This is not yet the time of girls, it is a time of fields, diamonds, courts, fake leather; vacant lots and asphalt, broken glass and blood. It is Sunday afternoon in early autumn on the front lawn of a public school. Time to pick up a game, choose sides, five on five, the sidewalk out of bounds. The other border is a long hedge behind which boys go to pee, play with matches, learn to smoke, drink, sniff, abuse small animals and sometimes each other, under the blind windows…The boy whose ball it is hikes to himself, backpedals in the dirt. His brother stands in front of him, arms raised, counting: “One one thousand, two one thousand…” (Sometimes he counts battleships.) Now here he comes.
Streetlights flicker.
It is officially dark, a school night; boys have algebra, state capitals, late Mass, boys have baths. Now it is four on four, now three on three. (Across the street the mother of twins sings her sons home: “JoeyEddie! EddieJoey!”) Two on two, then one on one, brother on brother, each trying to catch his own throw. But the boy the ball belongs to is the boy who belongs to the ball. He is shy, quiet, a bed-wetter, good with numbers, goes to confession, an altar boy—but a mother’s boy with no mercy. Even when it is touch, he tackles…An argument, blows, tears. Now he plays alone, throwing and running, against no one, against himself, against the dark, against all.
Drags a garbage can into the middle of the field, throws to what only he can see.
—
Coach tells his kids, “You must choose the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.” His assistant nods. The oldest boy is twelve.
They start with the three-point stance. Those who pick it up fast go on to snap drills. Some become centres; some don’t pick it up at all. The grass, unmarked, is fresh-cut and smells like the end of summer. Then there are sprints, bear crawls, tumbling drills to see who has feet. He is the oldest kid there but slow and skinny; he doesn’t have feet. They set up passing squares in the diamond. He stands on the pitcher’s mound again though Little League was months ago. Four receivers run around the bases and he throws to each as they cut around the bags.
The assistant is paunchy, pasty, rheumy-eyed. Calls him Snake because he’s left-handed like Number Twelve. “Just hit their hands. They don’t even have to catch it.”
He is four for four his first time out. Then the runners change direction and he is eight for eight. The assistant’s hand on his back, boneless, like a leech.
First day in pads, bigheaded in helmets, they learn to sweat, hit, how not to cry, vomit behind the ash tree that shades their parents at the edge of the grass. Coach keeps them thirsty. When their mothers aren’t there he speaks to them in the language of men, the language he used at the slab mill where he was a cinderman, where he ate carbon dust and iron like everyone else in the valley. But if you ask him he’ll tell you this is his real job.
“Fire out! Fire out!” he says. “Good group! Good group!” Says everything twice.
The boys bark like dogs.
When their mothers aren’t there some of them have no ride home. The assistant beeps his horn but the one he called Snake rides his bike. He has his number now.
—
Black Monday. A father arrives at Sheet and Tube, the Campbell Works, to find a sign taped to doors now chained shut. He and five thousand men and women turn around and go home or to the scores of bars that line the valley, and whose days are also numbered. He will not be the same.
Some fight back, but two years later the Brier Hill Works (blast furnaces named Grace and Jeannette) close. Then U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works, then Haselton, then Sharon Steel. Unemployment in Y-town rises to twenty-four percent, and a building a day burns down in the valley, insurance the only income for those who must walk away from homes and businesses. Arsonists pay off the fire departments.
—
Homecoming.
After the game, reassuringly sore—pain is still a privilege, a token of accomplishment—Number Nineteen moves in another way under a different kind of light with the captain of the majorettes. His vest matches her ball gown, and though they are not in the Court—both declined nominations to make room for the less popular, the unattractive, disabled, bullied, minority, a practice that has yet to establish itself—they are the true king and queen of the evening, their corner of the gym its centre, and to almost everyone.
