Million-Dollar Throw

by Mike Lupica

  He’d told Abby because, as always, she saw right through him and kept asking him what was wrong. He couldn’t lie to her.

  Now in her studio she said, “I don’t see why you couldn’t even tell your parents.”

  “I explained that,” he said. “I don’t want there to be any excuses if I miss.”

  “You’re not missing, remember?”

  “Right,” he said. “Silly me. How could I forget?”

  He sat down in his chair. She was standing in the middle of the room, staring at him. There was more on his mind than a hurt hand.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m just relaxing. And my hand is fine.”

  “There’s something else,” she said.

  “Abs, I know you’ve heard this from me before, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You holding back on me, Brady?”

  “Just holding back so I don’t start blubbering like a little girl.”

  “Okay,” she said. “That is extremely insulting to little girls.”

  “Good point.”

  “So you’re not holding back?” Still staring at him, as if she still had 20/20, even though she could see only a few feet in front of her now.

  If that.

  “Holding on is more like it.”

  “You’ll see me on Thursday night, remember?”

  “You promise you’ll be there?”

  Abby patted her heart the way he did on the field. “Promise.”

  Her mom called up to her then, said it was time for them to go to Boston. Abby closed the space between them at what felt like the speed of light, or sound, and hugged Nate as hard then as she ever had, as if she never wanted to let go.

  “Love you, Brady,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “You’re gonna make it.”

  “We’re both gonna make it,” Nate said.

  “I still believe in happy endings,” Abby said. “Just so you know.”

  “Me too,” Nate said again.

  They walked down the stairs together, Nate taking great care that she didn’t see his arm behind her, ready to catch her if she stumbled, even though she was using her cane.

  When they were on the front walk, Abby’s mom and dad wished Nate luck, told him they were rooting for him, said they’d see him on Thursday night in Foxboro.

  Nate shook hands with Mr. McCall and then Mrs. McCall. He didn’t say anything more to Abby. They’d said everything they needed to say to each other upstairs.

  He watched her climb into the backseat, hook up her seat belt, smile at him through the window, and press her hand to the window. Nate pressed his against the outside. Then he heard Mr. McCall start up the car and slowly back it out of the driveway, away from the big, expensive house that was as much for sale as his was.

  Nate walked out to the street and watched the car make a right turn on Eden Road. He stood there watching even when he knew Abby couldn’t see him anymore.

  Stood there wondering about happy endings, and just how many of those you could hope for in your life.

  Then he rode his bike home and got his ball and tried to throw it through a twenty-inch hole, making sure he followed through even when his hand hurt, making three the number today, telling himself he wasn’t going inside until he put it through the hole that many times.

  He was working on number three when the back door opened and his dad shouted loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. He’d made a sale on a house, a big one on the north side of town.

  Nate smiled. Then he turned and made one more throw.

  Money.

  CHAPTER 31

  They had decided, unanimously, that they would celebrate Thanksgiving on Friday, that there would be no turkey or Thanksgiving dinner or anything else until they got back from Foxboro. No matter what happened in Foxboro.

  The SportStuff people had arranged for them to spend Wednesday night at a Courtyard Boston hotel, just a few minutes away from Gillette Stadium. A limousine would pick them up at five o’clock, even though kickoff wasn’t until eight thirty. Nate and his dad knew why. They’d seen firsthand when they came to Patriots games that traffic getting in and out of Gillette could be rougher than the Patriots’ defense.

  As soon as they arrived at VIP parking, they were to be greeted by Doug Compton, SportStuff ’s vice president in charge of public relations, who would take them up to the company’s luxury suite.

  He’d told them the day before they could “relax” up there.

  “Yeah,” Nate said in the back of the limousine, the first limousine ride of his life. “That’s what I’m planning to do between now and halftime. Relax. You guys’ll probably have to wake me up from my nap so I don’t sleep through the throw.”

