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Glen sat down at the round oak dining room table, letting his long legs stretch out. “Sure, but we don’t come up that much during the fall. Summer’s our playtime, and when we get back to Boston, there’s plenty of work to be done.”
“And what exactly do you do now, Mr. Jackson?” And with that, the polite young chief sat down, took out a little notebook and opened it up on the dining room table. “You haven’t played for the Celtics for a very long time, right?”
“Promise not to laugh?” he asked.
“Sure. Promise not to laugh.”
“Good. I give motivational speeches, that’s what I do.” He couldn’t help himself, he smiled at the chief, who was gracious enough to smile back. “You see, the thing is, once you’re out of basketball, what’s left? I didn’t have the voice for doing a
“So you give speeches?”
“Yep. About a dozen a year, on how to be better managers, better team players, work together for the same goal. That sort of thing. Not lots of money, but enough to make a living. Hey. Wa
The chief smiled but there was something in those eyes that said he liked hearing secrets very much. “Sure. Go right ahead.”
Glen said, “Truth is, most of the time, I’m just stealin’ their money. Companies get in trouble, they have morale problems, they tend to look outside for a solution. They don’t think about looking inside. So I come by and give ’em a nice pep talk, everything’s jazzed up for a week or so after I’m gone, and then the same lousy managers and overworked employees fall back into their ruts, while I’m waiting for their checks to clear.”
Colter didn’t write anything down, which was fine. Glen said, “Secret’s safe with you?”
“Sure is,” the chief said.
Glen said, “All right, enough about me. What do you want to know about Marcus?”
“Did he play with you on the Celtics?”
Glen looked at that smooth face and those unblinking eyes, wondering if the guy was trying to play some sort of game. “No, he didn’t.”
The chief said, “But he was a teammate of yours, right?”
“Right. But not on the Celtics.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Where, then?”
Maybe the boy was just dumb. Could it be? Glen said, “On the Olympic team, that’s where. Marcus and me and ten other guys, we played for the United States back in ’72.”
“All right, then,” the chief said, making a note. “The 1972 Olympic team. Okay. Now. When did Marcus come up here?”
“Today’s Monday. He came up here Saturday, spent the night, and I dropped him off at the bus stop yesterday morning.”
“Was there anybody else in your house at the time?”
“Nope.”
“And what did the two of you do while he was here?”
Glen shrugged. “Played some hoops for old time’s sake. Talked about the old days. Had a barbecue and some beer.”
Colter took a careful sip from his lemonade. “Were you expecting him?”
“Excuse me?”
Colter said, “He’s only up here for a day and a half. He took a bus up from Queens, in New York. It seems like a lot of work to get up here for just a quick visit.”
Glen said, “Yeah, I was expecting him. But he only gave me a day’s warning.”
Colter’s eyes were now fixed on him. “So why the quick visit? Why did he come to see you, Mr. Jackson?”
Now he knew that the young boy was pretty sharp. “Money.”
“He had money problems?”
“Shit, yes. Poor guy’s about to be kicked out of his apartment, he’s had maybe a half dozen jobs over the years, everything from selling cars to real estate… like I said earlier, Chief, things are so much different now than it was back then. You get a guy like him or me, in our fifties… time’s ru
“Did you help him?”
Glen thought for just a moment, shook his head. “I offered to, but he wouldn’t take any of my money. But he had other ideas.”
“Like what?”
“The silver medal, that’s what.”
“I’m sorry, the what?”
He paused, judging the face, recalled all the times he had seen opponents’ faces on the court, trying to read who they were and where they were coming from. This one was trying to be the Mayberry hayseed, sort of be the dummy cop, and Glen was going to play along with the game. Thing about games is that it’s only fair when both sides know that it’s being played.
“The silver medal,” Glen said. “Marcus decided it was time to get it, and me and the other team members, we didn’t want him to. He came up here to try to convince me otherwise.”
Colter tried a smile and said, “You’re getting me even more confused, Mr. Jackson. Look. I’m sorry to hurt your feelings and all, but I’m not a basketball fan. I don’t know much about you or the game, or the Olympic team. I’m more of a Red Sox fan myself.”
“Okay. No problem there.”
“So I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, the silver medal. Did your team win the silver medal at the Olympics?”
“Sort of.”
“And why doesn’t Marcus have the silver medal?”
Glen shook his head. “Because none of us does, and none of us will. Look, you really meant that, about not knowing anything about basketball?”
A quick nod. “Hardly a thing.”
He ran a thumb across the top of his lemonade glass. “You in the mood for a history lesson?”
“Will it have something to do with Marcus?”
“It’ll have a lot to do with Marcus, and me, and the other guys, and what happened in ’72. Look. Back in 1972, the Olympics were in Munich, okay? First time they had been in Germany since Berlin, back in ’36. Which was one hell of a coincidence, because back in 1936, that was the first time basketball was an Olympic sport. The U.S. won the gold medal then, and won the gold medal at every other Olympics since then, right up to 1972. You know what our record was, the U.S. Olympic team record?”
“No, I don’t, but I’m sure you’ll tell me,” Colter said with a smile.
“Okay. Sixty-two and oh. That means almost over four decades, in six different Olympics, the United States had never lost a single basketball match. Not one. So we were favored, going into Munich, even though the Soviets were tough bastards and had been wanting to nail us for years. Okay. Munich. That Olympics mean anything to you?”
Colter rubbed at his chin. “The Israeli athletes, right?”
“Right you are. Eleven of those poor guys got killed by terrorists. Most Americans, you mention the Munich Olympics, they remember three things: the Israelis, Mark Spitz getting seven gold medals, and the way we guys on the basketball team got robbed.”
“How did you get robbed?”
Another shrug. “We just did. Look, imagine what it was like, being back there, most of us in our teens or early twenties. Our coach was Hank Iba, a legend. He had coached the Olympic teams in ’64 and ’68 and got a gold medal both times. We went through years of work and training and practice to be picked as part of the team. You know? And when we marched through that stadium with everybody else on the U.S. team, representing our friends and families and everyone back home… well, it made your hair stand up on end.”
“Marcus, too?”
“Sure, Marcus and everybody else. Then we started playing and we just blazed through everybody that was in our way. I mean, Christ, we beat Japan 99 to 33. We met other players, fans… it wasn’t like today, with the dream team playin’, every player demanding his own hotel suite. Nope, we bunked together in the dormitories, just like everybody else. And then the Israelis got killed and the Olympics were postponed for a day. It was awful, it was chaos, lots of rumors…”