“I’M CURRENTLY SINGLE, in case you were wondering,” Clay Rosen said to me.
“I wasn’t,” I said. “We’re having a drink together, not thinking of eloping.”
He toasted me with his glass in approval. “I’m getting a sense of how you could have fired your ex-husband.”
I sipped my wine. “I briefly considered calling him back an hour later and firing him again, if you must know.”
It was obvious that Clay Rosen was a regular at the Polo Lounge. Walk in like you belong, Joe Wolf had always taught us. Rosen had done just that. The place was crowded, but I immediately got the feeling that the maître d’ would have thrown people out into the lobby to get Rosen his usual banquette in the corner.
He’d explained by now that there was no need for him to watch the Oprah interview.
“I’m sure you were great. But I’ve been following your reality series from down here and had already come to the conclusion that you are pretty great.”
He told me then how sorry he was about Thomas; he should have told me that right away. I told him Thomas was the one who was great and would have become a great general manager if he’d gotten the chance.
We sat in silence for a moment. I could already tell that any kind of silence was the only thing that seemed to make Clay Rosen uneasy. I discreetly pointed across the room now and asked if that was the actress who’d been in that thing. I was in LA. I couldn’t help myself. I thought everybody was in the movies.
“No,” he said. “If it’s the thing I think you mean, that’s not her. The actress you’re thinking of is an old girlfriend of mine. Though not really all that old, to tell you the truth.”
“Okay, enough small talk. Back to my reality series. You really think I have no shot?”
He used his fingers to move the ice cubes in his vodka around.
“I don’t. You might have a couple more votes than you think, just based on my unofficial canvassing. But with that bloc of hard-liners, all of them between sixty and dead, I think you are royally screwed.”
“Because they don’t want another woman in the club?”
“Not a woman who scares the shit out of them the way you do,” he said. “I like Cissy and Karen, by the way. I do. They are smart, nice, competent women. But at the end of the day, they’re just happy to be in the club. They just go along to get along. You’re different.”
“Do I really want to know in what way?”
“Sure,” he said. “Because you don’t treat this sport like church. Because you don’t take any prisoners, the way your father didn’t—or at least he didn’t before he got old enough to be a crypt keeper himself.” He drank some vodka and smacked his lips. “Jeanie Buss is a friend of mine, and she’s done really well running the Lakers. But you’ve dialed it up to a whole nother level. There’s never been a woman owner like you in sports that I know about.”
“I’m just running my team the way I think it should be run.”
“But they can see you’re never going to be a team player with them,” Clay Rosen said. “This group is big on team players. My father was just like them.”
I liked Clay. I knew he was flirting with me; I just assumed it was his natural state. But he wasn’t being overt about it, or pushy, or weird. He seemed as completely comfortable in his own skin as he was being in this room.
“So you’re telling me I can’t change minds when I get my face-to-face with them tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Just not enough of them, in my opinion. The commissioner knows he’s got the hard-liners, so he’s been lobbying hard against you with everybody else, almost like he’s got an agenda here that I sure as hell don’t know about. But at the end of the day, I don’t see how you can move New England, Chicago, Houston, Indy, Tennessee. The hardest of the hard-liners. They’re the ones pushing all the She Wolf stuff. If you could turn them around, you might be able to thread the needle and get to twenty-four votes. But at this point, it would be like turning around a battleship.”
“I still have to try. Have you heard anything about my brother Danny wanting to sell the team?”
“Yeah. We all pretty much have. But he denies it.”
“He denies it with me, too,” I said.
“He could be lying.”
“He does that.”
“It may have something to do with the new stadium your dad could never seem to get built,” Clay Rosen said.
“The city fought him for years, even though the other sports teams in town somehow managed to get theirs.”
“It’s weird,” Rosen said. “Because new stadiums mean Super Bowls, which is like winning the jackpot for the host cities.”
“And the host team.”
“Tell me about it. We just had one here.”
He ordered another vodka. I ordered another wine. I wasn’t driving. And the night was going to be long enough once I got back to the suite.
For now I was having a good time with an owner who didn’t have a long knife out for me. The waiter brought our drinks. Clay Rosen raised his glass. I raised mine.
“What are we drinking to?”
“Beats the hell out of me.”
We both laughed and drank. I was facing the entrance. As I was putting my glass down, I saw the commissioner come walking into the Polo Lounge, followed by A. J. Frost, the Patriots’ owner.
The third member of the party was my ex-husband.