Gym Candy

by Carl Deuker

Coach Downs came in at two-forty-five, accompanied by Hal Carlson, the custodian. Carlson, a burly black man, was a decent guy, but I had no clue why he'd be standing next to Downs, unless it was to chew us out about something going on in the locker room. About forty other guys were sitting at tables around us.

  Downs strode to the front of the room and raised his hand to settle everyone. "This is hard for me to say, so I'll just say it. I won't be coaching here next year. I've got an opportunity to become offensive coordinator at Pacific Lutheran, and I can't turn it down."

  Downs let the murmuring go for a minute or two, and then he raised his hand again. "You guys have been great, and Shilshole High has been great. You're going to beat Foothill one of these years, go to the playoffs, and take it all. I know that, which makes leaving hard. Fortunately there is one thing I don't have to worry about. I know I'm leaving the program in good hands." He turned and looked at Hal. "Most of you know Mr. Carlson as the head custodian here. Starting today, he's also your head coach."

  Guys looked at one another in shock. From the front table I heard Clark laugh out loud. "This is a joke, right?" Drager called out. "Hal's not really our—"

  Downs started to answer. "This is no—"

  Carlson cut him off. "Coach Downs, I'll handle the meeting from here."

  Downs looked at him, pursed his lips, and then nodded. "You're right," he said. Then he turned back to us. "I'll be around school until the end of the semester. Stop by my office anytime you want."

  He walked to the door, turned back again to wave, and then left. As soon as the door closed behind him, Hal's eyes homed in on Drager. "Would you like to repeat that question?"

  Drager didn't back down. "I asked Coach Downs if he was joking."

  "About me being the coach?"

  "Yeah, about you being the head coach."

  "You're Drager, right? And you're Clark?"

  They both nodded.

  "Running back and quarterback, right?"

  Again they nodded.

  "The kids who got arrested?"

  The smiles disappeared.

  "Well, Mr. Drager and Mr. Clark, I will be reviewing your case in the next few weeks to determine what your future status on this team will be. Once I've acquainted myself with the facts, I'll let you know whether I will allow you the privilege of playing football for Shilshole High next year. As of now, you remain suspended. Since this is a meeting for team members only, you will have to leave."

  Aaron Clark laughed nervously. "Are you kicking us out?"

  Carlson nodded. "I'm kicking you out."

  Drager and Clark exchanged a look, smiled at each other and at their friends, then got up and left, slamming the door behind them. My eyes—everybody's eyes—had followed them on their way out. Once they were gone, we looked back to Carlson.

  The fury was still in his eyes, but it was gone from his voice. "From now on, when you address me, you will call me Coach Carlson or Coach. As to team rules: there's only one word you need to remember, and that word is respect. Respect yourself, respect one another, and respect the game. Do that and you and I will get along fine. Don't"—he looked toward the door Drager and Clark had just slammed—"and you won't be playing for me." His eyes scanned the room. "All right then. Now I want to hear from you. We'll start with the guys at the table in the back. Tell me your name, your position, and your year in school."

  One by one, players stood and gave the required information. Now and again Carlson would ask a question. "What do you bench-press?" Or "How fast do you run the forty?" Or "What's your vertical leap?"

  It took time, but Carlson questioned every player. When he finished, he folded his arms across his chest. His forearms were huge—a lineman's forearms. "A week from Saturday, we're going down to Tacoma to watch the 4A championship game. I've arranged for a bus and I've got tickets for all of you. Attendance is required. You got a date with your girl, change it. And don't even ask me if you can bring her." With that, he turned and walked out.

  Drew, DeShawn, and I left together. When we were clear of the other guys, Drew looked at me. "Wow!" he said.

  "Do you think he'd really kick them off the team for good?" I said.

  Drew shook his head. "He's just trying to scare them."

  "I don't know about that," DeShawn said, smiling. "My money is on a suspension, which means you two sorry souls are going to get a second chance."

  Drew turned to me and punched me a few times on the arm. "He might be right, Mick."

