Chapter 19 #2
“I told him, and he said the right thing, we image it, today, and I said I don’t want it on the books.
And Stevens…” Danny turns the mug a slow half-circle on his knee.
“Stevens gave me a card. A clinic. Off the grid. They gave me something strong enough to play on that wouldn’t ring the league’s drug screens.
And you know the rest, because you wrote the rest. A kid died.
The medical staff panicked because they knew exactly why, and management panicked because they didn’t.
Stevens suddenly manufactured a paper trail for every injury that never had one, mine included, and I got marched through the X-rays and MRIs at last. Cartilage: gone.
Ligament: held together by magic and tape.
” A beat. “And then a journalist started asking questions, and management decided to amputate before it became a league problem. Stevens, gone, fair enough. The whole medical wing, gone, in case there was a trail somewhere. Players offloaded, retired, released. My knee needed surgery, two months to walk, twelve to play. Nobody signs that. Nobody even returns that phone call.”
And here is the part he’s not saying, the part I’ll have to write with a steady hand: all of it was legal.
Immoral — God, yes. Unethical by any code anyone’s ever printed.
But Stevens’s job description said manage injuries, keep records, refer out what exceeds the facility.
The clinic broke no law writing prescriptions.
Stevens maybe took some kickbacks but of course no one there wanted to talk to me so I can’t even prove he was corrupt.
And the clinic was your normal orthopedic facility that also had other patients, everything on the books, minus some athletes who needed to hide injuries.
The kid that died had taken perfectly legal drugs.
Just that the drugs the clinic gave him and the drugs the medical staff provided for different reasons didn’t work well together.
The player never disclosed the full pharmacy he was on.
Nobody in the chain had a legal obligation they violated, they had jobs, and they did them in the worst possible faith.
And people have spent three years hating me… for doing mine.
“What happened after?” I ask, when the silence has done its work. “How do we get from there to the pictures?”
“When the kid died, I got scared straight, briefly. I was off the field anyway; I quit the pills cold. Then the cut came, and I had money, so I paid for the first surgery myself. Rehab too. But the pain never left, and post-surgery they put me on the strong stuff, prescribed, necessary, all above board, and when the doctors took me off it… I still needed it. So I found ways. The account got thinner. Second surgery. Detox, relapse, different substances, detox again.” He recites it evenly, a man reading his own chart.
“The cars went. Then the house. You do the rest of that math easily enough; it’s short division. ”
“Why didn’t you just report the injury?” I ask it softly, when he goes quiet. “At the very start.”
“Because I was scared of what the X-ray would show.” No armor on it at all now.
“Because I was terrified somebody in a white coat would say the sentence: you can’t play anymore.
” He looks at Nate, and something passes between them older than this room.
“See, almost every boy who grows up like us wants to make it big. When you’re small it’s a dream, same as astronaut.
Then high school comes and, turns out you’re actually good.
Then the magic happens: a college shows up with a full ride.
If it weren’t for football, I don’t go to college.
Couldn’t have afforded it. My grades were fine, not great, and let’s be honest, even great grades don’t open doors the way a football does. ”
He’s not wrong, and I feel the old, complicated sting of it: I had an academic scholarship that covered most of tuition and none of life, and I worked myself hollow to walk out debt-free.
Kick a ball beautifully, and the whole machine carries you.
I keep that off my face too. It’s not the story.
It’s just the seam the story runs along.
“In college I started letting myself wonder about the draft. I grew up dirt poor, Callie. Not my-mom-drove-an-old-car poor, or our-house-is-small poor. Rice and beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily type of poor. If I’d gone out into the regular world, best case, what, a decent job?
Say I really make it: a hundred grand, two hundred after I work my ass off for twenty years and I’m very, very lucky.
And how many twenty-year-olds see even that?
But against a million?” He shrugs. “It’s kid math.
It’s the math of somebody who never once had extra.
And then suddenly I had everything I’d ever wanted, and yeah, the money and the cars and the girls, that part’s fun, whatever.
