Hardwood: A Novel about College Basketball and Other Games Young Men Play

By Mike Consol

Hardwood is a comedic romp narrated by Jimmy Tribeca, a white point-guard from Brooklyn, N.Y., playing for an otherwise all-black Lewis & Clark College basketball team. Through a fluke, the tiny Portland, Oregon-based college shocks the collegiate basketball world by recruiting one of the nation's most sought after high school graduates, a scoring machine named Trevor Windgate. With superstar Windgate setting scoring records, the Lewis & Clark Pioneers are in hot pursuit of an undefeated Immaculate Season, until the story reaches its madcap crescendo when two catastrophic events imperil several careers and the team's perfect record.

Tribeca is a psychology major battling the persistent Portland rainfall and a nasty case of Seasonal Affective Disorder -- as well as an aberrant relationship with his on-and-off girlfriend and a relationship of questionable closeness to his mother. The protagonist's curriculum includes brutal and revealing therapy sessions with a German émigré named Meghan Himmler, a decorated psychologist Tribeca both admires and resents.

The standoffish Windgate is a nature-loving country boy (hence, his decision to attend Lewis & Clark to study environmental law) who has more in common with Tribeca than his black "brothers" from America's inner cities. One militant teammate starts a mail correspondence with Louis Farrakhan and decides to join the Nation of Islam at mid-season and insists on changing his name, setting off a fresh round of tumult.

The team's head coach, Roman Hoyt, is prescribed a cocktail of anti-depressants to endure the mounting pressure, a situation exacerbated by threats of dismissal from the college's Athletic Director if Hoyt doesn't finally win the Northwest Conference Championship – especially after the department bent recruiting guidelines to get Windgate's letter of intent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483547626

Book preview

34

1

Trevor Windgate was the first McDonald’s All American high school basketball player to enroll at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. They recruited Windgate for his perimeter shooting.

By mid-way through his junior year he would become the greatest scorer in the history of the Northwest Conference. Marketers anticipated his turning pro, joining an NBA franchise and becoming an endorsement machine. It was only a matter of time before he would have athletic shoes named after him and lend his visage and imprimatur to web portals, colognes, energy bars, over-priced automobiles and globally distributed electrolyte drinks. Tens of millions of dollars a year were assumed. It would become an odd footnote that one of the nation’s very best high school athletes would choose to attend a tiny, obscure institution of higher learning named after western explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, a school that only came to fame after it was disclosed that former presidential paramour Monica Lewinsky graduated from there in 1995 with a psychology degree.

The acoustics from those first couple of seasons left me disoriented. My hearing would cut out during pressure situations – the crowd going wild in animated silence. That is just one of several reasons why Trevor Windgate, despite his greatness and eccentricities, is no more than a secondary character in this story. Perhaps that is fitting for a young man who spurned full scholarships from basketball powerhouses like Connecticut, Duke, North Carolina and Kentucky to play in the obscurity of the rain-drenched forests of the Willamette Valley.

People’s motivations are rarely simple. There are complex layers and dimensions of experience and trauma that unwittingly inform just about every action they take. Basketball players only seem simple to the untrained observer because they operate within the black rectangular lines that delineate a basketball court. The objective couldn’t be any clearer — put the ball through the basket. Yet the strategies and counter-strategies required to accomplish that feat is a human chess-match with an unrelenting number of variables. It often drives us to do truly idiotic things. We commit flagrant and technical fouls, scream at referees, argue with coaches, throw elbows and lose our grip on single most important key to successful play: concentration. In the locker room after the game we all speak in clichés to the sports reporters who watch us take showers.

That winter the rain was incessant, setting a modern-day record. We were mostly oblivious because we spent all our time indoors attending classes and practicing. We practiced twice a day in the Pamplin Sports Center for three hours at a stretch. We sweated and drank Gatorade. The coaches pushed us to be more aggressive until a skirmish erupted between overheated teammates. Then the coaches would have us regroup, lecturing us on self-discipline and gamesmanship. At night we holed up in our dorm rooms with textbooks, playbooks and copies of ESPN magazine.

