Football Champ by Tim Green Read Free Book Online Page B

when he handed her the keys.
    “Not bad,” Seth finally said, tucking the football they’d been using into a mesh bag filled with others, “but the biggest thing is going to be stopping the run.”
    Seth circled the large stone swimming pool and disappeared behind some bushes under the deck overlooking the pool and lawn. When he reappeared, he was dragging a huge blue tackling dummy.
    “We gotta get you tackling low and hard and wrapping up with your arms,” Seth said. “That’s the key. It won’t do us any good to get you to where the ball’s going if you can’t make the tackle.”
    “If Tate can do it,” Troy said, getting into a ready stance on the lawn, “then I sure can.”
    “Hey,” his mom said, “don’t say that just because she’s a girl.”
    “Yeah,” Seth said, grunting with the dummy, “you’ll get us all in trouble.”
    “I just mean she’s pretty skinny,” Troy said.
    “It’s not about size,” Seth said, peeking out from behind the big blue bag. “You saw that today.”
    “I’ll let you two bang around,” Troy’s mom said, wiping her brow. “I’m going to get a cold drink.”
    “Today it was about brains,” Troy said, grinning at Seth as his mom walked away.
    “But this will be about heart,” Seth said, stepping aside after settling the dummy, whose sand-weighted base kept it upright, in the middle of the lawn. “Come on. I probably should have done this first, to see if the whole thing is worth even trying.
    “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
    Troy took a running start and unloaded on the dummy with all his might. Seth just shook his head. Troy hit it over and over, but Seth merely grunted and kept shaking his head.
    Troy rubbed his shoulder and finally asked, “What?”
    “You gotta hit it better than that,” Seth said, “and wrap your arms around the dummy when you tackle. You hit like that and they’ll run right through you like you’re a wet paper bag.”
    Troy’s stomach knotted tight. He felt his face go hot. He backed up and went at it again.
    “Man,” Seth said, still shaking his head.
    “What?” Troy demanded, getting up and brushing off the grass.
    “This ain’t offense,” Seth said. “You’re on defense now. Hit the thing, will you?”
    “I am ,” Troy said, fuming.
    “Really hit it,” Seth said, barking at Troy with the gruff edge to his voice he used when he coached the Tigers. “Not like some tap dancer. Come on . Get mad.”
    Being compared to a tap dancer made Troy see red. He coiled his body and launched himself at the dummy with all the fury he possessed.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    “ SO ,” TATE ASKED , “ HE thinks you can play defense or he doesn’t?”
    Troy and Tate sat together, dangling their feet off the iron railroad bridge that crossed the Chattahoochee River not too far down the tracks from the back of Troy’s house. A fat white moon glared down at them, its light buttering the slab-sided ripples in the water below. Above the river, black wings flickered, darted, and dove—bats searching for a meal.
    “He said I got the basics down,” Troy said, “and I finally made a tackle he liked.”
    “Sounds like he was pretty rough on you,” Tate said.
    “Well, he’s our coach,” Troy said. “I want him to treat me like everybody else.”
    “Why wouldn’t he?” Tate asked.
    Troy felt something boiling up inside him he couldn’t really explain, an anger squeezed tight, making it fester. His hands gripped the cool, rusty metal girder above his head.
    “You think they’re going to get married?” he asked.
    “I don’t know, do you?” Tate asked quietly.
    “They kiss each other a lot,” Troy said, swatting at one of the few mosquitoes still alive this late in the fall. “But that’s not it. It’s the way they sometimes look at each other.”
    “That wouldn’t be a bad thing, right?” Tate asked. “Seth Halloway for your dad? I mean, Seth marrying your mom.”
    Troy clenched his teeth and expelled hot blasts of