But some people still remembered, and I was one of them. Even after two decades I remembered that night in the Garden and I remembered Alex Rolfe and what he’d done. Rolfe had become something of an obsession with me over the years. The thing was, I thought I knew why he had vanished so suddenly and so completely, and I wanted to find him and talk to him about it. And the thing was, too, that his performance against the Sabers in 1957 had marked a turning point in my own life.
I had been young and ambitious in those days, on my way to the top, I thought; but my life and my career hadn’t quite worked out the way I’d always believed they would. In 1958 I had lost my job with the Herald-Tribune, for internal reasons that weren’t my fault, and I had also lost my wife in the divorce courts for domestic reasons that may or may not have been my fault. After that, my life and my career had settled into mediocrity — a succession of jobs with minor newspapers, a few freelance articles for second-string sports magazines, two sports biographies that hadn’t sold well, too many sessions with the bottle, and too many loveless affairs. My own dim memories of the past were all I had left now. Memories of the way it had been in the old days in New York, covering the Sabers and dreaming of wealth and fame. Memories of men like Alex Rolfe.
Off and on for the past twenty years I had spent time and energy trying to locate him, without success. Then, three days ago, the paper I was working for in Dayton had taken on a sports reporter whose last job was in Madison, Wisconsin. This reporter and I had gone out for a drink, and talk had turned to basketball, and Rolfe’s name had come up. And it turned out that the reporter knew of Rolfe, knew where he was living — in a small village in upstate Wisconsin, where he owned a tavern. The reporter had wanted to do a feature on him a year or so ago, but Rolfe had been uncooperative, saying that he didn’t want any publicity; the reporter hadn’t pursued the matter.
I had gotten on the phone immediately, dug up an address and number for Rolfe in the village of Harbor Lake, and then called the number. When I got through to Rolfe I explained that I was writing a series of articles on basketball players of the fifties for a national sports magazine and did he remember my name? He was silent for several seconds; then he said yes, he remembered me, but he didn’t want to be interviewed and besides, I had to be scraping the bottom of the barrel if I wanted to do a story on him. I reminded him of the championship game in the Garden and told him the magazine had given me carte blanche, write up anyone I cared to, not necessarily the stars but the journeymen players who had had moments of greatness in the past.
He still didn’t want to see me. I said I was going to be in Wisconsin anyway to talk to another old player and that I intended to drop in on him; said I was going to write about the Sabers-Wildcats title game with or without an interview. He told me it was my privilege to write whatever I felt like writing, and hung up on me.
The next day I took a leave of absence from the paper, got into my car, and headed north to Wisconsin.
And now, two days and eight hundred miles later, I had arrived in Harbor Lake. It wasn’t much of a town, just a few scattered houses along a small, tree-rimmed lake and half a dozen stores along a one-block main street. Quiet, sleepy, off the beaten track. It was a little past 4:00 P.M. as I drove through it, looking for the Harbor Lake Tavern. The leaden sky forecast rain, but there was nothing on the windshield of my car except streaks of dirt that gave the buildings and the gray-looking lake water a vaguely distorted appearance.
Rolfe’s tavern turned out to be on the far side of the village, tucked back near the water’s edge. It was a small weathered building with a rustic façade, shaded by pines; no neon sign or electric beer advertisements, nothing to tell you it was a bar except for the neatly painted wooden sign above the door that spelled out its name. I imagined that he did most of his business at night, even during these late spring months; there was only one other car on the gravel parking lot besides mine when I shut off the engine and went inside.
The car must have belonged to Rolfe himself because he was the only one in the place. He stood behind the plank, slicing lemons and limes into wedges. A man six-nine in his twenties is imposing, but in his forties he angles toward a question mark. There were heavy lines in his cheeks and a kind of melancholy in his expression, and when he came down to the stool I had taken he walked with a pronounced limp, as if he were suffering from arthritis. He looked old and tired — the same way my reflection looked in the backbar mirror. The years hadn’t been good to him either.
He asked me what I’d have, and I told him a double Scotch and soda and watched him build it. When he set the glass down in front of me I said, “You don’t recognize me, do you, Rolfe?”
He stared at me, searching his memory, and after a time I saw recognition seep into his eyes. His body stiffened a little; the fingers of both hands curled into fists, relaxed, curled again, relaxed again. “Joe Brady,” he said.
“That’s right. Joe Brady.”
“I told you I didn’t want to see you.”
“I’m here, Rolfe, like it or not.”
“I don’t want to talk about the past.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because it’s dead. Dead and buried. I haven’t thought about basketball in years.”
“Haven’t you?” I said.
Emotion flickered across his face; he looked away from me, through a window at the rear that framed a view of the lake. His hands curled into fists again. “Just what do you want from me, Brady?”
“An interview. A story.”
“I don’t have a story for you.”
“I think you do.”
His eyes shifted back to mine. “It’s been twenty-one years since that game in the Garden,” he said. “Nobody cares any more. Nobody remembers.”
“I care. I remember.”
“Why?”
“You played a great game, the finest game of your career. And then you disappeared, you quit cold.”
“And you want to know why.”
I nodded.
He didn’t say anything for a time. His eyes took on a remoteness, as if he were looking backward into the past. It was quiet in there, hushed except for the faint whirring of the refrigeration unit. From outside, over the lake, I thought I could hear the distant sheetmetal rumble of thunder.
Rolfe blinked finally and the remoteness was gone. “All right,” he said. “I left basketball after that game because it was the finest of my career. I figured I’d never have another one like it; it was a fluke and I was a second-string center and always would be. Not many mediocre pro athletes have great games and not many have the sense to get out if they do. I had a chance to quit a hero, a champion, and I took it. That’s all.”
“Is it?” I drank some of my Scotch and soda. “Tell me about the game, Rolfe.”
“Tell you about it? You were there.”
“Sure. But I want to hear your version of it, everything you remember. The fourth quarter, coming off the bench, scoring the eighteen points — start with that.”
“The shots I took went in. I was lucky.”
“You weren’t lucky, you were inspired. You made moves and shots you’d never even tried before. Remember the fourteen points in overtime? Remember the fadeaway jumpers you made with three men on you that hit nothing but net?”
“No,” Rolfe said, “I don’t remember.”
“Sure you do. You remember every point of it. Every footfall on the floor, every move and rebound and blocked shot, who was guarding you each time you scored.”
He shook his head. Kept on shaking it.