Game Changers

by Mike Lupica

  Lily smiled. “Well, at least the best son won.”

  “Aw, man,” Coop said, “I wish I’d said that.”

  Sam still wasn’t done.

  “Coaches always tell you that they’re gonna play the best guys,” Sam said. Really dug in now. “And that’s gonna be true this season for every position on the field except the most important one. Everybody saw what you did all week except the guy who should have seen. Shawn’s dad.”

  Ben wanted to change the subject, but he knew Sam Brown was right, that Sam was just putting words to what they all knew was true. Ben more than anybody.

  “I did think I could do something to get his attention. Coach’s, I mean. I felt like every night, I made a couple of plays that should have gotten his attention. But he’d already made up his mind.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said, “the day Shawn was born.”

  Lily pointed at Sam now.

  “You do need to let this go,” she said to him. “Because if you don’t, Ben never will.”

  Turning and looking right at Ben now. Or right through him, sometimes it was hard to tell.

  “You’re the guy who’s always telling me that size doesn’t matter in sports,” she said to Ben. “That when you’re playing a game you always believe you’re as big as anybody in it. I mean, you are still that guy, right?”

  He nodded.

  “So now you gotta be big enough to handle this. So you don’t get to play quarterback this season. Boo hoo. Stop acting like somebody stole your bike.”

  Ben felt a smile coming on him that he couldn’t have stopped if he tried. But then Lily had a way of making that happen. A lot.

  “It kills me to admit this,” he said, “but you’re right.”

  “Duh,” Lily said.

  She turned to Sam. “Are we good on this?”

  “No,” he said. Just because he was Sam. “I might stop talking about him being the best QB we’ve got. But even you can’t make me stop thinking it.”

  Sometimes Ben thought Sam was the only one of the three guys in the Core Four not afraid of Lily Wyatt.

  “Fair enough,” she said.

  They heard Ben’s mom calling from the other side of the street, wanting a head count on how many members of the Core Four would be staying for lunch today. Ben told her all of them.

  Then he picked up the ball lying next to him, stood up, said to Sam, “Go long.”

  Sam did, flying toward the playground at the other end of the park, Ben letting the ball go and watching Sam run under it at full speed, catching it with his arms stretched out as far as they would go, finally having to dodge one of the swings at the last second like it was a tackler trying to bring him down in the open field.

  Not a perfect spiral. Close enough.

  This time Ben really had thrown it as far as he could.

  “Now that’s a stinkin’ arm,” Coop said, staring down the field to where Sam was standing with the ball.

  “No, that was me doing what Lily told me to do,” Ben said.

  “Which is?”

  “Letting it go.”

  Ben told his parents at dinner that night what Lily had said to him, told them he was through feeling sorry for himself, and that his new goal was to be the most valuable player on the team wherever Coach O’Brien wanted to line him up.

  Beth McBain said, “It’s probably silly of me to even mention this. But, um, haven’t your dad and I been pretty much giving you the same advice? You’re starting to make me question my ability as a salesperson.”

  Ben’s mom had gotten her real estate license six months ago and gotten a job with a company in town, still managing to work out her schedule so that she was home every day by the time Ben got out of school. Jeff McBain ran the Rockwell YMCA.

  “Maybe it’s the same as when you’ve got two people trying to sell the same house,” Ben’s dad said, smiling at his wife. “Maybe Lily’s presentation was just better.”

  She said, “This is such a witty family. Really, it’s almost like living with the Simpsons.”

  “Mom,” Ben said, “it’s not that I don’t hear you guys. But you know that sometimes when stuff comes from one of your friends, it makes more sense to you. Or maybe I’m just plain old afraid to cross Lily.”

  “There is that,” his dad said.

  “So you’re good now?” his mom said.

  “Yep.”

  “Lily’s a genius,” Beth McBain said.

  Ben groaned. “Please don’t say that in front of her.”

  He knew he had said all the right things to his parents. And to Lily and Sam and Coop. And Ben had meant them.

  But there was one more thing he had to do before he let go of his dream of being a quarterback for another season.

  So he went upstairs to his room and closed the door and fired up his laptop and went to his Bookmarks and found the video of Doug Flutie making his throw one more time.

  Ben only knew about Doug Flutie because his dad had played on the same team with Flutie at Boston College. So Ben knew that Flutie had won the Heisman Trophy his senior year, knew he was really only 5-9 even though they sometimes listed him as being taller.

  Jeff McBain had graduated the same year as Flutie, which meant that he was on the field at the Orange Bowl the day the smallest guy on the field and one of the smallest to ever win a Heisman Trophy had thrown the most famous pass in college football history.

  It was the day after Thanksgiving in 1984, Boston College against Miami on national television. Miami, which had won the national championship the year before, which had a star quarterback of its own in Bernie Kosar, had finally gone ahead 45–41 in the last minute of what had been a crazy game.

  “You kept telling yourself all day that the last team with the ball was going to win,” Ben’s dad had said the first time he ever showed him the last few minutes of that game. “But then Bernie got them their last score and we had the ball on their forty-eight-yard line with just six seconds left, and I thought I was wrong. I thought Miami was going to win.”

