I Will Never Tell You The Secrets of Success on the Field and In Business by Coach X

 

They say the sports biography racket is a tough game.  It is.  But anyone who thinks I’m not tough enough gets to meet a headbutt from feared linebacker Conrad Dobler.  As told to me.

This is a cutthroat business.  An athlete or coach is about to talk, to as told, and the vultures start circling.  I’m not above it.  Circling’s my business too.

Drench Cranen spent fourteen months spotting Tom Thibodeau in a dank basement slowly working anecdotes about how to succeed in basketball and in life in between bench presses.  Then Drench Cranen was spotted falling 14 stories from the Tribune tower.  They say he jumped.  Money problems.  Three weeks later I see The Ice Man Yelleth by Tom Thibodeau with Frank Manztek from the Trib creeping up the bestseller list.

Back in the ‘90s, I got a telegram telling me that Mike Tyson wanted to write another book.  This was right after the ear biting.  I knew it was too good to be true, but if I was wrong, if another writer got to him and asked him “why’d you bite that guy” I could never live it down.  The telegram told me to meet him an abandoned meat packing plant in Queens.  There was someone there, alright.  It wasn’t Tyson but it was certainly someone who had pugilistic experience.  I guess Mitch Albom was not too happy I started interviewing his old professor on Mondays.  At least that’s what I think happened.  The goon he sent was much better at repeatedly showing me the location of my liver with his fist than explaining himself.

You have to have good instincts in this business.  “There’s pain behind these goggles,” is what Éric Gagné told me when we met to start working on his book.  “There’s plenty of green behind ‘em too,” is what I said.  I knew at that point we weren’t going to work together, though he made that clearer when he demonstrated the circle change grip on my face.

They told me there was some young coach out in the midwest who took a team to a bowl game after they threw out the old coach at the last minute.  Nasty stuff.  Ogres involved.  Everyone thought this kid would get eighty-sixed into the lake, but I got a tip to head out there and check it out after they won a couple of games.  I was free in early November and already in Wisconsin after the publishers canceled my book with Craig Counsell called From Brewer Boy to Miller Man: Why I’ll Never Leave Milwaukee.    

You never approach a sports personality through an agent or a team communications person.  That’s a good way to get the word out.  Next thing you know, you’re getting a free ride in Mike Lupica’s trunk while he goes to interview Jason Grimsley.  I like to approach them in a dank alley or in a parking garage.  I heard Rick Reilly hides in their houses and slowly descends from their ceiling while saying things like "They told him that basketball players couldn't play tight end.  But then again, he never had much patience for gatekeepers, even if it was in his name: Antonio Gates."

I thought I had worked out a good system to get to this Braun guy, but someone had dropped a dime on me by the time I had gotten to Evanston.  Maybe it was the shifty looking cabby who seemed a little too interested in my book on both guys named Vernon Wells.  Maybe it was the guy standing a little too close to the airport phonebooth.  Either way, I got a nasty present waiting for me at the hotel, someone grabbing the back of my neck.  “Stay away from Braun if you know what’s good for yous,” he said.  I don’t know what’s good for mes.  “I was expecting flowers,” I said.  What I was actually expecting was the inevitable sap to the back of the head.  Henchmen are always a tough crowd.

I woke up in a dumpster in an alley under the train tracks.  The guys who worked me over thoughtfully gave me a spit of expired gyros meat for a pillow.  The train rumbled overhead and the drizzle helped usher the meat grease from my hair into my eyes.  Good for the skin, I guess. The Greek Treatment.  It was a long hike back to the hotel but I needed the fresh air and didn’t trust a cab.  The doctor had told me I should stop getting hit in the back of the head.  That was three saps, two blackjacks, and a ceremonial parliamentary mace ago.  After Tony La Russa hit me at his golf tournament to raise money for drunk showbiz chimpanzees because I told him he should’ve brought in a lefty when he shanked one bad enough that it went into the Celebrity Ape Gallery.  Nearly made Dustin check out.  I lost out on writing Gifted Handedness: The Tony La Russa Story.

I crawled back to the hotel looking for a shower and a nap and I got neither.  Someone had been in my room looking for something, and it looked like how my head felt.  I was about to pick up the phone to have a full and frank discussion with the manager about their key policy when it started to ring.  I picked it up.  The voice was badly disguised.  Someone was trying to do a cockney accent.  “You won’t find yer book ‘ere,” the voice said.  “Braun’s a puppet, poppet.  You ‘ave no idea. When they win The Hat.” “Shouldn’t it be The ‘At?” I said.  They hung up.

Something was off.  I decided to fish around the practice facility.  By the time I got there the night was busy putting out the last few ashes of the afternoon.  I decided to hide out by the dumpster until it got completely dark.  Sometimes I wish someone told me how often I’d spend my evenings siring lady dumpster around a loading dock before I decided to become a sports personality biographer.

I figure about an hour passed when I saw something flicker from inside the dumpster.  Someone was lighting up a smoke.  Maybe it was a janitor taking a break.  Maybe it was some knuckle-duster out to get the jump on me.  I decided to investigate but as soon as I opened the lid I heard a voice.  “Keep it closed,” he said.  “Stay there.  We need to talk.”  A puff of nicotine wafted from the lid.

“He’ll never let you get close.  He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s pulling the strings.  And he’ll kill you if you figure out his secrets to winning on the gridiron and in the board room.  You can trust me on this.  I'm close.  I'm not exactly against the new guy, but against the world.  But you'll never get to him.”

“Who?” I yelled.  “Who?”  “What are you, some kind of owl?" he said. I grabbed the lid and flung it open ready to give this fella an ornithology lecture with my left and my right but he was gone.  The dumpster wasn’t a dumpster at all.  It was a fake, and it had a false bottom.  I tried to climb in but the door at the bottom was bolted fast.  Even if the guy I talked to was only capable of moving a few yards at a time, he'd be long gone before I got it open.

I had nothing to do but to walk back to the hotel.  I only closed the door and loosened my tie when someone knocked.  Telegram.  It simply said “meet me in Little Birmingham.”  “What the hell is Little Birmingham?” I wondered.  “You can see it right over there,” the telegram man said.  I turned my head and that’s when the blackjack came out.  This time, the lug made a mistake.  I hadn’t taken off my hat yet, which contained a small but resilient helmet shell within the lining specifically to ward off blows to the back of the head.  I ordered from the back of a magazine I got at the doctor’s office called What’s That? A Magazine for the Frequently Bludgeoned.

I whirled around and socked the man telegram operator in the jaw.  He was a oaf, the type of guy who looks like he spends a lot of time in a single-strap unitard.  I grabbed the sap and sent him a telegram of my own with a few full stops around the skull.

Little Birmingham did in fact happen to be right where the telegram guy was pointing before he tried to put my lights out.  It was only a few blocks away but it felt like a different world.  I thought it would be pockets of industrial England selling peas and textiles.  Wrong Birmingham.  There were rows of stores selling Birmingham Stallions nick-knacks.  “Y’all come in here,” they all called to me from their stores.  I had no idea what I was looking for, but I knew I was in a dangerous spot.  Suddenly, I was surrounded by a group of large men in 2022 World Games Fistball Champions sweatshirts and hustled into a vacant storefront at the end of the block.  They shoved me down a staircase into a dark basement.  At least no one gave me a knock on the bean.

“You’ve been asking a lot of questions around here,” a voice said to me in the dark.

“I just want to know if the coach who is winning games at Northwestern wants write a book about Leadership,” I said.

“Then you are asking the wrong person.  Let me ask you something, do you think a defensive coordinator from North Dakota State could orchestrate a 21 point comeback against P.J. Fleck and his All Anagram Defense?  Do you think he could figure out how to stop the UTEP rushing attack in the second half?  Do you think he could do all of that while scouting players for the USFL supplementary draft?”

“USFL?  Wait, a minute, are you…?"

“Who I am is none of your concern.  I’m running a USFL team as well as four other college teams you don’t know about, two NFL teams, the Fehérvár Enthroners, two lacrosse teams, and a team in a sport so secretive you’ve never even heard of it.  My family has been doing this for generations.  And I don’t need any two-bit hacks digging into it.  They already are getting close on what my father did to Ryan Day.”

“What you’re going to get from this project is nothing,” he continued.  “No interviews.  No nuggets.  No secrets of success from the quarterback room to the board room.  No analogies for overcoming adversity on the gridiron and in life.  You will stop.  You will go back to writing about golfers or basketball players or polo players for all I care, but your questions about Northwestern football stop.”

“So why would you tell me all of this?”

“To be honest, what I’m doing is very impressive and I’m sick of secrets.  I am sick of seeing this gape-mouth clod get the accolades while I sit here in the shadows.  But of course you can’t be trusted."  "Klaus!" he yelled suddenly. "Kristian!” I could hear the two burliest fistballers clomping down the stairs.  I knew they were itching to practice their new passing techniques on my kidneys.

“Look out!” I yelled.  "It’s former Louisana Tech Athletic Director Bruce Van De Velde!”

The mystery coach fell out of his chair.  In the confusion, I bowled over either Klaus or Kristian and then shoved the other Klaus or Kristian out of the way before sprinting out of the storefront and making a beeline out of Little Birmingham.

I did not even go back to the hotel where there would certainly be another bigger and meaner galoot waiting there to play the accordion on my spine.  Instead, I headed straight for the train station where I wanted to put as much distance between me and Evanston as possible.

This is a nasty business and a nasty town.  I now understood the lawn signs I saw that said "We've had enough" with the N and U capitalized.  I had eNoUgh as well.  I got back to the office but there was a dame waiting for me there.  She was dressed in the widow’s black and looked like she was working directly for Trouble, Inc.

“Please help me,” she said.  “I cannot sleep.  I cannot eat.  I simply must know how Brad Underwood feels about how success on the court can translate to success in business and in life.”