But in truth he is as uncomfortable in popularity as he is in this rented tuxedo, and declined the nomination for class presidency for somewhat the same reason, though also so he could focus on game tape and defensive alignments, and on English and Social Studies, his academic weaknesses. In truth a bit of a bore, shy with girls, good at math, drinks ginger ale at the parties he attends mainly for solidarity, fellowship of the varsity jacket, has a close friend somewhere out there among the absent and excluded who isn’t a jock, whom he has defended against his own teammates, all of which is forgiven because he threw for five scores and put up nearly four hundred yards tonight and is starting quarterback for a high school in the middle of America.
He vomits before every game.
But if it is true that he is shy with them, kind of skinny and geeky around them, gangling, purportedly saving himself for marriage (though, with his dark eyes and curls and aquiline nose, on the verge of looking the part he has played tonight), it is also true that it doesn’t matter, that they come to him, as the captain of the majorettes came, though perhaps in part because it was expected of her, and they believe they are in love, perhaps in part because it is expected, though perhaps he is truly in love with only one thing.
The deejay conjures Sade, smoke and velvet. Nineteen drops his hand to the small of her back, perfecting the embrace. Deep-sea slow. Streamers and balloons, colours bending over the polished wood floor and walls, over teachers relegated to chaperone, watching, policing, perhaps seeing themselves among the watched, recalling the cologne, the hair, the hush, the sway, the groping as for beauty just out of reach, the yet-unbroken promise of it all. Maybe as good as it got.
The King has cerebral palsy, dances knock-kneed with his mother at half court.
The captain of the majorettes looks up suddenly, not at Nineteen but over his shoulder, as if into her future (community college, Where Futures Begin®), then tucks her blond head under his chin, makes a memory, and he looks over it to another uncrowned queen on the other side of the gym. No escort, no makeup nor need of it, neither cheerleader nor majorette but a fair gymnast, probable valedictorian, and foremost a violinist, bound for some school without an athletic program. We think we want what we already have; he turns away. Sees Number Forty-Seven, looking around as if for a better party, a fight to break up or begin, prematurely thinning, wearing the same full beard since ninth grade, probably too small for college though not for the girl he is dancing with, not saving himself for anything; sees Thirty-Six and Seventy-Four, with whom he has visited nursing homes and soup kitchens at Coach’s behest; Coach in his tight suit and crewcut, lump in his chin, who has taught him humility as well as six different drops, that there is throwing and there is passing, that your eyes are more important than your arm, that there can be honour in losing but no winning without honour and everything else is just kicking stones.
Nineteen believes in almost all of it.
—
“I can’t believe you drove all that way in this weather,” his mother marvels at the Lightning’s coach. The family sits in the family room, on the same furniture in the same duplex his parents moved into the day they married. You can smell it. You can hear the neighbours’ TV on the other side of the wall.
“School jet can’t fly in a snowstorm?” his father says.
The coach smiles. His nose is red, bulbous. “You must be thinking of Alabama. Made sixty-some recruiting flights in six months.”
“Right, I forgot. You’re D-2.” His brother and sister smirk.
“It’s just a number. There’s nothing your son can get out of one of those programs that he can’t get out of ours.”
“Televised games…Drafted…”
They have a week to decide. It is the only full ride on the table so far, and full rides are rare from Division 2. A partial from the MAC. The Buckeyes sent a letter but only invited him to walk on. And utter silence from the rest of the Big 10, the Big 8, Pac-12. Too slow for the Wishbone, not built for the punishment this would draw—not to mention the sidearm throw. Not to mention there are no left-handers in the Hall of Fame.
“The big schools don’t care about intangibles,” the coach says.
“Intangibles won’t pay a house note,” his father says. He has not worked since Black Monday, and he looks everywhere but at whom he is talking to.
“He threw for two thousand yards this year,” his sister says. “He’s All-State.”
“With all due respect,” the coach says, “the world is full of gym teachers who threw for two thousand yards.”
“What’s wrong with being a gym teacher?” his mother says.
