Losers Take All (25 page)

When the coach, playing ref, blew his whistle, I knew in about five seconds that it was a completely different game from anything I'd played before. One team would keep the ball and probe for an opening, moving it around from side to side but also kicking it up and dropping it back. It wasn't so much about trying to score as possessing the ball and doing the right things with it.

I didn't have a clue where I should run to or what I should do with the ball if I got it. Our center midfielder, Diego, was the best player I'd ever been on a field with. He kept trying to position me: “Jack, stay wide. Show for the ball.
Hold your run
—don't let them catch you offsides.”

But they caught me offsides again and again, till I was afraid to go across the midfield line for fear the coach would just blow his whistle. The few times I did get the ball I didn't know who to pass it to, and when I finally completed a pass and stood there proudly Diego shouted at me: “After you pass it, Jack, move! That's the moment to run and you'll get it back! Don't stand still.”

At halftime I suggested to Jan that he should take me out. “I'm just hurting my team.”

“You're fine,” he said. “But you're not running at them. That's why we brought you here.”

“Yes, take them on,” Diego urged. “Make them defend you.” He spent the rest of halftime explaining to me that when we started to break on a counterattack I should check the defensive line to make sure that I was onside and then wait an extra second before starting my run.

In the second half I tried to have fun and do what they said. I was more careful of offside traps and stayed wide. When the ball was kicked to me I tried to take on my defender. Their left fullback who was guarding me was a guy in his thirties named Manny, and he didn't seem inclined to let an eighteen-year-old novice show him up. He played me tough, and twice when I almost got by him he took me down with tackles that were more leg than ball.

With just a few minutes to go in the scrimmage and the other team leading four to three, they threatened to score and put us away for good. They passed it around our penalty box and then their center forward cracked a whistling shot that our keeper snatched out of the air. He looked around quickly, took two giant steps, and hurled the ball thirty yards to Diego, who chested it down in the direction of his run. He dribbled past a defender and looked up quickly, and our eyes met. I checked their defensive line, and sure enough, they were stepping up to try to pull me offside. So I moved up with them half a yard and raised my hand to Diego. He swung his leg back and just as he kicked the ball I started my run.

He lofted a perfect pass down the right sideline. Their left midfielder read it and came swooping in on a sharp angle, trying to beat me to the ball. He was pretty fast, but I had a gear he didn't have. I flew into full sprint and managed to get there first and touch it by him.

Manny came roaring up for a challenge the same way he had several times before, lowering his center of gravity till he looked more like a wall than a man. His feet were close enough together so that I couldn't nutmeg him but wide enough apart to cut in either direction to stop me.

I couldn't go through him and I hadn't had much luck dribbling around him, so I decided to try going over him. I stopped my dribble, got my toe under the ball, and scooped it. The ball flew two feet over his head and took a nice bounce toward their goal. Then it was a test of pure speed. Manny tried to keep his body between me and the ball but he couldn't match me stride for stride. I whipped around him and touched the ball forward.

I saw the goalie coming out, arms spread to his full wingspan, making himself as big as possible. I heard someone—I think it was Diego—yelling, “Have one, Jack! Shoot!” I had no time to get the ball to my good right foot, so I tried to kick it solidly with my left.

The goalie dove and his fingertips grazed the ball, but I had kicked it with enough power to get it by him into the net.

I raised my arms and turned, and saw my dad. He was sitting in the front row of blue plastic chairs, and just when I looked he punched the air so hard he lost his balance and nearly toppled over the rail. He caught himself and laughed, and I laughed, too.

Diego slapped me hard on the back. “That's what I'm talking about!” My other teammates congratulated me, and a minute or two later the coach blew the whistle and the game was over.

“Who says you don't have a left foot?” Jan asked me.

“I couldn't do that again if I tried,” I told him. “Most of the time out there I didn't have a clue what I was doing.”

“You are a work in progress,” he agreed. “I can't play you in games yet, but I also can't not play you. Your speed makes you a real terror.”

“I could have caught him,” Manny grunted, walking off the field behind us.

“In your dreams.” Jan laughed, and then he said to me, “It's up to you, Jack. If you want to practice with us next Saturday, we'd like to have you. I can't start you in a game yet, but once you learn your position and refine your skills we'll work you in as a sub. I've seen plenty of good college players and you definitely have the potential to play at that level. I could even make some calls for you if you'd like.”

“He'd like that,” my dad said, and then shut up and looked at me. “I mean, wouldn't you?”

I hesitated for a long second, but I had to admit the breakaway run had felt pretty terrific. “Sure,” I said. “Let's try it.”

 

33

When Dad and I got home from my soccer tryout, Mom had made us brunch and we all sat together around the kitchen table eating and reading the morning newspaper. The
Star Dispatch
reporters hadn't held back: “Lions Lay an Egg,” the front page of the sports section blared in a big headline, with an embarrassing photo of our quarterback fumbling the ball. “State Champ Dreams End Early as Team Loses and Three Players Are Arrested.”

Lowry, Davis, and Barlow had been charged with aggravated assault as adults and let out on bail. I was starting to learn how much a news story is like a fire. If it runs out of wood, it sputters and dies. But give it a little new fuel and a puff of wind and it roars up again, much bigger than before. When our story began, the TV and newspaper coverage of the Losers had been mostly local and regional. When Dylan's wrist was broken, it had swelled. But as word got out that three football players had been charged with a felony, the national press came racing in as if all suddenly scenting the same trendy story.

Bullying in schools was a hot-button topic, and I guess our story had other things going for it. Soccer was becoming more popular all over America, while high school football was in retreat because of the controversy over head injuries. A football powerhouse run by people with screwed-up values made our story even juicier. Muhldinger was a villain right out of central casting. Finally there was our team—the Losers. There's a saying that everyone loves a winner, but actually I think most people prefer to hear about likable losers.

