Ninety-Nine

SUDDENLY IT WAS THE morning of the league championship game at Wolves Stadium, the Hunters Point Bears against the Basin Park Patriots.

The Bears had decided that day to keep me on as coach. Had given me a second chance after they held one more team meeting of their own with me out of the gym.

Now I was on the field watching my players warm up, as excited about the big game as they were. Feeling like I was the one back in high school. The Wolves were still winning, were now two victories away from being back in the playoffs. But the Wolves didn’t need me. In the end, these kids decided they did.

Just not nearly as much as I needed them.

I had spent the past couple of weeks focused on them, managing to stay out of the media for the first time since I’d taken over the Wolves.

The city was currently more obsessed with the mysterious death of John Gallo, speculating on almost an hourly basis about what might have driven one of the most powerful men in San Francisco to suicide. There had been more than one story written about the blood feud between Joe Wolf and Gallo and how both of them had died the way they had, in different parts of the bay.

When we were all on the field, a few minutes before the kickoff, I walked over to Chris Tinelli.

“Thanks for taking me back. Because I sure would have hated to miss this.”

He tipped back his helmet and smiled.

“Thanks for letting us use your football stadium.”

“It’s not mine today. It’s yours.”

The Bears just didn’t play that way—weren’t nearly up to what Ryan Morrissey liked to call the circumstances of the occasion, quickly falling behind by two touchdowns. Chris had fumbled a ball away when he got hit from the blind side, and the Patriots had driven down the field for their first touchdown. Carlos had fallen down in the open field, and Basin Park’s star running back, a kid named Mazeeka Brown, had run seventy yards for his team’s second store.

Things had gotten very quiet on the Hunters Point side of Wolves Stadium. With two minutes left in the first half, we had the ball at midfield. I always told the kids to be their best selves as players. I felt like I had to do the same now as a coach, somehow change the energy of the game so that we didn’t go into the locker room still down two scores.

I called a time-out and waved Chris over.

“You know that play we always mess around with at the end of practice?”

He said he knew which one.

I turned and yelled at Noah Glynn. When he was standing there with us, I told him what we were going to do.

“Cool.”

Noah lined up at quarterback. Chris lined up at wide receiver. After Noah took the snap, Chris stepped back so that he was behind Noah. Noah threw him a pass. As soon as Chris caught the ball again, Noah was flying down the left sideline. He was a wide receiver now. And wide open. Chris hit him with as long a pass as he’d thrown all season.

I kept Noah in the game. Even though Chris lined up at quarterback, our center direct-snapped the ball to Noah, who ran in for the two-point conversion.

Now we were only losing 14–8.

Yeah, I thought.

Yeah.

The kids were back in the game. So was I. The only drama in my life right now was in front of me on the field. I realized as we walked to the locker room what it would have been like to sit this out—and how close I’d come to doing just that.

“They’ve already played their best game,” I said to them at halftime. “But we haven’t.”

As I walked back on the field, I saw Ryan and Billy McGee sitting in the stands. Because of the Hunters Point–Basin Park game, the Wolves’ normal Saturday morning walk-through of their plays would be held later in the afternoon. Money McGee came down through the stands and leaned over the railing.

“Any words of wisdom?”

“Yeah, dude. Keep both your quarterbacks in the game.”

“Really?”

“I like your starter,” McGee said. “But the little guy reminds me of me.” He winked. “It’s a good thing.”

“Got any good plays?”

“Just one.”

He told me, and I said, “Does that still work?” Billy McGee winked again. “Only, like, since the beginning of time.”

The Bears didn’t move the ball much in the third quarter. But we didn’t fall further behind, either, because the defense just kept getting better and better, not letting the Patriots past midfield. I paced the sideline and couldn’t believe how fast the second half was unfolding, my team still down six points.

The kids had told me they’d nearly lost a couple of weeks ago because I wasn’t there. Now I had this fourth quarter to prove I was worth having back. That I was as present as I’d been all season.

Ryan had once told me that he felt sorry for people who couldn’t experience what he did in close games like this.

Now I understood what he was talking about.

We got the ball back on our thirty yard line with three minutes left and began to move it again, really for the first time in the second half. I did keep both Chris Tinelli and Noah Glynn on the field, just like Money McGee had told me to. They were both getting chances to throw the ball and keeping the Basin Park defense off balance because of it.

Finally, there were twenty seconds left when we had a second down from the Basin Park five yard line. I had to call our last time-out. Both Chris and Noah came running over to me.

I gave them two plays. One that I promised them would get us the touchdown that would tie the game. And another for the two-point conversion that would win it.

“Really?” Chris said.

“Those are the plays?” Noah said. “Like, for real?”

I bumped them both some fist.

“We having any fun yet?”

Chris lined up under center. Noah was behind him. Chris took the snap and rolled to his right and threw a short pass to Noah, who caught the ball but had two defenders in front of him and no daylight.

But almost as soon as he caught the ball, Chris Tinelli was flying out of the backfield, and Noah lateraled the ball to him before he was tackled. Chris ran into the end zone untouched to tie the championship game 14–14.

Chris and Noah knew what to run next. Chris was back under center; Noah was lined up as a wide receiver to his left. Chris dropped back to pass. Now it was Noah flying around from his left, grabbing the ball out of Chris’s hand.

What had always been known as the Statue of Liberty play. The one Money McGee said really was still money.

Nobody caught Noah before he got to the end zone, the little guy a streak of light one last time this season as he got us the two points that won the Bears the championship game.

Bears 16, Patriots 14.

Final.

There would be a picture the next day in the Tribune of me jumping higher than I ever could before that moment. Looking happier than I had been in a long time.

The kids tried to hand me the championship trophy during the presentation ceremony, but I handed it right back to Chris and Noah. I looked into the stands and saw Money McGee grinning at me, arms out, palms facing the sky, as if to say, Told you.

We all went back to have a party at All Good Pizza, the place where Chris had eaten before he’d gotten mugged that night. Mugged, I was still certain, because of me. I’d always thought it was somebody John Gallo or my brother Jack had sent, even though I might not ever know for sure.

I had paid All Good to close the place down for us, both the front and back rooms. Before I left, I took one last look at the Hunters Point Bears and tried to remember if there was a single time that I’d had a day like this when I was in high school, when I was growing up in the house of Wolf.

I went outside and got into my car.

The guy was sitting on my front steps when I got home, as if he’d been waiting for me.

“My name is Erik Mason,” he said.

I asked him what he wanted. He told me that Mr. Michael Barr would very much like to meet with me and that he was prepared to drive me to Mr. Barr’s residence on Scott Street right now if that was all right with me.

“Not happening.”

Mason smiled amiably, as if we were pals.

“It’s not really a request.”

I told him I had already picked up on that. Then I told Mason that since he had come to my house, he obviously knew who I was.

“Jenny Wolf. That’s w-o-l-f.”

Mason frowned.

Then I told him that there was probably no way that either he or his boss knew who my father’s best friend had been since childhood, the man who had always been like an uncle to me.

The one who had sent the rose to me at the Beverly Wilshire after he had persuaded the hard-line owners to change their votes.

I slowly spelled out my uncle’s last name for him.

“Five letters. Three vowels. Easy to remember.”

Erik Mason stared at me when I finished, but only briefly, before turning and walking to his car and driving away.