The Underdogs

by Mike Lupica

He took off his helmet, quietly slipped away from his teammates, walked around the bleachers, on his way to wait for his dad in the car.

  But one last time today, there was Kendrick Morris. Like he thought he had to cover Will all the way to the parking lot.

  “Know what the best part was?” Kendrick said, starting right in.

  He had taken his shoulder pads and jersey off, was just wearing a gray T-shirt with his football pants. He’d taken off his cleats, but even in socks, he was bigger than Will. Smiling at him. One of the meanest smiles Will had ever seen.

  Mean kid.

  “What?” Will said in a tired voice.

  “That you thought you had the game right before I snatched it back,” Kendrick said, pulling his arm back. “That was the best part.”

  “Glad that rang your bell,” Will said.

  “Oh yeah.”

  And in that moment, Will couldn’t help himself any longer.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he said.

  “Now you know I got answers for anything you throw my way, right? But go ahead, it pleases you.”

  Will was the one smiling now. “Do you think we should stop talking before somebody starts to think I’m the jerk?”

  It seemed to take a moment for it to register with Kendrick that he’d been insulted, maybe because of the pleasant tone of voice Will had used.

  But when it did, Kendrick’s smile disappeared and he was coming for Will, saying as he did, “You want some of me, little man?”

  He came up a yard short.

  Because Toby Keenan stepped out from the bleachers as if appearing out of nowhere, stepped right between Kendrick and Will.

  “Beat it,” he said to Kendrick Morris.

  Maybe it was the way Toby said it. Or the look on his face. Maybe it was just the size of him, towering over Kendrick the way he did.

  The best Kendrick could do was, “Who are you?”

  “The guy telling you to beat it. Unless you want a piece of me the way you wanted a piece of him.”

  Kendrick opened his mouth, closed it, turned just like that and walked around the corner of the bleachers, moving so quickly it was like he was suddenly afraid he might miss the team bus.

  Gone.

  “He shouldn’t have yelled at you,” Toby said. “I hate guys who yell like that.”

  “Me too.”

  It was still just the two of them behind the bleachers. Maybe the quiet between them seemed more pronounced because Kendrick was gone.

  “What are you doing here?” Will said finally.

  “I want to play,” Toby said.

  CHAPTER 21

  It turned out that Joe Tyler had done a good job guessing the sizes Toby would need for equipment if he ever did decide to play, including his head size for the helmet. The only place he guessed wrong was with the shoes. The ones he ordered were too small.

  Even with that the shoes weren’t big enough.

  Joe Tyler told him, no worries, he’d contact New Balance in the morning and Toby would probably have his new shoes in time for Wednesday’s practice.

  “I’ll tell them I need them ASAP for my game changer,” Will’s dad said.

  Toby looked down, the way he did a lot, Will had noticed. “I don’t know about that, Mr. Tyler.”

  “I tell Will all the time I can teach a lot of things on a football field,” Will’s dad said. “But no coach in history, not one of the guys who coached the Steelers to the Super Bowl, has ever been able to teach big and fast.”

  “You know how announcers are always talking about fans in a loud stadium being a team’s twelfth man?” Will said. “You’re gonna be a way different kind of twelfth man for us now.”

  They were in the living room, shoe boxes open on the floor, Toby wearing his brand-new football pants, helmet and shoulder pads in front of him on the coffee table. When he’d been standing next to Joe Tyler, Will noticed that he was just as tall. And looked a whole lot broader.

  Toby made their living room feel even smaller than normal just by being in it.

  Will’s dad said, “Can I ask you what changed your mind, if you don’t mind telling me? I mean, other than that Kendrick kid running his mouth at Will the way he did?”

  Now Toby looked up.

  “I watched the game,” he said.

  “I didn’t see you,” Will said.

  “Didn’t want you to. I just wanted to see the team play for myself.”

  Neither Will nor his dad said anything now, letting Toby tell it his own way. Will was wondering how much of an effort it took just for Toby to show up at the field, much less make the decision to get back in the game.

  “I saw how hard you guys fought,” Toby said to Will. “When the game started, I thought you had no chance. Castle Rock, they just had more of . . . everything. But somehow you stayed with them. Then as the game went along, I can’t explain it, but I started to see myself out there. Especially on their last drive, when one stop could have made the difference. And I’d always been taught—by my mom, anyway, before she left—that if you think you can make a difference in something, you have to try.”

  Toby shrugged, tried to smile. “All I got,” he said.

  “I’m glad,” Will said.

  “We’re all glad,” his dad said.

  Then Toby said, “Mr. Tyler, you know about my dad.”

  “I know your dad, son. My whole life.”

  “So you know what he’s like.”

  “Yeah, I know what he’s like when he gets around football.”

  Will looked at the big guy, biggest in their grade by far, like he’d grown nine more sizes since he’d last played football in the fifth grade, somehow looking like a scared little kid talking about his own father.

  Will thought: And I think I’ve got problems in my life.

  Toby said in a small voice, “I’m not gonna be able to keep him from coming to games.”

  “Did you tell him you were going to play?”

  “Last night, when I got home.”

  “Was he happy to hear it?” Will’s dad said.