Bielem It! The Bret Bielema Motivational System

 

I did not expect to be shivering at Willard Airport and waiting for a someone to take me to the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Performance Center where I was supposed to meet Bret Bielema, the head of coach of the Illinois Fighting Illini to talk about his book.  I was out of my element here in the midwest-- my life was on set or in writer's rooms punching up scripts and sampling a blend of exotic cocaines.  For thirty-five years, I've been saving shitty writers and producers from themselves in Hollywood, and I was the best.  They called me Doc Frankenstein for a long time because I'd drive up and dig up some parts of some other failed projects and then use some unholy magic to get the whole thing to work, at least they did until some jagoff executive producer didn't understand that Frankenstein referred to the scientist and not the monster and after he said "hey someone tighten the neck bolts on Frankenstein over there" I tried to run him over with the Batmobile (I was responsible for about 85% percent of Arnold Schwarzneegger's Mr. Freeze cold puns and I am specifically the person who came up with "stay cool bird boy" after which Arnold personally sent me a reproduction of his grotesquely red and swollen head from Total Recall from his own collection in gratitude).  

Every day producers would line up outside my office and beg me to rescue their crummy shows and save their asses.  I started from the absolute bottom of the industry.  We were filming on a set on Eraser and production had halted because Arnold just shot an alligator in the face and no one had any idea what he says (the dummy who wrote the script didn't have anything, like Arnold was just going to shoot and alligator in the snout and then just stand there like a fuckin' idiot) and I, a lowly PA who was already nearly fired for telling James Caan to get his own fucking walnuts and was saved only because Caan said he "liked the balls on this kid" just stood up and said "now you're luggage" and everyone was really pissed but it worked (the writer cut out "now" because he felt he had to do something).  Before long, I was Arnold's top emergency murder pun call.  I was also the person responsible for saving the movie Lake Placid by telling Betty White to say "fuckin" and "shit" and also rescued the dying Texas football soap opera by writing the part where that moon-faced kid kills the guy with a shovel, you're welcome.

I made a crucial mistake, though.  I wanted to finally make something on my own.  For years, I had secretly been working on a treatment of the classic Chekhov story "The Nose" that I had never really read except for instead of a Russian bureaucrat, the titular Nose came from a tough-as-nails Chicago cop named Eddie Noczinsky who just beats the hell out of people for 90 minutes and whose tagline is "I smell crime."  None of the big studios would finance it, not even after I selflessly saved their shitty movies for three decades, so I decided to sink all of my own money into it.  We ran into problems immediately.  No one could get the nose suit right, and none of the top costumers would work with me after I threatened them with one of Christopher Lambert's swords from Highlander III: Sorceror which he gave me after I told them to forget about the goddamn aliens and put the bad guy in a cave.  Also, I had already given millions of dollars to the great Dennis Farina to voice the Nose before he passed.  Unfortunately, I had burned a lot of bridges while desperately trying to raise money for the movie by threatening, attacking, or pissing in the offices of many of Hollywood's top executives, so I started to take whatever bullshit writing jobs they could cobble together.  I don't think that anyone even knew who I was when I was sent over to meet Bielema.

The large, jolly man who picked me up from the airport was Bielema himself.  "Hey man, how the hell are ya?" he asked me as I tried to climb into the truck.  It was covered in cameras and camera equipment for a TV show he was pitching called "Live from Bret Bielema's Car" where he would interview people from the sports and entertainment world with a variety of  ridiculous questions.  "Quick, top Thanksgiving foods," he asked me while practicing staring into a camera while switching lanes.  "I don't know.  I haven't had Thanksgiving since 2002, when Dino De Laurentiis threw me out of his house for trying to slap Bill Paxton with a fist full of cranberry sauce while I was out of my mind on a designer drug called "The Gobbler."  "Whoa, look at this fuckin' guy," Bielema said chuckling as we pulled into his office.

Bielema had a little shtick for everyone we met on the way in.  He shadowboxed a security guard.  He had a complicated handshake for one of the assistants.  He did an elaborate gun finger point at a walk-on which involved him feigning being gut-shot and staggering around a lot before collapsing to his knees and vowing revenge.  It was spellbinding.

When we got into his office, he told me that his publisher explained to him him that they liked to take some life lessons from football and put them into business situations.  They'd sell books, but more importantly they were selling the lecture circuit, boardrooms and hotel banquet halls, a money printing machine.  I asked him if he ever said anything cool after beating someone like "eat some turf" or "touch down to hell."  "One time I called a guy a prick and the university had to send an official apology," he said.  "Hell yeah," I said.

As we talked, I realized that writing this bullshit coach book was a waste of both of our time.  Bret Bielema was a dynamo, a star.  And he had a TV show.  Sure it was just a goofy little web series he was trying to sell to Big Ten Network Omega that would also air a select gas stations and interstate rest stops, but I saw something bigger here.  I saw a big, lovable tough guy who would have everyone in the palm of their hand.  I saw Bielema transcending midwestern football and me getting out of the Hollywood gutter.  I saw Eddie "Da Nose" Noscinsky.  

"Forget about the fuckin' book," I said.  "Everyone's got a motivational book.  Dick Wolf's assistant has a book." He looked at me blankly.  "P.J. Fleck's got a book," I said quickly remembering the name of a football coach I had seen on TV one time looking really weird.  His brow furrowed.  "Really?"  "We can do better than that," I said.  We need to go big.  We need to go to TV.  We need to get into Bret Bielema's car."

I thought I'd collect a few bucks to meet with Bielema, get his pitch and then go back home and buy some illegal lizard gland stimulants and just write the whole thing in a week, but I couldn't go back.  I hauled out my original screenplay for The Nose.  I would have to make some serious changes in order to accommodate most of the action taking place in an SUV instead of on city streets.  We also would have to accommodate Bielema by filming mostly in Champaign-Urbana and make make The Nose an expert on football crimes where he spent a lot of his time hanging around football fields and film sessions.  In this version, the Nose would smell out a guy stealing signs and then throw him from the top of the stadium into an active volcano.  But I knew I could make it work.  We just had to cobble together this first season secretly by stringing along the publisher and then we'd get our sets and our actors and our feature budget.

It took about a week to convince Bielema to come onboard.  I spent every day in his office or hounding him on the practice field, showing him pages of the script and telling him how much easier it would be to get great football players to come to the university if he was an international acting superstar.  He finally one day just said, "ah what the hell, I always wanted to be a detective.  Let's do it."  It felt amazing, like the first time I convinced a producer to spent an extra million on a helicopter because how fucking cool would it be to have a helicopter here.  

I did have one major problem.  There was no nose costume.  I didn't have the money to fly anyone out or even hire someone locally.  The whole thing didn't work without a giant nose walking around dispensing nostril justice and giving scumbags the Big Sneeze.  In desperation, I decided to make the nose myself.  I have no idea how to even go about doing something like that.  I always just wrote something and it appeared.  But now I was absolutely fucked.  I walked into a Michael's and told them I needed to make a giant nose, but no one was that helpful.  Eventually, I found an old mattress next to a dumpster.  I figured I could get something vaguely nose-shaped out of that, get it on Bielema for a fitting and then make some adjustments.  I worked for days not sleeping, measuring, cutting, duct taping, and spray painting until I felt I had a nose good enough for a test pilot.  The nose was too big and unwieldy for me to carry so I found an old wheelbarrow and bedsheet to cover it and pushed it for miles to the Illinois football offices.  The guard stopped me.  "Cool it, buddy, I've got a nose here for Coach Bielema," I said.  He told me to get lost. It took a lot of pleading, begging and even tears until they finally called Bielema and he came down.  He pulled the sheet off and took a look at the nose, which after the end of my nose-obsessed reverie I now saw was just a dirty, mangled mattress with uneven nostril holes and a deviated septum.  "Why don't you put that away and we can talk later," he said.

It took a few days, but Bielema finally told me to come by his office.  I appreciated that about him.  No bullshit, a straight shooter.  "I'm not going to bullshit you," he said to me.  Bielema finally talked to his agents about the Nose and they told him the whole project was insane and in fact really stupid.  He told me they didn't want him working with me on the book either because I clearly was a "crackpot."  I wasn't that upset.  I had been thrown out of fancier offices than the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Performance Center.  One time, Michael Ovitz had a dumpster flown in from an especially disgusting Chipotle parking lot for his goons to throw me in after I told him that First Kid should have been called First Shit.  But this one stung.  "Look, for the record, I really liked the part where the Nose drove my car into a guy so hard that he landed in a paint manufacturing plant and then I said to him 'let's paint the town red,'" Bielema told me.

I was waiting to get a plane back to Chicago and eventually Los Angeles when I got a message on my phone from a number I had never seen.  It was from James Franklin, the coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions.  The college football world is small and talks a lot.  "First of all, does the Nose drive an ATV?" he asked.  "Consider that my first note."

Journey to the Heart of Madness: Ryan Walters's Guide to Success in Football and Business

 

The following is repurposed from the journal and correspondence of film director Wolfram Krenkel relating to his unfinished documentary Journey to the Heart of Madness: Ryan Walters’s Playbook for Success in Life and Business before his mysterious disappearance in 2023.

Letter to the Institute of Wolfram Krinkel Studies, June 21, 2023 

I was on location in a remote island I am legally not allowed to disclose filming a new picture called “Murders from God” when I got a telegram from the United States. The film was not going well. My entire crew was suffering from an ailment that translated loosely as “the devil’s rivers” that was known around the camp as “diarrhea 2.” Our financing had run out two weeks before when accountants noticed that the eccentric count who had lavished us with funds for the production was declared legally demented and his heirs were preparing to tear each other apart in the legal system.  We were trying to get to the mainland to regroup. The leading man played by the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden had been rampaging throughout the set for weeks in a home-made “reverse loincloth” that covered his entire body from the neck down except for his nipples, buttocks, and genitals.  He menaced everyone he encountered after telling us he was beginning an intense biting regimen and was only held at bay with staves fashioned from tree branches. The telegram had told me that an American University in the midwest was offering me a substantial amount of money to make a film about their annual headbutting championship. I was intrigued.

