The Underdogs (18 page)

“You know how they call some guys ‘monster backs' in football?” Tim said to Will. “Dude, Toby really puts the monster in it.”

“Troy Polamalu, just without the hair,” Will said.

This was Monday night at practice, Toby's first with the Bull-dogs. Jeremiah, who'd spent most of the practice trying in vain to block Toby Keenan in what were now six-on-six drills, said, “I think the big guy and Polamalu are already the same size.”

Everybody on the field could see how Toby looked even bigger in football gear. But he was faster than Will remembered. And quick. Will knew there was a difference in sports; you could be one without being the other. There were guys on the Bulldogs who were fast over thirty or forty yards but not quick enough to the ball on defense, not quick enough with the kind of short burst you needed to fill a hole you saw opening a few yards in front of you.

Toby was both.

Big-time.

Maybe the most amazing thing, an hour into practice, was this: not only did he not look as if he'd taken a season off from football, he looked as if he hadn't missed a single practice. On top of that, it had only taken him one night of studying to learn all the plays Will's dad had sent him home with on Sunday.

It was as if he'd been waiting all this time to let all the football he had inside him
out.
To run around like this and hit people again and be a player again. And just maybe, Will thought, to be a part of something. Toby still wasn't saying much—other than “Sorry” sometimes when he'd level somebody new and immediately help him up—and never joked around between plays the way Tim and some of the other guys did.

And still, just watching him, Will felt like this was as happy as Toby ever got.

“You know what the challenge is gonna be?” Joe Tyler said to Will during a water break, with Toby out of earshot.

“Waiting until Saturday to see him in a real game?” Will said.

“Figuring out where he can help us the most on offense,” Joe Tyler said.

Will knew what his dad meant. Defense was a no-brainer; he was going to be in the middle of their 4-2-5, a monster back in all ways, moving around the field and terrorizing offenses the way Polamalu did or the way Clay Matthews of the Packers, another guy with insanely long hair, did.

But on offense? Will could see him at left tackle, protecting Chris's blind side. Or fullback. Even though he looked like more of a tight end than a wideout, Will couldn't help dreaming about a rematch with Castle Rock. Imagine what it would be like watching Kendrick Morris try to match up with Toby in a game instead of in back of the bleachers.

“For now I'm thinking tight end,” Joe Tyler said. “See if there are any linebackers in the West River league who can run with him or any safeties who want to hit him.”

In their first two games Will's dad had been moving his receivers around. Hannah was always at one wide receiver position, but he'd been swapping off Johnny and Tim at the other one, even throwing Gerry Dennis out there sometimes. It was Joe Tyler's way of mixing things up, giving the other team different looks. But for the last half hour of practice tonight, the Bulldogs first walking through their plays and then running through them with the orange cones, he had them line up this way:

Toby at tight end. Johnny at one wide receiver, Tim at the other, Hannah sitting out.

Joe Tyler had made sure to tell Hannah exactly what he was doing, trying to make it sound like a good thing that she wasn't out there right now.

“I know you have the plays down cold,” Will's dad said, “probably even better than my own kid. So you take a break and let Toby see what it looks like to have them up and running on the field. Okay?”

“No problem,” Hannah said.

Will wasn't so sure. Before they ran their first play, he watched her move to the side, take off her helmet, give her hair a shake, put the helmet on her hip. No expression on her face. But when the play was over, a simple buttonhook to Toby, and Will looked over at her again, he saw her staring straight at him.

Like he'd done something.

When practice was over, Hannah waited until she could get Will alone. On the field, Chris and Toby were doing some extra work, Toby running different pass patterns, even some from the outside, Chris mostly trying to see if his arm could keep up with Toby's speed.

“You promised,” Hannah said.

Before he could answer her, she turned and jogged toward where her dad was waiting for her, her words hanging in the air like one of her punts.

F
rom the start of Saturday's game against Cannondale, you could see that Toby Keenan was back in football in a big way.

For the Bulldogs that wasn't just good news, it was great news, on both sides of the ball.

That's what you could see. What you could hear was that his dad was back, too.

Bad news.

Dick Keenan didn't start in right away; the first time Will really became aware of him was early in the second quarter, when Chris tried to throw Toby an underneath pass on Go-7-Go, both Hannah and Johnny having taken off down the field ahead of him on fly patterns.

By then, it was 14–0 for the Bulldogs, Will having scored one touchdown on a thirty-two-yard run the first time they had the ball. Toby had scored the other on what Will thought was a pretty amazing catch, going up between a safety and a linebacker and coming down with the ball in the back of the end zone, managing to keep two feet inbounds.

“What's the next step up from monster?” Tim said.

“Him,” Will said.

But now on what looked like a much simpler catch, Toby got hit from the side just as the ball arrived, the Cannondale middle linebacker timing his hit perfectly and knocking the ball loose.

First ball he hadn't caught in his first game back. Toby was still playing like he'd practiced, like he'd never been away.

Toby's dad.

Will looked over to the bleachers, Toby's dad back at his old perch, last row. Nobody close to him.

Will knew Toby was hearing this, the way everybody else at Shea was. Will's dad had always said that you couldn't have what he called “rabbit ears” in sports, that you couldn't waste your time listening to what the other players were saying or the people in the stands.

But how could you not have rabbit ears when it was your
own
dad?

Toby, to his credit, didn't let it show, didn't let on that his dad was yelling at him this way. He'd known it was coming if
he
came back and now here it was, first time he screwed up.

