “That’s right. But only in your own yard.”

  “He wasn’t running wild!” Mason burst out.

  “Dog would never run wild,” Brody chimed in.

  “We were just playing fetch—”

  “And one time—well, a couple of times—”

  “The ball went over to her yard, and Dog ran to get it, and he was in her yard for a total of—”

  “Two seconds!”

  “The boys are telling the truth,” Mason’s dad said. “They’re very careful when they walk Dog, and they always clean up after him.”

  The animal-control man shook his head in an embarrassed way. “Look. I’m not going to give you a ticket for an off-leash violation. Frankly, well, the complaint strikes me as unreasonable. But I have to inform you that it will be on your dog’s record now that there has been a complaint. So, boys, keep your dog out of the neighbor’s yard, okay? Just keep him out of her yard.”

  He gave the four of them a friendly smile and even reached down and rubbed Dog’s head the proper way behind his long, silky ears.

  “Did you hear that, boys?” Mason’s dad asked.

  Both boys nodded.

  Then the man gave another good-natured grin, climbed back into his van, and drove away.

  “I am going to get that NO OLD LADIES sign,” Mason muttered, once his dad had gone back into the house.

  “But, Mason, she never comes out of her house, anyway.”

  Brody was right. Mason had never seen any sign of Mrs. Taylor, except for that telltale movement of the curtain in the upstairs window.

  “So what are we going to do?” Mason asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brody said. “Keep Dog out of her yard, I guess. But tonight, when I go trick-or-treating with Sheng and Julio, I’m not going to go to her house.”

  Mason wasn’t going to go trick-or-treating at all. His costume was too hard to explain. So he was going to stay at home and help hand out candy to people who didn’t mind wearing costumes.

  Mason gave Dog a huge hug, hoping that Mrs. Taylor was looking out of her window now to see what true love looked like, something a mean old, nasty old dog hater could never know.

  At basketball practice on Tuesday night—the last practice before the first game of the season, to be played on Saturday morning at ten—Mason’s dad handed out the schedule for all the games, six of them. On the schedule the teams were identified by coach and number, and not by name. There were six teams total for fourth-grade boys; Mason was on team number five. He had no idea which team was the Killer Whales.

  What if Dunk’s team was in a different league altogether? That would be extremely wonderful, but things that were extremely wonderful, in Mason’s experience, tended to fall under the heading “too good to be true.”

  It was interesting that there was no category of things that were too bad to be true, at least not that Mason had ever heard of.

  No new kids had joined the team. Mason’s dad repeated his plea.

  “Guys, we really need three or four more players!”

  Mason wondered if what his dad really meant was “three or four players who can actually play.”

  During the dribbling drill, Dylan’s ball was as hopelessly out of control as the previous week, and Dylan still couldn’t throw, catch, shoot, or guard. Dylan didn’t have much hustle, either, though if you played as badly as Dylan, there was a lot to be said for keeping a low profile.

  For the second half of the practice, Coach Dad split the boys into two teams to play three-on-three. Mason had Dylan on his team—of course—and a boy named Kevin. Brody’s team had Matt and Jeremy. Jeremy was probably, all around, the best player on the team. Coach Dad’s division of the players didn’t seem very fair to Mason.

  “So that we can tell the teams apart,” Coach Dad said, “one team will be the Shirts and the other will be the Skins. Brody, your team will be the Shirts. Mason, your team will be the Skins.”

  Skins?

  Kevin caught on more quickly and pulled his T-shirt up over his head, leaving his bare chest exposed. Dylan copied him. Mason had to do the same, but it made him feel strange. It was one thing to take off your shirt in the summertime, running through the sprinkler with Dog and Brody. It was another thing to take off your shirt in front of people who might think your chest looked funny: too fat, too flabby, too skinny, too scrawny, too white. Dylan’s chest, for example, definitely looked too fat, too flabby, and too white.

  Mason liked the comfort of nice, plain, solid-colored T-shirts—blue, green, yellow, red—with no words or pictures on them. Every day Mason wore the same thing: a plain T-shirt, blue jeans in the winter or khaki shorts in the summer, brown socks. He cast a longing glance at his plain blue T-shirt, crumpled up on the floor in a miserable-looking ball. He didn’t know if he could make any baskets without it.

  The practice game began.

  Jeremy scored right away. Then the Skins got the ball.

  “Get open, Mason, so Kevin can pass to you!” Coach Dad called.

  Mason tried, but dogged little Brody stayed on him.

  Kevin passed to Dylan instead. Bad mistake. When Dylan dropped the ball, Matt dove for it and passed it to Jeremy, who took the shot. The ball teetered on the rim but didn’t go in.

  “Rebound!” Coach Dad shouted. “Mason, rebound! Good job, Brody!”

  Brody leaped for the rebound, got it, shot again, and scored.

  “Good job, Brody!”

  That was how the rest of the game seemed to Mason. Either his dad was shouting, “Get open, Mason!” or “Mason, get on your man!” or “Mason, rebound!” or else he was shouting, “Good job, Brody!” or “Way to go, Brody!” or “Great hustle, Brody!”

