'Is it a reliable source?' I said.
'It was a girl who dated one of the team guys-'
'She should know,' I said.
'She didn't say she knew. She just said she'd heard somebody sort of hint at it, you know, joking.'
'Who was she dating?'
Barry shook his head. 'I won't tell you. I'm not going to get her in trouble.'
'Why would she get in trouble?' I said. Barry shook his head some more.
'At the moment no one's talking about prosecuting on this thing, but if they do, and your rumor is correct, then you're going to get asked this question again under the threat of a contempt citation,' I said. 'Then it's grown up time, kid.'
'You think I'm a kid and a kid doesn't know shit, don't you,' Barry said.
'Exactly,' I said.
A number of Barry's colleagues had gathered silently about during this interplay. None of them seemed to be rooting for me.
'Whyn't you get off his case, Mister,' said a young woman with very large pink-rimmed glasses.
'You happen to know the source of his rumor?' I said.
'No, but if I did, I wouldn't tell you.'
I looked at the rest of the kids, slowly, one at a time. Nobody said anything.
'What's too bad,' I said, 'is you've fastened on to the wrong principle. The heart of the business is not protecting your sources. It's spreading the truth.'
None of them said anything except one in the back, who said, 'Yeaa!' And another kid said, 'It's Lou Grant.'
Then a girl giggled and three or four others laughed. It is hard to remain dignified when being laughed at by a group of adolescents. I succeeded, however. I left without giving them the finger.
3
THE 'Taft Basketball Program' looks like Life magazine. It's in full color. It has biographies of all the players on both sides, pictures of everybody, individual statistics, and a history of the rivalry, which was Georgetown on a program Cort's secretary had given me. I had it rolled up and stuck in my left hip pocket when I drifted into the Taft field house and took a seat in the empty stands above the basketball court, put my feet up on the seats in front of me and spread out to watch the Taft Falcons practice. They were running switch drills in opposite corners of the floor under a couple of assistant coaches, and the head coach, Dixie Dunham, moved back and forth, commenting, correcting, reviling.
'Awright,' Dunham was screaming. 'Everybody around me down here.' The group at the far left of the court came down to the far right end where Dunham was standing.
'Okay,' Dunham said, 'Dwayne, you got the ball. You pass off to Dennis, come down here, set the pick. Dennis, you go off and pick to the right. Now ... okay, . . . Robert, what do you do?'
'Fight through the pick, Coach.'
'And if you do, and Kenny thinks you're going to switch, what happens?'
There was silence for a moment.
'What the fuck happens?' Dunham's voice went up an octave.
'Both guys guarding Dennis,' Dwayne said. 'I roll to the basket.'
'That's right. Come on, boys, is Dwayne the only one of you thinking? So what do you learn from that? What's the lesson we take? What does my system say about that?'
'We got to talk to each other,' Robert said.
'Check,' Dunham said, 'and double check. That, Robert, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar key. You got to talk. I don't care whether you switch, or you fight through the pick. Both of you got to know what the other guy's doing, otherwise, what? Kenny, what?'
'Two for them, Coach.'
'You bet your ass.' Dunham clapped his hands. 'Okay, Frank, Billy, take them back, let's work on it some more.'
Dunham was a legend. Certainly he was one of the two or three best college basketball coaches in the country. He was also a man of legendary temper and intensity and had sat out a five-game suspension a couple of years ago when he had gone into the stands after a heckler. Since he was six feet five and weighed maybe 225, when he went after the heckler it constituted a genuine threat. According to the program he'd been a small forward at Canisius, had averaged eight points, three assists and four rebounds a game, in a college career during which Canisius had won seventy and lost eighteen. He'd coached at Seton Hall, and then at Marquette, before he'd come to Taft, and he'd always won.
I sat quietly in the stands, one of maybe five or six people watching practice, and learning the players by comparing their pictures on last week's program with the faces on the court. In maybe twenty-five minutes I had them all memorized and attached to names.
I watched them scrimmage. I watched Dunham go into a frenzy at one point and send them all to the locker room, only to bring them back out of the locker room two minutes after they'd gone in. Finally the practice wound
