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Counting Coup

Warner Books

Chapter One

The only sign of energy in the town is the ubiquity of basketball hoops ... on telephone poles, sides of houses, scrawny trees. These hoops aren't fancy Air Jordan NBA specials purchased at the Rim Rock Mall in Billings-they have rotting plywood backboards and flimsy rims drooping toward the hardened dirt. Rare remnants of net, shredded by heavy use and the fierce winds that blow off the prairie, hang loosely.

At the park in the center of town-a luckless patch of dried grass with a well-used outdoor basketball surface in the middle-Norbert Hill, Paul Little Light, and Clay Dawes, three seniors on the Hardin High varsity, are playing a lazy game of half-court crunch. I know their names because I studied their photos in the showcase in the lobby of the high school gym. These are the guys I've traveled to this remote corner of southeastern Montana to write about, the athletic young men who carry the hopes of the Crow Tribe on their shoulders. In the heat, they move at half speed. I sit down to watch.

A burgundy Mercury Cougar riding out of the dusty Montana summer eases to the curb, and a young woman-I guess her to be seventeen-grabs a basketball from the back seat and walks onto the vacant end of the court, dribbling the ball between her legs with a casual ease, her eyes fixed on the guys at the other end. She shyly waves to them, then throws up a halfhearted shot from the free throw line, the ball sailing perfectly through the netless rim, hitting the support pole and bouncing onto the dead grass. Slowly, she retrieves it, picking it up with a tricky little flick of the foot, then returns to the court.

Tall and slender, she has a quiet beauty-high cheekbones, dark hair, mahogany eyes-yet she is not a celluloid Pocahontas or a black velvet rendition of an Indian princess. Her appeal is subtler. It is the way she moves, a grace, languid, fluid, sexy. All without effort. She seems mysterious, detached.

From the other end of the court, one of the boys beckons her to come play some two-on-two. He is Paul Little Light, a charming, handsome, crew-cut seventeen-year-old who dreams of Hollywood. He'll be a movie star with a Beamer, a Benz, and a mansion.

She rolls the ball off the court and walks to the other end, silent, serious. Her teammate will be Norbert, a young man slated to be captain, star player, and class clown. Twenty years earlier his uncle Darrell Hill had also been a star player at Hardin High, good enough to win All-State honors. After the season Uncle Darrell and his brother got into a fight outside a bar in Hardin with two men from another clan with a long-standing feud against the Hill family. When it was all over, the Hill brothers were dead on the sidewalk of stab wounds and the other two men were arrested, although one eventually walked free and the other spent only ten years in jail. Whites took the double murder as further proof that the Crows were their own worst enemy.

On the first play, the girl dribbles to her left, then zips a no-look pass to a wide-open Norbert, who scores. Little Light, her defender, grins, embarrassed. She shows no expression. Instead, she fakes left, then cuts backdoor, leaving Little Light flatfooted with his Hollywood smile. Norbert's pass is perfect and she scores an easy layup. She still doesn't smile, but she looks at home, as comfortable as the old T-shirt and shorts she wears.

At this moment, a red Chevy 4x4 with a young Indian man behind the wheel cruises by the park. The girl turns and watches it disappear around the corner, then flips the ball to Little Light and takes off running toward her Cougar, picking up her own ball on the way.

"Wait," pleads Little Light. "Let's finish the game."

She doesn't look back or bid them farewell. She just gets in her car and vanishes around the corner.

My journalistic journey to the Crow Indian Reservation, and my own fascination with sport, date back several decades. Back in the late 1960s, when America was going nuts in the streets, I was a professional baseball player, skilled enough to make it to the major leagues with the Philadelphia Phillies, but stupid enough to blow it one game after I got there, injured in a mindless bar brawl, my dream cut short. I played for the Phillies on a Tuesday.

But not a day has gone by since then that I haven't thought about the pursuit of fickle athletic glory and our national obsession with sports. It's hard not to: we've got fans in cheese hats, Dennis Rodman on the best-seller list, endorsement fees bigger than school district budgets. I always read the sports news first.

After I left baseball and took a turn at high school teaching, I wrote a book about pro basketball, as well as basketball stories for a number of magazines. Somehow along the way I became fascinated, then mystified and alarmed, at the plight of young Native American athletes. For reasons that were beyond me, these intelligent, very capable young men seemed to have their lives explode at the time when most young men's lives are just taking off. On the Crow Reservation, where the passion for basketball is legendary and star high school players are the heroes of the tribe and often the best players in Montana, these young athletes invariably finish their high school careers with no hope for a scholarship and no skills for the future.

Before coming to the rez to explore this phenomenon, I knew enough to understand that this is not just some funky little social trend. This is a whole culture that is backsliding, and has been for a very long time. Why, I wondered, is Native American society failing, leaving its people so hopeless at such an early age?

The story I've come looking for, however, is not at all the story I will write. The story I find is the girl who just dropped the ball and took off in pursuit of the 4x4.

At the end of my first week in Montana, I head off for another journey to Crow Agency, this time to check out Crow Fair, a huge tribal powwow. I decide to take the long way from my newly rented duplex in Hardin, a border town on the edge of the rez. The route will take me south on Montana State Highway 313, across the Big Horn River, then east through the heart of the rez. On my bicycle. Out of shape.

I've never been on a rez before, not even to gamble. I'm not a Native American scholar or New Age wannabe in search of becoming one with the tribe. I've come to Big Horn County only because Indians and sport seem like a good story and an interesting way to spend a year.

Riding through Hardin, I pass two Indians in front of the Mint Bar, angry, pointing fingers at each other. They interrupt their discourse to glare at me. I speed up.

Indians, I've been led to believe, are very emotional people who tend to score big from fat government handouts, then blow their windfall money. They are people with rocky family lives and major booze problems. Doesn't everyone know that?

Odd. That sounds familiar. Though I am, by DNA and upbringing, a WASP, I can identify. As an athlete and a writer, I've scored nice bonuses on occasion, and hey, why not buy a couple of rounds for everybody in the place-only to find myself months later...