Graveyard Plots

Rebound (With Barry N. Malzberg)

The last time I had seen Alex Rolfe was twenty-one years ago at the old Madison Square Garden at 49th Street and Eighth Avenue, in what was once called the heart of Manhattan.

That night, with the Continental Basketball Association championship series between the New York Sabers and the Chicago Wildcats tied at three games apiece, Rolfe had come into the last quarter of the seventh game when the Wildcats’ first-string center twisted an already tender ankle. And he had scored 18 points in ten minutes on a remarkable assortment of fadeaway jumpers and hook shots and reverse layups, had blocked five shots, had taken down eight rebounds, and had, unusual for a big man, twice forced turnovers on pressure defense. As a result, the Wildcats had wiped out a 13-point Sabers lead and on the strength of Rolfe’s last-second tip-in sent the game into overtime.

In the five-minute extra period he had blocked two more shots, grabbed off another four rebounds, and scored all 14 of the Wildcats’ points. The final score was 109–100, Chicago. His teammates had surrounded him after the buzzer and half carried him off the court, not a small accomplishment considering that Alex Rolfe was six-nine and weighed in the neighborhood of 270 pounds.

He was twenty-seven then, born on September 12, 1930, according to the program, and in his fifth season in the CBA. He had kicked around quite a bit; the Wildcats were his fourth team. He’d been a competent center in college, but the faster and more intricate patterns of professional basketball seemed to have confused him. Or they had until that one game, that one brilliant performance.

The next day all the New York papers, including the Telegram and Journal-American and Daily Mirror of sainted memory, had been filled with interviews and suggestions by a couple of columnists that Rolfe might be on the verge of realizing his full potential. I remember one particularly effusive writer suggesting that he might even become another George Mikan. My own write-up of the game — in those days I had covered the Sabers for the Herald-Tribune, also of sainted memory — had been a bit more restrained. There was no denying what Rolfe had accomplished, or of its impact on professional basketball in that era, but the Sabers were my team and he had almost singlehandedly taken what would have been their first championship away from them.

As things turned out, though, that game was to be Rolfe’s last. The day after it was over he literally disappeared from sight, never to be heard from again. No one seemed to know where he’d gone, or why — not even the management of the Wildcats — and he failed to show up when training camp opened the following season. There were a few “Whatever happened to Alex Rolfe?” stories that summer and during the next year, but after that most people forgot about him and about that glorious night in the Garden. Yesterday’s sports heroes are always quickly forgotten. It’s the heroes of today who get the ink and the adulation.

Now, twenty-one years later, Alex Rolfe was just a name in the yellowing pages of newspapers and sports magazines and record books. The old CBA was gone; all its great players were retired or coaching obscurely at the high-school or small-college level and just as forgotten as Rolfe himself. Professional basketball had entered a new and different age, a better age in a lot of ways. The high and low points of its past were little more than dim memories.

But some people still remembered, and I was one of them. Even after two decades I remembered that night in the Garden and I remembered Alex Rolfe and what he’d done. Rolfe had become something of an obsession with me over the years. The thing was, I thought I knew why he had vanished so suddenly and so completely, and I wanted to find him and talk to him about it. And the thing was, too, that his performance against the Sabers in 1957 had marked a turning point in my own life.

I had been young and ambitious in those days, on my way to the top, I thought; but my life and my career hadn’t quite worked out the way I’d always believed they would. In 1958 I had lost my job with the Herald-Tribune, for internal reasons that weren’t my fault, and I had also lost my wife in the divorce courts for domestic reasons that may or may not have been my fault. After that, my life and my career had settled into mediocrity — a succession of jobs with minor newspapers, a few freelance articles for second-string sports magazines, two sports biographies that hadn’t sold well, too many sessions with the bottle, and too many loveless affairs. My own dim memories of the past were all I had left now. Memories of the way it had been in the old days in New York, covering the Sabers and dreaming of wealth and fame. Memories of men like Alex Rolfe.

