Long Shot - Mike Lupica [18]
So this was one more thing he would have to learn: how to be a scrub.
He didn’t even want to look across the court to where his parents and Sarah were sitting.
Pedro told himself that he’d only do that after he’d gotten into the game and actually done something.
The Knights didn’t miss him at all in the first quarter, because they came out flying. They couldn’t do anything wrong and the Cavaliers couldn’t do anything right.
The Knights played so well that Pedro, as much of a team guy as he was, started to feel even worse about being on the bench. It was like: Do they have to make it look this easy without me on the court?
It was as if the Knights were pitching a perfect game. And the biggest reason was that the ball seemed to be in Ned Hancock’s hands as often as if he was the one pitching.
When the Knights ran their offense, they seemed to end up with layups half the time. When they ran out on the break, the Cavs were so slow trying to keep up, it was as if they were wearing their winter boots.
Dave was shutting down his man, Tim, staying in front of him the way Coach Cory had told him to. Ned was doing everything to Alex Truba except pulling his jersey up over his head to blindfold him.
When Jeff Harmon drove to the basket for yet one more layup right before the horn ended the first quarter, the Knights were ahead by the amazing score of 22-2. Before they even got to the bench, Coach Cory was out on the court to meet them, telling them not to go into their version of a touchdown dance, because there were three quarters left to play.
Then he turned back to the bench and said, “Next five, let’s go.”
Bobby Murray said, “Oh, great. How do we top that?”
“We don’t,” Pedro said in a voice only loud enough for Bobby to hear. “I think only Duke or Carolina could do that.”
Pedro was always nervous when he first got into a game. Not because he was scared of making a mistake, though there was always a little bit of that going on inside him. No. Usually Pedro had what Coach Cory liked to call his “good nerves” going for him. Nerves that Coach said you could always make disappear with your first good pass, good shot, or good stop on defense.
Today he couldn’t make them go away.
He wasn’t exactly playing badly. And the second unit—that expression had never bothered him before, but now he hated the sound of it inside his head: second unit, like it was a way of saying second class—would hold their own against the Cavaliers.
It wasn’t that.
It was that Pedro felt as if some stranger were wearing No. 10 today.
Pedro was the opposite of what he usually was, in soccer or basketball, which meant that he wasn’t playing to make something happen. Worse than that, he was playing afraid.
Afraid to make a mistake.
And if you were afraid like that, you shouldn’t even be out there.
He’d see an opening, a chance to thread the needle with one of his bullet passes. And he wouldn’t take it, because he was afraid he’d throw the ball away.
All of a sudden, a turnover felt like the thing that scared him most in the world. He was still seeing plays develop inside his head; he just wasn’t doing anything about them. And in a way, a big way, playing the game like that was worse than watching it from the bench.
With about two minutes left in the half, Pedro was on the right side of the court, just outside the circle, when Clarence set a perfect pick for Bobby over on the weak side. Pedro saw the whole thing developing, and even though there was some traffic between him and Bobby’s lane to the basket, the pass was there.
It was there.
But Pedro waited too long, held the ball, even though he could feel Bobby’s eyes burning into him the whole time. Finally he just swung the ball over to Clarence, who seemed so surprised to get it that he fired up a shot that banged high off