  At school the next day, Brad Middleton told us that Carlson had once been head coach at Snohomish High. We went to the library during English class, which gave me a chance to go on the Internet to check it out. Snohomish High had a good Web page, so it was easy to find their head football coaches. Sure enough, there was Carlson's name. He'd been head coach for nine years. Every one of his teams had had winning records, and two of them had gone to the state playoffs. He'd coached his last team five years earlier, and they'd finished 7-3.

  I stared at the screen, wondering why he'd quit. Maybe he burned out, or someone got sick in his family, or he hated the athletic director. Whatever the reason, Snohomish had gone straight downhill once he'd left. The bell sounded. I logged off, gathered my books, and headed toward my Spanish class. In the hallway, I spotted Coach Downs. "Good luck next year, Coach," I said.

  "Hey, thanks, Mick," he said, and he fell in step with me. For a while neither of us spoke, but as I started down a side hall, he stopped me. "You know, Mick, you could be a terrific player. You've got great moves, great speed. You just need to bulk up a little, get stronger. Hit that weight room harder and there's no telling how far you can go."

  "I will, Coach," I said.

  He clapped me on the shoulder. "Good luck to you."

  I hustled to get to class before Ms. Koss called roll, and just made it.

  I hadn't paid much attention to what Downs had said; I figured he was just talking to talk. But as Spanish class crawled along, what he'd meant came home.

  He was telling me I was weak. That's what it amounted to, when you cut through all the polite garbage. And that's what my dad had said, too, though I hadn't heard it that way. They were telling me that it wasn't enough to have moves and speed. In the red zone, in those final twenty yards, power was the name of the game. Not speed, not agility, not finesse. Raw power.

  2

  Saturday night was the state 4A title game. Drew wasn't crazy about going; I heard him and DeShawn complaining that they were going to miss some movie with Natalie Vick and her friends, but I wanted to see the game. My dad always said that you couldn't be the best until you knew what the best looked like.

  And Pasco was the best. Early in the season they'd beaten Long Beach Poly, a powerhouse team from California, had gone undefeated through their league, and had defeated Foothill 20–16 the week before. Pasco had a running back named Ivan Leander who averaged ten yards every time he touched the ball.

  I was the first player in the Shilshole High parking lot, but I wasn't there long before Middleton and Jones showed up, and then a bunch of other guys came. The last two were Drew and DeShawn. We were expecting a crummy yellow school bus, but a luxury Gray Line bus pulled into the parking lot. Even after the door opened with a hiss, nobody stepped inside. "Is this for us?" somebody called out to Carlson.

  He turned and looked back at us. "Time to go, men."

  Tacoma is thirty miles from Seattle, but with traffic the ride took an hour. Nobody much cared. Everybody was laughing and talking loudly, having a good time.

  The Tacoma Dome holds twenty thousand and was about half full. Carlson had us sit as a team on the fifty-yard line high above the field. "You can see plays develop better from up here. Pick out the guy playing your position and watch him closely. He's who you want to be."

  The Pasco players raced out of the tunnel first. As they ran they let out a wild man roar that grew louder and louder until it exploded into the word "Bulldogs." After that came a crazy howling as they cra
mmed into an ever-narrowing circle and jumped all over one another.

  A minute or two later, the Rogers players rushed onto the field. The noise that the Pasco fans had let loose worked like a challenge to the Rogers side. They stood and hollered louder and longer.

  Pasco's warm-up routine was good, but Rogers's was amazing. Their coach blew his whistle and immediately the players rushed toward the goal line, formed a perfect circle with the captains in the middle, and started doing jumping jacks, sit-ups, pushups. Next came another whistle, and within seconds they had broken up into different subgroups, and each subgroup had a coach directing it. At the ten-yard line, two sets of linemen charged each other as a running back practiced hitting the holes. At the thirty, the quarterbacks took turns throwing to receivers. Along the sidelines, the punter kicked to the return men. By the end zone, the placekicker practiced field goals.

