The Penalty for Holding

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

As the November possibility of snow turned to December certainty, the Temps’ record improved in inverse proportion to Smalley’s mood. Dave Donaldson, it turned out, didn’t have the flu but colon cancer. With him and Lance out for the season at least, it was all on Quinn. Another man would’ve considered it a stroke of luck—no, a blessing from the gridiron gods—to have lost two quarterbacks and not only survived but thrived. Coach Smalley, however, was not another man.

“You’re supposed to stand in the goddamn pocket and throw the ball,” Smalley would scream at Quinn. “Stand and deliver. That’s what a pure pocket passer does. But you’ll never be a pure pocket passer, a real quarterback, because you’re too f*****g stupid, stubborn, and gutless to do anything but run.”

“That’s a load of crap, Coach, and you know it,” Quinn would say. “I can deliver from the pocket. I do deliver from the pocket. But if no one’s open, I like our chances with my speed.”

“And risk getting injured when we have no one else right now? And then what am I going to do, smart ass, huh? You’ll end up like all those other running quarterbacks. You’ll run yourself right out of the league.”

Quinn knew Smalley had a point. (Was there anything more annoying than someone you hated being right?) But he also got the not-so-subtle subtext of these supportive chats. “Running quarterback” was code for the QBs of color who made up the vast portion of that category. The 411 was that they were athletic enough, all right, but not smart enough for the job. Quinn knew that wasn’t true, knew that while some people had brains or talent—wasn’t that the theme of one of his favorite films, Bull Durham?—he, like his running QB brothers, had both.

“You are brilliant, beautiful, talented and kind, my Quinnie,” Aunt Lena would say. “Someday you’ll be rich and famous, too. So you must give to others, even if it hurts. And I fear it will.”

“I’m trying, Aunt Lee,” Quinn would mutter under his breath after these go-rounds with Smalley. “But it ain’t easy.”

The more the team won—often with just Quinn’s combination of charismatic, strategic leadership and late-game heroics—the more Smalley made him and his teammates suffer in ways that left the guys, including those who, for whatever reason, had not previously been in Quinn’s corner, shaking their heads. These included grueling workouts that might have you retching, yet Quinn never minded. He liked pushing his body—and mind—to their limits. He figured it was all he really deserved. Besides, wasn’t that what the NFL called character-building? he wondered with a bitter smile.

The failure of anyone to complete any portion of such workouts resulted in more weightlifting, running, cycling, and sit-ups for the entire team. Quinn thought of filing a grievance with the players’ union on behalf of his teammates, but what was the point? Half the team was already in violation of league dress and conduct codes to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars—fines that you still had to pay in part even if you won your challenge—so what good would a formal complaint do?

Quinn tried to shut out the pain that ran from both sides of his neck up through his ears. He didn’t know which was worse—the workouts or Smalley’s voice blaring from a bullhorn or loudspeaker.

“Come on, you nellies,” he’d yell. “What’re ya gonna do someday when you have real problems, like Dave? Pick up the pace or I will make you start from scratch.”

“You know what this reminds me of?” Greg told Derrick and the others as they collapsed in the locker room, panting like porno stars. “That movie with Mel Gibson.”

“That really narrows it down,” Derrick said, barely able to get the words out as he lolled on a bench at last, his head rolling from side to side in ecstasy. “You mean, The Passion of the Christ?”

“No that’s by Mel Gibson. I mean the one with Mel Gibson and the guy who played Hannibal Lecter—Mutiny on the Bounty.”

“I think that version was just called The Bounty,” Quinn offered quietly.

“That’s it,” Greg said to Quinn. “The Bounty and you’re the guy the Hannibal Lecter guy keeps yelling at and we’re like the ship’s crew.”

“Please,” Derrick said, heading to the whirlpool bent like a creaky old man. “You know how I get seasick.”

With Templars Stadium a dry-docked HMS Bounty, Quinn tried to serve as a buffer and distraction between Smalley’s Capt. Bligh and the crew, er, players.

He visited Dave at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where he was undergoing tests.

“I’m scared, real scared,” Dave said, tenting his eyes with one arm to hide his tears.

Quinn was scared, too. Should he pat that arm, or would that be too intimate? Oh, hell. He squeezed Dave’s forearm.

“Pray,” Quinn said, “and I’ll pray for you. The whole team will.”

Quinn organized his teammates around Dave’s illness. They wore his number, 35, on their sleeves and flashed it—three fingers then five—whenever they got on the tube. They donated $10,000 to the American Cancer Society for every touchdown they scored. They sent him cards, flowers, and teddy bears and rotated visits among themselves and their families—reminders that even on the road, they had him on their radar. The effect was twofold: It buoyed Dave and it made the team at once looser and more cohesive, putting its Bounty-full situation in perspective.

The Temps’ other patient, though not nearly in as tough a spot, was more of a challenge for Quinn. He and Lance were rivals first, teammates second. But Quinn felt the need to set an example. So he circulated a get-well card among the team and organized a rotation of visits among Lance’s pals, himself excluded.

