"It's OK, Midget," Johnny said. "We were all upset when we heard about those two."

"I'm sorry, everybody," Bo said.

"No problem, Bo," I said.

"We're living in fucked times," Doug said, doing knee bends to loosen his legs.

Bo Maybank walked up to me and began massaging the dense constricted muscles in my neck and shoulders. He massaged my face and neck with one of his towels. The towels, as always, were hot and slightly damp from the dryer. "Score a basket for me tonight, Will," he whispered so Reuben could not hear.

"I'll score one for you and one for Vietnam," I chided him.

"I hope I didn't upset the team, Will," he said. "I don't know what got into me."

"Light stuff, Bo," I said, pulling several hairs out of his almost hairless legs.

Bo stood barely five feet two in his stocking feet and weighed slightly less than a hundred pounds. He looked like a species of mankind not yet fully evolved. His skin was flushed a pale blue, as though his thinness would allow you to study his entire circulatory system without cutting into his body. His hands were thin and spidery and when stretched out over the hide of a basketball had the delicacy and fragile beauty of a fish skeleton.

He was also the best shooter on the team, of that there was no doubt whatsoever. He had the pure artistry of the natural. Each night as we left the gym we could see Bo shooting at the glass backboard with a Wilson Special that looked like a beachball in his hands. His wrist, thin as wire, would shoot the ball toward the rim and we would hear the pure sharp song of leather snapping through the net that was the signature of our trade. Once he had made eighteen straight set shots from the top of the circle and Coach Byrum admitted aloud that Bo was one of the best shooters he had ever seen. Then, in an indifferent aside, he winked at us and said, "But who cares about a five-foot midget who shoots good?" I had found Bo sobbing in the equipment room after he did not show up in the mess hall for dinner.

I looked up at Bo and smiled. I had never understood why Bo Maybank liked me so much better than I liked myself. I knew it had something to do with my being his vicarious counterpart in the game he was too small to play. When I had a bad game, he suffered more than I did, and when I did well, his entire face radiated joy. I was often embarrassed by how much Bo preferred me to my teammates, but I also needed his gentle and uncritical advocacy of me-I would always need people like Bo in my life. He had simply chosen me from the rest and sometimes a choice is explanation enough and requires no further study or elaboration. His hands were still on my shoulder when Coach Byrum entered the room.

It was painful to watch Byrum's face as he pleaded with us to win the final game of the season. It was an exhausted face, one full of absurd dignity and the jowly looseness that often comes to men who face an uncertain future and who drink too much because of that uncertainty. He knew and we knew that his days as basketball coach at the Institute were over. Byrum was not a great coach, that I had decided long ago, but he was a humane one; and I learned more from his frailties, his terrors, and his flawed vulnerable humanity than I would have learned from a great coach's strength.

After each pre-game speech during that long, losing season, there was a terrifying moment when we thought Coach Byrum would break down in front of us and cry out of frustration and humiliation before the whole team. His voice was raspy and eroded, as though he were breaking up from inside. He held his stomach with his left hand as he spoke and he kept a cup full of Maalox by his seat during games. Several times during the season I wanted to embrace his large, tragic frame and beg his forgiveness for not being a better athlete. Whenever he looked at me with his haunted frightened eyes, he broke my heart.

I stood in the front of the line by the locker room door with my teammates behind me. Bo handed me a new Wilson Special to dribble while leading the team onto the court for warm-ups. Reverently, I took the ball and inhaled its newness. It smelled like an expensive pair of men's shoes. I bounced it on the cement floor for luck, the feel of the leather so pleasant to my fingertips, so natural in my hands.

We could hear the deep-throated hum of the Corps waiting for the teams to emerge. Then we heard the partisan outcry as the VMI players appeared on the opposite side of the field house. The Corps greeted them with a volley of boos and hisses that reverberated across the campus. When the noise subsided, we waited for Bo to swing open the door to our locker room. Glazed with sweat, we tensed for the moment of entry, the butterflies swarming in their familiar, nervous dance in our stomachs; we listened closely to the Corps's hymn of loathing directed at VMI, felt the eyes of the Corps turning toward us. Bo wiped my forehead with a towel. I winked at him. Then he flung the door open and we burst into the Armory, princes of the sudden light, flawed but game champions of the Corps of Cadets.

