by Tim Green
Troy spun around.
Standing there with his thick arms folded across his chest and a tough-looking grin on his face was Seth Halloway.
CHAPTER FIFTY
BACK BY THE TRUCK, Troy could see his mom, shading her eyes from the sun, watching.
“Real nice,” Coach Renfro said in disgust, “but we already made our decision. Come on, Jamie.”
Jamie got up and followed his dad to the parking lot. The three assistant coaches looked at one another.
“You guys will have to help me a little,” Seth said. He knelt down and dug Coach Renfro’s whistle out of the grass, then dusted it off and made a little chirp. “But I kinda know what I’m doing and I know we got a good line—”
Seth winked at Nathan.
“—the best kicker in the league—”
He winked at Tate.
“—and one heck of a quarterback.”
Seth angled his head toward Troy. The fathers grinned at Seth and, one after another, stepped forward to shake his hand.
“So,” Seth said, giving the whistle a blast. “Let’s line up and run some plays.”
The Tigers jumped up, and Seth walked out onto the field to set a ball down on a line. He told the first-string offense to line up and asked one of the dads to put a defense across from them.
“The thing you want to do when you’re sizing up an offense,” Seth said, speaking in a voice that rang out across the grassy field, “is know how deep you can go with your passing game. Who’s the fastest receiver we got?”
Rusty Howell raised his hand.
“So let’s throw one deep,” Seth said. “Rusty, you just go as fast and as far as you can. Troy, you let it fly. Now, I want the defense to put a rush on, ’cause I don’t want Troy to be able to stand back there all day. Okay, on two, let me see it.”
Troy shook the feeling into his arms and put his mouthpiece in. He slapped his own leg to make sure it was all real, then he stepped up to the center, glancing out at Rusty Howell, who gave him a thumbs-up and a grin. On the sideline behind Rusty, Troy’s mom waved.
“Down!” Troy roared, beginning the snap count. “Set! Hut! Hut!”
The ball snapped up into his hands and he dropped back seven steps. Rusty took off in a blur. Ten yards.
The defense began to close in, pushing Troy’s linemen back toward him.
Twenty.
Rusty looked back and held one hand up high. Troy had the ball up by his ear, cradled in both his hands like a pro.
Thirty.
He’d never thrown it farther than thirty-eight yards, and that was when he was raving mad.
Forty.
He cocked his arm. There was no rage fueling him now. It was something else, a blinding energy he never knew he had.
Forty-five.
He snapped his hips, rotating his entire body, funneling that energy up through his arm and out through the very tips of his fingers, rocketing the ball into the air.
The whole team turned their heads to watch. They saw it spin. They heard the laces whistling and the slap of the ball when it smacked down into Rusty’s outstretched hands, and Troy heard them gasp.
Troy stood limp, empty now, as if it weren’t really him who’d thrown such a pass.
The only thing left was his smile.
I AM GRATEFUL TO THE NFL for the use of the Atlanta Falcons name. Because I played for the team, this means a lot to me. However, FOOTBALL GENIUS is a work of fiction and the events and characters in this book, other than those football players mentioned who are public figures, have come from my imagination.
I would like to thank my agent, friend, and adviser, Esther Newberg, for bringing me the idea to write this book. Also, I couldn’t have done it without the fabulous editing and enthusiasm provided by Barbara Lalicki and her team, especially Laura Arnold. Nor could I have done this without the valuable input from my son, Troy, and my daughter, Tate, and her teacher, Mary Arnott, who allowed me to test market the book by reading it aloud to her class as I wrote. Young readers Colin Fitzsimmons, Sam Morkal-Williams, and Jake Feerick also provided helpful input.
I would also like to thank art director David Caplan and designer Joel Tippie for the touchdown they scored with the design of this book and its cover, as well as my old friend and photographer, Jimmy Cribb.
A special thanks to my good friend Arthur Blank, and his wife, Stephanie, who generously allowed me to use his team, the real Falcons, as the backdrop for this story and for welcoming me into the Falcons family as if I were a current player.
