Ball Don't Lie: NBA True Horror Stories — 'The Headbands Take All'
The dark magic at work in the NBA's Orlando Bubble.
I am trying to think. There’s definitely one about Phil Jackson, because there’s really no way to write an annual series of NBA-based horror stories without the NBA’s foremost uncanny/horny lycanthrope getting in the mix at some point. I remember that the last one involved Australian basketball players, but not that much else about it; it turns out it involved Ben Simmons and friends battling a vengeful supernatural Luc Longley, which is something I enjoyed while re-reading it, but barely remembered. That story was the last one ever to go up on The Classical, before the old CMS finally tipped over; it will, at some point, be back in sturdy WordPress form. It was also the last story I posted from the computer I was issued at my last job, which I quit on Halloween of 2019.
So things change, and things stay the same. Every year around this time, for years, I have read a goofy-spooky story that Katie wrote and Griffen illustrated. This year, I will be reading that story right along with you. I can tell you, just referring to my memory, that Katie would be repeating herself if it involved Paul Pierce being a grouchy vampire, or Jimmy Butler being a werewolf, but I can also tell you that she hasn’t repeated herself yet. I miss The Classical terribly, not just because I was younger and happier when I was doing it, but because the whole internet felt and really was different then. But I also miss being able to put up Katie’s posts, both because they always so fully embodied the spirit of what we were going for at the site—a type of appreciation that was skeptical and irreverent and aware and as strange as every person’s fingerprint—and because I got to read them first. They were, in the last years, the only thing on the site. They were, always, very close to the essence of what I always wanted the site to be. The site is undead. Ball Don’t Lie is, and I will please ask you to imagine lightning and thunder here, ALIVE!
David Roth
October 2020
The meeting, if there had been anyone there to witness it, surely would have seemed clandestine. Under a swollen south Florida half moon, the air heavy with waterlogged heat, two towering figures furtively ducked their heads together on the drawbridge of Cinderella’s Castle. What was said was in whispers, the air occasionally punctuated by the word “Gawersh” in a repeated recording of Goofy’s voice piped over the park’s speakers. An object changed hands, was quickly tucked into a pocket of sweatpants made from very technical fabric. There was a brief pause by both figures, as if considering what it was they were doing — the moment of no return — before they parted, one headed for a string of park hotels and the other went up the drawbridge and into the castle. They couldn’t know, not that either were blameless, but the course of league history had just changed forever.
*
“Let’s go back, Paul, I’m hungry,” Patrick Beverley whined.
“I need to get back too, Paul, Markieff and I promised to bench press each other before practice,” Marcus Morris said solemnly.
Sitting in the boat’s captain’s chair and swivelled to the stern to face the water, Paul George looked out across the Disney pond, his expression unreadable under his sport fisherman wraparound sunglasses.
“Lou said they’re doing waffles this morning, Mickey shaped?” Patrick said hopefully, “But they’ll be gone if we don’t get there before the Lopez brothers do.”
Paul George simply flicked his wrist, jigging his fishing line up.
“This is boring, Paul,” Pat said, changing his approach, “they stocked this pond so full of fish you could just reach in with your hands and grab one. Where’s the challenge in that for an angler like you?”
Marcus nodded gravely.
Another small cruising boat nosed up beside them. Boban Marjanovic cheerfully waved from its deck, “Hi Clippers!”
“You guys headed back for breakfast?” Pat asked them. Luka Doncic and Boban nodded.
Pat took in a breath to quip back just as Paul George raised a hand — “Go,” George said, voice even.
“Aw come on Paul, let’s go back as a team.”
“Yeah Paul, Ballmer wants us to be ‘Bubble brothers’, remember?” Marcus said.
“GO.” Paul said more forcefully, still not taking his eyes from the water.
Boban, accustomed to the strange things Clippers chemistry could do to people, had brought the other boat alongside. “Come Clippers,” he said quietly, “Leave PG13 to fishes.”
Pat and Marcus moved to the other boat and still Paul George didn’t take his eyes from the pond.
“It’s weird, man, it’s like he’s looking for one kind of fish when all these damn fish are the same,” Beverley shook his head.
