The first time Brent Callahan shoved me across the court, I was holding the ball, which I think offended him more than anything else I could have done.
It was the second Tuesday of November, 1986, fourth period gym at Lansing Hill High School in Troy, New York, and the whole building still smelled faintly of the Mets. Two weeks earlier the ball had gone through Bill Buckner's legs in Game Six, and every boy in the Capital District who wasn't a Red Sox fan had been walking around like he personally had hit the grounder. Mr. Dombrowski, who taught gym and coached varsity basketball and believed both jobs were the same job, had split us into shirts and skins for half-court three-on-three. I was a shirt, thank God. I weighed a hundred and forty-one pounds that fall and you could have played a xylophone on me.
Somebody on my team put up a long ugly shot. It hit the back iron, kicked high off the glass, and came down to the left, the way I had known it would come down to the left before it ever left the shooter's hands. I was already there. I didn't jump much. I never jumped much. I just stood in the place where the ball was going to be and let it arrive.
Brent arrived a half-second after it did.
He was six-foot-three and had a jaw like the front bumper of a Monte Carlo, which was appropriate, because his father owned Callahan Chevrolet out on Route 7 and did his own television commercials on Channel 6 in a red blazer, pointing at the camera and saying, "Come on down to Callahan's, where a handshake still means something." Brent had his father's jaw and his father's way of pointing at things he wanted. He was the leading scorer in the Big Ten, which in our part of Upstate New York was a high school league and not the college one, and there was a rumor that a man from Siena College had sat in the bleachers in a camel overcoat for two games last year and written in a little notebook.
He didn't go for the ball. He went for me. He put both hands in the middle of my chest and pushed, and it wasn't a basketball push, it wasn't a box-out or a reach, it was the kind of push you give a door that's stuck. My sneakers squealed on the varnish. I went backward past the foul line, past the circle, and into the folded-up bleachers with a sound like somebody dropping a filing cabinet.