Welcome to the NFL
I AM GRATEFUL TO THE NFL for the use of the Atlanta Falcons name. Because I played for the team, this means a lot to me. However, FOOTBALL GENIUS is a work of fiction and the events and characters in this book, other than those football players mentioned who are public figures, have come from my imagination.
I would like to thank my agent, friend, and adviser, Esther Newberg, for bringing me the idea to write this book. Also, I couldn’t have done it without the fabulous editing and enthusiasm provided by Barbara Lalicki and her team, especially Laura Arnold. Nor could I have done this without the valuable input from my son, Troy, and my daughter, Tate, and her teacher, Mary Arnott, who allowed me to test market the book by reading it aloud to her class as I wrote. Young readers Colin Fitzsimmons, Sam Morkal-Williams, and Jake Feerick also provided helpful input.
I would also like to thank art director David Caplan and designer Joel Tippie for the touchdown they scored with the design of this book and its cover, as well as my old friend and photographer, Jimmy Cribb.
A special thanks to my good friend Arthur Blank, and his wife, Stephanie, who generously allowed me to use his team, the real Falcons, as the backdrop for this story and for welcoming me into the Falcons family as if I were a current player.
Excerpt from Football Hero
Chapter One
TURNING TWELVE DIDN’T MATTER to Ty. Birthdays, like Christmas and every other holiday, had lost their thrill. Most of the day had already passed without anything special happening and Ty didn’t expect that to change. He knew the surprise his aunt and uncle had promised him wouldn’t amount to much more than a pair of underwear or a new ax for splitting wood, maybe a blanket. Surprises had a place in his other life, the one before his parents died.
But when Ty grabbed the handrail and stepped up into the school bus, he was surprised when someone yanked him back to earth and spun him around.
“Why weren’t you in gym class?”
Coach V had a voice like a growling Doberman, and he scowled down at Ty without easing the stranglehold on his upper arm. Ty’s face overheated. He swallowed and looked around. The bus at the front of the line hissed and roared, grinding gears and filling the air with a cloud of diesel fumes.
“I was in Mrs. Brennan’s office,” Ty said, looking down at the broken line of the curb. Mrs. Brennan was the school psychologist.
The coach ran a hand over the bristles of his dark hair, and his face softened a bit.
“You’re not in trouble?” he asked softly.
Ty looked at his blue no-name sneakers and shook his head. “For the accident.”
“Does she help?” the coach asked, still soft.
Ty knew that when adults asked questions, they already had the answer they wanted in mind. The right answer wasn’t that the death of his mom and dad had left a hole in his heart too big to be helped. The right answer was yes, and that’s what he said.
Coach V nodded and turned his big, sharp nose in the direction of the bus, eyes hiding behind the kind of mirror sunglasses that cops usually wore, the kind that reminded Ty of a housefly.
“We got spring football today,” the coach said, turning the insect eyes back at Ty so that he could see two dark-haired boys with glasses staring back in their mirrors. “You interested?”
“Spring football?” Ty asked, blinking and pushing his own glasses back up to the top of his nose.
“It’s a club, just for o
ne week,” Coach V said. “It lets me get the team together to see where we’re at. They didn’t have spring football in your old school?”
“I went to Tully. There’s no football until you get to high school.”
“Small town, huh?”
Ty jumped when his bus driver blared her horn and bellowed out at him, “Let’s go!”
“There’s a sports bus at five,” the coach said.
“You think I could play?” Ty asked.
The coach looked up at the bus driver with a twisted smile and pumped his thumb toward the exit.
“Go ahead, I got him,” he said to the driver.
The door slammed shut, and the bus growled away, unleashing the long line of waiting buses to do the same. Ty couldn’t hear the coach’s words over their roar until they reached the top steps of the school.
“I’m sorry,” Ty said. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Of course I want you to play,” the coach said.
“You’re the fastest kid in sixth grade and I need some deep speed for my passing game.”
