True Legend by Mike Lupica

about girls’ practice. They just talked about where they wanted to eat.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    Park Prep had more kids than any other school in their league.
    Park was loaded every single year, had won the league nine of the last eleven seasons, won it before Oakley joined the Valley in basketball, and kept on winning it after that. It was one of the most famous basketball programs in the state of California. Its coach, old John Mabry, was a California legend, having coached Park for forty years and won over seven hundred games.
    And Mabry’s team had beaten the Oakley Academy Wolves every single time they’d played.
    It was, Drew knew, the single best reason why Mr. Gilbert had brought in Billy DiGregorio two years ago, hired him away from the powerhouse program Billy had built in Sacramento. He had been brought to Oakley to beat Park Prep—as much as he’d been brought there to win a league title, and maybe a Southern District title after that—for the first time in school history.
    â€œI was at the press conference when he took the job,” Lee had told Drew. “He said he wasn’t taking on a job as much as a challenge. He didn’t know the challenge would get a lot less challenging when
you
fell into his lap. And ours.”
    Drew hadn’t fallen, of course. It was more like Mr. Gilbert had
placed
him there. From the time Mr. Gilbert started talking to Drew’s mom about them moving to the West Coast, there had never been any question about where Drew was going to school, any more than there was a question about where Darlene Robinson was going to work or where they were going to live.
    Maybe Mr. Gilbert had even picked out their street in Agoura Hills before he talked to Darlene Robinson after the all-star game that time.
    â€œI’m gonna paraphrase an old line from sports,” Mr. Gilbert had said to Drew once. “Your coach’s good luck is the result of
my
design.”
    Mr. Gilbert always told Drew and his mom it was their decision, he could get Drew into some other fancy private school if she wanted. Chaminade over in Woodland Hills was a great school. But it didn’t take too long for them to figure out that everything went a lot smoother when what they wanted was what he wanted.
    Meaning Mr. Gilbert.
    Like it was just one more part of the deal.
    Everybody called games between Oakley and Park “rivalry games,” but Drew could never see it as much of a rivalry when one team did all the winning.
    Still, this was the first of two regular season games between them, and the Oakley kids—because they had Drew now—were treating it like some kind of high-school-basketball Super Bowl. There had been a pep rally in the gym after practice on Monday, handmade posters all over the corridors, a huge “Beat Park” banner hanging across the top of the main building of their campus, from one corner to the other.
    â€œI’ve been waiting my whole life to beat these guys,” Lee said in the locker room, maybe forty-five minutes from the tip. “At least it feels like my whole life.”
    â€œDude,” Drew said, “chill yourself out. We’re playing Park tonight, not Kobe and the Lakers.”
    â€œBut if you grew up in this town the way I did, they
are
the Lakers,” Lee said. “Or the old Celtics. Or those UCLA teams from back in the day that used to win every year in college basketball.”
    â€œThey’re not winning tonight,” Drew said, on the carpet now in front of his locker, doing his back stretches.
    â€œIt would be so great for our school,” Lee said. “Finally getting those guys.”
    Drew nodded, meaning, Yeah, let’s do it for our school. But he
wasn’t
trying to do it for his school, or to make school history, or even for his buddy Lee.
    Tonight was about him against King Gadsen.
    That was the rivalry he was thinking on, even though he and King had never played against