Three plays later, Chris threw him the same pass. Toby got hit again. This time he held on to the ball. Not only did he hold on, he turned upfield, proceeded to run over three Cannondale tacklers on his way to a sixty-five-yard scoring play, knocking them over like they were orange cones at practice.

“Well,” Will said to Tim after Hannah kicked the point, “now we know what happens when you make the big guy mad.”

Tim was running alongside Will to where Hannah would kick off. “But what must it be like to go through life with
that
in your ear?”

“And in your face,” Will said.

By halftime it was 28–7. Over the rest of the second quarter, Toby's dad was still the loudest voice in the stands, by far. He didn't always criticize, but when Toby would get another sack or make another open-field tackle or make another catch, the best he could hope to hear was this:

Or:

Like somehow he was the one out on the field. Will found himself wondering if that was the problem, that he wasn't out there anymore. And wondering something else: if on Dick Keenan's best day he was even half the player that his son was.

The Cannondale quarterback looked around before every snap, making sure he knew where Toby was. Joe Tyler tried to make it hard for the poor kid, moving Toby around, putting him in a three-point stance on the line sometimes, dropping him back into coverage, blitzing him every chance he got.

At halftime Will said to Toby, “Dude, you were awesome out there.”

Toby said, “It'll be better in the second half.”

“I don't know how you could play much better.”

“No,” Toby said, “my dad's gone. He has to do some tree work today.”

“You just keep doing what you're doing,” Will said.

Toby pushed back his helmet, gave Will a long look. He started to say something, stopped, finally said, “I'll try.”

Will knew he had to have way more than a hundred rushing yards at half. Just having another threat like Toby on the field made things so much easier for him, didn't allow Cannondale to load up the box the way most teams did against the Bulldogs. When they did, Chris would fake the ball to Will and throw it to Toby.

Toby wasn't doing it alone on defense, either. Just by showing up, getting in there at linebacker next to Matt, backing up Jeremiah and Ernie and Wes and Jake in the D line, he was doing what big players—and not just big in size—were supposed to do in sports:

Make everybody around them better.

And he was helping in another way: giving the other Bulldogs a chance to take a few plays off. Joe Tyler picked his spots resting people, but even getting short breathers seemed to help by the time they got to the second half.

When Will scored his third touchdown of the day; it was 35–13. After that, Chris started handing the ball to Gerry Dennis when the Bulldogs were on offense. In the fourth quarter, Will's dad switched Will out to wide receiver and put Tim in the backfield, letting him have five or six carries on their last drive.

After Tim broke off a ten-yard run, he came back into the huddle and said to Will, “Look at me, I've turned into
you
!”

“I don't recall ever playing and doing play-by-play at the same time,” Will said.

“So sad,” Tim said, “a hater even as we're getting our first win.”

It stayed at 35–13. On this day, the Bulldogs could have scored more, run
up
the score if they'd wanted to. But Will's dad wasn't that kind of coach. He knew they were never going to be that kind of team.

As Will watched the last seconds tick off the clock, took one last look at the final score, he felt himself smiling. This time he felt himself flying even though he was standing still.

They were on the board.

L
ittle by little, Will saw his dad loving football again.

He wasn't sure if his dad would ever come out and say that, or if he was even thinking about it that way. But Will knew what he was seeing.

Joe Tyler still came home tired—and limping—after work. Still had to stretch out on the couch or on his bed if it had been a day when he'd been delivering the mail on foot instead of from the truck. Will had asked his dad one time why he wasn't always in the truck and his dad said that the rest of the guys alternated between walking and riding, and he wasn't going to ask for any special favors.

But when it was time to go to practice, it was like he'd turned into a different guy. A new man almost. Limping sometimes, but never looking tired.

Joe Tyler even knew how to get on guys, with humor, never with shouting. He'd promised Will he wasn't going to be that kind of coach and had kept his promise. It seemed more important than ever now that Toby Keenan was on the team.

And his dad knew how to praise guys, at practice and at games, without ever overdoing it, so that the words meant something.

In a way, Will thought, it was the same with his dad as it was with Toby:

All the football he'd carried inside him was coming out again.

And maybe his best coaching was with Hannah, which was why what was supposed to be one of the big issues of the season—having a girl on the team—seemed to be getting smaller all the time.

Will knew she didn't get as many passes thrown her way as she would have liked, but even she knew that Johnny was a better receiver than she was, and that's why more balls went his way. When a well-thrown ball did come her way, she held on to it. And showed she could take a good hit. And the other players on the team noticed that she never ran out-of-bounds to avoid a hit if she thought she could make more yardage.

She got in on tackles, too, even made some of her own in the open field.

“I was wrong about her,” Tim said to Will when they were warming up before the Merrell game. “Even though I will be forced to deny that if you ever try to tell anybody.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” Will said. “You big phony.”

Tim ignored the last part. “Not only can she play like a guy,” he said, “she's as tough as most guys we know.”

Will said, “She doesn't look at it that way. She thinks we're just trying to be as tough as her.”

The Merrell game turned out to be the roughest of the season by far. And occasionally—on the part of the Merrell players—the dirtiest.

There were a lot of penalties called in the first half. Just
stuff,
usually at the bottom of the pile when the refs couldn't see what was going on. One time Merrell's middle linebacker stepped on Will's hand after Will had gained a hard three yards on third down, clearly doing it on purpose even though he said, “My bad,” when he made a fake show of helping Will up. There was another time, again at the bottom of the pile, when the last guy up for the Merrell Lions “accidentally” pushed Will's face into the turf as he got to his feet.