Million-Dollar Throw (13 page)

Coach Rivers always saved the best part of his own pep talk for last, a few minutes before they ran onto the field for the opening kickoff.

Sometimes it was about football, sometimes not.

Today he used baseball.

“I want you guys to go out there and have a Joe DiMaggio day,” he said. He looked around at them and said, “Anybody happen to know who Mr. DiMaggio was?”

“One of the greatest baseball players of all time, for the Yankees,” Nate said. He knew about all the great old Yankees because his dad had grown up in upstate New York as a Yankees fan, even if they were living in Red Sox country now. “He was a center fielder, he played in ten World Series in his career, and the Yankees won nine of them.”

“Excellent!” Coach said. “Now here’s what I mean about having a DiMaggio day. He played this game against the Browns near the end of his career—”

“The Cleveland Browns?” Eric said.

Coach smiled. “No, the St. Louis Browns. Who later became the Orioles. Anyway . . . somebody asked him after the game why he had played so hard against a lousy team even though the Yankees had already clinched the pennant, and Mr. DiMaggio said, ‘Because there might be somebody in the stands today who’d never seen me play before, and might never see me again.’”

Coach let that sink in for a minute, even though Nate knew exactly what he meant, and hoped his teammates did, too. Sometimes the first impression you made on people was the only one you got, in sports or anything else.

“So go out there and have
that
kind of game against these guys,” he said. “At the end of it have people think they just saw the best eighth-grade football team they’re going to see all year.”

Yeah, Nate thought.

Only it was Melville that looked that way and played that way on the first drive of the game. Danny Gilman threw on almost every down, to just about every one of his receivers, connecting with them all over the field. Not just confusing the guys on the Valley defense, but making them look a step slow for the first time all season, coming at the Patriots at Nascar speed. Danny’s last pass of the drive was to his tight end, over the middle, wide open in the end zone after a play fake that fooled even Nate on the sideline.

Three minutes into the game and it was 7-0 for the home team.

“Okay, kid,” Coach Rivers said to Nate. “Now we show these suckers what we’ve got.”

Nate already knew the Patriots were coming out throwing today, having seen the first ten plays from the e-mail Coach had sent him the night before. Eight of them were passes.

But Nate hoped they’d only need the first one.

“We’re throwing with both hands if we have to,” Coach Rivers said. “Like your buds like to say, Number Twelve. Time to put your man suit back on.”

The first play of the game was Nate’s favorite from their playbook, a flea flicker they’d never before used to start a game. Nate handed off to LaDell, handed it to him as if it were a straight running play, LaDell running right up Malcolm Burnley’s back side. Except one step before he got to the line of scrimmage, LaDell put the brakes on, same as his blockers did.

LaDell spun around then, pitched the ball back to Nate.

And as soon as the ball was back in Nate’s hand, he didn’t hesitate. Like a snap he’d taken in shotgun formation, he turned and looked to the right sideline, where he knew Pete Mullaney was going to be a streak of light, behind the defense already if the play had worked the way it was supposed to.

It had.

Like a charm.

Pete, Nate could see, had blown past the cornerback covering him. And the corner was getting no help from his strong safety, who’d pinched in as soon as he saw LaDell with the ball. Malcolm, meanwhile, had knocked over the Melville nose tackle like a bowling ball knocking over a pin.

Time to let the ball rip.

It wasn’t the tight spiral Nate had thrown to Pete on his last warm-up toss, the ball wobbling a little in the air, but it didn’t matter. Nate still managed to lead Pete perfectly. Pete gathered the ball in at midfield and ran away from everybody like he was trying to set a record in the fifty-yard dash. Just like that, one play, Valley was on the board, too.

Nate didn’t chase Pete into the end zone the way he sometimes did, just ran straight over to the coaches to find out what play they wanted to run for the conversion. They would go for one point—a straight run with LaDell. Malcolm leveled their nose tackle again, LaDell fell across the goal line, and it was 7-7.

Nate wasn’t thinking about having a Joe DiMaggio day now.

A Nate Brodie day would do him just fine, thank you very much.

I’m back, he thought.

Melville was an even smaller town than Valley, and it showed in the number of players on their team. By Nate’s count of the players on the sideline plus the eleven on the field, they had a total of sixteen. So a bunch of their kids had to play both ways, offense and defense, including Danny Gilman, who on defense was playing the position of rover back. He was big enough to play like a linebacker when he wanted to, but still fast enough to drop back and be an extra safety on sure passing downs.

Basically he was free to rove the field like a one-man wrecking crew.

Danny had gotten fooled along with everybody else on the flea flicker to LaDell to start the game. But Nate was still tracking him on every play the way those Weather Channel guys tracked big storms, always making sure he knew where Danny was before Malcolm snapped him the ball.

But on the Patriots’ fourth possession of the game, the score still 7-7, it was as if Danny was the one inside Nate’s head, reading his mind, as if he knew
exactly
what Nate was going to do on a second-and-twenty play from midfield.

Danny stepped right in front of Eric on what was supposed to be a fairly nifty crossing pattern and intercepted the ball before Eric even got his hands all the way up. Then he broke to the outside like he was swimming against the whole flow of the play, and ran the rest of the way untouched for the score that put Melville back up a touchdown.

Nate thought he’d looked Danny off the second he got himself back in the pocket by eyeballing Pete, hard, on the left sideline, his eyes locked on Pete until he’d counted down in his head and knew it was the perfect time to deliver the ball to Eric, coming from the other side. And Nate thought he’d had plenty on the throw, like you always had to have when throwing over the middle. It didn’t matter. Danny, using one of his own linebackers as cover, almost like a shield, was so perfectly positioned once the ball was in the air that it was as if he were part of the pattern himself. Like an
X
on one of Coach’s play sheets had turned himself into an
O.