“Kenny Anderson went to a small school,” his brother points out. “Dave Krieg.” And the coach runs a pro-style offense.
The coach enthuses over the athletic facilities, though he doesn’t say the stadium is fifteen miles from campus and shared with two high schools. He talks about the renovated Fitness and Recreation Complex. Nineteen blanches at the subject of weights. He looks to his mother and speaks through his eyes: I will get you out of here.
His brother wears the jersey of The Only Team That Matters.
—
The school is a private liberal arts college founded in 1856 as a female seminary. Its main campus covers fifty-two acres in a small city two hours from Nineteen’s hometown. The prime minister of Ethiopia is an alumnus. The school motto is engraved on a bronze seal embedded in the sidewalk at College Hall. Students are asked to walk around it; most do.
Lux et Veritas, and girls.
Nineteen is still in a committed relationship.
He meets the Lightning’s starter outside the Athletic Training Centre behind College Hall. Number Eleven is a big friendly Italian kid who says, “If it ain’t me, I hope it’s you,” and drives a convertible, shirtless, wearing sunglasses like he’s Jim McMahon or something. He can bench-press three-fifty and runs a 4.7 forty. Nineteen—Associated Press’s Mr. Football, played in the state All-Star Classic but here so did everyone else—struggles to lift one eighty-five and has been clocked at 5.4—about as fast as you or me. This must be some kind of mistake. He wants to transfer, play baseball, crawl home.
“How about fencing?” Coach says. “Or water polo?”
During rush Nineteen is invited to pledge Phi Psi but declines; he’s heard things about alcohol poisoning and gang rape. Keeps himself on a short leash. Freshmen are required to take three credit hours in the humanities, and Nineteen takes a course in logic. He determines that the egg comes first.
—
Home games are broadcast on a thousand-watt AM station that plays gospel music on Sunday. There is no colour analyst and you can’t hear the noise of the game, only the announcer’s voice, eerily bare, as if he were calling it from a sealed vault.
Maybe two thousand in attendance if you count the pigeons
The Lightning have won nine games in five years, have dropped their first three so far and are down 20-0 in the third quarter of the fourth. Number Eleven confers with Coach at the edge of the track that rounds the field.
“Not one guy open. It’s like they got our script.”
“We string em out.”
What we call Indian summer
Eleven attempts a naked bootleg just inside the twenty. The middle backer grabs him below the knee and doesn’t just break his leg; his feet now point in opposite directions. Doesn’t feel a thing.
“Could probably still outrun you,” Coach says to Nineteen but gives him the nod and a play. “Just remember: it’s a pocket, not a pitcher’s mound.”
He hears himself in the huddle, purposeful gibberish: “Scatter Wing One, Packer, on One. Ready…” Can’t believe these words mean anything to anyone.
At first he just hands it off. A body squirting loose from a knot of other bodies. Then the Blue Knights put an extra man in the box and he can see downfield a little, goes upstairs. Just high enough but Eighty-Three drops it in the end zone. Coach is livid.
“You get two hands on that pig, hang on!” Swats him with the clipboard. “Secure the fuckin rock!”
Nineteen remains calm, recites more Dadaist poetry. Flow Tweet Packer on Two. The visitors’ bleachers are tiny. Someone’s mother exhorts the ref: “You blowin that whistle out your ass, get in the game!” God bless her.
Next time the wideout catches it in stride, scores, runs over a male cheerleader like he can’t stop. Nineteen feels close to God. The mascot—arms, legs, a face embedded in zigzag foam rubber—plays air guitar. The game tightens, gets personal. Helmets bang, exchange paint as in car accidents. Opposing players knock each other cold during a punt (one actually snores). The band plays Carmina Burana, gloriously out of tune.
BLUE AND WHITE! TRUTH AND LIGHT!