  A horn sounded and both teams lined up at midfield. As the stadium announcer called out the name of each player, people cheered, but when the stars were announced, the roar would go up a dozen decibels. After the introductions came "The Star-Spangled Banner," and then finally the kickoff.

  All through the first half, I wasn't quite sure what I was watching. It was supposed to be a game between the two best teams in the state, but Rogers seemed mediocre. They had only a handful of plays, and they ran them from the same formation: two backs, a wide out, and a receiver in the slot. Sometimes they'd send their fullback right up the middle; sometimes they'd run off tackle with the halfback; sometimes the slot receiver, coming in motion just before the ball was snapped, would take a handoff from the quarterback and go wide. They were incredibly crisp, just as you'd expect after watching their warm-ups, but the whole offense was simple.

  On most of their possessions, Rogers made a first down or two, and then Pasco would stop them and they'd punt. They did have great special teams—time after time their punter would pound the ball down the field, and the cover team would pin Pasco deep in their own territory. But it didn't look as though Rogers could ever score.

  When Pasco had the ball, the game kicked into high gear. Leander was like the Cheshire cat—now you see him, now you don't. Their quarterback didn't throw much, but when he did, he rifled the ball to his two wide receivers, both of whom had great hands. Pasco pushed Rogers around as if they were a JV team. Or at least, Pasco pushed them around until they got inside the twenty-yard line. But once they reached the red zone, something always seemed to go wrong. On the first drive it was a penalty for a block in the back, on the next drive Leander was hit so hard he coughed up the ball, on another there was an interception in the end zone. Pasco outgained Rogers four to one, but it wasn't until just before halftime that they finally pushed the ball into the end zone on a fourth and inches play, and even then no one was really sure Leander made it.

  3

  Throughout the game, Carlson sat with one group of guys or another. He'd talk to them for a few minutes and then leave. At halftime, he came down and sat with us. I tensed up, and I could tell DeShawn and Drew did, too. "Tell me your names again," he said, "and your positions." When I told him my name, his eyebrows went up. "You're the freshman who got stopped a yard short on the last play against Foothill. I was at that game. Very exciting."

  "A foot short," Drew said. "He was only a foot short."

  He smiled wryly at Drew. "Okay. A foot." Then he paused before saying: "Short."

  None of us spoke for a while. Carlson scratched the side of his face and then looked back to me. "So, who's going to win?" he said.

  It was a no-brainer.

  "Pasco," I answered.

  "You boys think so, too?"

  Drew and DeShawn nodded in agreement.

  "You sure?"

  "Pretty sure," DeShawn said. "They're ahead by six, and they could be ahead by twenty-six. I think they'll blow Rogers out."

  Carlson nodded, then looked at Drew. "You're a quarterback, right?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Okay, Mr. Quarterback. Tell me this. It's fourth and one. You've got the ball. Which defense scares you more: Pasco's or Rogers's?"

  Drew laughed. "Fourth and one? Those Rogers guys are tough, that's for sure. I guess I'd rather go against Pasco."

  Carlson stood. "Enjoy the second half, gentlemen." With that, he walked over to another group of guys.

  "He actually thinks Rogers is going to win," DeShawn said. Then he shook his head. "What's he been smoking?"

  I kept quiet. If I'd had to bet, I'd have picked Pasco. But something my dad said kept running through my mind: Let a team hang around, and they'll end up beating you. Pasco had definitely let Rogers hang around.

  The third quarter seemed no different than the first two. Pasco kept piling up the yardage but would then self-destruct in the red zone. Rogers would squeeze out a first down or two, and out would come their incredible kicker. After the punt, Pasco would drive down the field again but never push it all the way into the end zone.

  Near the end of the third quarter, Carlson came our way again. "Notice anything?" he said. We looked onto the field. None of us saw anything. "Check out the Pasco guys. They're all leaning forward; they've all got their hands on their knees, sucking air. Those guys are gassed." He paused while we looked. "Now look at the Rogers players. Standing tall, every last one of them."

