I’m not sure that Mrs. Fritz was right about the south field having better grass, but it was certainly more private. The field was sandwiched between the swimming pool and the tennis courts, so there was no view of it from any street. The two TV news trucks that pulled into our school’s parking lot in the early afternoon couldn’t get close. Dylan heard from his mom that the reporters were brought to the conference room, denied permission to film on school grounds, and asked not to bother any Fremont students.
When we headed out for our afternoon practice, a school guard was patrolling the field, making sure reporters and strangers stayed away. But he couldn’t stop other students from coming to watch, and more than twenty were waiting for us. They ranged from freshmen to seniors, from soccer fans to sports haters. The south field had no bleachers, so they sprawled on the grass and waited to see what all the fuss was about. I was surprised to see Rob Powers saunter over with two pretty girls and sit down gingerly. With his cracked rib and punctured lung it was clear that he couldn’t run any football drills, but surely he had better things to do than watch our pathetic soccer practice.
We now had a nickname—the Losers—and my teammates seemed to be embracing their own breaking story with excitement and a weird kind of pride. It was as if they were thrilled at becoming famous for being lousy. When we circled up for our yoga stretches, they compared notes on how our story kept getting hotter on the Web.
Chloe was tracking our numbers. She claimed that more than four million people had seen us on different sites. “That’s more than watched the president’s press conference last week,” she informed us.
“We’re more entertaining than the president’s press conference,” Meg said.
“Yeah, the president never collides with anyone or falls into a lake,” Dylan agreed. Meg smiled at him. I didn’t think they were dating yet, but my shy friend was now relaxed around her and could even crack lame jokes, which was a big step forward.
Frank described a site that featured an unflattering photo of Muhldinger—his big bald head shiny under fluorescent lights—labeled THE MUSCLE-HEAD OF MUSCLES HIGH. The site was running a Meanest Coach contest, inviting students to post pictures of their own nasty coaches.
Becca stretched out next to me and asked softly: “Did you and your dad talk?”
“Not really.”
“You don’t look like you got much sleep.”
“Just a few hours.”
“I didn’t get much either,” she said, unable to contain her excitement. “I kept reading the comments of people who say they’re going to come to our game on Tuesday. It’s insane. They’re carpooling from Brooklyn, and there’s a group biking over the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. There’s even a weird men’s soccer club in Hartford that claims they’re worse and more out of shape than we are, and they may drive down in a van to prove it.”
“We’ll show them what it means to be out of shape,” Pierre proclaimed. “I can boot again if necessary.”
“I hope it’s not necessary,” I told him. “I doubt that’s what they’re all coming to see.” Then I asked Becca, “How many people total do you think are really gonna show up on Tuesday?”
“Maybe a hundred,” she guessed. “They sound pretty serious about it. They’re mostly people who hated high school sports and felt pushed around and bullied, and they see coming out here and cheering for us as an opportunity to get some of their own back.”
“Once a revolution starts, the real power rests with those who have been most abandoned,” Shimsky contributed grimly.
“Who said that?” Meg wanted to know.
“Danton,” Shimsky told her.
“Don’t you mean Dante?” Becca asked.
“Georges-Jacques Danton,” Coach Percy explained. “A leading firebrand in the French Revolution who was eventually guillotined. Let’s take a lap around the field. It’s not a race, so feel free to go at your own pace.”
I’m not sure the Losers needed to be told that. We weren’t exactly known for our team speed. I didn’t want to show off, but even running slowly I couldn’t help taking the lead and pulling away. I believe that most healthy teenagers could walk around a soccer field more quickly than our team ran. Becca and Meg practiced Latin as they jogged, conjugating verbs back and forth and not paying any attention to where they ran so that they swerved wildly. Frank and Pierre seemed to actually be moving backward, but that must have been an optical illusion because they eventually finished their lap and joined the rest of us by the goal.
“A few quick announcements before we start,” Percy said. “First, as you may have heard, our season is back on.”
There was applause and an explosive belch, which Zirco let loose. Everyone turned to look at him and he tugged at his right ear.
“Second,” Percy continued, “the school authorities had a talk with your captain and me. They requested that all of you not speak to reporters about our team.”
“Can’t we talk to anyone we want?” Becca called out.
“Yeah, what about free speech?” Chloe demanded.
Percy looked at me for help.
“Go ahead and talk to whoever you want,” I told them. “Just be aware that this story’s getting big and Muhldinger’s trying his best to contain it.”
“He’s the muscle-head of Muscles High,” Meg shouted.
“Yeah, he needs to watch what he says a lot more than we do,” Dylan pointed out.
“I understand your strong feelings, but let’s try not to hold grudges,” Coach Percy suggested. “Your principal gave us our season back. Suppose we repay his gesture with forgiveness and even a little rudimentary progress in soccer?”
There were boos and hisses from the Losers. They all looked angry, except for Shimsky who was smiling, as if enjoying the fact that once a revolution has started no one can control it.
“I’m not suggesting we plunge into Spartan training,” Percy hastily explained. He glanced at Pierre. “But let’s try not to launch any more shoes at the goal.” His gaze swung over to Frank. “Or get tangled up in the net.” He looked at Zirco. “And I’m sure we can all agree that we don’t want anyone to drown.”
“Why should we change the way we play for Muhldinger?” Becca demanded. Percy was her favorite teacher, so I was a little surprised by how sharply she confronted him.
