Fantasy League

by Mike Lupica

  “Before we start,” he said, “I want to tell you something, just between the two of us.”

  Charlie Gaines and the quarterback of the L.A. Bulldogs. Sitting here being boys. Tom about to tell him something that was supposed to stay in the room, the way things were supposed to stay in the locker room.

  “I was thinking about something after Sunday’s game. About how the last person to change my life this way—just by believing in me the way you did—was my coach in high school. Only this time it was a twelve-year-old,” Tom said. “Unbelievable.”

  “Thank you,” Charlie said.

  “No,” Tom said. “Thank you.”

  Tom hit Play.

  Charlie saw that it was some view from upstairs, taking in the whole field, all twenty-two players, Charlie focusing on Tom as he went into a quick three-step drop in the middle of the last drive, forcing a throw to Harrison Mays that was nearly intercepted, ball bouncing out of the defender’s hands and into Harrison’s to get the Bulldogs a big third-down conversion.

  “You know why that happened, Charlie?” Tom said. “Because even though I had been working the other side of the field on the drive up to then, they knew that when I absolutely had to have yards, I was going back to my favorite receiver, Harrison. The corner knew it and jumped the route, and it was only dumb luck that he didn’t take it the other way.”

  He played it again.

  “See what I mean? He knew.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “He acted like he knew what play was coming.”

  Tom Pinkett nodded. “Even Peyton Manning cost the Colts a Super Bowl one time because a corner for the Saints jumped a route that way.”

  All day long, sitting with Mr. Warren, Charlie had felt like he was on the inside again, the way he had been the first day the two of them had watched practice on the field.

  But this was different.

  Better.

  Tom went back, started the play again, paused the picture, got up, walked to the screen, showed Charlie how the corner was coming at full speed before Tom even released the ball.

  “He knew I’d go back to what was working for me, even if I hadn’t run that play since the end of the first half,” he said. “And guess what? Sometimes you can get by with that.” Tom Pinkett winked at Charlie now the way the old man did sometimes and said, “But sometimes you gotta throw them a curveball. Just to keep them on their toes.”

  Charlie smiled. Not because Tom Pinkett had made a bad throw. No, he was smiling in the small, dark theater because he was in this room with him, the great Tom Pinkett, someone he never thought he’d get anywhere near.

  But feeling totally at home.

  Twenty-Three

  THE BULLDOGS FELL TO 2–2 in their next game, losing to the Eagles in Philadelphia.

  Tom Pinkett threw four touchdown passes to go with two interceptions—one returned for a touchdown, maybe his worst read of the season so far—but even the four touchdowns couldn’t give his team a decent chance to win on this day, thanks to a total meltdown by the defense.

  The worst of it, Charlie saw—everybody watching the game saw—was the linebacker play. There just seemed to be this huge hole in the middle of the L.A. defense, one that the Eagles exploited from their first drive of the game—hammering away the running game and mixing things up with short passes that couldn’t be stopped and that kept turning into large gains. Bart Tubbs, who kept trying to cover the area Troy Aikman called the “deep middle,” wound up with his back to the play more often than not, chasing the ballcarrier. Never a good thing for a linebacker.

  “Sometimes that deep middle for Bart looks like a deep sinkhole,” Aikman said at one point.

  “Actually,” Anna said to Charlie, “it looks like they’re asking Bart to cover the middle of the ocean. Only he can’t swim.”

  They were watching at her house. Charlie had wondered if she’d even want to watch the game with him, the way she’d been acting cool to him since that night in the park.

  But she’d called and invited him. So they watched together as the Eagles kept ringing up points, over five hundred yards in total offense, in what looked like a three-hour train wreck if you were a Bulldogs fan.

  It wasn’t just Bart, of course. Defense is a team game. Yet the team sure looked a lot different with Tubbs in the middle of it. And a defense that had been one of the surprises of the first quarter of the season suddenly looked more like a Pop Warner unit trying to keep up with grown men.

  Anna suggested that Coach Fiore could move either Alex Beech or Chuck Stoner, one of their two outside backers, to the middle.

  “Nah, they’re good where they are, not that you can tell so today,” Charlie said. “Besides, some famous coach said that you never weaken one position to strengthen another.”

  “We’re in deep trouble without Oradell,” Anna said.

  “We just need to find somebody a lot better than Bart to play there.”

  Then Charlie reminded her of a guy named Chase Blackburn, who had basically been sitting on his couch when the Giants signed him late one season, what turned out to be the season they won their second Super Bowl against the Patriots.

  “Remember him?” Charlie said. “We were watching the Giants play the Packers right after Thanksgiving and he made an interception and I was, like, ‘Who the heck is number 93?’”

  “And I said, wait, there’s a player in the league you don’t know?”

  “I knew him,” Charlie said. “I just didn’t know he was back on their team. He had been cut. But from that game on, he played great for the Giants all the way through the Super Bowl. Even intercepted a Tom Brady pass that ended up being the biggest defensive play of the game.”

  “Yeah,” Anna said. “People kept talking about the middle linebacker the Giants basically found on the street. Well, we need to find ourselves a street like that.”

