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“It doesn’t matter, because he’s going to.”
Ryan paused.
“This kid has been acting like a punk and letting people down his whole life, starting with himself. We’re just the latest.”
Then he told me about another McGee—Max McGee, a wide receiver with the Green Bay Packers in the first Super Bowl ever played. According to Ryan, Max stayed out all night in Los Angeles the night before, not arriving back at the team’s hotel until eight in the morning. He didn’t think he was going to play that day. Then the starting wide receiver got hurt, and Max McGee caught seven passes and scored two touchdowns and the Packers won.
“Some people, when they knew the whole story, called him the greatest Super Bowl hero of them all,” Ryan said. “Max said he was fine once he started figuring out which of the three balls he saw coming toward him was the real one.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“At least Billy’s stopped throwing up,” the coach of the Wolves said about his starting quarterback. Then he said he had to go; it was time to coach his team.
Then Billy McGee went out and played the first half as if he werestilldrunk.
One Hundred Three
WHILE BILLY MCGEE WASstill stumbling around, Ted Skyler was playing as if I had been crazy to ever let him go.
Billy threw interceptions the first two times the Wolves had the ball. Ted threw touchdown passes after both of them. Just like that, it was 14–0.
I was watching the game with Danny in his suite. Just the two of us, no guests tonight. I had called him in the morning to tell him about Billy’s condition. He’d asked if there was anything he could do and I told him yeah—he could think about prayer.
“This is on me,” I said now, after Billy was nearly intercepted again. “I knew who he was before I signed him.”
“Who he was and what he was.”
“The thing is, we wouldn’t have made it this far without him.”
“Now I’m wondering if he was hungover for the last two games, too, as badly as he played,” Danny said.
I slid deeper into my chair.
“This isn’t the way the story is supposed to end.”
With two minutes left before halftime, the Patriots led, 21–3. Billy had just thrown his third interception, but at least it hadn’t led to a Patriots score this time. When our offense came off the field and our defense went on, he ran past our bench and straight to the locker room. I just assumed he was going to be sick again.
But he was back on the field by the time our offense got the ball, and somehow he seemed to rouse himself. He completed three passes in a row, finally scrambling away from the Patriots’ rush and in for a score with fifty seconds left in the half. So at that point the Wolves were trailing only 21–10.
“I want this game so much it hurts,” I said to Danny.
“You sound like Dad.”
“Don’t be mean.”
It was different from the way I felt on the field with my kids from Hunters Point during the championship game. At least I had some control there, just because I could call the plays. I felt as if I wereinthe game, even though I was coaching it and not playing in it. This Wolves game was different and occasionally making me feel a little sick. I felt helpless. After all the fighting I’d had to do since my father had left the team to me, everything was in the hands—literally—of a guy who had been falling-down drunk at my house last night.
When the Patriots went running off the field at the end of the half, I was sure Ted Skyler stopped just long enough to look up at Danny’s suite, as if he somehow knew I was in there.
Then he waved.
I thought,Thirty minutes of football left before I might not just lose my season but also lose it to that guy.
I didn’t leave my seat during halftime. Just sat there and remembered the night when Cantor and Ryan and I had saved Billy McGee’s ass in Chinatown.
Last night and tonight were how he’d repaid me. And his coach.
It was still 21–10 for the Patriots when my ex-husband, being chased around his own end zone, stopped and threw a dumb desperation pass deep down the middle of the field. Andre DeWitt, the defensive back who’d smart-mouthed me in such a funny way the day I’d introduced myself to the team, intercepted the ball.
