The Walk On

by John Feinstein

  Alex looked at his phone and saw the text wasn’t from his mother but from Stephen.

  It said, Stark’s—11:30 tomorrow?

  Jonas was looking at his phone too.

  “You get this too?” he said, showing Alex his phone.

  Alex nodded, just as his phone buzzed again.

  NO Christine, the second message said.

  “Okay?” he asked Jonas.

  “Fine,” Jonas said, and they both sent their answers to Stephen as the bus pulled up in front of the locker room.

  By now, phone calls from Christine didn’t surprise Alex anymore.

  She texted him early on Saturday morning, asking him to call her. He debated whether to ignore her, text back, or call.

  He finally opted for calling—knowing it was probably a mistake.

  “Can we meet for lunch today?” she asked.

  “No,” Alex answered too quickly. “I mean, why?”

  “You saw what happened after the game,” she said. “No one was allowed to talk to anyone on the team.”

  “I know. But after what happened last week, it’s just too risky for any of us to talk. If anyone is quoted, even anonymously, Coach Gordon will go nuts.”

  “I know. I’m just curious how you all reacted when Coach Gordon decided to give up on the spread option and go to the I-formation at halftime.”

  “Coach Gordon?” he blurted. “Who said it was Coach Gordon’s idea?”

  “He did,” she said. “You mean it wasn’t him? Was it Coach Brotman?”

  Alex caught himself. If Coach Gordon had decided to take credit for the change in offense, he wasn’t going to be the one to contradict him.

  “Sure, it was him.”

  “Come on, Alex.”

  “I really don’t know who it was,” he said, not happy that he was lying but not feeling like he had a choice. “The coaches go off into a corner for a while and we can’t hear what they’re saying.”

  “So you just don’t want to give him credit for being smart, then.”

  “What!”

  Now she was defending Coach Gordon? Who would she get that from? Oh God—it had to be Jake.

  She was talking and he was half listening.

  “You know I’ll find out the truth one way or the other,” she was saying. “So will Steve. The assistant coaches still talk to him.”

  “Find out from them, then. They should know.”

  She sighed, clearly exasperated. Alex realized that he did a lot better not giving in to her on the phone than he did in person.

  “How about if we meet at Stark’s for lunch to talk about all this?”

  “Can’t,” he said. “Have plans.”

  “With who?” she asked, almost sounding indignant.

  “Don’t sound so shocked—I do have friends.”

  “I know,” she said. “I just thought we were … friends too.”

  He started to say something like, That’s funny, we weren’t friends until I got knocked silly and you got a story out of it. Or, Seems to me like you’re a lot friendlier with Jake than you are with me. He caught himself, though—neither comment was a good idea.

  “We are,” he said. “But I can’t talk to you right now. I’m the third-string quarterback and if I get caught doing something that upsets Coach Gordon, he’ll cut me altogether. Look what he did to Coach Hillier, and that could have cost us the game last night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said. Geez, if he stayed on the phone much longer he was going to say something he shouldn’t. “I gotta go,” he said. “My mother’s calling me to breakfast.”

  “No, she’s not,” Christine said. “You’re just afraid to talk to me.”

  She really was too smart for her own good—or his.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Which is why I have to go now.”

  He hung up feeling guilty, but letting her join them at Stark’s would be a disaster on every possible level.

  “Well, who was it, then?” Jonas asked.

  They were sitting at a back table inside Stark’s. Much to Alex’s relief, there were no familiar faces around when he walked in the door and found both Stephen and Jonas waiting for him, even though he was two minutes early.

  They hadn’t wasted any time getting to the point: Jonas said he hadn’t spoken to Coach Gordon and Stephen said the same thing. Alex figured it went without saying that he hadn’t confessed, but he confirmed that for the two of them nevertheless.

  Which led to Jonas’s question. Who?

  Alex had been wondering all night and had a theory. “What if no one said anything …? Is it possible that Coach Hillier had it right, that Coach Gordon didn’t want the entire team running for days and so he just said people had turned themselves in so it would look like he got what he wanted, even though he really didn’t?”

