Playing for Pizza (24 page)

Sam was screaming at the referees to eject McGregor, and it was deserved. But they would have to eject Nino as well for throwing a punch. The compromise was a fifteen-yard penalty against the Lions—first down Panthers. When Fabrizio saw the penalty being marked off, he slowly got to his feet and went to the bench.

No permanent injuries. Everybody would be back. Both sidelines were furious, and all the coaches were yelling at the officials in a heated mixture of languages.

Rick was fuming from the encounter with The Professor, so he called his number again. He swept to the right, cut around the end, and went straight for him. The collision was impressive, especially for Rick, the non-hitter, and when he rammed The Professor in front of the Panther bench, his teammates yelled with
delight. Gain of seven. The testosterone was pumping now. His entire body throbbed from two straight collisions. But his head was clear, and there was no residue from the old concussions. Same play, quarterback sweep right. Claudio got a block on The Professor, and when he spun around, Rick was charging at full speed, head low, helmet aimed at his chest. Another impressive collision. Rick Dockery, a headhunter.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sam barked when Rick jogged by.

“Moving the ball.”

If unpaid, Fabrizio would have gone to the locker room and called it a day. But the salary had brought a responsibility that the kid had maturely accepted. And, he still wanted to play college ball in the United States. Quitting wouldn’t help that dream. He jogged back on the field, along with Franco, and the offense was intact.

And Rick was tired of running. With Maschi on the bench, Rick worked the middle with Franco, who had vowed on his mother’s grave not to fumble, and pitched to Giancarlo around the ends. He bootlegged twice, running for nice gains. On a second and two from the 19, he faked to Franco, faked to Giancarlo, sprinted right on another bootleg, then pulled up at the line and hit Fabrizio in the end zone. McGregor was close, but not close enough.

“Whatta you think?” Sam asked Rick as they watched the teams line up for the kickoff.

“Watch McGregor. He’ll try to break Fabrizio’s leg, I guarantee it.”

“You hearing all that ‘Goat’ shit?”

“No, Sam, I’m deaf.”

The Bergamo tailback, the one the scouting report said didn’t like to hit, grabbed the ball on the third play and managed to hit (hard) every member of the Panther defense on his way to a beautiful seventy-four-yard gallop that electrified the fans and sent Sam into hysterics.

After the kickoff, Mr. Maschi strutted onto the field, but with a bit less spring in his gait. He hadn’t been killed after all. “I’ll get him,” Franco said. Why not? thought Rick. He called a dive play, handed it to Franco, and watched in horror as the ball was dropped. It somehow got kicked by a churning knee that propelled it high over the line of scrimmage. In the melee that followed, half the players on the field touched the loose ball as it rolled and hopped from pile to pile and finally careened, unpossessed, out of bounds. Still Panthers’ ball. Gain of sixteen.

“This might be our day,” Sam mumbled to no one.

Rick reshifted the offense, spread Fabrizio to the left, and hit him for eight yards on a down and out. McGregor shoved him out of bounds, but there was no foul. Back to the right, same play, for eight more. The short pass game worked for two reasons: Fabrizio was too fast to play tight, so McGregor had to yield space underneath; and Rick’s arm was too strong to be stopped in the short game. He and Fabrizio had spent hours on the timing patterns—the quick-outs, slants, hooks, curls.

The key would be how long Fabrizio was willing
to take shots from McGregor after he caught Rick’s passes.

The Panthers scored late in the first quarter when Giancarlo leaped over a wave of tacklers, landed on his feet, then sprinted ten yards to the end zone. It was an amazing, fearless, acrobatic maneuver, and the Parma faithful went berserk. Sam and Rick shook their heads. Only in Italy.

The Panthers led 14–7.

The punting game took over in the second quarter as both offenses sputtered. Maschi was slowly shaking off the cobwebs and returning to form. Some of his plays were impressive, at least from the safety of the deep pocket where Rick had a good view. Maschi did not, however, seem inclined to return to his kamikaze blitzing. Franco was always lurking nearby, near his quarterback.

