The Case Against William Page 8

  "You didn't go to the Ivy League."

  "My parents couldn't afford that for me. I can afford it for you. Harvard and Yale have football teams."

  "But I don't want to play for Harvard or Yale. I want to play for the best. UT. Notre Dame. Alabama. Dad, football is my destiny. That's where I belong. On a football field. I'm not smart like Becky. She loves school, but school is just a hobby for me. I'm a student of football, not math and science."

  Frank picked up his carry bag. They could ride in a cart, but a four-hour walk with your son, that's what golf is all about. It's not a sport; it's a way to be with your son without cell phones.

  "What if I say no?"

  William slung the strap of his bag over his broad shoulder and looked Frank in the eye. His voice was soft. Almost sad.

  "I'd hate you. Not now. But later, when I'm older and looking back, wondering if I could've lived my dream. I'd hate you, Dad, for not letting me try."

  William Tucker attended public school the next year.

  Chapter 10

  It was the fifth day of August, and across the state of Texas tens of thousands of high school boys took to the football field for the first day of fall practice. Only it wasn't fall. It was summer. And it was hot. In Odessa, it was 112 degrees Fahrenheit. In Dallas, it was 105 degrees. In Houston, it was only 99 degrees, but with 95 percent humidity the air felt like a steam sauna.

  William Tucker's body glistened in sweat, and practice hadn't even started yet. He wore only shorts and cleats; pads came next week. He was sixteen and stood six feet three inches tall and weighed one hundred ninety pounds with only ten percent body fat. He worked out with his personal trainer five times a week. He ate a strict diet designed by a sports nutritionist. He honed his skills at quarterback school and his speed with an Olympic coach. He could bench press two hundred fifty pounds ten times. Squat three hundred pounds fifteen times. Run a 4.5-second forty. Throw a football seventy-five yards. He had a forty-six inch chest and a thirty-inch waist. His body was muscular, his skin bronze, and his hair blond and curly. The leather football he held seemed a part of his body. He was a sophomore about to start his first year on varsity and sitting in the bleachers at his high school's new stadium. Seating capacity was twenty-five thousand. Parents camped out overnight at the admin building when season tickets became available; they became available only when a current season ticket holder forfeited his tickets—which never happened—or died—which didn't happen often enough to suit those waiting in line. Mounted atop the scoreboard in the north end zone was a huge high-definition video screen that showed instant replays during games. The turf was the same grass the pros played on. Behind the stadium stood the new indoor practice arena; it was air-conditioned, but the coaches made the team practice outside so their bodies could acclimate to the heat. That, or the coaches were just—

  "Sadistic bastards," Bobby said.

  Bobby Davis played center. He stood six-four and weighed two-ninety. He had a dozen scholarship offers from D-I schools. He was a senior and used steroids. Consequently, he stunk. William always stayed upwind of Bobby.

  "They're not happy unless someone passes out during practice," he said. "Puking used to be enough, but we lost in regionals last year. Two-a-days this summer are gonna be rough."

  "Really?"

  Bobby laughed and shook his head.

  "Private school kids. You guys come over here to play big-time ball, but you're like a bunch of altar boys going to a strip joint. So, William, you as good as they say?"

  "Yep."

  "Hey, don't be modest or nothing."

  "You asked."

  "You get nervous before a game?"

  "Is a shark nervous in water?"

  Bobby laughed. "If you play up to your ego, boy, you're gonna be all-American."

  "It's not ego if you can do it."

  Bobby grunted. "You want some D-bol?"

  Dianabol. Stanozolol. Nandrolone. Oxandrolone. Anabolic steroids. High school athletes knew the names like preteen girls knew Britney Spear's lyrics.

  "I don't need it."

  "You should've seen some of the quarterbacks at the summer football camp I went to back in June. They're fucking animals. Hairy fucking animals." Bobby laughed. "So I go in there weighing two-seventy. I'm almost nineteen years old—"

  "You're almost nineteen?"

