Football Genius (2007) Read online

  “Too bad your team’s gonna get pounded on Sunday,” he said, his breath reeking from Doritos.

  Jamie didn’t always live in Atlanta. He moved there when he was ten years old. Before that, his dad worked in Dallas, so he and his dad were Cowboys fans. The Falcons’ opening game was that coming Sunday. They were playing the Cowboys.

  “Wanna bet?” Troy said.

  “Sure. If that crummy team of your mom’s wins, I’ll give you my White Shoes ball, and when they lose, you can give me that football your mom stole,” Jamie said, laughing.

  Troy felt his face go hot. He stood up so fast that the legs of his chair made a squeaking sound on the floor.

  “My mom didn’t steal anything,” Troy said, glaring up at Jamie, his hands balled into fists.

  Mr. Squires, the lunch monitor, was making his way toward them through the tables. He raised his voice and said, “Hey, you two.”

  “Bet me, then,” Jamie said, holding out his hand and showing that mean smile of his.

  Troy slapped his hand into Jamie’s, gripping it as hard as he could. Jamie squeezed back, and his smile got even meaner.

  “Hey,” Mr. Squires said.

  Jamie let go and went back to his seat. When Troy sat back down, none of the guys would look at him. Everyone knew that the Falcons were seven-point underdogs.

  On the bus ride home, Troy, Nathan, and Tate agreed to drop off their things at home and meet on the tracks. Troy got there first. As he waited for his friends to make their way down the tracks, he walked back and forth, balancing on the rail. The Falcons football was under his arm.

  “I thought we were trading cards,” Nathan said when they arrived. He shook the shoe box he held in front of him.

  “We are,” Troy said, holding up the ball. “I gotta do this first. I’m putting it back.”

  “You wanna unload the hot goods,” Nathan said.

  “It’s not stolen,” Troy said, scowling. “I borrowed it.”

  “What about your bet?” Tate asked. “If you lose, you have to give it to Jamie.”

  “My mom will get me another ball,” Troy said.

  “You wanna wait until dark?” Nathan asked.

  “I just want to get it done,” Troy said. “Sneak through the bushes and throw it back onto his lawn.”

  Tate twirled the end of her ponytail and Nathan nodded. They followed him down the other side of the tracks toward the wall. As they got close, Troy held up his hand and his friends stopped.

  “Shh,” he said, tilting his head.

  “What?” Tate said in a hushed voice.

  “I don’t know,” Troy said. “Something’s different. I just feel it.”

  They crouched down in the weeds, and Troy crept toward the hole. When he parted the grass at the edge of the tree line, he saw what had happened. The hole in the wall had been filled in with concrete. He sniffed the air and could smell it. Troy looked up and down the length of the wall. There was no one in sight, and he eased across the open space.

  The concrete that had oozed through was damp, but already hard like the frosting on a week-old cake. He ran his fingers over the rough surface until he realized his friends were beside him. He slammed the football against the damp concrete and turned away, trudging back toward the tracks. By the time they reached his house, sweat was streaming down their faces.

  Troy took the ball and stuffed it back into the bottom of his equipment bag. After three big glasses of cold grape juice, they pushed the coffee table tight to the couch and spread their cards out on the living room rug. Troy started the trade, giving up two Tampa Bay defensive linemen for the Falcons safety Tate was reluctant to part with. Then he gave Nathan three Giants offensive linemen for the Falcons tight end.

  Tate looked over at Nathan with a gleam in her eye and tried to bite back her grin.

  “Man, you love those Falcons all of a sudden, huh?” she said, looking at Troy and staring pointedly at the special blue binder he used for storing his very best cards. “Like you’d trade anything to get the whole team, huh?”

  Troy looked down at the cards in his shoe box and raised his eyebrows, shrugging. Tate made him give up Brett Favre and Marvin Harrison for the Falcons kicker.

  “Nice friend you are,” he said, glaring at her as he slipped the cards out of his binder.

  “What?” she said, holding her hands out and up. “I like kickers. I’m a kicker.”

