The man from Updraft Athletics arrived at our shop two days after my brother's half-court shot hit number one on clips.com.
By then the clip had forty-one million replays. It had been knocked out of the gold frame once, briefly, by a cat that could open a refrigerator. It had climbed back within the hour. Odessa Lund from the clips.com Front Page desk had called me twice to report this, the way a doctor reports a fever breaking.
The man's name was Brock Ellery. He was thirty-eight and his business card said "VP, Brand Moments." He wore a gray suit and a pair of sneakers that did not exist yet. He told us so himself, before he told us his name.
"These aren't out until the fall," he said, lifting one foot slightly. "The Halo Four. You're looking at the future."
Walt looked at them. "They're very white," he said.
"Thank you," said Brock.
Our shop is a converted garage with a front office the size of a walk-in closet. There are two chairs for customers. One of them is usually holding a box of P-traps. I moved the box and Brock sat down, carefully, as if the chair might be sponsored by a competitor.
"Mr. Kovac," he said. "Can I call you Walt? Walt, what happened in that gym was a moment."
"It was a pass," said Walt.
Brock smiled at him with every tooth he owned. "The best moments always feel like accidents. That's what makes them moments."
He leaned forward. "Updraft would like to create another one. With you."
He laid it out. One shot from the half-court line at the Fernhill gym, three weeks from Saturday. Updraft would supply the ball, the shoes, the lights and a host. Clips.com would stream it live on the front page, in the gold frame, for the whole country.
"If the ball goes in," Brock said, "Updraft pays you fifty thousand dollars."
"And if it doesn't?" I asked.
"Then it's still a moment," said Brock. "Just a different one."
I wrote that down. I didn't know yet why. It just had the shape of a sentence somebody would regret.
Walt said no.
He said it politely, which for Walt means he said it while looking at the floor. "I'm a plumber," he said. "I shot three for forty-one on free throws this year. Tess has it in a book."
"I do have it in a book," I said.
"The clip is real," Walt went on. "I'm not saying it isn't."
He shrugged. "But I can't do it again. Nobody can do that again. That's what makes it a clip."
Brock nodded like a man who had been told no by better people than us and had outlasted all of them. He set a folder on the desk. It was white, with the Updraft logo pressed into the cover, a little wing.
"Look it over," he said. "Sleep on it. Have your people read it."
"I'm his people," I said.
"Then you should read it."
He stood and buttoned his jacket. At the door, he paused.
"Forty-one million replays, Walt. Do you know how many people watched our last commercial on purpose? About nine."
He left. Walt picked up an elbow fitting from the desk and lobbed it over his shoulder into the parts bucket by the door. It landed with a small, satisfied clank.
"I'm not doing it," he said.
He did it, of course. Here is why.
That Tuesday, the Backflow were supposed to have their end-of-season pizza at the Fernhill gym. When we arrived, there was a sheet of paper taped to the gym door. It was printed on city letterhead, which in our town is a light-blue color usually associated with parking tickets.
The gym would close on March first. The building had "an unresolved water intrusion issue beneath the playing surface." The city lacked funds to repair it. The adult rec league, the youth league, the Saturday seniors' walking club and the Thursday-night ballroom class would be "invited to seek alternative venues."
Marisol was inside, standing at the far end with her mop. The yellow bucket was half full. It had rained that morning.
"I found out yesterday," she said. "They sent a contractor out in December. I didn't think they'd actually read his report."
"What did he quote?" Walt asked.
Marisol pulled a folded paper out of her cardigan pocket. Walt read it. His face did something I had seen only once before, when a customer showed him a toilet installed by her nephew.
"Forty-nine thousand eight hundred," he said. "For a drain line."
"It's under the whole floor," Marisol said. "They'd have to pull up the boards."
"They'd have to pull up a third of the boards," said Walt. "And this guy's charging for all of them."
Dennis had arrived with the pizza. He set the boxes down on the scorer's table and adjusted both braces. "Fifty thousand," he said, slowly. "That's an interesting number."
Everybody looked at Walt. Walt looked at the mop.
"Forty-nine eight," he said. "It's not fifty. It's two hundred dollars less than fifty."
"That's even better," said Dennis. "There'd be money left over for pizza."
I read Brock's folder that night at the kitchen table. It was twelve pages.
Most of it was the usual language about likeness, rights and promotional use. There was a section about the shoes, which Walt would be required to wear. There was a section about the host, an Updraft spokesperson who was described only as "high-energy."
The rules were on page four.
The attempt had to be made from behind the half-court line, with an Updraft ball, in a single attempt. The ball had to "leave Mr. Kovac's hands and pass through the hoop." Clips.com would stream it live, and the stream would be the official record.
Page eleven was a single paragraph about footage "in the event of an unsuccessful attempt." It said Updraft would own it. I read it twice. It didn't say what for.
I flagged it with a sticky note. Then I went to bed. I should have stayed up and thought about it, and I would think about it plenty, later.
In the morning, Walt called Brock and said yes.
"I'm not doing it for the money," he told me after he hung up. "I'm doing it for the floor."
"The money is how the floor gets fixed," I said.
"Then I'm doing it for the money, for the floor."
Word got around faster than I could manage it. By Thursday, three customers had asked Walt to sign their invoices. A woman on Delancey Street paid hers in full and asked him to autograph the toilet.
"I'm not signing a toilet," Walt said.
"It's a brand-new toilet," she said. "You installed it."
He signed the tank lid, on the inside, where nobody would see it. She told him that was the most modest thing she had ever witnessed. Then she posted a photo of it on clips.com, where it got two hundred thousand replays.
The first practice was Friday night. Marisol let us in after the ballroom class finished. Dennis came, because Dennis comes to everything. He stood under the far basket with his arms up, out of habit.
Walt stood at the half-court line with a rack of balls. He bounced one, twice. He set his feet. Then he lifted the ball over his head, the way the players on television do, and shot it properly, with form, with an arc.
It missed the backboard by four feet. It bounced off the bleachers and rolled into the mop bucket.
"That's fine," said Walt. "First one."
I kept the book. I made a new page and labeled the column "attempts."
Ninety-nine attempts later, the column was all zeros. Eleven had hit the rim. Three had hit Dennis, who said he didn't mind. One went into the mop bucket a second time, which Walt said should count for something, and which I did not record.
Walt stood at half court, breathing hard, with the last ball in his hands.
"Zero for a hundred," I said.
"I know."
"The stream is in nineteen days."
He nodded. He didn't look at me. Then my phone buzzed, and I saw a new message from Odessa at clips.com.
It read: "Have you seen the comments? People are saying the clip is fake. They're saying your thumb is hiding the edit."
Up next: The Thumb
Continue to Part 3 →