“Bye, Paul,” Marcus said sadly as the other boat turned and pulled away.
Staring out at the stillness of the tepid pond, the bright sun slowly climbing over his shoulder, Paul George whispered to himself, “Where are you, Nacho?”
*
It started innocuously enough.
With the Bucks it was a bout of bad food poisoning. Something wrong with the turkey legs the Lopez brothers insisted the team have as a playoffs meal to turn their up to then lacklustre play around.
The brothers mostly wanted an excuse to eat their #1 prized park food item from their favourite place in the world, something the Bubble chefs had refused to serve (the caloric value isn’t great and they had their hands full with daily complaints from players about the Mickey waffles, about the ears being different sizes), but Brook and Robin insisted to the team, “We’ll channel the might of the medieval champions who came before us!”
Everyone “cheers”’d with their legs before digging into the novelty drumsticks that really just looked regular sized in all of their hands. Each member of the team did not leave their ensuite bathroom for the next 72-hours, piteous moans calling for Bango could be heard throughout the halls of Milwaukee’s hotel floor. When they finally managed to make it to the court, something about them just looked off. The Heat eliminated them so fast there were still residual gurgles sounding from most of Milwaukee’s stomachs.
The league did its due diligence asking after the way the turkey legs had been prepared but the chefs, up to their ears in the contentious ears of Mickey waffles, were already working with a short fuse. Still, had they asked after delivery staff they may have been given a vague memory of a tall, hooded figure bent over the boxes of drumsticks, one who looked like he was wearing a terrycloth headband, with a deep, luxuriously thick furrowed brow.
*
Anthony Davis gets to the Lakers temporary locker room before the rest of the team. He skipped the team bus, opting instead to steal Mike Malone’s bike from the running track when the Nuggets coach had flung it down to do his usual flurry of frenzied push-ups between laps. Davis, checking to make sure no one was coming down the tunnel, pulls a velvet bag from his own gym bag and carefully begins to pull headbands out of it.
To the naked eye these are standard issue, white terrycloth headbands, but Davis knows better. He checks each for the embroidered initials that have been sewn into their inner seam, making sure they’re all there. He’s not aware of it, but he’s murmuring each name as he goes, which, had he been more attuned to the dark arts at play, he’d’ve realized was the final incantation needed to activate the bands.
“AD, what are you doing here?” A nasally voice comes from behind him.
Startled, Davis nearly drops the sacred bag of bands. He turns with a hand to his heart and sees nothing until he looks down and sees Alex Caruso 4ft, give or take, below him. “Alex, what are you—”
As soon as the realization hits Davis catches himself. LeBron. James had individually set the entire team’s hotel clocks and watches ahead by 45 minutes before confiscating their phones on the first day. “We’re on Game Time now,” he’d told them all. Davis feels like a fool for forgetting.
“What’s in the bag?” Caruso stands on his tip toes and tries to peer into Davis’s hands.
Their teammates begin streaming into the locker room. Davis realizes he’s going to have to get this done quickly, and without LeBron seeing.
“I, uh, got special gifts for everyone,” Davis says tentatively. Hearing this, Dwight Howard, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Jared Dudley, Rondo, Markieff Morris and JaVale McGee crowd around Davis, pushing Caruso out. “You guys like headbands, right?” Six pairs of eyes light up. “I got some really special ones for the playoffs.”
“Special headbands are BANNED!” Caruso pipes up furiously from behind everyone.
“No, no, these are regulation. You could say I took it all the way to the top for approval.”
Davis starts doling out the extremely nondescript headbands to his teammates who, as the item’s plainness becomes apparent, begrudgingly take them.
“Try them on!” Davis claps his hands together, smiling.
One by one they slip the bands over their heads as Davis watches intently, waiting. He’s not exactly sure when it will happen, or what it will look like, but he was promised that he’d know when it did.
A shrill trilling bursts from the tunnel. It’s not Tuesday but LeBron has started to make the taco Tuesday noise at all times. Davis slips his own band on and heads out to the court for Game 2 against the Blazers.
