It was eleven-thirty on a rainy Thursday, nine days before his live shot on clips.com. My brother stood at half court in the Fernhill gym, holding a basketball like a box of fittings.
He had just made sixty-four copper elbows in a row into a mop bucket forty-seven feet away. I had watched the last two. I was standing by the scorer's table in my coat and slippers, and I had not said a word.
He didn't lift the ball over his head. He didn't bend his knees or set his elbow the way the men on television do. He held it at his chest, two hands, the way he'd held every fitting since he was twenty.
Then he threw it at the bucket.
It was not pretty. It came off his hands flat, with no spin a coach would allow. It went up and up, and for a long second I thought it would hit the ceiling.
It hit the front of the rim and bounced out, into the bucket. Splash.
"That's closer," Walt said.
"It's the closest you've been in five hundred tries," I said. I had not brought the book, so I wrote it on my hand.
He stayed until one in the morning. I stayed too. Marisol came back at midnight in a raincoat. She sat in the top row of the bleachers and fell asleep with the mop across her knees.
Walt threw a hundred and ten. Nine went in. Every one of them was two-handed, from the chest, aimed at the bucket instead of the basket.
"Why the bucket?" I asked.
"I don't know how to aim at a hoop," he said. "I've never known."
"You've been playing for twenty years."
"I always look at the hoop, and then I think about it." He picked up another ball. "I've never once thought about the bucket."
"Nine for a hundred and ten," I said. "That's about eight percent."
"Is that good?"
"Brock's data people said one in two thousand for a professional."
Walt considered this. He threw another one. It went in.
"Ten," he said. "Write that on your other hand."
In the morning, Walt called Brock himself. I listened from the office. He put it on speaker because he can't hold a phone and drink coffee at the same time.
"I'm back in," Walt said. "But the four seconds goes away."
There was a pause on the line. "Walt," said Brock, "the four seconds is the whole spot."
"Then the whole spot goes away," said Walt.
I had already drafted the language, and I read it aloud.
Page eleven would be struck. Any footage of a missed attempt could be used only with Walt's written consent. It could not appear in any ad, on any platform, including clips.com.
"That's not how this works," said Brock.
"Odessa thinks it is," I said.
I had called her at seven. Odessa had explained, very calmly, that clips.com had a front-page policy. Ads using a creator's footage needed that creator's sign-off. She had written the policy herself, two years earlier, after an incident involving a wedding cake.
"She's not going to schedule the stream if the spot's still in it," I told Brock. "She said to tell you she has a skateboarding dog ready for the gold frame."
The line was quiet for a long time. When Brock spoke again, he sounded different. He sounded like a person instead of a pitch.
"Okay," he said. "Strike it."
"Really?" said Walt.
"Really." Brock exhaled. "Look. I grew up in a gym like yours, in Galesford, Ohio."
He stopped, then went on. "My dad played in a Tuesday league until he was sixty. The scoreboard there had a dead segment, too. Every eight looked like a zero."
Walt and I looked at each other.
"I watched your clip about two hundred times," Brock said. "The first fifty were for work."
The last week went fast. Updraft sent a truck full of lights and four people in black who called the gym "the venue." They taped cables across the floor and set up three cameras. The clips.com stream would run through a box of equipment they bolted into the utility closet behind the far basket.
Marisol stood in the closet doorway with her mop.
"That closet floods," she said.
"We'll be fine," said the lead technician, a young man named Theo who was twenty-four and had a lanyard for every lanyard. "It's sealed."
"The closet isn't sealed," said Marisol. "That's the point of it flooding."
Theo smiled the way young men smile at women with mops. He explained that the box had a backup battery, a backup router and a backup backup.
"What's the backup for the floor?" asked Marisol.
Theo looked at the floor. He did not have an answer for the floor. He put a sandbag in the doorway. Marisol looked at the sandbag, then at me, and I wrote "closet" in the margin of the book.
Practice moved to six nights a week. Walt stopped looking at the hoop at all.
He put the mop bucket on the floor under the basket and aimed at it, every time. By Wednesday he was making one in six. Dennis stood beside the bucket in his braces with his arms up. He had stood under that basket for nineteen practices and saw no reason to quit now.
"You're in the way," I told him.
"I'm the target," said Dennis. "Walt says it helps."
"It helps," said Walt. "I've been throwing at Dennis since January."
The host arrived on Friday. His name was Kenji Marlowe, he was twenty-nine, and Updraft described him as high-energy. This turned out to be an understatement. He said "Let's go" eleven times in the first five minutes, including once to the vending machine.
"Big night tomorrow," he told Walt, shaking his hand with both of his. "How are we feeling? Are we feeling it?"
"I'm feeling a little sick," said Walt.
"Love that. Let's go."
That night, the clip of the first shot was still on the front page of clips.com. It wasn't number one anymore. It had settled into the top twenty, where it had more company. Above it, in the gold frame, Odessa had put a countdown.
It read: "One more shot. Live tomorrow at 8 p.m."
Nineteen million people had clicked "remind me."
Walt didn't sleep that night. I know, because he texted me at two in the morning. It wasn't "ok" or "k." It was a photo of an elbow fitting sitting in the parts bucket on the truck.
I texted back a photo of my thumb. He sent back a single question mark. It was the best conversation we had managed in a month.
Saturday came with rain. It started at noon, the way the forecast had promised, and it didn't stop.
By seven the gym was full. Not sixty-two people. Three hundred and forty, by my count, which Marisol said broke the fire code in a way she was choosing not to see.
The Gutter Kings came in their orange headbands. The ballroom class came in their dancing shoes. A retired dentist from Wren Avenue sat in the second row. He did not say "Do the shot," because I had sat down next to him.
Updraft had put a gold line of tape exactly on the half-court stripe. Kenji stood on it with a microphone, warming up the crowd. "Let's go," he said, and three hundred and forty people said it back.
Odessa sat beside me at the scorer's table with her laptop open. On the screen was the live counter. It went past two million, then three.
"That's more than the last major award show," she said, very quietly. "Don't tell anyone I said that."
Walt came out of the locker room at 7:58 in the Halo Fours. Very white. He walked to half court and did not wave.
Gus Tanaka-Bell handed him the official Updraft ball, whistle in his teeth.
The counter hit four million.
Walt turned the ball in his hands. Then he looked over at me, at the scorer's table. He looked calm for the first time in three weeks.
"Tess," he said, loud enough for the microphones. "Is Dennis open?"
Up next: One More Shot
Continue to Part 6 →