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“Why is that?”

“Because you’ve been famous since high school, and you were on your way to being great in the pros before you turned into a career slob,” I said, “and an all-around punk-ass bitch.”

He came out of his slouch then and off the couch, on fire.

“I want to play!”he said.“Okay? I…want…to…play.”

We all let that settle.

Billy McGee realized he was standing and sat back down.

But now everybody in the room seemed to have everybody else’s attention.

“We’d be drug-testing you every other day,” Ryan said. “Minimum. That would be just one of the rules of the road. Along with the league testing you whenever it damn well pleases.”

“Test away,” McGee said. “I’ve been clean for six months.” He shrugged. “My wife got me into a program. Did the full twenty-eight. Now I go to a meeting a day.”

It was all there in the reading I’d done on him. His wife, Amanda, who’d been his college sweetheart, had gotten him to go to Betty Ford, in Rancho Mirage. Somehow, through it all, she had stayed with him. Having now been in his presence for an hour, I thought it seemed like a love that passed all understanding. But they really were still together. And here we all were.

“You know we’d be taking all the risk here,” Ryan said.

Billy McGee looked at him and in a quiet voice said, “Dude, I don’t just want to play. Ineedto play.”

Bad-boy pose completely gone, at least for the moment.

“Well, then,” I said. “Let’s see what you got.”

My bag was on a table inside the front door. I walked over to it, threw my phone inside, took out my car keys, opened my front door, made a motion for him to come along.

“We going somewhere?” Money McGee said.

“We are.”

“And where’s that?”

“High school.”

Thirty-Three

I’D GOTTEN PERMISSION FROMJoey Rubino to pull half a dozen of my players out of lunch and work them out with Billy McGee.

“I don’t expect to keep this quiet for very long,” I said. “But for now, I’ll just have Billy waiting at the far end of the field when the kids get out there. And worry about my dear friends in the media later.”

“With friends like those…”Joey said.

He said all six of the players were in the same history class. He’d meet them when it let out and walk them down to the locker room himself, then out onto the field.

“Only one condition,” Joey said.

“Name it.”

“I get to come watch,” he said.

Now we were all down at the far end of the field, Ryan and Joey Rubino and my four best wide receivers and two defenders, just to make things interesting. And me. By now the kids had finally stopped losing their minds that they were on the same field and using the same football—even breathing the same air—as the infamous Money McGee. It really was as if their favorite rapper had suddenly appeared and asked them to hang out.

And they had all realized, quickly, the receivers especially, that they better get the stars out of their damn eyes or risk one of his passes hitting them in the face.

Davontae Lillis came over to me after he’d managed to hold on to half a dozen passes and whispered, “Coach, I can’t tell you how much my hands hurt. Just no way I’m lettinghimknow that.”