The Sidekick, page 12
“Did you make it into Pauley? Did you see anything?”
So I showed him my phone. Even if you magnified the image, Marcus Hayes looked like everybody else. When his jump shots fell, the net seemed to blur and swallow, but it was hard to tell if the ball went in.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” he asked me. Fred had a piece to file on “the comeback” but all he had was a bench guy for the Bruins saying, “He looks sharp. I just can’t believe I’m playing against him.”
I liked Fred. Everybody did. Even in the hotel lounge in Pasadena he wore his dad’s tweed jacket and a totally generic blue tie. Fred got paid two hundred thousand a year. Everybody read him, including front office guys. If it wasn’t the NBA he’d be covering the White House for CNN. But when success happens to you, you’ve got to maintain some kind of act that is different from that success. Because you don’t want to be the guy acting like two hundred thousand a year. So Fred played up the old beat reporter thing, which I basically respected him for—the spiral notebook, the chewed-up pencil, cab receipts coming out of his pockets.
“I tried to squirrel my way into Pauley but they wouldn’t let me in.”
“That’s because they recognized you,” I said.
“So what did you see?” He ignored the implication. “How does he look?”
Something told me I should keep my powder dry on all this, because if you’re writing a book about Marcus Hayes, you need every scoop you can get. But I like to talk.
“He looked heavy, he looked old. What you see in that video is after he got blocked by Jabari Moore. He tried to plant on a layup and nothing happened. It’s like he was jumping on sand.”
Fred looked at my phone again, I replayed the clip.
“All those shots went in?” I nodded my head. “At least he can shoot. That takes legs, too.”
“It looks different to me, his release, the whole thing. He used to get up on his jump shot, too. But now it’s more like a quick-trigger. Jabari is long but he doesn’t know how to fight through picks.”
Fred kept tapping the screen, freezing each frame, to see what was going on. Part of what he’s known for is real-time analysis. But he didn’t say anything and eventually passed me the phone again.
“So where are you with Marcus Hayes?” I asked. This is how we talked to each other, this is the language. Like, everybody has this complicated private relation to these people, which we have to digest and eventually make sense of. “What’s the piece about?”
Fred had been looking at all the players under contract, who the Sonics were taking to Austin. Last year they finished 36 and 46, which was a big step up on the previous season, mostly because of Jean Mmeremikwu. He had different nicknames because his last name was hard to pronounce, and his first name was French, so Americans either got it wrong or sounded stupid saying it. Fred made a point of calling him Mmeremikwu, like, what’s your problem, it’s not a big deal. But people also called him Mickey. His father was Nigerian but he grew up in Marseille and only started playing basketball when he was fifteen. His real love was soccer, that’s the kind of piece people wrote about him. He was six ten with a seven-five wingspan and could go baseline to baseline in two dribbles.
“What really worries me,” Fred said, “is Marcus going up against that guy in practice every day. Mmeremikwu’s a killer, he’s going to run him off the court. If there’s a power struggle in the team, and there’s going to be a power struggle, I don’t see how Marcus can keep up with him. He just won’t have the energy.”
“Is that what you’re going to write?”
“More or less. But I wanted to see him play first.”
The lounges in these hotels always pipe in soft jazz and easy-listening pop. There are heavy-leaved plants in large pots that have to be watered daily and give off a faint scent of spritz. The upholstery is totally sound-absorbent. That’s the atmosphere in which you conduct these conversations.
Fred said to me, “You look a little beat.”
“I flew in yesterday. I’ve been running around, trying to get people to answer my calls. My publisher needs Marcus to sign one of these access agreements for the authorized biography. Blah blah blah. They’re totally meaningless, but that’s what they want. If he changes his mind, he can change his mind, and there’s nothing anybody can do. But the whole book was Marcus’s idea in the first place, that’s what I told the publishers. So they want proof.”
“Congratulations, by the way. I’ve been meaning to write you.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t know.”
Sometimes almost in spite of these collegial relationships, where what you share is a nerd interest in unimportant facts, something human passes or gets communicated. “What’s up?” he said.
“Don’t you ever get sick of playing handmaiden to these people?”
“What do you mean?”
“They put balls in hoops, that’s what they do. But we chase them around the country for eight months a year trying to persuade our readers that it matters.”
“I know what you mean. I miss my kid.”
“How old is he now?”
“Three next month.”
“One of my nephews is three,” I said, but that wasn’t really an equivalent response. “None of this would bother me if we actually got to write what we think about these people, but we’re basically in the PR business.”
“I hate to tell you but I write what I think. This is the dumb stuff I think about. I’d rather cover these guys than Congress. At least these guys are good at what they do.”
“Maybe,” I said.