I was one of the white guys. There was something otherworldly about being a minority member, being so deeply ingrained in the physicality of black culture, and going up against men whose milk-chocolate muscularity and quicksilver movements came so naturally. Just one other guy on the twelve-member squad was white, and he didn’t count. His name was Pavel Benda, an east European from the Czech Republic. I had less in common with Pavel than my black teammates. Despite numerous racial and ethnic divides, our commonality was a love for basketball and the adulation of cheering crowds. Our lives revolved around the shriek of the whistle. All our movements were ruled by the coach’s whistle. We started and stopped with a single, harsh blast. Multiple blasts indicated a major transgression or altercation. On game nights the referees had the whistles, and we kicked into frenetic motion or froze in our tracks on their audible commands. The Westminster Dog Show comes to mind.

Word leaked that Trevor Windgate was joining our team. We confronted the coaching staff and they confirmed the rumor without resistance. Some of the benchwarmers worried their scholarships would be canceled. As the team’s freshman point guard, I would be more positively affected by Windgate’s arrival than anyone. Having a dead-eye shooting guard on my wing would take the pressure off. Defenses wouldn’t be able to double-team or overplay me without risking the awful consequences of an open Trevor Windgate spotting up behind the arc to knock down three-pointers.

Trevor Windgate grew up in rural Kentucky where he developed a obsession for the outdoors and all the activities it had to offer – particularly hunting and fishing. This alone set him apart from his black brethren who were all products of urban settings where human beings belonging to rival gangs were the prey of choice. Wild game was basically never seen in the inner city, unless you counted rats and cockroaches.

Windgate shocked the collegiate basketball world by enrolling at our no-name school because it had the best environmental law program in the nation, and the state’s natural beauty and outdoor recreational opportunities had few rivals. He fancied himself a defender of the earth’s natural resources and would bring the full force of U.S. law down upon those who would otherwise defile Mother Nature’s moist and dry bounties. Of course, first he would have to earn his bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences, then he was off to the NBA to fulfill a contract worth untold millions of dollars. The off-seasons would be reserved to return to campus and study for his law degree.

Our prized recruit had an analytical mind and a gift for polemics. But there’s nothing he was more skilled at than shooting a basketball, especially from long range. Few things in sports were as beautiful and dramatic as the thirty-foot jump shot. Fans held their breath as they watched the backspin and glorious arc through the glaring lights while the ball made its long journey toward the rim.

2

Just two days before classes started, Trevor Windgate pulled into campus amid fanfare never before known to Lewis & Clark. A small convoy of three black SUVs with smoked windows and omni-directional high-frequency antennas rolled onto campus and were parked at egotistical angles. Windgate climbed out of the rear seat of the middle vehicle. He was accompanied by the school’s athletic director and the basketball team’s head coach. From the other vehicles came four men, all wearing dark suits and shades on an overcast day. There were coiled wires coming out of their ears and they occasionally mumbled into their cuff links. That, and their immutably stern faces, gave observers the unmistakable impression that Trevor Windgate was already under protection of professional bodyguards. Former U.S. Secret Service agents, if I had to guess. It was all part of the pomp and stagecraft orchestrated by the Athletic Department to make sure its improbable new recruit wouldn’t have any regrets about going downscale.

A throng of reporters immediately surrounded the star. Rain drizzled from the sky. A man was holding an umbrella over Windgate’s head to make sure his fabulously expensive suit was protected from the elements.

The coaches asked me to attend because I would be the other half of the team’s backcourt tandem. Yet they had me stand forty feet away, as though my mundane presence might take some of the luster off their heralded Adonis. He hadn’t played a single minute of collegiate basketball and was already nationally renowned; I was recruited from Brooklyn, New York to be the team’s playmaker and nobody outside city limits knew my name.

Standing aside me in the moist haze was Wanda Rappaport, dean of the School of Law. The musty scent of patchouli oil emanated from her.

This is huge, she said, the biggest thing that could have happened to my law school. I’m going to mentor this young man. The people at the Alumni Association are already wetting themselves.

I looked at Rappaport, whose small round lens had fogged in the damp, chilly air. It wasn’t the kind of language one expected from a doctor of jurisprudence, but her point was taken. Trevor Windgate and the surging basketball program would have every graduate rediscovering their alma mater. That’s why athletic departments are the militaries of college campuses. They’re first in line for fiscal appropriations while other departments had to settle for the leftovers. Good athletic programs maintain school pride and keep money pouring into alumni association coffers. The average Joe was out there thinking, I might have flunked sophomore calculus twenty years ago but my basketball team won this weekend.