*
Out on the pond it’s past dark and the water is still, reflecting not the stars but the lurid glow of Disney. Paul George sits, quietly staring out at the unbroken surface, his sport fisherman wraparound sunglasses on.
He’s spent every night since he arrived in the Bubble out here and it’s starting to affect his game. He’d heard people using his Playoff P nickname more, which he thought was great until he walked in on Beverley trying to show Lou Williams something on his phone, the both of them snickering Playoff P. He’d asked them and they had only said, “They love you on Twitter, P”. He forgot about it until later when Patrick Patterson took him aside and said people loving you on Twitter was a bad thing (“Take it from me,” he’d added solemnly).
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. He was starting to feel like the games didn’t matter because he had a bad feeling about the cost, the true cost, of them.
He takes a tortilla chip out of his custom tackle box and baits a simple hook, “This is going to hurt for a sec, Teague,” he murmurs, before casting the line out. Almost instantly, there’s a bite.
“I knew it!” He whispers triumphantly into the night, reeling in his catch slowly, carefully, net at the ready beside him.
*
There could have been problems if Toronto hadn’t been knocked out by Boston (“A team that’s self-cursed itself before is more immune to this kind of thing,” the headband weaver had told Davis, “Self-cursed?” He asked. “Bargnani,” he said simply. “Ohhh, so all this time, the Knicks were self-cursed,” Davis said, nodding. “No,” the weaver shook their head, “that’s just Dolan”) but as it went the one person who could have handily taken a charge from dark magic, Kyle Lowry, had gone home.
The bands did their work against Portland, after one game the Lakers size suddenly became more sizeable, the team’s shots falling from where they normally wouldn’t. For one anxious minute Davis had seen Carmelo Anthony’s gaze go to the bands, as the weaver had warned him it might (“Melo’s… seen some things”, they’d said), but LeBron had called something out to his old friend and his suspicions slipped, he knew LeBron would never abide by a win powered with anything less than sheer will. With the Rockets it was the same, one game and then it was like the bands took over, having learned what to do. But Houston, it turned out, also had a problem not governed by the gravitational constraints of this world.
“D’Antoni is an alien.” The weaver had told Davis on Cinderella’s drawbridge.
“Yeah, he’s got some pretty strange coaching techniques,” Davis agreed.
“No, no I mean he’s an alien. From another planet. A planet with far less gravity, almost inverse gravity, where threes are the surest shot to go in. Basically free throws. He’s had a hard time adjusting,” the weaver shrugged.
The weaver, it turned out, knew a lot of things. Eerie things about each team and the nuances of their players, including Davis.
“I’m so glad I—I mean you, got yourself out of New Orleans,” they’d said to Davis.
“Thanks, yeah, I really like the Lakers. I love being a competitor.” Davis said, trailing off as he noticed the weaver murmuring “love being a competitor” right along with him.
With the Nuggets it seemed more difficult. Davis knew Paul Millsap also wore a headband, and hadn’t he learned some magic tricks during the hiatus? He wondered if Millsap might have the same kind of power, it would help to explain how Nikola Jokic could move the way he did, fast, but also in slow motion.
It was after a Game 3 loss that Davis had to talk Caruso down from telling LeBron. He assured Caruso that the bands would work, they always had, they’d still get a 4-1 series. It was also around that time Davis started to hear rumours about Paul George carrying a fish around the bubble in a shoe bag lined with a freezer bag, so the water didn’t leak. And not just that, George talked to it. He knew the Bubble was taking its toll on people but even for such an avid angler as George, that was a bit much.
But Davis had to get all that out of his head, because the Finals were about to begin.
*
Meyers Leonard was feeling low. The Heat were down two games and even the ice cold certified refreshment of a Coors Light couldn’t soothe the sting of all those headbanded Lakers, taunting his teammates. What’s more, he had just spilled his $20 Big Face Coffee in the Disney fish pond and let out the most explicit curse he knew (“Dagnabbit!”), when his mind began to go.
He knew stress manifested in strange ways, knew the isolation of Disney was getting to people. Maybe this, plus the stress of the Finals, had finally driven him to his breaking point. He blinked, trying to clear the mirage away of the man he’d just seen walk out of the pond, naked, and wave to him. And it wasn’t just any man.
