Playing for Pizza

Chapter 25

Bergamo traveled well. They brought an impressive number of fans who arrived early and loud, unfurled banners, practiced horn blowing and chants, and in general made themselves quite at home at Stadio Lanfranchi. Eight straight Super Bowls bestowed upon them the right to go anywhere in NFL Italy and take over the stadium. Their cheerleaders were dressed appropriately in skimpy gold skirts and knee-high black boots, and this proved to be a distraction for the Panthers during the lengthy pregame warm-up. Focus was lost, or at least temporarily detoured, as the girls stretched and jiggled and limbered up for the big game.

“Why can’t we have cheerleaders?” Rick asked Sam when he walked by.

“Shut up.”

Sam stalked around the field, growling at his players, as nervous as any NFL coach before a big game. He chatted briefly with a reporter from the Gazzetta di Parma. A television crew shot some footage, as much of the cheerleaders as of the players.

The Panthers’ fans were not to be outdone. Alex Olivetto had spent the week rounding up the younger players from the flag football leagues, and they packed together at one end of the home stands and were soon yelling at the Bergamo supporters. Many ex-Panthers were there, along with families and friends. Anyone with a passing interest in football americano had a seat long before kickoff.

The locker room was intense, and Sam made no effort to calm his players. Football is a game of emotion, most of it grounded on fear, and every coach wants his team clamoring for violence. He issued the standard warnings against penalties and turnovers and stupid mistakes, then turned them loose.

When the teams lined up for the opening kickoff, the stadium was full and noisy. Parma received, and Giancarlo zipped along the far sideline with the return until he was pushed into the Bergamo bench at the 31. Rick trotted out with his offense, outwardly cool but with a hard knot deep in his stomach.

The first three plays were scripted, and none was designed to score. Rick called a quarterback sneak, and no translation was needed. Nino was shaking with rage and nicotine deprivation. His glutes were in full arrest, but the snap was quick and he lunged like a rocket at Maschi, who fought him off and stopped the play after a one-yard gain.

“Nice run, Goat,” Maschi yelled in a thick accent. The nickname would be thrown at Rick many times in the first half.

The second play was another quarterback sneak. It went nowhere, which was the plan. Maschi blitzed hard on every third and long without exception, and some of his sacks were acts of brutality. His tendency, though, perhaps through lack of experience and perhaps because he loved to be seen, was to “blitz tall,” to come in high. In the huddle, Rick called their special play: “Kill Maschi.” The offense had been running the play for a week now. In the shotgun, with no tailback and three wideouts, Franco lined up close behind Karl the Dane at left tackle. He squatted low to hide himself. On the snap, the offensive line double-teamed the tackles, leaving a gaping hole for Signor “L.T.” Maschi to come crashing through, a straight shot at Rick. He took the bait, and his quickness almost killed him. Rick dropped deep to pass, hoping the play would work before the linebacker assaulted him. As Maschi exploded through the middle, tall and confident and thrilled for a chance at Rick so soon, Judge Franco suddenly shot up from nowhere and caused a mighty collision between two players who each weighed 220 pounds. Franco’s helmet landed perfectly, just under Maschi’s face mask, ripping off the chin strap and causing the gold Bergamo helmet to shoot high into the air. Maschi flipped, his feet soon chasing his helmet, and when he landed on his head, Sam thought they might have killed him. It was a classic beheading, a super highlight, the type of play that would be repeated a million times on the sports channels in the United States. Perfectly legal, perfectly brutal.

Rick missed it because he had the ball with his back to the play. He heard it, though, the crack and crunch of the extremely nasty hit, every bit as violent as something from the real NFL.

As the play developed, things became complicated, and when it was over, the referees needed five minutes to sort it all out. At least four flags were on the field, along with what appeared to be three dead bodies.

Maschi wasn’t moving, and not far away Franco wasn’t either. But there was no penalty on that part of the play. The first flag went down in the secondary. The safety was a little thug named McGregor, a Yank from Gettysburg College who fancied himself to be from the assassin school of roving safeties. In an attempt to establish turf, intimidate, bully, and simply start the game with the right tone, he delivered a vicious clothesline to Fabrizio as he ran benignly across the field, far away from the action. Fortunately, a referee saw it. Unfortunately, Nino did, too, and by the time Nino sprinted to McGregor and knocked him down, there were more flags. Coaches ran onto the field and barely prevented a brawl.