But I bought my mom a house. A car. I put my little sister through college and bought her her first car so she wouldn’t start life in debt over a used Corolla older than me.
Football did that. Football also happened to be the thing I loved most in the world.
And there is the team. Not just the Outlaws, but every team I have been on.
Nobody ever cares if I’m poor, that my daddy left when I was six and my mom worked her ass off.
I never fit anywhere but on a team. Too white for my Latino family, too Latino for my white classmates.
On a team? Nobody cared. All they cared about was how fast I can run and how many I can score.
” He spreads his hands, the universal gesture of a man resting his case.
“So you tell me. How does anybody walk away from that?”
Same answer as Nate’s. Same answer as Grant’s.
Three men, not necessarily the same origin circumstances, one principle: I love it, I cannot afford to lose it, it makes me feel whole and I will do unspeakable things to keep it.
There’s my article, whole, sitting in the middle of Danny Alvarez’s neat little living room.
I reach over and stop the recording.
“Thank you,” I say, and I put everything I can’t say into the two words, and by the way his eyes flicker, some of it arrives.
“When’s the surgery?” Nate asks, while I pack up my laptop.
“Three weeks out.” Nate goes very still beside me. “Ring sold for decent money. Covers the operation and the physio both.”
“Well. I still wish you’d asked me for the money.”
Hand the man an Oscar. Because almost everyone in this room knows that, technically, Nate paid for that surgery, well, Nate and Grant, splitting the check on an anonymous act of love with terrible auction discipline, and almost everyone in this room also knows we are never, ever going to say so out loud.
Some truths work better unspoken. I’m a journalist; it costs me something to admit that. I admit it anyway.
#
Nate
Cash Turner and I have an interesting dynamic.
He’s my backup, which makes him my healthy competition by default, the whip that never needs to be used, because its existence is the reminder: underperform, and Cash gets his chance, and Cash will not waste it.
Given recent events, that chance came closer than either of us has said out loud.
I don’t hate him for any of it; it’s the sport.
I took somebody’s job to stand where I stand.
Cash and I just enjoy needling each other, under a mutual understanding that if I like a thing, he’s contractually obligated to disparage it, and vice versa.
The one thing Cash and I have ever fully agreed on is that Callie Carter in a cocktail dress is a stunning sight. Part of me still wants to bleach the man’s eyes on the principle that he saw it first and owns the memory.
Tonight, I understand the gala story at a whole new resolution.
I pick Callie up from her place, boys deposited with Priya, who answered the door already wearing a tiara Finn had assigned her, and the moment Callie steps out, I stop wanting to go anywhere.
The dress is black and wrapped around her like it was painted on by somebody who loves me personally, mid-thigh, with heels that make her legs read as endless on a woman who is not tall.
That body in that dress was made for my hands, and instead I am required to be a civilized public figure for a minimum of two hours.
The league fines me for fighting, and I’d rather pay ten more fines than keep my hands off Callie for the next few hours. Unfortunately, I have to behave.
The event’s at a high school gymnasium, local youth sports, all disciplines, folding tables and bunting and kids in team polos working the raffle.
My contribution: a signed jersey for the silent auction, photos with every human who asks, and a donation generous enough that the organizer’s voice cracked, which, for the record, Morrison did not prompt.
I have a new hobby in youth athletics. Thank you, Eli Carter.
I spot David across the gym, and I take Callie’s hand and steer us straight at him. He sees me first and starts assembling the professional smile, then he sees her, and his face does the thing men’s faces do when they’re bracing for turbulence.
Oh, it’s going to be so much worse than turbulence, David. I guarantee it.
“David. Meet Callie Carter.” I’m smiling like it’s my birthday, because after months of this man running my life, I have finally located his one weak spot, and I am holding her hand.
“A pleasure.” Delivered in the precise tone that means none whatsoever.
“Nate tells me you can help me with something.”
That’s the play we installed in the car: Callie runs the offense. I could twist his arm myself, I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks, but she’s earned this drive, and I’m more useful as what I actually am tonight: the nuclear option, standing at her shoulder, warhead visible.