When Dad and I got home from my soccer tryout, Mom had made us brunch and we all sat together around the kitchen table eating and reading the morning newspaper. The Star Dispatch reporters hadn’t held back: “Lions Lay an Egg,” the front page of the sports section blared in a big headline, with an embarrassing photo of our quarterback fumbling the ball. “State Champ Dreams End Early as Team Loses and Three Players Are Arrested.”
Lowry, Davis, and Barlow had been charged with aggravated assault as adults and let out on bail. I was starting to learn how much a news story is like a fire. If it runs out of wood, it sputters and dies. But give it a little new fuel and a puff of wind and it roars up again, much bigger than before. When our story began, the TV and newspaper coverage of the Losers had been mostly local and regional. When Dylan’s wrist was broken, it had swelled. But as word got out that three football players had been charged with a felony, the national press came racing in as if all suddenly scenting the same trendy story.
Bullying in schools was a hot-button topic, and I guess our story had other things going for it. Soccer was becoming more popular all over America, while high school football was in retreat because of the controversy over head injuries. A football powerhouse run by people with screwed-up values made our story even juicier. Muhldinger was a villain right out of central casting. Finally there was our team—the Losers. There’s a saying that everyone loves a winner, but actually I think most people prefer to hear about likable losers.
On Monday morning a network news reporter whose face I recognized was doing interviews right on school grounds. It was funny because she was trying to ask questions and kids kept coming up and asking for her autograph. When we jogged out to the south field to practice on Monday afternoon, the guards had given up trying to shoo away reporters. Maybe our school authorities had realized that the more they tried to keep a cap on this the hotter the story got. Fifty students and fans were waiting for us, and three news crews filmed our pathetic soccer practice as if something important were taking place. It was a little hard to see how fifteen lousy soccer players preparing to play another school’s JV team deserved such attention.
Coach Percy told us to ignore the fuss and concentrate on our upcoming game against Pine River. That’s a little like being in the middle of a tornado and someone telling you to please disregard the fact that your house just got sucked into the air.
Rob Powers came to Monday’s practice and immediately made his mark. He’d never played soccer before, and he wasn’t trying to be competitive, but he was a natural athlete and he couldn’t turn it off. During a scrimmage he always seemed to be at the right place for passes, and while he toed the ball his kicks were still rockets compared to the rest of the Losers’. He kept dialing back his sports ability and trying not to show off, but it was clear that he could run rings around our other players.
It was fun for me to have another good athlete on the team. Rob’s dad had played on the same Fremont football team as my father, and we’d spent grade school tossing all different kinds of balls around. We were both new at soccer, but with Rob playing stopper I remembered how it felt to play ahead of Diego—the sense that there’s someone behind you who can make stops and feed you passes.
But there was also something about Rob’s joining our team that was all about his showmanship. He always seemed to be diving in front of TV cameras, getting up slowly and flashing his million-dollar smile. I knew he had a modeling career, and I started wondering if he’d wanted to join the Losers for the same reason the varsity cheerleaders wanted to do their routines at our home games. I told myself there was nothing wrong with a little self-promotion—Becca was using our weird season to help her get into college. And every time I saw Rob acrobatically flip in front of a TV camera and get up smoothing out his hair, it kind of cracked me up.
Our Internet followers quickly embraced our new team member. “New Loser Is Hot Hunk!” came the tweets, and soon pictures of Rob were posted on our fan sites, and not just soccer photos but also shots from his modeling gigs, including one of him in a bathing suit.
Becca saw what I saw, and at first she was hostile to Rob. But as he goofed around and got to know everybody, he was soon accepted by the Losers. I was surprised to see how much Becca hung out with him. She laughed at his lame jokes, and stretched out next to him, and while I wasn’t really jealous I was a little curious how he had persuaded her so quickly that he wasn’t the misogynist she’d pegged him as.
Rob might have been having fun on our team, but he paid for it in school and in the town. I heard people say things behind his back, and to his face, that I wouldn’t have known how to deal with. “Traitor” was the word most commonly used, but there were plenty of nastier names.
Rob just looked the other way and walked on by.
The Fremont football fans were hurting, and they needed someone to blame. Every afternoon the Lions practiced on Gentry Field, but their season was in shambles and few came to watch them. The bleachers sat largely empty, and the statue of Arthur Gentry with his motto “Just go for it” seemed to mock them. Every afternoon we practiced nearby on the south field and drew TV trucks and crowds.