Soft toss across the middle He may not have a hose but he’s got something
Nineteen is no dancer but never gives the ball away, gets rid of it in traffic, finds the gap with eight men in coverage. A play is a problem to be solved. The Lightning have a chance to force overtime at zero but the placekicker, somehow better at long range than close, botches the extra point. Nineteen stays at the throttle. Attendance improves. Number Eleven will become a sheep farmer after graduating and not own a phone or television.
—
Only the sure things throw draft parties. Nineteen spends the first day at the apartment he shares with his cousin on Liberty. They don’t have cable but he knows only a half dozen or so D-2 players will get selected—usually linemen, backs, receivers, if any—and they won’t go early so it’s just as well. He prepares for an Actuarial Science exam. Keeps glancing at the phone till it becomes the black hole at the heart of every possibility. Dead plastic.
Next day he is at a dive bar on East Main, shooting pool with a loose collection of friends, all but one (former) teammates. Dark wood and beer breath. ESPN. Nineteen watches two guys playing chess in a booth under a stuffed antelope head. He pretends not to watch the ticker, pretends not to watch the Commissioner in his polka-dot tie reading off the selections from small pieces of paper.
The top picks are all gone. Chris Berman says, “The Colts are now on the clock.”
“All about defense yesterday. Ismail went to Canada,” the bartender says. He looks like a retired bodybuilder. “But Marinovich before Favre? Didn’t see that coming.”
Nineteen buys another pitcher.
Back at the table the former nose guard breaks, still in his varsity jacket. Near the end of the eighth round the Bills grab a wide receiver from Anderson.
The nose guard is incredulous. “Fuckin D-3!”
“Who the hell is Brad Lamb?” the former tailback says.
“Someone who never heard of you either,” the former free safety says.
“Apples and oranges,” the non-athlete says for some reason. Nineteen sees a girl at the jukebox eyeballing him. He is in a committed relationship with his career, goes to the bar for a refill.
“There’s always UDFA,” the bartender says. “Arena…CFL?”
“What are you, my agent?” Nineteen is feeling drunk for the first time in his life. “We knocked off Central Michigan last year. Central Michigan.” Like the Christians ate the lions. “All Ws.”
The bartender offers a tautology: “It is what it is.” He sighs. “I could change the channel.” If only.
The free safety, a transfer from Central State, grabs Nineteen’s arm and displays it to the Commissioner. “Show masr yer arm, boy. Good arm dat masr, he do a heap a work mo wit dat arm yet. Now walk aroun, boy, let good masr see how spry you be.”
Nineteen elbows him in the belly and drifts toward the booths.
Back at the table the nose guard drinks from the pitcher. Spits in the non-athlete’s beer when he isn’t looking. The tailback is dancing for the girls at the jukebox and The Only Team That Matters takes a guard from Henderson State in the eleventh round.
The last pick is a quarterback from John Carroll. Who the fuck is Larry Wanke?
Size. Mobility. Leadership. So he’s not the rah-rah type.
Finds himself looming over the chess game.
“What about the intangibles?” He can barely say the word. “What about first fucking team Kodak All-American? Fuckin Harlon Hill. Fuckin nine games with a broken thumb.”
The chess players look at each other but not him.
“Hey! It’s your shot,” the non-athlete calls, but he has set aside his usual need to win.
“Bad move, White. You’re letting Black grab all the space in the centre.”
Black looks up. “Do you mind?”
But it is the fact that they’re drinking Coke he takes exception to, inserts a little finger under the edge of the board and flips the whole game into the air.
“Hey, I’m supposed to do that!” the former nose guard yells.
“Big man on a little campus,” the girl who looked at him says. He crushes a rook on the way out into spring light. Walks alone along the Grand River, which divides the world into the chosen and the left behind. He is afraid to go home.
He calls his agent, calls her. Only one of them answers.
—
Minimum wage plus a buck-fifty per delivery plus tips. You pay for your own gas. Unemployment in Y-town is still near twenty percent but he doesn’t feel lucky. Has a degree in Communication Studies. He could try for an assistantship at his alma mater, definitely his high school, but that would be like an artist working at a paint factory.