The team was better than it had ever been. Everyone was happier with its play. Well, almost everyone.

“How could you?” Smalley shrieked. “How could you have allowed that interception?”

“We won, didn’t we?” Quinn said.

“That’s not the point,” Smalley screamed. “We may not always be that lucky. It’s gonna take more than luck to beat the Miners this Sunday.”

That was true. If the Quakers were the best the NFL had produced—so far—the Miners were the only team capable of beating the best on any given Sunday. And in their QBs they had a pair of fascinating mismatched bookends—Mal Ryan and Tam Tarquin, two guys out of rival Philly high schools (Quaker Latin and St. Michael’s respectively) and rival colleges (Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania), two stars once vying for the starting QB spot on the Quakers’ roster. The Quakers went with Mal and Tam, incensed, signed with the Miners. The rest may not have been history, but it made for one hell of an ongoing sports conversation.

“And you know, Coach,” Rufus Washington was saying to broadcast partner Joe Nowicki before the Sunday-night game. “Except for that legendary high-school championship game in which Tam Tarquin’s team stunned Mal Ryan’s, Mal has always had a beat on Tam.”

Ah yes, the legendary all-city conference game in which the St. Michael’s Tigers beat the Quaker Latin Panthers—a game so famous and so stunning for its outcome, with the underdog Tigers squeaking by the undefeated Panthers in the last moment of play on a Hail Mary-pass from Tam, that even people like Quinn, who was still growing up half a world away at the time, felt as if he’d been there.

It was true what Doofus, er, Rufus said about Tam and Mal, Quinn thought. Even their looks echoed their places relative to each other: At six feet four inches, Tam was an inch shorter, his thick hair a darker gold. The gray of his eyes was a warmer, kinder, more relaxed complement to Mal’s otherworldly aquamarine. Quinn found both men intoxicating, with their cut bone structure and builds. Indeed, when teammates dared wonder aloud how he could take the constant beatdown from Smalley, he dared not speak the two reasons. He parsed Mal’s “I guess we’ll be seeing more of each other” like a schoolgirl mooning over her first kiss. Had Mal meant on the field? Yes, of course, that was it. What else could it be?

But it was possible he meant personally, wasn’t it? He had looked into Quinn’s eyes and then whispered the words into his ear as he held him in a gesture of intimacy. The whole thing had lasted no more than a few seconds at best. But to a lonely virgin who had never been touched by a man, Mal’s gesture was like a few drops of rain on a crimson succulent. Quinn’s parched spirit soaked it up and stored whatever it could, replaying the moment constantly.

He was still blossoming under the memory of Mal’s touch when he remembered that Tam and his Miners were coming to town. Quinn imagined the two rival QBs together and with him, Tam holding him gently from behind—his arms scooping under Quinn’s, drawing his shoulders back—as Mal approached him.

“Mmm,” Mal would murmur, “I love me some white chocolate.” Then he would go down on him, sucking him as hard as he could, his teeth raking Quinn’s c**k as Quinn cried out and Tam—entering him from behind and cupping Quinn’s buttocks as he thrust him forward into Mal’s voracious mouth—would rasp, “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

Tam was nicer than Mal—in imagination and reality. When the Temps lost to the Miners 38-35—a gutsy effort in which Quinn played with a sinus infection—there was none of the exercising of control in victory that Mal had in defeat. Instead, Tam wrapped Quinn in a bear hug.

“I know you’re gonna be one of the greats,” he said as he pulled away, laughing and patting Quinn’s stuffy, ski-capped head.

And then he was gone. It wasn’t the fantasy-inducing prelude to a boner that Mal’s seductive gesture had been—it was too big-brotherly for that—but it was warmer, more direct, more honest.

The thought that he had the love, respect, admiration, affection—whatever—of the two finest quarterbacks in the league, not to mention the two objects of his desire, was enough to sustain Quinn through the latest round of Smalley abuse.

“You know, the only thing worse than a niggah, is a half-niggah,” Smalley said afterward. “You cost the team this game. I just hope your lousy play doesn’t cost us a playoffs spot as well, you hear me?”

Loud and clear, Quinn thought as he ran his punitive extra laps around the field amid flurries, his head pounding. He imagined Tam cupping his chiseled jaw in the shadow of the stands and himself holding Tam’s gray-eyed gaze with his own big green eyes peering out from under curling lashes.

“You are so beautiful,” Tam would say. “How could anyone be so cruel to someone so lovely?”

Then Tam would tug at Quinn’s waistband. “You know what the sexiest part of a man is? Right here,” Tam would whisper thickly, exposing and tracing the café-au-lait-colored flesh and throbbing vein to the right of Quinn’s mossy man-fur. “As smooth and perfect as marble. Only you’re not cold and white like marble but dark and so warm.”

Quinn jerked his head around, as if the empty stadium could read his thoughts. How pathetic was that—to be afraid to be who he was, even in his own mind? In his headphones, Seal sang:

Pretend you don’t see it, that we can live a lie, so you run, so you run.