  Toby made a snorting sound. “Not too much makes my dad happy.”

  “What did he say?” Will said.

  “That it was about time I decided to man up; they already had one girl on the team.”

  “You know how they call some guys ‘monster backs’ in football?” Tim said to Will. “Dude, Toby really puts the monster in it.”

  “Troy Polamalu, just without the hair,” Will said.

  This was Monday night at practice, Toby’s first with the Bull-dogs. Jeremiah, who’d spent most of the practice trying in vain to block Toby Keenan in what were now six-on-six drills, said, “I think the big guy and Polamalu are already the same size.”

  Everybody on the field could see how Toby looked even bigger in football gear. But he was faster than Will remembered. And quick. Will knew there was a difference in sports; you could be one without being the other. There were guys on the Bulldogs who were fast over thirty or forty yards but not quick enough to the ball on defense, not quick enough with the kind of short burst you needed to fill a hole you saw opening a few yards in front of you.

  Toby was both.

  Big-time.

  Maybe the most amazing thing, an hour into practice, was this: not only did he not look as if he’d taken a season off from football, he looked as if he hadn’t missed a single practice. On top of that, it had only taken him one night of studying to learn all the plays Will’s dad had sent him home with on Sunday.

  It was as if he’d been waiting all this time to let all the football he had inside him out. To run around like this and hit people again and be a player again. And just maybe, Will thought, to be a part of something. Toby still wasn’t saying much—other than “Sorry” sometimes when he’d level somebody new and immediately help him up—and never joked around between plays the way Tim and some of the other guys did.

  And still, just watching him, Will felt like this was as happy as Toby ever g
ot.

  “You know what the challenge is gonna be?” Joe Tyler said to Will during a water break, with Toby out of earshot.

  “Waiting until Saturday to see him in a real game?” Will said.

  “Figuring out where he can help us the most on offense,” Joe Tyler said.

  Will knew what his dad meant. Defense was a no-brainer; he was going to be in the middle of their 4-2-5, a monster back in all ways, moving around the field and terrorizing offenses the way Polamalu did or the way Clay Matthews of the Packers, another guy with insanely long hair, did.

  But on offense? Will could see him at left tackle, protecting Chris’s blind side. Or fullback. Even though he looked like more of a tight end than a wideout, Will couldn’t help dreaming about a rematch with Castle Rock. Imagine what it would be like watching Kendrick Morris try to match up with Toby in a game instead of in back of the bleachers.

  “For now I’m thinking tight end,” Joe Tyler said. “See if there are any linebackers in the West River league who can run with him or any safeties who want to hit him.”

  In their first two games Will’s dad had been moving his receivers around. Hannah was always at one wide receiver position, but he’d been swapping off Johnny and Tim at the other one, even throwing Gerry Dennis out there sometimes. It was Joe Tyler’s way of mixing things up, giving the other team different looks. But for the last half hour of practice tonight, the Bulldogs first walking through their plays and then running through them with the orange cones, he had them line up this way:

  Toby at tight end. Johnny at one wide receiver, Tim at the other, Hannah sitting out.

  Joe Tyler had made sure to tell Hannah exactly what he was doing, trying to make it sound like a good thing that she wasn’t out there right now.

  “I know you have the plays down cold,” Will’s dad said, “probably even better than my own kid. So you take a break and let Toby see what it looks like to have them up and running on the field. Okay?”

  “No problem,” Hannah said.

  Will wasn’t so sure. Before they ran their first play, he watched her move to the side, take off her helmet, give her hair a shake, put the helmet on her hip. No expression on her face. But when the play was over, a simple buttonhook to Toby, and Will looked over at her again, he saw her staring straight at him.

  Like he’d done something.

  When practice was over, Hannah waited until she could get Will alone. On the field, Chris and Toby were doing some extra work, Toby running different pass patterns, even some from the outside, Chris mostly trying to see if his arm could keep up with Toby’s speed.

  “You promised,” Hannah said.

  Before he could answer her, she turned and jogged toward where her dad was waiting for her, her words hanging in the air like one of her punts.

  CHAPTER 22

  From the start of Saturday’s game against Cannondale, you could see that Toby Keenan was back in football in a big way.

  For the Bulldogs that wasn’t just good news, it was great news, on both sides of the ball.

  That’s what you could see. What you could hear was that his dad was back, too.

  Bad news.

  Dick Keenan didn’t start in right away; the first time Will really became aware of him was early in the second quarter, when Chris tried to throw Toby an underneath pass on Go-7-Go, both Hannah and Johnny having taken off down the field ahead of him on fly patterns.

  By then, it was 14–0 for the Bulldogs, Will having scored one touchdown on a thirty-two-yard run the first time they had the ball. Toby had scored the other on what Will thought was a pretty amazing catch, going up between a safety and a linebacker and coming down with the ball in the back of the end zone, managing to keep two feet inbounds.

  “What’s the next step up from monster?” Tim said.

  “Him,” Will said.

  But now on what looked like a much simpler catch, Toby got hit from the side just as the ball arrived, the Cannondale middle linebacker timing his hit perfectly and knocking the ball loose.

