Game Changers

by Mike Lupica

  “I believe you are. But I’m not. I may lose my son for a little bit because of this. But if I don’t do what’s right for the team, if I don’t play the best players on merit, than I lose the team.”

  He started making his own walk toward the bus then. In the distance, the other side of the parking lot, Ben could see Shawn sitting on the steps, waiting for him. Having to know his day wasn’t going to get any better, whether he’d escaped getting suspended or not.

  Ben watched until Coach got to the bus, watched him and Shawn walk up the steps together, both looking as if they’d lost something important on a day when the Rams had come back to win a big game.

  In that moment, Ben McBain felt the same way.

  I wanted to be the quarterback of this team more than anything, he told himself.

  Just not like this.

  No matter how much belief Ben had in himself, and he had a lot, there had always been one big question, through all the times when coaches thought he was too little:

  Was he really a quarterback?

  If somehow he ever did get his chance, the way he was getting it now, could he actually deliver what Coop always called “the goods”?

  Turned out he could.

  Turned out that when Coach O’Brien did throw him out there, Ben really was the player he’d always imagined he could be.

  The Rams had played two games since he had become the starter. They had won easily in the first one, another road game, against Fort Stuart, winning by three touchdowns, Ben throwing for one score to Sam, running for another.

  His second start was a much closer game, the Rams only up by six points in the fourth quarter, needing to make some first downs to run out the clock. Ben even completed his first official pass to Shawn, Shawn making a terrific catch between two defenders for the Rams’ last first down, the one that really put the game away.

  Ben waited until after the game and said to Shawn, “Awesome grab.”

  Shawn said, “Yeah,” then walked away.

  It was the longest conversation they’d had since Ben became the starting quarterback.

  Ben had thrown for two more touchdowns, the Rams were 4–2 in the league, Ben felt more comfortable being behind center than he had against Fort Stuart, knew he’d feel even more comfortable by next Saturday. But that was the way sports was supposed to feel, he thought. The game they’d just played was barely over and already he couldn’t wait for the next one. It was like when you saw a great movie and as soon as you got outside the theater you were already thinking about going back to see it again.

  Ben felt like that.

  “We were more a team today than we have been all season,” Coach O’Brien said to them after the handshake line. “If we gave out game balls, I’d want to give one to just about every one of you today, because I felt like everybody in front of me did something to help us win. Shawn? That was a pro catch on the last drive. Great QB-ing from Ben. Sam gets us a pick when it looks like Masters might tie us or go ahead. Blocking, tackling, everything. Two games left. We win them, we’re going to the championship game. But we can worry about all that starting Monday night at practice. For now, enjoy the heck out of this one. I don’t know what the other coaches were doing today, but what I was doing was looking out there at the best team in our league.”

  They brought it in around him then and Coach yelled, “Ram tough!” from the TV commercial.

  “Ram tough!” they yelled back at him, then went to have their snack.

  Ben was one of the last to get in on the snacks. When he turned around, on his way over to where Sam and Coop were sitting in the grass, Shawn was standing there. Most of the time these days, they’d just pass each other without saying a word. But in this moment, Ben thought that was dumb.

  So he said, “Your dad was right. That was a pro catch.”

  “My dad was more interested in the throw,” Shawn said, then added, “He’s finally got the quarterback he always wanted.”

  They both knew who “he” was.

  About an hour later, after everybody had changed, Ben’s dad took Ben and Sam and Coop and Lily into town for ice cream. He said he had to go to the hardware store, then the grocery store to pick up some stuff for dinner, and he’d pick them up at Two Scoops when he was done.

  “Now don’t celebrate this one too much,” Jeff McBain said. “Still a lot of season left.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. M,” Coop said. “I’ll keep everybody under control.”

  “Coop,” Ben’s dad said, “don’t take this the wrong way, but I never think of you as being a group leader.”

  “Ben must get his sense of humor from you,” Coop said.

