Summary: Years after high school Sendoh is no longer the ace basketball player he used to be. One-shot.
Dead Dreams
How long had it been? That's right. Eleven years this winter. Eleven years since he had graduated from Ryonan High, eleven years since he had stopped playing basketball in any capacity, professional or otherwise. Koshino and he had managed to convince themselves when high school ended that college would be no different. They'd join the basketball team in college, meet new people, reunite with old acquaintances.
Sendoh remembered the first time he ran into Akagi in his first week at Shintai—Akagi in a white and purple tracksuit bearing the Shintai logo, with a basketball tucked casually under his arm and a pair of glasses on his nose. Sendoh was startled to see how different Akagi looked out of a Shohoku uniform. It was as if the familiar red and black that he had known so well during his three years in high school had been the only thing that had lent Akagi the appearance of being in Sendoh's age group; now Sendoh was inclined to address him as "Akagi-sensei" rather than "Akagi-senpai".
"I look forward to seeing you on the team," Akagi had said, bowing his head slightly in a show of respect for Sendoh, who had come very close to shattering his dreams of going to the Inter Highs. Now that he was in college, Sendoh mused, he likely had different dreams.
Of course, Akagi had come in on a basketball scholarship. Sendoh, by contrast, had no such ties to Shintai's basketball team and thus did not feel guilty about disappointing Akagi. Nor did Shintai feel any guilt about not poaching Sendoh as vigorously as they had poached Akagi. It might have had something to do with the fact that Ryonan had failed to make it to the Inter Highs during his third and final year. His departure from high school basketball had been "not with a bang but a whimper", rendered the more unremarkable by Rukawa's meteoric rise: MVP in the district tournament, and only in his second year. By the time Sendoh graduated, people scarcely remembered that Rukawa and he had once been rivals.
Sendoh had touched a basketball once or twice since, but the passion was no longer there. When he essayed a free throw at the beachside basketball court, where the merest rumor of his presence had once drawn crowds of young basketball fans eager to become as great a basketball player as he one day, his feet did not leave the ground, and the ball missed the hoop altogether; and there was no one there to witness this symbolic moment—the last time Akira Sendoh would touch a basketball.
There had been a time after that when Sendoh had struggled to find a new identity. But that was in the past. Sendoh was quite well situated now. He had on a whim decided to go to law school and had landed a highly sought-after position at the Inoue & Ishida law firm, where Inoue had predicted that Sendoh was a cert to become a partner in less than ten years. Well, that prophecy had come true. Inoue & Ishida was now Ishida & Sendoh, the elderly Inoue having succumbed to a heart attack in his office three years earlier. Sendoh had been there but had been unable to do anything for the dying man. At the funeral, he had had to convince his disconsolate widow that he had died peacefully. Sendoh was good at lying now, because he was a lawyer—and by all accounts a good one.
As for his friends and teammates from Ryonan, he was not in touch with any of them. They all still lived in Kanagawa, with the exception of Uekusa, who had become a pilot for All Nippon Airways and spent much of his time flying to and from Tokyo and the wider world outside Japan; but they had parted on a bad note, and Sendoh had not wanted to see any of them again—and, he knew, the feeling had been mutual. The only thing he regretted from that time was the pained look on Coach Taoka's face when he had told him that he would not be playing basketball again, and it was because of him.
But time had dulled even that regret.
Why had Sendoh stopped playing basketball?
Oh, right. It was because of an injury he had suffered during the finals in the district tournament. Sendoh had gone in for a slam dunk. The crowd had risen to its feet as it often had during his time at Ryonan. Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his lower back. It was the opposing team's center tackling him from behind. He fell to the floor with the center still on top of him and slid to the end of the court, where his head collided with the base of the goal. He passed out, and the opposing center was dismissed, but Shintai was unable to pull themselves together, even under Akagi's expert captainship.
He spent his convalescent days at the hospital being consoled by Koshino, who in the usual breezy way of one who has never borne any responsibility for defeat told him that there was still next year, and Sendoh would surely lead their team to victory then, as he had in their last year at Ryonan, when they had qualified for the Inter Highs and made it all the way up to the quarter-finals, where they had lost to Sannoh—Rukawa in a corner of the room stubbornly insisting that it was his fault they had lost. No doubt the mention of Sannoh stung him just as much as it stung Sendoh, for Shohoku had lost to Sannoh in the previous round.
No one talked about Kainan anymore. They had tumbled rather unceremoniously from Olympus after Maki left.
