Payback Time (2 page)

I stopped believing I was going to be a pro in middle school, but I didn't stop watching the Seahawks and the Mariners on TV. My dad would sprawl out on the sofa, and I'd sit in the rocking chair. What's weird is that we rarely talked during the games, but we'd both remember key plays and discuss them months or even years later.

I don't just dream about being a journalist; I practice being a journalist every chance I get. I've got three marble notebooks filled with newspaper articles I've written based on movies and books. I pretend that what I've seen on the screen or read in the book actually happened. Then I get the
who, what, where, why,
and
how
down on the page just like a real reporter would.

Since middle school, I've done the same thing with all the games I watch with my dad. As the images flicker in front of me on the TV, in my head I'll compose a story:

It was fourth down and forever, with everything on the line. The quarterback dropped back to pass as his receivers streaked downfield. With the pocket collapsing around him, he stepped up and fired a long pass toward the end zone. The ball spiraled through the chill night air for what seemed an eternity, and then...

Give me a laptop and twenty minutes, and I can make the dullest game exciting.

So Alyssa was right—I could write sports for the
Lincoln Light.
But there was a problem. At Lincoln,
sports
meant Horst Diamond, and I was not going to spend my senior year singing the praises of Horst Diamond. It was impossible. Anybody else, okay. But not Horst.

I had to quit the
Lincoln Light.

Newspaper is an after-school club at Lincoln High, so there's never anybody in the newspaper room during the day. During lunch I sneaked in, intending to clean out my desk. I shoved Post-its, pencils, memo pads—everything—into my backpack. It had taken three years to fill the drawer, but it took only thirty seconds to empty it.

At the bottom of the drawer sat my scrapbook. In my freshman year, I'd hole-punched fifty pages of high-quality vellum paper and carefully bound the pages together with twine. My goal had been to fill every page.

Instead of shoving the scrapbook into my backpack, I sat down and started flipping through it. There was my first article: seventy-five words on the new microphone system in the library—the first seventy-five words I'd ever had published. I kept flipping. The animal rights protest ... the vandalism in the greenhouse ... the changes in graduation requirements. Okay, none of the articles was earth-shattering, but I'd sweated over every word, making each story as good as it could possibly be.

The last twenty pages of my scrapbook were blank—they were for my senior year. I leafed through them anyway. The blank pages stared up at me.

I dumped all of the stuff from my pack back into the drawer, shoved the drawer closed, and left. Writing was in my blood—even if it meant writing about Horst Diamond.

I couldn't quit.

O
NCE
, H
ORST
D
IAMOND AND
I
had been both neighbors and best friends. I was Danny back then, and we were in elementary school. Every day after school and every day in the summer, we played together at the park by Whittier Elementary.

The park has an ancient swing set with chains that seem fifty feet long. You can swing high and far and fast—if you have the guts. My butt was permanently glued to the seat, but Horst would stand up and swing with such fury that I was afraid he'd go over the top. When he reached the highest point, he'd jump. I'd see him fly out over the wood chips, his legs churning as if he were riding a bicycle, a big smile on his big face, his blond hair streaming behind him.

I'd grip my chains tighter. He was going to die, or at least break both legs. But he'd land on his feet, hop forward, and then do it again.

Horst would fly across rings, swing like an ape through the jungle gym, climb a rope ladder to the ship's prow. I was always ten steps behind him or ten feet below him. For years, he didn't notice what a coward I was. But then came the end of our friendship: football.

The weird thing is, at first football made us tighter. In fourth and fifth grade, he had the strong arm of a QB and I had the soft hands of a wide receiver. We'd head off to the park, and pretty soon other guys would show up and we'd play touch football. Back then, I was pudgy, not fat, so I could run a down-and-out pattern and get separation from the kid guarding me, and Horst could fit the ball into the tiniest openings. Other kids were faster, but they dropped passes, and I didn't. I pictured things remaining the same throughout junior high and high school. Horst Diamond to Danny True, just like Tom Brady to Randy Moss.