  Halfway into the fourth quarter, with the score still 6–0, Pasco had the ball near the fifty. On first down, the quarterback dropped back to pass. Rogers blitzed a safety; the Pasco fullback who was supposed to block him never saw him. The safety blind-sided the quarterback just as he started to pass. The ball floated like a party balloon toward the middle of the field. Rogers's cornerback cut in front of the intended receiver, plucked the ball out of the air, and took off. Fifty ... forty ... thirty ... twenty ... somebody dived at his feet but came up short ... fifteen ... ten ... five ...

  Touchdown Rogers!

  It was so unexpected that it took the Rogers fans a few seconds to start roaring, but once they started, you'd have sworn fifty thousand people were screaming. The placekicker split the uprights with the extra point, putting Rogers ahead 7–6.

  With the lead, the Rogers guys were supercharged. They held Pasco on downs on the next possession, blowing through the line on each play. The Pasco punter got off a high spiraling punt that pinned Rogers back on their own twenty-yard line. A couple of running plays got Rogers nine yards, leaving them with a third down and one yard to go for a first down.

  In similar spots all game long, Rogers had run the fullback on a dive into the line. This time the quarterback faked the handoff and dropped back to pass. From high above we could see the tight end come wide open in the middle of the field. The pass was perfectly thrown; the tight end caught the ball in stride at the forty-five yard line, and he was off to the races—no Pasco player came within ten yards of him.

  Pasco had one final possession, but they had no life at all. On fourth and ten, their quarterback tossed the ball about five yards behind his intended receiver. Rogers took over and ran out the clock. When the final horn sounded, DeShawn stood up. "You know something? Our new coach knows football."

  4

  A bunch of things happened over the Christmas break, most of them good, one of them strange, and the last one great.

  I turned sixteen the day after school broke for the holidays. My mom took me to the department of licensing off Greenwood. During football season, I hadn't had much time to practice driving. Guys on the team had talked about how they'd flunked on their first try, so I was nervous, but I did okay with everything except parallel parking. At the end, the examiner handed me a sheet with the number 82 on top. "Congratulations," she said.

  I drove the Honda home. When we were inside, my mom gave me a lecture on driving responsibly. She'd printed off the Internet a page with twenty safe-driving rules, and she had me sign at the bottom of the page. "Break any of these," she said, "and you lose your driving privileges. Understood?"

  That next morn
ing my dad came downstairs while I was eating breakfast. "I hear you passed your driving test," he said.

  "First try."

  "It took me three. I kept rolling through stop signs." He poured himself a cup of coffee. "You got anything planned for this morning?"

  "I was going to call Drew."

  "Don't. It's time I taught you how to drive the Jeep. That is, if you want to learn."

  "You bet I want to learn."

  "All right then. Finish your breakfast." He stopped and gave me one of those looks that let you know there's a joke that you're not in on. "I know the perfect place."

  He took Fifteenth across the Ballard Bridge and turned toward Discovery Park. He wound along one of the wooded park roads for a while and then made a quick turn into a driveway and put on the brakes. "Okay, let's switch seats."

  I looked up. In front of me were hundreds of tombstones. "This is a cemetery."

  He laughed. "Like I said—the perfect place to learn."

  It turned out he was right. There were no other cars, not one, so when I screwed up engaging the clutch and the Jeep lurched forward and then died—which happened a lot—nobody was behind me to honk. The roads in the cemetery meandered, turning this way and that, so I was constantly shifting back and forth from second to third to second. All through it were rolling hills that gave me a chance to practice engaging the clutch and working the emergency brake. It took a while, but after an hour I had the knack. "You're pretty good," my dad said when he took the wheel back. "A couple more times and you'll be ready to go on the road."

  Then came the strange thing.

  Instead of going home, my dad drove over to I-5. "Where we going?" I said.

  "You'll see."

  We went north to Mountlake Terrace, and he wound his way through a bunch of back roads. "There," he said, pointing to a billboard. gun range—first timers free! the sign promised. He followed a gravel road about half a mile before pulling into the parking lot. "You're sixteen," he said. "Time you learned how to fire a gun."