Long Shot - Mike Lupica [27]
And where.
“Word,” Joe said again, and put out his fist for a little pound.
“Lots of words,” Pedro Morales said. “And the best kind.”
“What kind is that?”
“The truth,” Pedro said.
When he got home from school Monday afternoon he was surprised to find both his parents there.
His mom had taken the afternoon off from True Blue and his dad said he had just come from the restaurant to pick up some paperwork he had left in the tiny office he kept on the second floor of their house.
Usually Pedro liked to chill for a couple of hours between the end of school and the start of practice. Not today. As soon as he got home today he knew he just should have stayed at school, because he decided when he went upstairs to play video games that he wanted to be in the gym working on his shooting. But when he asked his mom to drive him to practice early, his dad said he’d take him instead.
“Let me go get my sneakers and we can go right now if you want,” Luis Morales said.
“Why do you need your sneakers to drive me to school?”
“I could use a little exercise,” his dad said, “that does not involve rearranging tables and opening boxes.”
Then he ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, the way Pedro did when he was impatient to go outside and play. When he came back down, Pedro said to him, “You don’t have to do this, Papa.”
“I want to,” he said, then clapped his hands. “And who knows, maybe the old soccer dad can help you out with your basketball.”
He put his arm around his son’s shoulders and they walked through the front door together, like they were walking into one of their Saturday mornings.
But even having his dad on the court with him didn’t help with his shot.
His dad kept rebounding the ball for him, telling him to trust it, boy, telling him just get a good look at the basket and then let it go.
Pedro still couldn’t get nearly enough shots to fall.
“In soccer,” Luis Morales said, “if you think too much, it is as if somebody keeps moving the goal.”
He was right, as usual.
It was as if somebody kept moving the basket on Pedro, no matter how much his dad tried to keep him positive. And nobody he knew had a more positive attitude—about everything—than his dad did.
Pedro kept moving around the court, as if playing a game of Around the World against himself, trying to find a spot where he felt comfortable. But he couldn’t. It seemed to be something different on every shot. He had too much air under the ball. Or not enough. He didn’t put enough spin on the ball. Sometimes he felt as if he were chucking the ball from the side instead of taking his shooting hand right past his nose, the way Coach Cory had taught them on their very first day of fifth-grade practice.
The worse it got, the more frustrated Pedro became.
As good as his dad’s attitude was, Pedro’s was the opposite, at least today. This was something he couldn’t blame on Ned Hancock or anybody else. His dad always liked to say that you couldn’t fool sports, and so there was no point in trying to fool yourself.
Sports, Luis Morales said, always let you know exactly where you stood.
Today Pedro knew exactly where he stood with his shooting. No matter where he happened to be standing on the court.
“If I can’t make these shots here, with nobody guarding me,” he said to his dad, “how am I ever going to make a big shot in a game?”
“You will before the season goes much further, wait and see,” his dad said, then snapped off an amazing bounce pass from all the way across the court, making Pedro wonder again what kind of player his dad could have been if he had had the chance to play basketball instead of soccer.
Pedro caught the ball chest-high just left of the free throw line, thought he had actually released one perfectly for a change, then saw that this was another one that was too hard and offline, hitting high off the backboard without catching any iron.
“I quit!” Pedro shouted, his words seeming to bounce off every wall in the gym the way his shots