Long Shot - Mike Lupica [15]
“What you always do,” Sarah said. “Work harder.”
“You sound like my dad.”
Sarah smiled again and said, “That is the nicest thing you have ever said to me, Mr. Morales.”
“Sarah,” he said. “Ned isn’t just the best player on our team. He’s the best player in town and the best player in our league.”
“He’s better than you at basketball,” Sarah said. “But you’re better than him, especially if he’s acting this way. And you’re going to prove it.”
EIGHT
By the second week of practice, Dave DeLuca was getting as much time with the first team as Pedro was.
Sometimes more.
Coach Cory told Pedro not to get discouraged, he was just “mixing and matching” at this point, and that right now the offense just seemed to be “clicking” better when Ned and Dave were out there together.
Making it all sound like no big deal when they both knew that it was.
“You know you’re still my guy, right?” Coach Cory said.
“Sure,” Pedro said, knowing he sounded about as sincere as he felt. He didn’t feel like the coach’s guy, didn’t feel like the guy he used to be on a basketball court.
“Hey,” Coach Cory said. “You know how good I am at spreading the minutes around.”
Yeah, Pedro thought. My minutes.
If you weren’t Pedro Morales, if you didn’t know what was really going on, you wouldn’t have known anything had changed between Ned and him. Or with their team. But Pedro knew. He could see how different Ned was when Dave was out there with him, the way Ned tried to feature him every chance he could and went out of his way to give Dave a chance to shine.
The spotlight that Pedro always felt was trained on Ned? It was as if Ned was turning it around and putting it on Dave DeLuca.
Dave wasn’t as good a point guard as Pedro. He couldn’t pass as well, didn’t see the court as well, really could only dribble with his right hand, and was an even worse outside shooter than Pedro was.
None of that mattered lately, because Ned made sure it didn’t. If you could play at all—and you had to be able to play to make this team—he could make you look good if he wanted to. If he wanted you to look bad? Same.
Now it was as if he had gone ahead and changed the starting lineup without saying a word to anybody about it, not even the coach.
Coach Cory liked to say that there were always five or six plays that could change a game. An open guy who didn’t get the pass. Or make the shot. A rebound that that a defensive guy should have had, but which ended up in the hands of one of the offensive guys. A missed layup. A loose ball that you ended up with instead of the other guys.
“The biggest stories in sports are really a bunch of small moments,” Coach liked to say. “Sometimes one moment.”
He even used baseball as his big example. He talked about how the greatest comeback in sports history—when the Red Sox came back from three games to none against the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series—started this way in the ninth inning of Game 4, when the Yankees were three outs away from the World Series:
A walk.
A stolen base.
A single up the middle.
“All that did was tie the game,” Coach Cory said. “And the Yankees were still up three games to zip. But they were done from that moment on, we just didn’t know it until a few days later. Hugest story ever, and how did it start? Walk, stolen base, a single up the middle.”
The point of this, he always told them, was that you’d better play every play as hard as you could, because it could be the one that changed everything.
Right now, Pedro couldn’t make a play to save his life. And that’s why he knew, without Coach Cory coming out and saying it, that when the season started against Camden on Sunday afternoon, it was going to start with him on the bench.
Didn’t mean he was going to stay there. Didn’t mean it was permanent. He was still going to get his minutes, and his own chance to shine this season. He was still trying as hard as he could, as hard as he ever had.
It was just that nothing was clicking for him right now.
His favorite season of the year wasn’t spring or summer