Eighty-Five
GUS BLASINGAME AND I had arranged to meet at the Rooney Sports Complex at seven the next morning.
“Too early?” he’d asked after the workout and before Vince and I were on our way back to the hotel.
“Little late for me, frankly,” I’d said. “Most days I’m done with my morning workout by then.”
“We call those coaches’ hours,” the coach of the Steelers had said.
He left my name with the guard working the gate. The guard there told me how to find my way past the locker room to the head coach’s office.
Gus Blasingame’s door is open when I get there.
“Coffee?” he asks after he waves me in from behind his desk, his laptop open, some game video frozen on the huge flat-screen TV mounted on one of the walls.
“I’m good,” I tell him.
I try not to show how excited I am. How jazzed I still am after everything that had happened on the practice field the day before. No matter how many doubts he had to have had about my ability to even try a new position, I’d had more doubts.
And then I’d crushed it.
“I have to tell you something,” Blasingame says. “You were even better than I ever expected you could be. I didn’t want to show it yesterday, but you shocked the hell out of me.”
“Thank you.”
“No shit, Silas, you weren’t just good,” he says. “You were great out there.”
“Great to hear,” I say. “Goes without saying how much that means coming from you.”
He pulls his chair closer to his desk so he can put his elbows up and his hands under his chin and lean forward, almost as if he’s about to tell me a secret.
“We’re not signing you,” he says.