Guys Read: The Sports Pages

by Jon Scieszka

  “I want the full fifty.” I handed him the credit card I’d borrowed from Nate’s dad’s wallet the night before. His dad had dozens of credit cards for some reason, so he’d never even notice.

  “Is this really your card?” he asked. “You look a little young.”

  “Of course it is,” I said.

  Of course we both knew it wasn’t. I mean, I was twelve. And I didn’t even look old for my age. And Nate looked even younger than I did. But at the same time, if the witch doctor called me out, then he wouldn’t get paid.

  A short time later, after Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz had run the card and put on a hat that looked and smelled like it was made out of old KFC chicken bones, we went through a small door back into his “office.”

  “Do you have an object that belongs to the subject?” he asked.

  “Uh, I have this,” I said, and handed him the autographed picture of Derek Jeter that I’d gotten the day after he ruined my life.

  Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz looked at the picture and was barely able to hide a grin.

  “Close enough,” he said. “What do you want done? What are the specifics of your curse?”

  “I want him to go into an epic slump,” I said. “I mean, like the sort of thing that forces him into retirement. I’m talking below-the-Mendoza-Line bad. I don’t even want him on the Interstate by the end of it; I want him way below that. Make him go one for his next eighty-seven at bats. No, one for the next hundred and eighty-seven! And throw in seventeen errors while you’re at it. I want him to cause the Yankees to lose every game in September and miss the play-offs. I want people to see him for the washed-up old hack he really is instead of some sort of treasured national hero. Send him into retirement where he belongs.”

  “Jeez, kid,” Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz said. “Well, I guess you’re lucky I’m a Mets fan.”

  Then he started chanting something in a language I thought I recognized as Klingon from Star Trek. I exchanged a glance with Nate, who made a face like he wanted me to call out Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz as some sort of fraud. But I didn’t. If I did, there’d be no curse.

  The doctor finished chanting after a few minutes and then tossed some old chicken bones, a few feathers, and what looked like red hotels from the board game Monopoly into a wooden bowl. He set it on top of the autographed picture of Derek Jeter and said one final Klingon phrase.

  “Okay, kid, you’re good to go,” he said.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “So, like, when will his slump start?” I asked. “Tonight?”

  “Sure.” Doctor ZZ handed me my picture and showed us to the exit.

  That night, Derek Jeter went 4 for 4 with two home runs, a double, and seven RBIs. And Boston’s supposed ace, Jon Lester, had been the starting pitcher. And Jeter supposedly had the flu that night, which had those saps at ESPN praising him even more than they already would have. I bet they have a whole room that serves only as a shrine to Derek Jeter at ESPN headquarters, and all the employees change into Yankee pinstripe uniforms and Derek Jeter masks and go in there once a day to light candles and sing the seventh-inning stretch song.

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Nate the next day at lunch. “The curse was supposed to start last night!”

  “Where did you find that witch doctor guy again?” he asked.

  “The internet, remember?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah …”

  “Maybe it will start tonight?” I suggested, ignoring his cynical tone. When you’ve only got one friend left in the world, you have to make such oversights sometimes.

  “Maybe,” Nate said, but I could tell he clearly didn’t think so.

  And Nate was right, of course. Over the next several weeks, Jeter went on a hot streak of historic proportions. He hit an astounding .562 with seven home runs, eleven stolen bases, and nineteen RBIs. It was the best eleven-game stretch of his career. Maybe of anybody’s career, ever. There was even talk now on ESPN that Jeter might be in the running for MVP since he was doing all his damage in September, when it mattered the most considering the Yankees were right in the middle of the play-off race like always. If he did win, he’d be the oldest MVP in baseball history. As if he needed another record or more reason to be worshipped.

  At one point, this guy on ESPN—a skinny, bald dude with three names—actually drooled all over his tie when he was showing highlights of Jeter hitting for the cycle. Which, yeah, he did hit for the cycle a few days after the curse supposedly started. I would have asked for a refund from Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz, but it wasn’t my money, and he’d already done enough damage as it was.

