Chapter 13 — TEO
The team fills the hotel restaurant the way road teams always fill hotel restaurants: loud, half-awake, reaching for coffee before conversation.
Last night keeps replaying. Not the whole night. Just the pieces that won’t flatten into normal. His posture changing, the square shoulders settling into a slope like someone had cut the strings holding them up. His hand gripping my jacket in the elevator while he pleaded for mercy.
Zay is two tables over. Staff eats separately on the road, always have.
I catch his eye when I sit down and the look holds for half a second longer than professional.
Not warm. Not cold. The look of someone who was in that hotel room at three in the morning and is now eating a banana and pretending the day is normal.
He tips his chin, barely, and I know what the tip means.
Any news? And I look at the empty chair and back at him and the answer is in the look.
He nods once and goes back to his breakfast.
At eight twenty-six, Berger walks in.
He’s showered. Dressed. His shirt is pressed and tucked, his belt buckled with the precision of a man whose morning routine does not accommodate deviation.
His face doesn’t look like the slack, stripped thing I saw on that hotel bed five hours ago.
Just Berger’s face, set and forward, carrying the jaw that’s always carrying his jaw.
He sits down. Pours coffee. Drinks it without rating it.
That’s the first tell. Berger has rated every coffee on this road trip.
He’s rated coffees that weren’t worth rating and then explained why they deserved to be rated anyway, because the absence of quality is itself data.
This morning he drinks it like a man who needs this in his veins.
No commentary on the roast. No assessment of the hotel chain’s ongoing failure to understand extraction.
He’s chewing sausage and looking at his plate and the man who filled every silence from bartender rankings to burger predictions to wing sauce viscosity last night is sitting in a room full of his teammates and saying nothing.
Nobody else notices. The table is loud enough to cover the silence and I’m looking around thinking someone else should be seeing this and nobody is.
After breakfast, I catch him in the hallway outside the elevator. The team scatters, moving toward rooms to pack. Berger is walking with purpose, his bag over one shoulder, his phone in his hand, the posture of a man who does not want to be interrupted.
“Hey.” I fall into step beside him. Keep it easy. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” He doesn’t slow down and doesn’t look at me.
“Last night was pretty rough, man.”
“I had too much to drink. It happens.” He presses the elevator button. His voice is level. The voice of a man who considers this conversation settled.
“Berger.”
He turns. Looks at me full on. “You are blowing this out of proportion.” Each word he speaks carries the same measured certainty he uses to announce that a Cuban sandwich has been rated a six-point-one.
The same cadence, same volume. Like he rehearsed it in the mirror this morning. “I drank too much. It happens.”
The elevator opens. He steps in.
“Call it a four-point-three on the evening scale. Regrettable but within acceptable parameters.” He presses his floor. The door starts to close. “I appreciate the concern.”
The door shuts.
I stand in the hallway looking at brushed metal. Berger’s voice is still in my ears and I’m trying to reconcile what I heard in that elevator last night and what I just heard and I can’t make the two versions fit.
That night’s game is tight, a 3-2 win that comes down to a Hájek redirect in the third. The locker room is loud after and Berger is not in it. Already showered and dressed by the time I get back from media, his stall clean, his bag packed.
On the bus to the airport, I sit down beside him before he can claim a row alone. His headphones are around his neck but not on. The highway hums under us.
“Listen, I’m not trying to make it a thing. I just want to make sure you’re good.”
He looks at me. The same clear eyes. The same settled certainty. “Marchetti. I am good. You are very kind and I appreciate you, man. But I had a bad night. It was one night.” A pause, the smallest recalibration. “And I need you to let it be one bad night.”
His headphones go on. The conversation is over. I move to my usual seat and look out the window at whatever highway we’re on and try to figure out why my chest feels tight when the man just told me, clearly and directly, that he’s fine. My phone buzzes.
He okay?
I stare at the screen and type and delete and type again.
I honestly don’t know. He says it was just a bad night.
Maybe it was.
Three rows ahead, Berger is asleep with his neck pillow positioned at the angle he’s explained is optimal for cervical support during transit. My gut says it wasn’t just a bad night. But I don’t have anything concrete except a feeling.
My gut says it wasn’t.
Zay’s response comes after a long pause.
Mine too. But all you can do is be there for him.
I read it twice. He’s right. And it sits wrong anyway
The second day, Berger is at breakfast. On time.
Shirt pressed. Coffee poured without commentary.
He answers direct questions and initiates nothing.
Mueller asks about updating the wing sauce spreadsheet and Berger says “I’ll get to it” without the prosecutorial energy he usually brings to matters of ranking methodology.
Nobody pushes and I want to pull my hair out.
The third morning, Berger walks into breakfast and rates the coffee.
“Five-point-nine. An improvement over yesterday’s offering, which I declined to rate.” He pulls out his phone. “I’m adjusting the hotel coffee index. This chain has been on probation and this is a step toward rehabilitation.”
Mueller looks up. “You can’t put a hotel chain on probation.”
“I can and I did. The system requires accountability, Mueller. Without consequences, standards erode.”
Thompson doesn’t look up from his phone. “Your system has too many categories.”
“The system has the exact correct number of categories. Your discomfort with the system reflects your discomfort with rigor, not a flaw in the methodology.”
Hájek asks whether the coffee index accounts for altitude.
Berger turns to him, clearly pleased that his expertise has been requested.
“Altitude affects atmospheric pressure, which affects extraction temperature, which affects flavor profile. It is a variable I have considered and decided, at this time, not to include. But I appreciate the question. It shows you’re taking the system seriously, Hájek. ”
And just like that, he’s back. The broadcast restored.
The rankings live. The voice filling the room the way Berger’s voice always fills the room, with certainty and conviction and the cadence of a man who believes his opinions are public services.
Mueller disputes a data point. Berger dismantles the dispute.
Thompson shakes his head. The table is back to normal.
After the game that night, a loss, Berger delivers a three-minute analysis of the power play’s structural failures that nobody asked for and everyone listens to because Berger’s unsolicited analysis has a way of being uncomfortably correct.
He identifies two zone entries where the spacing collapsed, explains why the left-side option was open on the second unit’s failed set play, and rates the visiting locker room’s ventilation a three-point-nine.
He disputes a call from the second period with enough detail to suggest he’s already reviewed the footage.
He is, by every available measure, himself.
I’m almost convinced. I’m sitting in the visiting locker room pulling tape off my shins and listening to Berger narrate his way through the evening and I’m almost ready to call it what he told me it was. A bad night. One bad night and a guy who feels embarrassed about it.
Then Berger’s phone buzzes on the bench beside him.
He doesn’t check it. His hand moves toward it and stops.
His fingers hover for a second, then he picks it up and turns it face-down without looking at the screen.
I see a flicker of something, there and gone, the way a crack in a wall shows when the light hits at the right angle and disappears when it shifts.
He goes back to the ventilation rating. Full volume. The phone sits face-down on the bench and he doesn’t touch it again.
Nobody else sees it. But I do. And I don’t know what it means, but I know that a man who checks every notification, who rates every input, who catalogues every data point in his entire visible life, just chose not to look at his phone.
I pull my jersey over my head and I don’t say anything. Because Zay is right. All I can do is be there. But being there means watching, and now I’m watching and seeing more than I expected.