Twenty

I FELT LIKE I had a very weird, very split football personality going. My kids on the Bears, they wouldn’t lose. The Wolves? They just refused to get me a win.

We lost to the Seahawks as badly as we did—as if they’d thrown us down a flight of stairs—because our coach decided to bench Ted Skyler and replace him with his rookie backup, Chase Charles, who proceeded to throw three interceptions. By the end of the game, Charles had me wondering from my seat in the stands if it might be time for him to consider a change in vocation.

I waited an hour after the game had ended before I made my way down to Coach Rich Kopka’s office, adjacent to our locker room.

He was alone in there when I walked in. I didn’t waste any time, since my coach was constantly reminding me what an extremely busy guy he was.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

He peered over his reading glasses at me. They were perched at the break in his nose, one he’d suffered at the hands of his best assistant coach a few years ago, after Kopka had fired him—mostly because the guy, Ryan Morrissey, was smarter than Kopka and a much better football coach. Morrissey was also tired of taking the blame for the boneheaded play-calling decisions that Kopka kept making.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m working.”

“What I meant was what were you doing putting that scared little boy in at quarterback today?”

“He’s six four,” Kopka said. “Maybe a little scared today. Definitely not little.”

“Question remains the same.”

“I needed to find out what we’ve got with him.”

“That’s what training camp is for,” I said.

“It’s not as if your boyfriend was lighting things up before I sat his ass down.”

“Ex-husband. Not boyfriend. And irrelevant to this conversation. We’re talking about you, Coach. Not him.”

Kopka leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head and said, “Let’s just say I’m tired of him doing to the Wolves what he used to do to you.”

I knew he was trying to get a rise out of me. But I let it go. At least Joe Wolf had raised us to never punch down. My father hadn’t given us a lot of positive life lessons. But that was one of them.

“The only person who thought that kid was worth drafting was you.”

“I’m gonna make a pro quarterback out of him,” Kopka said. “It’s just gonna take a little time.”

“You could take until the end of time and not make an NFL quarterback out of him.”

“If you came down here to second-guess decisions I make about my team, you best get out of my office now, lady.”

My team.

They all think it’s theirs.

“Ted gives us the best chance to win this season,” I said.

“Your father didn’t tell me who to play. So I’m certainly not going to let you do that.”

“Who do you plan to start at quarterback next week?”

“Not that it’s any of your goddamn business,” he said, “but I’m gonna announce on Wednesday that I’m going with the kid.”

“No, you’re not.”

He smiled, calmly took off his reading glasses, folded them and placed them on his desk.

Then he stood up, as if the simple act of doing that would terrify me.

“This meeting is over.”

“Sit down.”

“Excuse me?”

“This meeting is over when I say it’s over,” I said, my eyes locked on his. The girl who’d grown up with three brothers and never taken any shit from any of them. “Now sit your ass down.”

He glared at me for a moment longer. But sat his ass back down.

“Have it your way, leastways as long as you get to have your way around here.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Kopka smiled. “Not what I’m hearing.”

“Just so we’re clear,” I said. “It is your intention to bench Ted and start that kid, is that right?”

“We’re not making the playoffs with your boyfriend under center.”

“So that’s it. You’re writing the season off.”

“I’m writing the season off because our aging quarterback already looks older than the Golden Gate Bridge. Good a time to turn the page as any,” he said.

“Well, you’re right. About turning the page, I mean.”

“Finally.”

“You’re fired,” I said.

“What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

He jumped out of his chair again, knocking it backward into the wall behind him, face as red as it got during cold-weather games in the East near the end of the season, when he looked like somebody had stuck a Wolves cap on a tomato.

“Fire me?” he shouted. “You can’t fire me. Your father told me I have a lifetime contract.”

“His lifetime. Not yours.”