  To make matters worse, somehow Nate’s dad did notice the charge on his credit card bill a few days after we’d placed the curse. Apparently, Nate got yelled at pretty bad and grounded for several weeks. And his dad took away his TV, which had to really stink since that was pretty much Nate’s only source of fun anymore with the broken elbow and being grounded and all.

  But what mattered even more than all of that was that the failed curse meant I’d need to take this to the next level if I really wanted to get my revenge on Derek Jeter.

  So, you may be wondering just what exactly had Derek Jeter done to me to deserve this kind of wrath? Well, I’ll tell you.

  It was my birthday, and my favorite team, the Boston Red Sox, were in town for an important late-August four-game series with the Yankees. My dad had been lucky enough to score us some amazing seats about eight rows back, right off of third base. It was perfect; I’d get to see the Red Sox pulverize the Yankees in Yankee Stadium on my birthday with my dad and best friend, Nate.

  And it was the night before my seventh-grade class voted on class president. The most recent polls showed that I was all but guaranteed to win. As class president, my popularity would get a major boost. I had already prepared my acceptance speech.

  And to top everything off, Sara Hernandez, who I’d had a crush on since first grade, was sitting just a few rows behind us. As we sat down, she smiled and gave me a little presidential salute.

  Basically, my life couldn’t have been more perfect that night.

  Until the fifth inning, that is.

  That’s when Jeter came up to bat for his third plate appearance. The score was 4–2; Boston was winning. Jeter was hitless so far. He fell behind in the count quickly, no balls and two strikes looking. Then the old, desperate man that he is, he just started swinging at everything. He fouled off four straight pitches. I was screaming at Lester to throw him a curveball or two. Or at least throw him something off the plate.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he threw more fastballs, each just on the edge of the strike zone. Jeter fouled off one. He fouled off another. And then, on the third, he hit a towering foul pop-up that started drifting toward our seats. I quickly pulled out my glove. I’d been to several games before, but I’d yet to ever get a ball.

  It was so high that I lost it for several seconds. But suddenly I had it again and realized it was coming right at me. I had it. I really did. I don’t even know what happened next, honestly, because I had that thing in my sights, I’m telling you. It was all but in my glove.

  But as the replay showed again and again and again and again and again, I clearly didn’t have it. In fact, what happened was that, right after I nudged Nate out of my way so I could make the catch cleanly, I ended up missing the ball entirely, and it nailed me right in the face.

  The blow sent me reeling backward, and my limbs flailed wildly. The chain reaction of events that I started in that one moment is almost too ridiculous to believe. In fact, if it wasn’t well documented by numerous TV cameras, I wouldn’t believe it had actually happened the way it did at all.

  Anyway, first Nate tried to grab me to keep me from tumbling back into the seats behind me. But he wasn’t able to stop my momentum, and we both ended up spilling over our seats back into the row behind us. As we fell, I accidently knocked a guy’s full tray of nachos up in the air and spilled two full sodas all ov
er two little kids, who promptly started bawling. The nachos landed on the team president’s wife’s head. (Yeah, about that, what was the team president doing down in the stands and not in a luxury box anyway? I guess he was trying to seem more like a regular fan instead of some big-shot rich executive, which is exactly what he was.)

  When the nachos hit her head, the hot cheese sauce caused her to launch her full soda backward, where it splashed all over Sara Hernandez. She got a face and lap full of Coke and ice, likely ruining my chances of ever getting to even speak to her again without her punching me in the temple repeatedly.

  Then Sara spilled her soda on an old guy in the aisle next to her. He was holding two sodas at the time himself, both of which proceeded to spill as well. It was like a rousing game of sodinoes (soda + dominoes). One soda ended up in the lap of an old war veteran who started having some sort of war flashback and spilled several more drinks on several other important people while air machine gunning everybody around him before diving across two rows of seats onto an imaginary live grenade. I guess if there’s one thing I learned that night besides the fact that Derek Jeter is an even bigger jerk than I’d always thought, it’s that the only people who can afford the good seats at Yankee stadium are generally pretty important people. And also that spilling beverages on old war veterans can be hazardous to your health.