  They both stared at him for a second.

  “So he bluffed?” Jonas said. “Waited until the last possible minute and then decided running everyone would hurt the team, so he backed off without admitting he backed off?”

  “I wouldn’t put that past him,” Stephen said.

  A waitress came to take their orders. The place had been virtually empty when Alex walked in, but now people were starting to fill the tables. Still, no one from school. He was sitting with his back to the wall, facing the front of the restaurant, so he could see everyone who walked in.

  “Actually, it’s pretty ingenious,” Alex said. “He’s got everyone scared to talk to anyone in the media, especially to anyone on the Weekly Roar, and the rest of the team probably believes a couple of guys turned themselves in. We only know he’s lying because we’re guilty, and we’re sure not going to tell anyone else that.”

  They were both nodding in agreement.

  “You know he didn’t give Matt any credit for changing the offense last night when he talked to the reporters,” Stephen said. “Took all the bows himself.”

  “How do you know that?” Jonas asked.

  Stephen reached down to the empty chair next to him and picked up a copy of the sports section of the Inquirer.

  “Page four,” he said. “Right at the top. Read the first quote.”

  Jonas took the paper and opened it so Alex could look over his shoulder. The headline, CHESTER HEIGHTS MUDDLES THROUGH MUD AND MAIN LINE, was stretched across the top of the page, making it the number one high school story of the day.

  Jonas read the quote from Coach Gordon aloud: “ ‘What we were doing in the spread option wasn’t working because of the conditions. Sometimes you have to adjust on the fly. It wasn’t a hard decision to make. I thought the kids did a really good job of running an offense we don’t practice very often because we usually only use it in our goal-line package.’ ”

  Alex grunted. “Pretty carefully worded. He doesn’t actually say it was his idea.…”

  “But he makes you think it was,” Jonas said, finishing his sentence.

  “I wonder how Matt feels about that,” Alex said.

  Stephen shrugged. “I think Matt gets who his father is. He’s always turned it into a joke when someone brings up his father. I remember once he said, ‘My mom always says we need two houses: one for us and one for my dad and his ego.’ ”

  “His mom might not have been joking,” Jonas said.

  Their hamburgers arrived. Alex was savoring his first bite when he looked up and saw something that almost made him choke on his food.

  Christine Whitford.

  “Oh boy,” he managed to say as his food went down too quickly. “Trouble.”

  Stephen and Jonas looked up as Christine, after a quick pause to look around the room, started walking toward their table.

  “Did you invite her?” Stephen asked, clearly not pleased.

  “Swear to God, no,” Alex said.

  “Good,” Stephen said. “Then you can tell her to leave.”

  “So I guessed right,” Christine said as she reached the table.

  “You g
uessed wrong if you thought you were welcome here,” Stephen said in a tone he usually reserved for the locker room.

  “Lighten up, Harvey. I’m not here to get anyone in trouble,” she answered. Alex figured Christine was about five four and weighed 110 pounds. Stephen Harvey was six three and a rock-hard 220 or so. Clearly, though, there was no back-down in Christine.

  Alex guessed she had biked over because her long dark hair looked windblown—and yet still somehow perfect. Stephen’s tone bothered Alex, but he didn’t say anything. He understood why Stephen was upset.

  “You’ve already gotten us in trouble,” Stephen said. “You got the whole team in trouble by getting Alex to talk Jonas and me into talking to your boy Garland. Can’t you just leave it alone?”

  “He’s not ‘my boy,’ ” she said defensively. “He’s the sports editor, and all three of you know he hasn’t written a word that isn’t true.”

  “That’s not the point, Christine,” Alex broke in. “Maybe it is from your point of view, but not from ours. We’re on the team—at least at the moment. We still have to answer to Coach Gordon every day. You don’t. Garland doesn’t. Coach Gordon’s actually right: we’re us and you’re them. The three of us and all the other guys and Coach Gordon are on the same team. You’re not.”