With a minute to go before the half, and the Panthers up by a touchdown, the game turned on its most crucial play. Rick, who hadn’t thrown an interception in five games, finally did so. It was a curl to Fabrizio, who was open, but the ball sailed high. McGregor caught it at midfield and had a good shot at the end zone. Rick bolted toward the sideline, as did Giancarlo. Fabrizio caught McGregor enough to spin him and slow him, but he stayed on his feet and kept running. Giancarlo was next, and when McGregor juked him, he was suddenly on a collision course with the quarterback.

A quarterback’s dream is to murder the safety who just picked off his pass, a dream that never comes
true because most quarterbacks really don’t want to get near a safety who has the ball and really wants to score. It’s just a dream.

But Rick had been smashing helmets all day, and for the first time since high school he was looking for contact. Suddenly he was a roving hit man, someone to be feared. With McGregor in the crosshairs, Rick left his feet, launched himself, abandoned any and all concern for his own body and safety, and aimed at his target. The impact was loud and violent. McGregor fell back as if he’d been shot in the head. Rick was dazed for a second but jumped to his feet as if it were just another kill. The crowd was stunned but also thrilled by such mayhem.

Giancarlo fell on the ball and Rick chose to run out the clock. As they left the field for halftime, Rick glanced at the Bergamo bench and saw McGregor walking gingerly with a trainer, much like a boxer who’d been flattened.

“Did you try to kill him?” Livvy would ask later, not in disgust but certainly not in admiration.

“Yes,” Rick answered.

·  ·  ·

McGregor did not answer the bell, and the second half quickly became the Fabrizio show. The Professor stepped over and immediately got burned on a post. If he played tight, Fabrizio ran by him. If he played loose, which he preferred to do, Rick tossed the ten-yarders that quickly added up. The Panthers scored twice in the third quarter. In the fourth, the Lions engaged
the strategy of a double-team, half of it being The Professor, who was by then quite winded and by any means overmatched, and the other half being an Italian who was not only too small but too slow. When Fabrizio outran them on a fly and hauled in a long, beautiful pass that Rick had launched from midfield, the score was 35–14, and the celebrating began.

The Parma fans lit fireworks, chanted nonstop, waved huge soccer-style banners, and someone tossed the obligatory smoke bomb. Across the field, the Bergamo fans were still and bewildered. If you win sixty-seven in a row, you’re never supposed to lose. Winning becomes automatic.

A loss in a tight game would be heartbreaking enough, but this was a romp. They rolled up their banners, packed their stuff. Their cute little cheerleaders were silent and very sad.

Many of the Lions had never lost, and as a whole they did so gracefully. Maschi, surprisingly, was a good-natured soul who sat on the grass with his shoulder pads off and chatted with several of the Panthers long after the game was over. He admired Franco for the brutal hit, and when he heard about the “Kill Maschi” play, he took it as a compliment. And he admitted that the long winning streak had created too much pressure, too many expectations. In a way, there was relief in getting it out of the way. They would meet again soon, Parma and Bergamo, probably in the Super Bowl, and the Lions would return to form. That was his promise.

Normally, the Americans from both teams met
after the game for a quick hello. It was nice to hear from home and compare notes on players each had met along the way. But not today. Rick resented the “Goat” calling and hustled off the field. He showered and changed quickly, celebrated just long enough, then hurried away with Livvy in tow.

He’d been dizzy in the fourth quarter, and a headache was settling in at the base of his skull. Too many blows to the head. Too much football.

Chapter

26

They slept till noon in their tiny room in a small
albergo
near the beach, then gathered their towels, sunscreen, water bottles, and paperbacks and stumbled, still groggy, to the edge of the Adriatic Sea, where they set up camp for the afternoon. It was early June and hot, the tourist season fast approaching, but the beach was not yet crowded.

“You need sun,” Livvy said as she covered herself with oil. Her top came off, leaving nothing but a few strings where they were absolutely necessary.

“I guess that’s why we’re here at the beach,” he said. “And I haven’t seen a single tanning salon in Parma.”

“Not enough Americans.”

They’d left Parma after the Friday practice and the Friday pizza at Polipo’s. The drive to Ancona took three hours, then another half hour south along the coast to the Conero Peninsula, and finally to the small resort town of Sirolo. It was after 3:00 a.m. when they checked in. Livvy had booked the room, found the directions, and knew where the restaurants were. She loved the details of travel.

