The money? That’s mine. The ball? That too. But your mind? That’s up to you. Let’s roll.
The Moneyball Gangster
My van is a nice van. Mercedes-Benz Metris. Top-of-the-line stuff. I see a lot of service vans around the city where the dashboard is all covered in junk: candy wrappers, various colors of crumpled paper. Junk. Not mine though. Only thing that’s on my dash is one of those little sunflower guys that dances when it’s in the sunlight. Sometimes it matches the beat of the song I’m listening to. Pretty funny.
To be frank with you, I don’t really need a van. Way too much space. I could pack all my gear into a Ford Focus or something like that, but when you’re given the option to ride around in a fully-loaded Metris with free SiriusXM radio, you’d be a fool to not take it, and I’m no fool.
I pull up to my fourth and final stop of the day. “Suds on Sixth”, a nice little beer-and-smokes shop on Seventh Avenue. They used to be on Sixth, but one of those IV drip bars went in next door and the rent went way up, so they moved. Jerry, the owner, didn’t want to pay for a new sign, I guess. Jerry calls me in to fix his NFL Hot Tix machine all the time, but sometimes I think he just wants someone to talk to.
I throw the Metris into park, grab my diagnostic reader and few other tools out of the back of the van, and head in. Jerry’s there to greet me, wearing the same thing he always is. “There he is,” he says, and extends his hand for a shake. His palms are always a bit greasy and my hand comes away smelling like cheese. That’s fine, I’ll never turn down a handshake.
What’s the problem, Jere? We walk over to his machine. He’s got an older model, which is fine. Doesn’t really matter, no matter what the suits try to sell you every sixth months. Just update the software and you’ll be right as rain, I tell them. And Jerry does, even if he doesn’t quite understand how it works.
“I think there’s a guy in here,” Jerry explains. He raps on the front panel of the machine. “Like a little tiny guy or something.”
A guy? A little tiny guy? Are you sure?
He’s not sure, but he has a “hunch”. Customers have been complaining about strange, ugly sounds, such as “Oh, put it on ice, baby!” and “Right on the money, honey!” emanating from the machine, as well as the large pile of half-consumed cartons of heavy whipping cream that has grown about the feet of the machine. Bad catchphrases, and the cream was attracting mice.
I grow concerned as I, a man with seven-plus years of experience repairing NFL Hot Tix (as well as NBA Press Pass and MLB Scorecard) machines, have never heard of such a problem with one of our apparatuses. Never mind the bad, stupid catchphrases and the expanding dairy-drunk mouse population, but the machine has been printing Hot Tix from before our service existed. One customer, Jerry explains, ordered a ticket for Is Lamar Jackson The Real Deal? (a top seller these days), but received a printed rant about how Curtis Enis’ power-running style will open up Chicago’s offense. Twenty years out of date, and somehow also incorrect. Not up to company standards.
Another customer complained about receiving a ticket that once rubbed off, revealed a single image of former San Diego running back Natrone Means smiling and giving a thumbs up, with a large comic book-style heading that read “Natrone Means Business”. For a memorabilia collector, specifically those accruing relics of replacement-level running backs of the 1990s, these Hot Tix may be of some worth, be it monetary or sentimental. But for the Joe Sixpacks of the world, inserting their Money Chips into the machine in search of the hottest, most in-depth NFL takes of the day, these will simply not do.
Have you tried opening it up?
He hadn’t. He couldn’t quite remember where he had placed the master key. He lost his keychain somewhere between his home (the apartment above the store) and the late-night leapfrog club he attends, because it’s the last place an honest, hard-working man like him can play a decent game of leapfrog in this goddamned city. No problem, though. A good repairman always has plenty of extra keys on him, and I’m a good repairman. I slide my key in and turn.
Hyuuunngh.
That’s odd, I say to Jerry, as the machines are not programmed to moan when keys are inserted into them.
“See? Guy.” Jerry points to the machine. What once sounded ridiculous now seems legitimate. Is there a little guy inside this machine? How? I turn the key fully and crack the front panel open at the hinge.
The sound that sprung forth from the machine as I opened it was nothing short of blood-curdling. Quite possibly the worst sound any man, machine, or man-inside-machine has ever made. Jerry and I plug our ears as the machine lets out a howling, horrified yawp; a scream louder than any cotton-candy-addled child on a rollercoaster, or Michael Myers victim, could muster.
The scream subsides after a few seconds. You might be on to something with that “there’s a guy in here” theory, I tell Jerry.
“Yeah, there’s a guy in here, alright,” says the machine. The machine’s voice has a solidly Midwestern tinge to it, a mid-tone tenor soaked in Miller and hot Italian beef.
Jerry hits me on the arm, perhaps a bit harder than he intended to. “I told ya! Look at that!”
Where are you? I ask the voice from the machine.
“I’m in here,” it responds. “In the freakin’ ticket machine you so rudely opened.”
Sorry about that, I say to the inanimate object splayed open in front of me. Typically, I’m not one for such trite and silly matters, such as apologizing to a disembodied voice inside an NFL Hot Tix machine, but these are uncharted waters. Where are you, exactly, in the machine? I ask, clicking the switch on a pen-sized flashlight that makes the Law and Order “gong-gong” sound when turned on.
