If I didn’t love football as much as I did, I would have asked myself what in the world I was doing here. And about to read an eighteen-year-old kid the riot act because he’d messed up at a high school football practice. By now the varsity team at Hunters Point High, in the section of town between Hunters Point and Bayview, knew that they weren’t playing on one of those teams that ended the season with participation trophies. I blew my whistle and walked toward Carlos Quintera, the linebacker who’d just blown the play. If he’d decided to keep going, he could have run untouched all the way to Sausalito. MY STAR QUARTERBACK ROLLED to his right and faked a pass, faked the closest linebacker out of his shoes and nearly his pants, then ran twenty yards untouched to the end zone. Joe Wolf turned toward the wheel now, ready to start the diesel back up and head back, his evening shot just like that. The boat had been at rest, rocking gently, the night suddenly still except for the lap of the water against the hull, the gulls having gone silent. “That’s it? You came all the way out here to ask me a question you should already know the answer to?” “Did you think we’d wait forever for you to give up?” Had to have been hiding below when Joe boarded. He raised the bottle to his lips, realized it was empty, was about to go below and open another one when he heard a noise behind him. His stadium, even if it was too old now, the way they said he was. No other boats anywhere in sight, just the smell of the water and the occasional screech of California gulls, the night shining with starlight-bright enough, Joe Wolf thought, to light Wolves Stadium. But that was when she told him she was walking away for good, and she meant it this time. Was that fight earlier this year or last year? There were so many he’d lost track. “I’m not like the rest of you!” she’d said the last time they fought. And in that way became the biggest disappointment of all. She was the best of them, the rising star of the family.
It was the way his three sons had turned out, the way they’d disappointed him. He never talked about his biggest secret, but his biggest regret was his family. How did she think he ended up with his own football team and his own newspaper-by winning the goddamn lottery? He apologized to nobody, not even for the deals he’d had to cut to get what he wanted, especially when he felt, as he did tonight, as if he owned the whole city.ĭid he have secrets? Who the hell didn’t have secrets? And regrets. Oh, he had heart, all right, and brains and balls to go with it.
Then he suddenly threw back his head and laughed, remembering the last time he’d belted out the song, with his second wife out here on The Sea Wolf, both of them knowing the marriage was over. ALONE ON HIS BOAT and half drunk, the Golden Gate Bridge off to his left and Alcatraz dead ahead, Joe Wolf started to sing about having left his heart in San Francisco.
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