Tackled (Alpha Ballers #1)

by Lucy Snow

  Oh well, to each their own. I shook Rich’s hand and kept moving toward the green room. Along the way I ran into a few more reporters gathered around talking shop. I checked my watch; I had about 60 seconds to kill before I really needed to get a move on, so I clapped one them on the shoulder and joined in the group.

  “What’s the good word, fellas?” I broke in, showing off just how jazzed I was to be there.

  “Oh, hey, Drake,” one of them replied, a look of confusion on his face. The rest of them were silent.

  I got a weird vibe from the whole thing and decided to make my exit. “Just wanted to say hi, guys, happy draft day and all, I’ll see you after the festivities. Be sure and get my good side when that phone call shot comes up, yeah?” I laughed as I walked away. “Oh yeah, both sides are my good side!”

  It was good to be on top. Those guys must have just been a little surprised to see me in their huddle so close to the draft. They probably figured I’d be in the green room already. I was Drake Rollins, though, I still had time to kiss babies and glad hand the common folk. I would never give that up - my adoring public needed me.

  As I walked away from them I heard them talk about me. That was more like it.

  I checked my watch again, and I needed to book it to get to the green room entrance before the cutoff. The league liked to keep things running as efficiently as possible especially on draft day, and I wasn’t about to be the loose cog that slowed everything down. That was no way for one of the league’s soon-to-be-biggest stars to start his career off, was it?

  Everyone was acting a little strange around me, and I didn’t know why. I tried to shrug it off as best I could as I walked towards the green room, but there was a voice in the back of my head I was telling me that something was wrong. And it wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard I tried to silence it.

  The green room entrance was a regular double door, with two security guards standing in front of it. Big guys, bigger than me. Guys that could play on the offensive or defensive line, and probably had in high school and college. They each had earpieces in, and wore suits.

  I rolled up, gave them the Drake Rollins smile. “Drake Rollins, here for the draft. Let’s get our green room on.” I waited for them to open the door.

  The security guards cocked their heads to the side, and each one of them put a finger to their ear piece, as if pressing it into here better above loud noise of the crowd in the huge hall. They listened for a few moments, and I tapped my foot against the floor. I didn’t have time for this. I need to be inside there with the cameras and the lights, so that people around the world could put a face to the name.

  Football wasn’t like basketball or baseball. We wore helmets almost all the time that people saw us, so draft day was the first time that most of these people would learn what I looked like. When I got my endorsement deals, I wouldn’t be wearing my helmet, so it was important that they started to recognize me soon as possible.

  These are all things I had learned in that public relations class I took back at Cal, and from all the different brand managers and endorsement dealers that my agent’d had me meet over the last few months. Everybody wanted to be in the business of Drake Rollins. As long as that made me money I was okay with it. A rising tide lifted all boats, and I was the biggest rising tide in town.

  “Sorry, Mr. Rollins, we can’t let you in.” The two security guards said in unison. If they had said anything else, I would’ve laughed, the way they were so well coordinated.

  “Excuse me? Let me in. I’m on the list.” Drake Rollins was always on the list. No matter what list, if you wanted to be on it, I was on it.

  “That is not the information were getting, sir. You’ll have to move along.”

  What the fuck was going on here? I had been invited to the green room at the draft this year. There was no way the league was keep the leading receiver two years running out the green room on fucking draft day. This made no sense.

  “I’m going in there, fellas. This was a funny joke, but I’m going in there.” I stepped toward security guards, intending to rush by them and get inside the green room, but they form the wall in front of me, immovable, and pushed me back.

  “We’re sorry, Mr. Rollins, but you can’t come in. You’ll have to move along, or we’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  “What the fuck, guys?” I was starting to get mad, and my voice showed it. “I was invited to the green room. I am on the list. Check the list.”

  “The list has changed.”

  “Change it again. I need to fucking get inside the room. the draft is about to begin.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help you. Please move along.”

  “Move along, move along, you keep fucking saying that. Where the fuck am I supposed to go?!”

  “I don’t know that, sir, but you can’t stay here. This area is for invited players and their families only.”

  “And I’m telling you fuckers, I am an invited player! Why is this so hard to understand?”

  “Because you no longer invited,” Adam said.

  I whipped around, still livid, to see Adam Snyder, my agent, standing behind me.

  “Adam! Thank fuck you’re here. These suckers won’t let me in, and the draft’s about to start. I need to get inside.”

  Adam was a shark of an agent, one of the best in the business. He was old school, didn’t get with any of the new fangled technology that most people use these days, but when you had his kind a roster of talent, and his skills at negotiating, you could dictate your own rules. Adam Snyder got the job done, and there was no one I would rather have as my agent.

  He put his arm on my shoulder, pulling me toward him. He was a good 4 inches shorter than me, but he carried himself like a man who was 7 feet tall, and the rest of the world treated him like it, myself included. “You haven’t checked your messages, have you?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been a little busy today. Why, what’s going on?”

