Read Online Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) by Jordan Sonnenblick - Free Book Online Page B

there you have it, sports fans: The Official Caveman’s Guide to Sports Photography.
    That night, I found myself sitting on the top row of the bleachers next to Angelika, lined up with the volleyball net. I was weighed down with enough cameras, lenses, and other assorted gear to collapse the whole structure. Before heading out, I had calledmy grandfather for advice, and he had told me all I would need was one specific lens. But he had also once told me that it’s better to carry three extra lenses, have a tired shoulder, and get your shot than to have a nice, light camera bag and miss the moment.
    Angelika was going to be shooting, too. She was all set up with a pretty nice camera of her own. It was a Canon, which meant we couldn’t share lenses, but it looked like she would do fine. The game started, and I learned something really fast: If you don’t know the sport, you can be the freaking Michelangelo of photography, and you still won’t get what you need. My camera was always pointed in the wrong direction; I missed every key play by a split second; I couldn’t get the shutter speed fast enough to keep the pictures from getting blurred in the dim light. I felt completely overwhelmed. After one game, I was ready to quit. “What I really need,” I said to Angelika, “is a pause button.”
    Angelika smiled, pointed to her camera’s viewfinder, and said, “No worries.” Then she said, “Keep shooting, though, partner. Try to get at least onegood shot of Number Nine spiking the ball, OK? She’s the captain. I’ll be down there for a while.” Angelika pointed to an area right behind the back line of the court and a little bit off to one side. She took the long telephoto lens off of her camera and put on a much shorter one. Then she was off.
    I watched her walk around the edge of the gym floor to her chosen spot, kneel down, and start shooting. Wow , I thought. She called me “partner.” I got back to shooting, but as soon as I got a picture of the captain girl jumping and spiking, I switched subjects and took maybe forty shots of Angelika in profile. I don’t know why exactly. I just did it.
    After the match, in the middle of packing all our gear away, Angelika asked me for the memory card I had been using so she could go home and process the photos on it. Without thinking, I handed the card over. I called my parents on my cell phone for a ride, and it wasn’t until I was halfway home that I realized Angelika would see all the footage of her.
    Great , I thought. There’s nothing as thrilling for a girl as finding out her new coeditor is a stalker.
    Â 
    Freshman year rolled along, kind of. Well, parts of it rolled along, parts of it lurched along, and parts of it scraped and screeched along in the manner of scrap metal being dragged across a chalkboard. For me, class was easy. I aced all of my academic courses without too much sweat, and the extra time demands of my sudden editorial gig weren’t anything compared to all the sports practices I’d always had before — between the lack of indoor baseball workouts and the fact that I wasn’t playing basketball, I had more time than I knew what to do with. Home was a little weird, though. Mom still didn’t want to hear there was anything wrong with her father. Dad was still working a million hours, and with Samantha off at college, the house was wa-a-ay too empty and quiet most of the time.
    The scraping and screeching mostly came from inside my own head. I was still having nightmares about surgery, pitching, and my grampa all tumbled up together. Plus, I kept wanting to tell AJ I wasn’t going to be his teammate ever again, but I was stillchickening out. He was networking like a madman with a lot of the older athletes, especially once he made the JV basketball team, and he kept introducing me to everyone as “Peter Friedman, Future Star Pitcher.” I wondered what he