The final flags floated down in the area where Rick had been tackled, after a five-yard gain. The cornerback, nicknamed The Professor, had played sparingly at Wake Forest as a youth, and now, in his mid-thirties, he was pursuing yet another degree in Italian literature. When he wasn’t studying or teaching, he was playing and coaching for the Bergamo Lions. Far from a soft academic, The Professor went for the head and was fond of the cheap shot. If his hamstring was bothering him, it wasn’t apparent. After a hard hit on Rick, he yelled, like a crazy man, “Great run, Goat! Now throw me a pass!” Rick gave him a shove, The Professor shoved back, and there were flags.

While the officials huddled frantically and seemed completely clueless about what to do, the trainers tended to the wounded. Franco was the first up. He jogged to the sideline, where he was mobbed by his teammates. Kill Maschi had worked to perfection. On the ground, Maschi’s legs were moving, so there was some relief around the stadium. Then his knees bent, the trainers stood, and Maschi bounded to his feet. He walked to the sideline, found a seat on the bench, and began taking oxygen. He would be back, and soon, though his enthusiasm for the blitz would not return that day.

Sam was screaming at the referees to eject McGregor, and it was deserved. But they would have to eject Nino as well for throwing a punch. The compromise was a fifteen-yard penalty against the Lions — first down Panthers. When Fabrizio saw the penalty being marked off, he slowly got to his feet and went to the bench.

No permanent injuries. Everybody would be back. Both sidelines were furious, and all the coaches were yelling at the officials in a heated mixture of languages.

Rick was fuming from the encounter with The Professor, so he called his number again. He swept to the right, cut around the end, and went straight for him. The collision was impressive, especially for Rick, the non-hitter, and when he rammed The Professor in front of the Panther bench, his teammates yelled with delight. Gain of seven. The testosterone was pumping now. His entire body throbbed from two straight collisions. But his head was clear, and there was no residue from the old concussions. Same play, quarterback sweep right. Claudio got a block on The Professor, and when he spun around, Rick was charging at full speed, head low, helmet aimed at his chest. Another impressive collision. Rick Dockery, a headhunter.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sam barked when Rick jogged by.

“Moving the ball.”

If unpaid, Fabrizio would have gone to the locker room and called it a day. But the salary had brought a responsibility that the kid had maturely accepted. And, he still wanted to play college ball in the United States. Quitting wouldn’t help that dream. He jogged back on the field, along with Franco, and the offense was intact.

And Rick was tired of running. With Maschi on the bench, Rick worked the middle with Franco, who had vowed on his mother’s grave not to fumble, and pitched to Giancarlo around the ends. He bootlegged twice, running for nice gains. On a second and two from the 19, he faked to Franco, faked to Giancarlo, sprinted right on another bootleg, then pulled up at the line and hit Fabrizio in the end zone. McGregor was close, but not close enough.

“Whatta you think?” Sam asked Rick as they watched the teams line up for the kickoff.

“Watch McGregor. He’ll try to break Fabrizio’s leg, I guarantee it.”

“You hearing all that ‘Goat’ shit?”

“No, Sam, I’m deaf.”

The Bergamo tailback, the one the scouting report said didn’t like to hit, grabbed the ball on the third play and managed to hit (hard) every member of the Panther defense on his way to a beautiful seventy-four-yard gallop that electrified the fans and sent Sam into hysterics.

After the kickoff, Mr. Maschi strutted onto the field, but with a bit less spring in his gait. He hadn’t been killed after all. “I’ll get him,” Franco said. Why not? thought Rick. He called a dive play, handed it to Franco, and watched in horror as the ball was dropped. It somehow got kicked by a churning knee that propelled it high over the line of scrimmage. In the melee that followed, half the players on the field touched the loose ball as it rolled and hopped from pile to pile and finally careened, unpossessed, out of bounds. Still Panthers’ ball. Gain of sixteen.

“This might be our day,” Sam mumbled to no one.

Rick reshifted the offense, spread Fabrizio to the left, and hit him for eight yards on a down and out. McGregor shoved him out of bounds, but there was no foul. Back to the right, same play, for eight more. The short pass game worked for two reasons: Fabrizio was too fast to play tight, so McGregor had to yield space underneath; and Rick’s arm was too strong to be stopped in the short game. He and Fabrizio had spent hours on the timing patterns — the quick-outs, slants, hooks, curls.

