TJ and the Sports Fanatic

by Hazel Hutchins

  I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed.

  Gabe stopped by.

  “Uniforms are in. Some kids have already dropped out. We need everyone on Tuesday.”

  Just what I needed—the whole team-pressure thing.

  Leroy stopped by.

  “Your weird friend is running around like crazy in the park. I had a pet gerbil that died of a heart attack that way.”

  Trust Leroy to make a special trip into the store to tell me.

  Amanda and her mom stopped by. Mom and Dad had gone to meet with the landlord, and it was just Mr. G. and me taking care of the place.

  “I’ll be back when your mom returns, TJ,” said Mrs. Baker. “Are you staying, Amanda?”

  Amanda nodded. Mrs. Baker left to run errands.

  “Doesn’t she like Mr. G. and me?” I asked Amanda.

  “We’re renovating,” said Amanda. “Your mom’s good with paint colors and ideas for blinds and carpets. What did you think of football practice?”

  “Meg’s already way better at football than I am,” I said. “Do you know how humiliating that is?”

  Amanda laughed.

  “Her family likes contact sports,” she said. “Meg’s aunt plays rugby on the national women’s team.”

  It didn’t surprise me. And it reminded me of something.

  “Swimming is your sport, right? Let me take a wild guess. One day you’d like to swim across Lake Ontario or the English Channel,” I said.

  Amanda looked puzzled. “How did you know that, TJ? I haven’t told anyone.”

  I just shook my head. I don’t think Amanda does it on purpose. She just naturally gravitates to things she can be really, really good at. I made a mental note to tell Seymour never to take up long-distance swimming.

  Amanda stayed to talk while I restocked our pet supplies. A lot of customers must have been away on summer holidays because not much had sold. It only took me about ten minutes to fill and tidy the shelves. By then Mom and Dad were back. They didn’t need me in the store any longer, so Amanda and I walked over to the park. Seymour was still there, running in short bursts like some kind of small crazed creature.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Fast-twitch muscle fibers.”

  “You got it,” he panted. “And they’ve about twitched to exhaustion.”

  He flopped down on the grass. We sat beside him.

  “Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to jog along the river path like everyone else?” asked Amanda.

  “That would be training for long-distance and endurance kind of stuff,” said Seymour. “That’s not what I need to work on, except any type of running helps the old cardio—you know—lungs and heart and stuff.”

  “Just don’t start lifting weights,” said Amanda. “My swim coach says lifting weights does more harm than good at this stage.”

  “Rats,” Seymour said, frowning.

  “But stretches are good after you’ve been working out,” said Amanda.

  They both began doing stretches, and pretty soon it became a contest to see who could wrap his leg around the back of his neck or who could tie her body in the best knot. Seymour was pretty good at it. When Amanda found out that he could stand on one leg and do some of the stretches, she was impressed.

  “Flexibility and balance have got to help you somehow,” she said.

  Seymour shrugged.

  “That stuff is easy for me,” he said. “I just wish there was some way—besides cutting my leg open—to figure out what type of muscle fibers I have.”

  I looked at him in horror.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not dumb enough to do that,” said Seymour.

  “Genetic tests can tell, but that’s elite athlete stuff,” said Amanda. “And there are are all sorts of ways to be good at something.”

  “Right,” said Seymour. He rummaged beneath some bushes and pulled out a football he’d stashed there. “Anyone want to throw me some passes?”

  We tried, but neither of us were much help. Seymour and his muscle fibers headed home. I still wanted to know if they actually twitched. When I got home, I began to read again. I never did find out, but I discovered something else that surprised me.

  Leg muscles aren’t a person’s strongest muscles. Jaw muscles are stronger. Heart muscles are stronger too—all that pumping away like crazy. In fact, if you’re in great physical shape your heart will push more blood around with each whoosh, and that means it won’t have to beat as often. There was a chart about it.

