Playing for Pizza Read online

  bouncing up and down the grandstand.

  At 10:30 Thursday night, a city employee arrived and made his presence known to Sam. His job was to turn off the lights.

  · · ·

  There were castles waiting. Rick first heard this news around 8:00 a.m., but managed to roll over and go back to sleep. Livvy threw on her jeans and went to find coffee. When she returned in thirty minutes, with two large cups of takeaway, she announced again that castles were waiting and she wanted to begin with one in the town of Fontanellato.

  “It’s very early,” Rick said, taking a sip, sitting up in bed, trying to orient himself to such an odd hour.

  “Have you been to Fontanellato?” she asked as she removed the jeans, picked up a guidebook with her notes, and returned to her side of the bed.

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Have you left Parma since you got here?”

  “Sure. We had a game in Milan, one in Rome, one in Bolzano.”

  “No, Ricky, I’m talking about hopping in your little copper Fiat and sightseeing through the countryside.”

  “No, why—”

  “Aren’t you the least bit curious about your new home?”

  “I’ve learned not to get attached to new homes. They’re all temporary.”

  “That’s nice. Look, I’m not lounging around this apartment all day, having sex every hour, and thinking about nothing but lunch and dinner.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m doing a road trip. Either you’re driving or I’ll catch a bus. There’s too much to see. We’re not even finished with Parma yet.”

  They left half an hour later and drove northwest in search of Fontanellato, a fifteenth-century castle Livvy was desperate to inspect. The day was warm and sunny. The windows were down. She wore a short denim skirt and a cotton blouse, and the wind rushed across everything nicely and kept him engaged. He groped her legs, and she pushed him away with one hand as she read a guidebook with the other.

  “They make 120,000 tons of Parmesan cheese here every year,” she was saying as she looked at the countryside. “Right here, on these farms.”

  “At least that much. These folks put it in their coffee.”

  “Five hundred dairies, all in a tightly defined area around Parma. It’s regulated by law.”

  “They make ice cream out of it.”

  “And ten million Parma hams each year. That’s hard to believe.”

  “Not if you live here. They put it on your table before you sit down. Why are we talking about food? You were in such a hurry we got no breakfast.”

  She put her book down and announced, “I’m starving.”

  “How about some cheese and ham?”

  They were on a narrow road with little traffic and soon came to the village of Baganzola, where they found a bar with coffee and croissants. She was anxious to practice her Italian, and while it sounded proficient to Rick, the signora at the counter struggled. “A dialect,” Livvy said as they headed for the car.

  The Rocca, or fortress, at Fontanellato had been built some five hundred years earlier, and it certainly looked impregnable. It was surrounded by a moat and anchored by four massive towers with wide openings for observation and weaponry. Inside, however, there was a marvelous palace with walls covered in art and remarkably decorated rooms. After fifteen minutes, Rick had seen enough, but his lady friend was just getting started.

  When he finally got her back into the car, they continued north, at her direction, to the town of Soragna. It was situated on fertile plains on the left bank of the river Stirone and had been the site of many ancient battles, according to their car’s historian, who could not digest the details fast enough. As she rattled them off, Rick drifted away to the Bergamo Lions and especially Signor Maschi, the very agile middle linebacker who, in Rick’s opinion, was the key to the game. He thought of all the plays and schemes devised by brilliant coaches to neutralize a great middle linebacker. They rarely worked.

  The castle at Soragna (still home to a real prince!) dated back only to the seventeenth century, and after a quick tour they found lunch at a small deli. Then onward, to San Secondo, famous nowadays for spalla, a boiled ham. The town’s castle, built in the fifteenth century as a fortress, played a role in many important battles. “Why did these people fight so much?” Rick asked at one point.

  Livvy shot him a quick answer but had little interest in the wars. She was more attracted to the art, the furniture, the marble fireplaces, and so on. Rick sneaked away and took a nap under a tree.

  They finished at Colorno, nicknamed the “little Versailles of the Po.” It was a majestic fortress that had been remodeled into a splendid home, complete with vast gardens and courtyards. When they arrived, Livvy was just as excited as she’d been seven hours earlier when they got to the first castle, one that Rick could barely remember. He gamely plodded on through the exhaustive tour, then finally quit.

  “Meet me at the bar,” he said, and left her alone in a massive hallway, gawking at frescoes high above and lost in another world.

  · · ·

  Rick balked on Saturday, and they argued briefly. It was their first dustup, and both found it amusing. It was over quickly, and neither seemed to hold a grudge, a promising sign.

  She had in mind a road trip to the south, to Langhirano, through the wine country, with only a couple of important castles to examine. He had in mind a quiet day, off his feet, as he tried to focus more on Bergamo and less on her legs. They compromised on a plan to stay in town and finish off a couple of churches.

  He was clear-eyed and rested, primarily because the team had decided to skip the Friday ritual of pizza and buckets of beer at Polipo’s. They had hustled through a quick workout in shorts, listened to more game planning from Sam, listened to yet another emotional speech, this one from Pietro, and finally quit at ten Friday night. They had practiced enough.

  Saturday night they gathered at Café Montana for the pregame meal, a three-hour gastronomic fiesta with Nino on center stage and Carlo roaring in the kitchen. Signor Bruncardo was present and addressed his team. He thanked them for a thrilling season, one that would not, however, be complete unless they thrashed Bergamo tomorrow.

  There were no women present—the little restaurant was packed with just the players—and this fact led to two raunchy poems and a final farewell, a profanity-laced ode composed by the lyrical Franco and delivered in a hysterical style.

  Sam sent them home before eleven.

  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—t
he 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.