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It’s My First Time With A Man—And He’s On The Opposing Team.
I’m a single dad, the Coach of the San Diego Coyotes.
Chris Woodgate is the star pitcher for the Los Angeles Blackbirds—and my son’s hero.
He should be off-limits to me.
He’s one of our rivals—and he’s a man and this is pro baseball!
If only he didn’t get to me the way no woman including my ex-wife ever did.
If only I didn’t have these feelings about him that I’ve had about good-looking men my whole life.
I didn’t ask for this—but when I set up a meeting with my son and Chris asks me out, I can’t say no.
Suddenly there are a lot of things I’m not saying “no” to—things that excite me and things that scare me.
Is my life about to become a home run because of Chris—or the most disastrous strikeout ever?
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CHAPTER 1
Rory
When my eight-year-old son and I had a disagreement one day, I had no idea what a life-changer it would turn out to be. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We should begin with what the disagreement was about. It was about the interview that I did in advance of the new baseball season.
The season was on the way and my team, the San Diego Coyotes, was in training at Century Field. During a break in training I went to the dugout, and there was a reporter with a microphone and a guy with a camera from one of the Cable sports channels, waiting to get some words from me as the Coyotes’ coach.
There were the natural questions about my pitching staff and my catching staff and how well everyone was shaping up. There were the equally natural questions about specific players and how they were looking ahead of the season. We had picked up a couple of new players in the annual draft, and I had to talk about how they were doing, becoming a part of the team.
After all that, came the other natural questions, and these were the ones that got me into trouble.
The reporter inevitably wanted to know my thoughts about the ongoing rivalry between the Coyotes and our arch-enemies, the Los Angeles Blackbirds.
Our two teams had been bitter foes for longer than I or mostly anyone else had been alive. The feud between San Diego and Los Angeles, in baseball, had long been a legend of the sporting world. No one was sure how the Blackbirds and the Coyotes got to be like Earth and the Klingons in Star Trek used to be. Maybe it was something that someone on one team said about the other team that escalated into a feud. Maybe a Coyote once caught a Blackbird sleeping with his girlfriend or his wife, or vice versa, and the teammates took sides against the other team. Maybe something happened during a game that turned into a fight, and no one could forget the ugly mood that came from it.
Whatever the reason, the Coyotes hated the Blackbirds and the Blackbirds hated the Coyotes in the same way that the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story hated each other. Okay, maybe not to the point of murder, but still, there was no love on either side. That was the way it had always been and everyone knew it, and this mutual contempt was treated as the natural state of affairs in the world. It was a given that if you were a Coyote you did not like the Blackbirds and if you happened to be a Blackbird you could not stand the Coyotes. The fans signed off on it and could be even more rabid about it than the two teams themselves. I’m sure that says a lot about human psychology, people learning to hate the ones they’re taught to hate. Wherever the feud came from, the fact remained that even in the world of sports, everyone loves a story about people who would happily kill each other. Figuratively, on the field, of course.
So there was no avoiding the question of what I, the coach of the Coyotes, thought of our chances of giving the Blackbirds a good and thorough plucking this season. I actually smiled, a crooked sort of smile, for the camera at the inevitability of it.
Into the reporter’s microphone I answered, “What have I said every year since I took over coaching this team? We’ve got this. The Blackbirds may put up a good fight. We expect them to put up a good fight. But they’re going down.”
The Cable sports guy said, “You know the coach of the Blackbirds says the same thing about you every year. And some years you take them down and some years they take you down.”
“Yes,” I said, “but the Blackbirds in those black uniforms of theirs are more show than substance, everybody knows that. They look good for the camera, but if you check the stats year by year, we have more games of winning over them than they have over us. Looking pretty isn’t guaranteed to get the job done.”
From the guys in the dugout came “Damn rights,” thumbs turned up, and other expressions of agreement and solidarity.
The reporter argued, “That’s not what they say about Chris Woodgate.”
Chris Woodgate. The sound of that name was always like a hot spike running through me and a cold splash down my back at the same time. Chris Woodgate—the Blackbirds player who brought women fans out to the ball game. Chris Woodgate, who would have women fans stampeding to get his autograph like the wildebeests in The Lion King, one of my son’s favorite movies. Men who loved the Blackbirds hated Chris Woodgate for the effect that he had on their girlfriends and wives. The guy didn’t look like a baseball player. He looked like an advertisement for men’s underwear, and people would go wild if he ever walked out onto a field dressed that way. He was blond, lean, tight-muscled, and so pretty that it hurt to look at him the way it hurt to look right at the Sun.
But perhaps the worst thing about Chris Woodgate was that he wasn’t all looks. The guy had talent. He was one of the best pitchers in the Major League. He’d struck out so many batters that a sports writer once said they should start playing the Funeral March whenever he stepped up to the mound.
That was all true, except...late last season, something had changed.