Journal Entry, July 18, 2023
I have arrived in West Lafeyette, Indiana, but quite late. They were anticipating me flying, but I explained that I had instead chosen to travel with a group of steamship enthusiasts crossing the Atlantic in a homemade vessel. The seas were violent, and I spent most of it ill alongside most of the crew. When we were not vomiting, the steamship enthusiasts quarreled among each other about the authenticity of the rivets and whether the food on board was period appropriate. Every night, a particularly irate retired professor of train literature from Italy threatened to mutiny with much screaming and wagging of his elaborate mustaches. Finally, this man managed to successfully pull off his coup after we had arrived in port by getting off the ship first and declaring himself the captain to a baffled customs agent. The crew got into an intense shoving match that lasted four hours until police intervened.  The university bursar who I told about my voyage in order to try to convince him that I had a valid reason for arriving late had no interest in hearing about the debased madness of man at sea.

Journal Entry, July 19, 2023
There are complications with the film. It appears that while I was on my sea voyage, I had missed some budgetary window to secure funding. The film professor who contacted me told me he had found some funds if I was willing to alter my project. It appears the football team was looking to document the activities of the team and had money for a film. I was instructed to meet with Lorenzo “Wayne” Kragg, the chief financier of the football team who somehow had no direct ties to the university but is instead a man who made his fortune selling decorative truck genitalia. I have no knowledge or interest in football but the professor was so apologetic that I felt I had to have a meeting out of politeness.

I was taken to Wayne Kragg’s mansion overlooking the scenic Celery Bog Nature Area. Mr. Kragg (“Call me Lorenzo “Wanyne,” he said) met me at the door and led me into the foyer. Everywhere I looked there were images of trains. On one wall, the famous nineteenth-century film “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat” ran on a loop from a projector while speakers blared train noises and whistles constantly. This agitated me greatly. I do not like trains, which I have always seen as the vanguard of man’s violent incursion against nature. Also I was told that my maternal great-uncles were all killed in separate and unrelated train accidents. One of them was bludgeoned to death, but it happened on a train. Lorenzo “Wayne” led me to a room covered in pictures of football players. He told me he had heard that I am a filmmaker of some international renown and he was honored to host me. I could tell he had not seen any of my films, not even my popular bird documentary “Shrieks of Hostility.”

He told me he wanted to make a motivational film about the leadership techniques of the program’s new coach. The coach was young and inexperienced and Lorenzo "Wayne" wanted to burnish his reputation and rally the other rich men who donated their money to the football team around this man. I told him I appreciated the attention, but I do not make those kind of films. I know nothing about football. In fact, I find the spectacle of violence and pageantry disgusting and anathema to everything I think about humanity. I am not opposed to violence, for example if a man is torn to pieces by a large, flightless bird. But the organized, symbolized warfare in American football is something I find odious and intolerable.

Then, I noticed something that changed my mind. In the corner, I saw a gigantic totem of a man wearing a football uniform and a hard hat. He is not quite a man. He is a grotesque caricature of a man, like if a person was drawn by a disturbed child like my school friend Dieter who was taken away and described as Bavaria’s youngest pyromaniac. This totem has gigantic bulging, dead eyes and a swollen, jutting chin. He carries a hammer. It is the stuff of waking nightmares. I asked Lorenzo “Wayne” what is this repulsive creature? He told me it was the school mascot “Purdue Pete” and he prowls the sidelines during athletic contests. I told him I must study this perverse abomination and the unhinged people that worship him. He said great, people here love Pete you can put him in the movie as much as you want. He also offered me enough money to restart my other film and hire a person specifically to restrain Kaspar from his normal course of biting and gouging attacks between scenes.

Journal Entry, July 20, 2023
I met the football coach Ryan Walters in his office. I told him I was there to learn his leadership secrets. I had already decided that my film would include none of the nonsense about leadership and I would instead investigate the twisted iconography of the terrible train goblin that had repulsed and intrigued me, but I needed to maintain the pretense. Coach Walters laughed. He told me that he thought that a motivational film about a first-year head coach was absurd, but he figured it was an easy way to keep Lorenzo “Wayne” happy, and he had to indulge him from time to time. Consider that his first Leadership Secret. I immediately liked him. I understood that you need to occasionally entertain the whims of maniacs in order to secure funding for your football program or film about a man who loses his mind trying to build a homemade spacecraft while you simultaneously try to build a homemade spacecraft as part of the filming process.  Over his shoulder I noticed a smaller totem of the Pete grimacing at him and seemingly peering into my soul. I asked him what he thought about Purdue Pete. He told me that everyone loved Pete. I asked him why because he looked like he was a demon dedicated to murder. Walters’s face changed. “I don’t think it’s a great idea to make fun of Pete like that. People here don’t like that.”

I thought he was joking but he appeared deadly serious so I changed the subject. I told him that I noticed from the pictures on the wall in the facility that many of those who came before him seemed to have large mustaches. Perhaps he should consider growing a mustache. “I haven’t earned mine yet. Not until he says so,” Walters said. Not until who says so? Uh, not he, I meant them. The fans. The fans, he said. Then he told me it was nice meeting me but he had a practice to prepare for.

Journal Entry, July 21 2023
I went to the library to research the iconography of Purdue Pete. The librarian handed me a dusty book on past showing the evolution of the Pete mascot through the years. He told me to enjoy the book and flashed a sinister smile. It turns out that Purdue Pete had gone through several changes dating back to the 1940s. The book showed photos and drawings of earlier, cruder designs where Pete was somehow more menacing and more deranged. In one earlier incarnation, he has broad shoulders and a tiny pin head emanating malice. In another, he has rosy cheeks like an evil California hamburger mascot. I wanted to retch and recoil but I could not look away. I sat for hours staring at these photos lost in some sort of demonic reverie. An unearthly cackle seemed to bounce around my skull. Eventually I threw down the book and ran out as the librarian chased me and scolded me, but I could not bear to touch the book anymore. On my way out I passed a drawing of a Purdue Pete reminding students to return their books and I threw my knapsack at it in disgust, exploding the half a turkey sandwich I had saved from my lunch all over a poster explaining the Dewey Decimal System.

Journal Entry, July 21, 2023
Last night I was unable to sleep. I had a vision that I was trying to move but was unable to because I had ingested some sort of psychedelic or poison that prevented me from using my limbs. I was affixed vertically on some sort of plank like I was standing up and could not see below me but I felt a rattling. I was able to move my eyes enough to see that my plank was mounted to a railroad track. I heard a blood-curdling bellow that sounded like someone trying to make a train whistle. That’s when I saw it coming. A shadowy figure was pumping one of those old time railroad vehicles and heading straight towards me. There was a blinding lantern mounted on it but I could see it also had a battering ram shaped like a Purdue Pete head. As it came closer, I could see the figure pumping was a malformed Pete, a sort of hideous amalgam of all of the historical and discarded Petes. The pump car was increasing speed and coming straight for me. Right when it was about to collide with me, I woke up screaming.

In fact, I had actually faced this exact situation when I was filming "The Grim Melánge" with the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden. We were in the desert and had run out of Kaspar’s favorite sarsaparilla brand. One night, I awoke to find myself lashed to a train track and Kaspar coming at me with a similar hand cart. His eyes were wide and he was singing passages from "Salome" in an agonized shriek. He rammed me thirteen times. My ribs were badly bruised. I could hardly speak and the doctors told me that if I laughed I would collapse into agony but fortunately I never laugh.

Journal Entry, July 24, 2023
I arrived at the football facility to get practice footage. The players are engaged in inscrutable drills and the coaches are bellowing out an indecipherable array of football jargon.  During breaks, I filmed short interviews with whatever players were around. I received very few usable answers. My line of questioning was simple and straightforward: what do you think about nature’s indifference to man’s thoughts and suffering? Most of the players simply laughed or said "I don't know" or asked me who I was and what I was doing there.  One player told me that “I am the indifference of nature to man’s suffering, on the football field.” I was so disturbed I had to leave.

I tried to interview Coach Walters on film. It took me several hours to light his office. The Purdue Pete on his shelf still stared at me, and I ended up covering it with a camera case. But when it was time for him to start, an assistant told me the coach was too busy. I began to pack my things. As I put away my camera equipment I thought I heard something stir at the door. I looked up but no one entered. Then a piece of paper shot under the door with my name on it. I opened it. There was a hasty and careless scrawl that only said “Pete Says Stop.” I opened the door and looked to see anyone who could have slid the note, but the hallway was empty. The door slammed behind me and locked with all of my equipment inside. I had to try to convince a janitor to let me back in, but he had to talk to three different people in the football department to find someone who had heard of me until I found someone who had recognized me as the villain from the action movie "Operation: Cobra Strike: A Jack Kicker Film."

As I headed back towards the hotel, I noticed something strange. A startling number of people I passed had large, blond mustaches. I thought I had noticed a slightly larger number of people you ordinarily see with a blond mustache, but now I was seeing them everywhere. And every person with a blond mustache seemed to look at me, if even for a second, and glare at me. I have only seen that look of pure hatred once in my life, and it was when the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden had chased me for three days through the Cambodian wilderness with a homemade nunchuk because I had told him to say “excuse me” instead of “pardon me” in a scene.