  He had smiled then, at what Ben was about to see. “But Doug didn’t.”

  By now, about to watch it again, Ben knew that the play was called “Flood Tip.” From all the reading up on the game that Ben had done, he knew Doug Flutie wanted to hold on to the ball as long as he could, so that his receivers had a chance to get to the end zone.

  Ben watched it now on his laptop screen. Watched Flutie drop back and scramble to his right.

  This was from a show about the game and the throw that ESPN had done one time, and on the screen now Ben saw Flutie saying, “I got to the corner and let it rip.”

  He threw the ball more than sixty yards because he could, because even at 5-9 he had a huge arm. He threw it high and far down the middle of the field and unless you knew it was a completion, that the ball had ended up in the hands of Flutie’s roommate and best bud Gerard Phelan — Like I threw it to Sam, Ben thought — you wouldn’t have been sure right away that it was a completion. Even the announcers on the game that day weren’t sure right away.

  But it was a completion. Flutie had done the impossible. BC had won that game.

  Ben watched him now, Flutie running and jumping down the field like he really was a little kid, then finally being lifted into the air by his teammates.

  On the screen now, Bernie Kosar, who’d watched the play from his sideline the way Jeff McBain watched it from his, said, “The guy was a winner.”

  The screen went to black then. Ben thought about watching it again, he never got tired of watching it, watching the impossible become possible in front of his eyes. Watching a guy who’d become his favorite football player ever even though he’d never seen him play live. It was why he always wore No. 22 and asked for it again this season, because it had been Doug Flutie’s number in college.

  But Ben had decided that he wasn’t going to watch the play again until the season was over. The play was about a quarterback, and he wasn’t one, except in his own mind, and heart. F
or now, it hurt too much to watch Doug Flutie make the kind of play Ben dreamed about making someday on a football field.

  It didn’t just hurt. It made him mad. He knew Lily was right, that he had to let this go. But Sam was more right:

  The best guys were supposed to play in sports. And Ben knew — in his mind, in his heart — that he was the best guy to play quarterback, no matter what the coach said, that he was the one who would give their team its best chance to win.

  He closed his laptop.

  Trying to convince himself there was more than one way to be a winner in football.

  At the end of their first official practice for the Rockwell Rams on Monday night, Coach O’Brien came over to Ben and said they needed to have a talk.

  The two of them walked to the back of the far end zone. When they got there, Coach said, “Step into my office.”

  Ben took off his helmet. “In the movies, this is when the coach tells the guy he’s been cut.”

  “If I ever tried to cut you, the people who hired me would have to turn around and fire me,” Coach O’Brien said. “You’re too good. And I need you too much.”

  “Thanks.”

  He’d had a great first practice, two big runs out of the backfield, returning a punt for a touchdown at the very end when Coach had them work on special teams. Something else hadn’t changed from last season to this one: Ben and Sam were still the two fastest guys on the team.

  “Listen,” Coach said, “I know you want to play quarterback.”

  Just coming right out with it.

  Ben looked up at him. Way up. Matt O’Brien was 6-4. He knew because he’d checked it out on the Internet, just out of curiosity.

  Ben waited.

  “I saw how hard you went after it last week, how much you wanted it,” Coach said. “I saw what kind of arm you’ve got on you. The only one here who’s got a bigger arm is my own kid.”

  It sounded like one of those good news–bad news deals to Ben, so he just said “Thanks” again.

  Coach said, “I didn’t need a whole week to see you’ve got as much heart as you do talent for this game, despite your lack of size. I can see how tough you are, the way you get right back up no matter how hard you get knocked down. If you’re tough enough to do that, you’re tough enough to get straight talk from me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Shawn’s a better quarterback than you are,” he said.

  Ben thought to himself: Not like he’s sugercoating it.

  Coach kept going. “He’s not the player he’s going to be someday, because someday he’s going to be an even better player than I was. The things he’s got, the size and the arm strength, you can’t teach those things. And when he gets hot, man oh man, you can see how much potential he really has. I’m not just saying it’s because he is bigger than you. I just believe he’ll be able to help us more at his natural position. And you’re going to help us everywhere else.”

  All Ben heard at the end was “his natural position.” Like he’d been born with it.

  Coach paused.

  “It’s important to me that you know this isn’t just because he’s my son,” Coach O’Brien said. “That wouldn’t be fair to him and it wouldn’t be fair to anybody else. He’s just a born quarterback.”

  Ben wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince in that moment. Sometimes his parents were like this, analyzing things to death until you wanted to shout, I get it!

  “Listen, I know he’s wound up a little too tight on the field sometimes,” Coach said. “I know sometimes he’s trying too hard to make the perfect play or the perfect pass. But that’s what great ones do. They put the most pressure on themselves. I always did.”

  Ben wasn’t sure how he was supposed to respond to any of this. Or even if he was supposed to respond at all. So he just said, “Coach, you don’t have to explain anything to me, I’ve got no complaints.”

  “I could call you a backup QB, but I don’t want you to think of yourself as a backup anything,” Coach said. “Because you’re too valuable doing everything you’re gonna do to help us win games.”