  First ball he hadn’t caught in his first game back. Toby was still playing like he’d practiced, like he’d never been away.

  “Concentrate!”

  Toby’s dad.

  “You think they’re gonna just go home because you made a couple of plays on them?”

  Will looked over to the bleachers, Toby’s dad back at his old perch, last row. Nobody close to him.

  “You go over the middle, you gotta expect to be hit. Protect the stinkin’ ball!”

  Will knew Toby was hearing this, the way everybody else at Shea was. Will’s dad had always said that you couldn’t have what he called “rabbit ears” in sports, that you couldn’t waste your time listening to what the other players were saying or the people in the stands.

  But how could you not have rabbit ears when it was your own dad?

  Toby, to his credit, didn’t let it show, didn’t let on that his dad was yelling at him this way. He’d known it was coming if he came back and now here it was, first time he screwed up.

  Three plays later, Chris threw him the same pass. Toby got hit again. This time he held on to the ball. Not only did he hold on, he turned upfield, proceeded to run over three Cannondale tacklers on his way to a sixty-five-yard scoring play, knocking them over like they were orange cones at practice.

  “Well,” Will said to Tim after Hannah kicked the point, “now we know what happens when you make the big guy mad.”

  Tim was running alongside Will to where Hannah would kick off. “But what must it be like to go through life with that in your ear?”

  “And in your face,” Will said.

  By halftime it was 28–7. Over the rest of the second quarter, Toby’s dad was still the loudest voice in the stands, by far. He didn’t always criticize, but when Toby would get another sack or make another open-field tackle or make another catch, the best he could hope to hear was this:

  “That’s more like it.”

  Or:

  “That’s the way I taught you.”

  Like somehow he was the one out on the field. Will found himself wondering if that was the problem, that he wasn’t out there anymore. And wondering something else: if on Dick Keenan’s best day he was even half the player that his son was.

  The Cannondale quarterback looked around before every snap, making sure he knew where Toby was. Joe Tyler tried to make it hard for the poor kid, moving Toby around, putting him in a three-point stance on the line sometimes, dropping him back into coverage, blitzing him every chance he got.

  At halftime Will said to Toby, “Dude, you were awesome out there.”

  Toby said, “It’ll be better in the second half.”

  “I don’t know how you could play much better.”

  “No,” Toby said, “my dad’s gone. He has to do some tree work today.”

  “You just keep doing what you’re doing,” Will said.

  Toby pushed back his helmet, gave Will a long look. He started to say something, stopped, finally said, “I’ll try.”

  Will knew he had to have way more than a hundred rushing yards at half. Just having another threat like Toby on the field made things so much easier for him, didn’t allow Cannondale to load up the box the way most teams did against the Bulldogs. When they did, Chris would fake the ball to Will and throw it to Toby.

  Toby wasn’t doing it alone on defense, either. Just by showing up, getting in there at linebacker next to Matt, backing up Jeremiah and Ernie and Wes and Jake in the D line, he was doing what big players—and not just big in size—were supposed to do in sports:

  Make everybody around them better.

  And he was helping in another way: giving the other Bulldogs a chance to take a few plays off. Joe Tyler picked his spots resting people, but even getting short breathers seemed to help by the time they got to the second half.

  When Will scored his third touchdown of the day; it was 35–13. After that, Chris started handing the ball to Gerry Dennis when the Bulldogs
were on offense. In the fourth quarter, Will’s dad switched Will out to wide receiver and put Tim in the backfield, letting him have five or six carries on their last drive.

  After Tim broke off a ten-yard run, he came back into the huddle and said to Will, “Look at me, I’ve turned into you!”

  “I don’t recall ever playing and doing play-by-play at the same time,” Will said.

  “So sad,” Tim said, “a hater even as we’re getting our first win.”

  It stayed at 35–13. On this day, the Bulldogs could have scored more, run up the score if they’d wanted to. But Will’s dad wasn’t that kind of coach. He knew they were never going to be that kind of team.

  As Will watched the last seconds tick off the clock, took one last look at the final score, he felt himself smiling. This time he felt himself flying even though he was standing still.

  They were on the board.

  CHAPTER 23

  Little by little, Will saw his dad loving football again.

  He wasn’t sure if his dad would ever come out and say that, or if he was even thinking about it that way. But Will knew what he was seeing.

  Joe Tyler still came home tired—and limping—after work. Still had to stretch out on the couch or on his bed if it had been a day when he’d been delivering the mail on foot instead of from the truck. Will had asked his dad one time why he wasn’t always in the truck and his dad said that the rest of the guys alternated between walking and riding, and he wasn’t going to ask for any special favors.

  But when it was time to go to practice, it was like he’d turned into a different guy. A new man almost. Limping sometimes, but never looking tired.

  Joe Tyler even knew how to get on guys, with humor, never with shouting. He’d promised Will he wasn’t going to be that kind of coach and had kept his promise. It seemed more important than ever now that Toby Keenan was on the team.

  And his dad knew how to praise guys, at practice and at games, without ever overdoing it, so that the words meant something.

  In a way, Will thought, it was the same with his dad as it was with Toby:

  All the football he’d carried inside him was coming out again.