  "My dad held me back so I'd have time to get bigger before varsity."

  "It worked."

  "Anyway, this is a camp for elite players, guys like me holding D-One offers. I tell the offensive line coach I'm gonna start as a freshman. He laughs, says, 'Not at two-seventy you ain't.' Said I need to weigh in at three hundred to start in D-One-A. I said, 'What do I do?' He said, 'Bulk up, Bobby.' "

  "He told you to use steroids?"

  "No. But I knew what he meant. Everyone knows. They told everyone the same thing, except those fucking fast-ass black receivers from the 'hood. Man, those guys could go pro straight out of high school."

  "So you put on twenty pounds with the juice?"

  "Shit works. You should try it."

  "Like I said, I don't need it."

  They watched the cheerleaders practicing their routines down the sideline. Including Becky.

  "Your sister's kind of cute," Bobby said.

  "Don't go there."

  He laughed. William didn't.

  "Hey, sorry, man," Bobby said. "Didn't know you were so touchy about your sister."

  He was. After a moment, he calmed.

  "You like this school?" William asked.

  "I like playing football at this school. Not so much going to school."

  "What's your GPA?"

  "One-point-seven."

  "That's low."

  "Not for a football player."

  "Do you study?"

  "Football. Why waste my time on math and English when I'm going to college to play football?"

  "Are your grades good enough to get into college?"

  "There ain't any academic standards for athletes. If you can play, you get in." He laughed. "College coaches today, they don't worry about your academic transcript, just your criminal background check."

  Bobby leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head as if all that he saw was his.

  "See, William, the rest of the world's got rules. We don't. If you can play football—I mean, really play—you're on a different level in life from everyone who can't play football. You live above the rules."

  A cute cheerleader bounced past; she gave them a finger wave and a smile.

  "Hi, William."

  He didn't know her.

  "She knows you."

  They watched her—she peeked back to make sure they did—all the way down the sideline to the other cheerleaders. Including his sister. When his dad allowed William to leave the Academy and attend public school, Becky had demanded equal treatment. She played volleyball, and this public school's teams were great. She wanted a scholarship.

  "Name's Chrissie. She's the team punch. You make the team, you make her."

  "Anyone on the team?"

  "Starters. She ain't gonna screw a sub, William."

  As if he should know that.

  "Girls line up for the starters."

  William knew he was ready to start on one of the top-ranked high school football teams in Texas, but was he ready for the cheerleaders? Bobby laughed and pointed.

  "Look at rich-boy Ronnie."

  Another player had walked up to the cheerleaders and was obviously trying to flirt. He was an offensive lineman like Bobby, and he was big, but not in a ripped, muscular way; he was big in the "he occupied a lot of space" way.

  "Thinks he can buy his way onto a D-One team," Bobby said. "Ain't enough money in his daddy's bank for that."

  "What's he doing here?"

  "Same thing as you. Another River Oaks rich boy slumming with the trailer trash, hoping to play big-time high school ball, develop his skills, get a D-One scholarship. It ain't never gonna happen for R
onnie."

  Down on the track, Ronnie's flirting had fallen flat with the cheerleaders. They had frowns on their faces and now ignored him. He was clearly not pleased. Becky turned away from him, but he grabbed her arm. The beast inside William roared to life. He jumped up, ran down the stands, and vaulted the railing. He landed on his feet and sprinted to his sister. She looked scared. The beast grabbed Ronnie by the throat, yanked him away from Becky, and then drove his fist into Ronnie's—

  "Whoa!"

  A massive arm wrapped around William's chest and pulled him back.

  "Shit, William!" Bobby said. "You're a fucking animal!"

  William broke loose of Bobby's grasp and stepped toward Ronnie; he outweighed William by sixty pounds but he stepped back. William put a finger in Ronnie's face.

  "Don't ever touch my sister again."

  Ronnie's eyes showed the fear of an antelope facing the lion. He turned and walked away. William turned to his sister.