Of course, Koshino was wrong, and Sendoh never did recover. He did not get to correct Fate's mistakes the following year and had to watch Rukawa lead Shintai to victory the year after that. And then? Rukawa got the phone call from the NBA that he had been waiting for, and Sendoh, after spending a year sulking, decided to take up wildlife photography in coastal Africa, away from all the people he had disappointed.
Chief among them, of course, old Coach Taoka, whom he had promised on his last day at Ryonan, no doubt under the influence of the beer that Koshino had smuggled into the school, that he would become the greatest basketball player in Japan and then proclaim to the country that he would not be anywhere if it hadn't been for Taoka Moichi, the greatest basketball coach in Japan, who would have been to him like the father he had never had if he had never had a father.
Only Uozumi understood.
Only Uozumi understood why Sendoh couldn't quit basketball, because he had quit basketball himself. Before he set out for college, Sendoh had got into numerous shouting matches with his parents, who wanted him to become a doctor like them. All Sendoh wanted was to play basketball in college and play in the NBA after that. His rivalry with Rukawa during his second year in high school had been nice, but now his rivals were big names on the national stage. Who was Rukawa? Shohoku who? Nobody had heard of them—Shohoku, who had come close to beating Kainan and closer still to beating Ryonan in the district tournament, but that's as far as they had been fated to go. Kainan and Ryonan went in triumph to Hiroshima, where they faced off against each other in the finals. Kainan won in the end, but both were welcomed back to Kanagawa with great fanfare. Schools from the same prefecture winning first and second place was almost unheard of. Was unheard of.
As for Shohoku, Akagi retired the following year, and Sakuragi, who had shown great promise initially, fell into a drug habit, courtesy of Mitsui's old gang. Mitsui had overdosed in an alley behind the school that summer. Ayako—and this was truly tragic—had been murdered by a disgruntled uncle with connections to the Yakuza. Miyagi, unable to contain his sorrow, had taken his own life. Coach Anzai had suffered a second heart attack and survived a second time, but Mrs. Anzai had suffered a stroke and died.
It was Rukawa who locked the doors of the gym and handed the keys to the school authorities. There would be no more basketball at Shohoku for the remainder of the year.
Sendoh had dropped by to give Rukawa his condolences. They were at an old Shinto shrine on the outskirts of town, where Rukawa spent many a melancholy afternoon these days.
Ting… ting… ting…
The wind chime tinkled in the wind.
"It is over," said Rukawa.
"It's not over yet," said Sendoh.
"It is over."
"You still have a whole life ahead of you."
"It is over," said Rukawa. "What do you know about loss?"
"I once lost a game in junior high," said Sendoh. He probably didn't mean to sound callous. Or maybe he did. "We came very close to winning, but the referee had it in for me. It was truly tragic. A true tragedy."
"A true tragedy."
"Sorry for your loss, by the way."
"Sorry for yours."
"I know she was close to you. Haruko Akagi. In retrospect, all the warning signs were there. Had you met her uncle?"
Rukawa nodded.
"He had a Yakuza tattoo on his neck."
"Yes." Sendoh nodded. "It could have been prevented. Now you may never have the strength to play basketball again."
Rukawa inhaled sharply.
"You loved him, didn't you?" said Sendoh. "I could see the way you looked at him. But he was oblivious, of course."
"Hisashi only had eyes for basketball."
"It's easy to see why he was the ace of your team, but he was so clueless when it came to feelings."
"He was in love with Ayako."
"Yes, everybody knew that."
"Captain Akagi, I mean."
"Who else?"
"Is that the alarm on your watch beeping? Beep… beep… beep…?"
"No, it's the wind chime. Ting… ting… ting… I do sometimes envy you, Rukawa, who know what it feels like to be in love."
"I wouldn't envy me. I've lost too much."
Beep… beep… beep…
"Is that the alarm on your watch?"
"I'm not wearing a watch."
Ting… ting… ting…
Beep… beep… beep… beep… beep…
It was the electrocardiogram that indicated that Rukawa was still alive. He could hear indistinct voices, but he couldn't move his muscles or open his eyes to see whose they were. It must be the doctors, he decided.
He had been in an accident. They were driving back from a basketball retreat in the mountains—this was seven years after high school, after they had both graduated from college. Rukawa was in the driver's seat. A truck coming down the mountain swerved into their lane, driving Sendoh and Rukawa off the road. They tumbled who knows how far down the rocky slopes and landed on the banks of a stream at the very bottom of the mountain.
Sendoh, Rukawa had gathered from the conversation of the invisible doctors, had died on the spot.
As for Rukawa, he would hold on for eleven more minutes—eleven, like his old high school jersey.
end.
A/N: Stream-of-consciousness + unreliable narrator ftw.