The Corps rose to its feet and greeted us in its cyclonic voice. It exploded in the wild, exhilarated language of a tribe screaming out its oneness with us. Nothing has ever affected me in that same profoundly visceral way as the salutation of the Corps when I broke free from the steamy enclave of the locker room into the blue-hazed, cavernous, light-filtered center of the Armory. The band struck up "Dixie." The screams entered my brain like some enormously powerful insulin, like gusts of pure oxygen, and I glided across the deeply polished mirror of the gymnasium floor, a boy in my prime who could run windsprints all day, a boy who could bring the ball up court against anybody on earth.

The team fanned out in two disciplined squads as I drove to the right side of the court and put the first warm-up shot high against the backboard and heard its sweet rippling sound as it fell through the nylon net. I was moving now and my motor was running. I fed off the applause. God, how I love this game, I thought, rebounding a missed shot and throwing a bounce pass to Doug Cumming as he broke toward the basket. God, how I love this game and how I wish I had been better at it. The happiest days of my boyhood were spent above the woodshine of oak and below the gaze of both friendly and hostile crowds. And I never loved the game better than when we played at home and sprinted directly into the fierce embrace of the Corps. It was a memorable thing to play a game with the Corps in all its virile wildness behind you. If a team played us in the Armory, we were ten points better than we were on the road and not because we automatically played better at home but because our skills merged with the fury of the Corps in full cry. Strangers could garner some glimpse of the plebe system's violent nature by sitting in the Armory and listening to the Corps's voice. The applause of the Corps, charged with repressed sexuality, was feral and imprisoned and out of control.

There was also an extra dimension of rivalry and fraternity when we played Virginia Military Institute. We were the last two state military colleges of any significance in the nation. Cadets were a rare and vanishing species of American fauna, and our contests were like duels between well-groomed gentlemen. Our hair was closely cropped, we said "sir" to the referees, we stood at attention during the National Anthem, and we were two of the last all-white basketball teams in the country. If the Institute was something from the Old South, then VMI was something from Old Virginia, and that was very different and very important indeed. I also liked the individual VMI players better than any other team in the Southern Conference. They were the only ones who did not laugh at our uniforms on road trips, did not call cadence as we walked to the locker room, and did not blame us for every death in the Vietnam War. The first stirrings of the antiwar movement were beginning on American college campuses, and the Institute became a highly visible symbol of that war to other student bodies.

The first antiwar demonstration I ever witnessed had stopped a game at George Washington University when fifty students staged a sit-down in center court. Reuben and I watched in amazement from the sidelines as campus police forcibly removed them from the gym. We were both disturbed and amused. As we watched, a pretty, brown-haired girl walked quietly up to us and said hello. When we looked around, she threw a bucket of human blood into our faces. Then she screamed at us, "How many kids did Institute graduates kill today, you bastards?" The crowd was booing loudly. Later, I realized they were jeering at the demonstrators but at that moment, I thought they were voicing some indefinable but universal loathing of me personally as I stood there wiping blood from my eyes and spitting it out of my mouth.

"Captain McLean," the referee said, tapping me on the shoulder.

"Just call me 'Cap,' Big George," I said, shaking hands with the referee I had seen three times a year for four years. "I don't like to stand on formality. Just call the fouls on them. I swear I'm not going to touch human flesh tonight."

"With you guarding Mance, I figure you'll foul out in this first half, Cap." Big George laughed, as we walked toward center court.

"Do you know any gamblers, George?" I whispered. "I can be bought cheap."

Jimmy Mance was watching me as we approached mid-court.

"Captain Mance," George said, nodding toward me, "Captain McLean."

"How you doing, Will?" Mance said, grinning and extending his hand. We shook hands warmly.

"It's my last game, Jimmy. Don't make me look like a complete jerk in front of the home crowd."

"I'll be lucky to score ten against you, Will," he said. "You know that."

The only way I could hold Mance to ten points would be to cut off one of his feet.

"George, I would like to file an official report," I said seriously.

"Will, would you please shut up and let me tell you the rules so we can get on with the game?"

"No, this is important, George. I have information from an impeccable source that Mr. Mance here is a Russian woman who had an operation so she could play ball for VMI."