  “We’re not supposed to be,” Christine said.

  “That’s fine,” Alex said. “But right now we’re having a team-only lunch. And you aren’t on the team.”

  The look on her face was tough for Alex to take because she was clearly hurt. Or angry. Or both.

  “You know this isn’t going to go away,” she said. “All those other people bought Coach Gordon’s story that none of you were going to talk to the media because everyone was so wet and tired from the game. We know better. We’re going to write about it this week. And we also know it was Matt’s idea, not his father’s, to change the offense at halftime. We’re going to write that too.”

  “How did you find all that out?” Jonas said.

  Her smile returned—if only for a moment. “I told you, Steve’s a good reporter. So is Kim Gagne. And, even though I’m not as experienced as they are, so am I.”

  Alex knew that Kim Gagne was a senior, like Garland, and that he wrote the game stories each week.

  “Well, good for you, then,” Stephen said. “But if you write that, Coach Gordon won’t be happy at all. And he’ll take it out on us.”

  She shrugged. “That’s not really our problem, is it?” she said. “We’re not on the same team. Right, Alex?”

  She turned and walked away.

  Alex looked at his hamburger. Suddenly he wasn’t very hungry anymore.

  Steve Garland’s story the following Wednesday was everything that Alex had feared it would be. Not only did it mention the gag order that Coach Gordon had imposed on the entire team, it also noted that he had taken credit for the change in the offense that had been suggested by his son.

  Garland wrote:

  We all know that our very talented coach is insatiable when it comes to feeding his ego, but this is way over the line. The irony is that Coach Gordon always preaches loyalty to his team. Everything is about us versus them. And yet, when it comes down to it, it seems to be about him.

  Those words had to sting—regardless of whether they were true or not.

  Garland’s story wasn’t the worst of it, though. Someone—maybe Garland?—had told Comcast SportsNet–Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Daily News about Coach Gordon taking credit for changing the game plan. On Wednesday, the entire school was buzzing about an interview Coach Gordon had done with Michael Barkann on Comcast about what Barkann called “the allegations.”

  Alex, Stephen, and Jonas huddled over Stephen’s computer at lunchtime, watching the interview.

  “Trust me, Michael, no one wants to give credit to Matt more than I do,” Coach Gordon said, lighting up the screen with a smile when Barkann asked him the question. “In fact, Matt and I had discussed the possibility of starting the game in an I-formation because of the conditions. Matt asked for a half to try to run our normal spread option and I thought that was the right way to go.

  “I think he felt, since I had gone along with his wishes as the captain and the quarterback in the first half, that he should be the one to bring up making the switch—which he did—at halftime. I was very proud of him.”

  Barkann followed up with the question that Alex would have asked.

  “Last week, we’re told, your players were only allowed to talk to the media if a coach was present. You told me before we started this interview that none of your players are available to talk at all—including Matt. Why is that?”

  Another big smile from Coach Gordon.

  “Michael, as much as I like you and quite a few media members, my first and only job is to do what’s best for our football team. We’re starting league play this week against a very good team—and that’s not coach-speak, they’re three and oh, just like we are—from King of Prussia High. Unfortunately, we’ve had one youngster on our school paper who doesn’t really understand the ethics of journalism—at least not yet. That’s created some issues for us to deal with and the last thing we need right now are issues off the field.”

  Alex wondered if somewhere in there was an answer to Barkann’s question. Apparently, so did Barkann.

  “I’m not sure I understand what a problem with the student newspaper has to do with keeping your players from talking to me or anyone else in the media,” he said.

  One last smile from Coach Gordon. “Well, Michael, the good news for me is that you don’t need to understand. Thanks for coming out.”

  Coach Gordon faded from the screen and was replaced by a shot of Barkann standing just outside the stadium in front of the sign that said WELCOME TO THE LIONS’ DEN, which fans passed under as they entered.