  Anyway, the second soda landed on the steps where a pretty heavy guy holding a huge tray of food just happened to be walking by. He slipped and went tumbling down the stairs, his food spraying across several rows of players’ family members. The tubby guy rolled all of the way down the aisle and somehow somersaulted right over the railing and onto the Red Sox dugout roof. He took out a $65,000 television camera, which shattered into a billion pieces that went raining down onto the field like some sort of cyborgian downpour.

  Then the fat guy, the cameraman, and the last few chunks of camera went crashing over the side of the dugout and landed on top of Dustin Pedroia, the Red Sox’s star second baseman, breaking his leg in three places and pretty much ending the Sox’s play-off hopes.

  Needless to say, this clip got tons of airtime on ESPN. They played it at least eight thousand times between all forty-six of their stations within the next twenty-four hours. The video went viral on the internet, getting over three million views faster than any other video in history. The fact that I’d been wearing Red Sox gear made the whole thing even worse.

  Basically, I was a laughingstock. Not just of my school, but of the whole country. Plus, I got a black eye to remind everyone at school, or in the subway, or anywhere in public, every day for the next several weeks that I was, indeed, that kid.

  “Hey, hey, aren’t you that kid?” they’d all say anywhere I went in public before laughing hysterically and mimicking my infamous whiff.

  Furthermore, Nate’s elbow had basically shattered when he fell trying to hold me back. Which really sucks, because he was the school basketball team’s star point guard. And even though the basketball season didn’t start for a few months, his elbow wouldn’t be fully healed until after the basketball season was over, essentially ending our chances of becoming the first team to ever win three straight regional championships. Mr. Benedict, the basketball coach, was also my Social Studies teacher, which meant I could pretty much kiss my chances at getting an A, or probably even a C, in his class good-bye.

  And of course I lost the election for class president by a landslide. A combination of spilling soda on a popular girl, killing our basketball season before it even began, and just generally making a fool of myself while embarrassing the whole school can have that effect. I think the final tally was: me 11 votes, the other candidate 297 votes. I still to this day can’t walk down the hall at school without people constantly throwing stuff at me and yelling, “Catch, butterfingers!” and then cracking some joke about me breaking people’s limbs.

  To make matters worse, another video clip from the game showed Derek Jeter in the dugout watching the replay on the Jumbotron and then smirking and laughing with his teammates. Instead of getting derided for such cruelty (I mean, he hit a little kid in the face with a baseball!), the talking heads on ESPN just laughed right along with him, citing his great sense of humor about it all.

  But I haven’t even told you the worst part. The worst part was what happened the evening after the game, right before the next game started. Because of the public reaction to what happened, Jeter agreed to do a meet-and-greet with me where he’d present me with a few autographed items and take some photos. I guess it was supposed to be an apology or something. Gatorade sponsored the event, and it got some media attention, but my name was hardly mentioned. Basically, all of the articles just went on and on about how great Derek Jeter was to forgive the poor uncoordinated boy for causing such a scene and what a great person he was. He didn’t even apologize to me personally during the entire ten-minute press conference. And I had to endure the angry stares of all the Red Sox fans in the room for wrecking Pedroia’s leg. Not to mention the melting glares the cameraman was giving me. Have you ever had to sit in a room with a bunch of grown-ups who all hate your guts? No? Well, let me tell you, it sucks.

  And then some reporter guy asked me a question. “What’s it like to get to meet Derek Jeter in person?”

