Two-Minute Drill - Mike Lupica [4]
Scott would throw until his arm got tired, and Casey, who never got tired, would keep tearing after the ball and bringing it back to him, holding it by one of the seams that had come loose.
And then it was time for Scott Parry to get around to the only thing he was really good at in football.
He’d kick.
He might not have the hands, or the arm, or the size.
But Scott Parry could really kick.
He’d start at the ten-yard line, which meant a twenty-yard kick, because the goalposts were ten yards deep in the back of the end zone, just like in real football, and put the ball down on the practice tee he always brought out here with him. He’d swing his leg, try to kick the ball through the uprights, pretending as hard as he could now, pretending that time was running out and the game was on the line.
Pretending that he was the best and most famous placekicker in the National Football League.
Sometimes he would put the ball on his plastic tee and pretend there were only a few seconds left in the Super Bowl.
“So it has come down to this,” he’d say, like he wasn’t just trying to win the game, but announce it on TV at the same time. “The whole season is on the foot of Scott Parry.”
He’d take two steps back from the ball, then one long step to the left of it, take a deep breath. Then he’d stride forward and kick with everything he had, following through the way the kickers on TV did. Sometimes he’d see how many he could make in a row from this distance, his all-time record being six.
But no matter how many he made in a row, no matter how dark it was getting or close to dinner, Scott still wasn’t done for the day.
Always saving the best until last.
He had been watching with his dad the day Doug Flutie of the Patriots had made the first dropkick in the NFL in what the announcers said was like a hundred years or something. It was the last game of Flutie’s long career. Scott’s dad, who’d played football at Boston College with Flutie, explained how great Flutie had been when he’d played quarterback for BC, even though he was only listed at five-nine and was really shorter than that. How he’d won the Heisman Trophy, how he’d thrown one of the most famous touchdown passes in all football history against the University of Miami when he was a senior. After that, according to Scott’s dad, Flutie had spent more than twenty years in pro football, in just about every league there was. Even the one in Canada.
Now Flutie was about to retire. And because it was his last game, his coach had let him try to drop-kick an extra point. It turned out Flutie loved football history almost as much as he loved playing. He knew that guys used to drop-kick all the time in the old days and had taught himself how to do it. Not only taught himself how, but gotten really good at it.
So Bill Belichick, the Patriots coach, put him in at the end of a game against the Dolphins, and Flutie drop-kicked the extra point right through. And even though that point didn’t win any championships for the Patriots, his teammates had acted as if it had. So had the people in the stands that day.
“They said he was too small his whole career,” Scott’s dad said. “But every time anybody ever gave him a fair chance, he played as big as anybody on the field.”
That was the biggest dream of all for Scott, down here behind his house, in his secret place between the woods and the water:
Someday he was going to get the chance to do something big in football.
FOUR
Chris Conlan came over on Saturday morning and brought his dog with him.
Scott hadn’t asked what kind of dog it was that day when Chris had said pictures didn’t do him justice. But in his head, he’d pictured a dog as big as Casey. Maybe a big old Lab, something like that.
It wasn’t a Lab.
Wasn’t even close.
The dog’s name was Brett, Chris said, for Brett Favre, his all-time favorite quarterback.
Brett was a black-and-tan Norwich terrier.
“Wow, he’s small,” Scott said when Chris came walking through the front door with Brett under his arm, carrying him the way he would a schoolbook.
Chris grinned and