Make It Take It Read online

  MAKE IT

  TAKE IT

  MAKE IT

  TAKE IT

  RUS BRADBURD

  Make It, Take It. Copyright © 2013 by Rus Bradburd. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews. For further information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas Avenue, El Paso, TX 79901; or call 1-915-838-1625.

  FIRST EDITION

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bradburd, Rus, 1959-

  Make it, take it / by Rus Bradburd.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN e-book 978-1-935955-44-3

  1. Basketball coaches—United States—Fiction. 2. Basketball—Scouting—United States—Fiction. 3. Basketball players—United States—Recruiting—Fiction. 4. College sports—United States—Recruiting—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.R335M35 2013

  813’.6—dc23

  2012018405

  Book, cover design and photo by Anne M. Giangiulio

  Composited by Lee Byrd

  (Mrs. Lee Byrd to you; aka his lovely wife)

  Shout out to Keith Wilkinson

  for posing as the frustrated coach who graces the cover of Make It, Take It

  Make It, Take It is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  for ROBERT BOSWELL

  Contents

  THE KING OF SIAM

  RIVERSIDE

  THE ETYMOLOGY OF FAMILY

  CUSTODIAN

  TERMS OF THE GAME: PART I

  THE JESUS OF COOL

  TERMS OF THE GAME: PART II

  TERMS OF THE GAME: PART III

  THE JACK HOOD REPORT

  WORLD UNIVERSITY GAMES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE KING OF SIAM

  A flat tire on Jack Hood’s car stalled them.

  Steve Pytel could already feel the intense heat as the peaceful cool of the April desert morning burned away. Wasteland spread in every direction—creosote and cactus, a graveyard of dead mesquite trees. Occasionally a car would zip by.

  “Join me over here,” Hood said from the narrow shade of a telephone pole. “Yesterday I laughed at a Mexican lady hiding like this at a bus stop. Today it’s not so funny.”

  The telephone pole’s shadow did provide some relief. Pytel and Hood were nearly the same height but Hood was bigger. Thicker. They stood back-to-back, as if help might arrive from somewhere off on the horizon.

  Jack Hood had recently moved to town as the new basketball coach at Southern Arizona State University and soon he’d be deciding Steve Pytel’s future. Since Hood’s arrival, several candidates had been close to accepting Pytel’s job—the assistant position that he was clinging to—but one by one, he’d learned, they’d declined.

  The college’s administration had appointed Pytel to temporarily lead the transition to the new regime, but since then he’d hardly been alone with Hood. How could he keep his job if he couldn’t even get face time with the new boss? Pytel tried to make it clear that he was anxious to remain on staff, had suggested lunch, coffee, whatever, knowing he might not get another paycheck after the first of May. It wasn’t fair to be led on, yet he suspected that that was exactly what Hood was doing.

  Pytel held hope for the first time that morning when Hood offered to show him his new house, five miles beyond the city limits, in the shiny silver Audi. Pytel saw this little trip as The Interview, a chance to shine. Although Hood hadn’t used the word “interview.”

  Pytel had lived in the Southwest for years and knew the sun could push you out of bounds. He had developed strategies to deal with the heat—white shirts, short sleeves, all cotton, a freezer full of water bottles, and ice in his beer at night.

  Pytel’s wife Stephanie teased him about his routines. She was comfortable in town. A transplanted Californian, her skin held a deep tan, whereas he turned pink or blistered at the slightest exposure. She wasn’t thrilled about the peculiar ethics of college basketball, or his desire to remain in the business now as an assistant coach. “You’re slogging around knee-deep in this shit,” she told him. “And for what?” Their salaries were not so different, and she claimed her own job teaching kids was noble. Stephanie wondered why he couldn’t just get his high school teaching certificate. Why not get out today? Hadn’t the door been left open when Pytel’s previous boss was dumped after another average season?

  If he got an offer from another university, he’d planned to ask her to try a new location, but she was now suggesting she would not tag along if he left town.

