“There’s something else you remember, too. The most important thing of all about that game.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about point-shaving, Rolfe,” I said. “I’m talking about criminal collusion with the gambling syndicates in New York and Chicago.”
Something seemed to break deep inside him; his body lost its stiffness, seemed to shrink in on itself. His eyes turned cloudy with pain.
“Lots of point-shaving in those days,” I said. “Mostly in the college ranks but there was talk that it was going on in the pros too. Vague rumors that the gamblers got to you and Donovan, the Wildcats’ shooting guard; I heard them and so did a couple of other reporters, but not until weeks after the game and then we couldn’t find enough proof to break the story.
“Point spread was Sabers plus five and you and Donovan were supposed to make sure the Wildcats didn’t beat that spread because there was heavy syndicate money on the Sabers. Help win the game if you could but not by more than four points; if the Wildcats built up a lead of six or better, then the two of you were to purposely miss shots, make a turnover or two, do whatever you could to get the margin down to less than five.
“Donovan delivered — he tried his damnedest to keep you from scoring all those points in overtime; but you played the best basketball of your life and crossed up the gamblers and blew the spread. Isn’t that the way it was?”
He turned away from me, limped over to the backbar, picked up a bottle of bourbon, came back, poured a triple shot, and drank it neat. I watched him shudder. “I knew something like this would happen,” he said thickly, talking more to himself than to me. “Twenty-one years, but I knew it would come out some day.”
“So you’re not going to deny it.”
He let out a heavy sighing breath. “Look at me,” he said. “You know it’s the truth, you can see that it is.”
I was looking at him, all right. I’d thought that if this moment of confrontation ever came, I would feel something — hatred for him, a kind of perverse satisfaction. But I felt nothing. Too many years had passed since that night in 1957. Too many years.
“What I want to know is why,” I said. “Why did you sell out to the gamblers and then double-cross them? A change of heart, is that it? They got to you in a weak moment, tempted you, and you couldn’t go through with it when the time came? The honest man triumphant?”
Anguish made the lines in Rolfe’s face look as deep as incisions. “I wish to God that was the way it was,” he said. “I’d still be something of a hero then, wouldn’t I? I’d still be able to live with myself. But it wasn’t like that at all.”
“How was it, then?”
No response at first. Thunder rumbled again over the lake, closer this time; a gust of wind rattled the tavern’s front door and window.
“I was a wild kid in those days,” Rolfe said abruptly. “I didn’t give a damn about much of anything except fast cars, fast women, and big money. I got in with the gamblers and I lost six thousand to them on the horses and playing high-stakes poker, and I couldn’t pay off my markers. So it was agree to shave points in the championship game or get my legs broken with a baseball bat. I agreed; I was eager as hell to agree. I went out there that night with every intention of doing what I was told to do.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because whatever else I was, I was also a basketball player. I loved the game, I’d always wanted to play it the way the best did. Only I just wasn’t good enough — a big, slow reserve center who was lucky to be in a professional uniform. I’d had some good games in college and in the pros, but nothing outstanding, nothing that even came close to real excellence. Except that night, that one night. I went into the game in the fourth quarter and it was all there: the moves, the shots, the excellence. You understand, Brady? For the first time in my life it was all there.”
I felt a little shiver along the saddle of my back. “Yeah,” I said, “I understand.”
“I couldn’t do anything wrong. I couldn’t even make myself do anything wrong. It was like I was drunk on basketball; all I could think about was the game, making the moves, making the shots, doing all the things I’d always wanted to do but had never been able to do. Nothing else mattered; there wasn’t anything else.” Rolfe swallowed heavily. There was sweat on his face now. “It wasn’t until the game was over that I realized I’d blown the point spread. That I realized what that one great game, those few minutes of real excellence, was going to cost me.”
I let out a breath. “What happened with the gamblers?”
“What do you think happened?” he said. His mouth twisted bitterly. “They did what they’d warned me they would do. They broke both my legs with a baseball bat.”
There wasn’t anything to say. I picked up my drink and finished it.
“I didn’t go back to Chicago after the game,” Rolfe said. “I ran instead — packed up my things at the hotel and bought a cheap car and drove out here to Wisconsin. A couple of weeks later I got in touch with the Wildcats and had them send my share of the championship money to a bank in Madison; I used that and borrowed the rest to pay off the six thousand I owed the gamblers.
“But it wasn’t any use and I knew it. They found me inside of a month. One of them visited me in the county hospital afterward and told me I was through playing basketball. I knew that too. But he could have saved himself the trouble because my right leg never did heal properly; that’s why I walk with a limp. I’ve got that limp to remind me of my one great game every time I take a step. Every step for the past twenty-one years.
“But that’s not the worst of it. Waiting all these years for someone like you to come along. Listening for footsteps out of the past — that’s not the worst of it either. The worst of it was all the years of wondering if that game really was a fluke or if the moves and the shots and the excellence would have been there for me in other games; if I could have been great some day. I’ll never know, Brady. I’ll never know.”
Outside, rain began to fall; I could hear it drumming against the roof of the tavern. The day had turned dark — but no darker than it was in here, or than it was inside Alex Rolfe.
He ran a hand across his face, as if to wipe away emotion as well as sweat. When he took the hand away his expression was weary and resigned. “So now you know the whole story,” he said. “Go ahead and write it if you want. I just don’t care any more.”
“I’m not going to write it,” I said.
He stared at me as I got off my stool. “That’s why you came here, isn’t it? To get the truth so you could tell the world what happened back in 1957?”
“Maybe it is. But I’m still not going to write the story. It’s something that happened twenty-one years ago; nobody cares any more, nobody remembers — you were right about that. Except you and me, and we’ve both got to keep on living with ourselves.”
I turned my back on him because I didn’t want to watch his reaction, didn’t want to look at him any longer, and hurried to the door and out into the warm spring rain.
But in my car, on the way back through the village, the image of Rolfe’s face remained sharp in my mind. Full of guilt, that face, full of torment and loss. Full of all the same things as that other face, the familiar one in the backbar mirror.
I had come to Harbor Lake to confront Rolfe with the truth, yes; but I had not sought him out for the sake of justice, not planned to write the real story behind the CBA championship game for public-spirited reasons. I had done it instead for the sole purpose of making him pay, even after all these years, for what I’d convinced myself he had done to me.