Inside Straight

Jamal’s father, Big Bill Norwood, was the best athlete in a South Central neighborhood noted for NBA stars and NFL running backs, for all kinds of major and minor league baseball players. “No hockey players, though,” Bill used to say. “No ice.”

Jamal was good, too, with the speed and eye-hand coordination of a world-class athlete. What he lacked was size, topping out at five-nine, 160 pounds in his junior year at powerhouse Loyola High. He could be the best basketball or football player the world had ever seen, but no scout or coach would look at him long enough to notice. That’s assuming the coach’s eyes noticed him at all, since he was a head shorter than his teammates.

Jamal had already experienced the humiliation of being passed over for the varsity baseball team at Loyola, even though his batting average was the highest on the team. He made the mistake of complaining to Bill one night on the drive home.

Big Bill simply shook his head. “Forget about being a pro athlete,” he said. “You’re never going to make it.”

“But I’m good, Dad! As good as the Wilkes brothers!”

“I’m not talking about ‘good,’ Jamal! You are good, probably in the top five percent of all the athletes your age. I’m just saying you’re never going to be a pro athlete. You’ve got too much going on.”

“I don’t understand.”

Big Bill sighed. “You’ve got too much going on in your head.” He must have realized that Jamal was still failing to see what he meant. “Look, you need two things to be a pro athlete: the skills, which you have, and the right kind of brain—which you don’t.”

“Are you saying I’m stupid?”

“I’m saying the opposite. I’m saying that you’ve got too many other things in your life to think about! What makes a kid a pro athlete is not having any other choices. You’ve got to be able to shoot hoops for six hours a day after school. You’ve got to bounce that ball off the step. And you’ve got to do it because you can’t do anything else! Because it is boring. If you get bored, if you find that you’d rather go to the movies or read a book or study or even chase girls, you aren’t gonna be a world-class athlete.”

Jamal mumbled something about jocks getting all the girls. “True. But it’s because the girls chase them, not the other way around.”

So he went off to USC determined to be the opposite of his father—not a jock, but an intellectual. He read Eggers and Pynchon and, yes, Stendahl. He discovered Marcel Duchamp and the Constructionists. He studied French film and Howard Hawks movies.

He even saw The Jolson Story.

Now that career had been sacrificed on the altar of the wild card.

Jamal Norwood needs American Hero.

~ ~ ~

“Today’s challenge is the Scavenger Hunt.”

Griffith Park Observatory has just emerged from a five-year-long, $90 million reconstruction. Having been dragged to the site for field trips all through grade school, Jamal feels as though he knows the place—and to his eye, it has not changed. The only difference is that you could no longer park. If he and the other Clubs hadn’t been driving their American Hero Humvees, they’d have had to take a bus.

Not that it matters for the Clubs. They are the last of the four suits to arrive, joining the other convoys as well as the horde of production vehicles and honey wagons.

Now Jamal and the other Clubs are lined up in front of a giant emblem so flimsy it flutters in the gentle morning breeze, and some kind of flat structure, like a scoreboard, covered with a colored sheet. The aces from the other suits, from Clubs to Diamonds to Spades to Hearts, all stand in front of Peregrine, all cleverly positioned so the light is in their faces. Peregrine herself steps onto a slick plastic circle twenty feet wide, bearing the American Hero logo.

Jamal has been on a dozen film sets, and yet he is still amazed at the artifice. Maybe it’s another sign that he is in the wrong business; he wants the characters on TV and in the movies to be real.

Toad Man nudges Jamal. “Boy, I thought we were having tough times. Look at them,” he says, nodding to the five Diamonds gathering in front of the symbol for their suit. They remind Jamal of an expansion baseball team about to take the field against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Only no expansion team had ever fielded such a sad-ass player as the Maharajah, missing two legs and one arm.

The Hearts, on the other hand, look cocky. There are six of them, just as there are six Clubs. Both teams have won a challenge, and the immunity that goes with it. The Spades and Diamonds, losers both times out, are down to five players apiece.

Jamal blinks—put them out of your mind. Think like Big Bill Norwood. They are all the enemy.

“We have hidden five statues just like this—” Peregrine raises a golden figurine, a stylized Jetboy a foot tall “—at five different locations around Los Angeles. The team that returns here within four hours with the most Jetboys wins. It’s that simple.”