  Nathan insisted he was quite fond of the Falcons starting right tackle and wouldn’t take anything less than Brian Urlacher and Simeon Rice in return. By the time Tate and Nathan had to go for dinner, Troy had given away most of his good cards. He didn’t care, though. He had the entire Falcons starting lineup carefully arranged in the blue binder.

  “When they win the Super Bowl, you guys won’t laugh,” Troy said. “They take everyone when they go to the Super Bowl. That means my mom. I’ll probably get to go, and I’ll get all these signed. Imagine what that’ll be worth?”

  On the way out the door, Tate stopped and fished into her shoe box. She handed him back Brett Favre, smiled, and gave him a little salute.

  “I do like kickers, but Marvin Harrison was enough.”

  “You’re okay,” he said, winking. “For a girl.”

  “Hey,” she said, and they all laughed.

  Troy watched them through the screen door as they disappeared into the pines. He went and dug through his room, cleaning out anything that had something to do with another team. It meant the books on his shelf had to stand on their own without the help of his New England Patriots bookends. Even his Kurt Warner bobblehead went into the box of non-Falcons things.

  He carried the box out of his room with two hands and hoisted it up onto the top shelf of the hall closet. As he climbed down, he heard the VW pull into the bare spot out front. He ran to the front door and yanked open the screen, meeting his mom on the porch. He threw his arms around her, hugging her tight.

  “Wow,” she said.

  He stared up at her and asked, “Did you get it?”

  She put her arm around him, squeezing him as they went through the door. “Not yet.”

  “Aw, Mom.”

  “Troy,” she said, holding up a finger.

  “I know,” he said.

  “But I got this,” she said, digging into her purse and holding out a big red card coated in plastic.

  Troy took it, asking what it was and turning it over in his hands. Two words in bold print stood out: ALL ACCESS.

  “You want to go to the game Sunday?” she asked.

  “The Cowboys game? Mom, this isn’t a ticket.”

  “It’s better,” she said.

  “Better?”

  “It’s a field pass,” she said. “I met the owner, Mr. Langan. His son was at practice, and he and I got to talking about kids. I told him I had a son, too, crazy for football. Well, when he asked if you’d ever been to a Falcons game, I had to tell him the truth. And he gave me the pass.”

  Troy turned it over a few more times and said, “This gets me into the Dome?”

  “It gets you in and lets you go anywhere you want to go.”

  “Mom?”

  “Anywhere. With me, but that shouldn’t be too bad.”

  “The locker room?” he asked.

  “Anywhere,” she said.

  “The field?”

  “Anywhere.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HIS MOM HAD A parking pass for the garage where the players’ cars were. Big, shiny machines, glinting with chrome. Mercedes SUVs and sedans. Cadillac Escalades. Lexus coupes. Porsche convertibles. BMW roadsters. And out of them stepped men so big that Troy had to blink. Men with hands the size of holiday hams. Heads like buckets. Legs like tree trunks.

  Some were dressed in jeans and polo shirts and wore only wedding bands or no jewelry at all. Others wore fancy suits with colorful ties and alligator shoes to match. Their watches sparkled with hundreds of diamonds, as did the pendants hanging from their necks like Olympic medals, and
their rings looked like Christmas tree ornaments.

  Troy felt his mom walking beside him as they went through the garage and in the side door of the Dome, where they showed the guard at the desk their passes. Players flowed by, silent, with grim faces, on their way to the locker room. Josh Lock, the Falcons’ famous quarterback, walked in. He looked the same as he did on the Nike billboards. The same as he did in all those commercials.

  Troy felt his mouth fall open. He felt his mom’s hand on his arm. She tightened her grip. Troy stared and Josh looked at him, right at him. A white smile lit up the quarterback’s face, and he pressed his fist to Troy’s shoulder the way his gramps sometimes did.

  “Hey, my man,” he said, and went on past.

  Troy was numb.

  After a minute, he realized his mom was tugging at him. He looked up at her and grinned. Troy met his mom’s boss, a smiling woman named Cecilia Fetters who carried a walkie-talkie and a clipboard.