He pays rent to his parents. Same wallpaper, closing in. Same smell.
No one has recognized him yet and that’s good and bad. One night he delivers an extra-large double-cheese pepperoni to a small brick building on the upper south side, next to an abandoned house full of feral cats. Flattened roach in the hallway. Muffled drama, an eviction notice. It takes him a moment to recognize the man who answers the door, then they embrace like refugees who have found each other in a camp. Forty-Seven has shaved his head and reduced his beard to a goatee, works at a slaughterhouse in the valley. He doesn’t invite Nineteen into the one-bedroom he and the girl he held at Homecoming share with their five-year-old son.
He asks after the captain of the majorettes.
Nineteen waffles. “I heard she’s a paralegal. You still talk to anybody?”
Those who couldn’t parlay their hand-eye coordination into manual labour have enlisted. Will the Hill rode a tank in Desert Storm. “Worked out with the Packers. He said something about some combine he signed up for. Elite something…”
“Meat market.” Nineteen still throws to Lightning receivers once a week, hoping to impress an NFL scout on Pro Day. Lifts, throws through a tire swing. “Cattle call.”
“Sure it is. They’ve gotten people signed.” Forty-Seven names names.
Nineteen pretends indifference. “Only one team I’m interested in.”
“Yeah, me too: GM. Lordstown. Cars are the new steel around here.”
A dog growls somewhere inside. A woman scolds: “Caesar.”
Forty-Seven lowers his voice. “I kill pigs with an electric wand, man.”
—
The Elite Pro Combine is held at an indoor college practice facility in the middle of Indiana in the middle of February. A green field with white stripes in an unheated warehouse. Must be five hundred guys there; guys on the bubble like Nineteen, guys who look like they played nothing but Nintendo, guys who were gods in high school then found themselves eighth on the depth chart. At least one ex-con. There’s a soccer player from Germany, a long snapper who’s fucking deaf and dumb but paid his two hundred dollars, a guy who runs a 4.3 forty but he’s five foot one and they took his money. It’s still dark out.
The offensive hopefuls are herded out to midfield and told to take a knee. They wear three-digit numbers. The Combine is presided over by a white-haired man with a clipboard, dressed in black, a former GM in yet another doomed alternate league.
“This is where you either keep your dream alive,” he tells them, “or let it die with dignity and get on with your real life.”
They start with calisthenics. The white-haired man in black moves through grunting, gasping, evenly spaced rows. “I know there’s some genuine offensive talent here,” he says, “but frankly, some of you are just…offensive,” and Nineteen wonders how many of them could be eliminated in these first fifteen minutes.
Drill proctors take them to their stations in groups of eight. They are weighed, measured, photographed with their shirts off. Guys with tits still heaving from the warm-up; sometimes dignity dies too. Then the forty, the short shuttle (almost kills the dreamer), the broad jump, the vertical. A lot of waiting around, talk, eyeballing. Public Enemy and AC/DC leaking from headphones. Nineteen loosens his arm in the Player Holding Area, tries not to listen.
“I missed a funeral for this. I ain’t leaving till I get my look.”
“Tuck in your jersey, they check all that shit.”
Three hours after the first push-up, the air horn blows again and position players are separated out for skill drills. Everything on tape. The evaluators are former pro scouts and coaches. Nineteen doesn’t know why they are former anything nor does he care; he cares about the spread of his fingers, about using body momentum to make up for his lack of arm strength. He hopes to draw a receiver who can actually catch; if not, just get it between the numbers and shoulder. Just hit their hands. This is no place for intangibles.
It’s dark outside again when they hear the horn for the last time, and snowing. Then it’s just you and the phone again.
—
“That’s not even on the team,” his father says. He is watching the evening news. “Taxi squad doesn’t play in real games.”