  He shouted various things to Jeremy, Kevin, and Matt, but Mason barely noticed. There was no point in shouting anything to Dylan except for “Watch out!”

  The score at the end of the game was something like a million to four. Mason chose not to remember the exact numbers.

  “Great practice, guys!” Coach Dad said as they had a water break before their final cool-down stretches. “If you guys hustle like that on Saturday, we’ll have a chance.”

  Well, Brody, Jeremy, Kevin, and Matt would have a chance. And even “a chance” hardly made victory sound very likely.

  “But do try to rustle up a couple more players,” Coach Dad pleaded. “We could really use some backups.”

  Maybe if they had enough other players, players who really wanted to play, Mason could quit. His dad had quit Little League, after all. Maybe quitting a sport ran in the male half of the Dixon family.

  If only Mason didn’t have to pretend to his parents that he wanted to play basketball—that he did like trying new things, after all. If only he didn’t have to pretend that playing basketball was fun.

  6

  “Would you like me to fix you some scrambled eggs?” Mason’s mother asked him on Saturday morning.

  Mason stared at the person who was asking him such a preposterous question. The person looked like his mother and sounded like his mother and had the familiar anxious smile of his mother. But she was uttering words that no one who knew Mason—such as his own mother—could possibly say.

  For reply, he stalked over to the p
antry cupboard and pulled out his box of plain Cheerios. From the fridge he took the gallon jug of milk. Then he poured some Cheerios into a bowl and poured some milk onto the Cheerios.

  “Some protein?” she persisted. “Wouldn’t that be a good idea, before your first game?”

  Mason started spooning Cheerios into his mouth.

  His father staggered into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, hair not yet combed. He was carrying the coaching book, with one finger inserted into the chapter he had been reading—presumably the chapter on how to coach your team’s first game. Mason hoped the chapter offered some discussion of what to do when your team had only six players, none of whom were any good at basketball, and one of whom was the worst player in the history of the game.

  This time Mason’s mother didn’t venture any dietary suggestions. She poured her husband a cup of black coffee and set it in front of him on the table.

  “What does the book say about getting ready for a game?” Mason asked.

  “Well, some of it doesn’t apply,” his dad said. “I mean, doesn’t apply to us.”

  Now Mason was truly curious. “Like what?”

  “It says to bench your players if they come late, or act inappropriately during a game, even if they’re your star players.”

  “We don’t have any star players,” Mason said.

  “We have hardly any extra players, period.”

  “What else does it say?”

  “I’m not supposed to yell at the referee if I disagree with a call. But I wouldn’t do that, anyway. I’m not a yelling kind of guy.”

  That was true.

  “And it said”—even though Mason’s dad kept his finger firmly in the book, he seemed to have it memorized—“to make it our goal to win with grace or lose with dignity.”

  Mason assumed their team would be focusing on dignity.

  “I just hope …” His dad finally pulled his finger out of the book and set it on the kitchen table so he could take a long sip of his coffee. “That poor kid Dylan. I hope he doesn’t get so discouraged that he gives up on the game altogether.”

  Which would be a bad thing?

  “And Brody—when a kid is so hopeful and enthusiastic all the time? It would be a shame if this first game took that away.”

  Mason waited for his father to go on to note all the ways today’s crushing defeat would be devastating for Jeremy, Kevin, and Matt. Apparently devastating effects on his own son weren’t such a huge source of worry.

  “Now, Dan.” Mason’s mother had obviously had enough of her husband’s mournful speech. “I think Mason’s first game is going to be wonderful.”

  “You weren’t at the practice,” Mason told her.

  “Well, what’s that saying? The worse the dress rehearsal, the better the show. So the worse the practice, the better the game.”

  “Sports are”—his father began the sentence, but father and son finished it together—“different.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want any scrambled eggs?” she asked Mason again. “Dan? Scrambled eggs?”

  “No,” father and son replied together.

  Mason and his parents arrived at the Y while the previous game was still in play. Brody and his family—both his parents and his two older sisters, Cara and Cammie—showed up a few minutes later.

  Gum-chewing Jonah was there, handing out team T-shirts to players as they arrived. The team color for team number five turned out to be yellow.

  “I love yellow!” Brody sang out. “Yellow is my lucky color. What’s your lucky color, Mason?”

  “I don’t have a lucky color,” Mason told him.

  As they waited at the edge of the gym, Mason scanned the players out on the court—red shirts versus gray shirts—to see if one of the players was Dunk. He didn’t recognize any large, lumbering, Dunklike object.

  Then, from behind, someone whacked his yellow-shirted shoulder—hard. Mason didn’t have to whirl around to identify the whacker.

  Dunk was wearing a blue shirt, appropriate, Mason thought, for the Killer Whales. His nasty grin stretched from ear to ear.

  “We’re going to beat you, we’re going to beat you,” he chanted.

  Dunk’s coach apparently hadn’t read the part of the coaching book about winning with grace, or had failed to mention that particular bit to his team.