The key would be how long Fabrizio was willing to take shots from McGregor after he caught Rick’s passes.

The Panthers scored late in the first quarter when Giancarlo leaped over a wave of tacklers, landed on his feet, then sprinted ten yards to the end zone. It was an amazing, fearless, acrobatic maneuver, and the Parma faithful went berserk. Sam and Rick shook their heads. Only in Italy.

The Panthers led 14–7.

The punting game took over in the second quarter as both offenses sputtered. Maschi was slowly shaking off the cobwebs and returning to form. Some of his plays were impressive, at least from the safety of the deep pocket where Rick had a good view. Maschi did not, however, seem inclined to return to his kamikaze blitzing. Franco was always lurking nearby, near his quarterback.

With a minute to go before the half, and the Panthers up by a touchdown, the game turned on its most crucial play. Rick, who hadn’t thrown an interception in five games, finally did so. It was a curl to Fabrizio, who was open, but the ball sailed high. McGregor caught it at midfield and had a good shot at the end zone. Rick bolted toward the sideline, as did Giancarlo. Fabrizio caught McGregor enough to spin him and slow him, but he stayed on his feet and kept running. Giancarlo was next, and when McGregor juked him, he was suddenly on a collision course with the quarterback.

A quarterback’s dream is to murder the safety who just picked off his pass, a dream that never comes true because most quarterbacks really don’t want to get near a safety who has the ball and really wants to score. It’s just a dream.

But Rick had been smashing helmets all day, and for the first time since high school he was looking for contact. Suddenly he was a roving hit man, someone to be feared. With McGregor in the crosshairs, Rick left his feet, launched himself, abandoned any and all concern for his own body and safety, and aimed at his target. The impact was loud and violent. McGregor fell back as if he’d been shot in the head. Rick was dazed for a second but jumped to his feet as if it were just another kill. The crowd was stunned but also thrilled by such mayhem.

Giancarlo fell on the ball and Rick chose to run out the clock. As they left the field for halftime, Rick glanced at the Bergamo bench and saw McGregor walking gingerly with a trainer, much like a boxer who’d been flattened.

“Did you try to kill him?” Livvy would ask later, not in disgust but certainly not in admiration.

“Yes,” Rick answered.

McGregor did not answer the bell, and the second half quickly became the Fabrizio show. The Professor stepped over and immediately got burned on a post. If he played tight, Fabrizio ran by him. If he played loose, which he preferred to do, Rick tossed the ten-yarders that quickly added up. The Panthers scored twice in the third quarter. In the fourth, the Lions engaged the strategy of a double-team, half of it being The Professor, who was by then quite winded and by any means overmatched, and the other half being an Italian who was not only too small but too slow. When Fabrizio outran them on a fly and hauled in a long, beautiful pass that Rick had launched from midfield, the score was 35–14, and the celebrating began.

The Parma fans lit fireworks, chanted nonstop, waved huge soccer-style banners, and someone tossed the obligatory smoke bomb. Across the field, the Bergamo fans were still and bewildered. If you win sixty-seven in a row, you’re never supposed to lose. Winning becomes automatic.

A loss in a tight game would be heartbreaking enough, but this was a romp. They rolled up their banners, packed their stuff. Their cute little cheerleaders were silent and very sad.

Many of the Lions had never lost, and as a whole they did so gracefully. Maschi, surprisingly, was a good-natured soul who sat on the grass with his shoulder pads off and chatted with several of the Panthers long after the game was over. He admired Franco for the brutal hit, and when he heard about the “Kill Maschi” play, he took it as a compliment. And he admitted that the long winning streak had created too much pressure, too many expectations. In a way, there was relief in getting it out of the way. They would meet again soon, Parma and Bergamo, probably in the Super Bowl, and the Lions would return to form. That was his promise.

Normally, the Americans from both teams met after the game for a quick hello. It was nice to hear from home and compare notes on players each had met along the way. But not today. Rick resented the “Goat” calling and hustled off the field. He showered and changed quickly, celebrated just long enough, then hurried away with Livvy in tow.

He’d been dizzy in the fourth quarter, and a headache was settling in at the base of his skull. Too many blows to the head. Too much football.