January 13, 2020   |   Tagged Leadership,

Presented by Shann Ray Ferch, Basketball Author

Fourteen Types of Belief - Literary Basketball Short Story

FOURTEEN TYPES OF BELIEF

1

THE HALLS are set with grey-white tile that shines a dull light, the walls built of hard red brick. As the boy walks, the other students look at him funny. Everett Highwalker is a freshman in high school. Pimpled face. Shock of black hair. He holds his head down. Slender, he carries his basketball wherever he goes, places the ball under the chair during class, cups it like a loved one everywhere else. He is five feet seven inches tall and barely weighs one hundred pounds. He thinks of his mother, her face in her hands at the kitchen table, the slant of her shoulders.

From his own sorrow over the loss of his father, he, too, is in great pain, but he gets taller, and as he does he works, and the school seems to grow smaller as he grows larger. Sophomore. Junior. He studies, plays, puts time in the gym, runs, shoots, lifts weights, gains strength. His face clears. He grows to six feet four, weighs one-hudred ninety-five pounds, and starts at forward for one of the top teams in the state. His mother works long hours, holds two jobs. A velocity breathes in him and he sees how the other athletes seem to look at him as they might a lion that paces and peers. He lives in Portland, Oregon where the mouth of the Columbia opens wide and wounds the body of the ocean.

2

HIS SENIOR year, he walks more upright but still he keeps his head down. When teachers ask him about last night’s game, he says how well his teammates played. When they ask him about his vertical, his jumper, his defense, how he won the game on a last second shot, he replies, “Still working. Need to work hard.”

“Where did you learn to work like that?” asks the Vice Principle who overhears the boy in the hall and loves to talk hoops. Man with grey-black hair who said he was slender once, though he’s beefy now. He played power forward for Duquesne in the late eighties. The boy holds the ball in his hands, shuffles his feet.

“My father,” the boy answers, and the VP says, “How about getting some lunch?” and the boy says, “Sure,” and they walk together to the cafeteria.

They find a place near the far wall.

The boy’s father was half-Cheyenne, and big.

DelVon Highwalker. Husband to Maria. Father of Everett.

He loved basketball like he loved family.

“He taught you what it takes to be great, didn’t he?” says the VP who looks the boy in the face. The boy says, “He did,” and puts his head down and clenches his jaw to keep the tears from his eyes. “Him, and my mother.” They sit at a table with benches attached by metal to the underworks of the tabletop. The boy cups the ball, turns it, rolls it, considers the curve and the channels, the leather, the feel of heat in his hands.

“I want to be someone,” he says. “Go somewhere.”

“Somewhere?” the VP asks.

“The next level,” Everett said, “not just here.”

The VP sees it in the boy, but at the same time he recognizes the shape of loss in him. Most men never achieve what they hope for, the VP thinks.

3

WHEN HE was young the boy’s father cupped his face and said, “Focus on a target within a target. If your shot slips in and out, it’s always the eyes. Lock in the eyes and that won’t happen. Got it?”

“Got it,” the boy repeated.

“And I got you,” his father said, and pulled him hard to his chest.

This, a month before his father died.

He’s gone now, the boy thinks, and it eats at the edge of his mind and only fades when he works on his game. Ball fake, drive left, pull up, nothing but net. Shot fake, drive right, pull up, bank off the glass. The movements and the rhythm are his only sense of calm. When he needs to, he goes to one knee on the outdoor court at night and cries. From the next world, his father welcomes his tears, the boy thinks.

He thinks his father cries, too.

4

THE VP played against the boy’s dad in city league, knows the boy’s dad worked at the mill. He worked heavy machinery and died when the boom of a crane broke loose and crushed the man’s chest.

A giant of a man, solitary in the world.

Another lunch. More talk of hoops.

The VP reaches, touches the boy’s shoulder for a moment. “Your father could shoot the J,” he says, “and defend like no other.”

“Serious ball player,” the boy says, and looks down.

“A thing of beauty, watching him play.” The VP holds his own follow-through in the air and smiles. “How about lunch every Wednesday?”

“Sure,” the boy replies.

5

THE BOY gets offers from a few small colleges. He dreams Division 1 and decides to walk on at the University of Oregon in the Pacific Athletic Conference, the PAC 12, where the Wizard of Westwood, John Wooden, guided UCLA to ten national titles and four undefeated seasons. That summer, the VP invites him to play on a tour team of all-stars from the Pacific Northwest, an international travel team to Great Britain, Scotland and the Isle of Man. The VP is the coach. The boy averages 37 a game and feels unstoppable. The team goes 9 and 2 beating Wales, Liverpool and Manchester. They lose to the London Knights and the Torches of Edinburgh.

