Halloween 2009, Kings at Spurs, and the bat was back.
It had already darted around the court earlier in the game, flew in a panic, stopped the action. It dodged towels and nets and wily vets on its up-tempo voyage, somehow escaping unscathed.
The bat would have less luck during its second and final visit to the court. Manu Ginobili, future Hall of Famer and the greatest sixth man of all time, took matters into his own hands. Well, hand. He swung on the bat with his powerful left, knocked it out of the air, and sent it crashing to the ground. It landed on the hardwood, and the AT&T Center broke into delirium. Laughter and applause, laughter and applause. Ginobili picked up the bat and walked it off the floor. Someone on the Spurs medical staff brought him hand sanitizer, and the game moved on.
The bat did not.
He was hanging when I arrived, upside down over a corner booth in a taco place he’s asked I keep secret. His name is Darren. He comes here five days a week, likes the chorizo, the quiet. The waitress, a gentle woman he calls B, turns the table light off for him. It’s better for his eyes, one of which, his left, is permanently shut. It’s been 15 years since the slap that changed his life, and he does not want to talk to me. After months of dead ends and full voicemail inboxes, I tracked him down at an address in North Florida, this lost cog in the crazed machinery of one of the strangest on-court events of the past 25 years. He shakes my hand without looking and ends his margarita. Black cardigan, gray jeans, San Antonio Missions cap riding low. An ancient hat, looks like it was made around the dawn of man. Like it’s been through several hundred stampedes. Like it was chewed.
Darren was sunk deep in the booth, the red pleather back absorbing him. Homer in the hedges. It looked like he didn’t want to be there. Like he didn’t want to be anywhere. There was a slight tremor in his hands, and his snout whistled through every exhale. He ordered another marg, lit a cigarette, and told me about the past.
“When we—they—first started winning titles, it was a dream,” Darren said. “The fellas and I prayed heavily the day of the ’97 lottery. Obviously we really wanted Timmy. Partied so hard that night.”
The morning after the ’99 Finals, they were still dancing on top of the Alamodome when the sun came peaking, silver confetti like diamonds at their feet. What followed were glorious years, watching Robinson and Duncan find their way together. Darren saw every game from the rafters, ate stolen pieces of popcorn, made jokes with his friends. Every time the Spurs clinched a title at home, after everyone had gone away, he and his buddies would descend from the rafters and soar throughout the arena. It was their nirvana, a playground of infinite delights. Those days, custodial staff wouldn’t come until the next day. They had the run of the place. Felt like eagles, like kings.
He remembers lapping up drops of Champagne off Rasho Nesterovic’s locker room seat, eating strawberry Nutri-Grains left out in the Spurs training room, sleeping in Malik Rose’s warm-ups.
“It feels like another bat was doing that, you know? I was just so alive.”
Darren doesn’t like to return to that night. Much trauma there, much anger. Why did it happen? Why him? He was leading a full life, bound by nothing, then, the parachutes. This was in the early days of parachute promos; only a few arenas were even trying them. Spurs staffers ascended to the rafters with T-shirts tied to miniature parachutes, and Darren and his friends were too focused on the game to hear them coming. By the time they realized they were there, it was too late to scatter. They hid behind black support beams, tried not to breathe. A panic washed over him. He felt like a horse was on his chest, like his brain was swelling. He grew dizzy and delirious and thought he was dying. It was like his heart was trying to run away. The arena twirled and melted around him.
He doesn’t remember leaving his perch a second time. He doesn’t remember flying over the court. He remembers only the sound of his bones being smashed under the hand of a player he loved. The last thing he heard was laughter and applause, laughter and applause. Then the world went black.
It’s one of the great curses of existence: That which we hold most dear can bring us the most pain. Besides the injuries, the hardest part in the immediate aftermath was the reaction from fans.
“Everybody was all, ‘Oh no, Manu had to get rabies shots? Is he gonna be OK?’ Give me a fucking break. I’m in traction.”
With time, Darren’s softened and been able to see the incident from other points of view.
“I get it. They were worried about their team. What hurts the most is the pain I caused Manu. All the tests, needles. He was probably so scared.”
The past is resilient and scrappy. It does not go down easily. Even now, 15 years later, people can’t let it go. It’s the third suggestion on YouTube when you type in Ginobili’s name. Above “Manu Ginobili Euro-step” (the move he practically invented) and “Manu Ginobili blocks Harden” (one of the defining plays of his career).
“I want to believe people are inherently good,” Darren said. “But the internet is a shithouse for the depraved. They’re rabid for pain.”
The guilt he felt over what he’d done and the anger from fans was too much. Shame paralyzed him. He used to go for walks in the park, drinks with friends, made himself part of the community’s social fabric. But now people screamed at him in the park, tried to stone him. During a happy hour three months after the incident, he got six drinks thrown in his face, and one guy tried to set him on fire. He retreated into himself, rarely left his apartment, and drank himself raw.
“I had no one to blame but myself,” he said.
He had to leave San Antonio.
Northwest Florida was the landing spot. His brother owned some condos there, told him he could hang in one for as long as he needed. He has views of the water from his balcony, and it’s only a quarter-mile hoof to the sand. Darren spends his days on the couch, at the beach, or inside a movie theater. Cinema has offered him a refuge, something that helps him lose his mind and fly away from his head.
“I hang in the dark and forget myself. The things that happened to me. The things I’ve done. I’m upside down, the images wash over me, and for a little while, I’m at peace.”
His friends tried calling for a while, but he never answered. Then, slowly but surely, the phone stopped ringing. Now, aging has made him contemplative. He ponders his place in this world, whether anyone besides his brother cares about him at all.
“Sometimes women are cool to you at first,” he said. “But then you realize it’s because they think you might be a vampire. Once they find out you’re just a bat, they’re out.
“Depression is a can of gasoline and a lit match. I just try to keep them as far apart as I can. Some days, they’re not in the same room. Some days, they get close.”
The movies don’t always help. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion came out in the fall of 2011. The film was a medical disaster thriller about a disease that ravages the globe and kills millions. The way the disease started? A bat takes a banana from a tree, eats some, then accidentally drops the infected fruit onto the floor of a pig farm. Darren sighs and lights another Camel.
“Bats used to mean something in this country. Batman, Batgirl … Dracula was a bat sometimes.”
When San Antonio beat Miami in the 2014 Finals, it was the first Spurs title since the incident. Darren watched the deciding Game 5 alone, on his balcony, smoking Camel Lights and staring at the television through the screen door. When the final buzzer sounded, he cried.
“Mixed emotions, really. So happy for the guys, for Manu. Just hurt not to be there … I’m sweating.”
He took off his cardigan, and I saw, for the first time, his left wing. It was much smaller than his right, gnarled and dented and mushed, atrophied to the point that it looked dead. I asked whether he wanted another drink. He said it was time to go. When he rose from the table, he grabbed his sweater and shook my hand again. He looked me in the eye this time, but his good one—sable and shaking now—just stared through me. He was somewhere else, on a mind ride.
“If you can find it in your heart to, go easy on me,” he said. “And if you talk to Manu, please tell him I’m sorry.”
I watched him leave the restaurant and walk among the beachside vendors hawking their wares. Footballs made of wood, coconut cups, turquoise necklaces bright in the late afternoon sun. At the end of one row, he paused, looked both ways, then up to the sky. I wondered which direction he’d fly. Then I realized—he can’t.
He walked toward the water. I lost him in the crowd.