“Hey, Meyers, sorry, this is a little awkward but, could you spot me your shirt? Maybe I could tie it around my waist while I see where I left my clothes. I just had the craziest dream, maybe I was sleepwalking? Went skinny dipping?” Klay Thompson laughs at himself, this situation, “Anyway bro, you’d be doing me one hell of a solid.”
*
The Heat had taken two games, things were tense, but Davis still believed in his plan. That was until LeBron called him over to where he sat with a cigar in the dark beside the hotel pool after the team had returned from the arena.
“Sit,” he motioned.
Davis sat.
James took a long draw from the stogie, studying Davis. After an excruciatingly long exhale, he cocked his head and said, “I heard you don’t believe in our team, maybe, don’t even believe in me.”
Before he could tell himself not to react, to stay calm, Davis was shaking his head, “That’s not true, that could never be true.”
James clamped the cigar between his teeth and opened his hands palm up in casually questioning gesture as if to say, “Well?”
“Who, who told you?” Davis steeled himself, “It was Caruso, wasn’t it?”
“Does it matter?” James shrugged, “But yeah, it was Alex.” LeBron shook his head, “AD, messing with the dark arts is one thing, but it almost offends me more that you doubted this, doubted us,” James took another long haul on the Cubano and said around a mouthful of rich smoke, “doubted me.”
“It’s not that, Bron, but after all those years of being told next year was my year, I just wanted to win so badly.” Davis shakes his head, “I never wanted you to find out.”
“Ah, but AD you should know, I know everything.”
There’s a sick lurch in Davis’s stomach. “The weaver and you, are you, it can’t be.”
“The Commissioner? He goes by a lot of names. But yeah, we came up with a kind of,” James waves the cigar, “agreement, after my first title. If he promised to never mess with me, my games or my teams, he could harvest my headbands.”
“What do you mean?” Davis asks, furrowing his brow and thinking of the special band James sometimes wore, different from the rest of the team.
“What I said. He takes my band and wrings it out, uses the essence to add to his own eternal pool, that’s how he seems to know everything, he’s been in the heads of so many players for so long,” James taps a temple, “and the rest of it he sells to Gatorade, they use it in the new zero sugar drinks.”
Davis sits silently for a few minutes, taking it all in. “But if he agreed to never interfere?”
“Why now?” LeBron nods, “It surprised me too but he must be getting nervous, thinking I’m close to finished. Not like he’s the first one,” James fixes Davis with a knowing, benevolent look.
“Bron, I’m so sorry,” the grief is almost too much, but Davis feels an immense relief, too.
James claps a hand on Davis’s shoulder, “You can make it up to me on the floor.”
*
It’s close and Davis is exhausted. What’s more is he can’t seem to stop falling down. It must be some withdrawal from the bands, from their powers, because he sees the unsteadiness in his teammates, too. The Heat, with a courtside espresso machine cranking out $20 espressos at every whistle, are practically levitating. He swears he heard Tyler Herro growling.
But LeBron is unperturbed. With less than two minutes left in the 4th, trailing by ten, he makes back-to-back threes and splits though the paint, parting the sea of over caffeinated twenty-somethings, and dunks. He’s fouled on the same play and the Lakers bench, exhausted, feebly erupts. There’s two seconds left on the clock. James makes the first free throw and composes himself for the second when suddenly, the lights in the arena go out.
From the rafters comes an angry wail and a cloaked figure slowly descends. The emergency arena strobe lighting flashes off a bald head and glasses and long fingers slowly peel away the cloak to reveal a snarling Adam Silver.
Everyone on the floor gasps, a few clutching one another. Except LeBron, who walks right up to the Commissioner and says, “Adam, we had a deal.”
“We did, until you dared to resist the natural order of things! You’ve refused the veteran’s minimum for years now, James, and it can no longer stand.” Silver draws something from his shroud, dangles it in front of James.
“My, my headband, where did you get that?” James growls.
