Page 66 of Hard Hitter
“Your call,” she said, sliding out of bed. “I’m going to use your fancy shower.”
She thought he might follow, but she showered alone.
NINETEEN
“March, man. Fucking March.” Castro set the barbell back down on the squat rack with a grimace. “It’s the month that killed Julius Caesar, and every year I think it’s gonna kill me, too.”
“Tell me about it,” O’Doul said. His body ached everywhere. A day off just wasn’t enough to repair the damage.
“Sixteen games in thirty-one days,” Castro said, wiping off the bar with the towel. “Batter up.”
When Castro moved out of the way, O’Doul adjusted his weight belt for his set. “You know who are a bunch of pussies?”
He hefted the weight, and Castro moved in behind him to spot. “Who?”
O’Doul hefted the weight three times before he answered. “Football. Players,” he huffed, guiding the bar back into its restraints. It fell with a clang, and then he could speak again. “One game a week,” he said, sweat pouring off him. “And average time on the field is eleven minutes. You believe that shit?”
“No, I do not,” Castro agreed. “Let ’em try to skate forty minutes in a game, three and a half nights a week. They’d curl up in a little fucking ball.”
“Your turn,” O’Doul said, giving Castro the weights. Hewasn’t going to do another set, either. His hip felt tricky after last night’s beat down, and he was trying to take it easy. “Need a spot?”
“I got it.”
“Okay.” O’Doul wiped off his face with his T-shirt and went over to the mat to stretch his hip.
“How are you today?”
He looked up to find Nate Kattenberger watching him. “Good, sir. You?”
“Can we talk for a second?”
“Sure.” As if he’d ever say no to the owner. It was kind of weird to find Nate here on a weekday, wandering through the weight room. The man should be at his Manhattan skyscraper, changing the world or whatever. He held the stretch for another sixty seconds, then followed Nate into an alcove outside the training office.
“I want to show you this chart,” Nate said, pulling up a file on a gleaming tablet the size of Brooklyn.
“Okay.” He squinted at the screen, where bubbles of different colors floated on an axis. “What am I looking at?”
“Ten years of history. Each dot is a team in a given year. They are plotted like this: injury days versus wins. Do you see the pattern?”
O’Doul hated this little exchange where he was supposed to answer the questions correctly. Nate stood in front of him, arms crossed, squinting at O’Doul the way teachers used to look at him. As if he was measuring him and finding he came up short.
He didn’t see the pattern. And then he did—the dots massed along a diagonal line. “Okay—yeah. The teams that had more injuries have fewer wins.”
“Exactly. And that’s just logical, right? But look howstrongthat correlation between healthy teams and winning is. Do you think they’re just smarter—their GMs somehow chose players that don’t ever get injured?”
“No.” He pointed at the chart. “They don’t have a fucking crystal ball in Dallas.”
“Right,” Nate agreed. “But they’ve realized that doing everything under the sun to keep people healthy is going to pay off. That’s what we’re going to do, too. I think winning more games isn’t like the sports pundits like to make it. We have the skills. We just need to keep everyone in rotation.”
“Okay.”
Nate turned to him and lifted his smug chin. “That’s why the club needs you to do less fighting.”
This again. “That’s a nice idea. But exactly how do you think I could avoid it?”
“Let Crikey take some,” Nate said immediately. “Coach asked you to, and you pushed back. I’m asking you to stop pushing back.”
The billionaire always had a way of saying these things that sounded irrefutable. The tone got under O’Doul’s skin. He pointed at the chart. “But are you trying to tell me your fancy stats don’t apply to Crikey, too? He hasn’t scrapped much up ’til now. He could fuck up his body immediately. And every player counts, right?”