  “Nah, his mom. He got his football talent from me.”

  Ben said, “You got no arm, Dad.”

  “Well, everything except that.”

  They sat in the back booth and all of them plowed through banana splits and talked about another win, Ben thinking how different everything was now from when they were losing those first two games. It had only taken a few weeks, but now winning felt normal, the way Ben being quarterback did.

  So why wasn’t he happier?

  He knew why.

  As badly as Shawn had behaved toward him, and continued to behave — trying to make it sound like Coach O’Brien having the quarterback he always wanted was Ben’s fault — Ben still felt badly for him. And made the mistake now at Two Scoops of sharing that with the table.

  Coop said, “Did you take a helmet-to-helmet shot today I didn’t see?”

  “C’mon, you got no sympathy for this guy?” Ben said. “For real?”

  “For real,” Coop said, “and forever.”

  “You still think you ought to be helping him?” Sam said. “Right. Because of the way he’s been such a big help to you.”

  Then Sam said, “Coop’s right.”

  “Boy,” Lily said, obviously trying to lighten the mood, like she did, “you never want to hear yourself saying that.”

  “Go ahead,” Coop said, “chirp on me all you want. You can’t touch me when I’m eating ice cream.”

  “Seriously,” Ben said, suddenly not hungry, “we don’t know what it’s like to be this guy. His dad was a QB, he was the QB, now he’s not. And even though he’s making some solid catches and we’re winning, maybe he feels like we’re doing it without him. Almost like he left the team when he left the huddle that time.”

  “Dude,” Sam said, “when was he ever a part of the team?”

  Ben wanted to tell them all of it now, about the conversation with Shawn at his house before things started pinballing around in this crazy way, Shawn saying he didn’t want to be the quarterback, then saying he did, blaming everything on Ben, catching passes from Ben now instead of trying to throw them to him.

  But he couldn’t tell. A promise was still a promise, even though keeping it didn’t seem all that important anymore.

  “I still think there’s got to be a way to make him feel like he’s a part of the team,” Ben said. “And like playing on it the way we do.”

  “He’s not us,” Sam said.

  “Neither am I sometimes!” Lily said, smiling again.

  “Maybe,” Ben said, “he just doesn’t know how to be us.”

  He heard a knock on the window then, saw his dad, saw Jeff McBain make a goofy face once he knew he’d caught his son’s eye. In that moment, Ben thought how it was never hard being Jeff McBain’s son, that things never seemed complicated between them, not for one day of Ben’s life.

  He wondered if Shawn ever felt that way.

  To Ben, Coach O’Brien seemed like just as good a guy as Ben’s own dad was. But Ben wasn’t smart enough to know why that wasn’t enough for Shawn.

  Maybe, Ben thought, sliding out of the booth, I’ll be able to figure this all out when I’m older.

  Just not today.

  Sam and Coop wanted to make the day last even more, said they wanted to see a movie later. Ben said he’d pass, he was just going to stay home and w
atch college football with his dad, Boston College against Florida State on ESPN. But they all agreed to get a pickup game together tomorrow at McBain Field before the Packers game at four.

  It was that time of year now for Ben, either playing football or watching it, all weekend long. Wall to wall.

  So Ben and his dad were in the basement at 8:30, a huge bowl of popcorn on the table in front of them. Just the two of them. The football night stretched out in front of them, no school to worry about in the morning, Ben knowing he could stay up until the game ended.

  Even better? BC was ahead by a couple of touchdowns early in the second quarter.

  During a commercial break Ben’s dad said, “Okay, how much does it weigh, I’ve always wondered?”

  Jeff McBain at one end of the couch, Ben at the other.

  Ben said, “What does what weigh?”

  His dad grinned. “Just wondering about the weight of the world. Just how heavy it really is.”

  “Dad,” Ben said, “I’ve got no clue what you’re talking about. I’m fine.”

