In the fall of 2000, a seemingly ordinary 21-year-old enrolled at a small college in Michigan. He didn’t look like a basketball player, and he certainly didn’t have the credentials, but he said he wanted a chance to play. He lobbied the coaches and earned a spot on the school’s JV team.
In the next three months he would destroy half the junior colleges in Detroit.
*** *** ***
On the peaceful wooded campus of Rochester College there is a lake beside the practice gymnasium. The lake is surrounded by trees and cut off from outside view. It is a body of water without movement and without feeling, like a reservoir of sad things. Lake Norcentra has seen hundreds of basketball players hike down the winding trails to get to practice. I was there in 2000, the year a ghost moved through the campus and possessed the gym.
Chris Blankenbaker looked exactly like a basketball star shouldn’t. He was precisely six feet tall, he was white, and he was not particularly muscular. He had played basketball at nearby Brighton High School but had never distinguished himself. By the time I met him in college, he was a 21-year-old freshman. He never talked about his past, never about where he had been in the years following high school, or where he learned to play basketball the way he did.
Chris was assigned to the JV team, along with me and a handful of other underclassmen. From the very beginning it was clear that Chris was on a different wavelength. He tore through the drills with an intensity that made the hairs on your arm look for someplace to hide. He was a prodigy, a wild-eyed bastard child of the basketball gods and mortal man. His practice armor consisted of a long-sleeved shirt underneath his practice jersey, plus a camouflage bandana rolled up into a band and tied around his head. Some days he was quiet like a brooding assassin. Other days he was constantly screaming, at himself and at his teammates and at the coaches and anyone else in the gym.
I have been around basketball most of my life. I have seen shooters come and go, watched the accolades melt off of them when the game turned and their stroke vanished. Chris was simply the best I have ever seen. He would stay in the gym for hours, launching threes from everywhere inside halfcourt, in repetitions that spoke more of obsession than dedication. Chris practiced with fear, with a sort of cold sweated abandon, like he had been let out of hell to play ball one last time. At full speed, racing around the perimeter, catching and shooting off the dribble, Chris routinely dropped in dozens of threes without grazing the rim. Sometimes you just had to stand there and count, so you could tell your friends that you saw a guy hit 219 out of 250.
Who was he? Where had he learned these skills? Why had we never heard of him before? No one seemed to know. The bitter and the jealous mused that he was a gimmick, a streetball novelty that could never perform in an actual game. We were about to find out.
In the first game of the JV season, Chris dropped 37 points on Wayne County Community College, one of the toughest junior colleges in Detroit. Chris willed us to victory despite the fact that we were outmatched and intimidated. While Wayne County pushed us around, controlled the boards, and generally bullied us up and down the floor, they simply had no answer for our 21-year-old savant sharpshooter. Chris buried three after three after three, confounding their zone schemes and double teams. When they pressed us, Chris took the ball and broke the pressure almost singlehandedly. By the second half we weren’t even pretending to run an offense anymore; all we did was screen and rescreen for Chris.
Word of his feat spread like wildfire. Teams like Wayne County did not lose to Christian college JV teams. It didn’t take long for opportunistic college coaches to start sniffing around the program, hoping to talk to the young man who had walked off the street and become an overnight sensation. Sensing the sharks in the water, our coaches quickly pulled Chris off the JV team and inserted him into the varsity roster.
During his first game on varsity, Chris was brought off the bench to get some minutes at shooting guard. However, something strange happened. When his feet hit the floor Chris was different. Tentative. He was like a wild animal that couldn’t trust his surroundings. The way the game moved, the way his new teammates flowed around him, something was off.
Two shot attempts, two points.
After the game Chris approached the coaches and matter-of-factly requested to be demoted back to the JV team. Unsure of what else to do, the coaches acquiesced. Chris rejoined us on the JV squad, sliding back into his role as alpha dog. We were utterly under his spell; he could have led us onto the floor to face the Detroit Pistons and we would have charged out behind him, latched on to his dark and mysterious confidence.
Early in the season we played at a four team classic, where each team plays two games over the weekend, regardless of whether they win or lose. In the first game we went up against Henry Ford Community College, and they edged us in a close contest. After the game, as the JV team was sitting in the locker room getting changed, I remember hearing a strange sound. I walked into the shower area, and – I will never forget this – I saw Chris. He was doubled over on his knees and was weeping uncontrollably. His chest shook violently, and with each quaking breath it seemed like he might choke on the stream of tears and sweat pouring down his face.
He didn’t say anything. Not one word.
Losing affected Chris in a way we could never understand. It hurt him in a way that made the rest of us feel ashamed. Chris had scored 43 points in the game, which was far beyond what any other player on either team had done. It was of no solace to him.
We played early the next morning in the second half of the classic, our bodies still sore from the game the night before. The stands were full of junior college coaches and an assortment of university scouts who had been scrambled from their weekend routines to come see Chris. The best players on the best teams on our schedule, the Division 1-bound athletes, rarely scored over 25 points in a single contest. Chris was averaging over 35, and doing it against sterling competition. Seemingly oblivious to the powerful spectators in attendance, Chris teemed with unbridled passion from the opening tip. The soles of his shoes scarcely touched the floor in the opening minutes, and with his each movement on the court the collection of onlookers jotted down notes in their ledgers. Chris unleashed a barrage of perfect threes that ripped through the net and buoyed us to a halftime lead over the host team, Delta Community College. During halftime Chris stomped up and down the rows of lockers, his eyes crazed with a look of overdue satisfaction. This was his game.
