The Underdogs

by Mike Lupica

  She had been avoiding even eye contact for the first three days of the school week, so on Thursday he just sat down next to her at lunch.

  “That seat is taken,” she said.

  Will said, “Come on, you can’t stay mad at me forever.”

  With that she just stood up and said, “Take this seat; it just opened up.”

  Will said, “Wait. How come this is all my fault?”

  “Because it’s your team.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes,” she said, “it is. And if you don’t know that, you’re the only boy in the seventh grade who doesn’t.”

  And then she was up and out of her chair in a blink, like she couldn’t get away from him fast enough, nearly running away from him, head down. So she didn’t see Tim LeBlanc and Jeremiah Keating walking across the middle of the room to bus their trays, Tim talking away as usual, neither one of them watching where they were going until the last second. Will almost yelled for her to watch out.

  Then he saw that he didn’t have to.

  Hannah saw them at the last-possible second. As fast as she was moving, she made a sudden stop and spin move that Will would have been proud of on the football field, like she was avoiding a couple of tacklers who’d appeared out of nowhere.

  Then she was out the door, untouched, and gone. Even Tim and Jeremiah stopped and watched her go.

  Will sat there for a long time after she was gone, thinking about her, about the team, about how if Toby Keenan was going to change his mind, he would have done that already.

  Mostly Will thought about how he still didn’t have eleven players.

  When his afternoon classes were over that day, he couldn’t remember a single thing one of his teachers had said to him after lunch. Later, he couldn’t remember anything Tim had said when they’d walked home.

  He was stuck on something.

  On somebody.

  His dad said, “A girl? You’re joking, right? Tell me you’re not serious.”

  “As a toothache.”

  “Good, because you’re giving me one. Along with a headache.” Joe Tyler pointed to Will, then at himself. “You want me to put a twelve-year-old girl on our team? On your team? No way.”

  This had been going on for a few minutes.

  “You can’t say that without at least giving her a look,” Will said. “That’s if I can get her to try out.”

  “If? If you can convince her? Were you playing without a helmet before we got our new ones?”

  This was Saturday morning. Their kitchen. Their usual Saturday morning breakfast, pancakes and bacon. A tradition with them, like another part of their secret language, the bond between them.

  One being tested—severely—right now.

  Will knew his dad wasn’t done.

  Joe Tyler said, “You’re the one who says you don’t want us to be a joke team. And now you want to put your new girlfriend on it?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Will said. “Right now, she’s not even my friend.”

  “You want to know something? I don’t care who she is. Or what kind of player you think she is. She’s not going to be a player on any team of mine.”

  Will said, “It’s not just yours.”

  “Good point! Excellent point, as a matter of fact! When we get to practice later, why don’t you take a vote of the other guys on the team and ask them what kind of great idea they think this is. I’ll help you count the votes.”

  Will knew that if he lost his cool, there was no way he’d get his dad to take a look at Hannah. Really see what she could do. And if he couldn’t get his dad behind the idea, having his dad behind him, he had no way of selling it to Tim and Chris and the rest of the guys.

  “Dad, do you think I’d even bring this up if I thought she couldn’t play? I’m telling you, I’ve seen what she can do. And if you watched her catch and throw and run from a distance, you’d swear she was a guy.”

  “But she’s not. And I wouldn’t be watching her from a distance if I gave her a uniform. I’d be watching her from the sidelines. Afraid some big guy was gonna break her in two. It’s why you gotta drop this. Now. And be happy you talked to me about it before you did your friends.”

  “No.”

  “No? Seriously?”

  Will had waited until they’d finished eating. No reason to spoil a perfectly good pancake breakfast.

  “First of all,” his dad said, “the league will never go for it.”

  “She already looked it up on the website. There’s no rule that says a girl can’t play.”

  “Trust me on something, bud. Whatever the language is on their website, the league wouldn’t want this even if I did. Which I don’t.”

  Will said, “If she’s good enough, she should have a chance. Isn’t that what you’ve told me about sports my whole life? If you’re good enough, somebody has to give you a chance.”

  That stopped his dad.

  Who took a deep breath, let it out, made a motion with his hands like he wanted everybody to calm down here. Even though he’d been the only one getting worked up about the subject of Hannah Grayson joining the Bulldogs.

  “Hear me out,” Joe Tyler said. “Sometimes things aren’t just about right or wrong. They’re about the way things really are. And here’s the way they are: it’s a boys’ league. Pop Warner was a boys’ league before this one. And even if I thought this was worth doing, which I don’t, you gotta be real, son. We’ve already got enough on our plate here. We don’t need some controversy that’s gonna end up on television and in the papers.”

  “She’s not a controversy, Dad,” Will said. “She’s a good player. You could put her at wide receiver to keep her away from the action. And way back at safety. Let her punt and try extra points if you don’t want her to run for them. You could hide her, Dad. But we’d have our eleven.”

  “Ten,” his dad said. “We’d still have ten boys. And one girl. And as I said, how many of those other boys are gonna go along with this?”

  “If I can get you to go along, I can get them to go along.”

  “You think they’ll listen to you?”

  “They usually do.”

