Officer Huang nodded. They were still there when I went inside.
Chapter 12
In the fall of 2005 I was twenty-one, entering my senior year at UC Berkeley. I arrived on campus with guarded optimism. The team that I’d led to the Final Four was largely intact. Three guys had graduated and two more had transferred, leaving nine familiar faces.
At our first team meeting I thanked everyone for their support throughout the long recovery process. Last season hadn’t been fun for anyone. I’d ridden it out on the sideline, in a brace, clapping as we dropped game after game. Nobody liked to lose, especially after you’d tasted success. What counted was what you learned from the experience. The time had come to start back up the mountain. We had our new guys to help us reach the top. We had our core guys. We had Coach.
It was a pretty good speech. I’d had fifteen months to refine it. I got a big round of applause. Everyone crowded in to rub me on the head.
One of the new guys was a redshirt sophomore named Patrick Starks, a transfer from San Diego State. Over the spring Coach had shown me tape and asked for my appraisal. I gave it to him: The kid’s jump shot was a work in progress. He needed to log some hours in the weight room. What he did have was a quick first step, a devastating handle, and that ineffable quality known as court vision: the ability to slow down time and move people around in mental space like chess pieces.
Call me naïve, but I’d had no idea, not the faintest suspicion, that I was watching the future.
My own court vision didn’t extend that far.
The Patrick Starks who greeted me that fall had logged the hours. All summer long he’d been running the same drills I had, except on two perfect knees. He bumped my fist, welcomed me back, and proceeded to dismantle me.
I’d never been the tallest or the strongest or the fastest. I’d gotten as far as I had by harnessing and taming a certain reckless instinct. I’d pull up from the hash mark. Run straight at guys half a foot bigger. Sometimes these impulses cost me. On good days they made me deadly. The key was using them judiciously, enough to sow uncertainty in a defender and chaos in his team. They never knew what I might do. I didn’t know it myself till I did it.
You practice and plan and scheme and diagram, and then you go out there and it all falls away, because your opponent is fighting for his life, just like you.
Advancing in the backcourt, I saw Patrick Starks ready for me, his smile hungry, his feet light below hips that slid as if on ball bearings. Now I was the uncertain one, and he was brash and unpredictable. He wanted to tear my heart out. And he could, and he knew it. I pressed against stiffness and heard the echo of pain, and I allowed myself the one emotion no great athlete can afford to feeclass="underline" fear.
At the end of practice I shook his hand, knowing I’d never start again.
For his part, Coach lobbied hard to keep me around. So what if I couldn’t perform at my previous standard? The guys looked up to me. Without question Starks had talent, but he also had room to grow. I could mentor him. It didn’t have to be martyrdom. I’d get minutes.
No, thanks, I said.
Pride prevented me from using the word quit. Coach was kind enough not to use it, either.
Leaving the athletics complex felt like jumping out of a plane without a parachute. I wandered, bewildered, through the hot smell of laundry blowing behind the PE building, through the eucalyptus grove, over lawns. Around me whirled a startling busyness. Students were talking, reading, running to class. In theory I was one of them. But not really. For three years I’d existed in a bubble of teammates and staff.
Who were all these strangers, lounging on their blankets and throwing their Frisbees and brandishing clipboards? There were so many of them, and their activity was indecipherable, these thirty thousand souls in pursuit of a goal alien to me: getting an education.
My academics were a train wreck. I didn’t see how I could graduate, short of staying on another three years.
I made my way to Tolman Hall, the psychology building, and gazed up at its cratered façade. I had more psych units than any other. Two whole classes. One of those had been taught by a genial, enthusiastic man named Paul Sandek, himself a former college basketball player. We’d chatted a few times after games. I had never been to his office hours, let alone confided in him. I didn’t know then that his playing career, like mine, had ended with an injury.
I could barely remember the names of my other professors.
I consulted the directory, climbed to the second floor, and walked a gloomy hall. Sandek’s door was shut. Hearing his raspy laugh, I turned to go; changed my mind and scrawled a note on his whiteboard.
The door opened. Sandek leaned out, phone pressed to his shirt. Clay. What a nice surprise.
I told him I was thinking of dropping out.
He rubbed his beard. In those days it was more pepper than salt. He apologized to the person on the other end of the line. He’d have to call them back.
It took summer sessions, two course waivers, and an extra semester, but under his guidance I finished my degree. Throughout those months, as Luke caused our family to implode, Paul took me into his, inviting me home for dinner, where his wife, Theresa, a business school professor, put out heaping portions of moussaka or chicken cacciatore. Afterward I rinsed the dishes and handed them to their daughter, a leggy blond high schooler named Amy, to slot in the dishwasher. Cleaning up was as crucial as eating. It was what normal people did, and I needed normal like a blood transfusion.
One night, after Amy had gone upstairs to do her homework, I sat with Paul and Theresa in the living room and they grilled me about the rest of my life. It was one thing to earn a diploma, quite another to find purpose. What interested me? What did I care about?
Initially, I had no answer. Every choice I’d made since fourth grade reflected the single-minded goal of playing professional basketball. In its absence I confronted an existential void.
My parents had shared the same goal. I say that to their credit. My mother, in particular, was unflagging. She’d driven me to every practice; traveled to every game, home or road. Hers was the first face I saw in the recovery room when I woke up after my surgery, and she accompanied me to physical therapy multiple times a week. She had her own reasons for throwing herself into the role of sports mom. I had a bright future, and it was simpler and more directly rewarding to invest in that than in trying to halt Luke’s deterioration. Given a choice, though, I doubt she would have opted to spend her forties driving to Fresno to scream her lungs out. Like every other narcissistic adolescent, I’d never asked her permission. I wanted what I wanted and she took on wanting it, too.
Then I stopped wanting it, leaving her staring into a void of her own. On some level she had to feel cheated: She’d backed a horse that came up lame. In doing so she’d also failed my brother. A new, unshakable conviction took hold of her. She could claw back time; she could and would save him.
But he had broken out of the stall to run wild.
In 2005 Luke was twenty-three. He worked at minimum wage, illegally, or not at all. He moved often, ditching one unthinkable living situation for another. He slept in his car, if he happened to have one. He slept rough.
He tells these stories now like they happened to someone else.
Looking back I feel guilt for how little thought I gave him and sadness at what my parents endured. It’s not as though they forgot about him, and my mom periodically let her pain show. Sitting beside me at PT, she’d yawn, and when I asked if she was okay she’d confess that she’d been up all night, bailing Luke out of jail. Or that he’d cropped up after a month, asking to have our old room for a few nights.