You pace around all day thinking about the meeting. During practice, you miss a few guffaws and Coach Mansz gets so upset that he tries to rip off his shirt in rage but he doesn’t know that the people who rip their shirts off on television have cut them with a razor and that the university’s supplier of Active Fit Coaching Polos are using a specific rip resistant material so he ends up just straining and his neck veins come popping out and he’s just ended up stretching his shirt a little bit and now he is so furious that he tries to kick a reinforced Squabbling Dummy and he falls down clutching his foot and makes you do 35 Man-Bellows by yourself.
The entire time as you are shredding your vocal cords you are thinking only about the pants meeting.
After practice you meet up with Moods.
“I think we should go to that meeting,” you say.
“I was thinking about that too. Duckett’s gone, we’ve got no heat on those pants.”
Moods starts laughing. “C’mon dude I know we’re not getting the pants,” he says.
It is midnight. You and Moods pull up to a warehouse in an industrial zone just outside city limits. It’s dark and you can hear the distant barking of some watch dogs.
You enter the warehouse through a side door that has been taped open. It is pitch dark. Can’t see anything so you just wait. It is silent. There is nothing. Maybe Wump didn’t make it. Then, you see it. A solitary match lighting up a cigarette on the other side of the warehouse.
“Gentlemen,” Wump says. The lights burst on, almost blinding you. What you see when you’re finished blinking is pants. Rows and rows of pants of every style, color, and cut. There are types of pants you’ve never even believed could exist. You turn to Moods, but you can tell he is temporarily dumbstruck by the sheer abundance of these pants.
Wump is chuckling. “I’m a man of my word,” he says “and my word is pants. Take a look around. Try some on. We have all night.”
Moods is almost in a trance and he’s already feeling some strange canary yellow parachute pants with lightning bolts embroidered on them. It’s time. You need to spring the trap. You pray that you’re doing the right thing.
“Mr. Wump, I’m sorry but we can’t accept these pants,” you stammer, trying to keep it together. You were in the semi-finals last year facing off against Brant and Bront Van Broant, the most fearsome twins in Full Contact College Squabbling before a television audience of millions and you were not as nervous as you are now in a warehouse talking to a jowly man with a bad haircut and an ocean’s worth of illegal pants.
“As you know, the transfer of pants without compensation is…is…is.” You can’t remember the words you rehearsed all day in your head.
“It’s in direct violation of the NCAA pants code,” Moods says, out of his reverie. “We take these pants, we can’t play. You know that. Dude.”
Wump takes out his cigarette and stubs it out on boot cut denim with a street value of $2,800.
“That’s right, we can’t take the pants. We’ve been authorized by Buck…”
“He’s here!” Wump says. “It’s Duckett!”
Almost instantly, a small army materializes in the warehouse. Men burst out of crates of pants with fabric swatches attached to their heads. Men in helmets rappel from the roof. A man rolls across the floor in a ghillie suit made entirely out of beige gabardine. They start tearing the warehouse apart. One man in a bright orange NCAA jacket seems to be in charge.
“I want you to secure a mile perimeter around this warehouse. Find him. Find Duckett.”
You and Moods have seen enough. You turn to try to run but are grabbed by a burly agent who had been hiding in a pile of khakis. Moods nearly makes to the door but one of the men has flung a pair of unhemmed suit trousers and caught him around the ankles.
The man in charge runs up to them. He only comes up to your shoulders but his fingers feel like granite when they poke your chest.
“I’m going to ask you only one time. Where’s Duckett?”
“He’s gone! He’s gone! He left! He’s not here!” you say.
“That’s right, he vamoosed, dude,” Moods says.
“What do you mean gone?”
“We… we went to go see him at the motel, to tell him about the the pants.” You’re talking faster than you can think. “And he was just gone, his car, the man with the eyebrows, you remember the eyebrows moods, he told us he was just the car.”
“You’re telling me you came alone? You’re not covering for him?”
“No no no no. No Duck, Duckett,” you say.
“I see we’ve got ourselves a scholar,” the man says. “Jick Jackett, NCAA. Special unit. Internal affairs.” You notice his jacket says “NCAA Kinetic Enforcement Team. Another man in an NCAA jacket runs up to him. “Nothing yet, sir.” Jackett balls up a pair of jogging leggings from the floor, balls them up, and spikes them against the wall. “Have a seat, boys. Tonight might be a long one.”
While the NCAA agents fruitlessly fan out and search the other warehouses for signs of Duckett, Jackett gathers you, Moods, and Wump who had been hiding behind a crate full of cargo shorts into a corner around a makeshift table made out of a few empty pallets.
“Buck Duckett was with us for a long time,” he says. “Great agent. Best pants man in the entire organization, and you can quote me on that. But that was a long time ago. You boys ever hear of NIL?”
“No,” you say.
“Of course not. It’s not policy yet. Something that’s in the works. Anyway, don’t tell anyone yet, but it looks like we’re on our way out. Those jackhead in Washington are legalizing it. Stereos, cars, pants… even cash. Nothing to stop Wump and his boys from paying you over the table.” .
“A few years ago we started to ease back on minor stuff. We saw the writing on the wall, Indianapolis didn’t want to pay for sting operations, they started winding it down. First to go was pants. Duckett didn’t take it well. Turned in his badge and told us he didn’t need the NCAA,” Jackett says.
Wump smirked. “He was all over me.”
Jackett continued. “We all were. This mopper over here was making us look like a bunch of dopes. Duckett didn’t like that. None of us did. But pretty soon it became clear that having Duckett running around doing citizen’s pants busts didn’t do us any good, not with the courts on our back. That’s when we approached Wump. Full immunity from the maximum NCAA penalty for boosters of a strongly worded letter. We needed him to get Duckett.”
“Wait, Wump’s with the NCAA?” you say?
“Exactly. A protected asset. We’d been placing him at SqabBalls around the country trying to lure Duckett out. We didn’t know that he’d already gotten to the two of you when Wump approached. We figured it out when we tracked you to the motel. That’s when I called in the strike team here. I thought we had ‘em.”
“You were tracking us? Dude, that’s messed up,” Moods says.
“It was tough. You left in a different car. Followed a guy playing werewolf music all the way to the dorm. Fortunately, Wump saw you get in the other car and we were able to pick you back up.”
“So what happens now? Are we in the clear?” you ask.
“Yeah, you two knucklers are OK. You can’t tell anyone about this, though. Could compromise the investigation. You hear anything from Duckett though, you tell us. He knows every trick in the book. Can vanish into any campus in the country. Knows every tailor and pants ship on the eastern seaboard. Something’s broken in that man,” Jackett says. “Just be glad you weren’t on the sharp edge of it.”
“Dude,” Moods says. “You think we can have any of these pants?”
Next chapter
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