Jimmy laughed loudly, for Jimmy Mance thought I was a hoot. It was the only thing about playing against him that was not personally humiliating. It had become an integral part of my strategy in defending him that I get him laughing at the opening tips and keep him giggling to the final whistle. I had once got him laughing so hard I had held him to twenty-two points. Another time I had made a joke about his mother, and he had ripped me for thirty-eight, fuming and choleric for the rest of the game. Even his sense of humor was a sensitive, high-strung instrument, and I had learned to play it delicately.

Jimmy Mance had played a far more important role in my life than he would ever realize. By observing this brilliant athlete, with his classical moves and his effortless grace, I could judge the depth and tenor of my own mediocrity. He was six feet four inches tall and built in that free-flowing, loose-muscled dignity of the natural. Every time I went against him I was unconscionably overmatched. He could jump higher, run faster, shoot better, pass more accurately ... it was as though God had deliberately set out to make a basketball player when he designed the body of Jimmy Mance. He had given me only the desire to be a great athlete, not the body. Mance had proven that to me each time I guarded him. My desire to stop him emphasized the extent of his gifts and the limits of my own. It was an honor to be on the same court with him, and I would tell my children of the nights I challenged him, guarded him, of the times I was beaten by him.

I left Mance and the referees and joined my teammates, who had encircled Coach Byrum, listening to him exhort us to win in an endless string of cliches that made up the impoverished language of sport. Bo Maybank stroked my face with a warm towel.

The buzzer sounded and we took to the court for my last game at the Institute. And, oh, the feeling as the voice of the Corps greeted us. I burned with the majesty of my sport; I burned with the joy of living life at that moment. In the stands I saw Pig and Mark and Tradd standing with their arms raised in gestures of support for me, caught the eyes of Commerce and Abigail, saluted the General, saw the Bear and Edward the Great, noticed Pearce sitting in a crowd of plebes, heard Cain Gilbreath call my name in the first row of. the stands, waved to the boys in R Company, and felt inalienable gratitude to this sport-this sport that had allowed me to become the showman, permitted the shy boy to strut and mug and preen for the approval of the crowd. I knew that Annie Kate would be listening to the game on radio, that my name would come to her through invisible waves as she sat in her isolation on Sullivan's Island. On the court, in the middle of games, I was completely happy. I felt cleansed of all sin, inflated with the grace of the planet, and free.

The centers rose toward the ball and I lost consciousness of the crowd, lost consciousness of myself, and entered into the high country of sport. Down the court I pursued Jimmy Mance. I watched a VMI forward pump in a beautiful jumper from the corner. I retrieved the ball out of bounds, flipped it to Johnny, moved up court, and saw the first play break down as Doug found himself trapped and surrounded in the corner as I ran toward him. He shoveled the ball to me just as I saw Reuben make a move on the VMI center and I shot the ball to him, as he went toward the rim for the ball and dunked it savagely through the basket. And I turned into the applause, exalted, running, wild on the court. I burned. I burned with the joy of the game. I tell you I was a burning boy that night in Charleston.

But burning alone could not stop or interfere with the brilliance of Jimmy Mance. He began to control the tempo and flow of the game with the sheer immensity of his gifts. He scored on his first five jumps shots. Down the court he would lope toward me, directly toward me, looking at me with those blazing predator's eyes, his body moving with a cold fluency, his dribble confident. He was the monarch of this brief season, and he knew the responsibilities of his reign. When he dribbled toward me maneuvering for his sixth shot, I shouted to him above the din of the crowd, "You're humiliating me, Mance. You're making me look like shit in front of all my friends."

He smiled, then wheeled suddenly around a pic, and I watched the ball arc high into the air, barely above my outstretched hand. It hit the rim and fell into the hands of a leaping, fully extended Doug Cumming.

"You're human, Mance. You're actually a human being," I screamed, breaking to the center of the court where I received a perfect pass over my shoulder from Doug and broke toward our basket with Johnny DuBruhl's shout entering my left ear as he filled the lane. Driving toward Mance, who had fallen back to defend against the fast break, I cut toward his right side, went up into the air with him, waited until I saw both of his arms above my head, and hit Johnny with a behind-the-back pass he caught on the dead run. He scored without a man around him and the Corps went berserk. I danced back up the court, a thing of beauty, receiving the shouted praise as my just due.