In sixth grade, Horst's dad decided it was time for Horst to try out for Junior Football, so that meant I had to try out, too. I was okay with it. I pictured myself hauling in passes and running untouched into the end zone. My teammates would chest-bump me, while in the stands my mom and dad would be delirious with joy. When I pulled on my helmet and looked at myself in the mirror, the guy staring back at me was
tough.

The day of tryouts, Coach Shoeman asked me my position.

"Wide receiver."

He looked at my gut. "You're built more like a lineman."

"Wide receiver," I insisted.

"All right, we'll try you at wide receiver."

I joined up with the four tall, skinny kids who also wanted to play wide receiver. Physically I didn't fit, but the early practices went okay because I could catch better than anybody.

Then came a full-contact scrimmage. The first play called for me was a simple slant over the middle. I went out a couple of steps and cut across the middle, just as in drills. Horst led me perfectly, just as in drills. I brought the ball in, took about half a step, and...
BOOM!
The ball flew in the air and I went down as if I'd been shot. That was nothing like drills. I stayed down, my head spinning. The linebacker who'd belted me was beaming. Far, far away I heard Coach Shoeman call out: "Now, that's a hit, men. That's what we're after."

I wobbled off the field to the bench. After what seemed like a long time, Shoeman came over. "Next time, brace yourself after you make the catch. You've got to hang on to the ball."

I nodded.

"Okay. Get back out there, and remember what I told you."

The first two plays were runs, but on third down and three, Horst called the slant pass again. "Don't drop it this time," he barked. "We need this first down."

On the snap, I took two steps forward and made my cut. I tried to concentrate on the ball, but my eyes searched instead for the linebacker who'd laid me out before. Horst's pass hit me in the chest, right between the numbers, and bounced away. A millisecond later, the same guy unloaded on me again.

For the second time I climbed off the deck and wobbled to the sideline. Five minutes ... ten minutes ... fifteen minutes. I sat on the bench, head woozy and legs like rubber. When the scrimmage was just about over, Shoeman came back to me. "Next punt, I want you out there on the coverage team."

I watched the game, praying there wouldn't be another punt, but there was. Shoeman nodded to me and clapped his hands. "You've been hit hard twice. Now
you
hit someone." I pulled on my helmet and lined up as a wide-out. The punter booted the ball, and I raced downfield, praying somebody else would tackle the returner, and quickly.

At first the play was moving away from me, but the punt returner suddenly reversed field, broke into the clear, and now was barreling right at me. I was the last guy with a shot to tackle him. When he was right in front of me, I lurched to the side as if he were a bull and I were a matador, and he roared by me. I spun around and watched him cross the goal line. When I turned back, Horst was glaring at me.

Shoeman blew his whistle. "Same time tomorrow."

I was dragging myself off the field when Shoeman called me back. He looked down at me as if I were a stinkbug. "A football player has to be able to take a hit. If you can't, you need to quit this game and find another."

I didn't find another game, but I did quit, and Horst stopped knocking on my door.

That summer, Lenny Westwood's family moved into the brick house on the corner. Westwood is a tall, skinny black kid with a quick first step and good hands, exactly the friend Horst wanted. In the fall Horst's mom had her twin girls, and by December they'd moved into their huge house near Sunset Hill Park.

A
T THE NEXT NEWSPAPER MEETING,
Alyssa did a double take when she saw me at the big table in the center of the room, and then she came over. "I thought you were quitting," she said quietly.

"I never said that."

"I thought you did."

"Well, I didn't."

"I'm glad, because you can add a lot to the newspaper."

"Thank you, Alyssa," I said. "That's nice of you to say."

"It's true, Mitch. I mean Dan."

"Call me Mitch."

Her long brown hair had fallen into her face, so she pushed it behind her ear. "This'll work, Mitch. And who knows? You might uncover a big sports story that will shake all of Seattle."

"Sure," I said. "And maybe I'll star in a Hollywood movie."

Her temper flashed. "Well, you don't know for sure, do you? It could happen."

"What? Me starring in a movie?"