*
That night I got a call from Joe Hahn, Marcus’s lawyer, who told me to stop by the house on my way to the airport in the morning. My flight was at noon. I’ll give you breakfast, he told me. What do you like? Pancakes, oatmeal, egg-white omelets? I’ve got a personal chef these days, my wife tells me I need to lose twenty pounds, but you can eat what you want. Joe’s accent was still the accent he grew up with, in Saginaw, which is one of those cities where the government is starting to tear stuff down. Just because nobody wants to live there. Anyway, that’s what he sounded like, pure Michigan, so when he talked about egg-white omelets it was hard to tell who he was making fun of. Me or this life he led. I said, toast is fine.
I can do toast myself.
He lived on Foothill Road, between Santa Monica and Sunset, in a modest six-thousand-square-foot ten-million-dollar house that looked like a Ramada Inn. The street was lined with palm trees, the grass had been recently crew cut, the hedges were shaped like fresh pears. When I rang the doorbell I could hear the clanging echoing through marble halls—it was nine o’clock in the morning, and the smell of freshly watered lawn rose in the air like mist from a perfume bottle. Already I could feel the heat of the day in my armpits. I felt like the kind of guy who gets turned away by the guy making ten bucks an hour to turn such people away.
Actually, his teenage daughter opened the door. The air tasted filtered and the kid said, “Hello? Can I help you?” She had been well brought up.
“Is your dad around? I think he’s expecting me,” and a voice from the back called out, “Kimmy? Who’s there? Is that Brian? Tell him to come in,” and she said, “Please, follow me.”
“Did you have a good summer?” I asked her.
“Yes, thank you.”
“Shouldn’t you be at school?”
“It’s Saturday!”
“That’s no excuse.”
“It’s not an excuse, it’s a reason.”
There was just a little eye contact, before her hair fell across her face. Then she handed me over and disappeared wherever in a house like that kids go.
Joe’s office was really the kitchen table. He even had a phone on it, and part of it was covered in papers. He said, “We’ve got seventeen rooms in this house, and it doesn’t matter, I always end up here. It drives my wife crazy, she says there’s nowhere to eat, so I said, that’s a fixable problem. Just get a bigger table, so that’s what we did.”
Behind him a wall of glass exposed the swimming pool, which was designed to look like it had been carved out of natural rock. Ferns and ivy overflowed into the water, and to walk dry-footed across the lawn a sort of trickle of paving stones had been set irregularly into the grass. You had to look closely through the tropical border to see the high metal fence.
I said, “Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Your wife.”
“On Saturday mornings she sings in this Anglican choir. It’s like a cult, but it makes her happy.” Then he said, “Can I get you something to drink? I make my own coffee. It’s better than the coffee other people make.”
“First you can tell me what the hell is going on,” I said. “Does he want me to write this book or not?”
“Let’s have coffee and we can talk about it.”
“I don’t want coffee, I have a plane to catch. The coffee at the Marriott is fine with me. I want a signature on a piece of paper.”
“I thought your flight was at twelve.”
“It is.”
“So sit down and chill the fuck out and let me make you a cup of coffee.”
And that’s what he did. It was a whole production, I don’t want to go into detail. He made me sit through it because the machine was too loud to permit conversation. After it was over, in the fresh quiet, he handed me a small cup and waited for me to say something about it, so I said, “It tastes like coffee.”
“You’re a real charmer.”
“Yesterday they kicked me out of Pauley when I tried to watch him practice.”
“It’s a closed session.”
“He asked me to write this book. I flew down here, at some personal cost. Every time I go out of town, arrangements have to be made, about who looks after the kids …”
“What kids? You don’t have any kids.”
“I’m living with my sister, she’s going through a divorce … I upend my whole life and move to Austin so I can write this book, and the publishers won’t even pay me until I get some kind of assurance that Marcus is going to play along.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your sister,” he said. The madder I got, the quieter he became.
“Marcus saw me at the gym, he let security take me away.”
“Let’s not worry about what Marcus did or didn’t see or do. He’s very focused right now on what he needs to be doing, which is getting himself ready for the season.”
“You forget, I’ve known him a lot longer than you have.”
“I don’t think making this personal like that is going to help anybody.”
“Then why did he ask me to write the book?”
For a second, Joe looked at me, he didn’t say anything. Then he said, “He wants you to do it but he wants to make sure you’re going to do it right.”
“What does that mean?”
Then Kimmy came into the kitchen and opened the fridge, like she was sneaking around.
“What are you eating?” Joe called out.
“I’m not eating, I’m just looking.”
“You just had breakfast. Have a piece of fruit.”
“I’m not hungry for fruit.”
“Have an apple.”
“I can’t eat apples.” And she grinned to show her braces.
“I’ll cut it up for you.”
“Dad,” she said and closed the fridge and walked out.
“How old’s your daughter?” I asked.
“I’m not talking about her.”
So we sat in silence for a minute. He looked at the papers on his desk, he had something to occupy him. I mean, he actually started working or whatever it is that lawyers do. After a while, you think, this is stupid, I’m not going to play these games. So you always lose.
“Why’d he ask me to write the book if he didn’t want it to be personal?”
“There’s personal and there’s personal.”
“So what does Marcus want?”
“The right kind.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Yes, you do. And if you don’t …”
“What?”