But Mance came toward me again. And he came toward me every time VMI had the ball, every time we scored or missed a shot. His presence and the nobility of his skills excited me. He humbled me. He defeated me time and time again as he moved in my direction. I battled him with all my strength and canniness about the game. Every trick I knew I used against him. But he countered them with the simplicity of his art. I would drive the lane past him and score. He would answer me with a long jump shot from the top of the key. Then Reuben would break loose in the middle and score in one of his long sweeping hooks or Johnny would come off a pic and score on a lovely jump shot, tying the score.

Again, all eyes turned toward Mance, toward me guarding Mance, and he would break off a double pic with me scrambling to catch up to him and another shot would sting the net with astounding accuracy. His art was pure; his defender was only earnest. His team led by three at half-time. In those first twenty minutes, Mance had scored twenty-four points.

But he also had three fouls, and during the half-time talk Coach Byrum gave me license to drive the middle against Mance to get him to foul out. Byrum shouted the instructions at me as Bo wiped the sweat from my face with a towel.

As the centers faced off for the beginning of the second half, the cadets of R Company rose and gave me a standing ovation. Pig, Tradd, and Mark held aloft a banner that read, "Romeo LOVES McLean." I had to turn away from that banner and my company to avoid crying in front of three thousand people.

"I heard a joke in the barracks today, Jimmy," I said, laughing to myself. "It's the funniest goddam joke I've ever heard."

"What's the joke?" he asked as the referee moved between the centers.

"I'm not going to tell you," I said, grinning at him, "but I swear I laughed for an hour."

VMI's center controlled the jump. Mance received the ball and slowly began bringing it up the court. "What's the joke?" he repeated above the noise of the crowd.

"It's the funniest joke I've ever heard," I answered as he turned his back to me and began backing me toward the basket. He failed to see Johnny DuBruhl leave the man he was guarding and sweep around Mance's blind side, tipping the ball toward the scorer's table. I broke for our basket and called for the ball.

The pass was too long and I sprinted for it as hard as I could run. It hit the floor in front of me and bounced high above the basket. I reached it in midair and shot the ball at the same instant, laying it against the painted white square of the glass backboard. I knew the shot was good before I saw it go in. When you are playing as well as you can play, there are times when you do not have to watch your shots strike the cords of the net. Experience and touch and instinct tell you that the shot is good as soon as it leaves your hand.

When I reached Mance, I taunted him, "On that last play, All-American candidate Jimmy Mance looked like horseshit. Everybody's laughing at you, Jimmy."

"Tell me the joke, McLean," he threatened, keeping a wary eye on Johnny, "or I'm going to score every single time I come down the court. And you know I can come damn close to doing it."

After issuing this statement, he pumped in a perfect twenty-five-foot jump shot that robbed the crowd of its exultancy and confidence. I quickly told him the only joke I could remember on the spur of the moment. "A cadet's definition of an intellectual is anyone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger."

"That's not funny, McLean," he said, glowering angrily at me. "That's the worst joke I ever heard."

"You had to be there, Jimmy," I answered, receiving the in-bounds pass from Johnny and bringing it up the court.

When I reached the front court, Reuben and the forwards cleared out of the middle; Johnny moved to the left of the court and stood directly in front of our bench.

"Drive him, Will," Johnny called. "Drive his ass off."

The right side of the court was left open for me to maneuver Mance.

"You've got three fouls, Jimmy," I said, eyeing the big men of VMI dropping off their men to protect their star. "Be careful. The pro scouts want to know if you can play defense. If you can't guard me there's a chance you won't be able to handle Jerry West and Oscar Robertson."

"Come on, Will," Mance challenged, sweat dropping off him in clean, hot drops.

I broke hard for the basket, beating Mance in a quick first step, put my body between him and the ball, and drove past him with all the speed and skill earned in a ten-year apprenticeship in the sport. But I felt him recover, match me step for step, straining to retrieve the last essential angle, which I refused to surrender. When I left my feet, I felt his breath and hovering presence and knew that he foolishly was going to try to block the shot. I showed him the ball and saw his long, muscled arm slap at it. He slapped my wrist instead as I pump faked, and with my eyes still on the basket and traveling full speed I was in the midst of doing what I did the best in my game. I laid the ball in softly, perfectly, with an underhand sweep that barely eluded a leaping VMI forward who had sloughed off Doug to help Mance.