  “It’s tough to question Matthew Gordon based on his coaching record,” Barkann said. “And it’s almost a certainty that if we had talked to Matt Gordon Junior he would have backed up his father’s story. But there’s clearly something amiss inside what is a very good Chester Heights team when the coach is letting stories in the student newspaper affect his team. We’ve learned that offensive coordinator Tom Hillier, who is also the faculty supervisor of the student newspaper, abruptly resigned last week because of the dispute between Coach Gordon and the paper.

  “From Chester Heights High School, I’m Michael Barkann.”

  Harvey shut the computer and shook his head. “Boy, not good when Michael Barkann is questioning you. He’s like the nicest guy in Philadelphia.”

  “What’s the Daily News story say?” Jonas asked. Stephen had a copy of the paper with him.

  “Same thing only more direct: Questions about whether Coach took credit for Matt’s idea; gag order for the team; Coach Hillier resigning; Coach being paranoid. There’s a great line from Garland. He says he didn’t realize how many friends he had on the football team until all the players were ordered not to speak to him.”

  “Oh boy,” Alex said. “I’ll bet that played well in the football offices.”

  There was no talk of Steve Garland or gag orders or anyone in the media that afternoon at practice. King of Prussia was a good team—just watching tape of them was enough to make that clear—and there was a heightened sense of anticipation for this first in-league game. That’s what would decide whether they had a chance to play for the state championship.

  “They’re fast,” Matt Gordon said to Alex and Jake as they warmed up. “Last year we beat them only because they had three fumbles. Otherwise, they beat us. I’ll have to be a lot better than I was last year if we’re going to win.”

  Alex was dying to ask Matt about whether he and his dad had really had any discussion about the offense before the Main Line game. He knew that was a bad idea—in fact, it was unfair to Matt to ask. As Jake had said when Alex brought it up, “You don’t ask anyone to say their father’s a liar—even if he might be.”

  Tha
t was the closest Jake had ever come to saying anything that indicated he might doubt Coach Gordon.

  Alex had never thought of his father as a liar, but he was hurt that he still hadn’t found time to make it to Philadelphia. On three different occasions his dad had said he was “hoping” to make it down for a weekend. All three times he had called back to say that something had come up.

  At one point his dad had suggested that he and Molly come up for a weekend, but Alex had games every Friday and Molly had soccer games on Saturdays. They could maybe get there by train late on a Saturday, but it’d be about ten hours of train time for about six hours of visiting time. His mom had said they could go to Boston for Thanksgiving but not before then. If his dad really wanted to see his children, he’d have to make the effort.

  “Dave, get real,” Alex heard her say on the phone one night. “It’s up to you to come see your kids; it’s not up to them to come see you.”

  Alex didn’t question his father’s love for him, but as each week slipped past, he felt like he and Molly were slipping in his dad’s pecking order of priorities. He kept telling them they were number one—but he had a strange way of showing it.

  There was another pep rally on Friday afternoon. It wasn’t much different from the first one, although Coach Gordon insisted that “never have we needed your support more than we need it tonight. This is about us versus them! Remember that!”

  Alex wondered exactly who them was. It appeared to be a lot of people not wearing opposing uniforms. Coach Gordon introduced him a little bit differently. “He’s proven he can take a hit—Chester Heights’ quarterback of the future … Alex Myers!”

  Alex guessed that was an improvement. Jonas didn’t. “Does he think it was funny that he almost got you killed?” he whispered when Alex joined him onstage.

  “I’m not sure he thinks anything is funny,” Alex answered.

  “That you’ve got right,” Jonas said. He wasn’t smiling.

  Even though he knew he wasn’t going to play—even to take a knee, since that had apparently now become Jake’s job—Alex couldn’t help but feel a rush of adrenaline when his mom dropped him off at school a couple of hours after the pep rally. He had gone home long enough to get something to eat and knock out some French vocabulary. He was carrying something between a B and a C in French and he badly wanted to improve. Getting the toughest part of his homework out of the way early on the weekend seemed like a good idea.