“Either one of two things is going to happen,” Cal said. “Either you’re going to get me the name of your source or I’m going to the black press to find out why you’re trying to give this tournament a bad name!”

“I’m trying …?” O’Donnel looked at Cal like he didn’t believe him. “Wait a minute.”

He went over to the table he had been sitting at before and pulled out the drawer. There were buttons on the drawer, and he pressed one. A moment later the secretary came in with her notebook and a pencil. That was definitely cool. He told her to bring him the file on the tournament.

“What’s your stake in this anyway?” Cal said.

“What stake?” O’Donnel said. He was putting out his cigar, and I figured the lead had just changed hands.

“I’m only going to ask you one more time,” Cal said. He took a step closer to O’Donnel and there was fear all over the guy.

“My firm handles public relations,” O’Donnel said. “Handling this won’t hurt us, maybe it’ll even help us in a small way with some of the accounts involved.”

The secretary returned with the file, and O’Donnel went back over to his table and pulled the chair around to the back of it and sat down.

“There was a phone call from a Mr. Rashid. That’s R-A-S-H-I-D,” O’Donnel said.

“Yeah,” Cal answered, “we’ll keep the name in mind.”

“Who’s Rashid?” I asked after we had got outside. Cal didn’t know.

“Then who the hell is O’Donnel?” I asked.

“O’Donnel is what basketball is all about,” Cal said. “O’Donnel and cats like him. Because what it’s all about is people paying to come into the gym and people paying to put their ads on television. He ain’t saying I can’t coach good; he’s saying I might hurt that money the sponsors are putting up.

“First thing a guy like O’Donnel does when he sets up a tournament is find out who can win and how they going to look to somebody who’s got some money to put up. Cats putting up big money to sell soft drinks don’t want no jailbirds on the court. They don’t want nobody with no dirt on them. And no matter how clean you look, they’re going to bend over backwards to look even cleaner. He’s got scouts telling him who can win, and somebody’s whispered our name in the man’s ears.”

I tried to talk to him some more about it, but it wasn’t getting through too tough. It had got to Cal, I could tell. The way he was acting and everything, like he was tired. Cal was never tired. He could play ball with us and then run laps and look better than we did.

I didn’t dig O’Donnel telling us what to do and playing his little game. When I left Cal, I told him to forget what O’Donnel had said. He told me to remember it.

“Why I want to remember that crap?” I asked.