Life doesn’t get much better than that for most American men.

But that’s how it works at major universities with nationally publicized sports programs. This was Lewis & Clark, a school that built its reputation on academic prowess. Athletics had been little more than after-school exercise programs. Maybe that was going to change. A new era might be dawning.

Trevor Windgate was on the move again, walking away from the reporters and surrounded by his new entourage. The man closest to him, occupying the position of power and influence, was head coach Roman Hoyt. All eyes were on the new recruit, all six-and-a-half feet of him. Packs of muscle were evident even through the fine wool of his suit and they found their greatest concentrations at the shoulders, triceps and quads. How was anybody supposed to guard a kid so jacked up on country blood and organic chemistry?

When they disappeared into the Student Union building Wanda Rappaport’s mouth started moving again.

What the media is saying about that lame-brain coach is a joke. Acid had come to her voice. Suddenly he’s a mastermind recruiter. What a smoking pile of horse excrement.

Again, the uncouth vernacular from such a learned woman. Perhaps she had been living among the pines for too long.

I’ll tell you who recruited Trevor Windgate to this school – I did. She paused to glance through her foggy spectacles, gauging my reaction. He didn’t come here to play basketball; he could have done that anywhere. He came here to study law and the environment. Hoyt will never admit that I was the person who made the decisive trip to Kentucky. Windgate was getting away and Hoyt didn’t know how to reel him back in. He didn’t understand the kid’s real motives. Trevor asked for me. I closed the deal. He didn’t want to talk X’s and O’s with the coach, he wanted to talk torts and litigation with a legal expert.

Rappaport stared straight ahead while she spoke, as though allergic to anything more than fleeting eye contact.

Of course, you won’t read any of this in the newspapers because the Athletic Department has muzzled me. They’re committed to their own version of events. I’ll play along … for now.

I extended a hand to Rappaport. My name is Jimmy Tribeca.

I know who you are, Rappaport said, ignoring my offering. You’re the point guard. Starting this season you’re life is going to be all about feeding the ball to Trevor Windgate.

I was startled that she knew me, and that she seemed to understand some of the finer aspects of basketball, a sport she had just derided.

You watch the team play?

Never.

Rappaport walked away, leaving a faint wisp of patchouli behind. She was a tiny woman, except for the big cumulus of frizzy hair, a wildlife preserve in its own right, as untamed and overgrown as most of the region’s heavily-watered vegetation.

An hour later my teammates and I were in the locker room circled around Trevor Windgate, who was on a scale, hands on hips and wearing only a burgundy pair of silk bikini briefs. If it had been two-hundred years earlier he might have been a Mandingo at a slave auction. Team trainer Danny Fazlow slid the scale’s metal weights forth and back until balance was achieved.

Two hundred twenty-three pounds Fazlow said. You’ve arrived just as advertised.

When the weigh-in ceremony ended I went my locker to get ready for practice. Next to me was last year’s starting guard, LeVoy Wiggin.

Wiggin raised an arm and applied a fresh layer of scented Red Zone deodorant. You ever stop to think life might not be worth living? he asked.

Odd way to start a conversation, I said.

What better way to start one on a day like this? I’m the disappearing man. In fact, as of today I’m officially invisible. You won’t see me because I’m hidden behind the gigantic shadow of the new recruit.

C’mon, Wig, it’s exciting to have a guy like Windgate here.

Easy for you to say, you’ll still play. My second-to-last fucking year and I’m going to ride the bench. Next week I turn twenty-one and an eighteen-year-old has taken my place.

You’ll still get playing time.

"Damn little. People are going to come out to see Windgate play. It might be college ball but this is still a business, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. The coaches are going to keep Windgate on the court forty minutes a game unless he gets into foul trouble, which probably won’t happen because from what I hear the guy doesn’t play defense. All the motherfucker does is shoot the ball. You know what they called him in high school? Trevor ‘The Machine Gun’ Windgate. I heard that one game he passed the ball just twice, and one of those passes went out of bounds."