The media hype built all week, till on Wednesday night, before the Pine River game, a network news show ran a big feature spot on our team and what was going on in Fremont. There were interviews with students, two TV psychologists who specialized in school violence explained how misguided our town’s values were, and Mr. Bryce even appeared to say Fremont was taking this seriously and cleaning its own house and would people please just give us some space.
By the time we got onto the bus for Pine River I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew things were getting a little out of control. It was clear from the spike in our hits online and all the new posts and chatter that this was no longer really about the Losers at all—we’d plugged into a much bigger national issue. A high school girl had recently committed suicide in Connecticut because she’d been teased mercilessly, and a ten-year-old boy in Pennsylvania was in a coma after a beating. Somehow our story had been adopted and embraced by people who cared a great deal about school violence, and we had become a flash point for them.
I sat on the bus behind Becca and Rob, who laughed and kidded each other the whole ride to Pine River. Rob was a natural athlete for sure, but he was even more naturally gifted when it came to getting pretty girls to like him.
Pine River High is just what it sounds like—a fifty-year-old brick school in the bend of a river, surrounded by pitch pines. It’s a small school that serves a farming community, and they weren’t prepared for what descended on them that October afternoon. The date and time of the game had been posted online by what my teammates had taken to calling “Loser Nation,” and many of our fans had promised to show up. By the time our bus chugged up to Pine River High School, there was nowhere to park. The lot was jammed, and the backup lot near the sports fields was also full. A guard directed us toward a grassy field a few hundred yards away, and when we got off the bus the press was waiting for us.
“Losers, look over here! Can we get a team picture?”
“Where’s Dylan? The attorney for one of the arrested football players said his client can’t get a fair trial because of all the publicity. Any comment?”
“Guys, do you think being victims makes you Losers or are you really winners?”
Some of us shouted replies and mugged for the cameras, but I kept my mouth shut and followed Coach Percy to the field. It had no bleachers so all the people who had driven to see the game were standing around it in a steadily growing crowd. The mob parted to let us through and then re-formed, so we were surrounded by staring, screaming strangers who felt like they knew us. I saw lots of signs against bullying and school violence, and activists were handing out leaflets. There was even a state politician shaking hands and giving interviews.
“What a circus,” Frank said, staring at a woman who had wrapped herself in bandages and was wearing a gag.
“We used to be the circus,” Dylan agreed with a nod, “but now I think we’re the sideshow.”
Coach Percy tried to get us to calm down. “It’s not luck that you are where you are right now,” he told us when we huddled up. “As Seneca said: ‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’ Have fun out there and play your own game.”
“Who’s Seneca?” I asked Becca.
“He’s not on my list of two thousand important people to know for the history AP,” she said.
When I went to midfield to meet the Pine River captain for the coin flip, he kept asking me what was going on.
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “It’s out of control.”
“No kidding,” he said, and ran a hand through his short hair. “But what’s going on?”
Before the game started the ref had the cops push the crowd back fifteen yards from the field’s perimeter so the line judges could run the sidelines. That gave us a feeling of a little breathing room, but within a minute our fans had edged back toward the corners, and the TV crews were practically standing on the field.
The ref blew his whistle and the game started, but the crowd was so distracting that it was hard to concentrate. Pine River was barely mediocre, and I had the same strange feeling I’d had against Maysville—Losers or not, we were actually just as good as they were. Rob was trying not to be too intense, but he kept stopping their attacks and feeding me the ball. Pine River scored three minutes in, and I quickly tied it. We might have actually played a fun, close soccer game but after twenty minutes it came to a surprising end.
Rob fed me a pass and I was dribbling the ball up when the ref blew his whistle. I knew I couldn’t possibly be offside, so I turned to him and shouted, “Come on, look at their defenders—I’m on!” He looked back at me and pointed.
A dozen protesters carrying signs with messages like MY SON WAS A VICTIM and ENOUGH PAIN—START THE HEALING NOW! had walked out onto the field and were chanting slogans in front of the TV cameras. The police tried to lead them away, but they sat down, linked arms, and refused to budge.
People from the crowd shouted at them to leave: “We drove an hour to see this game, you idiots.”
The protestors kept chanting, the crowd yelled back at them, and even though it was a protest against bullying, things started to feel a little hostile and threatening.
We gathered at the sideline where Coach Percy told us to drink water and not get involved. The Pine River coach hurried over with their athletic director and talked to Percy, who nodded. Then the athletic director told us, “Guys, I love a good soccer game, but I think it might be better for everyone if we just pulled the plug on this thing and went home.”
We walked through the crowd to the bus and drove back to Fremont, and my last view of Pine River was of the cops putting wrist restraints on protestors, picking them up, and carrying them off the field.