  I looked at him. And I looked at all the faces of the people around him. And I thought about the election, and Sara Hernandez, and the Red Sox’s season, and the way Mr. Benedict looked at me in the hall that day for taking out his star player—the same way the Red Sox manager would probably look at me for taking out his star player, Pedroia. And I opened my mouth to answer. And then—I couldn’t help it—I cried. And the room was silent, just the sound of me crying, and then, well … I peed my pants. I wish I was kidding, but you don’t know what it was like. Have you ever had to sit in a room being forced to drink glass after glass of Gatorade while billions of cameras and microphones are pointed at you and making you relive the worst moment of your life over and over again in front of millions of viewers across the country? No? Well, okay then, maybe you would have peed yourself too, so shut up.

  Of course, once that happened, Derek once again used my embarrassment for his own gain by cracking some joke about fish sticks that didn’t even make sense but that everybody laughed at so hard you’d have thought it was the best joke ever told in history. At least they stopped paying attention to me after his joke.

  Oh, and to cap it all off, Jeter hit a two-run home run on the very first pitch he saw that night and wound up scoring what would ultimately be the winning run.

  And, remember, it had been my birthday.

  Clearly, Derek Jeter had to pay.

  A few weeks into Jeter’s insane hot streak, which was also a few weeks after he was supposed to have been cursed, I decided that the baseball gods weren’t going to let me deliver Jeter’s comeuppance in the form of poor play on the field for some inexplicable reason. Probably Jeter sold his soul to them in the minors for eternal luck or something. Who knows?

  Anyway, I decided I’d have to show everybody just what kind of person Jeter really is in another way. The perfect opportunity presented itself to me a few days later. Most kids were spending their weekends at the beach or something like that, enjoying the last few weeks of nice weather before fall really hit the coast, but I spent all my free time on the computer researching the best way to get back at Jeter. And I came upon something interesting on Saturday afternoon.

  Derek Jeter was launching a new line of cologne as a part of some shameless sell-out million-dollar endorsement deal he’d made with Macy’s. The cologne was called Stolen, probably in reference to the fact that sometimes opposing pitchers let Jeter steal bases out of pity. A more accurate name for it would have been Hack or Overpaid or Worthless Jerk Who Everybody Loves for Some Reason Despite Being Nothing Better Than an Old Rusty Useless Puke Bucket.

  Anyway, the point is, I came up with the perfect plan to ruin his big perfume event and probably make him look l
ike an idiot in the process. Shoot, maybe if I got really lucky, he’d slip on a chunk of poop and separate his shoulder or something. Oh, yes, the plan most definitely was going to involve feces. Lots of it, with any luck.

  I just needed to convince Nate to help me.

  “Why are we doing this again?” Nate asked.

  “You know why.”

  “No, I mean, destroy Derek Jeter, yeah, I get that. I mean, what does my mom’s business have to do with getting back at Derek Jeter?”

  “You’ll see,” I said.

  Nate sighed. “I don’t like this.”

  “Yeah, well, you should be behind me on this. Derek Jeter is also responsible for your shattered elbow, remember?” I said.

  It looked like Nate was going to disagree with me about that for some reason, but then he just sighed and handed me his mom’s spare keys. We headed downstairs and then across the street to his mom’s kennel. She runs a daycare business for dogs. It’s crazy to me that people pay her to watch their dog while they’re at work every day. I mean, seriously, can’t you just leave your dog at home like most normal people? But I guess I should be happy that there are so many morons in New York City with extra cash and dogs. Because my plan wouldn’t have been a plan at all without them.

  We went around to the back door. It was lunchtime, which meant all of the dogs were in their little kennels or cages eating separately while Nate’s mom was in her little office eating lunch herself and taking a break. Her assistant almost always left to go get lunch somewhere else.

  I used the key Nate had given me, and we slipped in the back door. Luckily, the dogs were already crazily howling and barking, like always, so nobody heard us come in. We went into the back kennel area, and I grabbed a handful of leashes and got to work.

  Ten minutes later, I had leashed up twenty-eight dogs of various sizes and breeds and was ready to head over to the event. Nate wanted to stay behind, partly because he wouldn’t be much help with only one arm and partly because he was whining about how he was already grounded for two weeks and if he got caught doing this it’d probably become two years.