  Average adult… 70 heartbeats per minute (at rest)

  Athletic adult… 40 heartbeats per minute (at rest)

  There were other heart rates as well.

  Gray whale… 8 beats per minute

  For a body the size of a whale?

  Elephant… 25 beats per minute

  How big was an elephant’s heart?

  Shrew… 1200 beats per minute

  That worked out to twenty heartbeats every second. Maybe Leroy’s gerbil really had died of a heart attack!

  I decided to figure out the resting heart rate for a cat. T-Rex was sleeping in a sunbeam. I gently rolled him on his back and put my head against his furry little tummy. He decided I was a new wrestling toy. He grabbed my head with his front claws and began to kick with his back feet. Ow!

  I tried Alaska. She’s a whole lot more passive. Too passive. I couldn’t tell her heartbeat from her purring.

  I went back to the books. I was tired of looking at pictures of the human body with the skin removed. I chose a book with pictures of kids in uniform. It wasn’t about playing football, exactly; it was about coaching football. And it shed a whole new light on things.

  Chapter 6

  You feel really big when you put on your football pads and uniform. Big chest. Big shoulders. Big legs. I felt like I could tackle the world—once I learned to run with my legs padded. And then I put on my helmet and became Monster Man.

  Everyone else felt that way too. Kids began bouncing off each other or slapping each other on the helmet. It felt good in a weird sort of way. Seymour grinned at me. Behind my face guard, I was grinning right back.

  The dressing rooms at the park had been opened just for this afternoon. As kids finished suiting up you could see them sneak a peek over their shoulders into the cracked mirror above the sinks. I snuck a peek myself. Yup, I looked like a football player. And this time, when I stepped onto the field, I felt like a football player.

  It was all part of the secret plan.

  Getting kids interested and keeping them interested—that was an entire section in the book I’d read. The sooner kids had team uniforms the better.

  And Seymour was right about the coaches sizing us up to see what positions we’d play—more of the secret plan. Okay, it wasn’t so secret if people wrote books about it, but it was still interesting to read about football from a coaching point of view. One chapter even gave names to different types of coaches—some bad, some good, some in-between.

  On the bad side were Sloppy Joe, Don the Dictator, Mr. Sarcasm, Buddy Too-Friendly, Mr. Superstitious and Sid the Sulk. My old T-ball coach had been a mixture of all of them. Yuck. No wonder I hadn’t liked T-ball!

  On the better side were Football Fan, Statistical Simon, Arnie Organizer, Mr. Calm and Cool, Professor Football and The Doc. I began to match our football coaches with the book’s categories.

  Coach Mac was Football Fan. He kept saying things like “good try—great effort.” He worked hard at being supportive, but he didn’t seem to know very much. It was Coach Billings who gave the real directions for the offense, with Coach Mac doing the follow-up. Coach Mac was learning, just like the rest of us.

  Coach Billings was more complicated. He definitely had a big hunk of Don the Dictator in him, but part of him was simply Arnie Organizer. Right now he and Amanda’s swim coach, Sandy, were checking someone’s knee, so I added The Doc to Coach Billings’ list. There were other parts that I felt could go either way.

  I didn’t get a chance
to think about the other coaches because practice was starting.

  This time Sandy was on the field to help run warm-ups, stretches and conditioning drills. She was smart and fun and didn’t make you feel like an idiot when she told you training stuff. I could see why Amanda wanted to hang out with her.

  After that, Coach Billings put us into groups to work with position coaches. He made it clear that nothing was final yet. Anyone who wanted to try out a different position was welcome to do so. I’d read the book, of course, and knew that in the end he would still be the one to decide—as Don the Dictator—but at least he was giving kids a chance to learn about other positions.

  He called Gabe, Leroy and one other kid to learn quarterback skills. Right away, Seymour jogged over to join them.

  He called Meg, Shimu and others to work on catching and running. They’d be the offensive backfield, for when we had the ball and were trying to score. The book had predicted that lots of players would want these positions. Sure enough, when Coach said anyone with half-decent running speed could join them, more kids trotted over.

