Free Last Shot by John Feinstein Page B

answer. “Oh, really? No, that’s okay, thanks.” He hung up.
    “What happened?” Susan Carol said.
    “She said that all phone calls to people with theMinnesota State team were being blocked and I could leave a message if I wanted.”
    “Which, of course, you didn’t.”
    “No way! Okay, that’s the easy part. Now, how do we get into the hotel and find Chip Graber? If they’re blocking calls to people’s rooms, they certainly aren’t letting people roam around the hotel.”
    Susan Carol looked at her watch. “My father’s expecting me upstairs any minute. We’re supposed to go to dinner with a friend of his who lives here in town. There’s no way I can get out of it.”
    Stevie and his dad had been invited to dinner by a group of the coaches from Philadelphia at some hot shot New Orleans restaurant called K-Paul’s. When his dad had told him about the dinner, he had been excited at the prospect of eating with Fran Dunphy, the Penn coach he’d interviewed at the Palestra, and Jay Wright, the coach at Villanova. Now all he could think about was the entire evening being wasted. There wasn’t much they could do.
    “I think we need to get an early start in the morning,” he said. “The first game isn’t until five o’clock. That means the coaches won’t want the players up too early, so we can probably catch him in his room.”
    “Why don’t we leave here at eight-thirty,” she said. “It can’t be too far away if it’s in downtown.”
    “The question is, what do we tell our dads?”
    She looked baffled for a second, then snapped her fingers. “Easy. Remember when Mr. Brill was saying there’s anentire room filled with radio stations doing broadcasts over at the coaches’ hotel?”
    “Yeah, so?”
    “So we’ll tell them we were invited over there by a couple of radio stations to appear, and Mr. Brill and Mr. Weiss said we should do it because it would be good publicity for the USBWA.”
    “And what if they say they want to go with us?”
    “Chances are my dad won’t want to. He said something about wanting to go to a museum in the morning. And if they do, let’s just tell them we’d sort of like to do this on our own.”
    Stevie thought his dad would probably buy that, since they always argued over how much independence Stevie should be allowed at home. “Good idea,” he said. “I think that can work.”
    They got on the elevator to head to their rooms. Stevie’s floor came first. As he got off, he turned back to Susan Carol. “I’ll see you at eight-thirty in that lower lobby, okay?” he said.
    She gave him a nervous smile that reminded him how very pretty she was. “I hope you sleep tonight,” she said. “I know I won’t.”
    The door closed. She was right again. He knew he wouldn’t sleep at all. There was just much too much to think about. And worry about.

8: A NEW FRIEND
    STEVIE WOULD HAVE LAUGHED if someone had told him he would spend an evening in the presence of four college basketball coaches—Fran Dunphy had brought Harvard coach Frank Sullivan and Billy Hahn, the ex-La Salle coach, with him—wondering when it would be time to go home and go to bed. But that’s pretty much what happened. The coaches took turns telling stories that normally Stevie would have been fascinated to hear. Sullivan, who seemed very un-coachlike to Stevie, with his soft-spoken manner and easy smile, talked about how close Harvard had come to landing Wally Szczerbiak a few years earlier.
    “You mean
the
Wally Szczerbiak?” Stevie’s dad asked as Sullivan told the story.
    “The one who is an All-Star in Minnesota right now,”Sullivan said. “We had him until the last minute. Then Miami of Ohio came in and, well, they were in a better basketball league than the Ivy League—”
    “Wait a minute,” Bill Thomas said, breaking in. “You’re telling me a kid turned down Harvard to go to Miami of Ohio because the Mid-American Conference is a better basketball league than the Ivy