Silver cackles. “You think I wouldn’t give myself some insurance? There’s been dark magic woven in the threads of this band since you failed to repeat with the Cavs, I never activated it, no, but with what, to quote your own words, the best teammate you’ve ever had did for me, I didn’t have to. All their bands,” he motions with long fingers to the rest of the Lakers, “have touched yours. I finally have you.”
As Silver lifts James’s headband aloft, opening his mouth to wring it into, a largemouth bass comes sailing through the air and slaps the Commissioner wetly in the face. He screeches.
“Jeff!” Paul George rushes worriedly after the fish, scooping it up after several tries.
The headband goes flinging into the dark, strobe lighting distorting its trajectory to all but Silver who darts after it, the long claw of a fingernail extended. An arm intercepts, someone with the kind of reach and natural defensive capabilities not seen in years. Anthony Davis clenches the headband securely in one hand.
“Call it off!” Davis shouts, “We’ll win our own way.”
“Change back the fish!” Paul George adds.
Everyone turns to him, confused.
“I know who they are. They’re our former teammates, our friends! Hell, even our rivals don’t deserve to be stuck in that pond for the rest of their lives.”
“The bass in the Disney pond, they’re players?” Davis asks beseechingly.
George nods, “I knew it from the first day I caught him. His eyes, his mouth, the way he blinked when I called him Nacho. I had caught my former teammate, Jeff Teague. Think about it,” George continues, “has anyone heard from the other players who didn’t make the bubble?”
Everyone shakes their heads.
“It’s true,” Meyers Leonard shouts, “Klay Thompson walked out of the pond buck naked the other day. I was too scared to say anything, I thought I was losing it.”
Everyone turns to Silver who simply shrugs, “That was a Disney condition. Where do you think the fish, the flamingos, the crocodiles, even some of the mascots come from? Every convention, every special event, Disney takes its cut in blood. Nothing I can do about it. However,” his long fingers meet in a devious arch, “I believe there’s one shot left to be made. If LeBron can make this free throw, in the dark, with the emergency lights, we’ll call our agreement off.”
At the line, James squints, shaking his head as if to clear it.
“Come on, Bron,” Davis whispers, “I’m sorry I turned to dark magic. You got this. You always have and you always will.”
The ball sails toward the basket, moving in slow motion with the flashing lights of the arena. There’s silence, and then the smooth swish of synthetic fabric against pebbled leather. Adam Silver screams, then erupts into a cloud of bats and disappears down the dark arena tunnel.
From his commentators plexi booth, Mark Jackson whispers, “Mama, there goes that Nosferatu.”
The clock ticks down its last two seconds and confetti streams down from the ceiling. But it’s the sight of Paul George gently cradling a fish at center court that makes everyone stop.
Davis suddenly snaps his fingers, “Meyers, what happened just before Klay walked out of the pond? Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember, I was kicking myself. I spilled my Big Face Coffee into the water, it was my last twenty bucks.”
Jimmy Butler shakes his damn head.
“That’s it! It must have been. Quick, bring one of those espressos over here.”
Careful not to spill, Tyler Herro brings over a tiny cup and holds it over the fish Jeff Teague’s gaping mouth. He looks to Jimmy Butler for permission, who nods once and turns away, unable to bear watching a fish not pay for its coffee.
Instantly Jeff Teague is standing in a puddle, naked and dazed but otherwise intact. George gently puts Silver’s cowl over his shaking shoulders.
“Jimmy, do you have enough Big Face Coffee to fill the pond?”
Jimmy Butler snorts, “Of course I do, but the better question is, can you all afford it?”
“Jimmy this is serious!”
“You’re right, it’s seriously going to cost you however many cups it takes to change every last damn flopper of a fish.”
It takes several max salaries pooled together and an entire afternoon but by the end of the next day the pond has been emptied of fish, every lost player changed back.
Finally free from weeks worth of doubts and stress, Anthony Davis sits at the edge of the water, enjoying its reflective glint off his new, championship ring, blissfully unaware that in the rafters of Cinderella’s Castle a bat with a tiny headband, the remnant of LeBron’s and countless other seasons of storied league knowledge darkly stored, roosts.