  “Who’s coaching this team, you or me?”

  “Dad, you’re the coach,” Will said. “It doesn’t mean I can’t send in a play once in a while. Or a player.”

  His dad got up, walked over to the counter, refilled his coffee cup, sat back down.

  “Just take a look at her,” Will said. “That’s all I’m asking. And if you really don’t think she can help us, then I’ll back down.”

  “But you’re not gonna until I take a look at her, am I right?”

  “I’m right,” Will said.

  His dad started to raise his coffee cup, put it back down, smiled.

  “You want to know something amazing?”

  “What?”

  Joe Tyler said, “I had no idea you’ve been hanging on every word that came out of my mouth.”

  He reached over, speared the last piece of pancake on Will’s plate, ate it, washed it down with coffee, stood up.

  “Call Little Miss Sunshine and tell her to meet us at Shea in an hour,” Will’s dad said.

  When Will did, Hannah wanted to know why she had to try out.

  “Did anybody else have to?” she said.

  Will said, “Can you do me one favor today? Try to be nice.”

  “Nice doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she said. “It’s not like I was begging for a chance to come play with you losers.”

  Will almost hung up right there. But he didn’t. He should have known she’d be a harder sell than his dad.

  “You’re the one who said you wanted to play,” Will said. “Do you want to play or not?”

  Now there was a long pause at her end. Will was half-waiting to hear the dial tone that would have meant she’d hung up on him first.

  “I want to play.”

  “That’s what I thought. And Hannah?”

  Will di
dn’t know why he liked saying her name, hearing the sound of it as it came out of his mouth. But he did.

  “What?”

  “By nice I mean, please don’t talk to my dad in the mean way you talk to me,” Will said, then added, “See you at the field.”

  Then hung up before she could be mean.

  But she was totally different with Will’s dad, like a completely different girl from the moment Will introduced them.

  “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Tyler. Will’s told me so much about you.”

  (Will thinking: When exactly did we have that conversation?)

  “I couldn’t believe it when he told me you’d agreed to coach the team!”

  (Or that one.)

  “Anyway,” she said, “thanks so much for giving some crazy girl you don’t even know a chance to try out for you, on a day when you have practice later.”

  (Will thinking: Well, at least the crazy part is true.)

  When she was done blowing smoke at him, Will’s dad said, “Now that we’ve got the introductions out of the way, I need to ask you a serious question, Hannah: why do you want to do this, for real?”

  Hannah Grayson had her hair in a ponytail today, was wearing shorts and a blue Michigan T-shirt with a yellow M on the front. And cleats. They were soccer cleats, but she clearly wasn’t messing around.

  As usual, she had brought her own ball.

  She took a moment to answer.

  “Because,” she said. “I’ve got something to prove.”

  “What do you have to prove?”

  “That I’m as good as they are,” she said.

  Nodding at Will. Nodding at one boy like he was all the boys.

  Joe Tyler stared at her now, like he was taking another look at the tall girl with the ponytail, football under her arm. Probably seeing for the first time what Will had seen the first day, that this girl didn’t back up very much, either.

  “Well, then, let’s see what you got,” Will’s dad said. “Because it seems to me that just about everybody on this team has something to prove.”

  Joe Tyler didn’t go easy on her, or Will, working them both out, as if Will had come here to try out the same as Hannah had. Will had thought his dad would have her do some punting and placekicking first, just to see if she had as much leg as Will said she did.

  But he didn’t. He made them run first, made them run a lot, made them run a forty, take a break, then run another one. Will was still beating her the way he had when they’d raced on this field before. But not by a lot. Not the way he could beat Tim or Chris or Johnny Callahan, the next-fastest guy on the Bulldogs.

  Joe Tyler made Hannah cover Will on pass routes, then had Will cover her. Then he had Will punt some to her, just to see how she did holding on to a ball coming down at her out of the sky. One time Joe Tyler surprised her while the ball was still in the air, coming at her in that slow, wobbly run of his, just to dial up the pressure a little bit, see if she could handle the pressure and the ball.

  She did.

  Not only caught the ball, but then gave the creaky old guy in front of her a sweet head fake, faking him out so badly he nearly fell down, blowing past him, running at full speed the whole length of the field.

  Taking it to the house.

  When she got to the far end zone, she turned around, put the ball on her hip. If Will knew anything about this girl by now, he knew she wanted to say something in that moment. But she didn’t. She wasn’t here to trash-talk Will or even win him over; she already had that victory just by being here. Hannah was here to impress Will’s dad. Win him over. Like she was trying to show a new teacher that she was the brightest kid in class.

  And for now, the best way to do that was to keep her mouth shut. Will thought of a line he’d read from Buck Showalter, the Orioles manager, telling one of his players one time, “I can’t hear a word you’re saying because your actions are shouting too loudly at me.”

  That was Hannah today.

  Joe Tyler didn’t say anything, just motioned her up to midfield, saying, “We’re not done, you know?”

  “Just getting warmed up, Coach,” she said.

  They weren’t in pads, Will wondering if she even had pads, if any girl anywhere had pads. So there was no contact of any kind. Both Will and Hannah ran a few more pass routes, Joe Tyler doing the throwing this time, and then finally it was time for Hannah to do some kicking.