  “Fine? That’s where my guy sets the bar after a big win like today? You’re just fine?”

  “A little tired, maybe.”

  “Talk to me, big boy.”

  “About being tired?”

  “About whatever it is that’s bothering you, because something is.”

  Ben’s dad pointed the remote, muted the set. The basement was quiet now.

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “You should be,” Jeff McBain said, “but you’re not.”

  Ben took a deep breath, let it out, the sound way louder than normal because of the sudden quiet in the room.

  “I see how some of the other dads are sometimes, how out of control they can get about sports,” Ben said. “But you never put any pressure on me.”

  “Mostly because these games are important enough to you already.”

  “But I know how much you want me to do well.”

  “In the worst way, kiddo. Which is a good thing for parents and a bad thing, all at the same time. Because you’re right, you see and hear the same stuff I do, sometimes we do want things for our kids in the worst way. And I do mean the worst way. I do see it at your games all the time, all around me in the stands. It’s why I try to cheer as quietly as possible. I figured out a long time ago that your games aren’t about me.”

  Ben could see the players back on the field on the big screen. His dad kept the sound off.

  Jeff McBain said, “But I have the feeling this isn’t about you. Or us.”

  “No, Dad, we’re cool. Totally.”

  “Cool.”

  “I never asked you this before,” Ben said, “but when you were my age, you ever feel any pressure from Grandpa?”

  The force of his dad’s laugh surprised Ben.

  “All the time!” he said.

  “But Grandpa is, like, the nicest man in the world.”

  “A living saint,” Ben’s dad said about his own. “Still doesn’t mean it can’t get tricky between a father and a son, no matter how much they love each other. That’s the way it was with your grandfather and me and baseball.”

  “But football was your favorite.”

  “Let me finish,” his dad said. “Football was my favorite. But baseball was Grandpa’s. So he wanted it to be mine, too. He wanted me to be a pitcher the way he was, even though as you’ve pointed out, I don’t have much of an arm. So I did try to pitch. For him.” He smiled. “But I couldn’t pitch the way he had.”

  Ben turned so he was facing his dad now, listening up good. He had never heard this one. His dad had told a lot about what it was like when he was a boy. Never this.

  “But I knew I didn’t have it. In my heart of hearts, I knew something else: I didn’t have it in me to love baseball. It was just something I did with my buddies in the spring. And even though Grandpa never said a word, I knew he knew, and that it just killed him. He was a baseball guy, it was the only sport that mattered when he was growing up. Not just the national pastime. His. Oh, he’d go and watch me play football — which I really do love the way you do — but his heart wasn’t in it. And as sad as I just knew it made him, it made me even sadder.”

  Ben said, “You two ever talk about it?”

  Jeff McBain laughed again, not as loud as before, though. “Talk about stuff? With my dad? I grew up before that was popular.”

  “We talk all the time.”

  “Well, your grandpa and I didn’t.”

  “He talks about stuff with me.”

  “He’s gotten much better at it the second time around.”

  “Do you wish you’d talked it out, about you and him and baseball?”

  “Constantly,” Ben’s dad said. He un-muted the television now, almost like he was bringing this talk between them to an end. “There’s a part of me, even now, that wonders how much of it he could see, and how much he just didn’t want to. Like he kept thinking I would eventually come around.”

  Jeff McBain said, “Any of this making any sense to you?”

  “A lot.”

  “Wait a second! Weren’t we supposed to be talking about what was on your mind?”

  Ben smiled now at his dad, a smile that felt as if it came all the way up out of his heart of hearts.

  “Actually, Dad, we did.”

  When the game was over, when Ben was up in bed with his lights out, he thought about everything his dad had said to him in the basement.

  All his life, at least until Coach O’Brien put him in at quarterback, Ben thought it was only him that coaches couldn’t see. Couldn’t see the player he was supposed to be. Couldn’t see him for what he really was.

