Every agent had t-shirts, usually with their alma mater and whatever sports team they'd played for. Ironically and against all notions of what one might think of him, he'd played football in high school: he was the quarterback, being head and shoulders smaller than the other guys. He had been small (comparatively) and fast, wiry and tenacious, but that was not the reason he was so damn good at it.
What he loved best about it was the planning. He would make things just so, through whatever manipulation he needed, and then he would watch the face of the other quarterback—who he considered his real opponent—as their entire world fell apart. That was his favorite moment: not when he made the touchdown pass, not when he watched the other guy go down under a mountain of linebackers, not as he watched the numbers on the scoreboard slowly click upward in increments of seven. No:
He threw shapes.
He set them up, he watched them fall.
That was his favorite part.
He was not a team player, though; he was intolerable to his players, treating them like pawns and bishops and rooks and knights and, if they were very good, queens (he even called them that to their faces until they threatened castration). The chess metaphor had always intrigued him: that the king could win the game all from the back lines, and barely lift a finger. He was the king. It was a personal triumph if the only running he had to do was jogging up to the next first down line. In his estimation, the coach was only there to give suggestions, and he rarely took them; also to catch his mistakes, but he never made them.
Except once.
In fact, he'd never been sacked—
Except once.
That had been a bad experience.
He had felt the crushing weight of the linebacker, had thought that the entire world was crashing down around him, but it turned out that no, it was just the other guy's torso—several hundred pounds of all-American beef—attempting to squeeze his head into his suddenly too-small helmet. The world had narrowed to sweat and dust and leather.
Huh.
Am I getting metaphorical again?
Fuck, that needs to stop. Ahora.
