Zone Defense

The boos cascaded like rushing rapids onto the blond hardwood.

            They splashed back up, wave-like into Jimmy’s mouth and nostrils, damn near wetting his hair already coated with sweat.

            The boos were for him.

            All him.

            Damn, I love this game, he thought.

            A lesser coach, a poor man’s version of himself, one who merely hoped to win, or one who even planned to win but failed at least half of the time, would have folded in that moment of duress and provocation.

            They would have sat down and cowered, maybe mumbled something under their breath to their assistant or shook their head as to rid themselves of a persistent headache or a gnat in the ear.

            But he was Jimmy Trost. He did none of those things.

            He guaranteed victory. And usually, he was prescient. Three trips to state in five years. No titles, but that was coming.

            “Coach, do you really want a technical foul?”

            The corpulent referee, a big, fat zebra with a bald head and salt-and-pepper moustache, had come running up as if to launch himself in a tackle. But at the last moment he stopped and stood in front of the scorer’s table and Jimmy noticed his right leg was quivering ever so slightly.

            That was Jimmy’s reputation. Volatile misconduct.

            Even the zebras feared him.

            What happened next was a shit idea, but often when provoked, one revels in antisocial tendencies.

            “Go right ahead,” Jimmy replied, and he removed his ginger-tweed sport coat and handed it to someone behind him, he didn’t see. Probably one of his players or Kelso, that dipshit of a team manager whose only contribution to the Barton School men’s basketball team—and they were men, at least when Jimmy got done with them—was handing out towels and green cups of water with the orange Gatorade logo.

            Fatso didn’t crease his face.

            Clearly, he was nonplussed.

            He formed a T with the palms and erect fingers of his hands.

            Technical foul.

            Two shots for the home team, which wasn’t the Barton School.

            Jimmy’s five starters stood at half court, wiping the bottoms of their sneakers with their own palms. One of them was wiping the sweat off of his lips with the collar of his jersey. Each seemingly stared off in a different direction, as if to survey the crowd and its intentions.

            They stared as if they had seen it all before.

            There was pinprick of silence generated by the collective inhaling of hundreds of opposing fans, and then a cacophony of cheers sprinkled with, “Siddown asshole!” and “F you, Trost! You suck!”

            Jimmy grinned.

            This was his moment.

            He found them almost arousing, sexual in nature, and he’d prefer to climb inside the sheets and let whatever happen, happen. A time when the clock stopped, or rather disappeared.

            His lips moved.

            “Hit me again, baby!”

            Another collective inhalation, but this time, the cheers and jeers were delayed like a land mine in the middle of the rice paddies in Vietnam that Jimmy had read about, when he actually read.

            Fatso’s knee wasn’t quivering anymore.

            He reprised the T with his hands and yelled at the mortified folks at the scorer’s table.

            “We’ve got a double technical. Barton coach is ejected.”

            Now Jimmy guffawed, making daggered eye contact with Fatso.

            He sensed movement in his left peripheral vision.

            “Come on, coach, you gotta go.”

            That was the skinny ref, some guy about Jimmy’s age with an indigo flattop, probably wondering if Jimmy wasn’t beyond taking a poke at him. Or maybe he was wondering whether the $65 he earned for reffing this game was worth it. 

            Jimmy turned on his left heel and strode with purpose past his seated scrubs, toward Kelso, who held out the sport coat. He grabbed it, turned back on his right heel, and made a show of putting the jacket back on in front of the opposing fans behind his team’s bench.

            He was still grinning.

            “Get out!” they chanted. 

            “Get out! Get out!”

            “You get off on that, don’t you?”

            Kay-Kay successfully spun a basketball on the tip of her right index finger, and it stayed put like a globe until she pulled her finger away and the ball nestled into her hands. One of her players materialized and she executed a garden-variety bounce pass. The girl ran off dribbling, the sound of ball hitting floor echoing in the near-empty Barton School gym.

            “So what if I do?” Jimmy replied, picking up another basketball and spinning it on his right index finger before lofting it in the air toward another of Kay-Kay’s players who stood nearby with an apparent question. She must have changed her mind because she, too, turned and dribbled away.

            “That’s your fourth technical this season. We’re only in January.”

            “At least let me have this. I don’t drink, don’t smoke the ganja. I’m a fine church-going lad.”

            That wasn’t true. He hadn’t been to church since Pops passed, that self-proclaimed, sanctimonious fundamentalist. As for drinking, he enjoyed a mojito every now and again. Ganja he left behind in college.

            Kay-Kay merely shook her head, as if she was attempting to release his evil spirits that had taken up residence in her mind.