  But maybe he wasn’t alone.

  If it had happened to his dad, maybe it happened to everybody.

  Right before Ben went to sleep, he came up with his plan.

  Two home games left in the regular season, one against Darby that coming Saturday, one against Glendale the next.

  Parkerville and Glendale were tied for first place, both with 5–1 records. Rockwell and Darby were 4–2. If the Rams won out, they’d not only end up 6–2, they’d have beaten the other three teams fighting to get into the championship game.

  Math wasn’t always Ben McBain’s best subject, but the football math here was pretty simple:

  Win two games and nobody could keep them out of the championship game, no matter what anybody else did. Even after their 0–2 start, even after everything that had happened with Shawn, if they kept winning now — as Ben just knew they would — they would win the league.

  He wasn’t saying that out loud, of course.

  Not because he was superstitious or afraid of jinxing the Rams. Just because he knew you were never ever supposed to get ahead of yourself in sports. You started thinking about anything except the game you were playing and then the math got real simple:

  The other team would score more points and you’d lose.

  The Rams had fought too hard, fought back too hard, to allow that to happen now.

  “This feels like our version of the Turkey Bowl,” Coop said when they were warming up on the field before the Darby game, the weather much cooler all of a sudden, the first time all year it had felt like real football weather.

  Darby and Rockwell were big rivals in everything, Darby being the next town over. Every year, no matter what the records were for Rockwell High and Darby High, the Turkey Bowl game on Thanksgiving felt like the championship of the two towns.

  Sam said, “Just try not to play like a turkey today.”

  Coop said, “How come you never talk to him like that?”

  Pointing at Ben.

  “Because he never acts like a turkey.”

  “And I do?” Coop said.

  Sam grinned. “Gobble, gobble,” he said.

  “You know,” Coop said, “for all this Core Four stuff, it sure seems like only one of us is the one always getting his chops busted.”

  “We just think that the best way to
get you up for the game is to knock you down a little bit,” Ben said.

  “Thanks for caring,” Coop said. “And sharing.”

  They all knew a lot of the Darby guys from other sports, knew their best player was their halfback Ryan Hurley, knew the Darby Bears were going to run Ryan all game long, that their coach didn’t like to throw. Nobody in the Midget Division was going to take time to scout another team, not even someone who loved to be prepared the way Coach O’Brien did. But he told them in his pregame talk that maybe he had talked to a couple of the coaches whose teams had played Darby already, so he pretty much knew what to expect.

  “Smash-mouth football all the way,” he said. “But let them go ahead and try to run over this team.” Nodding as he said, “When we’ve got the ball? We run over them, and around them, and past them. And throw over them.”

  By the time the first half was nearly over, Ben wished it were that simple. Because for the first time since he’d become quarterback, the offense wasn’t clicking. The best scoring drive of the day had belonged to the Bears, their first drive of the way, Ryan Hurley getting the ball on practically every down. They ended up with a first and goal from the Rams’ five, but when it looked like Ryan was about to run it in for the game’s first touchdown, Coop closed the ground between them, rocked him with a hit from the side that knocked the ball loose, recovered it himself.

  “Gobble, gobble,” Coop said to Ben and Sam in the huddle. “Who’s a turkey now?”

  The Rams ran it out of there for a couple of first downs. But Ben was missing with his throws today, long and short. A couple had been batted down by the big guys in the Bears’ front line. The Rams’ best chance to score came right at the end of the half, but then Ben tried to force in a pass to Sam, who was double-covered the way he had been all day — obviously Coach O’Brien wasn’t the only one who had done a little scouting — and got picked off by Ryan Hurley, back playing safety.

  So the game stayed 0–0.

  Ben didn’t know what his passing stats were exactly, he was too busy playing the game. But he could only remember three completed passes for the half, two to Sam, one to Shawn. The rest of the time he really had been about as accurate as Shawn had been when he was still the starting quarterback for the Rams.