Chris Woodgate had not finished the last season. He was sidelined and out of the last couple of games because of a shoulder injury. All the sports writers talked about how the mighty had finally fallen. We sent the Blackbirds away with their tail feathers properly clipped last season, because they’d lost Chris Woodgate and they didn’t know whether they would get him back. Their prospects for this season were uncertain. And the women who loved him wept.
Skeptically, almost sarcastically, I asked the Cable guy, “What is it they’re saying about Chris Woodgate?”
“They say he’s coming back,” said the reporter. “He’s coming back and he’ll be as powerful as ever.”
I almost snorted at that, and I’m not the uncouth, snorting kind. “Right! He’s coming back!” I scoffed. “Well, he can come back if he wants, but it’s not going to be the same. The Blackbirds this year, heh, they’re going to be like the Avengers without Thor, if you know what I mean.”
“But Woodgate has had surgery on that shoulder,” he argued. “They say when he gets back into training he’ll pick up where he left off before the injury, and he’ll be back with a vengeance.”
With a pucker of my lips and a shake of my head, I said, “I don’t see that happening. The kind of injury that he had changes a player’s career. He can come back to the game, but he’s not coming back from that. This will be a ‘down’ season for the Blackbirds. We’ve got ‘em. And we’ve got Chris Woodgate.” Nodding at the camera, I said with certainty, “Chris Woodgate is no threat to us or anyone else. His best days are over. He should think about retiring now while he’s still got the good memories behind him.”
So there, I’d done it. I had answered the reporter’s questions with confidence in the strength of my team and the weakness of our old rivals, and one of them in particular. I thought I’d set a tone of optimism and good feelings about the Coyotes’ performance. I thought I’d done a good job as Coach for the morale of my team. I finished the day’s training and sent the guys to the showers feeling damn good about everything.
As I would soon learn, my son had a different opinion.
Cody slept over with his friend Jeremy Bonner a lot. You might think letting a kid have sleepovers all the time is somewhat less than responsible parenting, but it was somewhat compatible with my work and my lifestyle. Being a coach in Major League Baseball, I traveled a lot. My ex-wife lived about forty miles away in Oceanside where she had gotten a job as a fashion buyer, so sending Cody to stay with his Mom was a bit of a job in logistics. It worked out great both for Cody and for me that he and Jeremy were as thick as thieves and Jeremy’s family loved my boy and could be trusted. Jeremy’s home had become pretty much Cody’s second home, which made me feel a lot better when I had to be away. That’s all by way of preface. What happened was that I got a very uncomfortable vibe from my son after that interview, when I pulled up to the Bonners’ driveway to pick him up. He came trudging out of Jeremy’s house, his backpack in hand, looking at his feet as he walked, seeming a little upset.
That concerned me. Had he and his best friend had a fight? Was it something I should call the Bonners about? Cody climbed into the back seat of the car without a word and slammed the door in a way that made me apprehensive. He didn’t look at me when I pulled away from the driveway and got onto the road. What could be on his mind?
“Son, are you okay?” I called back from the front seat.
In the most half-hearted tone—perhaps even less than half-hearted—Cody replied, “Yeah, Dad, I’m fine.” But he still didn’t look up. He seemed to be staring at his backpack in his lap.
“You don’t sound fine,” I said. “Did something happen? Is everything okay with you and Jeremy?”
“We’re fine, Dad,” he said, sounding irritated and totally uninterested in talking to me. I was getting a worse vibe from this every minute.
“Then what are you so down about? If there’s something wrong, son, you can tell me. We can’t fix it if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”
“There’s nothing to fix, Dad,” said Cody, now looking up, not at me but out the window at the houses that we passed on the way home. “He’ll be all good as new soon.”
“Who?” I wondered. “Is it Jeremy? Did he get sick?”
Still staring out the window, Cody said, “No, not Jeremy. Jeremy’s fine.”
“Well, son, you’re worrying me a bit here. This doesn’t sound good. If you’re fine and Jeremy’s fine, who is it that will be all good as new?”
Finally, my son looked forward in my direction, probably into my eyes in the rear view mirror, and in a voice that now sounded more angry and offended, he snapped at me—actually snapped at me, “Chris Woodgate, all right? Chris Woodgate! He’ll be all healed up from his hurt shoulder soon and then you can find out if he’s really a threat to you and if his best days are over and if he should retire! Okay? Chris Woodgate!”
My teeth clenched from the sting of my son’s words and tone. This was serious, I knew. There are few things as grievous to a little boy as someone, especially a parent that he’s meant to respect, attacking one of his heroes. Little boys need heroes to look up to, and it was sometimes to my dismay that my son’s hero happened to be one of the people that I wasn’t supposed to like. In fact Chris Woodgate was, by virtue of his team and his talent, someone that I was absolutely meant to despise. But whatever attitude I was meant to have about him, because of my own position with my team, was irrelevant to my son. The painful fact was that my son loved and admired Chris Woodgate perhaps even more than he did his own father. His father who, by the way, had divorced his mother and ripped apart his family.
Without thinking, because of my need to give good soundbites to a Cable sports channel, I had trodden on my son’s most holy ground. And there we had it. That was why we were having a problem now.