  “You look calm enough to me,” his mom said.

  “Cool as a cucumber,” his dad said.

  Nate shook his head. “Whatever veggie’s not cool? That’s me.”

  Malcolm was sitting next to him, having made the trip with the Brodies from Valley to Foxboro the night before. Nate had told Malcolm that he wanted him along so he’d have somebody to warm up with, even though Malcolm didn’t exactly have the softest hands on the Patriots. That was the cover story, anyway. The real reason was that Malcolm was his best friend on the team and he’d always been able to make Nate feel better about almost everything just by being around.

  For tonight, Malcolm was describing himself as Nate’s “quality control coach.”

  “You’re gonna be cool because you are cool,” Malcolm said in the limo. “Gonna be the same on this field as it’s gonna be against Blair in the championship game. Nobody is gonna see my man sweat.”

  “I wish,” Nate said.

  Doug Compton was waiting for them in VIP parking, as promised. They’d met Doug at the hotel last night, when he’d come over to “walk them through” the halftime show.

  “We’re rooting for you tonight,” Doug said.

  Nate said, “But I could cost you a million dollars.”

  “Nate, listen to me,” Doug said. “If a thirteen-year-old boy makes that throw on national television, nobody at our place is going to feel like a loser. You’ve got to trust me on that one.”

  Now he handed them all the credentials they were supposed to wear around their necks. When they were inside, Nate asked Doug Compton to double-check again that the tickets had been left for Abby and her parents. Doug said he would when they got upstairs, then said to Nate, “Well, you look nice and relaxed, considering the circumstances.”

  Nate looked at Malcolm and rolled his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Cool as a cucumber.”

  When they got to the suite, neither Nate nor Malcolm could believe their eyes. “My whole house isn’t as nice as this,” Malcolm said. There was a living area with a huge flat-screen TV that was showing the Cowboys game from Dallas, and a kitchen and four rows of seats looking out at the 45-yard-line, and even a stack of video games and controllers that Doug said SportStuff had ordered for the occasion.

  “I don’t just want to watch the game from here,” Malcolm said. “I want to move here.”

  Doug Compton told everybody to help themselves to food and drinks, that a waiter would be arriving any second, then reminded Nate and his parents that he would walk them downstairs with about five minutes remaining in the first half. When the half ended, he’d take them out on the field along with the president of SportStuff, then Nate would be interviewed briefly by Gil Santos, the Patriots radio play-by-play man, over the stadium’s public address system.

  “At that point,” Doug Compton said, “somebody will hand you the ball.”

  Nate said, “I brought my own,” and opened up the small gym bag he’d brought with him and showed Doug Compton the Brady ball.

  Before Doug left, Nate asked if it would be all right for him and Malcolm to go back down to the field for a few minutes, just so he could loosen up a little and get used to the lights, ma
ybe even the wind. He didn’t want halftime to be the first time he was on that field. Doug made a quick call on his cell phone, said, “No problem,” and then he and Nate and Malcolm went back down the elevator.

  Nate wasn’t sure what he would feel like in a few hours, when he was making the walk toward the field for real. But even now, walking past the Pats’ locker room, his heart was pounding so hard and so fast, making him feel so out of breath, that it was as if he’d skipped the limo ride and run all the way here from the hotel.

  A lot of the Patriots’ players were already on the field. They weren’t dressed in full pads yet, no helmets—just sweatshirts, some playing catch, some stretching, some doing wind sprints. All were getting ready for their own big night on Thanksgiving. Nate looked around for Tom Brady, hoping he might be out early, but didn’t see him anywhere.

  Nate asked Doug Compton again if Abby and her parents would have the same credentials he had so they’d be able to come down to the field at halftime, too.

  If this did end the way Nate wanted it to, she had to be there.

  “Just spoke to them,” Doug said. “On her mom’s cell. They hit some traffic but got to the suite right after we came down here. So no worries. Why don’t you go get your throwing in? SportStuff has a lot of juice around here, but they’re not going to let us stay on the field forever.”