  “Yup,” Charlie said.

  And just like that, he knew just the right street.

  Twenty-Four

  WHEN HE GOT HOME HE went straight upstairs, sat down in front of his laptop like he was working on an assignment for school. Only this felt way more important to him than school right now.

  He wasn’t even going to tell Anna, at least not yet, because he didn’t want to be talked out of it, because he knew if he tried to explain to her about the guy he was thinking about he was going to sound like some kind of crazy person.

  Because the guy he was thinking about was Jack “Sack” Sutton.

  The actor.

  Charlie went back now and read articles on Jack Sutton he’d read before. Went to YouTube and ESPN.com and looked at old highlights, going all the way back to when Jack Sutton should have won the Heisman, when he was the best college football player in the country at the University of Miami. Back when he was constantly getting in trouble.

  Then he left college early for the pros and got into even more trouble, like he didn’t just want to be like Lawrence Taylor on the field—he wanted to outdo Taylor off the field. The most athletic linebacker in years, acting like life was one big party without rules. Then came that hit to his knee. And the operation. And the game was over.

  “Too little, too late,” Jack Sutton had said to Charlie that day on Alvarado Street.

  But was it too late?

  He was still only twenty-seven years old, just twenty-seven last month, Charlie looked that up, too. But Charlie knew this wasn’t just about his age, or the condition of his knee, or the condition of the rest of him. Even if he wanted to play—and Charlie had no way of knowing whether he did or not—who knew if he still could after being out of it for so long?

  Who knew if Mr. Warren and Matt would even want anything to do with him? That was how much trouble he’d caused for himself and the Jaguars.

  There was the story about the brawl Jack started in a New York club. And about the re
ntal car he’d totaled in New Orleans after a night of partying, though they never got to test him for drunk driving because he left the car on Poydras Street near the Superdome, went straight to the airport, and left town.

  There was the six-game suspension he got at the start of his last season for picking up an assistant coach and body-slamming him to the ground after practice one day.

  “I got tired of a guy who could never play football worth a lick telling me how to play football” was his explanation to the commissioner.

  Then came the knee injury, and the three surgeries, and the failed comeback with the Jaguars in training camp the year before last. Finally Jack Sutton retired, moved to L.A., announced he was trying acting full time after a few well-received appearances on Fright Night Lights.

  After an hour Charlie rubbed his eyes, closed his laptop, and thought:

  This is nuts.

  I am nuts.

  Twenty-Five

  CHARLIE DECIDED HE WOULD TELL Mr. Warren in person, at the Bulldogs’ practice on Monday afternoon.

  Charlie still hadn’t told Anna, worried that she might clown him on the spot. It was funny, if you thought about it, he was more scared of telling her his idea than he was her grandfather, who only owned the team.

  So he’d wait and see what kind of reaction he got. Good or bad, or even if Mr. Warren burst out laughing. If the idea went anywhere—meaning if Joe Warren thought it was worth placing a call to Jack Sutton or his agent—Charlie would tell Anna first thing.

  On the way to the stadium Charlie and Carlos talked about how quickly the season had gone wrong after such a promising start, after the city had started feeling better about the Bulldogs than it ever had, Mr. Warren feeling the exact same way.

  “This can’t happen to us all over again,” Carlos said.

  “Lot of football left to be played,” Charlie said, knowing he sounded like a coach, but meaning what he said. “We both know how long these seasons are.”

  “You have no idea how long they can get around here.”

  When they got upstairs Mr. Warren’s secretary told Charlie to go right in. Mr. Warren smiled when he saw Charlie come through the door, the way he always did.

  Charlie noticed he had some printouts in his hand.

  “I’ve been looking at the names of some of the linebackers on the waiver wire,” he said. “The list is not pretty, Charlie boy.”

  “Maybe the guy we’re looking for isn’t on that list,” Charlie said. “Did you ever think about that?”

  The old man put the paper down, motioned for Charlie to take a seat on the other side of the desk.

  “That sounds mysterious. You got somebody for me? Did you find me the Tom Pinkett of NFL linebackers, another guy the league was about to forget?”

  “It’s going to sound way crazier than that, Mr. Warren, trust me.”

  “How about you tell me what’s on your mind and then I’ll be the one to say how crazy it is or not,” Joe Warren said.

  “But if you do think it is,” Charlie said, “crazy, I mean, you promise you won’t tell anybody that I even brought it up in the first place?”

  “Not even if I get my own podcast,” the old man said.

  Then Charlie told him about Jack Sutton.

  Told him all of it: seeing him on the movie set, seeing him run.

  He told him about Chase Blackburn going back to the Giants that year and helping take them to the Super Bowl. How sometimes you found the guy you were looking for on the street, and how Anna had told Charlie the Bulldogs needed to find that street.

  Talking fast, not wanting to lose his nerve.

  When he finally finished, Mr. Warren didn’t say anything right away.

  But he didn’t laugh, either.

  • • •

  They were sitting outside now, on the perch above the field, practice over. Mr. Warren had his feet up on the chair in front of him, wearing the same soft-looking, scuffed brown shoes he always did.