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah. Thanks, William."

  Bobby Davis grinned. "Man, it's gonna be a fun year with a beast like you playing quarterback for us."

  Bobby spread his arms out to the stadium where they would play their first game in three weeks.

  "And you're gonna love it. We go undefeated for seven or eight games, you're not gonna believe this fucking place."

  Chapter 11

  The stadium looked as if the Barnum & Bailey Circus had come to town.

  The high-profile trial of a star athlete was a three-ring circus. But a football game featuring star athletes on two top-ranked high school teams on a Friday night in Texas was the biggest circus of them all. It was late October, and the heat and humidity of Houston had finally broken. The air was cool and filled with excitement and the sound of the bands competing from opposing bleachers across fifty-three and one-third yards of manicured green grass that rivaled the fairways at the country club. Twenty-five thousand parents and students and lovers of football filled the stands; thousands more without tickets stood outside the perimeter fence at the south end zone to watch the game on the video screen in the north end zone. Frank Tucker had a ticket. Two. Normally, he would have been put on a waiting list and waited at least five years to purchase season tickets. But parents of the players got moved to the front of the line. A perk of your son playing football on the number one ranked team in the state of Texas.

  This public high school enrolled four thousand students in grades nine through twelve. Two thousand were boys. A football team played eleven boys on offense and eleven on defense. All the coaches needed were twenty-two athletes out of a pool of two thousand. They found them. Big white boys from working-class families, fast black boys from the 'hood, and a rich quarterback from River Oaks. The public school that served River Oaks also served the Fourth Ward. The inner city. Blacks and Latinos. Two-thirds of the students were minorities; one-third was white. One hundred percent were poor. The rich kids were in private schools. But not William Tucker. Because his father did not want his son to hate him. Football was his dream. For the other players, it was their way out of the Fourth Ward.

  Cheerleaders in uniforms jumped and somersaulted and performed stunts on the sideline. Students roamed the open area around the home concession stand. Their parents sat in the stands.

  It was not an Academy crowd.

  The girls wore body-hugging clothes that seemed more befitting of street hookers than high school students. The white boys wore sweatshirts bearing college logos—UT and A&M, not Harvard and MIT—and the black boys wore hoodies and their pants below their butts revealing colorful undershorts. The parents did not wear the latest from Neiman Marcus but instead the latest from Nike and Adidas, as if they all had endorsement contracts. Sweat suits and sneakers and football jerseys. Caps on backwards and tattoos on their arms and ankles and lower backs. Pickups and SUVs made in America filled the parking lot. Video cameras made in Asia filled the stands; the parents captured their sons' glory days on tape for college coaches or posterity.

  Frank stood along the sideline fence. Alone and without a video camera. He didn't know any of the other parents and Liz refused to come; this multicultural and working-class environment was too far below her social standing. She had encouraged William to transfer to this public school so he'd become a star, but she didn't want to personally witness his path to stardom, similar to wanting to be a politician but not be willing to dive into the filthy muck called fundraising. Frank had grown up in just such a working-class environment, but he did not feel at ease. The times and attire had changed. The people had changed. Many of the dads still worked in the petrochemical plants that lined the Houston Ship Channel and the moms at jobs that served the industry, but they did not seem like the moms and dads he had remembered as a boy. Those moms and dads seemed like TV parents, like Ward and June Cleaver. These moms and dads seemed like the Osbournes.

  "Fuck you, asshole!" one of the dads yelled to the referees.

  "Not exactly a River Oaks polo crowd, is it?"

  Sam Jenkins, the college scout, stood next to Frank. He smoked a cigar and remained loyal to Old Spice. Polo was in fact played in River Oaks.

  "Nope."

  Sam laughed. "This is a football crowd, Frank. You don't get a lot of JDs and MBAs and PhD's at a high school football game, except at the Academy, and what those boys do doesn't qualify as football. This is your working class. NFL is built on the working class and Latinos. Shit, you been to a Texans game?"