  Of course he wanted to keep his wife, yet he wasn’t ready to leave college ball. He was pushing, instead, in the other direction—he’d been an assistant coach far too long, and he deserved the chance to run his own college team. He could name coaches who’d gotten that shot who weren’t nearly as qualified. If he could have convinced Stephanie to discuss it at length, he’d have admitted the appeal of the huge salary a head coach commanded.

  Weeks earlier, before Hood was hired, Pytel had made some inquiries about the head job on his own behalf, tested the waters, but was told twice that the team was not doing well enough—universities did not promote assistants from losing teams. Most schools didn’t keep them around at all. Pytel now believed that being attached to a winner remained as one of two prerequisites to his professional advancement.

  The second was this: Pytel had learned, after his own informal survey, that the percentage of head coaches without children was miniscule, nearly as small as the number of single head coaches. He was now convinced that completing the trinity with Stephanie would increase his marketability. Having a baby, of course, would also keep her on board, or maybe even keep her at home temporarily.

  He had been to the fertility clinic on the day Jack Hood was named to the position Pytel coveted. For two hours he waited to be called by a nurse, which gave him plenty of time to retrace his steps, figure how his career had broken down at this crossroads. A decade earlier, as an assistant at another college, he’d come close to being selected as head coach. Just thirty-two years old at the time, he’d been derailed by what he now understood was the kiss of death: the black players had publicly endorsed him. That wouldn’t happen again—lately they seemed to speak a new language, one he no longer had the patience to learn.

  This was Pytel’s basketball resume: practicing his long-range shot religiously as a boy on the graveled driveway, a euphoric ritual. Next, a scholarship to a school called Morehead State. After graduation, it was weekend coaching clinics while he taught American history at a Detroit area high school. Then an entry-level job back at his alma mater, where he’d gotten too friendly with the black guys. Finally, the assistant coaching job at State. And this was the sum of his knowledge: a college program’s success hinged simply on one thing—the prospects you could lasso for your team. Pytel’s job was to hunt down good players and keep them eligible.

  Now, in order to advance his career, he had to keep his job, help put a great team on the court, and start a family. How difficult could that be?

  Stephanie had been through lengthy medical sessions and the tests had proven her capable, which only raised Pytel’s level of anxiety. He’d gotten kneed in the nuts once in college, was black and blue for weeks, and he suspected he was sterile. The fertility clinic was an exercise in humiliation. Before he left, he instructed the nurse to call him with the results. If the news wasn’t good, he could figure a new plan of attack. He’d been waiting ever since, waiting to learn if he was to blame.

/>   “You think a person has to love his job,” Pytel said to Stephanie when the regime change was announced, his job jeopardized.

  “Your job is a soul-killer,” she replied. “It’s got you thinking like the older teachers I work with.” In the faculty lunchroom, she said, her colleagues had the hundred-yard stare. They couldn’t wait to get away from their students and thought Stephanie was weird because she ate with her class, trading sandwiches and knock-knock jokes.

  Pytel said he used to love his work, although he hadn’t for years. Like many coaches, he wished he could recapture a feeling about basketball that he couldn’t articulate and hardly remembered. “But if I thought you were correct,” he added, “I’d quit today.” How could a game become a soul-killer, anyway? He liked basketball, liked kids, and that used to be enough. Pytel was going to ride this out, see if Jack Hood would retain him. Hood would not have been Pytel’s first choice, but naturally nobody had asked him. He couldn’t imagine he’d really have to choose between a wife and a job in college ball.

  “You’re sinking,” she said. “This is your time to get out of an awful business. This should be a life raft, not a fresh start.”

  As they’d exited campus, Hood had asked Pytel his opinion of the new Audi. Local car dealers supplied the basketball and football coaches with freebies.

  “It’s the same model they issued to Jerry Conroy,” Pytel said.

  “That pink coach?” Hood sniffed. He was already deriding the man he’d replaced—Conroy had led the “Tough Enough to Wear Pink” campaign for breast cancer awareness. “No, it’s not the same model,” Hood added, patting the leather seat. He explained that this was the second Audi he had been given as the “courtesy car” perk. The first model didn’t have leather seats and so it never left the show lot.

