Chapter 14 Damián
The pitch at the training facility is softer than the stadium turf and the air has already made up its mind about the day. Late-morning sun on the back of my neck. Phase of play, defenders against the attacking unit, the coaching staff calling triggers from the half-line.
“Step.” My voice. “Step. Hold.”
The line steps. The line holds. Ková? on my right shoulder, Novotny at left back, the young center half filling in at right.
His name is Horák. I’ve been pretending I can’t remember it for three days because it makes him try harder, which is cruel and effective and possibly the most honest coaching I’ve ever done.
The attackers play their pattern. The ball gets recycled. Reset. Run it again.
“Vě?, the kid’s too high.”
“I see him. Push him back two yards.”
Ková? barks. Horák drops. The next pattern develops. The ball gets played in behind and Ková? reads the run and steps before the pass and intercepts cleanly.
He grins. We reset. The next pattern is a switch, the ball goes left, comes back across, and Horák steps in front of his man early, gets isolated, and a midfielder slides into the gap behind him. The attackers don’t punish it because they’re working at training pace, but it’s a goal in a match.
Horák’s jaw tightens. He starts apologizing before the ball stops rolling.
I’m beside him before the sentence finishes. Hand on the back of his neck. Eye contact.
“Hey. You’re fine. You stepped early because you wanted the ball. The want is right. The timing catches up. Next pattern.”
“I read it wrong.”
“You read it half a second wrong. That’s nothing. We’re going again.”
He nods. I squeeze the back of his neck once and release. Ková? reaches over and clips the kid on the arm. The line resets.
The next pattern develops and I make the call.
Step. The line steps. And I’m a yard early.
A striker I should have read as anchored has slipped his marker’s shoulder and is moving and I committed before I checked and the ball goes over the top into the space I just vacated.
Novotny covers. The attacker doesn’t even need to break stride.
My hands go to my hips and then drop because hands on the hips is visible frustration and visible frustration is an announcement.
“Good cover, Novotny,” Tomá? calls from the half-line. “Reset. Dami, you good?”
“Yeah.”
The “yeah” is the word I use when Tomá? says we’re fine and I disagree. It will play for the rest of the session, quietly, in the calling of a defensive line by a man who got caught a yard early on a step-up at a training session in July.
I make the next twelve calls. Every one clean. The coaching staff moves on.
“You’re calling the shape like a man with a grievance,” Ková? says, walking past with his shirt in his hand. “Did the line do something to you personally?”
“The line is excellent.”
“The line is fine. The line is also slightly intimidated.”
“Better intimidated than wrong.”
?íma jogs up behind us, toweling his neck. “Vě? ran the last twenty minutes like he owed the pitch money. The pitch was not asking to be repaid.”
“?íma, you’re supposed to be cooling down.”
“I’m cooling down verbally. It’s a method.”
“It’s not a method.”
“It’s my method. My method involves commentary. Ková?, tell him.”
“Leave me out of this. I’m conserving energy.”
“You’ve been conserving energy since 2019.”
I let the corner of my mouth go up because the banter is old and warm and these are my people and they will give me shit in three languages before breakfast. My muscles are still playing.
My calves are still reading the pitch. The mistake is still sitting where it sits, but the sun is on my shoulders and the grass smells the way Atlanta grass smells, which is different from German grass. Wetter. Greener somehow.
The session ends and I’m pulling on a training top near the bench when I see him.
Tobík is at the far side of the pitch, sitting in the metal bleachers behind the near goal with a water bottle. Alone.
He lifts a hand. I lift a hand back. The gesture is small and correct and exactly what it would look like from the outside.
From the inside, the wave is the closest I’ve come to touching him in six days.
I walk toward the bleachers because walking away would be more conspicuous.
The team filters toward the tunnel behind me.
?íma is beside me for a second, still toweling his neck, and I feel his attention shift.
His eyes land on my face and then follow where my face is pointed.
A pause. ?íma doesn’t say anything. The not-saying-anything is louder than the commentary was.
He jogs ahead toward the tunnel. The moment passes.
Tobík doesn’t stand. He waits, forearms on his knees. His eyes are doing the thing they always do, which is working carefully over whatever’s in front of him as if the looking itself is a form of respect.
“Tomá? told you we’d be out here?”