I made the foul shot and the score was tied. For the next fifteen minutes, the play was spirited and furious, but with three minutes to play Johnny hit a jump shot that tied the score for the thirteenth time in the game.

Mance came down the court with his eye fixed to the clock. Picking him up at half court, I tried to make him surrender the ball or give up his dribble. But he was too good and quick, and he taught me some lessons about ball handling as he moved me toward the key.

I could sense that the other VMI players were setting up a series of screens behind me.

"Pic right, Will," I heard Johnny cry out.

"Pic left," I heard Doug's voice and I knew that Mance was making his choices and taking his time.

I moved to my left, overplaying his right hand, his best hand. With a beautiful crossover dribble he drove to his left past the first pic, but kept his eye on me for a second too long. He did not see Johnny anticipate his move and jump into his path, establishing a solid defensive position. He did not see Johnny until he ran right over him, his shoulder catching Johnny in the midsection. It sounded like the collision of steers, and Johnny somersaulted across the court. The referee put his palm behind his head and signaled a charging violation. There was bedlam in the crowd as the buzzer sounded and the official score-keeper indicated that the great Jimmy Mance had fouled out of the game.

With his head down, Mance loped toward his bench. I followed him and near midcourt I laid my hand on his shoulder. He stopped, and we faced each other wordlessly. He put his arm around my shoulder, and we walked toward his bench together. The Corps rose and paid him homage in a thunderous, rousing ovation. Before he sat down, we embraced, embraced hard, and we held it for several moments. It would be the last time we would ever play against each other, the last time we would ever duel beneath the lights. He had scored forty points; I had scored twelve.

"If I guarded you every night, you'd be an All-American for sure, Jimmy," I said.

"If I played as well against everyone else, I'd deserve to be. Good luck, Will."

"You're the best I ever saw, Jimmy. The best I ever saw in my life."

Mance walked to his seat by his coach and out of my life forever.

Without Mance, the VMI team was not nearly as good a team as we were. But there are times in athletics when that does not matter. There are times when average ballplayers transform themselves by an immense spiritual effort into athletes they were never meant to be. When we returned to the court to face the disadvantaged VMI squad for the final minutes, we figured we would win the game easily. But we had not reckoned on the possibility of these splendid transformations. The VMI team came at us with hunger and spirit and elan. They surprised us with their hunger, the fierce terror of their want, as they scrapped us from line to line. The boardplay beneath the rim was fearful and savage. Only a last-second shot by Reuben tied the game and brought us into the first overtime. VMI had found heroes in three mediocre players, and it was beautiful to watch.

Though we did not know it then, we were engaged in one of those games that would become legendary in the barracks. On this night, these two average college basketball teams would honor their sport with the irrepressible intensity of their will to win and the radiant chivalry of their gamesmanship. Each team scored nine points in the first five-minute overtime. Each team scored six in the second overtime. Each team scored seven in the third overtime. We were playing in the longest game in the history of the Institute.

As we prepared to take to the court, exhausted and feverish below the passionate crowd, we could not hear Coach Byrum's shouted instructions for our strategy in the fourth overtime. He was losing his voice and the noise of the crowd precluded any chance or need of hearing him. Bo Maybank stroked my arms and neck with a clean towel, and the pressure of his small hands felt almost sexual as I closed my eyes and listened to the masculine chant of the Corps in all its primitiveness and lawless carnality.

I could barely move as the horn sounded to end the fourth overtime. My feet and legs ached, and my knees felt as though someone had poured lead shot into them. I winked at Abigail, nodded to the General, and knelt on the floor to tie my shoes. Johnny DuBruhl came over, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, "Let's end it, Will. I'm tired as shit. If we have to go through one more overtime, I'm going to ask Byrum to forfeit."

"I'm dying, boy," I replied.

VMI scored two quick baskets in that first minute of play, but Doug hit a fall-away jumper in the corner and Johnny scored on a fast break. With three minutes left, VMI went into their freeze pattern and decided to gamble on taking the last shot of the game. The seconds fell slowly off the clock. I tried to pressure the sophomore guard who had taken Mance's place, but he was a fine and cautious ball handler. I dropped back off him as he fed a pass to a forward, who had come out to the back court to take the pressure off the VMI guards. When I looked at the clock again, there was only a minute left to play, and I edged out toward the sophomore again and tried to bother him into a mistake of inexperience.