Work on your intermediate game and interior play. Forget the point or shooting guard positions and start thinking of yourself as the running forward. Reposition yourself. Readjust. Be a utility player.

A utility player? LeVoy Wiggin screwed up his expression to convey his annoyance. The fuck’s a utility player?

You know what I’m talking about. A guy the coach can plug in anywhere, someone he can count on for whatever the team needs – some defense, some rebounding, an effective screen.

Man, you got it all figured out, don’t you JT? I’m not even good enough to hold onto a starting slot, now you’re telling me to turn myself into Magic ‘Fucking’ Johnson. You got some fairy dust in that locker of yours that I can use, or you been smoking crack?

By now I was naked and gave Wiggin a gesture that indicated surrender.

Don’t be giving me the silent treatment. I ain’t done arguing with you.

I stepped into my jockstrap and carefully adjusted my genitalia until molded into an aerodynamically-shaped lump.

Wiggin said, Maybe I’ll get myself arrested for assaulting some delinquent at Paddy’s Bar & Grill, or driving under the influence. Might as well start acting out. Isn’t that what they call it? At least then I’ll get some attention from the coaches and see my name in the papers a couple times this season.

Now there’s a mature approach. Why not just get your hands on some coaxial cable and hang yourself by the neck from the Hawthorne Bridge. Is that a public enough humiliation for you? I’ll join the crowd that gathers and we can all watch you twitch to death.

We started warming up by sprinting from one end of the court to the other. Though it was our first practice of the year, Johnnie Eureka was screaming at us to go faster. Windgate wasn’t making matters any better by showing off his speed and winning every sprint pulling away. After everyone was lacquered with sweat we started a combination weave and shoot-around.

Roman Hoyt was halfway up the bleachers getting an overview of the situation, monitoring our movements and reaction times. Every time Windgate went up for a jump shot the whole team froze long enough to watch. A dozen shots into the shoot-around and Windgate still hadn’t missed.

I came down on somebody’s foot and turned an ankle. It was a minor sprang but enough to send me limping to the far end of the gym. I went to the floor and leaned against the wall, embarrassed by my misstep. Trainer Danny Fazlow popped a chemical icepack and slapped it on the wounded joint to reduce the swelling. Hoyt was shaking his head. First day of practice and I was hurt. We hadn’t even taped our ankles because nobody ever gets hurt during shooting drills.

Watching from a safe distance, the green and white jerseys crisscrossed in syncopated patterns. The starting five got the green jerseys, the rest of the squad wore white.

Run that Candy Box, Hoyt shouted, and the starting five – minus me – organized itself against the second team. LeVoy Wiggin pulled a green jersey over his head and played point guard in my absence. Remember that we’re just going through the motions, Hoyt said. No physical contact or you’ll end up like that pussy Tribeca.

The Candy Box was an offensive scheme of Roman Hoyt’s own invention. It was his answer to the Triangle Offense, invented by NBA coaching legend Tex Winter and perfected by fellow NBA coaching legend Phil Jackson. But it was superior to the Triangle by Hoyt’s estimation because it did an even better job of spreading the defense and opening up more improvisational options, or so the story went. The epiphany came to Roman Hoyt in a religious experience during a Sunday church service, or during the stressful aftermath of a car accident depending on what press clipping you read. The accident involved his Lincoln Continental and a runaway truck carrying boxes of Whitman’s Sampler.

Hoyt’s system was not even a modest success. Six years as head coach at Lewis & Clark and still no Northwest Conference titles, and he had yet to find a peer at any level who had adopted the Candy Box Offense. His explanation was that, like the vaunted Triangle Offense, it was too complicated for most coaches and players to even begin executing properly. Now it would be put to the ultimate test. Could it provide the ideal environment for a phenom like Trevor Windgate to reach his full potential? Would it now turn Lewis & Clark into a NCAA Division III collegiate power? Hoyt figured this was exactly the opportunity he needed for his Candy Box Offense to earn the national repute it deserved.