Coach liked to tell him that football wasn’t a game of one-on-one if you were a quarterback, it was one-on-eleven—all eleven guys on defense. But Nate felt like it had turned into one-on-one now because the other QB had just beaten him badly, like this had turned into basketball and Danny Gilman had just dunked on him, hard.

When he came off the field, Coach Hanratty got to him first.

“Dude,” he said, “the guy’s a total gangster. You’re gonna have to know where he is on every play the rest of the game, or you gotta eat the ball.”

“I’ve been trying,” Nate said. “I thought I knew where he was on that play.”

Coach Hanratty said, “You know my first rule of football. No medals for trying.”

On the very next series, the Patriots back on offense, Danny came on a blitz along with what felt like the whole town of Melville, came from Nate’s blind side, hitting him hard and clean and knocking the ball loose. One of the Cowboys’ linebackers recovered it at the Valley 15-yard line.

Two plays later, after another Danny Gilman touchdown pass and successful conversion, Melville was ahead 21-7.

They were one series into the second quarter and Nate had already been intercepted once for a touchdown and practically fumbled away another touchdown, coughing up his own confidence at the same time.

Back? Yeah, he was back, all right.

Back to throwing the ball around as if he had a rag arm, back to missing wide-open guys, back to fretting over every single throw, whether it was into coverage or not, into Danny Gilman’s area or not. He threw seven straight incompletions.

It wasn’t quite a miracle that the game was still 21-7 at halftime, because there was no miraculous stuff going on with the Valley defense, who had stepped up their intensity and were playing as if every snap Danny Gilman ran and every series Melville had was the whole game. Sam Baum forced Danny to fumble one time and Malcolm personally separated their fullback from the ball another. And so the Patriots hung in there despite still being down two touchdowns.

When the half ended, Nate sprinted off the field, not even bothering to look up into the stands, knowing Abby wouldn’t be there. Even his mom wasn’t there today. She was doing volunteer work at the hospital.

Pete and Malcolm came and sat with him, one bud on either side, both holding a bottle of Gatorade. The day was cold enough that when they took their helmets off, Nate could see the steam coming off of them, though it really should have been coming out of their ears after the way Nate had played. Their uniforms were covered with dirt and grass stains and even what looked like a couple of small drops of blood, as if all the effort the two of them had made, the effort
all
the guys on defense had made, was painted on the fronts of their uniforms and told a story as brilliantly as Abby could have with one of her paintings.

Malcolm offered his bottle of Gatorade to Nate before he even unscrewed the cap. Nate shook his head.

“Don’t try to make me feel better,” he said.

“It’s only Gatorade,” Malcolm said, grinning, “not gold.”

“I’m
killing
us,” Nate said. “We’re the ones who should be up two scores, not the other way around.”

“Can I say one thing?” Pete said.

“No.”

“You gotta stop acting as if it’s on you to win the game all by yourself,” Pete said. “Or think you’re losing it all by yourself.”

“If Danny Gilman was taking snaps from Malcolm instead of me,” Nate said, “you know I’d be right about the score.”

In a quiet voice, over the scratchy music being piped in over the loudspeakers at each end of the field, Malcolm said, “But he’s
not
our quarterback. You are. We don’t want him to be taking snaps from me. We want you.”

“So just go play like you in the second half,” Pete said. He grinned. “Problem solved!”

Malcolm stood up and said, “And stop whining or we’ll tell Abby.”

He knew they were right about all of it, especially the whining. He knew he wasn’t going to reverse the slump he’d been in,
was
in, all at once. He couldn’t tie up the game with one throw. It didn’t work that way in football. Nate was going to have to get himself out of this one complete pass at a time.

But the throws kept missing their marks in the third quarter. The one that hurt the most was an incompletion he tossed over Eric’s head when he was all alone in the back of the end zone on a fourth-down play that would have brought Valley back to within a touchdown.

The guys on defense continued to play like champs, though, continued to keep their team in it. They notched up their pass rush enough that suddenly Danny Gilman was missing his receivers as much as Nate was. So the game became a battle of field position, the way so many games did. But the problem for the Patriots was that even when they managed to get good field position, they weren’t able to take advantage of it. It wasn’t hard for Melville to figure out that Nate couldn’t complete a pass to save his life today. So they kept putting more and more guys in the box to stop the run, daring Nate to throw.

So this was the same guy he’d been for weeks, unable to get out of his own way, his head filled with so many bad thoughts that he imagined a long line of them outside, waiting to get in.

Not a Joe DiMaggio day.

Groundhog Day
was more like it.

Making the same mistakes over and over again.

Finally, at the end of the third quarter, the teams switching ends of the field, Coach Rivers came over and said to Nate, “We’ll get you squared away in practice this week. But for the rest of today, let’s give Eric a chance, see if he can get us going.”

He’d been benched.

N
ate couldn’t remember the last time he had been benched.

Couldn’t remember if it had
ever
happened.

But now that it had happened, he wasn’t surprised, or even angry.

For Eric, who had been taking a few snaps in practice each week as Nate’s backup, it was as if he’d been waiting all season to get his chance to run the team. He completed his first four passes, the last one a total screaming ice-cold silver bullet to Pete, a thirty-yard touchdown pass that finished off a sixty-yard touchdown drive. Then he lofted a pass over Danny Gilman to Bradley Jacob for the conversion.