He learned this obsession—and, possibly, inherited it—from his father, Greg Lazenby, a former play-by-play man for CBS’ college basketball team. Greg relished in relentless pressure on defense, in the marshaling of the troops on the floor, in brazen dagger shots at the end of games. In the indescribable rush of a game’s waning moments, he reverted to his childhood trip to Philadelphia, watching Dr. J. win the world’s first Slam Dunk Contest, taking in the sweat and grunts and curses and screams and squeaks of the contest, its swagger, its vitality. Wanting it.
Greg’s love for the game was both a blessing and a curse. It made him one of the industry’s rising stars almost instantaneously, thanks to his enthusiasm and utter sincerity; he was an amateur in a professional’s world. It also ended his career.
Memphis, riding a number one ranking in the polls for much of the year, was hosting number two Michigan State. It was nothing less than a championship game preview. It was Greg’s biggest call yet. And it did not disappoint.
Furious drives to the hoop! Chest beating and roars after hard fouls! And-ones! Utter cool after drained threes! It wasn’t one of the best games Greg had ever seen; it was the best, better than Christian Laettner, better than Jimmy V’s championship, better than the Flu Game or countless other Michael moments.
It’s poetry on hardwood.
Michigan State is trailing with eight seconds left, and their all-world point guard, Sterling Grice, heaves up a desperation three. Memphis’ center, Campion, rebounds, and Greg’s heart plummets as he narrates. This game, it seems, too shall pass, except—
Coyer stole the ball. Jonny Coyer, Michigan State’s scrappy, undersized forward, stole the ball right out of Darnell Campion’s hands. Memphis, dumbfounded, races to get back in position. They double Coyer, pressure him, but he spins—a spin move! such grace! such ease!—and drives to the hoop. He elevates…
Staring at the rim, he passes the ball to Sterling Grice, who stands alone in the coffin corner behind the arc. Surely Coyer took too much—no. Just enough time. Time enough for Greg. Time enough for his partner, Steve Coogan, heaving orgasmic, guttural, whiskey-and-pizza stained syllables into his microphone. Time enough for Sterling Grice.
He shoots. He sinks it. The crowd, deafening only seconds before, goes utterly silent.
“Sterling did it! He beat the buzzer! WE’RE GOING TO HALFTIME!”
He doesn’t realize what he’s done until the second or third time he’s heard his words echo around the stadium. Then comes the laughter—everyone’s heard him. Everyone at home, on what will become the most-watched regular season college basketball game of all time, has heard him. Finally, mercifully, they go to commercial.
Officially, Greg was in the clear. He just made a slip of the tongue, that’s all; he got caught up in the heat of the moment. But he knew. He could see it in Jay Bilas’ beady little eyes, in Tim Brando’s shit-eating grin, in Verne Lundquist’s jowls. He had failed. He was an embarrassment. He was a loser. Gone from rising star to has-been clown in one fucking slip of the tongue.
He was exiled, along with his old partner, to the purgatory of Pac-10 Basketball, where there was no threat of Greg ever reassembling his old national following. Coogan, an aging jock with no ACLs, constantly needled him in private about the call.
One night, when USC was getting steamrolled by Oregon State on a regional broadcast, the clock was winding down at the end of the first half, and the old drunk said, “Well, that’s it, folks. We’re going to halftime!”
“Shut the fuck up, Steve,” Greg said. He didn’t return to call the rest of the game.
After CBS summarily dismissed him, he went on to sports radio back in his native Alabama, and called basketball and football games for his son’s high school.
Gene Lazenby tried to make it look easy, and at times he did. Areas that required a lot of discipline, like sports and writing metered verse and glassblowing, were out from the start. But when expanding on his natural talents, Gene was expert at exuding effortlessness.
He was, for one thing, a spectacularly gifted liar. Combined with his not inconsiderable natural charisma, he had a way of dealing with—and double-dealing—people that bordered on legendary. Even when the lies were clearly doomed to failure, he remained committed; commitment was the sole jealousy of discipline to which he dedicated himself. One time in high school, in the calm before an exam, he sneezed a river of snot into his hands, looked over at the handsome girl sitting next to him, shrugged, and said, “Wasn’t me.”
He was a very capable thief and swindler, and frequently—routinely—impressed his friends by pulling the wool over the eyes of some of his high school’s easier marks. Gene pulled off short cons and pranks in untold numbers. His accomplice for his favorite trick was Eddie Hansen, a gymnast with remarkably flexible limbs. Eddie got picked on mercilessly for doing gymnastics, to say nothing of his teetering on the edge of the closet. It didn’t bother him in the slightest, then, when Gene asked him to walk by the football players’ table, trip, and throw an arm behind his neck at an unnatural angle and start shrieking. Gene used the distraction to clean up picking pockets.
What Gene really lived for, though, was the long con. It took a little more effort, but it mostly required patient observation. There was the time he cased Paul-Robert Meggars, captain of Eclectic High School’s Forensic Society (the debate team), for two weeks, ingratiating himself with Meggars, then switching out the allergy medicine in his pill bottle with Levitra the day of the team’s district competition. There was also, of course, the calculated tradeoff to get the mousy and dandruff-stricken Annie Farrow—her nickname at school was Snowflake--to sit with him in the cafeteria in exchange for buying his lunch.
With that in mind, it would be easy to think of Gene as a selfish, manipulative cad, and this would not be doing him a grave disservice. But he did have more gracious qualities. The few people he did consider his friends, such as the perennially put-upon Eddie Hansen, he protected and genuinely cared for. He loved, or perhaps just pitied, his father, who had proven much more likable without the stresses of travel and the spotlight. Sometimes at night he took the time to consider, though briefly, if he might have turned out differently if his mother had survived childbirth.
The most salient detail of Gene’s life at the moment, however, has nothing to do with his family. It is the only thing that can reduce him to uncontrollable heat-spasms of emotion. It determined his four-year plan at Eclectic High and his decision to go to a small college in the north of the state. It is one of the few things, no matter how hard he tries to ignore it, that Gene can not make look easy. It is the passion that burns in him for Sissie Brasher, and it is why Gene is at a mixer tonight.
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