Journal Entry, July 25 2023
It is the middle of the night. I have heard a nonstop rattling in my room for several hours. I initially thought it was the air conditioner, so I turned it off and the room immediately became impossibly warm and humid in the steamy Indiana night. I am soaked in sweat. I tried to call the front desk but no one answers and the humidity seems to have swelled my door closed and jammed. A storm has rolled in and the rain pounds on my window while the thunder bellows outside. I pound on the door and scream for help but no one answers. Perhaps I am going mad. But I have suffered from the entire scale of filmmakers’ madnesses in my career: desert madness, jungle madness, and space madness, and this does not feel like any of them.

I look outside the window and see only my own face reflected in the window, but when a flash of lightning illuminated the courtyard I could swear I saw the face. The eyes. The chin. I thought I should

The journal ends there.  Wolfram Krenkel has not been seen since.

Football Leadership Book, by Luke Fickell

 

Luke Fickell doesn't eat anything.  I'm sitting across from Wisconsin football coach Luke Fickell at "Well I Can Eat," one of Madison's trendiest new restaurants and I'm trying to figure out what to do.  I got in the habit of meeting sports people at restaurants when I was profiling them for magazines because it made a great lede: "Marv Albert digs his spoon into the chicken a la king;" "Jeff Van Gundy orders an entire Thanksgiving meal off-menu;" "Buddy Ryan eats a steak with his bare hands;" but if I was profiling Fickell, I'd be at a loss.  He doesn't order anything, not even a glass of water. He is staring at me like he's trying to see through my skin.  "Jeff Van Gundy told me this place has incredible cranberry sauce," I say.  "No thanks," he says.

I wasn't here to profile Fickell.  My magazine writing days hit a speed bump when Man's Man: A Magazine for Men got purchased by thirteen different companies in two years, got spun off into a series of branded bar and grills and a show on the short-lived streaming network "THIS," and then finally got liquidated with the back issues sold to paper magnate Glen Masted, the Pulp King of Michigan City.  After a brief plagiarism scandal (I lifted a chapter from Rick Reilly's Who's Your Caddy* because of a bad reaction to gout treatment) and the recent resurfacing of some profiles of women from the early 2000s I wrote that had these censorious outrage-mavens desperate for an apology even though I have a mother and a step-niece, I was looking for work.  That's how I ended up traveling around the country trying to pitch coaches on leadership books.  They certainly did not exist in the higher literary plane I had lived in when I wrote things like "What's Eating Gordon Ramsay?" and "Rick Fox is Ready for His Closeup" but they were fast and easy and tended to sell well if the person was famous enough.  With enough traction, I could even go around giving lectures in hotel ballrooms.  But I had been having a tough time finding collaborators.  I had already been turned down by Quin Snyder, Dawn Staley, Ben McAdoo, Jim Boylen, and Jim Boylan.   

"So," I say to Fickell.  "If we were to start working on this book, what do you think you'd want to focus on?  "Leadership," Fickell says.  "What elements of leadership? You know you were really thrown into the crucible there with Ohio State, with,  you know the whole Tressell thing."  Fickell got his first head coaching job unexpectedly when his the famed NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett caught numerous Buckeyes players in the grip of a notorious midwestern pants-trafficking ring.  The NCAA moved in to punish Ohio State coach Jim Tressell for the infractions. Tressell wouldn't go quietly-- the result was a thirteen hour siege of the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. They took Tressell to a maximum security NCAA facility for three years where he had no access to football or pants.  While locked up, he penned Tressellball: The Art of Integrity- In Conversation with Chad Crad that topped the New York Times bestseller list for 49 consecutive weeks.  In the midst of all of the chaos, Fickell, then serving as the defensive coordinator, got promoted into leading the powerhouse program.  "I don't want to talk about that," Fickell says to me. "That's personal."

Perhaps, I suggest, he could talk about his second stint as defensive coordinator.  After his one season in charge of Ohio State, the university fired him as head coach and brought in the former Florida coach who had retired for health reasons to a TV job but suddenly found himself invigorated by the Ohio State offer.  Fickell stayed on as defensive coordinator under Meyer, which is certainly an unorthodox move in college football coaching. "Maybe you can talk about what you learned about leadership under Urban Meyer." "No," Fickell says. 

(Fair enough.  Last year, I pitched an exposé detailing Meyer's time with the Jacksonville Jaguars as an A Told To with Josh Lambo called Who Kicks The Kicker? He declined.)

"OK, maybe we leave your own personal history out of this and approach things a little more philosophically.  How do you personally prepare a team to win?" I ask, starting to panic a little.  "Winning mentality.  Winning mindset," Fickell says.  "That's perfect," I say.  "How do you instill this winning mindset?"  Fickell's brow wrinkles.  "Winning mindset.  You have to be about winning."  "OK. But how do you become about winning?" I ask.  "Because you want to win. Either you do or you lose," Fickell says, looking as close to incredulous as I can see a person look who does not have facial expressions.  "OK," I say.

I try one last move.  "Look, we can talk about what's in the book later on, but these things really move with good titles.  I was thinking 'A Fickell Twit of Fate.' Or, how about 'Football: Not For The Fickell?'" "No," Fickell said.  "No Fickell puns."  The man had no idea how literature works.  I could have sold a profile on a football coach called "Luke's Not Fickell" to Man's Man sight unseen even though my main sports editor Victor Flugge would have no idea who Luke Fickell is.  He did not even know the basic rules of football and only watched an illegal, combat-oriented version of Jai Alai called "Montserrat."  

"OK then, thanks for your time, Coach," I say.  I pay for my bloody mary that was mainly three full sized sausages and a quirt of tomato juice and start to head for the door.  Thinking I was out of earshot I mutter to myself "Puke Sickell" but I guess I am not.  I don't hear him move.  I don't hear the chair and I don't hear footsteps from anyone coming near me, but before I reach the doorknob someone grabs me.  It is more like being enveloped. My right arm feels like it is being torn from its socket and my left shin seems like it is somehow being thrust upward to stab my own knee.  Fickell, a high school wrestling champion, has me in his legendary trebuchet hold that he had used to subdue 195 consecutive opponents from 1990 to 1992.  Somehow, instead of just screaming out "aaaaahhh and my shin" I manage to blurt out "aaaaaaggghhh trebuchet trebuchet" and Fickell releases me.  

"I see you've done your research," he says.  He's not smiling but he's no longer scowling.  "You know, I like you.  I think we can work together."  He gestures towards the table.  I limp back over there and order another sausage mary.  "It's called Football Leadership Book," he says.

Going Iowanfinite: The Rise of a Football Revolutionary

 

Note: The following excerpt from the author embedded within the Iowa football program in the spring of 2023, is from a book originally completed before the 2023 football season and published on Friday, October 27, 2023.     

“Let me ask you something,” Brian Ferentz said to his offensive coaching staff.  He sat at the head of a large u-shaped desk at the Hansen Football Performance Center leaning back, his arms behind his head.  “What’s the most efficient play in football?”

He stared at the group before him, wizened old coaches whose heads bore permanent marks and indentations from years of headset squinting through half-glasses, eager young graduate assistants still in playing shape and looming like distant mountains in the corners of the room, afraid to say anything, and me, trying not to be noticed as I wrote everything down.

“Three point three yard run,” wheezed out Mackett.  Walt Mackett had been with the Hawkeyes since he played as a nasty fullback in 1952 and unofficially led the Big Ten in biting incidents.  Mackett officially retired in 1997, but still hung around in meetings and prepared detailed longhand scouting reports that he passed around.

“Wrong,” Ferentz said.  “Plannitz.”

Plannitz, a nervous assistant who had just graduated after five years as a walk-on and who never got into a single game because the one time they decided to send him in in a blowout against Western Illinois he was on the toilet, gulped.  “Uhhh, five yard out,” he said.

“Wrong.”  He began randomly pointing around the room with his marker.

“Tight end screen.”  

“Nope.”

“Jet sweep.”

“No.”

“Flea flicker.”

“That's not even real. Oh Grady, you think this is boring?  Well, enlighten us.”

Grant Grady, a hotshot receivers coach who was not too fond of Ferentz’s little quizzes, had been folding a playsheet into a paper giraffe in a sort of hostile origami.  “I don’t know Brian, what about a fuckin’ punt.”  

Everyone laughed.  The stagnant nature of Iowa’s 2022 offense was a running joke in the football media and one that Ferentz didn’t think was very funny, which is why he was in the meeting room.

“You know what you’re not that far off.”

Ferentz stood up and sauntered over to the whiteboard.  He maintained the bulk and bearing of a former lineman.  He uncapped his marker and wrote a two on the board.  

“Safety.  How many plays did the offense run?”

“The offense, coach?” said Plannitz.

“Yeah.  How many did we run?  It’s not a trick question.”

“Uh, none,” Plannitz said.

“Damn straight.”  He put a slash sign with a zero next to the two.

“Fumble return, how many did we run?”  He wrote a six on the board.

This time two or three coaches chimed in at the same time.  “Zero.”  Six slash zero on the board.

“Right.  Punt return?” He wrote another 6 then a slash.  

All of the coaches said “zero” in unison as Ferentz wrote it on the board except for one or two that said “none” and Grady, who was intently drawing teeth on his giraffe.  

“How about a situation where a team lines up for an extra point or two-point conversion but somehow manages to lose possession of the football in its own endzone on the complete other end of the field?”

“Zero,” they yelled out because that was the pattern but many of them looked confused.  “That’s right,” Ferentz said and then wrote a one slash zero.  “Do the math on those.  Which one is most efficient? We’re talkin’ points per offensive play.  Who here knows basic division?”

A few brows furrowed.  Plannitz pulled his phone halfway out of his pocket and then sheepishly put it back when he noticed no one else doing that.  A heavy silence settled in the room.

Grady looked up.  “They’re all horseshit.  You can’t do ‘em.”  “You can’t divide by zero.  It’s not allowed or something.”