  The words came out of Ben’s mouth before he could stop them. “But if you ever did have to put me in,” he said, “you could. I know where everybody’s supposed to be on every play.”

  He did.

  He always did.

  “Great,” Coach O’Brien said.

  To Ben, it felt as if he’d just been patted on the head.

  Coach said, “Even last year, Shawn told me that having you is like having an assistant coach on the field. So, definitely, in an emergency, I could throw you out there. But one of my big things is that the leader of the team needs to be on the field. I saw that when I was backing up Peyton Manning in Indy. Guy never missed a down.”

  Ben nodded. Coach O’Brien got down on one knee now, put his hands on Ben’s shoulders. “I need you to be great for me this season,” he said. “I need you and Shawn needs you. He said that if I try to take you out of the game for more than a couple of plays at a time, he’ll fire me.”

  “Like I said, Coach, I’ve got no complaints.”

  Coach stood up, groaning as he did, saying that once your knees go, they don’t come back. Then he put out his hand. Ben shook it. Ben found himself wishing that he didn’t like this coach.

  But he did.

  Coach O’Brien said, “Anything else you need from me?”

  “Just the ball,” Ben said.

  It had been complicated between Ben and Shawn from the time they started playing together last season, even before Shawn’s dad had started coaching the team.

  There were no huge problems between them, even if Ben didn’t always like the way Shawn acted on the field. There were other guys he wanted to tell to dial it down a notch once in a while when they got too excited after a good play or started acting crazy after a bad one. And there were other guys on the team who sometimes looked like blamers when something would go wrong. All part of being on a team. They all had the same goal — win the game — but they were all different.

  Still: A year after Shawn had moved to town, Ben felt as if they really didn’t know each other, almost like Shawn didn’t care whether he got to know his teammates or not.

  Shawn’s dad wanted him to be a team leader, but as far as Ben could tell, he was anything but. Ben wanted him to be a leader, wanted him to act like a better teammate and a better guy. Wanted him to be the kind of player who made the other players better, because Ben thought that’s what a quarterback should do.

  He just wasn’t sure how to do something about it. Or if it was his place to do something about it. If his own father couldn’t get him to act like more of a team guy, how could one of his teammates?

  And this was about more than Shawn having the job Ben wanted. At least Ben hoped it was.

  Once the games started last season, they actually got along fine. Ben knew it wasn’t like that with other guys on the team, but he never tried to big-time Ben, not once. In fact, over the last half of the season, when their team won five straight games and just missed going to the championship of the Bantam Division — the two teams with the best record getting to play for the championship — it was Shawn who went to Coach Bucci and told him Ben should be running the ball more and he, Shawn, should be throwing it less, now that his hot streaks were coming less and less frequently, when he was missing a lot more throws than he was making.

  Shawn was still the one who got under center and called the signals. But when they got hot at the end of the year, made their run, he seemed happy to call Ben’s signal as often as possible.

  Suddenly being a better teammate than he had been all season.

  In their last game, when they were coming from behind against Harlan, Shawn even did something he’d hardly done at all during the season, changed the play that Coach Bucci had sent in, calling for a short pass to Ben instead of a long one to Sam down the field.

  “My call,” he’d said to Ben at the time. “Your ball.”r />
  Coach didn’t mind, as it turned out, Ben catching the ball in the backfield and running thirty yards to the end zone and Rockwell winning the game because he did. Afterward, he actually thought it was pretty cool, Shawn stepping out of the way when he could have looked like the star, pretty much tossing the ball and the game Ben’s way. Fine with Ben. He always wanted the ball, in any sport he was playing. It was why he liked pitching and why he liked being a point guard.

  Why he dreamed about being a QB someday. Someday and somehow.

  He wanted to be the one controlling the action in all ways, same as he did when he had the controls of a video game in his hand.

  It was different with Shawn. Sometimes Ben thought that the real problem between Shawn and him, the thing keeping them from being friends, wasn’t the position Shawn O’Brien played, it was that he just didn’t seem to flat-out love football the way Ben did. That football was almost like an after-school job to him. It was one more thing about him that Ben didn’t understand, almost made him angry sometimes, Shawn not seeming to appreciate having a job Ben wanted so badly.

  It was why Ben finally decided to suck it up and somehow get to know Shawn better this season.

  Before practice on Saturday morning, at the end of the second week, Ben told his mom he had to at least try to be friends with Shawn, mostly because it was the kind of thing you talked to your mom about.

  She said, “Let me ask you this: What do the two of you usually talk about, when you do talk?”

  “Football.”

  “Just football?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Beth McBain laughed. “Men. I gave up asking your father, bless his heart, what he and the other guys in his foursome talked about when they played golf, because the answer was always the same.”

  Ben grinned. “Football?” he said.

  “Golf!” she said.

  “Boy,” Ben said, “I didn’t see that coming.”

  His mom said, “Listen, the only way for you to find out about this boy is to talk to him about something more than what you guys are playing on third down.”

  “What kind of play we’re running, Mom. Not playing.”