  Nate and Malcolm went over and began soft-tossing behind the Patriots’ bench. Nate took his time between throws so he could look around, at the open end of the stadium, at the SportStuff signs and an even bigger one for F. W. Webb, the huge Gillette sign over the scoreboard. Finally seeing the world of pro football—Brady’s world—from the inside. The lights. The signs. The fans starting to fill the seats. The wire over his head, the one with the camera attached to it, zooming along this way and that, as if the camera were warming up, too, for when it would give people watching on television those amazing overhead shots.

  Nate even noticed how green the grass was, how white the white of the hash marks looked from down here, how bright the colors of the lettering for “Patriots” in the end zones and the Patriots logo on the field.

  As bright as Abby colors.

  The first time Nate’s dad had taken him to Fenway Park, Nate had been surprised that the place looked even smaller than he’d expected from watching on television. Gillette Stadium was bigger. He thought, Everything is bigger tonight.

  Except maybe the target.

  All along, every day of practice, every night when this throw was the last thing he’d think about—when he wasn’t thinking about what was happening with Abby—Nate kept telling himself the same thing: It would be the same target in Gillette that he was throwing to in his backyard. Only now, standing on this field, he knew better. Now even the thought of the pep talks he’d been giving himself made him laugh out loud, loud enough for Malcolm to hear over the pregame rock music being piped into Gillette Stadium.

  Malcolm yelled down to him, “What’s so funny?”

  Nate put the Brady ball under his arm and made a gesture with his left hand that tried to take in the whole stadium.

  “This!” he yelled back. “Us being here. Me trying to make the throw tonight.”

  “And this . . . amuses you?”

  “Yeah, it kind of does,” Nate said.

  Nate threw him one last pass, a spiral so tight the ball seemed to shrink in the air, then signaled that he was finished. Malcolm jogged over to him and handed him back the ball.

  “You always tell me that winning’s more fun than anything,” Malcolm said. “Well, tonight you’re gonna win something people will never forget, and turn this into the funnest night of your life.”

  Nate knelt down behind the bench then, grabbed a clump of grass, a big one, stuck it in the pocket of his jeans. Malcolm gave him a look. Nate said, “Souvenir.” Malcolm nodded and grabbed some grass of his own.

  Doug Compton led them back toward the tunnel. Malcolm started talking about all the things he’d buy for himself with a million dollars if he only had to spend it on himself: flat screens, an iPhone, every cool video game known to man, season tickets to the Patriots’ games, and a fancy sports car that he would hold on to until he was old enough to drive it to Gillette Stadium.

  “What about you?” he said to Nate. “You must’ve thought about it.”

  “Yeah, dude,” Nate said. “I have.”

  “So, you gonna tell?”

  Nate smiled and shook his head. “It’s like you don’t tell what your wish is before you blow out the candles,” he said.

  Nate believed it.

  He believed, tonight more than ever, that if you said it out loud, about the million bucks, it would never happen in a million years.

  For most of the first half, what turned out to be a dream first half for Brady and the Patriots, Nate focused on every move the quarterback made. Thinking he might never have a view of a quarterback this good again. And knowing he’d better appreciate it, knowing how quickly things could change, how quickly things had changed for Tom Brady the day he’d gotten hurt.

  It had been harder for him to come back than anybody had ever expected. There had been complicatons after the first surgery followed by more setbacks and then even more surgery, which meant starting rehab all over again. Some people wondered if he would ever play again. But finally, Tom Brady was back. Boy, was he ever back—and playing as if he’d never been away, completing the first fourteen passes he attempted, three of them for touchdowns. He was in complete command of himself and his team, and if you watched him move around in the pocket, you wouldn’t have known that anything had ever happened to one of his knees. The Patriots didn’t even attempt a punt until their second possession of the second quarter.