In the US, at the D1 level, no one knows his name.

He walks on at Oregon and makes the team.

The coaches dog him. Run him. Yell at him. Curse him.

Though he thinks he has no chance of earning playing time he works hard and sacrifices. His hunger grows fierce. His love for the game grows stronger.

6

HIS ENTIRE freshman year he plays a total of 22 minutes in four games. He shoots 0 for 3, gathers 2 rebounds, fouls twice, and garners 1 steal. His sophomore year, three guys get injured. He weighs two-hundred twenty pounds and gets 14 minutes per game, averages 4 points, 4.5 rebounds, and 1.3 steals. He takes care of the ball. The team improves and breaks .500. Midway through the season, he sweeps in from the wing for a rebound in the half-court offense. Untouched, the players part before him and he plants, launches into the sky, and catches an errant shot that caroms wide of the rim. Everyone is far below him now as he tip jams, massively, over two defenders. The force of the dunk is like the barrel-swing of a sledgehammer. He lands off-kilter in the middle of the pack and bounces to his feet as the crowd erupts, and the sound is deafening and the air seems to compress and expand and catch flame. He looks at his hands. A red mark registers high on his wrist, like a blood wound from the rim, and his teammates mob him and holler and pound his chest.

The team talks about the dunk for weeks.

From this single event, he gains the nickname Tomahawk.

The play is the first of many.

Twenty games in, the coaches tell him he has made a huge contribution to the team and they will scholarship him next year. After the season, the coaching staff confirms their promise. At home for the summer, he holds his head high and walks into the gym and tells his friends from high school. They give him five and hug him and smile wide and look at him as if he is from another, brighter world.

In the kitchen, he holds his mother’s hand and she smiles. “So good to have you back,” she says. Her face is a sanctuary.

In the dark when she sleeps, he drives her car to the outskirts of town, parks, and walks the clean grass incline to where he sits beside his father’s grave and tells him about the scholarship and feels his eyes well. The pine trees are like sentinels. “Mom misses you,” the boy says. “I miss you.” He places his hands on the ground over his father. “I need you,” he says. The stars wheel overhead and he feels lost but not lost, and when he rises and walks from the cemetery, he remembers the sorrow takes a long time going, and perhaps is never really gone. In his dreams, his father walks with him.

The next day, Everett has lunch with the VP and tells him about the scholarship, and the VP slaps him on the back, laughing. He looks him in the face and says, “Congratulations! You’ve worked hard for this. Keep working, son.”

“I will,” Everett says, and before he leaves, he looks at the VP face and pauses. “I wouldn’t be where I am without you,” he says. The skin on the VP’s neck turns red. The man looks at his feet and taps the boy on the shoulder a few times.

“Count on me every home game,” he says.

7

MID-SUMMER before Everett returns to campus, an assistant coach calls. “Couldn’t give you the scholarship,” he says. “We need it for other positions.”

“That’s not right,” the boy says softly. “You lied to me. Broke your promise.”

“Happens,” the assistant retorts, “get over it.”

8

THE BOY does, but a fire burns in him at the dishonesty of men, men unlike his father, unlike the VP. He burns and he works. He runs and jumps and increases in power. He weighs two-hundred thirty pounds now and benches two-hundred eighty. His vertical tops 40 inches. He dribbles all over town, the ball an extension of his body, the jumper, the follow-through, the release, the backspin a gift from his father, the loft of the arc a gift from his mother, the net-like rain, the sound of the swish a music that transcends the world.

“He plays defense like an army of men,” his old teachers say.

“He rebounds like a wrecking ball.”

He believes what they say is true because when he defends, he feels alive. And when he crashes the boards, the other players fall away like trees felled in a forest. He remembers when his father took him to the Beartooth Mountains and the boy shot his first bull elk on the pass north of Two Oceans Plateau, the animal huge and ominous in the early light, a rack of tines hung back from the head, the horns thick and pointed skyward even in death. He’d used his father’s Remington .243, the stock warm against his cheek, the scope a cross-haired window, deep breath blown smooth from his lungs. He saw the animal’s body collapse before he heard the rifle report. He held the legs as his father made the cut from neck to base and drew the hide away from the rib cage with clean swipes of the hunting knife so that the white inner lining shone in the half-light. His father pulled out the entrails, his arms drenched in blood to the elbows. He looked to the boy then and said, “We give this to the animals. The coyote, the crow. We bring the meat home to Mama.” He went back to knife work. “My father’s people went hungry. Don’t forget that, son.”

