“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 Istillam 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.
EIGHTY-SIX
I CAN’T BELIEVE I’ve just heard him right, even though I know I have—I can see it on his face how bad he clearly feels delivering news like this, because he had to know I’d expected a completely different outcome.
At first, I don’t know how to react or respond. But I know he has to see the disappointment on my own face.
I’ve never been cut from a team in my life, not from the time I started playing flag football when I was six years old.
But I feel as if I’ve been cut now. Or released. Either way, I wonder how many times in his coaching career Gus Blasingame has sat in this office and delivered news like this.
“I was ready to roll the dice,” he continues. “And that’s not me BS-ing you, as a way of trying to soften the blow, because I know that’s not happening today, or for a long time. I know what I saw yesterday, I just told you. I know what the guys lined up across from you saw. If I had my way, there’d be a contract on this desk waiting for you to sign, and we’d be figuring out a timetable about how to get you back into real football shape, maybe by midseason, and back on the field.”
My head is spinning now, I can’t help it, because I do know what I saw on that field. I know what Idid.He’s the coach of the team and he’d just finished telling me how great he thought I did.
Now this.
But I feel myself straightening in my chair, as if my pride just kicked in. I’m not going to plead my case or try to talk him out of anything. I haven’t forgotten who I was in football, the player I was. So I’m not about to beg him for a job or try to change his mind because it’s clear that’s not about to happen, the verdict has just been delivered.
“Gotta tell you something, Coach,” I finally say. “Sounds like I’m getting kind of a mixed message here.”
“That’s because you are,” he says. “I told you what I think. But I got voted down by my owner, my general manager, even by my defensive coordinator. End of the day, none of them are willing to sign off on you having zero experience on defense. When I pushed back on my GM, he told me that it’s one thing to go up against scrubs—his word, by the way, not mine—but it’s another to line up next to guys who have played in the line or even as linebackers their whole lives, and across from guys on offense who have done the same on their side of the ball.”
“Did any of them watch my workout?”
“They all did, Silas,” he says. “My GM came down hardest. Between me and you, I’ve always seen him as more of a numbers cruncher. Sometimes I want to ask him if he knows whether or not a football is blown up or stuffed. But the man is still my boss.”
“Bill Parcells,” I say quietly.
“What?”
