Page 98 of The Tiger in the Sack

I hung up and Zahra was watching me with the not-quite-smile, the maybe-a-whole-paragraph one.

“You let us grab an end,” she said.

“I let you grab an end.”

“Took you about a million years.”

“I’m an engineer,” I said. “I like to be thorough.”

And Zahra Smith, who is not naturally warm and is unconditionally warm once you’ve earned it, laughed, full out, in the studio her grandmother’s name was on, surrounded by the whole impossible community we’d built, and for the first time since a tablet slid across Monty Whyte’s desk, item one on my list was not a threat.

It was these people.

It was that I finally had them.

WRITE THAT DOWN

ISAK

At a postgame press conference you are tired down to the marrow. A tired that has nothing to do with sleep, your body is a bruise wearing a suit, and they put you behind a table with a backdrop full of sponsor logos and a room full of people whose job is to find the one question that turns a tired man into a headline.

I had been good at this for three seasons. I gave them the cat. I gave them a bit about Fox. I said “we” instead of “I” and “credit to the line” and “we’ll watch the film” and I had never once, not one time, given them the thing they actually came for.

We’d won. I’d thrown for two-eighty. Clover had walked into Gabrielle’s office two days before with a spreadsheet that ended Monty Whyte, and the lawyers were moving, and the truth was coming, and I knew all of that sitting behind that table, which is the only reason I can explain what I did, because I’d told myself the danger was over.

Then a guy in the third row, a governance-graphic guy, one of the writers who’d spent a week landing hits on two women and a flattering adjective on me, raised his hand and asked his question.

“Isak, given all the trouble Clover Freeman and Gabrielle Jackson have stirred up around the franchise this season, the distraction of it, do you think the organization needs to make some changes to refocus on football?”

The trouble they’d stirred up.

The distraction of it.

I felt the deflect come up. The cat. The bit. The “I’m just focused on the next game.” I felt it come up the way I’d felt it come up on the balcony with Chris, the well-worn exit I’d built into the floor of every hard moment of my life.

I did not let it go past this time.

I leaned into the microphone.

“You want to talk about trouble,” I said. “Okay. Let’s talk about trouble.”

The room changed temperature. They always know. A press room can smell a man going off-script the way a defense smells a checkdown.

“Gabrielle Jackson has given twenty years to this team. She started from the bottom up, selling hot dogs at the concession stand. She’s hauled around equipment and sold tickets. She has sat at her father’s side as he tore the worst team in the league down the studs and rebuilt it stronger. Now she is leading us into the future while people like the gentleman in the third row write columns about whether or not she is in over her head. She is not trouble. Gabrielle Jackson is the most qualified person in this building to head this organization and it isn’t even close.”

Somebody’s pen had stopped moving. I could see it. A pen stops and a press room tilts and you are now throwing into coverage whether you like it or not.

“Clover Freeman has a degree in engineering. She does. Go look it up before you write your byline. She turned down rooms that would’ve been easy for her because she wanted to build a squad of women that this league and the world have spent years telling to sit down. She built it and four million people watched thirty-one of them turn an organized act of cruelty into the best thing that’s happened to this franchise in a decade, and you’re calling that trouble. You’re calling that a distraction.” I was barreling now.

I could feel myself crossing the line of my own restraint and I could not have stopped if Coach had walked up and put a hand on my chest. “The only trouble around this franchise this season was manufactured. On purpose. By people who are about to find out exactly how many receipts a community keeps. And when that comes out, you’re going to want to have asked better questions than the one you just asked me.”

I should have stopped there. That was already a grenade. That was already going to be the story for a week.

The guy in the third row, because his job is to find the half-second the lane opens too, asked the follow-up.

“That’s a passionate defense of your girlfriend, Isak.”

And the lane opened, and I threw a cannon down the field. n.