And he stopped what he was doing and looked up. “Come on, Brian. This is a beautiful story, don’t make it complicated. A kid like Marcus Hayes, who grew up the way Marcus grew up … single mother, there are a lot of different men around, not all of them nice. In the end he gets taken in by another family, a nice white middle-class family, so he can finish high school. I don’t need to tell you any of this. Anyway, he makes it to the NBA, he wins titles, he wins MVPs, he makes a ton of money and retires. And now he wants to come back for one more run, so he can bring NBA basketball to his hometown.”
“I don’t understand why he wants to come back.”
“I just told you.”
“I don’t understand why he quit in the first place.”
“Brian,” Joe said. “Is what I just described not an accurate description of events?”
“It’s fine. So you write the book.”
“He asked you. For what it’s worth, I advised against it. I said, Brian Blum is one of those reporters who thinks the real story is always something unpleasant.”
“You’re talking about the gambling piece again. Pat McConaughey.”
“I’m making a general observation.”
I looked at my watch, I had a plane to catch. But time never passes the way you want it to … there was no great urgency. It was half an hour to the airport from Beverly Hills and only nine o’clock. Joe saw me look and said, “There’s plenty of time.”
“So what happens now?”
“Are you going to write something about the workouts at Pauley?”
“I was there for like five minutes before they kicked me out.”
“Are you going to write something?”
“I might.”
“We look forward to reading it,” he said and walked me to the door.
14
I didn’t see as much of Marcus junior year, because Caukwell promoted him to varsity. On Friday nights, the JV game tipped off right after class; it was really just the warm-up act. We finished around six, and most of the guys showered and went home. But I hung around the gym afterward because I’d started writing a sports column for the school newspaper. So I watched him play like everybody else, from the bleachers.
Marcus had a breakout season and Burleson spent most of it in first place. Then, just before the playoffs, Isaac Brown quit the team and transferred to McCallum. I mean, he actually left the school because of Marcus, who just abused him in practice. Caukwell tried to put a stop to it, he tried to contain it. In scrimmages, he made them play together. But what Marcus did, since he often had the ball, was drive deep into the lane and then suddenly whip a pass to Isaac under the basket. That was Isaac’s weak spot, he had hard hands. Marcus didn’t even have to say anything when the ball bounced out, he just ran back on D. But the next time down he’d do the same thing again.
It got to the point where Isaac wouldn’t even get in rebounding position, because he didn’t want to drop another pass. I heard all this from Caukwell years later; he thought it was funny. Most coaches have a soft spot for guys who are totally ruthless. Especially ex-football types. But at the time it must have been a real problem, Isaac was his second-best player.
*
Various things were going on in Marcus’s home life. The reason Selena moved from Dallas in the first place is that she broke up with her married lover, who was a patient-care technician at Baylor. That’s why she ended up at Seton Medical, to make a clean break. But later that year, over the summer, she moved back to Dallas and eventually started living with the guy, who had gotten a divorce. Who knows when they actually resumed their relationship, maybe they never completely fell out of touch. Selena needed and received a lot of male attention. Tony, Harvey’s dad, was basically living with her at the time. He also had a new baby with his former wife and a house in Taylor for which he still made mortgage payments.
But Marcus never talked to me about all this.
A few weeks before the playoffs started, we biked over to Eastwoods and Harvey tagged along. Sometimes he liked to stand on the sidelines and comment on the games, like he was Brent Musburger. “What a rebound by Marcus Hayes! Flying through the air! Head and shoulders above the crowd!” Loud enough so everyone could hear.
Afterward, when we got on our bikes again, Marcus said to him, “Why are you such a loser?”
And Harvey said, “What are you talking about?”
“You let all those people laugh at you.”
“They were just laughing.”
“Because they’re thinking, what a loser.”
“You know what, I don’t even care what people are laughing at.”
“That’s good, because it’s you.”
“Whatever.”
On the way home, we saw a piece of garden hose lying in the road. Then we realized it was a rattlesnake. Harvey got off his bike and picked it up—he held it limply in his hand, because it was dead.
Marcus said, “You crazy, man. You one crazy kid.”
“It was obviously dead.”
“Maybe it’s just asleep.”
And Harvey put his knuckle to the snake’s head, and said, “Wakey, wakey!”
“You’re crazy,” Marcus said again.
“Do you want to touch it?” Harvey said.
“No way.”
“Come on, touch it. It’s like, super dry.” He stroked its back like he was stroking fur. “It’s kind of cool.”
“No, thank you.”
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.
“Give it to my stepmom. For a necklace.”
And he hung it around his neck. It was only four or five feet long, just a baby rattler, and you could see where it got run over by a car. Part of the middle was squished flat.
“For real?” Marcus said; he was laughing. He actually had a nice laugh, totally kid-like and almost silent.
“No, dipshit,” Harvey said and threw it down the curbside drain. We went as far as Red River in convoy, mostly on neighborhood streets, then I headed north alone and they crossed under the highway to the east side. I watched them bike off together.
