“You call that a valuable?” I asked him.

“When you’re as pretty as I am, it is,” he said.

We practiced every day that week. Except it wasn’t practice. We didn’t run any plays, we didn’t work out any strategy, nothing. Just simple stuff like going after loose balls. Cal had us going after loose balls so much that anytime a ball would fall to the ground five guys would want to jump on it. Then we practiced boxing out and rebounding until all the fun went out of even being in a gym. My hand was still sore, but it wasn’t that bad. Cal said that I was lucky it hadn’t got infected.

“Hey, Mr. Coach.” Jo-Jo was laying on the floor in a pool of sweat trying to catch his breath. “I just figured out something. This ain’t basketball, man; this is torture with dribbling thrown in to fool the public!”

“It won’t be like this much longer,” Cal said.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Jo-Jo said. “Because I think this is killing me.”

“It won’t be like this much longer,” Cal went on, “because we’re going to have to work harder from now on.”

Jo-Jo started rattling off something in Spanish. If I hadn’t been so tired, it might have been funny.

A day later Ox had to do something so he was going to miss practice, and Breeze said he had to miss, too. So Cal called off practice for that day. That is, he called it off for everybody except me.

Everybody had dug how Cal had been on my case. I’d do something the same way that everybody else did it, but he would find something wrong with it. Sometimes he wouldn’t find anything wrong with it; he would just tell me to do something else.

“When you get the step on the man anywhere from the key in,” he said, “just lay it up. Don’t jam!”

“Why not?” I asked. “That’s the best way to make sure you got the deuce!”

“Yeah, and the only way your man is going to recover,” he said. “Because you got to take that dip step to get up high enough to jam.”

I didn’t give him a lot of static because I knew he was trying, even if he was wrong in some of the things he was putting down. There’s nobody going to recover fast enough to stop me from jamming once I get the step inside the key. I knew how fast I was if Cal didn’t.

When Cal called the practice off for everybody except me, I figured he was just going to be on my case again, but I didn’t mind, really. In fact, I even dug it a little. But when we got to the gym, he was wearing his sneakers and told me to take the ball out. He was going to play against me, and right away I sensed that we were going through a manhood thing.

I took the ball out and went for the hoop as straight up as I could because I didn’t want to hear his mouth talking about how fancy I was trying to get. But he was all over me, pushing at me with his body and all. I figured okay, if he wanted to play manhood games with me, I could play them, too. He was always talking about playing the game to the bust, so that’s the way I started to play it, to the bust.