“You do it?”

“Yeah, I did it.”

“Man …” I couldn’t think of anything to say. “At least Blue was innocent.”

“Dave Blue was used, and I was used,” he said. “The only difference was that he didn’t know he was being used because he didn’t see it. I didn’t know I was being used because I didn’t want to see it.”

“White cats do it to you?”

“Ain’t nobody did anything to me,” he said. “I did it to myself. A man come up to me with a fistful of money, and I took it. Nobody gives you something for nothing, and I knew it.”

“What did you do, throw a game?”

“I was what they called a shaver. The gamblers figure out how much a team should win by. They figure you should win by five points, maybe seven. Then that’s the spread. Somebody want to bet some money on you they got to give up the points in the spread. If we were supposed to win by five, I’d see to it that we only won by three or four. If we were supposed to win by three or four, I’d try to cut it down to a deuce.”

“That don’t sound so bad, man; you was still winning.”

“Walking down the street naked don’t sound too bad either until they put your behind in jail.… I knew what I was doing. It wasn’t about the money either. I was making more money than I ever had. I was on top of the world, looking down from a silver cloud. The money the guy gave me was chump change. But he told me I was being slick, and I listened to him. The only thing I ever had in life was my game, Lonnie. It was so sweet, people who didn’t know a thing about it would come to see me play. You know how women come to the games sometimes. They want to see your body in the air doing things that other cats can’t do. You know how that feels to you when you’re doing it. I would touch the ball and I would know something was going to happen.… It was a kind of magic. It made me something that a million other guys would pay to watch.

“That’s what I sold for the chump change. I sold my game! It got so that I hated to play. I’d go out there and warm up with the other guys, and all I could think about was what I was going to do. I still had a game, but there would come times when I had to pull it together, when I had to play it to the bust to keep from losing, and I just couldn’t do it.

“I told the cat that gave me the bread that I couldn’t do it anymore, and he looked at me and he just laughed. We were sitting in the lobby of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. He looked at me when I said I wouldn’t shave any more points for him, and then he ordered a bottle of liquor and acted like he had never heard what I said. I had already sold my game.