  “Does your team have a name?” Dunk asked.

  They hadn’t actually gotten around to voting on a name. The choice of a name, Mason thought, was the least of their problems.

  “The Fighting Bulldogs,” Brody said, going with the name he had put forward before.

  Dunk laughed, as if that were a dumb name for a team, which it wasn’t.

  “We’ll see how much fight you have left after our game,” he sneered.

  The previous game ended. The two teams filed past each other out on the court, shaking hands. Mason felt sorry for the losers having to shake hands with the winners.

  If there was anything in the world he didn’t want to do, it was to lose to Dunk and then shake his sweaty, pudgy hand.

  After a few warm-up drills, Coach Dad summoned his players into a huddle.

  “Team,” Mason’s dad said, “we are going to go out there and play with everything we’ve got. We’re going to play our best. We’re going to play to win. But there’s one thing that’s more important than winning. What’s that?”

  Sheer survival?

  “It’s how we play. If we win, we’re going to win with grace. If we lose, we’re going to lose with dignity.”

  Mason had to admit his dad made the lines sound great.

  “Okay, team,” Coach Dad said, “let’s go play some basketball.”

  With six players on the team, five would be on the court to start, and only one would be on the bench to sub. If Mason had been the coach, he would have put Dylan on the bench, because Dylan was indisputably the worst player on the team. But the coaching book must have warned against making your worst player feel that he was the worst, even when it was obvious to everyone that he was the worst.

  “Let’s see,” Coach Dad said, as if he were choosing the only nonstarter purely at random. “Mason, why don’t you sit out for the first bit, and you’ll rotate in as soon as we need you.”

  Did this mean that his dad thought that he, Mason, was the second-worst player on the team? Mason plopped himself down on the bench—actually, a folding chair—gloomily.

  Until this moment, he would have thought the bench was the best place to be if you had to be on a basketball team at all. Why run around red-faced and sweaty, when you could relax restfully and watch it all as a detached, amused observer?

  But it was hard to be a detached, amused observer when your team was getting slaughtered by Dunk’s team. Player after player for the Killer Whales seemed to be dancing his way down the court, shooting, and scoring, practically as if the Fighting Bulldogs weren’t even there. It sure looked to Mason as if there was a lot of traveling going on.

  Mason started watching the Whales’ feet closely. At least twice he saw feet that seemed to be taking some extra steps. Why wasn’t the ref calling a traveling violation?

  Mason looked over at the ref. The ref was Jonah! Too busy chewing gum, presumably, to referee with any accuracy.

  At the end of the first six-minute quarter, the score was 10–0.

  Mason went in for Dylan, who looked stunned and would probably quit the team before the game was over. The Killer Whales had already rotated in their subs, so all their players were fresh as a daisy. One of the subs was Dunk. Mason felt a twinge of satisfaction that Dunk hadn’t been a starter for the Killer Whales. Then he remembered that he himself hadn’t been a starter for the Fighting Bulldogs, either.

  Mason managed to get open enough that Jeremy passed to him. He took two dribbles down the court before a Killer Whale stole the ball. In the process, the Killer Whale whacked Mason’s arm as well.

  Mason gave a loud “Ow!” to alert the ref to the Whale’s wrongful bodily contact
. Hearing no whistle, he turned to glare at Jonah, who kept on calmly chewing his gum.

  Mason sprinted after the fouling Whale and stole the ball back.

  Fwee! The whistle sounded.

  Was Jonah-the-ref kidding? Mason hadn’t even touched the Whale, whereas the Whale had whacked Mason so hard his arm still stung.

  Surely his dad would say something. A coach couldn’t stand by and do nothing when a foul was unfairly called against one of his players. And when the player was his son! Could he?

  Apparently he could. Too late, Mason remembered the coaching book’s stupid commandment against yelling at the referee.

  The Killer Whale took a free throw, when he deserved to be taken out of the game. The ball soared through the rim and net.

  At the half, the score was 23–4.

  Mason’s dad got his sweaty, panting team into a huddle.

  “Look,” he said. “This is our first-ever game, played against a much more experienced team, with twice as many players. Given all that, I think we’re doing pretty darn well.”

  “Besides, the ref is blind!” Mason burst out. A new idea popped into his brain, an idea that would explain everything. “I think the Killer Whales bribed him!”

  They were buying Jonah’s bubble gum!

  “Now, Mason,” his dad said.

  “I didn’t foul that kid. He fouled me!”

  “In the heat of a play, it can be hard to see exactly who fouled whom,” Coach Dad said mildly.

  “But they kept traveling, too!”

  “Well, sometimes the refs don’t call every single violation for the first game in the season.”

  If Mason survived this basketball season—a big if—he was going to write his own coaching manual. It would have a chapter on how to protest an obviously corrupt and cheating referee.

  And another on why you shouldn’t treat your own son worse than everyone else on the team.

  Even Brody looked subdued. “Well, it will all be over in twelve more minutes,” he said, which was more the kind of thing Mason would say.