Off and on for the past twenty years I had spent time and energy trying to locate him, without success. Then, three days ago, the paper I was working for in Dayton had taken on a sports reporter whose last job was in Madison, Wisconsin. This reporter and I had gone out for a drink, and talk had turned to basketball, and Rolfe’s name had come up. And it turned out that the reporter knew of Rolfe, knew where he was living — in a small village in upstate Wisconsin, where he owned a tavern. The reporter had wanted to do a feature on him a year or so ago, but Rolfe had been uncooperative, saying that he didn’t want any publicity; the reporter hadn’t pursued the matter.

I had gotten on the phone immediately, dug up an address and number for Rolfe in the village of Harbor Lake, and then called the number. When I got through to Rolfe I explained that I was writing a series of articles on basketball players of the fifties for a national sports magazine and did he remember my name? He was silent for several seconds; then he said yes, he remembered me, but he didn’t want to be interviewed and besides, I had to be scraping the bottom of the barrel if I wanted to do a story on him. I reminded him of the championship game in the Garden and told him the magazine had given me carte blanche, write up anyone I cared to, not necessarily the stars but the journeymen players who had had moments of greatness in the past.

He still didn’t want to see me. I said I was going to be in Wisconsin anyway to talk to another old player and that I intended to drop in on him; said I was going to write about the Sabers-Wildcats title game with or without an interview. He told me it was my privilege to write whatever I felt like writing, and hung up on me.

The next day I took a leave of absence from the paper, got into my car, and headed north to Wisconsin.

And now, two days and eight hundred miles later, I had arrived in Harbor Lake. It wasn’t much of a town, just a few scattered houses along a small, tree-rimmed lake and half a dozen stores along a one-block main street. Quiet, sleepy, off the beaten track. It was a little past 4:00 P.M. as I drove through it, looking for the Harbor Lake Tavern. The leaden sky forecast rain, but there was nothing on the windshield of my car except streaks of dirt that gave the buildings and the gray-looking lake water a vaguely distorted appearance.

Rolfe’s tavern turned out to be on the far side of the village, tucked back near the water’s edge. It was a small weathered building with a rustic façade, shaded by pines; no neon sign or electric beer advertisements, nothing to tell you it was a bar except for the neatly painted wooden sign above the door that spelled out its name. I imagined that he did most of his business at night, even during these late spring months; there was only one other car on the gravel parking lot besides mine when I shut off the engine and went inside.

The car must have belonged to Rolfe himself because he was the only one in the place. He stood behind the plank, slicing lemons and limes into wedges. A man six-nine in his twenties is imposing, but in his forties he angles toward a question mark. There were heavy lines in his cheeks and a kind of melancholy in his expression, and when he came down to the stool I had taken he walked with a pronounced limp, as if he were suffering from arthritis. He looked old and tired — the same way my reflection looked in the backbar mirror. The years hadn’t been good to him either.

He asked me what I’d have, and I told him a double Scotch and soda and watched him build it. When he set the glass down in front of me I said, “You don’t recognize me, do you, Rolfe?”

He stared at me, searching his memory, and after a time I saw recognition seep into his eyes. His body stiffened a little; the fingers of both hands curled into fists, relaxed, curled again, relaxed again. “Joe Brady,” he said.

“That’s right. Joe Brady.”

“I told you I didn’t want to see you.”

“I’m here, Rolfe, like it or not.”

“I don’t want to talk about the past.”

“No? Why not?”

“Because it’s dead. Dead and buried. I haven’t thought about basketball in years.”

“Haven’t you?” I said.

Emotion flickered across his face; he looked away from me, through a window at the rear that framed a view of the lake. His hands curled into fists again. “Just what do you want from me, Brady?”

“An interview. A story.”

“I don’t have a story for you.”

“I think you do.”

His eyes shifted back to mine. “It’s been twenty-one years since that game in the Garden,” he said. “Nobody cares any more. Nobody remembers.”

“I care. I remember.”

“Why?”

“You played a great game, the finest game of your career. And then you disappeared, you quit cold.”

“And you want to know why.”

I nodded.

He didn’t say anything for a time. His eyes took on a remoteness, as if he were looking backward into the past. It was quiet in there, hushed except for the faint whirring of the refrigeration unit. From outside, over the lake, I thought I could hear the distant sheetmetal rumble of thunder.

