Above All Else Read online

  ABOVE ALL ELSE

  JEFF ROSS

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2014 Jeff Ross

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now

  known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Ross, Jeff, 1973-, author

  Above all else / Jeff Ross.

  (Orca sports)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  isbn 978-1-4598-0388-6 (pbk).--isbn 978-1-4598-0389-3 (pdf).--

  isbn 978-1-4598-0390-9 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca sports

  ps8635.o6928a76 2014 jc813’.6 c2013-906730-2

  c2013-906731-0

  First published in the United States, 2014

  Library of Congress Control Number:2013951371

  Summary: Del tries to figure out who is responsible for injuring his teammate

  when winning takes priority on the Cardinals soccer team.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover photography by Corbis Images

  Author photo by Simon Bell

  In Canada:

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 5626, Station B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4

  In the United States:

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  17 16 15 14 • 4 3 2 1

  As always, for Megan.

  Contents

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter one

  “We got this one, guys!” Jared Haynes said. Then he began slapping his shin pads in the quick way he did before every game. Next he would fiddle with his necklace before taking it off and looping it around itself three times. Finally, he would start pacing the room, his head bobbing from side to side.

  “Number one, guys,” Osmund (Oz) Clarke said on cue. It was as if they were reading from a script. Nothing changed game after game. Normally, I would have tried to get changed and out onto the field as quickly as possible. But as the season wound down, Coach Dolan had demanded that everyone remain in the locker room until the last second. No exceptions. The idea was that we came out as a team, so we would play like a team.

  The reality, however, was that I was forced to suffer through this garbage.

  “Hey, Oz,” Jared said, flicking a ball to him.

  “Yeah, mon,” Oz replied. Oz is half Jamaican, half white. If he were a coffee, he’d be heavily creamed. I’m on the other end of the color spectrum. My mother is Dutch, and my father’s family is Swedish. It’s as if the sun spotted us one day, then said, “All right, that’s enough” and never returned.

  “What’s second place, Oz?”

  “Second place, mon?”

  “Yeah. Second place.”

  “Last time I checked, second place was the first loser.”

  “Damn straight, Oz.” They slapped hands as a portion of the locker room settled into a chant of “losers, losers, Heighton ain’t no losers.”

  “These guys are going down,” Oz said, standing up and thumping his chest against Jared’s.

  “No doubt.” The chanting moved to a steady, rhythmic “We’re number one!” I wished I could just get out of the room. It was ridiculous to watch. Sure, Heighton High’s soccer team hadn’t lost a match in almost three years. This was the final game of the season. I wasn’t on the team the first year, but I was the second, and I’ll admit, winning feels great. It felt like we were a part of something bigger than all of us. Going undefeated in any sport is unheard of. Somehow we had the right collection of players and, of course, the right coach. None of this dulled the pain of how annoying the whole “winning attitude” had become. It was as if we didn’t just expect to win, we deserved it.

  Don’t get me wrong—I’m not a huge believer in “the end result of any game is to have fun.” But all the fun was being sucked out of the games. And then there were the practices. I’d never spent so much time running drills, watching videos and endlessly lining up penalty shots in my life.

  But winning had become part of our culture, and losing was no longer an option.

  Personally, I blamed our football team. They sucked hard. They’d been sucking hard for years. So when the soccer team started on its incredible roll, the whole student body got behind us.

  “We got this one, Del,” Riley McCoy said. Riley and I had made the team together. We were two of only three sophomores who had broken in that year. The rest of the team was made up of seniors, all still around from that first flawless season.

  “It’s not going to be easy,” I said.

  “Another perfect season,” Oz yelled. “Three in a row. Unheard of.”

  Coach Dolan stepped into the locker room. Dolan, apparently, had played for some club in England before he found himself on the bad side of a tackle and permanently messed up his knee. He became a teacher and followed his wife here for work. That was three years ago. Exactly the same time that the team’s winning streak began.

  “How are we today, lads?” Coach said.

  “Fired up, Coach,” Oz said.

  “Good on you. What do we have in the tank?”

  “Filled up, Coach!” everyone yelled. Dolan demanded that we call him Coach. Never Mr. Dolan or Coach Dolan. Just Coach. It was like a secret handshake when you passed him in the hallway. “What are we going to give?”

  “All we have and more!”

  “That’s right, lads. That’s right. I know you will.” He put a foot up on one of the benches and took us all in. “Lads, we have a chance to do something special here today. No team has gone three straight seasons without a loss. I believe we can be the first. There’s no can or cannot here. Not only is losing not an option, it’s not even a possibility.” Most of the players were nodding to this. Grinning. Getting “geared up,” as Coach would say.

