True Legend Read Free

because they were too busy watching Drew play
his.
    And the cameras; don’t forget the cameras.
    It was funny, Drew thought. It had gotten to where he felt eyes on him even when there weren’t any around.

THREE
    H e knew exactly when it had all changed for him, when people had started talking him up and wanting to watch him play.
    When Drew Robinson had turned into True Robinson.
    And everybody knew that, in sports, when they put a nickname on you, that’s when you’ve really arrived.
    It was when he’d played that AAU all-star game, East versus West—back when he was still East, just thirteen years old—with a bunch of other guys from his New Heights team.
    The game was on ESPN, first time on national TV for all of them. Huge deal.
    People in New York, in high school ball and AAU ball, had started to notice Drew that year, his freshman year at Archbishop Molloy in Queens, playing for Jack Curran, a New York City basketball legend who’d been at Molloy long enough to win more games than any high school coach the city ever had.
    Then came that all-star game and the two passes Drew made that ended up as SportsCenter’s number one and number two plays in their Top 10, ahead of everything else that happened in college and the pros that night.
    Two passes he threw that were still getting hits on YouTube, even now.
    And the funny thing was, there were at least four other passes in that game they could have gone with, if they’d wanted.
    The first was one he’d been working on from the time his hands got big enough to control a regulation-size ball, one he knew he’d invented before other guys started showing up on YouTube with their own versions.
    The one off his elbow.
    What happened: Drew came down on the break, three on two, the defense backing up because they just
knew
something bad was about to happen to them, Drew on the fly, completely in charge of the action in front of him and all around him.
    He had a Brooklyn kid from another AAU team, the Riverside Hawks, a stone-cold shooter named Ray Pope, in the right-hand corner, wide open, ahead of the play, all spotted up to make a three, waving for the ball.
    Drew also had his own big dog from New Heights, DeMarcus Nelson, busting it from the left wing.
    Drew knew the ball was
supposed
to go to the corner. Ray was on fire shooting the ball. He’d made his last three bombs in a row to break the game wide open.
    And they’d left Ray wide open again.
    Only Drew had a better idea.
    He wanted to get the ball to DeMarcus as soon as he cleared traffic, let him throw one down, just because he’d earned the right, the way he’d been dominating the boards on both ends.
    So what Drew did, he went behind his back with his left hand, like he was going to style the ball to Ray Pope that way.
    Only as the ball came behind him, Drew pulled his right arm back just enough, used his right
elbow
to deflect the ball in the opposite direction. To DeMarcus. Whose dunk almost brought down the whole backboard, like he was trying to make ESPN’s Top 10 his own bad self.
    That was Drew’s second-best pass of the night, at least according to SportsCenter.
    Number one really
was
the one, the pass people still asked him about, just because they wanted to know how he saw everything he did and
did
everything he did on the last play of the first half.
    It started simple enough. Drew was just trying to save the ball from going out of bounds, jumping in the air to save it in front of his own bench. Maybe in a real game he would’ve tried to call time-out from the air, because that was before they’d changed the rules. But it was an all-star game. It was on TV. Was supposed to be fun.
    So why not have some?
    As he got his hands on the ball, he was able to turn his body just enough to pick up the clock behind the basket, pick up where all the other players were at the same time.
    Drew could always do that, from the time he was the