  “Your guy isn’t cheating us tonight, is he?” Nate’s dad said, sitting next to him in the front row of the suite.

  Nate said, “You think he’d mind making my throw for me? Because he hasn’t missed anything he’s aimed at all night.”

  Abby punched Nate from the row behind him. “You’re not missing either, Brodie.”

  “I’m Brodie now?” he said.

  Nate turned around, saw Abby squinting at the field, where Brady had just completed another pass down the field to Randy Moss. “He’s Brady tonight,” she said. “You’re Brodie.”

  Nate had been trying not to look at the clock too much, not even sure if he wanted it to go slower or faster. But before long there was five twenty-eight showing on the game clock. He heard a knock on the window from inside and saw Doug Compton and the president of SportStuff, Mr. Levine, waving at him. Nate’s mom was with them. Then Doug smiled and pointed at his watch.

  Nate walked back inside and his mom said, “Showtime.”

  Mr. and Mrs. McCall said they were too nervous, they were going to stay upstairs, watch from here. So the rest of them formed a caravan as they walked down the hall to the elevator bank: Nate, his parents, Abby, Malcolm, Doug Compton, Mr. Levine.

  It was then that Doug noticed that Nate was bringing his ball with him.

  “Whose autograph?” Doug said, pointing at the ball.

  “Tom Brady,” Nate said.

  “Should’ve known,” Doug said. Then he smiled and said, “Absolutely perfect.”

  By the time they were at the entrance to the tunnel, watching the game from there, Brady had thrown his fourth touchdown pass of the half and the Patriots were ahead 28-7. Major beatdown. It wasn’t ever going to make up for that loss to the Giants in the Super Bowl a few years before, the night in Arizona when the Patriots were trying to go undefeated for a whole season, but for tonight it would do.

  I’m the one trying to go undefeated tonight, Nate thought, not Brady.

  When the half ended, the players from both teams went running right past them, all of them seeming to arrive at once. Nate tried to spot Brady but couldn’t, figuring he must be hidden by a bunch of linemen who up close looked as big as SUVs.

  “Okay,” Nate’s dad said, “let’s do thi
s,” and then Doug Compton led them all toward the other end of the field, where Nate could see workmen wheeling out the SportStuff target.

  Abby was holding on to Nate. No cane tonight. No special glasses, even with the stadium lights as bright as they were. She gave his arm a squeeze.

  “You ready?”

  “No,” he said.

  She laughed, hooked her arm inside his now, totally the old Abby in that moment. “C’mon,” she said. “It’s going to be great.”

  Malcolm walked on the other side of him. Nate’s mom and dad were behind him. Nate forced himself to stop looking around now, to stop looking into the stands and at the television cameraman walking along with them, his camera trained on Nate, all the other cameramen taking their place up near the 30-yard line.

  Nate tried to keep his eyes on the target.

  Now he heard Gil Santos, the voice of the Patriots for a period that Nate’s dad described as forever, welcoming everybody to a very special Thanksgiving halftime show, explaining to the people in the stands that thirteen-year-old Nate Brodie of Valley, Massachusetts, was about to try to throw a football through the hole in the middle of the SportStuff target to win a million dollars for himself and his family.

  “Here they are crossing midfield right now!” Gil Santos said. “So let’s give a rousing Gillette Stadium welcome to the young man of the hour . . . Nate Brodie!”

  Then they were all walking into the most incredible sound Nate had ever heard, one he couldn’t believe was for him. The force of it seemed to knock the air out of him, making him feel at the same time as if his legs had stopped working.

  “Wow!” Abby yelled. “Wow wow wow!”

  “Yeah,” Malcolm said. “What she said.”

  Somehow Nate kept walking.

  They stopped at the 40, ten yards from where Nate would make the throw. Somehow it seemed more cameramen and photographers had appeared, out of nowhere. Gil Santos introduced Mr. Levine, who waved to the crowd.