  “Just keep an eye on the handheld cameras,” Cecilia said to his mom, handing her a walkie-talkie. “They like to get inside the bench area. Tell them to leave if they do. Don’t be nice about it, either. I know I don’t know you that well, but I can tell, if anything, you’re too nice. Call me if you have any problems.”

  Then they were out on the sideline. Except for a handful of security people and ushers, the stands were empty. There were players scattered around on the field, stretching, tossing footballs back and forth, or just standing in small bunches, their voices floating up into the vast empty space. Most of them wore their football pants and shoes with sleeveless T-shirts. Their helmets and shoulder pads were still in the locker room.

  One tall player, dressed all in black in skintight pants and a T-shirt, was jogging around the edge of the field. Troy saw him cross the goal line and head up the Falcons’ sideline. As he got closer, Troy saw muscles on muscles. All the players were big and built well, but this one looked like a cartoon action figure, with a narrow waist and shoulders and arms as big as cannonballs. Troy moved closer and saw his face and felt a chill.

  It was Terrell Owens, the Cowboys’ brazen, loudmouthed star receiver. The man who played in the Super Bowl with an unhealed broken leg. The man whose jersey Jamie Renfro loved to wear. Owens’s mouth was set in a frown and the lids of his eyes were half shut. He went right past Troy without looking.

  Someone put his finger in Troy’s back and said, “Hey. Let me see your pass.”

  Troy held out the red card that his mom had attached to his belt loop and looked up at a man in a yellow windbreaker that said SECURITY. The man examined the pass, then pointed at a broken yellow line that looked like the white one you’d see in the middle of the road.

  “You stay behind the yellow line,” he said. “You can’t go inside that. Players and staff only.”

  The broken yellow line was ten feet outside the broad white border of the field, and it made a jog around the hundred-foot area where the players’ benches were.

  Troy jumped back outside the yellow line and said he was sorry. His mom was behind the rectangular bench area, talking to a man in a suit. Troy went and stood next to her, careful to keep well outside of the yellow line.

  As the game drew nearer, more and more people crowded into the sideline area outside the yellow line. The stands began to fill with people dressed in red and black, the Falcons’ colors. About forty-five minutes before kickoff, the players drifted back into the tunnels that led to their team locker rooms, then came out all together in their uniforms for their official warm-up. TV cameramen and photographers with two-foot lenses jostled each other to get pictures of the stars. Troy kept close to his mom, and every so often he would push through the crowd to get a glimpse of the field and the monstrous players. Then the teams went in and security guards swept the sidelines, telling almost everyone to leave.

  When a thick-shouldered guard asked to see his and his mom’s pass, Troy crossed his arms and pretended to be searching for someone in the crowd. His mom explained that she was the new PR assistant. The guard turned Troy’s pass over and narrowed his eyes.

  “Yeah, but he can’t stay,” the guard said in a rumbling voice, letting go of the pass and nodding at Troy.

  “I’m with the public relations department for the team,” his mom said. “He’s my son.”

  “I don’t care who you are, lady,” the guard said. “These passes are only for people working.

  “The kid has to leave.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “MR. LANGAN GAVE ME these passes personally,” Troy’s mom said. Her mouth was a flat line and her chin was tilted up at the hefty guard.

  “Mr. Langan?” the guard said, looking around and then back at his mom. “He did?”

  “Ask him if you like,” his mom said. “What’s your name?”

  “No, it’s okay,” the guard said, holding out his hands, palms down. “Just keep him behind the yellow, okay?”

  The guard walked away, and Troy grinned up at his mom. She raised her eyebrows at him, just for a moment, then dropped them.

  “Way to go, Tessa,” Troy said, slow-punching her arm.

  “Tessa?”

  “That’s what your friends call you,” he said, grinning even wider.

  She shook her head, trying to hold back a smile before she turned toward the field for the player introductions.

  The Falcons’ starting offense ran out through the tunnel, one by one, as their names were called. Fireworks exploded and smoke filled the inside of the Dome. The crowd roared. Troy covered his ears. When the Cowboys were announced, there was only some scattered applause. Drew Bledsoe, their quarterback, got some cheers. But when Terrell Owens ran out through the goalpost, the Dome erupted in loud boos.

