Roy got up the highest; I came in second; then Ox, Breeze, Paul, and Lenny. Jo-Jo, Walter, and the rest of the scrubs did okay, but not as good as the starters. Then Cal made each of us go to a basket and put a piece of tape on the backboard as high as we had jumped on the first board.

“Now all I want you to do is to jump two inches higher than that mark and you can sit down and have a soda on me and then we can play some four-on-four.”

It sounded easy enough. Roy started in first, but Cal stopped him and called him over to where he was standing under the board.

“Now do it!” Cal said.

Roy jumped up but missed the tape. He tried again. He missed again. Then he backed off and started to come in, but Cal stopped him.

“No good,” he said. “I want you to come in and start from here.”

We had been had. When he first told us to come and make the jump, we had been standing at the top of the key, so naturally we had started out with a run so we could really sky. Now we were trying to jump from a standstill.

“You keep jumping now,” Cal said, “until you’re ready to go show me how you can go two inches over that tape. You just yell out ‘TIT,’ and I’ll come running over.”

Everybody really tried hard at first, but none of us could make it. Then we started slipping further away from the tape as we got tired. Every time we tried to catch some rest, Cal would come over and get on our cases. We called a few things out, but none of them had anything to do with two inches.

I had come to the practice ready to show Cal that I wanted to take care of business. When he talked about his Two-Inch Theory, it was cool with me because I was ready to do it. I figured I would show him that I could work harder than anybody else. But the practice wasn’t hard, it was ridiculous. He had us jumping until I swear I could hear my heart beating louder in my ears than anything else. Then he had us scrambling around on the floor for balls. Not once or twice, but for a half hour! For the whole half hour nobody could stand on his feet. I asked him who he thought we were going to be playing, the NBA All-Stars?

When the practice was finally over, nobody said a word. That’s how tired we were. I wanted to talk to Cal about what had went down with Paul, but I didn’t want Paul to know I was rapping about his situation. I hadn’t spoken to him any more about it, and Mary-Ann said that she didn’t even talk to him about it.

We took showers and were getting dressed, still without talking, when Matt Lee came in with this old dude. He wasn’t really that old, but he was just about bald. He was from a black newspaper and wanted to take some pictures and interview some of the guys. Cal said he could interview some of the guys if he wanted to, but no flicks. That was a downer because everybody wanted to get their flick in the paper. If he had put all our pictures in the paper, they wouldn’t have to sell them on the newsstands because we would have bought them all.