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He shoots. Swish.
Seven.
Eight.
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Victor shot three for 20 at last year’s tournament, but that’s only because the rim he practiced on all summer was the wrong height. Last New Year’s Day, after a few shots of Wild Turkey to ring in 1981, Victor’s Uncle Luca finally admitted what Victor knew all along: he’d never bothered to measure the space between the ground and the rim before he screwed a backboard onto Victor’s garage. Victor had been begging for a basketball net since the fourth grade, and when his dad refused to put one up, his mom asked her brother for help. Victor had told Uncle Luca again and again that the rim needed to be exactly ten feet above the ground, but, lacking a tape measure, Uncle Luca, who knew he was about six feet tall, visualized his daughter, who he figured was about three feet tall, standing on his shoulders. Luca pictured her with her arms raised upward to make up that last foot before marking off the spots for the screws with the racing-form pencil he kept in his sock. Uncle Luca was off by a foot, which meant that Victor had been shooting at a nine-foot net all summer. He’d shot at least 100 free throws a day, going in for the night only after he hit seven out of ten or better. Uncle Luca fixed the basket in the spring. Victor made sure to stand on a ladder with a tape measure while his uncle adjusted the brackets to bring the rim to regulation height.
“Jesus, Zelant, put some muscle into it,” said Coach Andy at the first practice last season. “You gotta work on those noodle arms.”
He steps back to let Mr. Loverdi’s Lincoln Continental pass, waving to his neighbor as he drives by, and walks slowly back up to the free throw line he painted on the pavement last summer with extra Candy Apple Red No. 5 from his Ford Mustang model kit. His front toes hug the charity stripe, as Coach Andy calls it.