This was not a conversation I could have while driving. I pulled off the road and parked a few blocks away from the Bonners’ house, and turned in the driver’s seat and looked at Cody, stewing over my words about his hero.
“Cody,” I said. “Will you look at me?”
He didn’t move. He just looked up the front lawn of the house outside the back seat window and frowned.
“Come on, Cody,” I said. “Let’s be men, okay? We face our problems and talk them out, right? Like men do. Look at me.”
At that, he turned his frowning little-boy face in my direction.
Gently, I said, “Cody, you know the way things are with my work. Sports and athletics are about competition, and when the press comes asking about how my team stacks up with another team, I have to tell them something good, right? I have to sound confident, like a coach, like a leader. I can’t be telling them the Coyotes are just going to roll over for the Blackbirds, can I?”
Cody wasn’t impressed. He just rolled his eyes and gave me a tsk.
“Okay, look, Cody,” I said. “That’s not the way to be.”
He leaned forward with the seatbelt around him and blurted, “Well, what you said about Chris isn’t the way to be, either! And I don’t care if you and the Blackbirds are supposed to be enemies and hate each other! You talked about Chris like he’s a nothing! He’s not a nothing, Dad! He’s the greatest! And he’s nice! I never heard him say anything bad about you!”
My son actually had a point. Every season, part of the talk of the Major Leagues in California was always the ongoing clash of the Coyotes and Blackbirds, and how one team planned to annihilate the other, and who were the stronger players and who were the weaker ones on each team, and who was going to kick whose ass on the field. Every year it was the same—except for some reason Chris Woodgate always kept himself out of it. The most provocative thing I think I’d ever heard him say to the press was that he always played hard and played to win against everyone, no matter who they were, and when he met the Coyotes we could expect him to bring his best game every time. No mockery, no insults, no personal attacks—just confident sportsmanship from someone whose “best game” was among the best in the League.
If I weren’t expected to hate Chris Woodgate just for being a Blackbird, hell, I could almost admire him.
Sighing heavily, I gave in to my son’s mood. “All right, Cody, listen. Maybe I went too far trying to sound good for the press. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to pick on Chris, who’s been hurt. For all I know, he really will be as good as new when he gets back in the game, and he’ll be the same Chris who’s always been your favorite. I’m sorry, okay?”
Cody’s frown dissolved a bit. He looked at least a little less upset with me.
The operative phrase was “at least a little.” As his father, I had still trampled his hero. His hurt feelings were not just going to go away. Something had to be done—and there was only one thing I could think of that might work. What I had in mind could be controversial. It might ruffle some feathers, especially for the Coyotes. But this was my son, who’d had his heart broken badly enough by my not being able to stay with his mother. Keeping further heartbreaks out of his life was something I now took as a serious fatherly duty.
I ventured the question, “Cody...what if I did something to make this up to you, something to make it all right?”
He looked at me with the unique skepticism of an eight-year-old boy and asked, “What?”
“Something that I think you might like,” I said. “Something that might make you happy.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
With the mischievous smile that I gave him, I may have looked somewhat like a little boy myself. “You’ll see,” I said. “It’ll be a surprise.”
And without another word, I turned back in the driver’s seat, pulled out of the space, and got back on the road.
The rest of the drive home was quiet as I gave thought to the idea that I’d just floated out to appease my offended son. It would be a surprise—if I could actually pull it off.
No, there could be no “if’s” about it. I had to pull this off. I had to make this happen. If I couldn’t make this happen, it could be another great disappointment in Cody’s life. Poor Cody had had his fill of disappointments the day he had to say goodbye to his mother when she moved to Oceanside. Since then Cody’s life had been made up of shuttling back and forth between Joyce and me. I didn’t want to be the source of any more big disappointments for him. Just the experience of growing up would give him plenty more of those, and I couldn’t do anything about any of them.
My thoughts turned to the idea that I had—and to Chris Woodgate. I saw him striding out onto Century Field for one of our home games, looking confident but not cocky as he always did, one hand in a mitt, the rest of him poured into that black uniform with red and yellow accents, just like the California Red-Winged Blackbird from which his team took its name. There was something about the way he walked up to the pitcher’s mound in that uniform. There was something about how it fit him, almost like a super-hero’s costume, suggesting the muscles moving and rippling underneath it, and something about his smile. Baseball players were sometimes called “the Eternal Boys of Summer.” If there were ever anyone that that phrase was meant to describe, it was Chris Woodgate. There was something forever young about that blond face and something forever ageless about that smile.
Chris Woodgate was younger than I was and must have had a very different life from mine. With all the women swarming around him, he must have had experiences I would never know. The only such experiences I’d ever had were with one woman whom I married because I thought I loved her. When I fell out of love with her, it left me wondering if I’d ever really been in love with her in the first place.
How many lovers had Chris Woodgate known? How much more of life had he seen than I had? On the drive home, I gave thought to this man that my son idolized and that I was so famously supposed to despise, and I didn’t hate him.
I actually envied him a little.
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