  Next, Coach Billings put together the defensive backfield, the players who’d try to protect our goal line when the other team had the ball. It was a small group because so many kids had joined the offensive side. That would change. More of the secret plan.

  And that left the rest of us. The book had even described this moment. It was the moment when kids who’d dreamed of scoring touchdowns and being football heroes suddenly realized they’d be standing in the middle of the field pushing against each other. They would be the linemen. Disappointment—big-time.

  Beside me, Gibson frowned. He was the biggest kid on the team and anyone could have guessed where he’d be playing, but he’d been thinking exactly the way the book had predicted. I knew how he felt. In some strange place deep inside me—even though I knew I ran slower than most kids and had a terrible time hanging onto the ball—I’d hoped to be a runner or receiver myself.

  “Linemen are the unsung heroes,” I said.

  I didn’t know if it was true, it was just something I’d read, but Gibson heard me.

  “At least we can be unsung heroes on the scoring side,” he said. He called across the field. “Hey, Coach. Put me on offense!”

  “Offensive line—over with Gibson,” bellowed Coach Billings. I followed Gibson. I liked the idea of standing next to someone big.

  Whack. Oof. That’s the sound you make when you start hitting. Whack is the sound of your pads. Oof is the sound of your breath. We weren’t hitting each other; we were hitting blocking dummies.

  When we did begin to work against each other, it was mostly fit-up drills again. Coach G. quietly repeated a simple mantra during the blocking drill: “Feet apart, helmet below helmet, hands inside hands.” Pretty soon Coach Mac and Coach Billings were bellowing it. We switched to a tackling drill and Coach G. started another mantra: “Rip, rise and run.” The other coaches picked it up too. That’s when I decided which category Coach G. fell into… Professor Football. It was the teaching part of football that he liked.

  We began to work on some of the plays we’d be running. Gibson had a question.

  “Coach, once I’ve got the other guy flattened, I should watch for the ball, right?”

  “Gibson,” said Coach G., “the idea isn’t to flatten your opponent, it’s to control him. That’s why it’s called blocking instead of flattening.”

  “Yeah, but if I happen to flatten him, then I should be watching to grab the ball, right?”

  Coach G. was still shaking his head. “If you touch the ball the referee will whistle it down. You’re an offensive lineman. You open holes for the runners and protect the quarterback when he needs some time to throw.”

  “You mean I can’t even touch the football?” asked Gibson in disbelief. “But there are interceptions! What if I get an interception?”

  “Ahhh,” said Professor Football, finally understanding where Gibson had been heading all along. “Good point. Except we’re offense. We already have the ball.”

  The light dawned.

  “I’d be intercepting against my own team,” said Gibson. He turned and called across the field. “Hey, Coach. I’m switching to defense!”

  Coach Mac welcomed him with open arms. I would have followed, but I didn’t want to look like some kind of groupie. Besides, Coach G. had decided to try me at the right guard position and began explaining what that meant.

  Learning an actual position was more complex than I thought it would be. I didn’t have much time to see what Seymour was up to, but every once in a while I caught a glimpse of him. First he was working with the quarterbacks. Then he was working with the offensive backfield. After break he worked with the defensive backfield. That’s where he stayed.

  We ended with wind sprints and the same final lecture. Coach Billings only had two lectures: one forward, one reverse. They both seemed to go on forever. The book needed another category—Longwinded Larry.

  Coach G. handed out the playbooks at the end of practice. Playbooks are written in football code. They fall right into the secret plan idea. And in true Professor Football fashion, Coach G. couldn’t resist adding to it when he reached Seymour and me.

  “Here’s something else for you to figure out.” He took a pen from his pocket and wrote across the back of each of our play-books.

  F = ma

  “He’s gone bonkers from too much time in the sun,” said Seymour on the way home. “Why would a defensive back need to know a math formula?”