“I won’t, Papa,” he said, and saw the detail of his father’s frame as he boned out the animal, cutting the joints with the bone saw, quartering the elk and removing the hooves. “Your mother’s words are good to me,” his father said, and quoted from memory what she’d read to them the night before. “He knows what lies in the darkness and light dwells with Him.” The boy nodded and peered out over the land to where the sun went down. “Spirit of the Creator,” his father whispered, and stood and turned to the boy. “Treat your mother with dignity; she’s like the land, like the hand of God.” The boy looked into his father’s eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said, and kneeled to help cape the animal and bag the meat. His father tied the head and horns to his own pack and had the boy help hoist the pack to his shoulders. In the last light of dusk, they walked in tandem, the horns upside down above his father’s back, the skull heavy, the tines arched like wings.

9

BEFORE SUMMER’S end, the boy and the VP travel to Alaska to put on an assembly for a school in Seldovia, where the VP’s good friend is the principal. Seldovia, harbor on the edge of the ocean, town of blue water in a bowl of forest and rock surrounded by small poverty-ridden homes, smoke adrift from tight tin chimneys. Every kid in town shows, and their parents with them, so the little box gym is filled to the rafters as the VP speaks to the kids about school and leadership, about grades, and dreams. The boy comes to the microphone in a baggy sweatsuit and clean white Nike Airs and speaks about life. The students are a mix of Eskimo and white, native, and northern. The people who gave them breath fill his field of vision and they are strong and good, he thinks, and he feels thankful for them, for his own family, for the VP, and for basketball. He tells the kids he believes in them. He places his hand over his chest and says God resides in the strength of their fathers and the joy of their mothers, and in the end he says, “Don’t stop dreaming your dreams.”

He removes his sweats and walks onto the court in a white t-shirt and black silk shorts, baggy and bordered with green and gold. The kids line up under the basket on one end and the dunk show begins. He throws himself alley-oop lob passes from half-court. He tosses the ball high and it bounces off the hardwood and lofts itself to a point far above the rim as he runs and flies and meets the ball in midair. He rises higher and hammers home one-handed tomahawks and two-handed shoulder blades, a flurry of reverses, windmills, and 360s. “Clap out the beat!” he says, and the people cheer and clap in unison to a deep drum rhythm as he puts backspin on the ball and watches it return to him before he lofts another lob from half-court, rounds the turn, launches, and soars on a sideways lean with his back to the rim. Up near the rim he snatches the ball from the air and touches it to his heels, and when he smashes it behind his head, he hears a loud bang. Like a shout from a rifle barrel, the rim breaks free and the backboard shatters.

He lands in a rain of glass, and everyone goes silent.

Shards fan at his feet and out from him in an arc that reaches to the top of the key, and wider still and more dispersed beyond the half-court line. He sees the rim on the hardwood floor, displaced like the shed horn of an animal. He turns to the kids packed along the baseline, their eyes wide and mouths open. Finally, a skinny high schooler stands and starts clapping, then the kid shouts and lifts his hands and the others stand then and they all applaud wildly and the whole gym roars as the kids gather around Everett. They touch his hands and his arms. They pick up pieces of glass to take home. He shows them the bruises the rim has made on his wrists. He smiles directly into their eyes.

10

IN SEPTEMBER he returns to the team. He gets 22 minutes a game his junior year. He weighs in at two-hundred forty pounds and hauls rebounds like a freight train. He runs faster, jumps higher, and plays harder. He gets time, goes after every loose ball, turns the momentum of the game. “He’s a beast,” the head coach whispers, secretly in awe, and the boy’s numbers ascend. The coaching staff again promises him a full ride. The team takes another step, battles for a top four position in the league and ends up third. They lose their first two games in the league tournament but win two in the National Invitational Tournament, the NIT, losing to Seton Hall one game before the semis and Madison Square Garden.

He meets with the coaches post season. “No scholarship,” they tell him again. He puts his head in his hands. The words pierce him, circling his chest like barbed wire. “We don’t have any scholarships left,” the head man says. “We gave the last one to the big man from Germany. You know how much we need a big man.”

That weekend, he goes home. Face flushed and heart-pounding, he tells the VP.

They return together to meet with the coaches.

