Travel Team - Softcover

Lupica, Mike

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593692845 ISBN 13: 9780593692844

Verlag: Viking Childrens Books, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

The #1 Bestseller!

Twelve-year-old Danny Walker may be the smallest kid on the basketball court -- but don't tell him that. Because no one plays with more heart or court sense. But none of that matters when he is cut from his local travel team, the very same team his father led to national prominence as a boy. Danny's father, still smarting from his own troubles, knows Danny isn't the only kid who was cut for the wrong reason, and together, this washed-up former player and a bunch of never-say-die kids prove that the heart simply cannot be measured.

For fans of The Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, the Mighty Ducks, and Mike Lupica's other New York Times bestselling novels Heat, The Underdogs, and Million-Dollar Throw, here is a book that proves that when the game knocks you down, champions stand tall.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mike Lupica is the author of multiple bestselling books for young readers, including QB 1, Heat, Travel Team, Million-Dollar Throw, and The Underdogs. He has carved out a niche as the sporting world’s finest storyteller. Mike lives in Connecticut with his wife and their four children. When not writing novels, Mike Lupica writes for New York's Daily News, appears on ESPN's The Sports Reporters and hosts The Mike Lupica Show on ESPN Radio. You can visit Mike Lupica at mikelupicabooks.com
 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

He knew he was small.

He just didn’t think he was small.

Big difference.

Danny had known his whole life how small he was compared to everybody in his grade, from the first grade on. How he had been put in the front row, front and center, of every class picture taken. Been in the front of every line marching into every school assembly, first one through the door. Sat in the front of every classroom. Hey, little man. Hey, little guy. He was used to it by now. They’d been studying DNA in science lately; being small was in his DNA. He’d show up for soccer, or Little League baseball tryouts, or basketball, when he’d first started going to basketball tryouts at the Y, and there’d always be one of those clipboard dads who didn’t know him, or his mom. Or his dad.

Asking him: “Are you sure you’re with the right group, little guy?”

Meaning the right age group.

It happened the first time when he was eight, back when he still had to put the ball up on his shoulder and give it a heave just to get it up to a ten–foot rim. When he’d already taught himself how to lean into the bigger kid guarding him, just because there was always a bigger kid guarding him, and then step back so he could get his dopey shot off.

This was way back before he’d even tried any fancy stuff, including the crossover.

He just told the clipboard dad that he was eight, that he was little, that this was his right group, and could he have his number, please? When he told his mom about it later, she just smiled and said, “You know what you should hear when people start talking about your size? Blah blah blah.”

He smiled back at her and said that he was pretty sure he would be able to remember that.

“How did you play?” she said that day, when she couldn’t wait any longer for him to tell.

“I did okay.”

“I have a feeling you did more than that,” she said, hugging him to her. “My streak of light.”

Sometimes she’d tell him how small his dad had been when he was Danny’s age.

Sometimes not.

But here was the deal, when he added it all up: His height had always been much more of a stinking issue for other people, including his mom, than it was for him.

He tried not to sweat the small stuff, basically, the way grown–ups always told you.

He knew he was faster than everybody else at St. Patrick’s School. And at Springs School, for that matter. Nobody on either side of town could get in front of him. He was the best passer his age, even better than Ty Ross, who was better at everything in sports than just about anybody. He knew that when it was just kids—which is the way kids always liked it in sports—and the parents were out of the gym or off the playground and you got to just play without a whistle blowing every ten seconds or somebody yelling out more instructions, he was always one of the first picked, because the other guys on his team, the shooters especially, knew he’d get them the ball.

Most kids, his dad told him one time, know something about basketball that even most grown–ups never figure out.

One good passer changes everything.

Danny could pass, which is why he’d always made the team.

Almost always.

But no matter what was happening with any team he’d ever played on, no matter how tired he would be after practice, no matter how much homework he still had left, this driveway was still his special place. Like a special club with a membership of one, the place where he could come out at this time of night and imagine it up good, imagine it big and bright, even with just the one floodlight over the backboard and the other light, smaller, over the back door. His mother had done everything she could to make the driveway wider back here, even cutting into what little backyard they had the summer before last. “I told them you needed more room in the corners,” she said. “The men from the paving company. They just nodded at me, like corners were some sort of crucial guy thing.”

“Right up there with the remote control switcher for the TV,” Danny said. “And leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor.”

“How are the corners now?”

“Perfect,” he said. “Like at the Garden.”

He had just enough room in the corners now, mostly for shooting. He didn’t feel as if he was trying to make a drive to the basket in his closet. Or an elevator car. He had room to maneuver, pretend he really was at the real Garden, that he was one of the small fast guys who’d made it all the way there. Like Muggsy Bogues, somebody he’d read up on when one of his coaches told him to, who was only 5–3 and made it to the NBA. Like Tiny Archibald and Bobby Hurley and Earl Boykins, a 5–5 guy who came out of the basketball minor leagues, another streak of light who showed everybody that more than size mattered, even in hoops.

And, of course, Richie Walker.

Middletown’s own.

Danny would put chairs out there and dribble through them like he was dribbling out the clock at the end of the game. Some nights he would borrow a pair of his mother’s old sunglasses and tape the bottom part of the lens so he couldn’t see the ball unless he looked straight down at it. This was back when he was first trying to perfect the double crossover, before he even had a chance to do it right, his hands being too little and his arms not being nearly long enough.

Sometimes he’d be so dog tired when he finished—though he would never cop to that with his mom—he’d fall into bed with his clothes on and nearly fall asleep that way.

“You done?” she’d say when she came in to say goodnight.

“I finally got bored,” he’d say, and she’d say with a smile,

“I always worry about that, you getting bored by basketball.”

Everybody he’d ever read up on, short or tall, had talked about how they outworked everybody else. Magic Johnson, he knew, won the championship his rookie season with the Lakers, scored forty–two points in the final game of the championship series when he had to play center because Kareem Abdul–Jabbar was hurt, then went back to East Lansing, Michigan, where he was from, in the summer and worked on his outside shooting because he’d decided it wasn’t good enough.

Tonight, Danny had worked past the time when his mom usually called him in, not even noticing how cold it had gotten for October. Worked underneath the new backboard she’d gotten for him at the end of the summer. Not the only kid in his class with divorced parents now. Not the smallest kid on the court now. Just the only one. He’d drive to the basket and then hit one of the chairs with one of his lookaway passes. Or he’d step back and make a shot from the outside. Sometimes, breathing hard, like it was a real game, he’d step to the free throw line he’d drawn with chalk and make two free throws for the championship of something.

Just him and the ball and the feel of it in his hands and the whoosh of it going through the net and the sound one of the old wooden school chairs would make when he tipped it over with another bounce pass. He knew he was wearing out another pair of sneakers his mom called “old school,” which to Danny always meant “on sale.” Or that she had found his size at either the Nike store or the Reebok store at the factory outlet mall about forty–five minutes from Middletown, both of them knowing she couldn’t afford what Athlete’s Foot or Foot Locker was charging for the new Kobe sneakers from Nike, or Iverson’s, or McGrady’s. Or the cool new LeBron James kicks that so many of the Springs School kids were wearing...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Viking Childrens Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593692845
• ISBN 13: 9780593692844
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 274
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: VTech Electronics Europe B.V; https://www.vtech-jouets.com/; ; Fahrenheitstraat 22; DC Weert; 6003; Niederlande