“That’s absolutely right.  They’re all exactly the same.  The same efficiency.  Zero plays for the offense.  It’s so efficient that it is scientifically impossible to determine.  Every other offense in the country is running plays.  They’re trying to do yardage.  They’re trying to do points.  Well guess what, you take the best offense in the goddamn country and you know what they’re doing?  Look at their efficiency numbers.  They exist.  Ours don’t.  There’s no defense in the goddamn universe that knows how to stop our shit.”

Grady exhaled deeply.”

“Got something to say, Grant?”  

“This is the absolute stupidest shit I’ve ever heard, Brian,” he said.  Ferentz walked over to him and they met forehead to forehead.  

“Get the fuck out of my football performance center,” Ferentz said.

“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Grady said as he gathered his stuff and walked out.  “Good luck, fellas.  I mean that.  Good fuckin’ luck.”  Ferentz grabbed the giraffe in his meaty hand and crushed it.

“Undetermined.  That’s our strategy.”

**********

You would not think that Iowa’s football team, a notoriously staid institution where Brian’s father Kirk has been churning out the same defense, tight ends, and punts operation for decades as the longest-tenured coach in the Big Ten would be something I would write about.  My interests tend towards the cutting edge.  For example, in Jeeves Nation, I explored the world’s most innovative search engine poised to remake the entire concept of searching the World Wide Web.  In Liar’s Pogs, I examined the burgeoning pog economy emerging in schoolyards that turned into a complex international financial system of its own.  My own interest in sports came out in The Trestman Cometh, a story about a coach whose battle to bring revolutionary strategies from Canadian football to the NFL was derailed by the fact that he looked like a ventriloquists’ dummy from the cover of an R.L. Stine novel.

College football represents a far more diverse array of strategies than the NFL.  Teams are limited based on their own resources and available players.  Teams are also molded to coaches' idiosyncratic preferences.  Some teams like to try to gradually run over their opponents like a slow-moving molasses calamity.  Some teams try to move as quickly as possible and exhaust their opponents.  Other teams, like the Army, Navy, and Air Force teams unable to field players with the wide-bodied bulk of their peers, like to confuse opponents by running archaic option configurations that befuddle defenses unsure of who can run the ball.  

At Iowa, though, whatever system they had was not working.  In 2022, Iowa ranked dead last out of 130 total teams in yards per game, averaging nearly 30 yards fewer than the next-worst team Eastern Michigan.  They averaged only 117 passing yards per game; the only teams that threw for fewer yards were Navy and Air Force, which intentionally eschew the forward pass as part of their offensive strategy.  Despite the pitiful and ineffectual play of its offense, Iowa's defense still managed to carry the team to eight wins, including a victory in the Music City Bowl.  But Brian Ferentz was sick of hearing about how crappy his offense was.  With his offense already at rock bottom, Ferentz was prepared to unleash his new concept and forever change how college football was played.

I first came to know Brian Ferentz after publishing “Boylenball”, an article for the New Yorker that featured a coach who revolutionized the concept of the timeout in the NBA using innovative mathematical models to time them while philistines dismissed him as a bald asshole taking pointless timeouts while already hopelessly behind because he was mad.  Ferentz reached out to me to ask about a photo that ran in the article where Boylen wore a pork pie hat because, as a man with an equally enormous head, he had trouble finding a one that could accommodate his bulbous cranium.  I told him that Boylen was no longer talking to me because he thought the article made him seem like a “boob” but the photographer tipped me off to a place called Fred Gazoo’s Huge Haberdaschery that specialized in hats for the large-headed gentleman.  We started corresponding after that and finally met for a drink when he was scouting a player not far from where I was embedded with the founders of WebTV.  This is when I learned about Undetermined Football.

The easy way to talk about Brian Ferentz is with the cliched story of a son desperate to escape the enormous shadow of his own father.  After all, that is how things appear.  He played for Kirk and then, after a brief foray coaching in the NFL, returned to coach for him, steadily rising through the ranks, rankled by charges of nepotism while never being able to satisfy the old man.  The book practically writes itself.  But, at least as Ferentz tells it, that has nothing to do with his entry into football.  He instead sees it not as some sort of complicated King Lear-style family drama but as an intellectual puzzle.  He’d be happy to run his experiments anywhere.  But Iowa provided an opportunity and a head coach who would at least have to listen to his ideas because his mom would yell “Kirk! Listen to Brian’s ideas.”

Ferentz had been nurturing the idea for undetermined football for some time.  He tells me that the idea is rooted predictably in rebellion.  He had grown up with the idea of staid Iowa football and as a teenager became obsessed with offense, with elaborate ways of marching down the field and scoring points.  He studied the then-novel spread offense, the air raid, the old run & shoot.  As a boy, he hid play sheets showing the run/pass option under his mattress.  But as he got older, Ferentz grew tired of exotic offensive looks.  He had in mind something better.

“Do you know about Napoleon in Russia?” he said.  I told him I did but he kept going as if I said I did not.  Ferentz, a history major and the owner of several books about horse-based  warfare, began to explain how, as the Grande Armée penetrated deeper into Russia, the Russian forces defeated them by retreating further, stretching the French supply lines as winter encroached upon it.  “I thought to myself, well in the Big Ten we have a hell of a winter.  What if we also have retreat?”  

Ferentz told me that his new offensive gameplan was not just based on mathematics and the impossible “divide by zero” principle but also had elements of psychology.  He showed me papers on the concept of “mirroring” where humans as social animals had an unconscious need to emulate other humans in a similar setting.  Therefore, instead of having his team model brilliant offensive behavior such as by completing multiple forward passes or earning first downs, his team would instead foster an environment hostile to offense.  His running backs would run pointlessly into defensive tackles.  His quarterbacks would throw the ball mainly to the turf.  The other team, unaware of basic human psychology, would find themselves also playing like dogshit subconsciously out of a fear of ostracization that resided in the vestigial lobes of our primate brains.  Pretty soon both quarterbacks would be hurling themselves into linebackers or letting snaps fly over their head but only one would be doing so by design.  “Everyone's trying to run plays that work.  But we don't.  That’s the advantage right there,” he said to me as he drilled his running backs on letting a ball hit them in the face.

The idea was as counterintuitive as it was brilliant.  An offense that functionally refused to act, that performed the minimum amount of offense allowed in a football game, would act as a fulcrum where the defense and special teams would have more and more opportunities to score points.  This process would become so efficient, at least according to Ferentz’s calculations, that Iowa would become one of the highest-scoring teams in the country.  And this year he was going to find out.

It was unclear around the program whether Kirk Ferentz was on board with his son’s program or simply didn’t notice.  I tried speaking to him about this, but during our brief allotted interview time he simply squinted at me and ate an entire white onion like an apple.  

I had found a new innovation.  My publisher told me to go ahead and embed myself with the Iowa offense during training camp for the 2023 season.  To make things even more interesting, Ferentz had Iowa’s athletic director add in clauses to his own contract about how many points the team would score.  I was nervous about fitting in, so I started wearing hats and coach-style sunglasses and constantly spitting and calling things “horseshit” until I seamlessly blended into the sideline. That summer, I observed Iowa secretly installing new drills that no one had ever seen: fumbling, taking idiotic penalties at the exact wrong time, and summoning the punt team.  My publisher sold the film rights for $12 million.

It was obvious that Ferentz had stumbled onto a revolution in football strategy.  No one in the Big Ten knew what as coming.  No one in the football press knew this would happen, except for one person: me.

Please enjoy my next project Planet of The Apes: How NFTs Reshaped the Global Economy.

Lock In Success The Mike Locksley Way

 

And when it ended, all Mike Locksley wanted from me was an explanation. I told him I was desperate and that I needed money.  More than that, I wanted a shot-- I spent all day answering calls and turning people down on my boss's behalf as they tried to throw money and plaudits at him, but no one ever called and asked for me.  He told me this was not a road to success the Mike Locksley way.  I know, I said.  I had read all about it in his papers.

I had been working as the assistant for legendary sports personality ghostwriter Roddy Pfampfor about eight months.  My novel, an experimental work about hypotheticals and the objectivity of "truth" that I explored by writing about something happening and then writing "or did it?" right after or sometimes in a footnote, had been rejected by 71 small presses, journals, quarterlies, websites and even some 'zines, and I had just been fired from a job proofreading manifestos.  I got the job with Pfamp after seeing a bizarre ad for a "Literary Fetchman" in the print shop where I was picking up another copy of my manuscript that I was going to send to a publisher that specialized in vintage microwave owner's manuals.  I learned that I was the only one who answered that ad, and soon I found myself at the right hand of Roddy Pfamp.

Pfamp was not a household name, but most people encountered him at some point by picking up one of his ghostwritten memoirs.  He written hundreds, including The Hat Had It Coming by Lou Piniella, Bill Laimbeer's Combat Literature, and Climbing to the Majors: A Matt Stairs Story.  Pfamp was a ghostwriter's ghostwriter, always refusing credit and press.  On any occasion where he had to be credited as an "as told to" or even a "with," he always used a different pen name; no one knew that Losing to Win by Matt Millen with Herb Nadacky was by the same author as Winning to Lose by Marv Levy as told to Larry "Gred" Gredsonof.  Pfamp also refused to be photographed and wore elaborate disguises every time he met with an author in order to maintain his air of mystery.

Pfamp needed an assistant because he had been seriously injured on his last assignment.  No one knew that Pfamp had another secret career as the ghostwriter for the entire literary output of famed sportswriter Warren "Plaid" Blanton.  Blanton had been a fixture in the sports press for decades, known for his outrageous participation stunts, his love for an exotic form of Flemish badminton, and his ever-present pipe.  What no one knew was that everything under Blanton's byline was actually written by Roddy Pfamp.  Blanton never wrote a word of his book Fly Me To The Ground chronicling his attempt to win a home-made flying contraption contest nor did he write the famous prank article where he invented a legendary baseball player named "Mickey Mantle," which bamboozled an entire generation of Baby Boomers. Blanton was a handsome man who sounded vaguely European despite having grown up entirely in the United States and who divided his time between the literary fête circuit and by expounding from his book-lined study in documentaries about boxing, squash, joust injuries.  The two had met when the they were covering a varsity squinting competition.  Blanton was a young stringer for Cudgel, and the two of them essentially invented the Plaid Blanton persona over a drunken, weeks-long bacchanal that resulted in Pfamp ghostwriting Blanton's first "I Say" column and Blanton purchasing his first ascot.  