11

ROOM OF GLASS windows and leather chairs. Everyone seated. The head coach begins, and the words are smooth from his tongue, but sound brittle and foolish in the air. “We’ve been more than fair here,” he says, but already the VP has had enough. “Shut your mouth,” he orders the coach, “I’ll do the talking.” He slams his hands on the table, stands and leans over until they are eye to eye. “You are a liar,” he says. “The boy has earned every inch of ground he’s gained. Treat him right.” The VP’s face is red, the tendons in his neck like taut wire. He turns and looks at Everett and his face softens. “He’s like a son to me. Like a son to the whole town he comes from.” He draws himself back and sits down again. He stares at the coach. “You need to be a better man,” he says. “This is beneath you and your program. Treat him right. He’ll give you everything.”

The coach’s head is down now.

He looks up at the boy.

The boy stares back and does not waver.

“You want that scholarship, son?” the coach asks.

“Yes,” the boy answers.

“It’s yours,” the coach says. “I agree. We need to treat you right.”

12

AND THE COACH does.

The boy signs on the line and enters his senior year ready.

His teammates elect him team captain. He starts every game, averages 11.6 points, 12.4 rebounds, and 2.1 steals. He is named Conference Defensive Player of the Year, and the team advances to the championship game of the league tournament winning 92-87 in double overtime as the fans swarm the court and the players and coaches are swept up in the middle. The VP meets him near the center circle, and they embrace and streamers rain down on everyone. As the boy releases the VP, the older man wipes tears from his face and sees the boy moving with his teammates to where they bunch near the closest backboard. He watches as they climb the ladder, and after the nets are cut, the VP waves to the boy, and the boy smiles and waves back.

After the celebration dies down, the team gathers in the locker room where the head coach holds one of the nets out to Everett and says, “To our captain.” The coach places it around Everett’s neck and the team roars, and the point guard punches Everett’s chest and yells, “For being a killer!” and the first assistant shouts, “For leading us here!” Everett bows his head and the team bumps his shoulders and starts dancing, and they dance all the way to March Madness where they ride a wave of momentum to the Sweet 16 before they are finally knocked off in Indianapolis by eventual champion Kansas.

13

WHEN THE BOY returns home, he walks to the high school early and asks the VP to breakfast. The VP gladly accepts, and they walk together in the dark to a bright-windowed diner two blocks north. Midway through the meal, the boy takes the net from his backpack, reaches out, and places it like a necklace over the older man’s head.

“For all you’ve given me,” he says.

“It was nothing,” the VP says, and his voice cracks. “Thank you, Everett.”

14

WHEN BREAKFAST is done, they stand. The VP grips Everett’s arm. “Let’s go show your father,” he says, and they drive in the dark to the edge of town where they park and walk to the grave. They stand beside the headstone where the boy listens as the VP tells the story aloud and thanks Everett’s father, and tells Everett’s father his strength runs in his boy like lightning. When Everett and the VP go from that place the ground is firm beneath their feet. Down a slight descent, their shoes make footprints in lush grass. A remnant of darkness still robes the land as they behold granite forms as if risen from the earth, crosses over apexes of stone, marble angels whose arched wings and raised swords beckon light. Everett lifts his face. Near the far wall of the graveyard, the trunks of great trees pattern the earth, their limbs reaching skyward in a single sweep of motion.

Author:
Shann Ferch played professional basketball in Germany. He played for Montana State in the late 1980's. Shann and his brother Kral won multiple state championships and their team at MSU was inducted into the Montana State Hall of Fame in 2020. Shann also played for Pepperdine during the tragic season when Hank Gathers for Loyola Marymount died on the floor in the semi-finals. Shann (Ray) Ferch's work has appeared in Esquire, Poetry, McSweeney’s, Narrative, Montana Quarterly, and Salon.

Shann Ray grew up fishing the waterways of Montana and Alaska, and spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in southeast Montana. He attended NBC, coached at NBC, and played professional basketball in Germany's top league, the Bundesliga, where he was the 7th leading scorer and 2nd leading 3-point scorer, shooting 52% from the international 3-point line. Honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the High Plains Book Award, and the American Book Award. He lives with his wife, Jennifer, COO of NBC, and three daughters in Spokane, Washington and teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University. He is the author of Sweetclover, Blood Fire Vapor Smoke, American Masculine, American Copper, Balefire, Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity, Atomic Theory 7, and the libretto The Garment of Praise.

About NBC Basketball
NBC Basketball started in 1971 built on the belief that basketball fundamentals, hard work, mental toughness, leadership, and faith are key to future success. NBC Basketball focuses on helping student-athletes improve at basketball as well as become great leaders off the court. NBC Basketball Leadership coaches love to read and believe in the importance of the written word. For more information about NBC Basketball visit www.nbccamps.com/basketball for camps, summer academies, clinics, and other training options.