Page 71 of Game On | AllFreeNovel

“Bullshit,” he cut me off. “Talk to me.”

“It’s just a lot of fucking pressure,” I whispered. The words sounded pathetic when I said them out loud. My whole life revolved around playing football. I was supposed to be on top of my game.

“The game?”

“The potential of being drafted.” I swallowed hard. Ever since the first game, I couldn’t get it out of my head. A bad game now meant something. It showed the world I wasn’t good enough. I knew how to navigate the pressure from my dad. I’d done it since I was a kid, but scouts? Scouts didn’t care about potential. They cared about performance and numbers. “Everything I do matters, and what if I screw up this chance?”

“Every player fucks up, Theo,” Rhodes replied, his voice almost painfully gentle. “Every single one of them. Do I need to put together a list of every player to screw up this year alone? Because I will.”

A laugh almost escaped me because I knew he’d do it. I knew he’d spend hours doing exactly that, and for what? For me to keep screwing up?

“But what if I screw up this chance?” I asked.

“You’ll screw up a lot, but you won’t screw up this chance.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because you’re talented, Theo, and you have the yips,” he reassured me, and I groaned. Leave it to Rhodes to diagnose my existential crisis with the dumbest-sounding term in sports. The stupid yips. I hated that he was probably right, too. Thinking harder only made me hesitate. Hesitating just made me play worse. And the worse I played, the more thinking I did. I’d managed to trap myself in a loop I couldn’t seem to escape. “You’re stuck inside your head.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t play.” The words slipped out before I could stop them.

“Oh, no.” He shook his head quickly, and my heart sank a little. “No, no, no. You’re going to play, and you’re going to stop thinking about scouts, the draft, the NFL, and everything else. You’re going to go out there and play with your best friends. You’re going to go out there and bring the same energy you brought in the locker room. Give me the guy dancing on the bench and belting out Queen. Give me the guy who has fun playing football because that’s the guy that’ll play well, not the guy stressing about how he looks to the crowd.”

My chest tightened. That guy felt so far out of reach at this point, like I’d somehow left him in the locker room.

“Okay.” I wasn’t sure I believed him.

“And when the game is over, you and me… we’re going to talk,” he continued. “I want to hear about what you enjoyed.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Rhodes interjected. “There’s a time and place for critiquing how you played, and this isn’t it. Go out there and have fun, Theo.”

My lips pressed together tightly. I wasn’t sure I could go out there and have fun. Somewhere along the way, the pressure had eaten up any enjoyment I had for the game.

“That’s an order, little wolf,” Rhodes added under his breath, saying words only I was meant to hear. My gaze collided with his. For one reckless heartbeat, everything else faded as the familiarity of the word folded around me in a way that had nothing to do with football. He’d whispered that name a hundred times over, and in those moments, I’d learned to surrender. I’d learned to trust him. To understand that he knew what I needed better than I did.

Right here in the hallway, he was asking me to do the same thing. To trust him. To trust that, as my coach, he knew better than I did. He knew me better than I did—at least in that moment.