I went out through the week training and hanging with Sandra sometimes. The day of my first game finally came. All my friends from my old neighborhood came to support me, Flo even came from school just to watch, but I know deep down she was worried that I would fail because of my past injuries. Sandra was sitting next to Opal and Rasta cheering me on, I saw Opal starting to cry, and I knew it was because the last time she went to a basketball game, it was with our mother.
I smiled at her and blew her a kiss causing her to make an ugly face that cheered her up. Coach went over the game plan, and we went up to greet the other team. They only had a one-star player called Chris Paul, who was a point guard for the team. We were playing against a team not too far from our school. The team was called the Black Panthers, which I thought was funny because most of the players were white.The game finally started, and a jump ball, Momba won the ball and passed it to Iso to get the attack started. I was a little far from the three-point line when I decided to use one of my perfect shots to make the first point, so I asked for the ball and took the shot and made it. The Panthers whole team was shocked. I made the point from so far away, but Chris Paul was not surprised and simply went to inbound the ball.He started his attack by crossing over Iso, making him fall and scoring three points right back. The game went on back and forth until we reached the fourth quarter, we were up by eight points, and the Panthers all looked dead tired at this point. I had two more perfect shots and one more freeze time, so I decided to save them until the last minute. Chris Paul was tired but still tried to put up points. I was sitting on the bench as 2S was playing for me.He wasn't bad. He made a few points here and there and was starting to look better than 2, with two minutes left of the game I came in to play. I didn't do much but play defense until the last 30 second, I asked for the ball and shot it from beyond the Arc after activating a perfect shot to increase our lead further. Chris ball brought the ball down, and when he got to the half-court, I activated time to freeze and stole the ball, and just as the clock was down to 2 seconds, I took the perfect shot, and it was all net causing the crowd to erupt with cheers.Chris Paul was surprised I could shoot from there and still make it. After the game, we shook the Panther's hands and went out to celebrate at Wendy's for winning our first match. The weekend came again, and Shawn had called me and asked if I wanted to go to Rucker Park to make some money for the weekend, I quickly agreed because I needed some money and I hadn't gone out with Shawn since the last time we went almost three years ago. He was in college now and staying on campus, so he also needed some money.I let my family know I'll be back on Sunday evening and telling them I have a tournament to play in New York. Rasta wanted to come, so I let him since flo was going to be around to watch Opal. The next morning we packed up and met Shawn at the train station. We boarded and headed out to New York.We got to Rucker Park and its crew as ever, but this time we got a hotel room so we could ball all day until the lights went out. This time Rasta joined our team so we could make more money from three vs. three. It would be $600 per game, which wasn't bad.Every two hours, we had a game, and we started from 12 pm until 10 pm.We had won all our games, and some people even recognized me from years ago when we came to play last time. Thank God my ability had upgraded from the resets being once a day to once a game, or I wouldn't have been able to play so many games that day and letting me use the time to freeze outside of games. We played five games, which net us $3,000.00, but we had to pay our fees, so in total, we made $2,900.00 that day, which wasn't bad.Tomorrow we will play even longer, so we were hoping to make a lot more. At 5 am the next day, we were out to get some breakfast to eat and hung out till they opened the park at 8 am. As soon they opened, we were there and ready to ball. We ran games until it was time to go at 8 pm. We made $6,480.00 in total after two days in New York. I was shocked and imagined if we had five members in the team, we would have made even more.We each took home $2,160.00, which made us pretty happy and excited to bring others along next time. When we got to the train station a guy, we remembered as one of the refs met us there and took a gun out on us telling us to give him all our money. Rasta and Shawn froze, but I quickly used the time to freeze and took the gun from him and pointed it at him, shocking him until he pissed himself about how the tables changed real quick. He asked me how I got it, and I told him to scram, causing Shawn and Rasta to bust out laughing.Rasta then told us he had his gun on him, so the minute he took his eyes off us, he was going to stick him up and take our money back. I gave the gun to Rasta after wiping my fingerprints off because I didn't want anything on my record on my way to the NBA, so they would have something negative to say about me when I got there.The rest of the trip was uneventful. We got home and had Shawn spend the night since it was late, and he had a lot of money on him.