  “Losing ain’t a word we even know!” Jared yelled.

  “That’s right, Jared. That word isn’t part of this team’s vocabulary.”

  “Damn straight,” Oz said. He and Jared high-fived one another.

  “Lads, I don’t need to tell you that if we win today, we get a bye to the second round of the playoffs. We won’t have to play useless first-round stuff. But I want you to erase that thought from your minds. All you need to think about when you get out on that pitch today is winning. From the first second to the end of stoppage time, you are only thinking of winning. Nothing else matters. Now, let’s get out there and finish this season right.” He clapped his hands, and everyone jumped up.

  “Get a goal and you’re a hero today, Del,” Riley said to me. “You’ll go down in history.”

  “You too, Riley.”

  “I’m defense, Del. You’re a striker. The glory is all yours.”

  “We’ll see,” I said as we ran through the door.

  chapter two

  It wasn’t exactly an ear-shattering roar that greeted us on the field, but it was something. There were about two hundred kids in the bleachers. Most of them got to their feet when we ran onto the field. It wasn’t like in those big games you see on TV where the team comes out of a tunnel or anything. We actually had to run across a regular suburban street to get to the pitch. But we did come up right between the two sets of bleachers.

  The Roland Hills Rebels were already out on the pitch in their blue-and-gold outfits. The gold sparkled in the late-day sun.

  “They look like a glee squad waiting to audition for a talent show,” Jared said. He was jogging onto the pitch beside me, his chest high. I could tell he was sucking his stomach in.

  “Pretty fancy outfits,” I said.

  “Car-di-nals, Car-di-nals,” the crowd chanted.

  “We are going to massacre them, mon,” Oz said. Most of the year, Oz said mon maybe twice a week. But his family goes to Jamaica every spring break, and he comes back sounding like he’s been possessed by the ghost of Bob Marley.

  The ref blew his whistle twice as we neared.

  “I should have dropped the ball already,” he said. The ref was this bald guy who worked at the
hardware store one town over. He was way too serious about soccer. “The game was supposed to start two minutes ago.”

  “Sorry,” Jared said. He put his hand out, and the ref shook it.

  “The Rebels have won the flip. Their ball.” Jared accepted this. Coming out at the last minute was a ploy to get the other team angry. Coach believed that a team angry at some little thing like punctuality was more likely to make bad decisions due to frustration. I thought the whole idea was ridiculous, though the other players were staring us down and shaking their heads in annoyance.

  The ref blew the whistle twice more as we scurried into position.

  I play striker, so I didn’t have far to go. The Rebels center kicked the ball back, and they quickly fell into a defensive structure. We had already played them once this season and managed to squeak out a win. It was very close though and ended up being their only loss of the season. That game could have gone either way.

  So could this one.

  The Rebels passed the ball around a lot. Back and forth. Round and round. It seemed as if they were endlessly attempting to set up the perfect play. The problem with waiting for the perfect play is that you have to hope the other team falls out of position—which we rarely do.

  Sometimes I rushed to intercept a pass or pressure one of the opposing strikers. Twice they kicked the ball back to their goalie, who then hoofed it upfield again. After about five minutes, it began to feel like one of those boring, inactive games that gives soccer a bad name.

  “Come on,” Jared called from the midfield. “Let’s get this thing going.” I was pretty sure the Rebels’ technique was to lull us into a semi-comatose state and then try to sneak up to our net.

  “Someone rush them,” Romano said.

  “Chill, Rom,” Oz called.

  The lead striker for the Rebels, Tim Irvine, took a pass off the right wing and started running the ball upfield. He passed Oz, who was too busy telling Rom to shut up, and easily deked Markus Miller, one of our midfielders.

  Which left Rom.

  Tim cut in toward the middle of the field before suddenly going back to the touchline. He was almost past Rom when Rom performed a slide tackle, knocking the ball out of bounds and sending Tim flying.

  “What the hell was that?” Tim said, getting up.

  The ref was there immediately, a yellow card raised above him.

  “I got the ball first,” Rom said.

  “You got my ankle first, asshole.”

  The ref blew the whistle again and waved the yellow card at Tim. Swearing during a game had been banned years before. Everyone knew it.

  “Oh, come on,” Tim said.

  The ref grabbed the ball and waited for one player from each team to step up for a drop. Oz won the ball and quickly crossed it. Jared took the ball on the inside of his calf and started it upfield. The Rebels closed in quickly and somehow Jared managed to thread the needle and get a pass up to me. I tried to cross it back to Oz, but Tim got in the way, and the ball fell back into a muddle of kicking feet.

