A Man Does What They Have to Do

Ch. 7 of An Evening With God

In Junior Blumenthal’s second season, the Chiefs nearly made the Super Bowl, and Junior finished second in the voting for Most Valuable Player. He got a lot more endorsements, and started being invited onto late night talk shows, on which he would…josh with former comedian hosts named Jimmy. He came across as a sort of goofy good sport who didn’t mind being teased, sort of as the Pittsburgh Steelers great Terry Bradshaw had back in his heyday, as a lovable dimwit who had no illusions about being a dimwit. Eric speculated that his agency must have persuaded Junior to take acting lessons.

In his third season, Junior led the Chiefs into the Super Bowl against the ferocious Nigerian linebacker’s 49ers, who won by a point on a last-minute field goal. Before he left the field semi-conscious, because concussed, after being sacked by the ferocious linebacker on the second play of the fourth quarter, Junior set a Super Bowl record for most completed passes and most passing yardage.

All the usual suspect made all the usual noises about the barbarity of professional football, and Junior was featured in a documentary series Netflix commissioned about the problem. He talked about much more than his concussion. The interviewer asked him about his early love of sports, and wondered if Junior, like so many top athletes, was the son of an ex-jock. Junior snorted derisively and said, “My old man was the president of his high school debate team or whatever. He couldn’t have been less athletic on a bet. He couldn’t catch a pass in a shopping cart.” The interviewer and Junior shared a little chuckle and Eric, watching with Leanne at home, died a little bit. Leanne noticed the look on his face, stopped grinning at her son’s witticism, and said, “Oh, for crying out loud. He’s kidding! Would you get over yourself, please?”

Eric stormed from the room, grabbed his car keys, and headed for Dave’s Dugout, where he was commonly accorded a celebrity’s welcome, but invariably pounced on by some half-tanked sports bore who wanted to contest something Eric had said on TV.

Maybe Dave had become a stingy pourer. The place wasn’t even half as crowded as on Eric’s earlier visits. Dave, at least, made an effort. “There he is!” he whooped on noticing Eric having seated himself at the bar. “Our local television star. San Rodrigo’s foremost sports expert.”

Three unoccupied stools down from Eric, a guy seemed to be posing for a portrait to be entitled Morose Lone Drinker. His arms made an inverted V on the table, with his drink well within the protected zone his arms demarcated. His hands were folded. He was looking at his drink as though at a judge who’d just decided to give his wife both the cars and the house and sole custody of the kids, with respectful resentment. He turned, as though he disliked having to do so, toward Eric and smirked at him in bitter acknowledgment. Eric obligingly mumbled, “How you doing?”

The guy ensured that his drink hadn’t flown the coop. “Saw your boy on Netflix earlier,” Dave told Eric, “that documentary thing. What a career he’s having, huh? You must be so proud of him.”

Well, actually, no, Eric didn’t say. He’s an asshole, my son. Stupid, but very opinionated. A Republican, apparently. A bully. A thug. A hypocrite.

“Hell, yes, I am,” he actually said.

“You couldn’t have too happy with what he said about you, though,” Inverted V Guy mumbled, just loudly enough to be heard.

Maybe the best idea was to play possum. “What did he say?” Eric asked.

Inverted V Guy chuckled miserably, as though at an obvious lie. “That you weren’t much help genetically. That there probably wasn’t another professional athlete on earth with a wimpier old man.” That must have been after Eric fled the living room. He pretended. to be amused. “Kids say the damnedest things, don’t they?”

“He said,” Inverted V Guy continued, “that you were always telling him never to let anybody push him around, even though you yourself were a dyed-in-the-wool chickenshit. He told about an incident when he was little, and a guy zipped into a parking place you’d been waiting for, and you were pissed off, but when the guy got out from behind his steering wheel, you got out of Dodge pronto even though the other guy was little. Remember that, Mr. TV Star?”

All too well. Excruciatingly well. As vividly as the worst humiliations of his school days. His son’s having witnessed his reflexive cowardice had made it probably the worst humiliation of Eric’s life.

“Like I said,” Eric refusing to appear anything other than amused, chuckled. “Kids say the damnedest things. I can’t say I remember any such thing. Did he mention the millions of hours we spent playing catch out on the front lawn, or shooting baskets?”

The guy snickered. His and Eric’s conversation may have been the highlight of his evening. “Well, he did say something about your not being very good at catch.”

“Maybe there’s something else you’d like to talk about with Eric,” Dave told the guy. “I know i’d prefer it if you did.”

The guy shrugged and got back to his baleful staring.

After his second concussion, Junior was effectively banned from the National Football League, which feared a ruinous lawsuit if he suffered a third head injury, and wound up a vegetable, as the Patriots’ safety Semi Tuigamala had the previous season. The good news was that the Chiefs had to keep paying him his salary, as they would for two more seasons. The bad news was that his endorsement income went down precipitously. As his agent explained, “If a sneakers company’s going to pay a guy 10 mil to endorse their shoes, it’s going to be someone who wears them to play in, and not someone who wears them to watch the game on TV.”

Junior stewed in his own juices for a few days, apparently taking his frustration out on his two sons, Kerry and Kevin, and his daughter Katee, Junior’s very fertile trophy bride Desiree spoke often to her mother-in-law, Leanne. Junior didn’t return Eric’s calls.