“He mentioned it. I like watching football. The way everything moves together.”
“And how did it move today?”
“It moved well. You were the loudest thing on the pitch. Not your voice. The way the line bent to where you pointed. Everyone knew where to be because you knew.”
I sit on the bench one row below him. Close enough that if I turned my head his knees would be at my shoulder. The cicadas are loud in the trees beyond the parking lot. The metal of the bleachers is warm under my hand.
“You played well today,” he says.
“I got caught on one.”
“You got caught on one and then you made every call after.”
“That’s the job.”
“You said something like that to the new kid. When he stepped early. You told him the want is right and the timing catches up.”
“Because that’s true.”
“Yes. And then you got caught and you didn’t say it to yourself. You said yeah to Tomá? and then you went quiet and you made twelve calls and the twelve calls weren’t celebration. They were something else.”
The sentence arrives the way Tobík’s sentences arrive. Plainly. Without warning.
“I corrected the error,” I say.
“You corrected the call. You didn’t correct the other thing.”
“What other thing.”
He’s quiet for a second. Eyes on the pitch, not on me. When Tobík looks away it’s because he’s finding words.
“The kid makes a mistake and you put your hand on his neck and you tell him it’s fine.
Next pattern. And it works. He’s fine. Because you gave him the thing that lets the mistake be small.
” He pauses. “I’ve watched it three times this week.
You forgave the kid. You forgave Novotny for the bad pass on Tuesday.
You told Horák his positioning was good when it wasn’t good but the telling was what he needed.
And every time you make an error you go somewhere else.
Not physically. But the person leaves and the mask stays. ”
My jaw is locked. I can feel it locked and I can’t unlock it because the muscles already moved without me.
“Everyone’s harder on themselves than on their teammates,” I say.
“That’s how competition works. The pitch is the one place where I can’t be wrong and also be fine about being wrong.
On the pitch, wrong costs. Off the pitch, you tell people it doesn’t.
The kid needs to hear it doesn’t. I need to not hear it.
There’s a difference between teaching and performing. ”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“What are you saying?”
“The kid’s mistake is a mistake. Your mistake is a verdict. And you hand out pardons to every person on that pitch except yourself.”
My fingers tighten on the warm metal edge of the bench. The ground crew is dragging a hose across the turf. A car door slams somewhere behind the stadium. The cicadas keep up their noise.
“You give everyone the thing you won’t give yourself,” he says. The way he says everything. Like an observation about the weather. “I don’t know who decided you don’t get it too. But they were wrong.”
I don’t say anything. He’s not asking me to agree.
He’s not asking me to do anything. He just said it the way you’d say the coffee is good, and now the coffee is sitting between us and I don’t know what to do with it except sit here, on a warm metal bench, next to a man who just saw something nobody has seen.
My father calls after matches and tells me I was too deep at forty-three. Tomá? says we’re fine, forget it. Nobody has ever looked at the space between what I give others and what I keep from myself and said anything at all.
“I should shower,” I say. “Review session at one.”
“Okay.” The word is soft. He doesn’t push past it.
I stand. The standing is less abrupt than it wants to be. I manage that much. He stays where he is, forearms on his knees, and his eyes have the gold in them that the sun finds, and he is looking at me with something steady and unhurried that I don’t have a name for.
“I’ll see you at dinner,” I say. “If Tomá? arranges something.”
“He usually does.”
I walk toward the tunnel. The tunnel is dark and cool and I’m walking through it with the gait of a man heading to a review session. This is true. Review session at one.
Also true: a man just said the truest thing anyone has said to me, and I walked away from it with excellent posture and am hiding from a hockey player in a tunnel. Very dignified.
Later back at the hotel, I have the room to myself. ?íma is out somewhere and I am sitting staring at my phone.
I pick it up. I put it down. I pick it up.
I text Tobík. The words go before the thinking catches them.
Are you home?
Under a minute.
Yes.
Can I come over?
Yes.
Four messages. No edits. No rehearsal. I don’t look at myself in the mirror because looking in the mirror would involve acknowledging that I’m putting on real clothes at ten forty-five to go to a man’s apartment and the sensible arguments would win and I can’t let them win tonight.
I pull on jeans and a shirt and shoes and I’m out the door. The lobby is empty. The Uber takes eleven minutes. The driver doesn’t talk.