“Yeah, he’s only letting us finish our season because his job is on the line,” Frank agreed. “We may be the Losers, but so far we’re totally kicking his butt by doing what we do.”
Percy looked surprised by the fury of the team’s response. He knitted his fingers behind his neck and paced back and forth for a moment, the way I had seen him do in his apartment when Becca and I had asked him to be our coach. Finally he stopped pacing and nodded at us. “I take your point. I certainly don’t want to change the wonderful … exuberance of our team. Let’s do our best to … do what we do … and make sure we have fun.”
Fun was a kind word for it—what we were good at was losing. As we ran onto the field, a chant went up from my teammates: “Losers, losers, losers forever!” It was picked up by a few grinning students sitting on the grass. “Losers, losers, losers forever,” they chanted in a familiar rhythm that made a mockery of our most famous football chant: “Fremont, Fremont, Fremont forever!”
I joined the chant, but as I looked around I was also dreading what was to come.
* * *
Sure enough, everything that could possibly go wrong on a soccer field did. To the delight of the increasingly large crowds that came to watch us over the next few days, practicing seemed to make us worse and not better. Some of it was due to our genuine lack of sports talent, but as the week wore on I realized that several of my teammates were making themselves look lousy on purpose.
They must have been untying their cleats before shooting drills because the number of shoes that were launched at the goal kept growing. Frank dodged them and occasionally snatched one out of the air and winged it back. He fell asleep twice in the goal during practice that week, and it became a running gag that he managed to find new ways of getting tangled in the net. Once his head got snagged, and we had to cut the nylon mesh with scissors.
Our midfielders sprinted forward, backed up, and ran side to side at the same time, and frequently two or three of them collided in what looked like bad traffic accidents in the middle of the field. Bodies piled up, there were dramatic screams, arms and legs thrashed, and lots of laughter rang out.
The “Jenks” became our team’s signature dribbling move, and was repeated with many creative variations. The move had been invented by our spectacularly uncoordinated defender—Alan “the Jinx” Jenks—who sometimes missed his head when he went to comb his curly brown hair. To perform a Jenks, a player whiffs on the ball completely while trying to kick it forward and then back-heels it blindly on the backswing. Great teams feature the Nutmeg, the Rainbow, the Maradona, and the Sombrero. We had the Flying Shoe, the Sleeping Goalie, and Jinx doing the Jenks.
Percy gave up trying to rein in the mayhem, and often contributed to it. His attempts at positioning drills were taken from ancient battles and frequently led to chaos. On Thursday he had us reenact the Battle of Gaugamela, and Meg led a “cavalry charge” into the fence of the tennis court. On Friday when the weather turned sunny Percy showed up in a pith helmet that made it look like he was ready for a safari. Kids on the sidelines laughed and filmed him with cell phones.
Every evening my mom asked me what was going on with our team, and I told her nothing much. Dad had no questions—he missed several dinners and when he was there he just wolfed down his food and excused himself. I couldn’t tell if he was still mad at me or just pissed off at life in general. I decided to stay quiet for a while and keep a low profile, both at home and with our team.
I had never been involved in a breaking news event before, and I kept expecting the Losers saga to die down. Instead, our school’s efforts to limit media coverage seemed to stoke the fires. We were featured on several TV sports and news shows, and every day I got more e-mails and phone calls from reporters and bloggers. I took Mr. Bryce’s advice and deleted the messages.
But some of my friends were clearly doing a lot of talking, although they were smart enough to ask not to be named. Articles and blogs came out with all kinds of inside information about our team. They described our goofy practices, our nutty coach, and our geeky players. A few of them even named me as the team captain and scorer of our only goal.
The media hype built through the week, as if our match on Tuesday against Maysville was some sort of watershed event. When I got home from soccer practice on Friday there were five messages on our home phone from different reporters asking me to call back. I erased them, but when the phone rang a few minutes later I picked it up out of habit. “Jack Logan?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Yes?”
“This is Dianne Foster from the Star Dispatch. I left you two messages.”
“Sorry but I’m not talking to reporters.”
“Why not?” she asked. “I don’t bite.”
“I just don’t want to.”
“Well, then suppose I do the talking and you just listen,” she suggested. “I think you’ll want to hear this. Okay?”
“Go on,” I said, curious despite myself.
“I’m writing an article about your soccer team that you may be very interested in,” she said. “You see, I know who you are, Jack.”
“I don’t know what that means. I’m no one. Goodbye.”
“That’s very modest of you,” she said with a laugh. “But you’re Tom Logan’s youngest son.”
I gripped the phone a little tighter. “My father has nothing to do with this story.”
“Doesn’t he?” she asked. “The captain of the self-proclaimed worst soccer team in America that’s challenging its own high school’s testosterone-fueled sports ethos just happens to be the son of the best football player in the whole history of the school? To me that’s a pretty interesting father-son story.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “But please don’t write it.”
“I already have,” she said. “I just want to confirm some of the details. Is it true that you were offered a spot on the varsity football team? They even wanted to give you your father’s old number. And when you turned it down your principal put his fist through a door?”
“Who told you that?” I tried to think of who knew all the details of what had happened in Muhldinger’s office. Dylan? Frank? I hesitated for a long second. Becca?
“And is it true that your father personally called Principal Muhldinger and asked him to give the Losers a chance to play, so in a way your team’s challenge to your school is all his doing?”
I hung up the phone, and even though it was warm in our kitchen I shivered.