PROLOGUE
The tunnel under the arena was where your last moment of fears fell away, because entering the court with anything but the game on your mind is asking for disaster. A lesson I wish I learned earlier on.
On the night I finally understood what I’d been bought for, I stood in it with eleven thousand people already screaming for a basketball game that hadn’t started yet.
You can hear them down there but you can’t see anything. That’s the design. Wet concrete, one working light, a rubber mat somebody had laid down years ago that had gone slick and useless, and at the far end a rectangle of white where the floor was. The noise came down through the ceiling in waves, and when it hit that low concrete it stopped sounding like people and started sounding like a distant storm.
My mouth was dry the way it always got. I’d chewed the inside of my cheek raw in the locker room without noticing, and I could taste it — that thin rusted-penny taste, faint, more the idea of blood than the real thing. I kept running my tongue over the spot like it was something I could fix.
Somebody put a hand on my shoulder.
I don’t remember who. I saw him — I must have, he was right there, we were four feet apart in a lit corridor — and there is nothing in my head where his face should be. What I’ve got is the hand. That it didn’t grip. That it just sat there, warm through the fabric, longer than a stranger’s would. That when it lifted, a ring caught in the mesh of my jersey and pulled before it came free.
That’s the part that gets me now. I can give you the smell of that tunnel and the taste of my own mouth and the exact temperature of the air coming off the floor, and I could not tell you who touched me.
Out past the mouth of the tunnel they’d started the introductions. I could hear the announcer working the room, and under him the crowd doing the thing they’d been doing for about two weeks by then. Two syllables. Over and over.
ROS-SI. ROS-SI. ROS-SI.
I’d wanted that. I want to be honest about that. I had lain awake in a room with a water stain shaped like Delaware on the ceiling and wanted exactly that sound, and now it was happening and it was landing on me like rain on a window — close, loud, and not actually touching me at all.
Because I’d started doing the math, standing there. And the math was coming out wrong.
I’d been doing it wrong for weeks. I’d been breaking my body in that gym against men with ten years on me, men with wives and knees held together by tape, and I had been taking home more than any of them. I knew that. I’d known it since the second week and I had filed it under lucky.
The equation I’d been running was simple: get good enough, get seen, get through. Earn it. It had a solution and the solution was work harder, and I had loved it, because work was the one currency I had an unlimited supply of.
But a door had opened. That was the thing I kept coming back around to, there in the wet concrete, like a tongue going back to a split lip.
A door had opened the first day. Before anybody had seen me play a full minute. Before anybody knew if I could shoot from range or hold a screen or keep my mouth shut. Somebody had looked at a guy off a cracked street court in the Pit — no agent, no tape, no name — and opened a door, and I had walked through it grinning.
It had never once occurred to me to ask why it was open.
Ten thousand a month.
I’d read it three times in the truck outside the gym, and then I’d read it out loud to my mother at the kitchen table, and she’d put down the mail she was sorting into two piles, the pile you pay and the pile you don’t. She hadn’t said anything for a second. Then she’d said, Ten thousand, not like a question. And I’d said yeah. And she’d said it again, quieter, and I’d thought that was joy.
Nobody pays that to a guy nobody’s scouted. Not to win.
That was the whole shape of it, and it had been sitting in plain sight since the first day. I was there to be on the floor, in the frame, in the box score. To go down loud and ugly and cheap in front of a camera, so a number on somebody’s books came out looking a certain way to men I would never meet.
They hadn’t hired a player. They’d hired a result. I was just the only thing in the room that didn’t know it.
I’d like to tell you I got there and felt something clean. Rage would have been clean. Rage would have been useful, and I’ve had plenty of it since, and I know what to do with it now.
What I felt was stupid. Just — small, and hot, and stupid, standing under a building that was screaming my name like it was proof of something.
I was twenty-four and I had been hungry my whole life, and I'll be honest, I was not the kind of hungry man to ask why the door was open. I want that on the record. Not as an excuse — I’d stopped being young enough for one of those. Just so you know what you’re looking at.
Then the captain came past me.
He went by close, close enough that I felt the air move, out toward the white rectangle and the noise. He had that face on. The one for the room. He didn’t look at me — or he did, one beat, and there was nothing in it I could read, and then he was gone into the light and I heard the crowd change pitch when they got him.
I stood there with my jaw tight and thought: coward.
That’s the first lie I ever told about him. I want it on the record early, because it wasn’t the last, and it wasn’t the worst.
Then they called us out.
Here’s the thing I need you to understand before any of the rest of it happens. Before the gala and the hospital and the contract.
Standing right there in that tunnel, with the arithmetic finally coming out true, I knew exactly what the smart thing to do was. It was obvious. It would have cost me nothing and saved me everything.
I walked out onto that floor and I did not do the smart thing.
It was only later that I figured out why. They hired me to lose.
