Their trusting faces said they knew.
“Coach Newtrokni.” The f.a.c. issued the answer.
Lesson One for First Assistant Coaches: Never assume!
The Coach ignored him and kept looking at the players. “Well, I hope you know who you can go to when you have some such problem, men. I hope you know, because you sure as shit can’t come to me! I don’t want to know about your fuckin’ problems! Keep ’em to yourself! I’m a coach, not a fuckin’ sky-pilot! And don’t you guys ever forget it. Now suit up and be out on the field in five minutes. Hop to it, you batch of uncoordinated turds!”
Rhino and I held a quick meeting with Terry behind the bulk provided by Nuke Outlaw. We reached a quick decision. Neither Rhino nor I felt up to facing Coach Newtrokni with the news that one of his new quarterbacks had an empty space where his macho was supposed to be hanging. Rhino summed up our cowardice:
“Let’s let Coach get a look at Terry in action before we spring it on him. After he’s seen her, he won’t mind so much. Believe me.”
I didn’t believe him, but I was for anything that would postpone the moment of truth. “You don’t think maybe he’ll notice when she comes out on the field?”
“With a loose jersey, shoulder pads, and her hair under a helmet, she’ll get by.”
That’s what I liked about Rhino. Once he got his teeth into an idea, he never gave up. He was still hoping we could pass Terry off as a guy. It was the kind of sticktoitiveness that had made him a good Marine, the quality that had propelled him to save my life in ’Nam, the trait that would probably get all three of us fired by Coach Newtrokni.
Nuke sneaked the uniform and helmet out of the locker room for us. We found a deserted hallway and Terry dressed there. Rhino and I stood guard at either end of the corridor.
Actually, it wasn’t too bad. Terry really didn’t look particularly female in the loose-fitting uniform. Rhino added some padding here and there that served to square off her curves. When he was through she looked like a tall candidate for a junior high school team.
We were late getting onto the field. The rest of the team was there already. Coach Newtrokni noticed. “That’s fifty, Niemath,” he announced. “Late for practice!”
Terry started to protest, but Rhino clapped his hand over her mouth and led her away. He sat her down on the bench with some other players and parked himself between them and her. I hustled over and sat on her other side. We didn't want any premature revelation.
The coach was testing out the candidates for the offensive and defensive lines. He’d set up a four-man standard defense against a five-man split offensive. He kept changing the players, but not the pattern. He wasn’t interested in plays. He was trying to gauge speed and muscle and knowhow.
The linemen as a group were short on all three. They looked hefty enough but, when they slammed into one another, you could see there was a lot more grunt than brawn. They were as light on their feet as a bunch of sea tortoises, and their reflexes were strictly slow-motion. Their instincts, on the other hand, guided them as jerkily as Keystone Cops.
I paid particular attention to the offense. These were the guys who’d have to block for our underweight female quarterback if Terry made the team. In pro football, that meant that more than her success in any given game would depend on them. There would be many, many times when her life would depend on them. At her weight, being sacked could definitely be fatal.
Nuke Outlaw was decidedly the size lineman Terry would need for protection. The three of us watched him hopefully as he towered over the opposition when they lined up. When the ball was snapped, Nuke moved surely to the left and took out his own guard and center. The defensive line gratefully paraded through the hole at right tackle. If there had been a quarterback there, the poor patsy would have gone down under more than a thousand pounds of hard-charging and ferocious tacklers. If that quarterback had been Terry, they’d have needed a magnifying glass to find all her pieces and a blotter to pick them up.
Coach Newtrokni was pacing back and forth on the sidelines. As Nuke took out the right half of his own line, he paused in front of us to make a note on his clipboard. I peered over his shoulder, curious to see what it was. Next to Nuke’s name, he’d scrawled, “heft plus zilch.” A quick glance showed me that Nuke wasn’t alone. Next to the names of the other linemen there were similarly derogatory comments.
He started shuffling the linemen around. He tried out the first of the candidates for quarterback with them. With Nuke again blocking away from the play, the poor guy was creamed in the pocket on his first pass attempt. On the second play he tried to run. Coach was writing even before they hit him: “Lollypop legs” was his judgment. From the crazy angles they were pointing at when they carried him off the field, that sounded right to me.
The second candidate handed off three times running to a teammate who wasn’t there. The fourth time, he handed off to the defensive guard who—typically—ran the wrong way to score a touchdown for the other side. The quarterback looked pleased with himself at how well things had worked out—almost as if he’d convinced himself he’d planned it that way—and trotted off the field. But then, he hadn’t seen Coach’s comment: “Puts on pants over head!”
Coach Newtrokni decided to test the third quarterback candidate’s passing ability. He stationed a receiver twenty yards away in the right-hand corner. The quarterback underthrew him by ten yards and was at least twenty degrees to the left. After he’d repeated this a dozen or so times, Coach sent him to the showers. The comment was: “Dependable as a Pinto.”
“Niemath! Get your ass out there! Let’s see what you can do! Let’s see your arm. How far can it go?”
“Try forty yards,” Rhino suggested.
Coach deigned to notice his presence for the first time. “Who the hell are you?”
“Rhino Dubrowski. The scout who signed Niemath.”
“You sign those other clunkers?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I guess that’s a plus. Let’s see what your boy can do.”
Rhino winced at the word ‘boy’ and then yelled to Terry. “Forty-yard pass.”
A hopeless receiver jogged forty yards to the ten yard line and stood there with his hands dangling at his side. Obviously he didn’t expect the pass to come anywhere near him. A moment later the football bounced hard off his gut, knocking the wind out of him. We could hear him go “Oof!” from the sidelines.
Coach Newtrokni’s eyebrows reached for his receding hairline. “Again,” he decided.
Terry threw a dozen more passes in a row. The Coach had receivers criss-crossing the field like roadrunners to test Terry’s accuracy. She never missed. The receiver didn’t always make it, but the ball was always exactly where it was supposed to be when it was supposed to be.
Coach penciled in a comment with my chin on his shoulder. “Arm super; heft puny.” Compared to the other comments on his sheet, it was exorbitant praise. “Try a handoff,” he ordered Terry.
She handed off so smoothly that the opposing linemen didn’t even bother tackling her. She repeated this five or six times. On two of the plays, the running back fumbled the ball and Terry smoothly slipped a hand under it and bobbled it back up into his gut again. A couple of times, the defensive guards broke through in time to break up the play but, in each case, Terry reversed smoothly, avoided them, and managed to hand the ball to the running back so that he caught the tackle instead of her.