  Adam shook his head, exasperated. He looked like he wanted to yell at me. He’d yelled at me before, and I had taken it without firing him, because he was Adam Snyder, and even though I was going to be the hottest thing on the field since sliced bread, I still listened to him. “You idiot, you’re not supposed to be here today.”

  “Adam, I got the invitation. You gave it to me.”

  “Things have changed, your latest stunt last week got everyone talking, and this morning the league decided it would be best for them and everyone involved if you didn’t show up today.”

  “What the fuck? I never got charged with anything.”

  “Yeah, thanks to me, asshole. I had to stick my neck out for you, farther than I ever have before for anyone else.”

  “And you did that because you know I’m gonna make you bank - contracts, endorsements, you know it.”

  Adam looked at me and I could see the familiarity and whatever bond between us slowly disappear. “That doesn’t look likely if you don’t get drafted, now doesn’t it?”

  What. The. Fuck.

  Not get drafted?

  “Adam…what are you saying?”

  He pulled me in closer. “This is what I’m saying, try and get it through your thick skull for once. You may be smart, Drake. Fuck it, you’re not just smart, you’re brilliant. And you can play football. But all that extra shit you keep doing just got you kicked out of the draft.”

  Shit.

  I tried to wrap my head around this bombshell. It wasn’t easy. This was supposed to be the best day of my life until I caught my first professional touchdown, and then my first Super Bowl winning touchdown. “But…I’m still gonna get drafted, right?” I didn’t really need to be here as long as a team took me on.

  And every team that could have picked me up before the one that finally did, I’d write down their name and make sure to burn them every time we played my entire career. Because fuck those guys.

  My off the field shit wasn’t that bad. So I partied hard and slept around. That’
s what worked for me, and I was always there when the game started. Wasn’t that all that mattered?

  Adam pulled back. “I don’t know if you’ll get drafted. None of the teams will want to take a chance on someone with your character concerns.”

  “Character concerns!? I fucking graduated from college early! I have an engineering degree and a 3.6 GPA on top of football at one of the best universities on fucking planet!”

  “And yet when you arrive at the party things always get out of hand and the police get called. And you always seem to wake up with someone important’s 19 year old daughter in your bed.”

  I couldn’t really argue with that. I breathed in deep, shutting my eyes, still unable to handle all of this. “What’re my options?”

  “Go home, kid. Don’t watch the draft. I’ll call you and let know what happens.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Think about what you’ve done and see if maybe, maybe, if a team gives you a shot, that you’ll consider cleaning up your life and giving the media no reason to pay attention to you for just a year.”

  “This is fucking bullshit, Adam.”

  “You’re telling me.” And with that, Adam, nodded to the security, who stepped aside and let him into the green room. Of course, Adam was allowed to go in. He had a bunch of other clients in there, and I’m sure all of them had put him on the list as one of their allowed guests.

  “Fuck this shit!” I yelled after Adam as the door closed. I tried to push my way into the room, past the two security guards, but they must have seen me coming because they closed up right behind Adam and I didn’t get more than a hand on the door before they’d shoved me back.

  “Mr. Rollins, we’ll have to ask you to leave peacefully, or we’ll be forced to call the police.”

  “Alright, alright,” I yelled back, holding up my hands before I straightened my suit. “I’ll go, I’ll go.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I knew that I’d made a scene and that there were cameras on me already. People were talking all around me in hushed whispers, like they were scared that I would lash out at them if I could hear what they were saying about me.

  They were probably right.

  I needed to get the fuck out of here as soon as possible. The corridor stretched in the direction opposite to the stage, and that seemed as good a place as any, so I ran down it, just trying to get out of the spotlight for a moment so I could collect myself.

  Fuck everything.

  CHAPTER 03 - LILY

  Bill came up behind me. “Drake Rollins actually showed up?” He chuckled under his breath. “I didn’t think the kid had it in him.”

  I turned to Bill to ask what he meant by that, but Bill scowled at me and immediately focused back on watching Drake argue with the security guards locking down the entrance to the green room. It was hard to turn away from it myself.

  Drake Rollins and I didn’t have much of a history together, but we’d known each other briefly at Cal. He’d taken a media and communications class that I’d taken a year earlier, as a breadth requirement for his degree, and I’d tutored him a few times. Drake wasn’t the type to need tutoring - in addition to being an amazing athlete, he was also brilliant. He just had a style of learning that was different from most. He didn’t learn things from hearing lectures or reading books, he learned through conversations.

  The professors at Cal had gotten a little frustrated with him constantly asking questions in class, derailing their lecture plans, and finally had decided to give him wide access to talk to any of their assistants whenever he wanted. The plan had worked, and despite having a full load of football work and obligations, he’d completed an electrical engineering degree in just three years.

  Why he’d taken a media and communications class I never really understood, but I’d really enjoyed our conversations together. And not just because they were interesting and informative, or because I’d learned a few things myself.