Junior got himself a tryout with Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves, who signed him to pitch every fourth day, and to play first base on the days in between, and to bat cleanup every day. In his first season, he was third in the major leagues in batting average, fourth in home runs, and. fifth in victories as a pitcher. He told the press that he owed it all to Jesus, and to Desiree. He complained endlessly about the NFL, which had been paying him better, being run by a bunch of pussies and faggots, even while becoming an extremely close friend, according to the mogul, of the blllionaire owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, Sol Peretz, a small man who enjoyed the company of very large athletes.

Eric related to that. If the jocks back at high school had allowed hm to bathe in their radiated hypermasculinity, to swagger around with them, he’d have been the happiest boy west of the Mississippi. One of less monstrous PE teachers, who doubled as coaches, had taken him aside after his disastrous tryout for the C football team and said, “You now, Eric, you’re just never going to make a team as a player, by what not be part of the team as a manager?” Eric didn’t find out until later that being a high school team’s manager didn’t mean directing their strategy and deciding who did or did not play, but handing the actual players cups of Gatorade during timeouts, letting them snap their towels at his butt after victories, and collecting their soiled uniforms and soggy jock straps from the locker room floor after both victories and defeats.

Peretz introduced Junior and others to Norman Pruitt, the New Jersey businessman who had come to believe that playing a genius billionaire businessman on a reality television show qualified him to become a United States senator. Eric had always made it a point to ignore him — he hadn’t watched 30 seconds of his reality show — but how to ignore him when, at the televised conference at which he announced his candidacy, and at which Junior was one of four prominent celebrities arrayed behind him, enthusiastically applauding Pruitt’s rabid xenophobia, contempt for the disadvantaged, and palpable stupidity.

“Where and how did we go that wrong?” Eric agonized aloud.

“Because he supports Norm Pruitt?” Leanne scoffed. “Well, you might be interested to know that a lot of what he says makes sense to me, and I think you have to admire his having the courage to speak his mind.”

Discovering that both son and spouse were Pruitt boosters on the same afternoon? Had any man ever known greater torment? Eric took a deep breath and decided to make light of the situation. “I don’t think it’s his mind Big Pru speaks. What he speaks is the cavity in his cranium where a mind would ordinarily be.”

Leanne sighed and got up. She said, “Have it your way, Eric,” and left the room.

The next morning’s news contained an account of three men — two professional athletes and the deputy campaign manager for senatorial candidate Norm Pruitt — having attacked an encampment of homeless Latinos in San Francisco with baseball bats. Two of the victims were in critical condition, and Junior was one of the alleged attackers. His bail was set at $2 million. He paid it immediately, and that of his Giant buddy. Presumably at the fervent urging of his agent and the Braves’ lawyers, Junior refused interviews after the incident, but his Giant buddy, Jayden Corcoran, may not have been so advised, and told CBS Sports’ main interviewer that, given the politicians’ failure to combat it effectively, it was ordinary citizens’ duty to try to do something about the ever-worsening homelessness epidemic. He and his “homies” hadn’t set out to injure anyone, and had used their bats only when two of the group of indigent Salvadorans they tried to persuade to become decent contributing members of society threatened to cut them with machetes. The police report had described the Salvadorans as unarmed.

Apparently envious of the attention his more forthcoming partner in crime was getting, Junior decided that ESPN viewers needed to hear his side of the story too.

“Get this straight, he said in the first of his interviews, using Norm Pruitt’s favorite phrase as he very sternly addressed the camera. “I think violence sucks. But when you’re trying to show somebody a better way to be, and the thanks you get is being threatened, a man does what they have to do. These guys didn’t even talk English!”

As Eric hoped he might, the interviewer asked which of the Gang of Three spoke Spanish. Junior seemed puzzled by the question. “None of us,” he said, “Why would we want to?”

“Well, for one,” the interviewer said, “so you could communicate effectively with your six Dominican, Mexican, and Puerto Rican teammates.”

Junior sneered in disgust. “Our country, our language. If I was going to play in Dominica, or wherever, I’d learn Dominican. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Founding Fathers talked Mexican.” He laughed at his own joke while his interviewer resisted the temptation to turn toward the camera in disgusted incredulity, and instead asked, “If none of you speaks Spanish, how do you know you were being threatened?”

It looked as though Junior wished he could stuff a soggy jock strap into the interviewer’s mouth. “You could see it in their eyes,” he said. “I mean, it ain’t exactly rocket science that these type of people hate America.”

Around half the electorate that saw the interview was appalled. The other half thought the Gang of Three heroic and patriotic. Junior and Corcoran became one of the most loudly applauded warmup acts at Norm Pruitt’s ever-scarier campaign rallies. The third of the Gang of Three, serving as emcee, would say, “And now, before Norman D. Pruitt lays out his vision for a more American America, it’s my honor to introduce to you the two great American athletes I was privileged to try to strike a blow with against homelessness and illegal immigration.”

Junior next appeared on a sports show on ETV, the evangelical channel. His host asked what he thought of Eric’s distaste for crediting God with athletic heroism. Junior pretended not to have heard about it before. He didn’t watch his dad’s show because no one who hadn’t played professionally could possibly know enough to comment on professional sports dependably, but he was disgusted. “If it’s true he said something that stupid,” he said, “then I’m even less proud to be his son than I was before.”

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