He was one of the twenty-six, feeling like more of a football player than he ever had in his life.
Because he was as sore as he’d ever been in his life after all the hits he’d taken, including the one in particular that not only made him lose his breath, but made him think for a minute he’d never be able to find his breath again.
Yet here he was.
On the team.
A survivor.
“Now, boys, I want to make this crystal clear,” Mr. Dolan said after they came out of the gym, where they’d changed out of their regular clothes and into the football gear. “Light contact means light contact tonight. I’m sure we’re going to have the hardest hitters in the county on this team, but I don’t need you trying to take a teammate’s head off the very first night.”
They did some basic blocking drills after that, divided up by weight like they were kids being assigned to different grades in school, even though everybody here was the same age. Scott knew from Chris that the weight limit was one hundred and fifty pounds in their league.
Great,
Scott thought,
the big guys like Jimmy Dolan have me by fifty pounds.
Mr. Dolan had been a star middle linebacker at Ohio State, something he’d told them when he introduced himself before the first practice on Monday night. It was almost like, “Hi, I’m Dick Dolan. I’m your coach, and I played for Ohio State.”
Tonight he said that proper tackling was proper tackling no matter what level of football you played, sixth-grade ball or Pop Warner or college or the pros. So he showed them how he wanted them to set themselves and lower their shoulders and square themselves in front of the ballcarrier and drive right through him.
But that was for games, he said.
For tonight, he wanted them to get into solid position, but then just put their arms around the ballcarrier and hold up when he blew his whistle.
Scott was with the backs on both offense and defense, even though he kept tripping over his own feet when the coaches were showing how to back-pedal in order to cover a receiver. The second time he fell, he was so embarrassed that he reached down and started fussing with the laces on his high-top black shoes, as though they were untied.
Near the end of practice Mr. Dolan had them line up eleven against eleven and told them they were going to run some simple handoff plays with Chris at quarterback. Each back was to carry the ball one time and then switch over to defense, while somebody from defense would come over and get a carry.
There was nothing very tricky about it. Chris would take the ball from center, spin around—another thing he made look easy—and put the ball in somebody’s stomach. Then that guy would try to gain a few yards before somebody wrapped him up and Mr. Dolan blew his whistle.
When it was finally Scott’s turn, he wasn’t thinking about even getting as far as the line of scrimmage.
He just wanted to put two hands on the ball and not drop it.
He didn’t think he was going to get the ball from Chris and suddenly turn into LaDainian Tomlinson or Reggie Bush or Tiki Barber, break into the clear, run for the daylight that the TV announcers were always talking about.
Scott Parry was just praying that for once those small hands of his were going to hold on to the stupid ball.
By now, they all knew Chris would say “hut hut hut” and get the ball on the third “hut.” The only thing the guys on defense didn’t know was whether they were going to run right or left. They were supposed to read the way Chris turned and which way the blockers were going.
In the huddle, Chris told Scott they were running right this time.
Chris said, “No matter what happens, keep your legs moving, even after you hear the whistle.”
“I can’t
feel
my legs,” Scott whispered to him.
The fullback got down into his stance in front of Scott. Scott was standing behind him, crouched over a little, hands on his thighs the way Mr. Dolan had showed him.
Please,
he thought,
let this be just one time when I look as if I belong here.
On the third “hut” he moved forward and to his right, his hands in the position that the coaches had shown them for receiving the ball: Right arm underneath, palm up. Left arm on top, palm down. Chris spun to his right, put the ball in perfect position. Scott squeezed the ball between his arms, telling himself he wasn’t letting go, no matter what.
Scott knew he was supposed to “read” the blocking ahead of him—that’s the way Mr. Dolan had put it—and then either run inside or outside the right tackle.
He never made it that far.
Jimmy Dolan, playing middle linebacker like his dad had, blew right through the opening between the right guard and the right tackle before they even had the chance to straighten up and
try
to block him. Then, ignoring what his own dad had said about no tackling, he piled right into Scott, putting his helmet into Scott’s stomach right below where the ball was.
Scott never had the chance to think about stepping left or right.
From the ground, the only direction he could see was up.
From what sounded like the other end of the field, Scott thought he heard a whistle blowing.
Or maybe that was just all the air in his body coming out of him at once.
The next thing he heard after the faraway sound of the whistle was Jimmy, still on top of him, saying, “Sorry, brain. Guess I got a little carried away.”
Then Chris was there, yelling, “Get off of him, Jimmy!”
But Jimmy yelled right back, “Take a chill pill, Conlan! I just didn’t hear the whistle in time to stop myself.”
“Right,” Chris said, pushing Jimmy out of the way.
“This
is
still tackle football, right?” Jimmy said.
“Yeah,” Chris said. “And you’re the tackling dummy.”
Then Mr. Dolan was there with Chris, telling Scott to try to relax, he just got the wind knocked out of him. “Sit up if you can,” he said. “But easy does it.”
Chris put his hand behind Scott’s back, gently helped him up, took his helmet off, said, “Your face is pretty red. You okay yet?”
All Scott could do was shake his head.
He still couldn’t breathe.
When he finally did get some air back into him, he suddenly started coughing so hard that Chris, not sure what to do, started patting him on the back, as if that would make him stop.
When he stopped coughing, Scott was at least able to make a joke out of it.
“Were you trying to burp me?” he said to Chris.
“Sorry.”
Mr. Dolan said, “Put your head down for one more second, just to make sure.”
Scott did. That’s when he realized something.
He was still holding on to the ball.
SEVEN
The first official practice, for all the guys who had made it through the evaluations and still wanted to play sixth-grade football, was the next Saturday.