“I’m not too skinny?” Ty said, glancing down at his thin legs.
“Deion Sanders was skinny, but if you’re the fastest man on the planet it doesn’t matter.”
“Who’s Deion Sanders?”
Coach V stopped and looked at him, then shook his head and said, “You’re too young.”
Ty swung the old pillowcase his aunt made him use for a book bag over his shoulder and hustled to keep up. “My older brother plays football.”
“Great,” the coach said. He swung open the locker room door and banged his palm on one of the old metal lockers. “Get your gym clothes on and get outside.”
“At Syracuse,” Ty said, setting his pillowcase full of books down on the scarred wooden bench.
Coach V froze and whipped off his sunglasses as he spun around.
“Not Tiger Lewis?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The Tiger Lewis? That’s your brother?”
“His real name is Thane. They just call him Tiger.”
“How come you never said?”
Ty shrugged and searched for the right answer.
In truth, he kept his older brother a secret because he already got picked on enough for being the new kid at school. Picked on for reading all the time, his glasses, the musty pillowcase he used to carry his books, his canvas grocery-store sneakers, and his skinny legs. He imagined that if he claimed Tiger Lewis for his brother, the kids would either refuse to believe him or they would point out how pitiful he was compared to his all-American brother, the football hero.
In truth, it sometimes seemed to Ty that he only imagined Tiger Lewis was his brother. The two of them were so far apart in age—ten years—that they really didn’t know each other that well. Ty had been eight when Thane went off to college. Since then, he only got to see his older brother on holidays or family vacations. Two weeks every summer their mom and dad used to take them camping, once in July, once in August. The memory of those times flashed in his mind, like dreams—being out in a small boat, just him and Thane, or climbing a rocky mountain trail, Thane reaching down to help him, the veins protruding from his muscular forearms.
When they were together, Thane, or Tiger, as everyone called him now, would share his knowledge with Ty. He’d tell stories with lessons and say that he wanted Ty to learn from the mistakes he’d already made. Thane’s nuggets of wisdom would come back to Ty at random moments, crashing through his consciousness like a loud commercial in the middle of a television program. When they did, Ty would lose himself for a moment as if in a trance. One of those memories came back to him now.
He and Thane stood on the bare face of a massive rock atop Bald Mountain in the middle of the Adirondacks, waiting for their parents to catch up. Clouds floated by in their blue field. Lakes glittered below, gems nestled into the pine trees. A warm breeze cooled the sweat on their faces, and the scent of balsam floated by. They had been talking about a book Thane gave him where a boy raised by a witch got picked on. Thane said he knew what that boy felt like.
“No one ever picked on you,” Ty had said.
“That what you think?” Thane asked him, squinting his eyes into the sun and pointing to a golden eagle.
“Look at you,” Ty said. “You’d kill anyone who picked on you.”
“Think again,” Thane said, glancing at him. “I got like this lifting weights. I had legs skinnier than you, glasses, zits on my face, always reading books. Yeah, they got me. Dumped my books. Gum on my chair. All that.”
“What happened?” Ty asked.
Thane shrugged and said, “Then I found the game.”
“Football?”
“There’s only one,” Thane said.
“Hey,” Coach V said, shaking Ty by the shoulder. “You okay?”
“Huh?” Ty said.
Coach V wrinkled his brow, raised one eyebrow, and pointed toward the door. “You do that on the field and you’ll get your clock cleaned. Hurry up.”
Coach V turned without waiting and banged open the locker room door, disappearing into the warm afternoon sunlight.
Ty flung open his locker and tore off his clothes. He threw on his gym shirt and shorts, stiff and ripe from two-day-old dried sweat. One of the other things he remembered Thane telling him was to tie his shoes tight before any contest.
“Easy to remember,” Thane said one day, before all the bad things happened. “That’s your name. Don’t forget to tie, Ty.”