With twenty-two seconds left, the sophomore passed to the VMI center, who had broken up to the foul line. The center shoveled a pass to the forward on my side of the court. The forward's eyes were nervous with the pressure, and I saw that he was desperately looking to get rid of the ball as soon as he could find an open man. My man moved to his right to receive an outlet pass. Doug, with his hands held high and his body taut and glistening, moved in quickly to pressure the forward. The forward pivoted cleanly away from Doug and glanced at the clock. Eighteen seconds. Seventeen. My body tensed as I felt the critical moment arrive as the game died on us. I saw the forward's eyes search for the man I was guarding. I pulled back and let my man slide out unmolested to receive the pass. But I carefully preserved an angle between my man and the passer. I crouched and waited and I knew I was going to make a move, knew I was going to gamble, that I was going to spring into the center of action, knew that I was going to, knew I was, knew I . . . fourteen seconds, thirteen . . . and I saw the ball coming through the air as I lunged outward, my hand extended, as I tipped the ball away and chased it to the side of the court, controlled it, went behind my back with the dribble, and broke for the center, with players from both teams exploding toward the far court. Then I felt it.

I felt the Corps. They had broken with me; they had risen to their feet and I was swept forward by the immensity of their sound. They carried me forward with their noise and the power of their advocacy. I heard their thunder, their storm, the whole prodigious solidarity of the brotherhood accompanying my charge down the court.

I watched two of the VMI players, blurred images of scrambling gold racing ahead of me, trying to position themselves to contain the fast break that was forming in perfect order as I approached them, coming faster than I had ever come before, the seconds spilling off the clock. I heard Johnny filling the lane to the right and Doug calling to me from the left and Reuben trailing four steps behind me. The ball was part of me and I was confident and exultant as I swept past center court and faced the two nameless VMI players who awaited my coming.

The first player came out to meet me. It was the sophomore guard, and he came too quickly, an error of inexperience. I slowed, faked a change to my right, and switched to my left hand, passing him in a blur. He had not recognized the old trick of hesitation, the small betrayal of speed that was the essence of the change of pace.

I heard Johnny screaming for the ball to my right. I turned my head toward him, but my eye fastened on the last defender. The VMI man moved out to cut off the pass to Johnny But there would be no pass to Johnny. I left the floor, rising into the air, into the light and smoke, into the history of that night, into the death of time and the last game I would ever play. I rose up into the happiest, most glorious moment in my life, to take the shot I had awaited since I was a boy of ten. Realizing his mistake too late, the VMI forward lunged wildly toward me, but I moved my left shoulder between him and the ball, braced myself for his impact, and spun the ball softly, gently against the backboard. I did not see the ball go into the basket, but I did not need to. The marvelous noise of the Corps had turned the Armory into a vessel of unimaginable tumult.

I lay on my back, out of bounds, where the collision with the VMI forward had knocked me and stared straight up into the ceiling lights. But I was not seeing anything; I was taking in the praise of the crowd, accepting the homage of its brawling, rowdy lyrics. I heard the chant of my name. At that moment, the Corps and I were one body, one substance, one passionate, untamable force.

Then Johnny fell on me, locked me into a jubilant embrace, and we rolled on the gym floor, laughing hysterically Rising, we began leaping up and down in a delirious, primitive dance of triumph. Doug and Reuben and Dave joined us, and I was slapped, pummeled, and hugged. All five VMI players had bowed their heads in that gesture of shame and failure I had known so many times in my career at the Institute. Their faces were dispirited, beaten, and exhausted.

Going to the foul line, I lifted both arms to the crowd and the noise carried me again, entered each cell of my dazzled, inflamed consciousness, and I let it take me, seduce me. . . . I wanted my life to freeze at that exact moment, with my arms raised above me, the crowd on its feet, those thousands of human voices screaming out my name.

The referees handed me the ball and I shot my free throw, watched the net shiver with the ball's entry, saw the long desperate pass of the VMI guard fall harmlessly into the far court, and heard the buzzer signal the end of the game.