  It was one of those days when he looked more tired than usual. More shake to his hand when he put his water bottle to his lips, taking what he called his “afternoon pill,” which he said wasn’t to be confused with his morning and evening pills.

  They were still talking about Jack Sutton.

  “I wanted to draft him, you know. Badly. Despite what a bad boy he was.”

  “I read that,” Charlie said.

  Mr. Warren turned and grinned. “Course you did. But then we didn’t draft him, for all the reasons Matt gave me and even some he didn’t. And then when he started to get into all that trouble after he got to the league, Matt said, ‘Told you so, Dad.’ Told me that some of those young actors and actresses in Hollywood, they have star power, too. But they blow it all in the end because they don’t have any discipline. Or character. They act like their talent is a part-time job and their full-time job is going to parties.”

  The old man paused, waved his hand in the air in front of him, Charlie thinking it looked like a paper floating in a breeze.

  “Then the boy got hurt and Matt said, see, it would’ve been a wasted pick even if we had put up with all his nonsense for a few years. It was then that I had to remind him about the fallacy of the predetermined outcome.”

  “The what?”

  “Assuming that if you could have changed just one thing that happened in a game, everything else that happened afterward would have played out exactly the same way,” Joe Warren said. “Guy gets caught stealing in a baseball game, next guy hits a home run, the announcers say, ‘Well, that should have been a two-run homer.’ Except they don’t know if the next guy would have been pitched differently with a guy on a second. Maybe that home run never happens.”

  “I see what you mean,” Charlie said.

  Mr. Warren said, “So maybe things go differently for Jack Sutton if he plays for us. Maybe even if he plays for somebody like me, who knows. Maybe he doesn’t get hurt, maybe he would have cleaned up his act. Or maybe being in L.A. would have just meant more temptations for him and more trouble. Who’s to say?”

  He paused now and turned to look at Charlie. “You say you saw him run?”

  Charlie nodded. “Like the wind.”

  Joe Warren said, “We have no idea if he even wants to try to come back.”

  “Nope.”

  “But you really believe that if he could get himself into football shape, and do it fast, that he could help us?”

  “What I think, Mr. Warren, is that we’ve got nothing to lose by asking him.”

  We.

  Meaning it as much right then as he ever had, knowing it was like he was laying his love for the team on the line by coming here, by making this suggestion.

  “You only get so many chances,” the old man said in a quiet voice. “Jack Sutton, before he got hurt, he probably thought he could play forever. Then he found out differently. Who knows? Maybe now that he found out that he wasn’t going to have all the chances and all the seasons he wanted, he might want what they all want in sports.”

  “What’s that?”

  “One more shot,” Joe Warren said. He slapped his thigh now. “You know what, Charlie? You’re right about something. What’s the worst thing he can say to me? No? People have been saying no to me my whole life. For years they said, no, you can’t bring football back to L.A. You think about it, Charlie, my own team’s been saying no to me from the start, the way all these seasons have ended.”

  “We need to have a better ending this time, Mr. Warren.”

  Joe Warren said, “Maybe a guy from the movies can help us out with that.”

  Charlie reminded him that Jack Sutton hadn’t played middle linebacker since high school, he’d looked that up, too. But Mr. Warren said that with the way defense was played nowadays, it wouldn’t be that big of an adjustment. And might even help him if he’d lost a couple o
f steps due to surgery.

  Charlie agreed. Thinking once again there was more to this old man when it came to football than he liked to let on.

  Joe Warren stood up now, not looking tired all of a sudden, not looking tired at all, slapped his thigh again, the sound louder than before.

  “Never forget something, Charlie,” he said. “This is L.A. And everyone in this town loves a good story.”

  Twenty-Six

  IT TURNED OUT THAT JACK Sutton was still interested in playing football.

  Extremely interested.

  Joe Warren found out when he called Jack himself, electing not to bother with a middleman. Sutton told him that he hadn’t rehabbed his knee as hard as he had because of any hope of ever playing again—he’d just wanted to be able to walk up a flight of stairs without pain when he was fifty years old.

  “Being able to outrun Vin Diesel in the movies was just an added bonus,” he told Mr. Warren.

  Jack Sutton explained that he had found this trainer in New York City named Ming Chew who’d gotten Jason Kidd back in the playoffs one time when Kidd was supposed to be through for the season.

  The guy didn’t believe that surgery was the answer to every single sports injury, believed in acupuncture and deep-tissue massage and some other treatments that went right over Charlie Gaines’s head.

  Jack Sutton, with nothing much to do between football and when he got serious with acting, moved to New York for three months and worked out with Ming Chew every day. And started to feel a little better, then a lot better, happy to be living a pain-free life, still thinking he had closed the book on football.

  At that point in the conversation Mr. Warren said he told Jack Sutton, “Start thinking about opening that book back up, son.”

  Two days later, seven in the morning, Mr. Warren and Matt Warren and Coach Nick Fiore watched Jack Sutton go through his first workout since he’d retired from the Jaguars. First out of pads, then in them. Agility drills. Sprints.