  Drake Rollins was the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. And that wasn’t exactly a unique opinion among the girls at Cal or any of the schools he visited through football. The man could turn heads of the female persuasion no matter what he was doing or wearing.

  The trouble was, he was absolutely aware of that fact. I had heard stories around campus of this legendary conquests. With a chiseled body, and a smile cut out of stone like that, it’s not like too many girls would even dream of turning him down, and I had yet to hear of any that had done so.

  I remembered over the course of our tutoring sessions, that I had tried and tried to get him to notice me, wearing increasingly sexier outfits, and doing my best to flirt with him. Drake had responded, of course, flirting back, but I had always gotten the impression that he was keeping himself from me.

  Of course, he was also a world-class asshole. Everything had been handed to him, the school had bent over backward to accommodate him, and he knew it.

  And he took advantage of it. That was the magic of touchdowns. If you could score on Saturdays, that’s all that mattered. You could do almost anything else the other six days a week.

  The last time we had met, I had worked up the courage to ask him why that was, why he wasn’t making a pass at me, but in the moment, when it was the right time to ask, I chickened out, and the moment passed.

  We had been at a party later that week and Drake had come up to me, a little tipsy, and made an awkward pass at me. I’d gone along with it, of course, and I remembered that kiss to this day. He seemed to forget it right away, though, and nothing ever came of it. Maybe he had had too much to drink that night, but even if he didn’t remember, I did, and I thought about it every day since.

  It was quite a shock to see him here on draft day. Of course, I knew that given his record and his stats that he would be invited to the green room, but that’s still hadn’t prepared me for seeing him in person again. Drake Rollins had an effect on me that no man had ever had before.

  Of course I had also read the news about him being uninvited from the draft day events at the last moment. I knew about his off the field issues and I had read each news item over the last few months with a resigned kind of dread, the kind you reserve for someone you care deeply about who can’t seem to get it together, no matter how hard they try.

  In Drake Rollins’ case, though, it seemed as though he was actively trying to sabotage his future career, and I just couldn’t understand why.

  The scuffle with security guards in front of the door came to a head, and I heard the shouting begin. Drake then took off down the hall, and Bill turned to me, a sneer on his face. “Looks like the kid doesn’t have it in ‘em after all. I should’ve known.”

  Again, I was about to ask Bill what he meant by that, and why he was taking even a modest interest in Drake Rollins, but before I could get a word out, Bill started back toward the globes table, and I couldn’t get a word in. I was left watching Drakes retreating form.

  No one else seemed to be doing anything about it; the security guards went back to guarding the door, and the rest of the media around kept on doing their thing, milling about and mentioning that Drake Rollins arrived, but no one made any other moves.

  That made sense, because the draft was almost about to start. But it seemed to me like the most interesting story was leaving right at that moment.

  Here was Drake Rollins, the number one receiver in the country, widely expected to be a top draft pick, taken off almost every team’s draft board because of off the field issues, uninvited from the draft itself, and he showed up, and now he was running away?

  And no one was following him?

  I turned to Steve, and he looked back at me, waiting for me to speak. “Follow me. And get that camera ready.”

  Steve hoisted his camera and smiled. “Where are we going?”

  “To follow the biggest story of the draft.” Steve nodded, and I took off after Drake.

  Drake had a little bit of a head start on us; Radio City Music Hall was
a giant place, and it was entirely possible that he had gotten lost by now in the caverns and tunnels behind and around the stage.

  As Steve I left the hallway I could hear the music start up, and the TV announcers begin their voice over.

  the draft was starting, and I was about to miss it. I felt a momentary pang of disappointment course through me, but I knew deep down that I was following the real interesting story of the draft. Everyone else would see who was picked by which team and when, and if I was honest with myself, my reporting of those picks would be much like any other junior reporter’s coverage.

  This, though, this was different. This was exclusive.

  As we move down the corridor, I glanced at Steve’s camera, and saw the red light on it. He was recording, moving left and right in slow motion, taking it all in, getting a sense of what was going on. We weren’t streaming live to the Globe’s website, but whatever we got today, the Globe’s video editors would clean up and put on there as soon as they could.

  Something told me this would be a huge scoop.

  Drake must’ve known that he wasn’t allowed at the draft today. So why did he show up? Did you think they would just let him in? Did he think that in the spur of the moment all of his off the field transgressions, which were numerous, would just be forgotten?

  And say they did let them in, say they did let a teams draft him, which team would take a chance on a player with so many red flags?

  draft picks were extremely valuable, especially high ones. Football teams couldn’t afford to miss on them, and draft a player who wouldn’t perform, or who wouldn’t even be able to play. Drake Rollins looked like one of the latter.

  Even if he didn’t get drafted high in the first round, he could probably find a team desperate enough to take a chance on him in the later rounds. At least, he might be able to find such a team five years ago. Or maybe even three years ago. But with all the increased scrutiny and condemnation the league had gone through over player issues off the field in the last couple years, with this latest move, uninviting Drake from the draft, no team would draft him, even if they were able to.