Read Playing Days for Free Online Page A

around waiting for Coach before picking up a basketball.
    Only Darmstadt, a schoolboy, was out on court, grinning the broad uncontrollable grin of a kid being looked at, and trying to prove to us that he could dunk. For him, practice was just a small part of an ordinary life, maybe even an escape from it. He was sixteen years old and about to begin his final year at the Fachschule. His father was a pharmacist; his mother grew up on one of the smallholdings outside Landshut and still spent most of her days at the family farm, helping out. Darmstadt was a real local; he didn’t expect to make it out of town. Henkel had drafted him as a part of his economy drive, after somebody from the club spotted him in the youth league and figured he could fill out the practice squad. The team paid him a few hundred marks a monthfor showing up: a windfall, from Darmstadt’s point of view. Every day after the morning session, two of his high school friends met him at the bike racks outside the sports hall, and he took them out to lunch at McDonald’s. Later it would probably seem to him the best summer of his life.
    Not that he couldn’t play. He was skinny and pimply, with long arms whose elbows almost knocked against his hips. Size fifteen shoes don’t suit many people; they look especially awkward on a teenage boy still growing into his length. But he had a quick first step and a cheerful indifference to every aspect of the game that didn’t involve getting off his own shot. With a decent run-up and a lucky grip on the ball he could just about squeeze a dunk over the front rim. Whenever he did, we cheered him, with a loud irony that made him blush – out of pleasure and embarrassment. In any case, it gave him an incentive to try again, and again.
    â€˜It makes me tired to look at him,’ Olaf said.
    Meanwhile, somebody had begun to warm up at the other end of the court. He wore a T-shirt and tracksuit pants and what looked like a pair of loafers (by the way he shuffled around in them) over white socks. Loafers are what old ballplayers turn to when their backs and knees go, but I didn’t know that at the time. I assumed some guy off the street had seen the open door and wanted to try his hand. He bounced the ball a couple times and lined himself up just outside the three-point arc. Then he put up a shot, not hard enough it seemed to me, butthe ball went in. The spin drew it back and he waited for it to come to him, then shuffled a few more steps along the three-point line.
    Something looked wrong about the next shot, awkward or sidelong, but it also went in, and not till he had reached the top of the key did I realize he had shifted to his left hand. When he missed, he chased the ball with heavy steps and returned to the spot he’d missed from and knocked down three straight slowly, with great deliberation, before moving on. I watched him for a few minutes, drawn to the sight as we are to any private act in a public place: a man tying his shoelaces or crying; a boy and a girl holding hands. Then Henkel called us to order at the center of the court, and the stranger reluctantly collected his ball and walked over.
    I recognized him then – he had picked me up from the airport. Only Olaf came over to greet him and slapped him teasingly on his off-season belly. Hadnot made a fist. Then Henkel introduced him to the new guys and the fat young man from the front office took him inside to get his ankles taped.
    Bo had changed out of his loafers and sweats by the time he came out again, but he didn’t look much better. Whether or not his knees still bothered him, a summer on the couch hadn’t done the rest of him any good. He untucked his shirt to give his belly room and moved with the slow persistence of a man trying to find something he might have dropped earlier. Then we ran drills;for the first time all week Henkel took it easy on us. A lot of jumpshots, half court traps, free throws. Nobody