A waiter finally noticed them and trudged over
for a tip. They ordered sandwiches and beer and waited a good hour for both. Livvy kept her nose stuck in a paperback while Rick managed to drift in and out of consciousness, or if fully awake he would shift to his right side and admire her, topless and sizzling in the sun.

Her cell phone buzzed from somewhere deep in the beach bag. She grabbed it, stared at the caller ID, and decided not to answer. “My father,” she said with distaste, then returned to her mystery.

Her father had been calling, as had her mother and sister. Livvy was ten days past due from her year of study abroad and had dropped more than one hint that she might not come home. Why should she? Things were much safer in Italy.

Though she was still guarded with some of the details, Rick had learned the basics. Her mother’s family was a strain of Savannah blue bloods, miserable people, according to Livvy’s succinct descriptions, and they had never accepted her father, because he was from New England. Her parents had met at the University of Georgia, the family school. Their wedding had been hotly opposed in private by her family, and this had only inspired her mother to go on with it. There was infighting at many levels, and the marriage was doomed from the beginning.

The fact that he was a prominent brain surgeon who earned lots of money meant little to his in-laws, who actually had very little cash but had been forever blessed with the status of “family money.”

Her father worked brutal hours and was thoroughly
consumed by his career. He ate at the office, slept at the office, and evidently was soon enjoying the companionship of nurses at the office. This went on for years, and in retribution her mother began seeing younger men. Much younger. Her sister, and only sibling, was in therapy by the age of ten. “A totally dysfunctional family” was Livvy’s assessment.

She couldn’t wait to leave for boarding school at fourteen. She picked one in Vermont, as far away as possible, and for four years dreaded the holidays. Summers were spent in Montana, where she worked as a camp counselor.

For this summer, upon her return from Florence, her father had arranged an internship with a hospital in Atlanta where she would work with brain-damaged accident victims. He planned for her to be a doctor, no doubt a great one like himself. She had no plans, except those that would take her far from the routes chosen by her parents.

The divorce trial was scheduled for late September, with a lot of money at stake. Her mother was demanding that she testify on her behalf, specifically about an incident three years earlier when Livvy surprised her father at the hospital and caught him groping a young female doctor. Her father was playing the money card. The divorce had been raging for almost two years, and Savannah couldn’t wait for the public showdown between the great doctor and the prominent socialite.

Livvy was desperate to avoid it. She did not want
her senior year of college wrecked by a sleazy brawl between her parents.

Rick was given this background in brief narratives, almost reluctantly, usually whenever her phone rang and she was forced to deal with her family. He listened patiently and she was grateful to have a sounding board. Back in Florence, her roommates were too absorbed with their own lives.

He was thankful for his rather dull parents and their simple lives in Davenport.

Her phone rang again. She grabbed it, grunted, then took off down the beach with the phone stuck to her head. Rick watched and admired every step. Other men adjusted themselves in beach chairs to have a look.

He guessed it was her sister because she took the call and quickly walked away, as if to spare him the details. He wouldn’t know, though. When she returned, she said, “Sorry,” then rearranged herself in the sun and began reading.

·  ·  ·

Fortunately for Rick, the Allies leveled Ancona at the end of the war, and thus it was light on castles and palazzi. According to Livvy’s collection of guidebooks, there was only an old cathedral worth looking at, and she was not keen to see it. Sunday, they slept late again, skipped the sightseeing, and finally found the football field.

The Panthers arrived by bus at 1:30. Rick was alone in the locker room waiting for them. Livvy was
alone in the bleachers reading an Italian Sunday newspaper.

“Glad you could make it,” Sam growled at his quarterback.

“So you’re in your usual happy mood, Coach.”

“Oh yes. A four-hour bus ride always makes me happy.”

The great victory over Bergamo had yet to wear off, and Sam, as usual, was expecting a disaster against the Dolphins of Ancona. An upset, and the Panthers would miss the play-offs. He had pushed them hard Wednesday and Friday, but they were still reveling in their stunning disruption of the Great Streak. The
Gazzetta di Parma
ran a front-page story, complete with a large action shot of Fabrizio racing down the field. There was another story on Tuesday, one that featured Franco, Nino, Pietro, and Giancarlo. The Panthers were the hottest team in the league, and they were winning big with real Italian footballers. Only their quarterback was American. And so on.