I checked the phone part, and I had voicemails, again from my agent. All that stuff could wait till after the draft. I didn’t need to hear anything from him right now. As much as I wanted to know which team was in a play for, I kind of wanted to hold onto the surprise just a little bit longer.
I wanted to learn with the rest of America which team Drake Rollins was going to play for.
Finally, I got up and got ready for the draft. It was gonna be a full day, but by the end of it, I was gonna be a professional football player.
Drake Rollins, professional football player.
It had a nice ring to it.
CHAPTER 07 - LILY
Three days after the draft…
Bill Thompson wanted to see me in his office.
A couple weeks ago if you had said that to me I’d be both giddy with anticipation and excitement and really nervous. But now, two weeks later, there was nothing but dread.
I had only been on the job 10 days at the Boston Globe and I already was used to Bill Thompson and his attitude toward younger journalists, especially women younger journalists.
Especially women younger journalists who covered sports.
You see, Bill Thompson didn’t quite understand why women wanted to come to work when they could just as easily stay home and raise families while their husbands brought home the bacon. And he certainly didn’t understand how they could make it in the tough trenches of daily news coverage. And he even if he got past all that…a woman covering a professional football team? Wasn’t that what the cheerleaders were for?
All of these things I had learned in just two weeks of working with Bill Thompson. Still, despite his terrible and outdated opinions about women in the workplace, just covering the same beat as him was exhilarating. The man had forgotten more about the Patriots than I’d ever known, and pro football in general was his thing. He was an acidic and tough to deal with even on a good day, but his writing was fantastic, and before I could read my dad would read each of Thompson’s columns to me out loud when they came in the paper.
So yeah, I might not like being around Bill Thompson, but putting up with his sour looks and even sourer demeanor was a small price to pay to get to cover my favorite team for a living. I did hold out some small hope that some day I could bring my dad around to the Globe offices to meet Bill; he was such a big fan and it would have been one of the highlights of his life.
It was funny that real people had a way of being nothing like who you thought they’d be from taking in their body of work.
But on to more important things.
the draft. Damn. That had been a day.
After Steve and I caught Drake Rollins’ outburst on camera, the rest of the draft had seemed ho-hum, nothing exciting despite being the biggest thing happening in football since the championship game months earlier.
It should have been a huge deal, covering it for the first time for the Boston Globe, but something struck me about it after that kerfuffle with Drake. We had argued for a few minutes longer, Drake alternating between almost child-like wonder at his predicament and anger at the world for treating him like this.
Once he finally stormed out, I went back to the draft, shaking my head. Bill Thompson had not been happy that I had missed the first few picks, but I hoped by now he had forgotten about that. I didn’t tell him about the Drake thing because I didn’t think it was something he would be interested in - his focus was entirely on the Patriots and their key divisional opponents.
Bill Thompson was a grizzled old sports reporter, and he didn’t make any bones about having an allegiance to a particular team, even if that made him less than impartial. Pretty much all he cared about was how good the patriots were, and how they had gotten better as compared to their biggest opponents and rivals.
So, when I found out that he wanted to see me in his office, a couple days after the draft, I was scared. I figured he was about to fire me, and I very nearly started updating my resume, though I had a hunch that ‘two weeks at the Boston Globe’ wouldn’t look very good to any future prospective employers.
Still, I looked down at my outfit to make sure there were no strange creases anywhere, then I took a deep breath and headed into Bill’s office.
Bill’s office was stark and clean, and huge for a reporter, as befitting his many years of service to the Boston Globe. Bill sat in his chair facing the door, and didn’t get up when I came in. He looked up from his computer screen, and pushed his keyboard away, like he’d never gotten used to using it in the first place.
“You wanted to see me, Bill?”
Bill waved at me like he wasn’t interested in hearing me speak. “Sit down, Pearson.”
I gulped, and sat down in the left of the two chairs in front of Bill’s desk. I was already bracing myself for the worst. My father was going to be so disappointed that I had already gotten fired from covering the Patriots for the Globe, after just 10 days.
“You’re terrible at this.”