  Hood drifted around the road, couldn’t seem to stay between the lines, and the weaving pulled Pytel gently from side to side. Hood announced he had a story to tell.

  “This was back East, as everyone around here calls it,” he said. He’d been at a private university before State, where he’d earned an NCAA tournament bid, the only time in that school’s history. His first year there he’d given a scholarship to a player named Willie Norfolk, a nice kid but a mediocre student. Hood said he’d been in Norfolk’s home to recruit him, consoled his mother who cried while she detailed the hardship of raising a teenager in their crumbling North Philadelphia neighborhood. He was impressed with the lady—despite the Ritz crackers and grape Shasta sodas she’d welcomed him with. The mother was the key when recruiting black kids, but there was a corollary, Hood said. “An over-attachment to a strong-willed woman screws up a guy’s head.”

  Hood learned after Norfolk enrolled that he’d made a mistake. “Norfolk couldn’t play dead in a cowboy movie,” he said. Like any coach, Hood grew to resent him and needed to take away Norfolk’s scholarship, use it to attract a better player. A kid could quickly prove to be a bad investment, a mistake, and that left the coaches wishing he would get the message and go home, go anywhere. “You’re nodding your head,” Hood said, “so I know it’s happened to you, too.”

  Pytel had, in fact, delivered the bad news of a withdrawn scholarship on two occasions. The first time he was overcome with guilt. The second time it felt good, taking a knucklehead down a notch.

  “Like all our challenged students,” Hood continued, “Willie Norfolk developed a close relationship with the lady in charge of tutoring the team—a real slut, but that’s a story I’d need a few beers to tell. Anyway, by the time I realized we didn’t want Norfolk around, he was already banging this lady, who actually had the same first name as the kid’s mother. Leah. That’s something that would keep most guys from bedding down an older woman.”

  That spring, Hood gave Norfolk’s scholarship to another prospect, a much better player. Norfolk was not yet aware his full ride was gone though, and Hood needed him to drop out on his own accord: school policy handcuffed Hood, wouldn’t allow him to revoke a scholarship, unless a player had been arrested. He met with Norfolk, told him he didn’t fit into their plans, and although Hood cared about his future, he’d be better off at another college. Which was probably true. “If you try to fit a round peg in a square hole, you just fuck up the peg,” he said. But Norfolk said he wanted to stay, even if he had to ride the bench.

  Almost on cue, as Pytel and Hood reached the city limits sign, miles from any service station, the driver-side tire on the Audi blew. Hood jerked the car onto the gravel shoulder and cursed. He had no idea, he admitted, how the car’s scissor jack worked.

  Pytel could feel Hood’s resentment as his story was put on hold—going from boss to supplicant. Pytel immediately recognized it as an opportunity to show his resourcefulness. He popped the passenger door open and got out. “Want to unlatch the trunk?” he said, arms draped over the car’s roof, peering in. “I can change this thing, pronto.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Hood said. “It’s not our problem.” He found a business card in the visor. “Royal Motors,” he snorted, and punched a number into his phone. “Put the owner on,” he said. He would not leave a message. Hood explained their situation a minute later, but sputtered over the specifics. “My location?” he said as he got out of the car. “It all looks the same to me.”

  Pytel told him the name of the road, which Hood relayed before clapping the phone shut. That was when Hood noticed the shade of the telephone pole and invited Pytel to join him. Pytel decided to not ask Hood why they couldn’t simply wait in the car with the air-conditioning blasting. Instead, he figured he’d get to the point, his point anyway, although Hood had not concluded his story about Willie Norfolk. “What kind of person are you looking to hire?” he asked.

  “It’s simple, really,” Hood said. “We can’t expect ghettoized players—overgrown children, really—to be loyal to anything. And a college’s loyalty goes only as far as a legal contract. But human loyalty, man to man—” He paused, stepped out of the shadow to face Pytel. The sun glistened off his slicked-back silver hair and momentarily blinded Pytel. “Loyalty, that’s all anyone in this business can cling to.”