“They call it the practice squad now.” Nineteen doesn’t have his own place yet but has never gotten used to it—farts, leftovers, rotting foam in the cushions. “Someone gets hurt or cut, I could get activated. And I get reps.” Watches home games from the press box. And he wears the same number he’s worn since high school, same as Unitas.
“Not even the fifty-third man.”
“Three thousand a week,” Nineteen’s mother says, still not over it.
“What’s he gonna do the rest of the year? Johnny U laid tile in the off-season.”
She looks at the envelope in Nineteen’s hand. “What’s that?”
“Whatever you need it for.”
Another mousetrap goes off like a gunshot.
“Lou the Toe sold insurance.” His father stares at news of the past. “Jack Gregory was a farmer…They blew up Charlie Cadillac in his Caddy. Vinnie D, Billy Naples. Called it a Y-town tune-up anymore.” The past stares back. “Just leave it on the table.”
He leaves when his father starts singing. He has a new agent now, sees a girl he met while looking for a place in the city, though she is not the violinist who was valedictorian.
—
Seven weeks into the season the third-string quarterback is pulled over for speeding on a Sunday night. A plastic bag containing what is determined to be a Schedule II controlled substance is found in his vehicle and he is suspended for the rest of the year. Coach only dresses two for games but Nineteen moves from his TV set to the sideline. The speed, the trash talk, brute utterance of impact; you hear the life of the game. A great privilege. The Only Team That Matters goes 4-12, and Nineteen asks his parents what else they need.
Next August he is still backup to a backup and Coach can’t remember his name. Spends Thursday nights alone in a diner with the playbook—twenty chapters, two hundred and fifty pages, fifteen hundred diagrams in Coach’s scrawl—commits over two hundred plays to photographic memory. If Peg dogs, the weak G blocks him and F checks Wanda. The waitress never asks. He studies the opposing sideline in his street clothes, looking at hand gestures, body language as they break huddle, anything he can relay to the DC. The backup quarterback, third year out of Harvard, pretends he doesn’t exist but Number Fifteen, the starter, is impressed. Greying, beer-paunched, thirty-six years old, he has played for seven teams, married three wives, carouses, smokes, collects motorcycles. Takes Nineteen golfing and passes on a journeyman’s wisdom, the game within the game: it’s seventy-five percent mental…everything good starts in the huddle…look at the linebacker’s feet…don’t throw high over the middle…when in doubt, check her ID.
“And don’t get old,” he says, and breaks his right arm in Baltimore, four games in. Coach suffers the backup for six quarters, seven picks and a field goal, then down in Arizona says, “Say hi to those guys, Lefty. Just take care of the ball.”
Jogs across two inches of actual grass to land the plane. The Sun Devil welcomes fresh meat. Nine-year-old giving him the finger. Semicircle of the huddle, hands on knees, hands on hips. The centre has to shut them up. Nineteen has to repeat the call. On Three.
He licks his hand.
Under centre, knuckles hard up against a moist crotch. The beginnings of a chemistry. Eighteen seconds. He looks over the defense (if Wanda doesn’t dog, F is free to release). Bodies in colours, hands in the dirt. The nose tackle glaring or grinning.
“Somebody order double-cheese?”
Someone on his side laughs. At the snap he trips over his left guard’s foot and doesn’t take care of the ball. The tackle recovers it. The cheering is a knife in his heart.
“Hey, hold up. Here go your tip!”
Next series he completes his first seven passes. Up north the leaves are turning.
—
He is not a born leader. This, he knows, has always been a mark against him. Too reticent, aloof. Never threw someone out of a huddle. His trash talk is garbage. When he tries to bust balls in the locker room, his wit falls flat, his high five another awkward mechanic. He has teammates with bullet scars, who play with pictures of dead kids in their helmets. Fundamentalist Christians, a Rhodes Scholar, veterans who hear the clock ticking, whose autographs he sought when he was in middle school.
Not a born leader but a quick study. He watches twenty hours of game tape a week, ...
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