The Stiff Upper Lip Read Online Free

ticket out, look at Wilt, man, look at Jabbar, look at Sy Wicks and Curtis Rowe. Hey, look at them. Only it hasn’t panned out that way for you. Maybe your college club doesn’t make the tournaments. Or the night the scouts come to look you over, you shoot one for eleven. Or maybe it’s simple statistics. Like there are how many thousands playing college ball in America? And how many make the pro league? A couple of hundred, no more.
    So you’ve been had, right? Right in the American Dream, Spade Department. Well, you aren’t the first one.
    Only then, one day, the Man comes to talk. You’ve never seen him before, but he’s the Man all right, even though he talks with a crazy acccent. He’s seen you play, and he likes what he’s seen. He even has a plane ticket for you, made out in your name, one way to Paris, France, and a cash bonus if you use it. Shit, man, Pa- ree ! So you’re not pulling down two thou a month, more like a hundred bucks a game plus expenses, and so the Man never told you nobody’d speak your language, not even the coach, and that the French red wine’d give you the runs worse than Thunderbird. But since when did they have to pay you to play ball? And don’t it beat unemployment?
    Roscoe Hadley, though, didn’t get to France that way.
    The way Roscoe Hadley told it, he was mooching down the street one day on the outskirts of Paris, minding his mutton chops, when he heard this noise coming from a building. A funny thump-thump noise, and familiar, kind of. He walked in. Sure enough, it was a gym. A bunch of French cats were shooting baskets, in this gym, on the outskirts of Paris. And Roscoe’s palms started to itch. He took off his jacket. He took off his shoes so as not to mark the floor. He picked up a loose ball, palmed it. Then he showed them a trick or two, like Roscoe’s finger-roll. Then they did a little one-on-one; then two-on-one; then three-on-one; then the whole she bang trying to take the ball away from Roscoe.
    And what happened then?
    â€œWell,” said Roscoe Hadley, “What happ’n then just happ’n, man. Natchr’l. It was workin’ the kinks out. That an’ finding me a pair o’ shooze.”
    At that, his version was probably pretty accurate. Allowing for an omission or two.
    Between that day in the gym and the night, almost a year later, when we drove down to see him play, there’d been a lot of changes. And hot only for Roscoe. The French pro league, you see, has a First Division of sixteen teams. At the end of each season, the bottom three teams in the standings drop into the Second Division and the top three from the Second move up. When Roscoe started playing for his club, they were somewhere in the middle of Second Division limbo; by the summer, they were on their way up to basketball heaven. Then, over the summer break, the club owner got carried away. First he moved the team from the Paris suburbs to a so-called “new city” some forty kilometers south on the autoroute. Then he hired his second foreigner, a balding black rebounder from Oakland, by way of Barcelona and Milan, called Odessa Grimes.
    Or “Greemse,” in French.
    Oh yes, and in the meantime Roscoe Hadley had met Valérie. And fallen in love.
    The night we saw him play, we missed the first ten minutes trying to find the joint. Valérie had been there before, but it wasn’t hard to get lost. The autoroute off-ramp took us onto a loop which circled the new city, but whenever we followed the “Palais des Sports” signs off the loop, a forest of skyscraper dormitories closed in on us, and the only way out of the forest was back onto the loop. Finally we parked and hiked our way in through a futuristic shopping-mall labyrinth. It was the sound that guided us the last kilometer, a steady two-syllable chant that went “ AD - LAY AD - LAY AD - LAY AD - LAY ” and meant, allowing for the French