The only national repute Roman Hoyt had curried to date was of the ill variety. Ironically enough it was a sex triangle. One of his players had become sexually and repeatedly acquainted with a cheerleader, an egregious violation of athletic program’s code of conduct. Although Hoyt demanded that his player cease-and-desist, the young man admitted that he was powerless in the matter. He couldn’t stop climbing atop the searingly lusty cheerleader if he wanted to – and he didn’t want to, even if that meant giving up his college basketball career. Hoyt decided to work the problem from the other side of the equation, paying a visit to the cheerleader’s off-campus apartment to reason with her, make her understand that she was jeopardizing a young man’s athletic scholarship and college education, not to mention her own image. Instead, Roman Hoyt quickly fell victim to the troublesome Lolita’s wiles and also ended up in her bed. Like his player, Hoyt kept coming back for extras. When word leaked to local sportswriters (allegedly from the offending player, frustrated that he was sharing his love interest with his coach) a mushroom-cloud-shaped scandal erupted. The situation grew even more scandalous when the cheerleader was expelled from the college rather than Hoyt or his player. Although the story went national, Roman Hoyt managed to survive the indignity because the stories were given brief treatment and the coverage was short-lived, thanks to the college’s obscurity and Division III status.

As practice drew to a close, coach Hoyt ordered us to huddle at center court. He was holding a document in the air.

Listen up, gentlemen. Here is this year’s playbook. It contains one-hundred-fifty plays, about double last year’s playbook.

The air came out of 6-foot 10-inch power forward Cazzie Threet. One-fifty. Why so many?

Our offense was too predictable last season. You guys still haven’t demonstrated a true understanding of the Candy Box. So we need to diversify and shake things up a little bit.

How can we possibly memorize a script that big? I said. I was expecting things to get simpler now that Wind is here. We give him the ball and he shoots it.

Don’t be a smart ass, Hoyt said. This isn’t a one-man show. Wind is going to need a supporting cast. That’s all of you. Read the playbook. Memorize it. You have young brains that can hold a lot of information. Besides, half the plays are the same ones we were running last season. A copy is already in all your dorm rooms. We’ll work our way through it section by section, starting with the half-court offense, which has a lot of double screens and pick-and-rolls. You’re all being assigned tutors to work on your memorization skills.

Hoyt gestured toward assistant coach Johnnie Eureka and said, Talk to them. Then the head coach walked away.

Eureka said, There will be a team dinner tonight in a private room at Jake’s Famous Crawfish. The team bus leaves at six o’clock sharp. You’re all expected to be on time and hungry. This isn’t just feeding time, it’s also going to be a skull session, a time to talk about what this season’s focus will be. Our primary focus this year is going to be staying focused. And our other focus is going to be alacrity.

Alacrity was the one big word Eureka had learned during the off-season and was prepared to overuse for the next five months.

Alacrity, for those of you who don’t keep a Webster’s handy, means we’re going to be cheerful, ready and prompt.

Man, I can’t even pronounce that, LeVoy Wiggin said. It sounds like some kinda scary disease, maybe even incurable. Can’t we just say ‘cheerful and ready’ instead of that big word you just used?

No we can’t. The word is ‘alacrity,’ men. Get used to it and live up to it. The reason we need to focus on being more focused is so we can stop making so damn many mental errors. I don’t mind losing games to superior talent, but if there’s any one thing I cannot stand it’s when we beat ourselves with mental errors. We do stupid things when we don’t concentrate on what we’re doing, and concentration is just another word for focus.

Eureka’s left foot pawed neurotically at the floor as he grasped for additional thoughts.

There are some other matters you need to pay attention to this semester. Spend time with your textbooks. Don’t backtalk your professors. Be wary of all interpersonal relationships outside of this group. Don’t be afraid to change your major. There is no reason to be ashamed of majoring in physical fitness or criminal justice. More than half of you are already there, so any converts would be in good company. Do not wear headphones or ear buds when coach Hoyt is talking to you. When preparing for a game, be in bed by nine o’clock with lights out and your hands on top of the sheets. It’s essential that you hold onto your seed because it will increase stamina. It’s not advisable to ejaculate within forty-eight hours of tip-off.

3

A few days later athletic director Dick Reardon pulled me aside. As always his hair was neatly combed and sprayed into place with half a can of Aqua Net Extra Super Hold. Reardon was best described as a man who had lived through the Fifties twice and skipped the Sixties.

You’re going to have to give up the team vehicle, he said. I’ll need the keys to the Mustang.