Rolfe blinked finally and the remoteness was gone. “All right,” he said. “I left basketball after that game because it was the finest of my career. I figured I’d never have another one like it; it was a fluke and I was a second-string center and always would be. Not many mediocre pro athletes have great games and not many have the sense to get out if they do. I had a chance to quit a hero, a champion, and I took it. That’s all.”

“Is it?” I drank some of my Scotch and soda. “Tell me about the game, Rolfe.”

“Tell you about it? You were there.”

“Sure. But I want to hear your version of it, everything you remember. The fourth quarter, coming off the bench, scoring the eighteen points — start with that.”

“The shots I took went in. I was lucky.”

“You weren’t lucky, you were inspired. You made moves and shots you’d never even tried before. Remember the fourteen points in overtime? Remember the fadeaway jumpers you made with three men on you that hit nothing but net?”

“No,” Rolfe said, “I don’t remember.”

“Sure you do. You remember every point of it. Every footfall on the floor, every move and rebound and blocked shot, who was guarding you each time you scored.”

He shook his head. Kept on shaking it.

“There’s something else you remember, too. The most important thing of all about that game.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about point-shaving, Rolfe,” I said. “I’m talking about criminal collusion with the gambling syndicates in New York and Chicago.”

Something seemed to break deep inside him; his body lost its stiffness, seemed to shrink in on itself. His eyes turned cloudy with pain.

“Lots of point-shaving in those days,” I said. “Mostly in the college ranks but there was talk that it was going on in the pros too. Vague rumors that the gamblers got to you and Donovan, the Wildcats’ shooting guard; I heard them and so did a couple of other reporters, but not until weeks after the game and then we couldn’t find enough proof to break the story.

“Point spread was Sabers plus five and you and Donovan were supposed to make sure the Wildcats didn’t beat that spread because there was heavy syndicate money on the Sabers. Help win the game if you could but not by more than four points; if the Wildcats built up a lead of six or better, then the two of you were to purposely miss shots, make a turnover or two, do whatever you could to get the margin down to less than five.

“Donovan delivered — he tried his damnedest to keep you from scoring all those points in overtime; but you played the best basketball of your life and crossed up the gamblers and blew the spread. Isn’t that the way it was?”

He turned away from me, limped over to the backbar, picked up a bottle of bourbon, came back, poured a triple shot, and drank it neat. I watched him shudder. “I knew something like this would happen,” he said thickly, talking more to himself than to me. “Twenty-one years, but I knew it would come out some day.”

“So you’re not going to deny it.”

He let out a heavy sighing breath. “Look at me,” he said. “You know it’s the truth, you can see that it is.”

I was looking at him, all right. I’d thought that if this moment of confrontation ever came, I would feel something — hatred for him, a kind of perverse satisfaction. But I felt nothing. Too many years had passed since that night in 1957. Too many years.

“What I want to know is why,” I said. “Why did you sell out to the gamblers and then double-cross them? A change of heart, is that it? They got to you in a weak moment, tempted you, and you couldn’t go through with it when the time came? The honest man triumphant?”

Anguish made the lines in Rolfe’s face look as deep as incisions. “I wish to God that was the way it was,” he said. “I’d still be something of a hero then, wouldn’t I? I’d still be able to live with myself. But it wasn’t like that at all.”

“How was it, then?”

No response at first. Thunder rumbled again over the lake, closer this time; a gust of wind rattled the tavern’s front door and window.

“I was a wild kid in those days,” Rolfe said abruptly. “I didn’t give a damn about much of anything except fast cars, fast women, and big money. I got in with the gamblers and I lost six thousand to them on the horses and playing high-stakes poker, and I couldn’t pay off my markers. So it was agree to shave points in the championship game or get my legs broken with a baseball bat. I agreed; I was eager as hell to agree. I went out there that night with every intention of doing what I was told to do.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because whatever else I was, I was also a basketball player. I loved the game, I’d always wanted to play it the way the best did. Only I just wasn’t good enough — a big, slow reserve center who was lucky to be in a professional uniform. I’d had some good games in college and in the pros, but nothing outstanding, nothing that even came close to real excellence. Except that night, that one night. I went into the game in the fourth quarter and it was all there: the moves, the shots, the excellence. You understand, Brady? For the first time in my life it was all there.”