  She started with punting and it was here, where Will least expected it, that the mouthy, cocky girl showed some nerves, shanking the first one. But after that she got into it, kicked about six beauties in a row, even angling them inside the ten-yard line when Will’s dad asked her to try that.

  Finally, placekicking. Just simple extra points, Joe Tyler doing the snapping as if he’d been a long snapper his whole life, Will holding for Hannah, even spinning the ball like a pro so that the laces faced away from her.

  She made ten kicks in a row and they were done.

  “You’re as good as Will said,” Joe Tyler said. “So we’re gonna give this a shot.”

  Hannah smiled, one of her big ones. “Thank you,” she said. “And just so you know, I’m not afraid of getting hit. If I was, I wouldn’t have tried out.”

  “You may not be afraid,” Will’s dad said. “But I am. Not everybody in this league is my son’s size.”

  “Hey,” Will said.

  Grinning as he did.

  “And there are going to be some jerks who are going to want to put it to you just to show how tough they are, or show you how much they don’t want a girl playing their game. Like it makes them feel less like guys somehow. So they’ll be looking to, I don’t know . . .”

  “Compensate?” Hannah said.

  “Exactly. Smart girl.”

  “Smarter than most boys,” she said.

  Unable to help herself.

  “Most girls are,” Will’s dad said.

  “Hey,” Will said again.

  “Facts are facts, son.” To Hannah, Joe Tyler said, “I’ll need to talk to your parents. I assume this is all right with them, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “My dad a lot more than my mom,” Hannah said. “You’ll see when you talk to them. But they said if I wanted to do this, they wouldn’t stand in my way.”

  Will’s dad shook his head.

  “I may be crazy,” he said. “No, check that. I am crazy or I wouldn’t be here myself. But we started this day with ten players and now we’ve got one more, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Cool,” Hannah said.

  “But there’s one thing: we gotta get the other guys on board with this.”

  “Wait a second, Mr. Tyler,” Hannah said. Like she was digging in. “You’re the coach. And there’d be no team without him.”

  Nodding at Will again.

  “You’re right, there’d be no team without Will,” Joe Tyler said. “But on every good team I was ever around, it was all for one.”

  He shrugged at Hannah, smiled.

  “Now we gotta see how that theory holds up when you’re the one,” Will’s dad said.

  CHAPTER 15

  Convincing his dad about Hannah turned out to be a piece of cake compared to convincing his teammates.

  The most vocal of them, surprising Will, was Tim LeBlanc.

  Not surprising Will by being the most vocal—that was a given with his best friend. The only time he would shut up was when a teacher would threaten him with a lunch detention.

  No. The surprise here was just how much Tim, the closest thing Will had to a brother, was dead-solid set against the idea of putting Hannah on the team.

  “Why don’t we just change our name to the Poodles?” he said.

  Everything he was saying before practice was directed at Will. Not Will’s dad, the coach of the team.

  Just Will.

  “That’s not funny,” Will said.

  “For once, I’m not trying to be funny,” Tim said.

  Will tried to be, just wanting to chill him out a
little. “It must be a struggle,” he said.

  “No,” Tim said. “But what is a struggle for the rest of us is looking at a whole season of being the butt end of jokes because you came up with the genius idea of us adding a girl to the roster.”

  “She can help us,” Will said. “Do you really think I’d do something, after we’ve gotten this far, to hurt us?”

  Tim ignored the question. “I thought this was supposed to be the West River league,” he said. “Not A League of Their Own.”

  It was a movie they’d watched one time about a women’s professional baseball league. The one where the manager said there was no crying in baseball.

  “You haven’t seen her yet,” Will said, “but you’ve already made up your mind. That’s not right.”

  “What’s not right is her jamming up the rest of us and making us look pathetic,” Tim said.

  They were in a circle at midfield. Every time Tim stopped talking, the rest of the Bulldogs were staring right at Will.

  Now he went at them.

  “What do the rest of you guys have to say?” Will said. “LeBlanc may be the loudest voice on the team, but it’s not the only one.”

  Chris said, “I didn’t sign on to play with girls.”

  Jeremiah said, “Same.”

  “Same,” Wes said.

  “It’s not a bunch of girls,” Will said. “It’s one girl.”

  “All it takes,” Chris said.

  “One girl who seems to be, like, dominating you,” Tim said.

  “Are you joking?” Will said. “She wasn’t even speaking to me until today.”

  “But I’ll bet she was fine as soon as you gave her what she wanted,” Tim said. “Just flat-out promised her a spot on the team before you even talked to the rest of us. Sweet.”

  “If I’d promised her a spot,” Will said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Thinking: he and Tim had never seriously fought about anything, until now. Fighting over a girl. Just not the way guys usually did.

  “The only thing I promise,” Will said, “is that she can help us.”

  Johnny Callahan said, “In what? A flag football league?” Will said, “Dude, I hear you. Hannah knows this better than anybody: the first time she told me she wanted to play on our team, I shot her down big-time. She wouldn’t even talk to me.” He shrugged. “But I’m telling you, I was wrong about her.”