Scott did his own count, saw that nobody had dropped out after Wednesday. Still twenty-six survivors. After they’d finished, Mr. Dolan called them all together at midfield and told them that playing on his team was going to require almost as serious a commitment to hard work as school did.
“Hard work and hard hitting,” he said.
There would be three night practices during the week, he said, and one on Saturday mornings until they started playing games on Saturday.
The six-game schedule would begin in two weeks, one game against each of the other seven teams in their league.
Their team would be called the Eagles.
“I know that doesn’t sound like a lot of games,” Mr. Dolan said when practice was over. “But this is a small town, and we play in a small league.” He was kneeling in front of the whole group, wearing a cap with an
O
on it that Scott knew was from Ohio State. “This is the first time for me coaching at this level, and I know it’s the first time playing organized football for a lot of you guys. But we’re still out here to win. All I’ve ever been about in football, going back to when I was your age, was winning, and that isn’t going to change now. Starting today, I’m going to do whatever it takes to make this a winning team. Do you all understand that?”
Some of the guys nodded. Some mumbled, “Yeah.”
Mr. Dolan suddenly turned into one of those drill sergeants you’d see in a movie, yelling, “I can’t
hear
you. Is this going to be a winning team?”
“Yes!” they yelled back at him.
“See?” Mr. Dolan said. “You’re learning already.”
“Now there’s one other thing you need to understand,” he continued. “Now that the evaluations are over, the tryouts begin.”
Scott looked around. Everybody else seemed as confused as he was. Everybody had made such a big deal out of calling the first three nights “evalations.”
“What that means,” Mr. Dolan said, “is that just because you have a uniform and a number doesn’t guarantee you a spot out on that field. It doesn’t work that way in our league. The only thing I can promise you is that if you’re willing to learn, which means willing to be coached, then you’re going to learn more about football in the next couple of months than you ever thought you could.” He paused then and said, “And that’s just in practice.”
Mr. Dolan stood up, making a face as he did, then rubbing his right knee hard before he started talking again. Scott had already noticed that he limped a little when he moved around the field.
“I’ll explain this all to your parents at our meeting,” he said. “But this isn’t one of those football leagues where everybody has to play a certain amount of downs. Playing time is up to me and my coaches. If we don’t think you’re ready to play tackle football, even at this level, then practice players is all some of you are going to be this season.”
Scott had one knee on the ground, his right hand resting on his helmet, trying to look like Chris and Jimmy.
Mr. Dolan was standing right over him now.
In Scott’s mind, the coach wasn’t talking to the whole team.
He was speaking directly to him.
“What you’re really going to find out this season is just how much you love football,” he said.
Scott wanted to say, Don’t worry, Coach, I already know.
If I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t still be here.
The only time he had gotten to scrimmage today was at the very end, when Mr. Dolan put him in on the kickoff team.
Nick Donegan, the only kid on the team bigger than Jimmy Dolan, was kicking the ball off. Jeremy Sharp, the fastest kid on their team, was back by himself receiving. Scott was on the far left, as close to the sideline as they could put him, hoping he could run down the field and get somewhere near Jeremy Sharp without falling all over himself.
No chance.
He made it about three steps before he tripped over his own feet again. By the time he picked himself up, Jeremy had grabbed Nick’s line-drive kick on one bounce, dodged the first couple of tacklers, made Nick miss, made Jimmy Dolan miss, cut to his right, broke into the clear down the sideline.
Just one guy left to beat now:
Scott.
Who was feeling like he was out in the street and had a speeding car coming right for him.
He tried to stay calm, hard as his heart was beating, and squared himself up the way the coaches had shown them, reminded himself to be up on the balls of his feet in case Jeremy made another cut, this one back toward the middle of the field.
Jeremy didn’t cut back.
Didn’t have to.
He just switched the ball to his left hand and straight-armed Scott with his right, sending him flying out of bounds, making it look as if Scott was the one who had gotten tackled as Jeremy ran the rest of the way to the end zone.
“Hey, brain,” Jimmy yelled from the middle of the field, even though all he’d tackled on the play was air, “at least you got your uniform dirty.”
Yeah, he loved football, all right.
Scott didn’t need a missed tackle to tell him he wasn’t even close to being good. All he had to do was watch everybody else play eleven-on-eleven. You didn’t have to ask if they loved football, or why they did. It was right there in front of your eyes. You saw it with Jimmy Dolan, as soon as he got out there and was allowed to start hitting people. You saw it with Jeremy Sharp, who looked like he was born to run the way he had down the sideline.
Most of all, you saw it with Chris Conlan.
This wasn’t Parry Field. This wasn’t anything like the Chris from Parry Field when he was playing catch with Scott, the one who was as much a cheerleader as a quarterback.
No, this was a whole different Chris Conlan, moving guys around on offense if they weren’t lined up in the right place, running down the field and showing somebody like Jeremy that he’d run the wrong pass pattern, slapping the sides of his helmet with both hands when he was the one who’d made a mistake.
And as good as he was, he would make mistakes, like everybody else. Sometimes it was almost as if he was making them on purpose. Mr. Dolan would come into the huddle and bring a piece of paper with the Xs and Os on it, and then they’d get up to the line of scrimmage and the blockers would run one way and Chris would run the other.
Maybe he just doesn’t want to look perfect every single second he’s out there,
Scott thought,
like he’s so far above everybody else.
But most of the time he was, not just looking better but looking older somehow, especially when Mr. Dolan would let him cut loose and throw a pass down the field. Or when he’d let Chris roll out and run with the ball himself. Chris would fight for every last yard, even when somebody managed to bring him down in the open field.
Scott didn’t mind watching from the sidelines.
Just being there, just being on the team, getting to wear a uniform, that’s what mattered.