I felt a little shiver along the saddle of my back. “Yeah,” I said, “I understand.”

“I couldn’t do anything wrong. I couldn’t even make myself do anything wrong. It was like I was drunk on basketball; all I could think about was the game, making the moves, making the shots, doing all the things I’d always wanted to do but had never been able to do. Nothing else mattered; there wasn’t anything else.” Rolfe swallowed heavily. There was sweat on his face now. “It wasn’t until the game was over that I realized I’d blown the point spread. That I realized what that one great game, those few minutes of real excellence, was going to cost me.”

I let out a breath. “What happened with the gamblers?”

“What do you think happened?” he said. His mouth twisted bitterly. “They did what they’d warned me they would do. They broke both my legs with a baseball bat.”

There wasn’t anything to say. I picked up my drink and finished it.

“I didn’t go back to Chicago after the game,” Rolfe said. “I ran instead — packed up my things at the hotel and bought a cheap car and drove out here to Wisconsin. A couple of weeks later I got in touch with the Wildcats and had them send my share of the championship money to a bank in Madison; I used that and borrowed the rest to pay off the six thousand I owed the gamblers.

“But it wasn’t any use and I knew it. They found me inside of a month. One of them visited me in the county hospital afterward and told me I was through playing basketball. I knew that too. But he could have saved himself the trouble because my right leg never did heal properly; that’s why I walk with a limp. I’ve got that limp to remind me of my one great game every time I take a step. Every step for the past twenty-one years.

“But that’s not the worst of it. Waiting all these years for someone like you to come along. Listening for footsteps out of the past — that’s not the worst of it either. The worst of it was all the years of wondering if that game really was a fluke or if the moves and the shots and the excellence would have been there for me in other games; if I could have been great some day. I’ll never know, Brady. I’ll never know.”

Outside, rain began to fall; I could hear it drumming against the roof of the tavern. The day had turned dark — but no darker than it was in here, or than it was inside Alex Rolfe.

He ran a hand across his face, as if to wipe away emotion as well as sweat. When he took the hand away his expression was weary and resigned. “So now you know the whole story,” he said. “Go ahead and write it if you want. I just don’t care any more.”

“I’m not going to write it,” I said.

He stared at me as I got off my stool. “That’s why you came here, isn’t it? To get the truth so you could tell the world what happened back in 1957?”

“Maybe it is. But I’m still not going to write the story. It’s something that happened twenty-one years ago; nobody cares any more, nobody remembers — you were right about that. Except you and me, and we’ve both got to keep on living with ourselves.”

I turned my back on him because I didn’t want to watch his reaction, didn’t want to look at him any longer, and hurried to the door and out into the warm spring rain.

But in my car, on the way back through the village, the image of Rolfe’s face remained sharp in my mind. Full of guilt, that face, full of torment and loss. Full of all the same things as that other face, the familiar one in the backbar mirror.

I had come to Harbor Lake to confront Rolfe with the truth, yes; but I had not sought him out for the sake of justice, not planned to write the real story behind the CBA championship game for public-spirited reasons. I had done it instead for the sole purpose of making him pay, even after all these years, for what I’d convinced myself he had done to me.

Because I had not, as I’d told him, found out about the point-shaving weeks after the game. I had found out about it the day before the game, through a personal contact in the gambling syndicate. And instead of breaking the story, blowing the lid off the whole sordid affair, I had withdrawn my wife’s and my entire savings of $8,000 and bet it all on the New York Sabers.

Yet it was not Rolfe who had cost me my savings, and as a result my marriage; it was me who had lost them, me who had robbed myself. I could admit that now, after all this time. I was no better than Rolfe; we were two of a kind. Just as he had had his moment of greatness in 1957, so had I had my moment. Just as he had fallen from grace because of one terrible mistake, and lost a career full of promise and a chance for fulfillment, so had I.

Alex Rolfe had lived in his own private hell for twenty-one years; he would go on living in it for the rest of his life.

And so would I in mine.