            Jimmy Trost tended to keep others at an arm’s length, because he’d had enough of the sky-blue pink that came with people that said one thing and then darkened as they did something else. People who asked for advice, for example, and didn’t take his. Or someone who spoke enthusiastically to his face and then talked shit behind his back. Club coaches could be like that. So could entitled parents who’d spent thousands on club basketball, only to realize their kid barely made the team, much less start.

            Jimmy wasn’t that far gone to believe everyone was a snake, waiting to bite. To outsiders, it only seemed that way.

            Kay-Kay was his rare exception. 

            She of the coffee skin and perpetual black hair band, with the belief that man-to-man defense always trumped zone—Jimmy didn’t agree, but they laughed about it—had been hired as the Barton School’s women’s basketball coach the same school year as he had, five seasons ago now. They were unlikely confidants. She told him things. He told her a few things, more than other people. Mostly they talked basketball: The proper way to break a press, for example, or the finer points of teaching the game to kids that had grown up in club ball and considered themselves hot shit by the time they got to high school.

            Or technical fouls.

            Kay-Kay had gotten one—one!—technical in her entire coaching tenure. But it was justified, she had said.

            As for Jimmy, he had lost count.

            He was a dragon on the court, with the refs, opposing coaches, hell, even his own players from time to time.

            But he won. The three times he had taken his team downstate, the media coverage had been so substantial that the Barton School’s marketing department leveraged it to the hilt. The equation went like this:

            Get to state = media coverage = Barton School prestige = increased enrollment = dollars.

            That was the quotient. Always the dollars.

            The school’s regents by and large overlooked his behavior for that reason.

            “You better be careful.”

            Jimmy looked up and Kay-Kay’s eyes bored into his own with an anvil presence, as if he had been caught stealing in the local 7-Eleven.

            “What are they going to do, fire me?”

            “You ever thought about what would happen if they did?”

            Nope. 

            “Why do you hassle the referees so much? You know you’re only going to get kicked out.”

            “To relax,” Jimmy deadpanned. 

            “You’re not funny,” Kay-Kay said, before blowing her whistle, the screech still filling the gym as she yelled to her kids, “All right, fifty free throws. Get to it.”

            “Besides,” Jimmy said, “if that’s my only vice, then I’m doing pretty good in life.”

            “Yes, but what about your players? What are you teaching them?”

            “That you have to stick up for yourself sometimes, otherwise people will bulldoze you.”

            “No,” Kay-Kay said, “you’re teaching them that it’s okay to react without contemplation. That it’s actually a virtue.”

            When Jimmy heard this, he was tempted, oh, ever so tempted, to remind Kay-Kay that she had never taken a team to state, though she had gotten close twice. As of January 6, 2022, her team was undefeated, so maybe this would be the year.

            But she hadn’t done it yet.

            Saying so would be an asshole move, though, and while Jimmy didn’t care much for most people, he did value Kay-Kay’s insights about basketball, and sometimes, about life.

            “Let’s see, reacting without contemplation,” Jimmy replied. “What do you think Bobby Knight would say about that?”

            The former Indiana coach had won three NCAA national championships with the Hoosiers and nearly two more. He was bombastic, confrontational and controversial, once throwing a chair across the Assembly Hall floor after (in his estimation) a bad call. His anger and sarcasm knew little boundary, especially when he knew he was right.

            Bob Knight was Jimmy’s hero. While he doubted he’d ever toss a chair, the thought had danced in the back of his mind more than a few times. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

            Maybe. But Jimmy sensed the media-savvy marketing department, and the regents, wouldn’t appreciate the bad publicity. That could impact enrollment.

            Always the dollars.

            “It’s January,” Kay-Kay said. “Maybe it’s time to turn over a new leaf.”

            “I like my leaves the way they are.”

            “You ever heard of Dry January?”

            “What’s that?

            Kay-Kay shook her head to indicate her continued amazement that Jimmy simply ignored what wasn’t within the tunnel-vision confines of basketball.

            “It’s where you take the month off from drinking.”

            “I don’t drink.” Again, not exactly true.

            “But it can be for any vice,” she said, intently observing her players’ free throws, and not speaking directly to Jimmy. “You have the ability to affect change in your life, and by extension, the lives of others.”

            “Now, wait a minute,” he replied. “Are you saying I’m, what, flawed?”

            Then Kay-Kay turned to him. 

            “We’re all flawed,” she said. “I’m only saying, eventually one of your tirades is going to get you in a helluva lot of trouble, something you might not be able to get out of. That’s what eventually happened to Knight, if you recall.”

            She was right, of course. That’s how Bobby ended up at Texas Tech at the end of his career.

            “I’ll just go somewhere else,” he said, with a flippancy that touched a nerve with Kay-Kay, because she took a baby step toward him and jutted out her right index finger. The carefully shaped nail was painted a fluorescent pink.

