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“It turns out Thomas made one other stop that night.”
Seventy-Two
I WAITED OUTSIDE THEBordeaux Room while Danny addressed the owners first.
“Sorry it had to come to this,” he’d said, passing me on the way into the conference room.
“I’m glad it’s going to be over soon, one way or another.”
“I never wanted this,” Danny had said. “Not that I expect you to believe me.”
“Do what you have to do.”
It was becoming my default position with my two older brothers.
Danny was in there about twenty minutes. At no point did I have any urge to crack open the door and sneak a listen. Danny, for his whole life, had been full of what our father called palaver. It was Joe Wolf’s polite way of saying “BS”—on the rare occasions when he made the effort to clean up his language at the dinner table.
When Danny came out, he walked right past me, this time without even looking at me. I knew there would be a fifteen-minute break before it was my turn to basically defend my life.
Or, in the words of Thomas Wolf, to throw the damn money on the table.
I smiled to myself, thinking,Where’s Oprah when I really need her?
As the doors opened and the owners headed for the coffee setup or the restrooms, Clay Rosen saw me and came walking over.
“Public speaking really isn’t your brother’s thing, is it?”
“The English language isn’t his thing.”
All in all, I was surprisingly calm. Maybe it was because of lack of sleep after my conversation with Ben Cantor. I ended up pacing the suite before I finally did go to bed, practicing what I wanted to say, then did the same thing after I’d awakened.
At ten o’clock sharp, the appointed hour, one of the league PR guys poked his head out of the Bordeaux Room and said, “It’s time, Ms. Wolf.”
I managed not to ask for a blindfold and cigarette.
The commissioner gave me a brief introduction, his remarks about as welcoming as those I would have gotten from a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I thanked him when I stepped to the podium and thanked the men and women in front of me for allowing me the opportunity to speak to them this morning.
I offered them what I hoped was my most winning smile.
“Though by now,” I said, “you probably all think you’ve not onlyheardenough from me, you’ve alsoseenenough.”
The women laughed. So did Clay Rosen, if a bit too enthusiastically.
“But I want to tell you myself that I’m not the person you have been reading about and hearing about, the one who felt she needed to defend herself with Oprah Winfrey last night,” I said. “I’m who I’ve always been: Joe Wolf’s daughter. And I’m here because he wanted me to be here.”
I told them that I was like every other owner in the room. I was a caretaker of a public trust. And I wanted to win, pointing out that my teamhadbeen winning since I took over and had gotten a new coach and a new quarterback.
“My dad always said that one thing had never changed in pro football and would never change. In the end, this is a results business. And I’ve been getting results.”
There was more I had planned to say. But I decided to get to it now, my big finish, pulling the envelope out of the side pocket of my blazer, then carefully removing the single piece of paper within it.
“I haven’t shown this to anybody or told anybody about it until today,” I said. “But this is a letter I received from my father a couple of weeks after he died. Most of you know he was never much for email. But he still wrote letters, and the only reason this one took as long to get to me as it did is because my father,beingmy father, sent it to the wrong street address.”
I made a show of smoothing out the paper and cleared my throat.
“By now,” I read, “you know the team is yours. It’s yours because I finally realized you’re the one to run it, mostly because you’re the one most like me. Nobody could ever take the Wolves away from me. Don’t let anybody ever take them away from you.”
I paused, then looked down one last time.
