Read Online Sam's Legacy by Jay Neugeboren - Free Book Online Page B

well—coming in as their sixth man sometimes, ahead of Cazzie Russell—but when Sam had telephoned Mr. Sabatini to put something on their third game (as planned, he had not bet on the second game), Mr. Sabatini had, for the first time in six years, refused to take his bet. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he had said. “I’d like to help you out, but the Knicks are off my board until further notice.”
    Sam had telephoned again, before each succeeding game, but the reply was always the same. Whatever was up—Sam’s guess was that Sabatini couldn’t farm out enough of the action to cover himself: the Knicks were not only winning, but they were having an easy time with the point spreads—Sam couldn’t do anything about it. He figured that any other bookie who would handle bets of three hundred and less would be in the same boat as Sabatini; Sam would bide his time, then, and when the Knick window was open again, he’d be there. The season was long.
    He leafed through the newspaper, from back to front, checking the results at Aqueduct, not for the horses, but to see what the previous day’s number had been: the last three digits of the day’s mutuel take gave you the Brooklyn number. Six, eight, and six. Double six. The numbers men wouldn’t like that. It was trickier to figure the Manhattan number—you had to put together the payoff prices on the winning horses in the first three races to get the first digit—then the same with the fourth and fifth races for the second, then the sixth and seventh. Sam never bothered. Only suckers played the numbers anyway. He checked the point spreads on the pro football games, the pro basketball games, some college games. “Look, sweetheart,” Sabatini had said the last time Sam had called, two days before, when the Knicks had been at home against the Celtics. “I’m not the Bank of Israel. Three of my colleagues went on unemployment last week because they handled the Knicks.” That was rich, Sam thought—the Bank of Israel. A lot his father knew.
    It was probably true about how many people bet the Knicks. The streak helped, of course—everybody loved a winner—but Sam figured the betting had been heavy even before the string began to develop. Guys in the city were that way: about the Knicks, the Mets, the Giants. When the Dodgers had gone to Los Angeles, Brooklyn had been like a funeral parlor.
    On the subway, coming home from the game two nights before, he’d tried to remember as many other guys, like Stallworth, as he could. It picked him up, thinking of guys like Ben Hogan and Pete Reiser and Ray Berry—guys who’d had the deck stacked against them and had come back anyway. Hogan from a near-fatal auto crash, Reiser from running into the centerfield wall in Ebbets Field, Berry from polio as a kid. And what, he thought, about Ed Head, who’d been a top Dodger prospect before the war, had gone into the service, had had his right arm ruined by the Nazis, and then had come back, in 1945, to pitch a no-hitter with his left hand! A sportswriter in the Post had suggested that Stallworth hadn’t had an actual heart attack in the first place, that, given the perfect reading of his EKG now, it might have been something else—some kind of clot—but Sam laughed at that. What difference did it make? The point was, any way you looked at it, that the guy had come back: he’d had to live with the thought that he was washed up at twenty-five, he’d had to fight with the doctors and the coaches to prove that he had a right to get out on the hardwood again. And even if it had been a mild heart attack, so what? A heart attack was a heart attack. Sure. You couldn’t be a little bit pregnant.
    Sam slipped into his trousers, put a shirt on over the T-shirt he’d slept in, buckled his belt. He’d call Sabatini later, put something down on the Milwaukee Bucks—the