Anyhow, I went on out to the Barn with Ellen and missed practice, and when I got back to the frat house that night, old Micky was flopped on the bed looking at some cheesecake in a magazine, and he said, “Where the hell you been?” and I said, “Out with Ellen, and if you want to put your asbestos ear muffs on, I’ll tell you about it,” and he said, “Asbestos ear muffs, hell! You better have an asbestos tail at practice tomorrow, because old Umpy’s going to chew it good.”
“Well,” I said, “if he messes with me, he’ll think he’s got a God-damn wildcat by the tail,” but I didn’t put much heart in it because, as a matter of fact, I didn’t feel much, and when I went around to practice the next afternoon I’ll have to admit I was as nervous as a pregnant spinster. Old Umplett didn’t look at me or say anything or do any God-damn thing at all, and that made it even worse, and all the time practice was going on I kept wondering when the hell he’d start in on me, and what with thinking about it all the time, I fumbled some passes and missed some easy shots and was pretty lousy altogether. He still didn’t say anything, though, even when I loused up the plays, and afterward in the locker room I got to feeling easier and began to think maybe I was going to get away with it all right, and of course that’s just when the son of a bitch reached out and grabbed me.
I’d just finished dressing, and he stuck his bald head out the door of his stinking little office and said, “Come in here, Scaggs,” and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do but go. I went in and stood there with my teeth hanging out, and he sat down in the chair behind his desk and slumped down on the back of his neck and looked at me through his God-damn eyebrows and didn’t ask me to sit down or drop dead or anything at all. He just sat there looking at me like it made him sick to his stomach to do it, and after a while I got to feeling all squirmy inside like I was full of worms, and I said, “You want to talk to me, Coach?” and he said, “No. The last thing on God’s earth I want to do is talk to you, so I’m going to make it short and to the point.”
I could see then that he was feeling pretty mean, which wasn’t anything unusual, and pretty soon he said, “Where the hell were you yesterday?” and I said, “I had something else I had to do,” and he got a little smile on his face and kept looking at me with his nasty eyes that looked half asleep, and after about a full God-damn minute, he said, “Now isn’t that interesting! Isn’t that just about the most interesting God-damn thing you could imagine! Well, Mr. Scaggs, I’m sure an important fellow like you just has a lot of things to do that might interfere with basketball practice, so I think I’d better tell you how I feel about it. To put it bluntly, Mr. Scaggs, if your God-damn grandmother dropped dead at your feet at five minutes to three, I’d expect you to be to practice at three sharp as usual. Is that clear? While I’m at it, I might say that I’ve been in this business more years than I can count, and I’ve had my head on the chopping block more times than I care to remember, and I’ve learned a hell of a lot of things a man has to know to stay hooked to a contract, and one of the things I’ve learned is the smell of a sharp little opportunist like you. By God, you’re just barely dry behind the ears, and you’re already making a business out of what was once meant to be fun. So it’s a business. It’s business with you, and it’s business with me, and there’s no God-damn fun left in it. You’re getting paid to come to school to play basketball, and you wouldn’t ever come to school at all if you didn’t get paid to play basketball, and so you’ll God-damn well play basketball. You’ll come to practice after this on time and every time, and you’ll run and you’ll sweat and you’ll hate my guts, and the more you hate them the better I’ll like it, and don’t ever expect me to treat you like anything but the hired sharpshooter you are. You’re paid to win games, and that’s exactly what I expect of you and nothing more, and God help you if you don’t. Is all this perfectly clear, Mr. Scaggs?”
Well, it sure as hell was, and I said so and left, and after that it would have taken a hell of a lot more than a few beers and what I could find in a pair of drawers to make me miss a practice, and to tell the truth, I didn’t miss another damn one, and whatever else he was, old Umplett was the best damn basketball coach that ever lived, and I’ll admit it even though I hated his guts just like he said I would.
He worked the hell out of us all through November, and we got faster and faster, and the faster we got the smoother we got, and even old Carboy quit falling over his own feet all the time and got pretty good at jumping up and ramming one through from the rafters now and then, but mostly he took the ball in the slot and fed out to Micky or me, and there weren’t any flies on that Micky, either, if you want to know the truth of it, and you could tell that God-damn Umplett was looking forward to a good season but would rather have dropped dead than say so.
Toward the end of November we had a couple of home games scheduled, and these were just with small colleges not far away and not very good, and we won them both by scores that looked like the totals in some lopsided election or something. You wouldn’t have thought a couple of crummy games like that would get much play, but anyone who thought like that just didn’t know Pipskill, and they’d have turned out for a game there if it had been with some team scraped up in a kindergarten. The field house was packed, and the band played, and all in all it was just like the old high school, except bigger and louder and even crazier. As a matter of fact, I never saw such blood-thirsty God-damn maniacs in my life, and even when we had the score almost doubled they kept yelling at us to pour it on and kept cheering every lousy point like it might make the difference between winning and losing. Lots of coaches will ease up a little when their team gets a big lead, but not old Umplett. He kept the first stringers in right up to the end, and maybe it was because the crowd wanted him to and he knew he damn well better, but it was more likely because he was just as blood-thirsty as any bastard in the crowd, and however it was, it was great stuff for your point total, and I made forty points the first game and thirty-five the second, and right after that everyone started calling me the Platinum Sophomore, which is what they kept on calling me all year, even in the newspapers.
First part of December, we made a swing through the East all the way to New York and played two games on the way and one in Madison Square Garden and one on the way back, and we won all the games but not by any God-damn lopsided scores like the first two at home. As a matter of fact we damn near lost the one in Madison Square Garden because we had a fat lead at the half and got sloppy in the third quarter while the other team was getting hot, and we were lucky to pull it out by three points at the end. Old Umplett was so God-damn mad about it that he jerked us all back to the hotel and wouldn’t let us go out and see some of the town, and Micky and I talked about sneaking out to see some of it, anyhow, but decided not to.
The next morning we started home and stopped off for the last game, and this game was with a college that hadn’t lost a game on their home court for about a million years, and I guess no one around there thought they were ever going to lose one, but we changed a hell of a lot of thinking on that subject before we were through with them. The God-damn people who came to watch the game were just as crazy as the people at Pipskill, and when the game was almost over and they began to realize how it was coming out, they started to boo us and throw paper and stuff on the court and raise hell in general, and damned if it didn’t look for a while like they might lynch us or something, but we got out of it all right and left town the next day. I read later on in the sports page that they said the only reason we beat them was because their star player had a stinking virus or something and was sick and played the whole game on the verge of death like a God-damn hero, and we couldn’t beat them again in a thousand years, but this was just sour grapes and a damn lie, and we proved it by beating them again in a tournament after the regular season was over, and I made ten more points than their lousy hero to boot.