Then the Corps was on me. I was in the center of an uproarious surge of gray uniforms; I was lifted toward the lights and found myself on the shoulders of Mark and Pig, felt hands reaching me, touching me, and I thought I would remember those hands more than anything else that night. I tried to preserve every memory of that delirious charge of the Corps onto center court. But you cannot preserve the memory of applause; it is too volatile, too perishable. Later it would astonish me that I could not satisfactorily summon back that moment. I remembered the ride to the locker room, the hands trying to reach me, the movement of the gray uniforms trying to get close to me. But it was my destiny and my character not to be able to recall the exact feeling, the exact one, of those brief seconds in the adoration of the Corps.

No, I would remember the towel. . . Bo Maybank's towel. Precisely and completely and for the rest of my life. I do not know how he got to me, but I felt his light leaps up to my face and felt the towel warm against my brow. And his face, I would remember his face as he wiped the sweat from mine, transfigured with joy for me-his face vulnerable and febrile and anonymous-as he danced on the floor below me, as he tried to reach me, as he tried to be a part of the finest moment of my life.

I would lose Bo after that night, as I would lose Jimmy Mance, Coach Byrum, Johnny, Doug, and Reuben. I would lose basketball and the fine camaraderie of athletics. But it was Bo I would miss the most, the little boy-child with his useless, lonely set shot and his towels fresh and warm from the dryers. His mother would call me three years later, grieving and proud, to tell me about the death of her son, the helicopter pilot, Lieutenant Bo Maybank. How can I say how splendid it must have been for him to come winged and ominous from the heights, dwarfing the tall men who had once teased him and stuffed him struggling and outraged into towel carts full of soiled laundry? How can I tell you that Bo never learned that height is not always the important thing? But he had learned all that he would ever need to learn about other small men with good eyes, good hands, instinctive cunning, and set shots far deadlier than his. A small man shot Bo Maybank out of the skies of Vietnam. The bullet entered his eye and blew out the back of his head.

His mother wept and I wept. I cried all night for that smallest of men who had loved me with his towels, who loved the game but never scored a single point or took a single shot except in empty gyms after the crowds had gone home. I remembered his tiny leaps up toward me after the VMI game and I regretted I had not looked down from the shoulders of my roommates, from the accolades of the crowd, looked down and done the right thing for once in my life, the grand and perfect gesture. I should have lifted Bo Maybank up with me, and together we should have taken that last frantic ride to the locker room. But I didn't; I wanted it all, all for myself.

When I finished dressing that evening, I walked out to the center court and stood, silent, in the middle of the gymnasium floor. I was one of the last to dress and the Armory was massive and lonely. I saw a basketball beneath the bench that Bo had not seen when he collected the equipment after the game. My footsteps echoed through the gym as I walked over to retrieve it. I dribbled the ball to the top of the key. I could measure my life in the number of jump shots and layups I had aimed at the steel rims of baskets. I had played the game because I felt ugly as a kid and painfully shy. People sought me out in my guise as an athlete. I did not have confidence they would seek me out or like me if I faced them nakedly, without the aura of my sport to recommend me. To masquerade my fear and insecurity I had found a sport to hide behind, and now I would have to perfect other disguises and join other masquerades. My time in gymnasiums was finished.

In the darkness of a gymnasium lit only by a winter moon, I shot a jump shot that hit the rim and bounced back toward me. I did not retrieve it. It bounced past the half-court line, the bounces getting smaller until the ball began rolling. I watched it roll past the other foul line, slowly now, until it crossed the out-of-bounds line and stopped. Out of bounds and out of my life. Like most other ballplayers I had a superstition. I could never leave the gym until I had made my last shot. But not tonight. I turned and began walking out of the gym. I had missed the shot and somewhere along the line, I had missed the point. But it was over now. I had gone to my limits as an athlete and I knew the secrets all athletes knew. I walked out of the gymnasium and never once did it occur to me to look back. I was free.

But as I passed through the dark corridor behind the stands, a voice called out to me from beneath the bleachers. I was startled and turned toward the voice, both angry and afraid.

"Mr. McLean," the voice said desperately, "I've got to see you, sir."

It was Pearce. I looked back toward the locker room and saw Doug Cumming saying good night to Bo.

"You scared the living shit out of me, Pearce," I said.

"I need your help, sir," he answered. "Could you come down to the yacht basin and talk to me? There's no one around there at this time of night. We can talk alone."

"Go on down there, Pearce. I'll walk around first battalion and cut across the baseball field."

He departed silently and I walked out the front door.