  It was hot and we were carrying our pads and helmets. Football players our age don’t need to lift weights. They get lots of exercise lugging their gear around.

  “Is that what position you’re playing?” I asked. “Defensive back?”

  Seymour nodded.

  “Do you think a defensive back could ever get chosen to be a team captain?” he asked.

  A couple of days earlier I would have thought he was being weird again. Now that I’d guessed about his mom having a boyfriend, however, I could figure it out. If he couldn’t be a quarterback or an offensive player with a chance to score some touchdowns, at least he could impress his mom’s boyfriend by being a team captain.

  “Maybe,” I said. “If someone’s good at it.”

  Seymour headed home to study his playbook. I went home too, but for once Alaska wasn’t waiting in the window. I understood as soon as I opened the door. The smell of shrimp had clogged her TJ radar. Dad was home and he was feeding the cats from a freshly opened tin.

  Why was Dad home in the middle of the day?

  He never did tell me. We just talked for a while, and then he went back to the store. It had been great to sit around and visit with him. A few minutes later, Mom phoned.

  “Dad just left,” I told her.

  “Did you talk about anything special?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “We discussed how weird it is that cats hate water but love shrimp even though shrimp live at the bottom of the ocean. It was a very deep subject.”

  Mom doesn’t always appreciate my humor.

  “Right,” she sighed. “See you later.”

  I made a snack and opened my play-book. There were X’s and O’s and arrows everywhere. Too bad they hadn’t supplied a secret decoder ring.

  A page from TJ’s playbook

  Chapter 7

  “It’s physics. F = ma is physics!” said Seymour, showing up just as I took the garbage to the curb the next morning. He’d found a new book—The Science of Football. “Which would you rather be hit by—something heavy or something light?”

  “Something light,” I said.

  “Wrong!” said Seymour. “Well, not completely wrong, but half wrong. A bullet is light. A bullet can do a lot of damage when it’s shot out of a gun.”

  He smiled and walked up the front steps and into my house.

  “Okay,” I said, following him. “But being hit by a freight train wouldn’t exactly be wonderful either.”
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  “Right,” said Seymour. “Size and speed. It’s physics—Newton’s Second Law of Motion. F = ma. Force equals mass times acceleration. They even measure it in units called newtons for old Isaac Newton himself—gravity scientist and apple eater.”

  He plunked down the book. All kinds of formulas and definitions spilled across the pages—force, mass, acceleration, velocity, momentum, impulse.

  “And it doesn’t just apply to rockets and bullets. It applies to football. Small players can stop big players so long as the small player is traveling fast enough,” explained Seymour. “F = ma.”

  He was right. That’s what it meant. Of course, if there were big differences in size, then the small player would have to be traveling a lot faster than the large player. Either that or he’d need to hang on and get dragged along.

  We had to do a lot of estimating and a lot of ignoring things like change of direction or how long a person could move at a certain rate of acceleration. But by substituting our weights and guessing that Seymour ran half as fast, and I ran a quarter as fast, as a professional team player, we came up with some figures.

  Seymour had a force of 95 newtons.

  I had a force of 54 newtons.

  Gibson (who was big but sill almost as fast as Seymour) had a force of 125 newtons.

  Good grief. Gibson could run right over me if he wanted to! Even Seymour shook his head.

  “If I have to tackle someone the size of Gibson, I’ll definitely have to hang on to him,” he said.

  There were pages and pages of football physics. Some of it was pretty interesting, like the fact that two big players who run into each other can experience nine times the force of gravity. It’s only for a split second, but that’s still a lot of G’s!

  The book also made a couple of important points. The first was that long before scientists thought of doing football physics, coaches and players had figured most of it out on their own.

  The second was that physics couldn’t allow for the “will to win” factor. The formulas were accurate, but things weren’t always as predictable as they seemed on paper.

  Still, it was fun to mess around with the figures. We’d just calculated that, at full speed, T-Rex had a force of 26 newtons, when Gran showed up.