Ty put his left foot on the bench and bent over, pulling the laces snug and retying the sneaker so that it hugged his foot. He switched feet, but when he tugged on the ratty gray laces of his right shoe, one snapped off down at the eye hole. It would take several minutes to relace the sneaker. Ty began, but the whistle sounded outside and he sprang up and sprinted through the door with a loose shoe, exactly what his brother had warned him to never do.
Excerpt from Baseball Great
Chapter One
JOSH WONDERED WHY EVERY time something really good happened, something else had to spoil it. It had been like this since he could remember, like biting into a ruby red apple only to find a brown worm crawling through the crisp, white fruit. For the first time since he’d moved to his new neighborhood, he had been recognized, and his unusual talent had been appreciated. So why was it that that same fame had kicked up the muddy rumor that got a high school kid looking to bash his teeth in?
For the moment, though, riding the school bus, he was safe. The school newspaper in Josh’s backpack filled his whole body with an electric current of joy and pride, so much so that his cheeks burned. He sat alone in the very front seat and kept his eyes ahead, ignoring the stares and whispers as the other kids got off at the earlier stops. When Jaden Neidermeyer, the new girl from Texas who’d written the article, got off at her stop, Josh stared hard at his sneakers. He just couldn’t look.
After she left, he glanced around and carefully parted the lips of his backpack’s zipper. Without removing the newspaper, he stole another glance at the headline, BASEBALL GREAT, and the picture of him with a bat and the caption underneath: “Grant Middle’s best hope for its first-ever citywide championship, Josh LeBlanc.”
The bus ground to a halt at his stop and Josh got off.
As the bus rumbled away, Josh saw Bart Wilson standing on the next corner. The tenth grader pitched his cigarette into the gutter and started toward him with long strides. Josh gasped, turned, and ran without looking back. A car blared its horn. Brakes squealed. Josh leaped back, his heart galloping fast, like the tenth grader now heading his way, even faster. Josh circled the car—the driver yelling at him through the window—and dashed across the street and down the far sidewalk.
He rounded the corner at Murphy’s bar and sprinted up the block, ducking behind a wrecked station wagon at Calhoon’s Body Shop, peeking through the broken web of glass back toward the corner. Breathing hard, he slipped the straps of the backpack he carried around his should
ers and fastened it tight. Two men in hooded sweatshirts and jeans jackets burst out of Murphy’s and got into a pickup truck; otherwise, Josh saw no one. Still, he scooted up the side street, checking behind him and dodging from one parked car to another for cover.
When he saw his home, a narrow, red two-story place with a steep roof and a sagging front porch, he breathed deep, and his heart began to slow. The previous owner had three pit bulls, and so a chain-link fence surrounded the house and its tiny front and back lawns, separating them from the close-packed neighbors on either side. The driveway ran tight to the house, and like the single, detached garage, it was just outside the fence. Josh lifted the latch, but as he pulled open the front gate, a hand appeared from nowhere, slamming it shut. The latch clanked home, and the hand spun Josh around.
“What you running from?” asked Bart Wilson, the tenth-grade smoker.
Excerpt from Football Champ
Chapter One
TROY KNEW BETTER THAN to push the NFL coach aside and signal the play himself for everyone to see. Troy was a secret. The Falcons were winning, 17–13, but the Bears had the ball on the Falcons’ five-yard line, and there was time for one last play. If the Falcons’ defense held, the game would be over and the team’s run at the playoffs would be real.
“You’re sure?” the coach asked, pain in his eyes as the smoke from his breath drifted skyward in the cold Chicago air.
The Bears’ offense broke the huddle and started for the line. Seth Halloway, the Falcons’ star linebacker, waved his hands to Troy and the coach, frantic for a defensive play.
“Yes,” Troy said impatiently. “They’re going to run the slant.”
He knew adults doubted twelve-year-olds, anyway. His calls had been good enough in the last three games for the Falcons to end a losing streak and beat the Raiders, Tampa Bay, and New Orleans. Troy stared hard into the defensive coordinator’s eyes until the older man blinked, turned, and signaled in Troy’s play.