I didn't say anything. I didn't think I was tough. I've never thought I was tough. I thought I was a kid who knew where the ball was going, and I was right about that, and I was going to keep being right about it whether he liked it or not.
Next trip down, Brent got the ball on the wing, and he looked at me.
I was guarding a junior named Paul Ostrowski, but I'd drifted toward the lane, and Brent saw me and decided, I think, that he would go straight through me. He wanted to finish it. He put the ball on the floor and drove left, hard, with his head down, and he went up for a layup off the glass on my side of the basket, the kind of hard showy layup that he liked to finish with a little shout. I didn't jump early. That's the whole secret, if there is one; I didn't jump early. I waited until the ball was out of his hand and rising, and then I went up with my right arm straight and my hand open, and I met the ball against the backboard at the top of its arc.
I didn't slap it. I want to be clear about that, too, because later people told the story like I'd spiked it into the third row. I pinned it. My palm pressed the ball flat against the glass for a quarter of a second, and the glass flexed, and then the glass gave it back.
The ball came off that backboard like it had been fired from a cannon. It shot straight down and out, past my hand, past Brent's reaching fingers, and it hit Brent Callahan square in the chest, right where his hands had hit mine two minutes before. It hit him so hard it made a sound, a deep flat pock that went all the way up into the rafters. Brent was still in the air. He came down off balance and sat on the floor under the basket with his legs straight out in front of him, like a toddler who's fallen off a tricycle and isn't sure yet whether to cry.
And the ball, having struck him, bounced straight up off his chest, once, and dropped into my hands.