"Very funny." She rose, but before she walked away, she fixed me with a steely stare. "Mitch, if you're not going to do the job right, tell me and I'll get somebody else."

"Don't worry. I'll do my job."

She stayed on me. "That means you'll have a football preview ready to go for September's issue. And you'll cover girls' volleyball, too."

She was being serious, so I owed her a serious answer. "I won't have time for any minor sports. But I will do the major sports, both girls and boys, all year long, and that's a promise."

She nodded. "I'm going to surprise you, Mitch. Last year there were four newspapers. I'm going to put one out every month, or close to it. And every single one of them is going to be better than anything we did last year. That's a promise, too."

She walked to the front of the room and called everyone to attention. As she ran the meeting, I thought about big sports stories that reporters had broken. There'd been articles on steroids, and there'd been a book on Bobby Knight and how crazy he was as a coach. The more I thought, the more I came up with. Baseball, basketball, football, cycling, soccer—every sport had stories that went way beyond the games. I'd have to get lucky, but maybe Alyssa would be right. Maybe something would happen at Lincoln.

T
HE FIRST FOOTBALL PRACTICE
was August 15. Lincoln's coach, Hal McNulty, is one of those gruff, Marine-sergeant types: crew-cut hair, bulging muscles, pants and shirt pressed, shoes shined. He's a PE teacher as well as a coach, and I had him my sophomore year. Some PE teachers ignore fat guys, and some torture them. He was a torturer. He made me attempt every gymnastic move, including cartwheels, and he snickered when I flopped on the mat like a tortoise without a shell.

He'd had a head coaching job at some Division II college in the Midwest but had gotten himself fired for having tutors write essays for the players who didn't know their left shoe from their right ear, or at least that was the rumor. When he was first hired at Lincoln, he told Chet Jetton, the high school sports reporter for the
Seattle Times,
that his goal was to win a state title so he could get back into college coaching.

I don't know whether it is because of McNulty's coaching or Horst's quarterbacking, but Lincoln has taken the league the past two years, though both times they lost in the first round of the playoffs. Those losses had to eat at McNulty—he'd come so close.

I work afternoons in the summer at my parents' business, so it was early in the morning on August 14 when I headed to Lincoln High hoping to corner McNulty before practices started and get him to talk. I wanted him to respect me as a reporter, so before I left, I stood in front of the mirror and practiced sucking in my gut as I introduced myself. "
Hello, Coach, I'm Mitch True. I'll be covering the team for the
Lincoln Light
this year.
" I tried three or four different voices, but none sounded right. Besides, regardless of the voice I used, I had to breathe, and when I did, my flabby gut would hang over my belt.

I parked my mom's Ford Focus by the gym, eased out of the front seat, and looked around. When I spotted McNulty loading tackling sleds into a school van, I tensed. To him, I'd always be a fat loser and nothing more. But a reporter has to have the courage to approach people, ask them questions, and get them to talk. "I'm Mitch True," I said as I neared him. "I'm the school sports reporter. I'd like to ask you some questions."

"I was hoping you'd come around," he said. "Step into my office."

I gaped, dumbfounded.
He was hoping I'd come around?
When I recovered, I nearly had to run to catch up as he strode across the field and into the coaches' office in the gym. He took a seat behind a neatly organized desk while I squeezed into a wobbly blue plastic chair across from him.

"What's your name again?"

I told him again.

"You were in my gym class last year, right?"

"Two years ago."

"Well, Mr. True, you are now an important member of the Lincoln Mustangs football family."

I smiled.

"What's funny?" McNulty said, his blue-gray eyes glittering like shiny stones.

Like an idiot, I patted my jiggly belly. "Me? An important member of the football family? How?"

He leaned forward, pointing his pencil at me. "You are the person who sends in a game recap to the
Seattle Times.
You write exciting articles, and the
Times
will push them to the top of the high school page. That happens, and other newspapers will pick them up, which translates into publicity for the players and for me. It also means a byline for you, some cash, and a summer internship to boot. You remember last year's sports writer, Boyd Harte. He interned at the
Bellevue Journal.
"