On Monday morning a network news reporter whose face I recognized was doing interviews right on school grounds. It was funny because she was trying to ask questions and kids kept coming up and asking for her autograph. When we jogged out to the south field to practice on Monday afternoon, the guards had given up trying to shoo away reporters. Maybe our school authorities had realized that the more they tried to keep a cap on this the hotter the story got. Fifty students and fans were waiting for us, and three news crews filmed our pathetic soccer practice as if something important were taking place. It was a little hard to see how fifteen lousy soccer players preparing to play another school's JV team deserved such attention.

Coach Percy told us to ignore the fuss and concentrate on our upcoming game against Pine River. That's a little like being in the middle of a tornado and someone telling you to please disregard the fact that your house just got sucked into the air.

Rob Powers came to Monday's practice and immediately made his mark. He'd never played soccer before, and he wasn't trying to be competitive, but he was a natural athlete and he couldn't turn it off. During a scrimmage he always seemed to be at the right place for passes, and while he toed the ball his kicks were still rockets compared to the rest of the Losers'. He kept dialing back his sports ability and trying not to show off, but it was clear that he could run rings around our other players.

It was fun for me to have another good athlete on the team. Rob's dad had played on the same Fremont football team as my father, and we'd spent grade school tossing all different kinds of balls around. We were both new at soccer, but with Rob playing stopper I remembered how it felt to play ahead of Diego—the sense that there's someone behind you who can make stops and feed you passes.

But there was also something about Rob's joining our team that was all about his showmanship. He always seemed to be diving in front of TV cameras, getting up slowly and flashing his million-dollar smile. I knew he had a modeling career, and I started wondering if he'd wanted to join the Losers for the same reason the varsity cheerleaders wanted to do their routines at our home games. I told myself there was nothing wrong with a little self-promotion—Becca was using our weird season to help her get into college. And every time I saw Rob acrobatically flip in front of a TV camera and get up smoothing out his hair, it kind of cracked me up.

Our Internet followers quickly embraced our new team member. “New Loser Is Hot Hunk!” came the tweets, and soon pictures of Rob were posted on our fan sites, and not just soccer photos but also shots from his modeling gigs, including one of him in a bathing suit.

Becca saw what I saw, and at first she was hostile to Rob. But as he goofed around and got to know everybody, he was soon accepted by the Losers. I was surprised to see how much Becca hung out with him. She laughed at his lame jokes, and stretched out next to him, and while I wasn't really jealous I was a little curious how he had persuaded her so quickly that he wasn't the misogynist she'd pegged him as.

Rob might have been having fun on our team, but he paid for it in school and in the town. I heard people say things behind his back, and to his face, that I wouldn't have known how to deal with. “Traitor” was the word most commonly used, but there were plenty of nastier names.

Rob just looked the other way and walked on by.

The Fremont football fans were hurting, and they needed someone to blame. Every afternoon the Lions practiced on Gentry Field, but their season was in shambles and few came to watch them. The bleachers sat largely empty, and the statue of Arthur Gentry with his motto “Just go for it” seemed to mock them. Every afternoon we practiced nearby on the south field and drew TV trucks and crowds.

The media hype built all week, till on Wednesday night, before the Pine River game, a network news show ran a big feature spot on our team and what was going on in Fremont. There were interviews with students, two TV psychologists who specialized in school violence explained how misguided our town's values were, and Mr. Bryce even appeared to say Fremont was taking this seriously and cleaning its own house and would people please just give us some space.

By the time we got onto the bus for Pine River I didn't know what to expect, but I knew things were getting a little out of control. It was clear from the spike in our hits online and all the new posts and chatter that this was no longer really about the Losers at all—we'd plugged into a much bigger national issue. A high school girl had recently committed suicide in Connecticut because she'd been teased mercilessly, and a ten-year-old boy in Pennsylvania was in a coma after a beating. Somehow our story had been adopted and embraced by people who cared a great deal about school violence, and we had become a flash point for them.

I sat on the bus behind Becca and Rob, who laughed and kidded each other the whole ride to Pine River. Rob was a natural athlete for sure, but he was even more naturally gifted when it came to getting pretty girls to like him.

Pine River High is just what it sounds like—a fifty-year-old brick school in the bend of a river, surrounded by pitch pines. It's a small school that serves a farming community, and they weren't prepared for what descended on them that October afternoon. The date and time of the game had been posted online by what my teammates had taken to calling “Loser Nation,” and many of our fans had promised to show up. By the time our bus chugged up to Pine River High School, there was nowhere to park. The lot was jammed, and the backup lot near the sports fields was also full. A guard directed us toward a grassy field a few hundred yards away, and when we got off the bus the press was waiting for us.

“Losers, look over here! Can we get a team picture?”

“Where's Dylan? The attorney for one of the arrested football players said his client can't get a fair trial because of all the publicity. Any comment?”

“Guys, do you think being victims makes you Losers or are you really winners?”

Some of us shouted replies and mugged for the cameras, but I kept my mouth shut and followed Coach Percy to the field. It had no bleachers so all the people who had driven to see the game were standing around it in a steadily growing crowd. The mob parted to let us through and then re-formed, so we were surrounded by staring, screaming strangers who felt like they knew us. I saw lots of signs against bullying and school violence, and activists were handing out leaflets. There was even a state politician shaking hands and giving interviews.

“What a circus,” Frank said, staring at a woman who had wrapped herself in bandages and was wearing a gag.

“We used to be the circus,” Dylan agreed with a nod, “but now I think we're the sideshow.”

Coach Percy tried to get us to calm down. “It's not luck that you are where you are right now,” he told us when we huddled up. “As Seneca said: ‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.' Have fun out there and play your own game.”