Pfamp's injury occurred when he was writing a book about Blanton secretly joining the new Slamball revival.  What people didn't realize is that Pfamp also silently joined in these stunts, working alongside Blanton as a lion-tamer, monster jam driver, and competitor in the New England Maritime Salty Sea Dog competition.  Pfamp felt he needed to join the Slamball league disguised as someone named Titus Slamballicus despite being 77 years old, and he instantly severed 70% of his leg ligaments on his first attempted slam.

It was not particularly fun to work for Roddy Pfamp.  I thought he would be full of interesting and colorful stories about the famous sports-men he met, but he was gruff and quick to anger.  I'm not sure he ever learned my name.  Instead he just called me "egghead" because of the remarkably round and admittedly somewhat bulbous shape of my skull.  "You, Egghead, get me the 1959 Almanack of Yachting Winds," is something he might say.  Or "How can I get it into your head to get no pulp orange juice? I'm speaking literally, how does anything penetrate that cranium?"  I brought up my writing often and even left copies of my manuscript around in areas where he would normally read it but he became so agitated even seeing it that a doctor told me that I had to burn it in front of him or he might suffer from a rare condition common in old, mean writers called Literary Agita.

My main job, aside from helping with the basic household tasks, was dealing with Pfamp's voluminous correspondence.  Even in his ailing state, publishers bombarded him with requests.  Sports personalities needed memoirs, magazine profiles, and apologies written on the notes app on their phones and posted to social media.  I was told to turn them all down.  I learned that this was Pfamp's preferred technique.  He had not accepted a pitch for decades.  Instead, the publishers and editors he preferred to work with and those who knew how to handle him all understood how to find him.  Others who didn't know him thought they could win him over with elaborate gestures.  One publisher, desperate to sign him onto an untitled Rony Seikaly project, sent over fourteen singing telegrams.  Another disguised himself as a meter reader from the city in order to get an audience with Pfamp, who then chased him from his apartment with a game-used Mickey Morandini bat.  Others sent elaborate meals, expensive liquor, blank checks.  Every day, I sifted through a pile of proposals and sent pointed letters to them on Pfamp's letterhead telling them to buzz off.

I was tired, frustrated, and broke when I found a small packet buried under some papers.  While Pfamp rejected all proposals on sight, he still read all of them in the off-chance something special caught his eye and also so he could ridicule the book when it was inevitably published by one of his many ghostwriter rivals.  But he had not seen this one.  It had gotten lost among his notes for an abandoned project called A Life In Fifteen Shoves by Charles Oakley that ended in a shoving match. The packet held a proposal for a book to be titled Lock In Success, a life advice manual from a fellow named Mike Locksley.  The offer was a truly astronomical sum.  I began to get an idea.

Because of his elaborate disguise regimen and reclusive personal life, almost no one knew what Roddy Pfamp actually looked like.  I could easily present myself to this Locksley, write down his Business Secrets from sports, and produce a book very quickly.  The money would allow me to quit this job and tell Pfamp where to cram it while knowing that my giant head had outwitted him and then self-publish my masterpiece and even market it to the discerning literary public at various high society functions.  It was a scheme so devious and simple that I chuckled to myself when I first game up with it.  I wrote the publisher and told them that Roddy Pfamp accepted and then detailed instructions for payment to his assistant who handles those sorts of things for him as he was too busy to get bogged down in the details of business (unlike Mike Locksley, I presumed).

I figured that Locksley would appreciate a punctual man, but I my planned subterfuge to get several hours away from Pfamp had not worked.  He had a difficult time getting his VCR to work and he wanted to watch an old Olympic fencing match from 1984 to heckle the participants, but the tape was old and worn and Pfamp kept telling me I was causing "cranial interference" so by the time I was able to pry myself from him and get to Locksley's hotel room, I was nearly an hour late.  

Mike Locksley, I learned, is not a man you want to keep waiting.  He is detailed and precise and busy.  I knew from previous research that he was a football coach, and that implied to me a certain type of disciplinary fetish. I told him I had been detained by car problems and began inventing an elaborate story about a zoo truck that had unleashed two or three irate rhinoceros on the main highway.  "Let me tell you what Nick Saban used to say about excuses," he said.  I took it that Nick Saban was some sort of football personality that I should know about.  "The minute you give me an excuse, you excuse yourself from consideration."  He stared at me and then smiled, so I let out a nervous chuckle as if to say yes that is something Nick Saban would say.  "Well you made it here, let's see if we can work together."

He handed me a a sheaf of papers.  It was an outline based on some motivational seminars he had been given, some anecdotes, life lessons, etc. that would form the basis of the book.  Lock in Success, they were called.  There were a lot of football metaphors.  This was a problem.  Though I worked for a major sportswriter, I had no interest or knowledge of any sort of sport or sporting pursuit.  I despised them and saw them as grunting circuses for troglodytes.  I had no working knowledge of football whatsoever.  I suppose, in my excitement for the scheme, I had not ever considered that ghostwriting for a football coach might at some point require learning about football.  Locksley told me to look over the materials and come back in a week with a few samples so we could see if we were on the same page.  

On the way home, I started to read.  "When life gives you fourth and inches, don't punt."  I was lost.  I tried to subtly get Pfamp to explain football to me, every time I brought it up he said "You, Egghead.  You're blocking the afternoon sun.  Move that melon of yours before I freeze."  I even tried to research football at the local library, but a quick glance at some books made everything seem even more complicated.  The deadline loomed.  

It was four AM and I had consumed several bags of coffee at the time (I had lost my coffee pot in an ill-fated night of gambling with my old peers at an experimental writing workshop that I eventually left after exposing them all as charlatans and at this time I was simply chewing the beans).  I was set to meet Locksley in only two days.  It was impossible to ask for an extension because that would be a dreaded excuse.  I began looking at the pages again, my eyes barely able to focus, when I had a brilliant idea, one so simple yet ingenious that I could not believe it did not strike me earlier.  I would simply make up football.  A parallel system that had its own equally confounding jargon and terminology.  Because Locksley was a master coach and technician, the lay reader would only assume he was talking about stratagems so complex and diabolical that he or she could not grasp it and would simply skim through it to get to the valuable life lessons.

I began writing.  Now, instead of facing something called fourth and short, which I imagined to be some sort of adverse position, the quartered-back would be cowering in Strife Position (as a writer, I could not simply holster my literary weapons altogether).  I assumed one of the appeals of football was its violence and mayhem so I wrote many anecdotes about football players fighting out of dire circumstances by kicking and biting the opposition.  In fact, I enjoyed the concept of sports-biting so much that I invented a designated chomper-back, a strong-jawed specialist who would be lowered onto the field in a cage and then left to set upon anyone in his path with savage abandon.

I became so taken with my own version of football that I quickly abandoned Locksley's materials to elaborate on the astonishing game that flowed from my pen.  Once every thirteen minutes, the visiting team may legally perform a Reverse Oxen.  During the fourteenth period, players may craft artificial limbs to attach to themselves including tails, claws, mandibles, and fins.  In certain conditions, the coach can call for the game to take place entirely within a body of water where both teams must attack each other on skiffs.  There are times when the ball was illegal but it was only possible to figure it out by deciphering an elaborate riddle.  Points are awarded in lengthy arbitration hearings.  

I was very excited to present my new vision of football to Locksley.  As a discerning sportsman, I figured he would easily see the superior qualities of my version of the sport and become an ardent promoter.  This is not what happened.  Locksley was perplexed.  "This was a very simple assignment.  I did almost all of the work.  I know people respond to these life lessons packaged with football because I did these presentation to literally thousands of people.  It's as if you have no idea what you're doing whatsoever."  

I decided to switch tactics.  I told him that I ghostwrote for a lot of people in a lot of sports.  It would be too easy to get mixed up.  For example, what if I was writing a memoir about a tennis player and then a swimmer and pretty soon I had the tennis player doing laps at Roland Garros?  He frowned.  I explained that in order to clear my head in between projects I practiced a mental technique called "shamanic forgetting" where I would attempt to completely rid myself of all information about one sport.  I had just done a baseball book, and had completely cleared it out of my head.  "I could not tell you a batsman from a quickjobber," I said.  He continued to frown and stare.  He said "I'm sorry but you seem like you are really full of shit."

I apologized and confessed to the ruse, telling him of my desperation for money and literary fame.  This did not move him.  Another excuse.  This time he didn't laugh.  I was ruined and humiliated.  Locksley would get word back to the publisher and, though I controlled most communications with Pfamp from the outside world, the ghostwriting community was a small world, and someone would quickly tell him what I had done.  I could not face the browbeating.  I simply stopped going to Pfamp's house with no explanation.

Several months later, I was walking past the bookstore when something caught my eye.  Lock In Success.  Dozens of copies of it in the window.  The sign said "best-seller" and "top book for 45 weeks in the Life Advice With Football Metaphors genre.  I ran in and grabbed it.  In small print, it said "with Reginald Ox."  I knew it immediately.  It was a Pfamp.