  The game went that way for most of the first half. Back and forth. Running from one end to the other. The anticipation of a good setup or a possible corner kick—then nothing, the ball harmlessly booted down to the other end.

  As time was running out on the first half, Oz and I managed to pass the Rebels midfielders in a quick give and go. Just inside the Rebels box, I swung out, then quickly cut back toward center. I faked a shot and crossed the ball back to Oz, who got up above his defender and headed it directly into the net.

  I wouldn’t say the crowd went wild, but the cheers were pretty loud. Oz came over and we high-fived. The whistle blew, and we left the field with a one–nothing lead.

  On the sidelines, after giving Oz and me congratulatory claps on the back, Coach took Rom aside. I downed some water and a slice of orange. It seemed like Rom was getting an earful for his aggressiveness. Though you never knew with Coach. It was entirely possible that he was praising Rom for his “intensity” and “need to win.”

  In the days after that game, with everything that happened, I thought back to that halftime and wondered what Coach had said to Rom. And if anything could have been different.

  chapter three

  “All right,” Coach said, as the intermission came to a close. “Get back out there. And remember, you’re playing to win, not to not lose.”

  The Rebels were going to have to play differently during this half. They needed a goal, so the sit-and-wait mentality wouldn’t work.

  They immediately began pressing. But that wasn’t their style, and soon enough they were making wilder passes and coughing the ball up more frequently. Their coach started coming unglued on the sidelines. He kept yelling, “Control, control,” until the ref came over and gave him a warning. The Rebels strikers began moving deeper into our end. Every time they did this, we pushed them back to half or let them play themselves into an offside. But with three of their players settled into our end, it left us with an opportunity to jump on any mistake they might make and have a nearly clear approach to their net.

  Which was exactly what happened.

  One of their midfielders tried to make a quick pass around Oz. But Oz is incredibly fast and managed to cut the pass off and tip it over to me. This time I had the whole left side clear. I ran the ball up the edge of the field. When a defender came in to intercept, I flicked the ball between his feet and kept moving. The defenders began shouting at one another. I could see Oz on the far side and Jared moving into the center. I had a head start on all of them, and only two defenders in my way. I got around one of the defenders as I neared the Rebels box and then, before the other defender could do anything, I bent over the ball and aimed squarely for the top left corner.

  The ball arced up quickly and was on its way back down when it rang off the crossbar and shot straight back out onto the field. One of the Rebels defenders caught it with a quick header and sent it back to center, where a striker turned and blasted past our midfield. A quick give-and-go set him up for an easy tip-in.

  Our keeper never had a chance.

  I looked at our side, and we were in complete disarray. Everyone was out of position. This often happens when you get a good rush upfield. Everyone wants in on the action and moves farther forward, ready to keep the ball in play or quickly run up for a shot on net.

  The Rebels celebrated as if they’d just won the World Cup.

  “Look at those losers,” Rom said. His face had gone a light pink. He was breathing heavily. “Man, I hate those guys.”

  “Bad bounce,” I said. He turned his attention to me for a second. “It’ll be the last one,” he said, before trudging back to his defensive position.

  What we had at the end of that game was a twenty-minute match. Neither team wanted the tie. It had nothing to do with the standings. Both teams just wanted to win.

  Outside of our unbeaten record, a tie was as good as a win, because we had one more point than the Rebels. If the Rebels won, we would then each have a single loss. The problem was, we would end up in second place based on goal differential.

  I checked Coach out as we lined up again. He was shaking his head. Beneath him was a stomped-on water bottle.

  “Come on, guys!” Jared yelled, clapping his hands. “Get together!”

  We moved quickly after the ref blew the whistle. Oz got the ball back to Jared, who then passed it on to another midfielder. This was a set play for us and likely the right decision at the time. We tried to move the other team side to side across the field until a lane opened.

  In moments like this, I wished I could see the field from above. Like in a video game. When you’re on the field, it’s difficult to see which way everyone is moving. You might already have a lane and not know it. Or the other players could be closing in just as quickly.

  Rom had the ball deep in our end. He spotted me upfield, deked out a rushing striker and hoofed the ball as hard as he could, trying to spring me. Rom is a decent defender. He can usually keep up with the opposing strikers and run them out of bounds or get in the way of a shot. But he has the worst long kick known to man. It’s like he’s trying to put the ball through a cloud or something. They always go almost straight up.