  Hood scowled, taking in the desolation around them. “Where the hell is that tow truck? Five minutes, my ass.”

  Pytel pivoted and the two men faced the same direction. Without a word they inched sideways to remain in the long narrow shade.

  “We’ve been stuck ten minutes,” Hood said moments later. “Still no fucking help.” He trudged back to the car, where he kicked the offending tire. “We’re outta here.”

  Pytel followed, assuming Hood would lock it up and they’d call a taxi from the side of the road.

  “You’re driving,” Hood said, and he lofted the keys to Pytel, who nearly flubbed the simple catch. “What a piece of shit this car turned out to be, huh?” Hood added. He slid into the passenger’s side and jabbed the flashers on before Pytel understood what he was being asked to do: possibly damage a car that simply needed a flat tire fixed. For a moment, he wondered about a confrontation—he could say he would not drive, would not screw up somebody else’s vehicle. He could toss the keys back. That would have ended the interview, he knew. Anyway, Hood looked so confident, relaxed. The car was, after all, his responsibility.

  The low rumble of the flattened radial agitated the steering column immediately, and the tighter Pytel gripped, the more his arms shook. What about the rims? he almost said, but understood this must be some sort of test, that Hood wanted to see how he’d react to the reckless stunt. He shut up, kept his speed down. Two passing cars beeped while their passengers pointed out the crippled car’s front tire.

  “German engineering,” Hood said. “It’s an all-wheel drive. Now, back to my story about Willie Norfolk.” He reclined his seat. “I didn’t want to hurt him. But word came back that his eligibility hinged on a sociology paper due at the end of the semester. It was an evening class, one that half of our team enrolled in each year.”

  The professor was a
stickler for attendance and punctuality, and his class was the only hurdle in an easy major. If Norfolk didn’t screw up, he’d be fine, and he’d at least pull a “B.” Hood knew what was going on—Leah the tutor was writing the paper. Norfolk only had to sit by her side and try to comprehend what the words meant in case anyone got wise and started to ask questions.

  “You see my dilemma?” Hood asked. “I wanted Norfolk to fail. I was hoping a good kid would flunk out.”

  The grind of metal rim against the road began. When they ran over a small pothole, the jolt caused Pytel to bite the tip of his tongue. He struggled to keep the car straddled over the dotted line. The steel rim was digging a rut into the hot asphalt.

  Hood shouted now over the grating noise. “We were in the last week of school, and our guys still played in pickup games. That Monday afternoon I had to interrupt them to tell a different player to get his sorry ass to the student health clinic before he infected any more coeds. On my way back up to the office, I saw Norfolk’s backpack on a seat. I knew it was his because it had his self-proclaimed nickname, The Duke, in gothic letters. Can you believe that? Duke Norfolk? Duke, my ass. The imposter. Just below his nickname was his sociology paper in a clear-blue plastic binder. I remember the title. Cultural Relativism and Values.”

  Hood had hurried back to the office and called Leah the tutor, but just as he’d hoped, the call went instantly to her answering machine. Her office was closed for the day and there’d be no way for Norfolk to get another copy before class.

  “I returned to the arena, to the power switches at the top row,” Hood said. “With my hand on the light switch, I gauged the distance down to the backpack. Then I killed the lights.”

  Pytel imagined Hood creeping down the steps of the basketball arena in the dark, the players cursing.

  “Willie Norfolk did not turn in his paper that evening,” Hood said. “So he flunked the class. We had our scholarship back. And I’ll tell you this, which might surprise you. He came to my office the next week to tell me he was going to fail, and we wept very real tears together. It was my duty to phone his mother, the other Leah, and let her know her son wasn’t going to succeed. I was sorry about what I’d done in every respect.” Hood powered down his window and spat. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Pytel? I had to do the wrong thing for the right reason.”