  Because his mom had to be near the bench during the game, she and Troy stood directly behind where the players sat. They were outside the yellow line, but Troy could still hear the players talking to one another and their coaches, and he could smell the sweat that darkened their jerseys. The game started off slow, with both teams’ offenses sputtering and then punting the ball back and forth. At the end of the first quarter, no points had been scored.

  Troy’s eyes were glued to the field. He paid closest attention to each team’s offensive strategy. He saw what the Falcons were doing with Josh Lock. He kept handing the ball off to the running back on the right side, and Troy knew that would open up a bootleg play. Soon, the whole offense would make it look like it was another run to the right, but Lock would keep the ball instead of handing it off and run the opposite direction, all alone, free to either make a long run or a long pass.

  With six minutes to go before the end of the half, they did it. Lock sprinted to his left, wide open. The defense closed in on him, and at the last instant he let the ball fly, striking his wide receiver in the end zone. Touchdown. The place went nuts.

  The Cowboys had a long runback after the kickoff. It wasn’t enough for a touchdown, but it put them almost close enough to try a field goal. In the Cowboys’ huddle, Troy saw the quarterback say something to the running back, Julius Jones, who flexed his hands. He watched the formation and muttered to himself that they were going to run a sweep to the left. They did.

  He looked at the marker. Second and five.

  “Short pass to Jones,” he said to himself under his breath. “Probably an angle route.”

  It was an angle route.

  The running back ran a pattern that looked like a V tipped on its side and caught the ball for what looked like a five-yard gain. It would have been, too, except for Seth Halloway. Seth must have anticipated the angle route as well, because as soon as the ball touched the running back’s hands, Seth lowered his shoulder and exploded up through the offensive player, knocking him into the air and jarring the ball loose to fall incomplete onto the turf.

  Troy heard the crunch of pads and the huff of air leaving Jones’s body. A current of excitement ran through him when he saw Seth’s grin and heard him screaming in celebration with the
teammates who swarmed him. Troy pumped his fist in the air and screamed along with him, nearly jumping out of his shoes. Some of the players on the bench swung their sweaty heads around, pointed at him, and grinned, nodding their heads as if they liked his enthusiasm. His mom put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Draw,” Troy said, looking up at his mom. “They’ll run the play right at Seth.”

  They did. The quarterback dropped back, faking a pass, then handed it to the running back, who shot up through the line. Seth was waiting, though, and he dumped the runner on his back a yard short of the first down with a thud that made Troy wince. The crowd roared the old player’s name: “Seth. Seth. Seth.”

  They loved him. He was a hero, a great player, but a great guy, too. He was the guy who handed out toys to homeless kids at Christmas and who dished out soup to street people at the downtown shelters on Tuesday evenings, his day off. Troy loved him for that, but he loved him just as much for his big hits. As Seth came off the field, he raised his arms like lightning rods. By the look in Seth’s eyes, Troy suspected that the current of seventy thousand people was flowing right through him.

  “Wow, honey,” his mom said. “Good guess.”

  He opened his mouth to tell her that it wasn’t a guess, that he somehow just knew. Today, he felt it stronger than he ever had before. Maybe it was because he was right there, on the sideline, seeing it, hearing it, smelling it, living it. The gift inside him felt like a lamp with its shade suddenly pulled off. He wanted to tell his mom that he could help their team win.

  Instead, he smiled and shrugged.

  The Cowboys kicked a field goal and the half ended with the Falcons on top 7–3. Troy thought about Jamie’s NFL football, the one signed by White Shoes Johnson. It would be sweet to get it, but he knew a lot could happen with a half still to play.

  Halftime seemed to take forever, but after the teams came out, Troy began calling the plays to himself. He was right every time. The Falcons marched ninety yards, and on third and one from the one-yard line, Troy knew Lock was going to run that bootleg again. No! He had to tell someone. Troy knew the Cowboys’ defense would be ready. He just knew it! A reverse by the Falcons, instead of the bootleg, would easily score. A Falcons touchdown would secure the momentum of the game.