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Tayshawn Pratt was there, too.
“I thought Chris’s passes weretight,” he said. “What we got goin’ out here? That is what you call a whole different situation.”
Then McGee was motioning to them and telling them to get their asses back out there, as Caleb Mortimer was taking a break, his eyes big.
He was the one keeping his voice low now, as if afraid Money McGee might hear him.
“You see that ball I dropped a couple of minutes ago?” he said. “When I ran back to where he was throwing from, he told me that if I dropped another one on him he was gonna follow me home after school.”
He looked at me. “He was kidding, right, Coach?”
I shrugged.
“Why don’t you hold on to the ball from now on, just to be on the safe side?”
Billy McGee sent out two receivers at a time, telling them what patterns he wanted them to run against the two defenders. Most of the time he had at least one guy open. Even when he didn’t, even when he had to put a little extra on the ball, the pass would end up in increasingly sore hands.
The whole time, Billy McGee was trash-talking a bunch of high school kids, almost like he was still one of them, like he was having more fun than any of them.
When the ball wasn’t in the air, McGee spent a lot of time talking about the kids’ mamas.
“We didn’t bring him in to be a role model,” Ryan Morrissey said to me.
Billy McGee heard him. At which point he turned around, tugged his jeans about halfway down his butt, pointed at it, and, grinning, said to Ryan, “Kiss this if you brought me in here to act like I’m running to be these dudes’ class president.”
The Hunters Point Bears out there with him howled with delight.
When we finished, after one last fifty-yard strike to Davontae, my players crowded around their man Money McGee for a selfie festival. He still seemed to be enjoying himself more than anyone. But I was aware that he’d been full of good intentions before.
Ryan pulled me aside.
“What do you think?”
I grinned. “He looks like he’d be able to kill it if he was starting for us against Galileo next Saturday. Now we need to see how he acts when he’s back on the field with grown-ups.”
I saw his head whip around. I’d figured out by now that Billy McGee had almost mutantlike hearing.
He called over to us and said, “I plan to treat those grown-ass players y’all have the way I always did.”
“How?” I called back.
“Like the bitches that they are.”
Thirty-Four
EVEN I HAD TOadmit the next morning that theTribune’s front page was inspired. There was Billy McGee bending over and pointing to the half of his back end hanging out of his faded jeans at Hunters Point High under the headline:
ANOTHER ASS
The feature was accompanied by other photographs shot at Hunters Point High School of Billy McGee working out on the field there with some of my receivers and running backs.
The pictures had to have been taken either by a student or a faculty member, but the column had been written by Seth Dowd. McGee’s previous transgressions, Dowd said, included just about everything except storming the US Capitol that time.
Dowd also quoted Ted Skyler as saying, “Apparently Money really lit it up with the prison team in its big game against Alcatraz.”
I watched from my office at Wolves Stadium now as Ryan Morrissey put McGee through one passing drill after another with a handful of our wide receivers and defensive backs. They’d only been out there for about thirty minutes when Ryan turned, knowing I was watching, and gave me a thumbs-up.
But we’d really decided to sign him, and offer him one of those contracts loaded with incentives to get him back on the field and keep him there, after watching him throw to the kids at Hunters Point.
