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But of what?

Or of whom?

“She doesn’t have the votes. I’ll be back running the team by next Sunday’s game.”

The house phone next to Gallo rang. He picked it up, listened, said, “Tell him to come up,” then put the phone back down.

“I have another appointment,” he said to Danny. “Now, you get back over toyourhotel and get your ass back to work.”

Talking to Danny like he wanted him to go pick up his shirts.

Danny was in the elevator, the doors about to close, when he saw someone he thought he recognized step out of the next elevator bank.

Danny waited until the little guy passed by him, then he poked his head out and watched him walk down the hall and knock on Gallo’s door.

“Mr. Gallo,” the guy said.

“Well, well, well,” Danny heard John Gallo say. “The famous Bobby Erlich.”

Sixty-Six

THE INTERVIEW WITH OPRAHwas scheduled for eight Eastern time and would run three hours later on the West Coast.

I was scheduled to have a drink in the bar downstairs with Bobby Erlich around six o’clock, right before the owners’ reception, but he had called to say he was running late and might not show up at all.

“It’s Hollywood, baby!” he said, as if that were all the explanation he needed. “It’s when I turn into Bobby Erlich on steroids!”

The Oprah people had just sent me the link to the interview, which I was about to watch on my laptop. I remembered the one she’d done with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle a couple of years ago, remembered watching along with everybody else in America that night. Only now I was the one sitting across from her in a huge house overlooking the ocean that her people had rented for the occasion, the backyard behind us seeming bigger than the field at Wolves Stadium.

“Go big or go home,” Oprah had said when we’d arrived and I’d been properly blown away by the house and the view.

Oprah got me to open up about my difficult relationship with my father and how I’d walked away from him and the family. She asked me about Jack and Danny, and I told her that my relationship with them now hadn’t changed much since our growing-up years. I managed to hold it together, barely, when she asked about Thomas.

Fun shots of me coaching the Hunters Point Bears lifted the mood.

“You can take the girl out of football,” I said, shrugging. “But I discovered that you can’t take football out of the girl.”

Oprah didn’t pull any punches or go easy on me. She’d let me know going in that no subject was off-limits. She asked about Ted and the decision to release him from the Wolves, joking that since I was the one who’d filed for divorce, it was technically the second time I’d fired him. She wanted to know if I was motivated by business or vindictiveness.

I asked her if she’d ask a man that question. She smiled an Oprah smile and let out a shriek and said, “You got me!”

Then she focused on my trying to punch Jack Wolf’s lights out.

“Gotta ask. Did it feel good?”

“Soooo good.”

“But wasn’t it a dumb thing to do?” she said.

“Soooo dumb.”

She asked all the right questions, but then I knew she would. She asked why I thought my brothers had turned on me the way they did.

“It wasn’t really a turn. They’re right where they always were when I had something they wanted.”

Near the end, she wanted to know why I’d put myself through this for a team I’d previously wanted no part of and from which I had walked away, planning never to return.

“Because it was essentially my father’s dying wish that I run it.”