One More Shot

Four million people were watching on clips.com when my brother, a forty-six-year-old plumber in borrowed white sneakers, asked me if Dennis was open.

The gym went quiet. Three hundred and forty people turned to look at the scorer's table, where I sat with the book. Kenji Marlowe lowered his microphone for the first time all night.

"Dennis is always open," I said.

"Thank you," said Walt.

Dennis was already moving. He walked from our bench to the far basket in both braces. He went slowly, the way he walks to the board in chemistry class.

He stopped under the hoop. He raised his arms.

Then Marisol came out of the shadows with the yellow mop bucket. She set it on the floor beside Dennis, directly under the rim. She did not ask anyone's permission.

"It's always there," she told Theo, who had started to object. "It's part of the gym."

Theo looked at Brock. Brock, in the front row, shook his head very slightly. Leave it.

---

Walt held the ball at his chest. Two hands. The way he'd held ten thousand fittings, in driveways and crawl spaces and once, memorably, on a roof.

He didn't look at the hoop. I could see that from the table. He looked at the bucket, and at Dennis waving above it.

I raised my phone. I didn't decide to. It's what my hands do when Walt is on a court. My thumb went to the bottom-left corner of the lens and stayed there.

Walt threw it.

It came off his hands flat and ugly, with no spin. It went up into the lights. Up past the banners for the 1974 seniors' walking club champions. Up so high that the crowd made a sound I had never heard before, a kind of collective inhale.

And at the exact top of its flight, the stream went down.

I know because Odessa said "No," very quietly, beside me. On her laptop, the clips.com live player had frozen. Four million people were looking at a ball hanging in the air above a mop bucket. Then a gray box appeared over it: "Stream unavailable."

From the utility closet behind the far basket came a hiss and a small pop. Water was coming out from under the door. It had come around the sandbag, exactly as Marisol had said it would.

None of the three hundred and forty people in the gym were looking at the closet. They were watching the ball come down.

It dropped toward Dennis's hands. Dennis, to his credit, did not try to catch it. He ducked.

It went through the rim without touching anything. Then it landed in the mop bucket. Splash.

---

I'm told the noise could be heard four blocks away. I don't remember it.

I remember Walt on the gold tape with his hands still out in front of him. He looked like he was waiting for the fitting to clank. I remember Dennis, soaked from the splash, laughing so hard he had to sit down. I remember Marisol holding the mop over her head like a trophy.

The Gutter Kings carried Walt on their shoulders. Roofers are very strong. The ballroom class did something that might have been a waltz.

Kenji Marlowe said "Let's go" so many times that he lost his voice by the third chorus.

At the scorer's table, Odessa was typing very fast. Brock was standing in the front row with his phone pressed to his ear. His face had gone from pitching to listening, and it was not a good kind of listening.

"Legal," he mouthed to me.

---

It took about four minutes for the problem to become clear. Theo explained it first, standing in an inch of water in the closet doorway.

The cameras had fed straight into the box. The box was now underwater. Nothing had been recorded.

Brock hung up and walked over. He looked like he had aged a year since tip-off.

"The contract says the clips.com stream is the official record," he said. "Legal says the stream didn't show the ball going in."

"Three hundred and forty people saw it go in," I said.

"I saw it go in," said Brock. "I'm on your side. I'm telling you what they said."

Walt had come down from the roofers' shoulders. He was still breathing hard. "So it doesn't count."

"It counts," said Odessa, without looking up. "Give me your phone, Tess."

I gave it to her. My video was right there, eleven seconds long. It started with Walt asking if Dennis was open and ended with the splash. In the bottom-left corner, pink and steady in every frame, was my thumb.

"Brock," Odessa said. "Read me the clause."

He read it off his phone. "The attempt will be streamed live on clips.com, and the clips.com stream will constitute the official record."

"Clips.com," said Odessa. "It doesn't say the clips.com live player. It says clips.com."

She uploaded my video while she talked. "And at clips.com, every clip is a stream. That's how we describe the product, in our terms of service. I wrote that part, too."

She hit a key. Then she turned the laptop around.

In the gold frame at the top of the front page was my clip. Under it was a note: "Verified by the Front Page desk. The stream went down. The thumb didn't."

The replay counter started at zero. By the time Brock had finished calling legal back, it was at six million.

---

Updraft paid on Tuesday. Brock delivered the check to the shop himself, wearing sneakers he said wouldn't be out for two years. They were brown, which seemed like a risk.

"Legal agreed it counted," he said. "Eventually. I told them the alternative was explaining to sixty million people why it didn't."

"Sixty?" said Walt.

"As of this morning."

Brock set the check on my desk. "We're making a new ad. Your clip, thumb and all. If you'll sign off."

"What's it called?" I asked.

"'Lightning doesn't strike twice,'" he said. "'Plumbers do.'"

Walt signed.

---

Walt didn't hire the contractor who quoted forty-nine thousand eight hundred. He fixed the drain himself. It took eleven days, two rented saws and a third of the boards, exactly as he'd said.

The Backflow pulled up the floor. The Gutter Kings helped, because they were good at heavy things. Brock came on the weekends in sneakers that were definitely not meant for demolition.

The whole repair cost fourteen thousand dollars. With the rest, Marisol had the scoreboard fixed, all seven segments. She bought new nets, two new doors and a lock for the utility closet.

The city canceled the closure in March. The letter came on the light-blue paper. It was the first time anyone in our town had been glad to see that color.

Marisol kept the mop. She said the floor might be dry now, but the mop had earned its spot.

---

The first game on the new floor was in April. The Backflow against the Gutter Kings again, because everybody wanted it. Brock played for us, in orange-soled Embers, very limited. He was terrible and didn't care at all.

With four seconds left, we were down one. Gus blew the whistle through his teeth and called a timeout.

"Inbound to Walt," said Dennis. "Walt finds me. I'll be open."

Every roofer on the floor went for Walt. Nobody went for Dennis. Nobody ever had.

Walt caught the inbound at the free-throw line. He looked up at the far basket. Then he looked at Dennis, alone under the hoop, waving both arms.

He threw it two-handed, from the chest. It wasn't a shot. It went straight into Dennis's hands.

Dennis looked at the ball as if it were an element he had only read about. Then he laid it in off the glass.

The horn went off. The new scoreboard said we had won by one. All the digits were correct.

I filmed it, of course, with my thumb in the corner.

I posted it on clips.com that night, titled "Teacher, 52, scores." By morning it had fourteen replays. Dennis told me he'd watched it all fourteen times.

In the scorebook, I found the margin where I had written "Dennis open" thirty-four times. Under the last one I wrote: "Dennis, two points."

Walt read it over my shoulder. He tossed a fitting into the parts bucket by the door. Clank.

"See?" he said. "I was passing to Dennis."