  The Texans were Houston's pro football team.

  "No."

  William followed the Cowboys, so he had not pressured Frank to take him to the Texans' games.

  "Like going to a bullfight in Juarez, everyone speaking Spanish. And in the high-dollar seats. They don't have health insurance, but they'll pay brokers a thousand bucks to watch a pro football game. For the lower class, football's an escape from their fucked-up lives."

  "You're a psychologist now?"

  Sam shrugged. "Part of being a scout, figuring people out, what makes them tick. You see a boy, he's got all the physical tools, but you've got to figure his mind out, does he have ice in his veins, does he burn with the competitive desire, does he want to win more than live, does he have the confidence to be the man."

  William's new team was big, strong, and fast. Big, strong white boys and fast black boys. They ran a pro offense. William had thrown thirty-two passes in the first half and completed twenty-seven for two hundred seventy-five yards and four touchdowns. He had also run for another seventy-five yards and a touchdown. Eight games into his sophomore season, William Tucker was the top college prospect in the nation. He was sixteen years old.

  "You did the right thing, Frank."

  "Did I?"

  They had gone all in on William Tucker's career. A big public school with a pro-style offense and an indoor practice arena. A personal trainer and a nutritionist. An ex-Olympian speed coach. Quarterback school. Seven-on-seven passing tournaments. Tens of thousands of dollars. Frank Tucker had nurtured his son's gift, no expense spared. It had seemed so … American. To spend whatever it took—whether Ivy League tuition or speed training by a gold medal winner—to buy your children success. A better life. Their dreams. But, despite his misgivings, Frank had to confess that it had worked. William's improvement over the last two years was nothing less than remarkable. His skills soared. His size, his strength, and his speed increased dramatically. His footwork and throwing motion were now textbook. His vision of the field—twenty-one other players who seemed to be running around chaotically—was both omniscient and laser focused. His recognition of the pass coverage and thus which of his receivers would be open on the play was instant and unerring.

  "He's a hell of a quarterback," Sam said.

  Perhaps his son was born to play football just as Mozart was born to write symphonies and Bobby Fischer to play chess. Perhaps we are who we were meant to be. Pushing a boy to be a football player when he wasn't born for it, that's wrong. But allowing a
boy to be what he was born to be—how can that be wrong? Some people were born to be doctors and scientists and perhaps even lawyers? Why not athletes? Why not football players?

  "I've kept tabs on William," Sam said. "Saw him at the quarterback schools."

  From his expression, Frank could tell that Sam was about to offer more career advice for his son. He gestured to the field where the teams were returning for the second half. The boys pounded their chests and held their arms out to the fans like victorious gladiators. Sam shook his head.

  "People on TV talk about kids having no self-esteem. Complete bullshit. Kids today got self-esteems the size of fucking Wyoming. Self-esteem oozes from every pore on their bodies. They been told they're special since the day they popped out of mama and a hundred times a day since. They believe it. They haven't done a goddamn thing in their lives, but they know they're special. So when they fail at sports or school or life, it's not because they didn't work hard enough or they're just not smart enough or good enough. No, they're special, so it's got to be someone else's fault. They didn't fail. Someone made them fail. Now we've got an entire generation of fucked-up narcissists 'cause their mamas told them they're special."

  "What's your point, Sam?"

  "My point is, it's not bullshit with William. He really is special."

  Sam smoked his cigar.

  "Game program says William's six-three and one-ninety. That true?"

  "It is."

  "Shoe size?"

  "Sixteen."

  Sam grunted in obvious admiration of William's shoe size.

  "And no tattoos."

  "He's afraid of needles."

  Sam chuckled. "Everyone's got something that'll make them sweat. I hate snakes."

  Another puff on his cigar, which he then pointed at the field. At William.

  "Time he's a senior, he'll be six-five, two-twenty. He's number one on my list. Hell, he's number one on every scout's list. He'll have his choice of schools."

  "We've already gotten dozens of recruiting letters."