The Matt Rhules: A Guide to Success on the Football Field and in Life

 Nobody who leaves wants to return to sportswriting, but the profession has a way of grabbing you and never letting you escape. I had never been particularly interested in the genre, but after one of my freelance pieces entitled “John Daly Has Gout” gained traction, I found myself on the sports interview circuit. “Rod Beck picks baked beans out of his mustache,” I wrote in my lede about sitting with the reliever in his trailer outside the Iowa Cubs ballpark. “Jeff George slices up a steak the same way he slices a defense.” That sort of thing. I signed up for the pro bocce ball circuit. I tried to stop a Greg Ostertag slap shot. In one terrifying evening, I gambled on demolition derby at the Grenlee County Fair with Phil Mickelson and we ended up fleeing for our lives from a father and son team driving a half-totaled Chrysler Imperial that attempted to ram us because Michelson owed them forty grand that he didn’t have because he lost it all on the horse game. And then I stopped.

After a few decades, I lost my interest in sports personalities. Sure, every once in awhile I would get kicked in the genitals by a UFC fighter or get bitten by a professional biting coach that in order to critique Mike Tyson’s technique, but for the most part it was boring dinners with boring people. “Troy Aikman orders the Chicken Kiev.” “Bill Wennington buys his own McDonald's sandwich.” Etc. So I left the magazine and transitioned to novels. Here, I was not bound to what athletes said and did but could finally play in the greatest and most exhilarating literary space imaginable– my own imagination.

It took months of research and exploring my own psyche– I abandoned my family for six months to take a bevy of mind-expanding psychedelics derived from wildflowers and cacti– and fits and starts of experimentation before finally releasing my masterpiece called Charlatan-In-Chief: Operation Hole In One: A Clark Craggler Novel. The book was a mixture of roman á clef, autofiction, magical realism, and thriller about how distinguished sportswriter Clark Craggler, who is also secretly an operative with an élite government intelligence unit where its members are deployed as civilians until “activated” by their mysterious boss known only as “Magma” in dire national emergency situations. Craggler goes from writing a tiresome feature on a star quarterback’s dreadful diet regimen to stop a catastrophe: catching the sitting president repeatedly cheating at golf. His job is to write an exposé of the president taking too many mulligans and generously giving himself lays and even altering the scorecard, which would be designed to trigger a congressional investigation, but while investigating him, he gets tied up in a sinister presidential plot to destroy the country’s golf courses with a piece of secret military technology that instantly divots acres of pristine greens from low-earth orbit.

Unfortunately, Charlatan-In-Chief: Operation Hole In One: A Clark Craggler Novel was not the critical and commercial darling I hoped it would be. Reviewers savaged it. One called it a “masturbatory doofus fantasia.” Another had the headline “Hole In One” but the art on the article was a picture of a toilet. The New York Times didn’t even review it, not even a capsule. It was my first book not to make it onto the bestseller list after I had easily done it with Speaking Franch: Dennis Franchione In His Own Words and even Of Weis and Men: Charlie Weis on Leadership on the Gridiron and the Boardroom. My publishers told me in no uncertain terms that Clark Craggler would not return for the sequel Charlatan-in-Jail. If I ever wanted to make money writing again, I’d have to start interviewing sports people again.

It was a soggy, muggy summer day in Lincoln, Nebraska. I pulled up to the elaborate practice facility and a public relations person took me over to Matt Rhule’s office. When I walked in, there was no one in his chair, so I said “Coach Rhule?” He popped up from behind a massive desk and whipped a little foam football-shaped stress ball at my face.

“Think fast!” Rhule yelled as it knocked my glasses askew and nearly made me drop my pen. I looked up, confused and vaguely dazed.

“That’s a Matt Rule,” the coach said. “Number thirteen. If you can’t think fast, you’ll be slow, in life.” He sat down and put his hands behind his head. “That’s the book right there. Matt Rhules. Branding. Writes itself. Have a seat.”

The PR assistant pulled down a screen and started fussing with a computer and then I saw the presentation come up: The Matt Rhules: A Guide to Success on the Football Field and in Life.

“The Matt Rhules System. We provide these rules and then some examples from my life or from Nebraska football and how they apply to people’s lives. For example, Matt Rhule: Protect Your Quarterback.” The presentation showed a picture of an offensive tackle pancaking a blitzing linebacker. “In football terms, it’s the most important part of the passing game. But people have people in their lives around them that are important. Their 'quarterbacks' if you will.  And you need to stop them from getting blitzed by Issues.”

The next slide clicked over to a black and white picture of Coach Rhule pointing aggressively. “Matt Rhule: Don’t let your mouth cash checks your body can’t cash.”

“You get it, right? We’re going to do a whole book with these Matt Rhules. It’s branded content. That's where the money is.” He handed me a tote bag that has “Matt Rhules” spelled out in training tape stuck to it. “These are just a prototype. Once we get published and up and running, we’ll have it all: shirts, bags, fuck even diapers. Matt Rhule: Don’t shit on me.” He looked at me as I stared at him, bewildered. “That’s a joke. That’s a fake Matt Rhule.”

“Well, that's the pitch,” he said. “I’ve got some rules. You’ve got to tie them together. Get them from football to apply to people’s lives or whatever. Publisher said you do this stuff all the time.”

I tried hard to hide how aghast I was at this comparison. Sure there were some superficial similarities to this and James Dolan: Six Chords to Success but those ignored the obvious literary merit of that project where I explored the craft of songwriting and owning one's one fleet of helicopters. But then I remembered that I had a time share payment and a lease on a Sea-Doo that I purchased from David Cone, so I swallowed my pride. “Yes. I work with famous sports personalities and help put their vision on the page.”

“Perfect,” he said, clapping his hands. “We all have our talents. Here’s a Matt Rhule: From Each According to His Ability, To Each According To His Means.”

“Isn’t that Karl Marx?” I said.

“Then fix it up and make it a Matt Rhule. It's not that hard.” He handed me a thumb drive. "Get started and I’ll see you in a week.”

I drove off into the rain to my Lincoln hotel. It looked like I would be here for awhile.

The thumb drive contained the presentation I just saw (Rhule referred to it as a “deck” for some reason) and a nearly inscrutable word document containing various Matt Rhules or at least jumbles of phrases that I was supposed to shape into coherent Matt Rhules. The rest of the files were various samples of logos and an MP3 of a Matt Rhule theme song that he had made himself, affecting a sort of James Dolanish growl-croon.

Several of the files contained short videos of Rhule whipping his head around to stare at the camera. “Matt Rhule,” he says in one of them. “Give it your all or give it up.” Then there is a short guitar riff as he nods at the camera. That one was not included in the text list. I start to divide them between Canonical Matt Rhules and Supplemental Matt Rhules.

Day two. I woke up in my Lincoln hotel and for several brief seconds I had no idea what I was doing there (I had dreamed that was giving a talk about my new novel to a large panel except in the dream it was called Air Fraud One: A Harold Chuck Novel and it was about how the president was somehow concealing being a bear from the public and was going to eat too many salmon. I was laying into a person who I immediately understood as being my sworn literary nemesis by I think also accusing him of being secretly a bear when the nature of my trip to Lincoln came into depressing focus.

For hours I stared at the Matt Rhules until the bleakness of my job overwhelmed me. I could not for the life of me come up with new Matt Rules, and it was nearly impossible to write stories based on the ones he had. “Matt Rhule: Always try to win, in football and in business.” Instead, I started daydreaming where instead of Matt Rhule winning on the football field, it was Clark Craggler defiantly laying out the president’s Golf Crimes to a congressional subcommittee. That was what winning looked like in life and in literature. But Craggler had been crushed, much like how the Carolina Panthers were crushed by the San Francisco 49ers resulting in Rhule’s ouster from the NFL.

I could not sleep at night and I decided to find something to eat. I got in my car and began aimlessly driving around. Soon, I had left Lincoln altogether. Something compelled me to keep moving. I drove for hours and hours. There was no radio, no music, nothing but the sound of the car and the road and the sight of my haunted eyes in the reflection of the windows,

The sun rose. I found myself at the outskirts of a park, a federal wilderness area. I left my car and hiked for hours, deeper and deeper into an unmarked wilderness. Finally, exhausted, I stopped and opened my backpack. There it was. Wrapped in some foil, the last of my iboga root that I had bought on a retreat from what I was told would be a shaman but turned out to be a man named Daryl who I later learned was on the run from the FBI for a crime described to me as “dojo fraud.” I prepared the powder and ate a few starburst that were in there as well.

The forest floor dropped from under me and I began to float through a miasma of consciousness, not just mine but the very concept of human consciousness. It is very difficult for me to describe in words what happened to me on this journey but I entered a mental plane beyond sanity and beyond the bonds of this physical world and, just as I thought I would never return and be forced to float forever in a cosmic goo, I remembered the Matt Rhules. Matt Rhule: I am bound by the laws of the corporeal. I awoke days later from my psychadelic odyssey. My legs ached as if I had walked for miles, but I had not moved from that spot. I gingerly made my way back to the car and drove back toward Lincoln, stopping only to record any  thoughts on the Matt Rhules that materialized in the shimmers of empty highway. It had come to me out there in the wilderness– the Matt Rhules were not a simple marketing gimmick for a football coach, but this goateed oaf had somehow stumbled onto the central organizing principle of life itself.

I arrived back at the hotel. It was no longer enough to think of myself as a literary superstar, but I was now a sort of holy man, a person put on earth to explain the precepts of the Matt Rhules. For the rest of the week, I fell into a feverish trance as I made elaborate notes, wrote hundreds of pages, and added compendia and appendices to the original Matt Rhules. Matt Rhule: Do not try to “fold” space time into a single locus, instead try to “layer” it. Matt Rhule: My brain is merely a vessel for cosmic static. Matt Rhule: Organization and preparation will score a “touchdown” for the football team or for your small business.

At last, I felt I had something to present to the Coach. I piled up my manuscript, which I had moved from the computer to a series of coffee filters loosely stapled to together in pleasing geometric patterns and put on my “Rhunic,” a tunic fashioned from hotel bedsheets and left for the practice facility. No one wanted to let me in when I told them I had urgent business to disseminate the teachings of Coach Rhule to the wider cosmos but then when I reminded them I was the book guy they finally let me in.