The second half began, and Chris picked up where he left off. He zipped up and under and over and through the elaborate screens we laid for him, eluding the Delta defenders at every spot. Now he was driving, storming to the rim with impunity for layups. Delta tried fouling him, knocking him down hard. It didn’t matter; his free throws fell through the net with the certainty of seconds ticking on a stopwatch.
Ironically, it was the rest of us that got tired. Our JV team consisted of only 8 players, and after the grueling game with Henry Ford the night before, we were running on fumes. Slowly, cruelly, our level of play began to slip. The lead that we had spent the first half carefully constructing began to ebb away. Soon we were walking while Delta ran. We were tugging on our shorts during stoppages in play. We left Chris exposed, dancing alone with the swirling packs of Delta players nipping at him from every angle. As good as he was, he couldn’t stem the flow of their advance alone. For every basket his sweat purchased, they seemed to score two.
In the waning seconds of the game, with Delta safely ahead by double digits, Chris could not let go. As Delta inbounded on the final possession, intent on running out the clock, Chris charged forward toward the ball handler. He paused just before reaching the Delta player and bent down and slapped the floor with both palms, the resultant smack echoing throughout the spacious gym. With ten seconds left in a decided game our best player was beating the floor and hounding the ball until the bitter end. No one had called for the press; everyone had conceded but him. His heart just wouldn’t let him give up. In those fleeting seconds the last of his manic fight bled out all over the gym floor.
When the buzzer sounded, Chris pulled his jersey up over his head, hiding the tears that were already streaming out of his bloodshot eyes. He walked silently off the court, shoulders slumped underneath an unseen burden. He had scored 37 points.
*** *** ***
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the magic stopped. A couple of weeks before the semester break we played an unheralded junior college from northern Michigan. From the opening tip things did not feel right. Something was wrong with our star player. When Chris was open to shoot, he drove into a congested lane. When defenders were crowding him and daring him to dribble, he threw up ill-advised shots. Something was amiss, but no one knew how to approach him.
Two hours later, our team sat in the locker room, dejected. We had been drubbed by 30 points in a contest that was never close during the entire second half. Chris just sat there, shaking his head.
A few days later, Chris was absent from practice. Calls to his cell phone went unanswered. The coaches worriedly tracked down his professors. One after another, his professors gave the same answer: Chris had been AWOL from class for almost two weeks.
Just like that, he was gone.
After 11 years it took me a week to find him. As far as the Internet was concerned, the Chris Blankenbaker that I was looking for did not exist. The deeper I pushed, the longer I trolled, the more I began to worry that perhaps he was no longer alive. Potential leads shriveled up as soon as I touched them, as if the very act of searching for this lost soul was cursed. Finally I found an old friend who was a shared acquaintance. He gave me a number with a Michigan area code.
After all the years I have to know what happened. The phone rings, and an energetic voice fills my ear. Chris says he is surprised to hear from me. Says he’s got plenty of time to talk, that he’s just leaving the gym.
I explain what I’m doing and begin asking my questions. He takes them all, firing back as honestly as he can. He talks about his younger days, about marrying his girlfriend and panicking when she turned up pregnant a short while later. He talks about his classes piling up on him during the season, until he could no longer catch up or face the campus. When the wheels at last came off, he left. He says he’s been working ever since. Had a tryout for a pro league in Mexico, but nothing came of it. Says he still plays ball all the time.
He talks about an undying dream to make it to the NBA. His tone betrays the wisdom of someone who knows it won’t happen, but he guards the dream fiercely. He describes the NBA as if it were no farther away than next door. He talks about getting in the right league, the right tournament, the right tryout, in front of the right pair of eyes. His voice rides high with excitement, the words accelerating as he goes on. Then he laughs at himself, at how this must sound to the writer in search of a story.
“I know this sounds crazy,” he chuckles. “But there’s a part of me that will never let go if it.”
We find ourselves talking again about the good old days, about the practices in the gym by the lake. I ask him where all of his passion came from.
“I had a lot to prove,” he says solemnly.
“Well, did you?” I counter.
Silence on the other end.
*** *** ***
Fall will come early this year at Rochester College. The heat of the summer will break and cool air will flow down from Canada, bathing the campus in a soft chill. It is a warning, a notice that school is about to begin again. It is also a sign that basketball season approaches.
On some mornings a layer of fog hovers over the campus grounds. The lake does funny things to the fog. The shrouds of mist swirl and twist on the surface of the water like a team of ghosts playing hockey. On this kind of morning the shooters will come, arriving to get their shots in before the world wakes up. Maybe they’ll talk about the names on the banners, the small college All-Americans, and who was the best. Maybe they’ll talk about a name that’s not on the banners, about the guard who scored 80 points in 12 hours, who set the court on fire and fled in the dead of night.
*** *** ***
Chris is still fumbling through my question. He starts, stops, backtracks and hedges. If this was basketball he would have had a five count already. He is at war with himself. Finally he presents an answer that his sides can agree on:
“I’m still proving it.”
Mostly, though, he sounds content. He has three children, which God seems to have used to great effect to give him some balance. Chris gushes about his three-year-old, who has a habit of telling her daddy to not worry.
“She owns my heart, bro,” says the ghost. He tells me he’s happy, and I choose to believe him.
*** *** ***
Back in the gym the shooters will be finishing up soon. They will shower and change and hurry up the trails with their books to get to class. The woods will be quiet and the lake will be as perfect and as still as ever. Somewhere out there, beyond the trees, the ghost of Lake Norcentra is finding peace.
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