Two-Minute Drill - Mike Lupica [18]
“Oh, come on, it’s still way too early to be talking like that.”
“Dad, we play our first game in a week.”
Hank Parry said, “Most coaches I ever had wanted to keep guys off balance about who was going to get the most playing time until the last possible moment.”
So his dad was the one drawing the smiley face.
As usual.
“Well, he must love me, Dad. Because I’m always off balance.”
His dad laughed and said, “Good one, kiddo.”
Yeah, Scott thought, when it comes to football, I’m hilarious.
“Well, does he have you working more on offense or defense?” his dad said.
“Special teams.”
It was the truth. Not that it made him feel very special. When he did get on the field now, it was almost always as one of the guys running downfield on punts, even if he hadn’t made a single tackle yet. Not one. He’d be close to the guy with the ball sometimes, even throw himself down near the real tacklers just to feel as if he’d been part of the play. But he knew he wasn’t fooling anybody.
Starting with himself.
Sometimes on punts Mr. Dolan would put him on the receiving team, on the outside, lining him up against the fast guys who could actually run down and make a tackle, telling him to try to throw a block as a way of slowing them down.
Then another outside guy on the kick team would run around him as if he wasn’t even there.
Jimmy Dolan, just for the fun of it, would go out of his way to knock Scott down before running down the field, even though he knew it would cost him a few seconds getting to the punt returner, and that he would hear it from his dad when the play was over. Which he did.
“Use your head once in a while,” Mr. Dolan would say to Jimmy, trying to act as hard on him as he was on everybody else, even though not one single player on the team believed it. They knew that Jimmy got away with stuff that nobody else on the team could, stuff nobody would even dream about trying to get away with on the field.
“Sorry, brain,” Jimmy would say when the play was over. “But there’s just something about putting you on the ground that is so totally awesome. It’s like I’m racking up points playing video.”
Water boy would actually be a step up, he realized.
“Your chance will come,” his dad said from across the dinner table now.
“Dad, I’m trying not to get my hopes up,” Scott said. “All I see myself doing this year is riding the bench, unless we’re winning, like, 100-0.”
His dad put down his knife and fork and in a soft voice said to him, “Hey, what happened to my Rudy?”
Rudy was one of their favorite sports movies to watch together. No, that wasn’t right. It was one of their favorite movies, period. The story of the Notre Dame guy, a little guy who wasn’t supposed to make the team and then, once he was on the team, wasn’t ever supposed to get in a game. But he finally got in for one play and made a tackle and got carried off the field by his teammates at the end.
It said on the screen at the end of the movie that it was the only time in the whole history of Notre Dame football that any player had ever been carried off the field.
“You just gotta be ready for your Rudy moment,” his dad said.
“But what difference does it make if I’m ready if I can’t even make a tackle in practice?” Scott said. “If the only person I can bring down most of the time is myself?”
“Yet,” his dad said. “You haven’t made a tackle yet.”
Scott said, “The only big play I’m gonna make this season is in your dreams.”
“Let me worry about my dreams,” his dad said. “You just worry about your own.”
He called into the den and told his parents he was going to take Casey for a walk.
“With the leash,” his dad said.
“Case won’t go anywhere,” Scott said.
“Case goes everywhere,” his dad called back, “especially at night. And, besides, you know the rules.”
“At night he’s on the leash.”
“And don’t—”
“—leave the neighborhood.”
Casey had never liked being on a leash, from the time he was a pup. But he knew the leash was a signal he was going outside, and he loved going outside.