“Coach,” I said. “I have sat in the forest. I have opened my forehead. I have let the Rhules seep into my primary consciousness and beyond-thought. I am ready to accept them. I am ready to adopt them. I am ready to show people how to apply them on the football field and in the boardroom.” I dropped my coffee filter manifesto on his desk.

“What the heck are you talking about?” Rhule said as he turned to me (he was looking at emails during most of my speech). “Oh that Matt Rhules thing. Yeah, I thought about it and it seems kind of cheesy. Kind of obvious, you know?”

“Hey, you know what I was thinking now would be really cool? Instead of a book telling people what to do, what if it was a novel where I caught the commissioner of the NFL cheating at golf? The Commissioner of Lies, how about that? A Mack Racker novel. You ever think about writing something like that?”

Roar From the Valley: How Leaders Win the Winner’s Way: A Frank Jackman Novel by James Franklin

 

I did not set out to become a ghostwriter for sports personalities, but when the publisher has you in purgatory, there’s almost nothing you won’t write in order to get out. You would be surprised to see which towering literary figures of the twentieth century produced worked in the ghostwriting mines; consider You Are Not Loyal, Or A Man by Pat Riley with Marv Grobott (long rumored to be a pseudonym for Don DeLillo) or I Pity the Drool: The Dog Training Secrets of Mr. T (an open secret that it was written and tested by Joyce Carol Oates, who was bitten dozens of times during research). I found myself in the crosshairs of the publisher after my novel I Bet You Philistines Won’t Even Read This and its followup I Guess You Didn’t were both released to deafening silence in the book press. I was crushed and fell into a months-long drugs-bender where I repeatedly claimed that I had written the book Dubliners and spent weeks affixing my name to every copy I could find with stickers. They banned me from 24 New York book stores and thirteen branches of the library. I genuinely thought I had produced the 1914 Irish masterpiece. “Jaysus,” I screamed as the city’s burliest galoots from Library Security worked me over in an alley.

I was told I would have to pay back my advance on my newest essay collection War Crimes and Cigarettes, but I had already spent it on a really cool jacket that had a picture of my face on the back, so I was in no position to fight my editor when he demanded that I write Roar From the Valley: How Leaders Win the Winner’s Way, for James Franklin, the coach of the Penn State football team. “Wait, isn’t that the…” I said, and my publisher said “Don’t bring it up.”

I met Franklin at his spacious office in State College after a long and frustrating interpretative study of various parking restrictions.

“Three minutes late,” Franklin said to me before I could even introduce myself. “We don’t lollygag here at Penn State. We run. You owe me three laps.”

I laughed. I thought he was joking. He was not. “Three laps!” he said. “Of the office?” I replied. That’s when the whistle came out. He tooted at me as I took three halfhearted laps around his spacious office, coughing and sputtering since I had just finished about four cigarettes on the ride over and make it a point to refuse to exercise because of Art.

Franklin told me now that I’ve earned his time, and it was time to talk about his book. 

“You know, I don’t want to just crap out another coach book about lessons for leadership and winning,” he said. Well, I did. I figured that I’d write a few thousand words about being in shorts and yelling at people and how it applied to The Boardroom and I’d be free to finish my essay about how I was sick of seeing this Pynchon guy everywhere, so when Franklin told me he wanted to get away from that idea, I started to get a little worried.

“I think it would be better not to focus on me at all. Or at least not James Franklin, the man, the visionary, the leader, etc. Have you ever heard of myths and legends?"

I told him I had.

“I want to create something beyond myself. James Franklin is a bag of bones, blood, and flesh. But what if I could forge something larger than myself? What if I, if we, made something that could transcend time and space and would be a way to impart the things I have learned as a Coach, as a Leader and as a Man in a way that would go beyond football and live for eternity?”

He got up from the desk and flipped over a whiteboard. On it, he had written the words “Frank Jackman.”

“Frank Jackman. FBI. CIA. An elite unit that no one has ever heard of. A man of action, thought, philosophy. A fighter. A lover.”

He flipped over another whiteboard. It said Roar From the Valley: How Leaders Win the Winner’s Way: A Frank Jackman Novel.

“I need to know right now if you can do this or if you’re wasting my time.”

“Ok,” I said.

Franklin was a busy man, so I fit into his schedule. I spent late nights in his office listening to him tell me Frank Jackman stories or in the film room as he shadowboxed against his imaginary antagonists, uually organized rings of thieves or street gangs that talked like they were in the 1950s. In the end, after several months, the book fell by the wayside. The publisher wanted the standard football coach book that could move units. He was not in the eternal myths business.  I was almost relieved.  I was already planning to work under the pseudonym Tad Craddler, which I had used previously to send abusive letters to the Paris Review, but I could tell Franklin was disappointed.  So, with his permission, here are some selections from Roar from the Valley: How Leaders Win The Winners Way: A Frank Jackman Novel.

I.

Frank Jackman was not usually the biggest man in the fight, but he was always the last man. Jackman had studied every martial art you have ever heard of and several that you haven’t, but he didn’t often need them. First he would talk to the suspect. “There are 27 bones in the hand and wrist,” Jackman would say in a menacing growl-whisper, and then he would patiently explain how he would break each and every one of them. That was enough for all but the most determined henchman to lay down their wrenches and bo staffs and give themselves up. For the most obstinate, Jackman had to give a demonstration, a little presentation that he put together made up of punches and sometimes kicks.

II.

Frank Jackman was the greatest quarterback in the history of Pennsylvania high school football. He was also had three masters degrees in physics, forensics, and classics, and was the first person to own a street-legal ATV. By age 29, he headed up the FBI’s Motorcycle and Ninja Heists Division. His division head, Agent Lou Ryers, wanted to promote him to a desk job, but he refused. He had offers to join the CIA, where they would let him create his own elite unit and also the NSA, DIA, and ZIA, an organization so secret that no one knew it even existed. But Jackman stayed put. He had his team here, in the FBI, and he had a really cool apartment that was also a dojo and it would be an enormous hassle to move all of his swords.

III.

“Only seven, Jackman? Must be getting old and slow,” Moose said after throwing a masked jewel thief into a trash compactor. Moose Pfuncher blocked for Jackman in high school and college and had joined the FBI with Jackman after graduation. That was a challenge. Moose was not built for books, and it took Jackman months of preparation to get him through his entrance exams. In the end, they rigged up an elaborate mirror and semafor system to get him through his final multiple choice test, but no one in the FBI would complain at the results. No one other than Jackman had ever beaten him in a fight, and Moose was also great at intimidating suspects into confession by biting things that absolutely should not be bitten into. Jackman also knew that Moose would take a bullet for him– in fact, he had, three times. Once in the leg, once the elbow, and once in the buttocks. Moose loved to guilt Jackman into doing things by wistfully pointing at his damaged butt, which is how the two of them briefly owned a karate-themed bar and grill until they got shut down by the city because troublemakers kept getting thrown through a jukebox.

A thief popped out behind Moose and prepared to hit him with a priceless antique hat rack, but Jackman threw an enormous diamond and hit him in the forehead, knocking him into a pile of subdued criminals. “That’s eight,” Jackman said.

IV.

Frank Jackman arrived at the scene. Everything was neat and clean. The glass cases were intact and undisturbed, yet he immediately ascertained that they were empty. The prize Jewels of Happy Valley seemed to have vanished. “Eddie what have you got?” he said. Eddie was straight from the academy, constantly writing in his notebook. You have to look up from that book and take a look with your eyes, is what Jackman always told him, but the kid was all right. “Clean as a whistle, Agent J,” Eddie said. The thieves had left not as much as a hair or clothing fiber at the scene. Jackman assessed the room, looking for marks. Anything subtle could be a tell. Once, he determined that a gang of thieves had used fake tracks to make it look like they had driven through the Louvre on motorcycles when they had simply descended from the ceiling, but Jackman had utilized his extensive knowledge of motocross to instantly tell they were not the type of tires that a real thief would use for a museum. The French government had wanted to hire him to to lead their entire art heist department at a time when thieves were hauling off Monets and Manets at a rate of dozens per week. “Non,” Jackman said.

Jackman analyzed the surroundings. “It doesn’t make sense, Agent J,” Eddie said. “It’s like they were never here.”

“Funny you say that, Eddie,” Jackman said, staring at an empty jewel case with a loup. “What I’m thinking is that it’s the jewels that were never here.” He took out his phone and called Walleye Baxton back at HQ. “Get me a list of every train carrying a jewel shipment to the Happy Valley Jewel Museum in the last six months,” he said. These weren’t art thieves, he determined. These were train robbers.

V.

Jackman clung to the side of the train as it careened around a mountain curve going far too fast. He had managed to detach dozens of cars containing shale gas and now only the car with a crate carrying the Lion’s Fang jewel was attached to the engine. He steadied himself and climbed the ladder to the roof. And there they were: the perpetrators. One of the thieves one the roof was crawling toward the engine hoping to slow it down but kept getting knocked back by the wind. Jackman laughed as he got into a tactical crouch. This gang may have been made up of courageous and brilliant master thieves not afraid of committing cold-blooded murders, but they clearly were not versed in Train Combat. But Frank Jackman was. He was certified to fight on thirteen different types of train and one of those carts that you push up and down. 

He quickly advanced on the fleeing thief and grabbed him. “Time to complete your training,” he said. That’s when the throwing star flew up and knocked the tiny sunglasses off of Jackman’s face. He immediately ascertained that there was another hostile on the train, directly in front of him, based on the trajectory and motion of the throwing star. He let the thief he was holding go and he yelped as he rolled across the roof of the train desperately looking for something to grab onto. Then he heard the throwing star thief yell over the roar of the wind and train engine. “It’s a pity you came all this way to die, Agent Frank Jackman.”