Summer Ball by Mike Lupica Page A

beat a press.
    Not this press.
    Danny kept trying to tell his guys what to do, where to go. Didn’t help. Wherever the ball ended up, there was an immediate double-team, or a triple-team, one that somehow always seemed to include the long arms of Ty or Ollie Grey.
    The only help they were getting from Coach Powers was this:
    â€œThink!”
    â€œYou know what I think?” Will said to Danny, while Ty knocked down a couple more free throws. “I think this dweeb only gets to be our coach for about twenty-two more days.”
    â€œAnd seven hours,” Danny said.
    Tarik pointed at the real clock, not the game clock. “And thirty-four minutes.”
    Danny threw the ball away twice. Dribbled off his foot when he tried to beat one of the Cavaliers’ traps and get down the sideline.
    He’d had one of his outside shots blocked by Ty, which made everybody in the stands cheer.
    â€œSorry,” Ty said quietly after the ball bounced out of bounds.
    â€œMe, too,” Danny said.
    Danny didn’t look at the scoreboard again until it was 75–50 with one minute left. He was wondering by then why somebody hadn’t invoked the kind of slaughter rule they had in Little League baseball.
    For some reason, Coach Powers called one last time-out. In the huddle he said to them, “Nobody thinks so right now, but this has been a great lesson. Would you boys like to know why?” Without waiting for anybody to answer, he said, “I’ll tell you why. Because everybody on this team got a real nice wake-up call today.” He was nodding his head. “You all learned a lesson that boys learn the first week of camp every single year—that only the strong survive here.”
    Will, behind Coach Powers, made a gag-me motion, quickly sticking his finger in his mouth.
    â€œSo as we go forward as a team after today, we’ll find out who our survivors are going to be,” he said.
    Then he told them to run what he called the old picket-fence play, from Hoosiers, Danny’s true all-time favorite movie. He had had the play memorized long before Coach Powers showed it to them, the way he had the movie memorized.
    They took the ball out on the left side, near half-court. Danny started dribbling right, toward the stands. As soon as he did, the Celtics started setting their screens for him, one after another. First Will, then Tarik, then Alex, who set a monster one on Ollie Grey.
    Danny came tearing around Alex like a streak, hit the baseline at full speed, seeing he had a clear path to the basket now.
    He knew how long Ollie’s legs were, how quick he was to the basket or the ball when he wanted to be. But Danny had him now, by ten feet easy, maybe more.
    He thought about going to his left hand as he came down the right baseline, showing Coach Powers that he could bank in a left-hand layup, but decided against it. He wasn’t taking any chances. He was just going to float up a soft little layup and get the heck out of here, go to supper having scored at least one basket today.
    He kept his chin up, eyes on the basket like his dad had always taught him, in a lifetime of telling Danny to play the game with his head up, putting what he knew was the perfect spin on the ball as he released it.
    Then Danny kept running underneath the basket, the way you ran through first base in baseball, angling his body as he moved into the left corner so he could watch his shot go through the basket.
    What he saw instead was Ollie.
    Catching his shot.
    Not just blocking it, catching it with both hands and letting out this roar at the same time.
    Catching it like it was a lob pass Danny had been throwing to him.
    Ollie was so high, had so much time to kill up there, he actually faked like he might throw the ball down, even if this was the Celtics’ basket. Then he smiled and cradled the ball, landing as the horn sounded.
    But the horn wasn’t the sound Danny would remember.
    He would remember the