            “Just think to yourself the next time some ref tempts you to go off,” she said., “am I being myself? Or am I outside my body, being someone else? Being someone better than me?”

            “So the idea with Dry January is self-improvement?”

            “No, it has little to do with you. It’s about empowerment.”

            She turned back to her free-throw-shooting players.

            “Of others.”

            The ball sailed out of bounds into the faceless crowd of bobbing, screaming heads, and was caught in the second row by a dad of one of the kids on the opposing team. The man stood, and at approximately 6-foot-4 with muscles bulging through his gray t-shirt, he looked to be spry enough to take the floor. For a moment, Jimmy pondered how he would neutralize him if he actually entered the game. Probably a double-team to force him to kick it outside. Then you had to hope the shooter wasn’t deadly from three-point range.

            Jimmy flushed that nonsense from his mind when the referee—Fatso from the other night—signaled the ball had been last touched by one of Barton School’s red-jerseyed players, a stiff named Cowley. Fatso held up his left hand, fingers erect, and slid the palm of his other hand across the fingertips, then spun and pointed in the opposite direction, away from the Barton School bench, where Jimmy had been standing with his arms flared out like a set of shipyard cranes.

            Last touched by Barton.

            Opponent’s ball.

            “What?” Jimmy caterwauled. “You gotta be kidding me!”

            Fatso didn’t even turn around. He just ran down the floor.

            “Sir, the ball was last touched by fourteen!” Jimmy howled, speaking of a kid that, Jimmy came to think of it, might have been the son of the dad who caught the ball.

            There was the sudden sensation of something ricocheting off his left leg. It stung for a mere moment, almost bullet-like in its surprise.

            Jimmy turned.

            The dad had lofted the ball, not to Fatso, but toward Jimmy. When the ball hit him, the man remained standing and raised both of his arms in the air. Jimmy made eye contact with him and the dad mouthed, “Screw you.” 

             Always wanting to get in on the action, because he wasn’t good enough to make the team, Kelso had grabbed the ball, ran it over to Jimmy, and handed it to him.

            Fatso arrived a moment later.

            “What, you’re going to let that go?” Jimmy hollered. “That guy ought to get kicked out of here. That’s may very well have been assault.”

            “We’re going to deal with him, coach,” Fatso replied, raising his voice over the crowd that had been simmering, but was now flailing with glee.

            “You better.”

            The referee stared Jimmy down with black eyes.

            “Come on, coach, don’t make me T you up again. Remember the other night.”

            Jimmy was then outside of his body, not in empowerment, but rage, the waves returning and splashing against his shirt, soaking his underarms, steam escaping through his shirt collar, forming beads of sweat on his forehead and cheeks.

            He stamped his right foot on the floor, leaving a black mark from the heel of his loafers in front of his chair. Oh, it was tempting.

            Jimmy thought of Bob Knight. 

            He thought about picking up the chair and lofting it in the direction of the dad.

            The moment was scintillating. 

            Would the regents have cared? They lived in a bubble of bean-counting that came from effective marketing and PR. That made Jimmy a tool, a means to an end. A way to increase enrollment.

            He won basketball games. Parents wanted their kids to play for a winner.

            Check that. His players won games. They executed strategy.

            Objective. Strategy. Tactics. The components of effective marketing and PR.

            The objective was to win. Everything else, from zone defense to three-point shooting, rolled up to that.

            Jimmy was still outside of his body, but the tide had receded. The steam had dissipated. The beads of sweat were drying ever so slowly.

            I’m someone else, he said to himself. I’m someone else.

            I don’t know if I’m better, but I’m someone else.

            I don’t know. Am I better? 

            Was I sick? Am I sick?

            There was movement in his left peripheral vision. The dad was elbowing his way past other fans in the bleachers. A man in a blue windbreaker that said Security on the back in bold white letters pointed toward the exit, and the man complied, but not before delivering a middle-finger salute to Jimmy. The fans around him cackled.

            Fatso took two large Simon Says steps toward Jimmy and held up his hands in a near-wrestling pose, anticipating the worst.

            Jimmy was now truly outside his body, in a parallel universe of his own creation.

            Kay-Kay wasn’t there, but her ghostly image stood beside him, complete with her black headband and a Property of The Barton School hoodie. She didn’t speak. She was just…there.

            “Okay, coach. Just relax, we took care of him. He’s gone.”

            Jimmy turned to Fatso and eyed him up. He was tempted to remove his sport coat, but he decided it was now a bit chilly in the gym. Then he sat down, crossing his hands on his lap.

            His players on the court had stopped wiping the bottoms of their sneakers and stood at attention, awaiting his call for the next play. 

            Man defense or zone?

            “Let’s play ball,” Jimmy said. “Let’s just play ball.”