The machines are large, but not large enough to house a full-sized human being, so perhaps I was in search of a football pygmy, a field mouse of the gridiron. I shine the light around the inside of the machine. Blank tickets, the processing unit, the typical cast of red, blue, and yellow wires–but no miniscule man.
“You won’t find anything in there,” the voice says. “I’m everywhere and nowhere. I’m–I’m an indigo, of sorts,” he continued, presumably substituting “indigo” for “enigma”.
“You see, I am the machine now. The machine is me, and I am it. This is my home now, and it is…my home. Listen, I’m not too great with the words these days, but I am good at being this machine, so I’m gonna keep being it.”
Great. Well, we need you to not be the machine anymore.
“I got customers to serve, and these tickets are a big thing for them. I need you outta there, guy,” Jerry says.
“No can do, brother,” the machine continues. “Like I said, this is me now. If you don’t like it, well, that’s tough shit. Pardon my Franch.”
Listening to this mysterious Illini is making me anxious, partly because I still have no earthy clue where it is coming from or who it is, but also because it is struggling to say anything correctly.
“I died not too far from here. Nice fall day. 1997. Squashed to death by a grand piano being lifted into an apartment,” the voice explains. “Splat. Like a damned Looney Tune. But, before that, I was the sports editor at the Evansville Enquirer. Nice little paper, not too many writers, but I was the king of the world. People liked my opinions, and even when they didn’t, they’d read just to get pissed off at something. Watch this.”
A blinding ray of blue light shoots out from the machine. Jerry and I instinctively cover our eyes, shielding our retinas from the jolt of luminosity. The light subsides, and small, glowing orb now floats around the beer store.
“What the hell? What are you?” Jerry says. He gets on his knees and folds his hands in prayer. “I’ve done nothing wrong, please spare me!”
Get a grip, I say to Jerry. If there’s a god, surely they aren’t taking earthly form as an NFL Hot Tix machine.
“I’m not God. I’m Tubsy. Tubsy Briggs. Well, the soul of Tubsy Briggs, really,” the orb says. It floats by a promotional display for Grizzly Bear Brewing Company’s new Skiier’s Delight Belgian White. There’s a large inflatable grizzly in the display, wearing a shirt reading DRINK MORE BEAR. Kind of clever, but a bit too close to the Chick-Fil-A cows for my liking. Originality in advertising is dead, and the American public is worse off for it.
The orb zaps itself inside the inflatable bear. The eyes of the bear flash alive in a way that is truly too horrifying to convey in words. Its mouth opens. “Look, I’m a bear now,” Tubsy’s voice exclaims. “I could do this all day, if I wanted to. I think if I do it too often though, I will actually die. Takes a lot out of me.”
Tubsy, if you can be anything you want to be, why bother the honest, hard-working people of this city? They just want their tickets, and Jerry just wants their Money Chips.
“That machine,” the bear says, moving itself from the display and closer to the Hot Tix, “is the closest thing I have to the–time before.” Tubsy the Inflatable Bears starts to sniffle, and his eyes, though completely black and made of vinyl, are visibly steamy. “In there, I can be the old Tubsy. Givin’ out takes, drinkin’ whippin’ cream, and watchin’ their eyes roll when I tell ’em Dallas should move on from Troy Aikman because his forehead’s too big.” Tubsy is now crying, his tears comprised of what appears to be heavy whipping cream.
He takes a paw and wipes the cream away. I turn to my left and notice Jerry is also crying. “I know how you feel, Tubs,” Jerry says, his gravelly voice rattling under a weight of despair. “This store is all I have left of my father, who also got smushed like a stinkbug underneath a falling piano. This is my home.” He takes a solemn look around his brick-and-mortar retail castle. This is where he lives on.” Jerry steels himself. “You can stay here forever, Tubs.”
No he can’t. While I understand Jerry’s sentiments, this is no time for emotion. SporTakes property has been compromised by a spectre, and it must be ousted. You have to go somewhere else, Tubsy. Your takes are outdated. We have no use for you.
“You heard the guy, he said I could stay here forever. You said that, right?” The bear extends an inflatable paw towards the shopkeeper. Jerry shrugs, deferring to me.
We need you out of here, and while, yes I feel bad for taking your home, it’s not yours. It’s not even Jerry’s. The tickets you have been creating are out of line with our company’s brand–
I catch myself. What was I doing? Had I really become this cold? I’m a man, a company man even, but not a monster. Hell, I don’t even think the inflatable bear that has been possessed by the spirit of a crotchety old sportswriter is a monster.
Tubsy’s tone becomes pallid. “Please don’t make me leave, guy. I’m begging you.”
I look to Jerry, who shrugs once again.
Fine, I relent. You can continue to possess this machine under one condition: you get up to speed on the ins and outs of the modern NFL. Everything that’s happened since 1997. We owe a duty to our customers, and that is to provide the most in-depth–
The bear’s voice regains its previous grating, Chicagoan tone. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just tell me what I need to know.” The orb jolts out of the inflatable bear and the bear’s life-giving air seeping out, leaving it a wilted pile of fabric on the hardwood floor. Another beam of light, and Tubsy’s soul speeds back into the machine, slamming the front panel behind it.
Lock the door, Jerry. We’re gonna be here a while.
Jerry closes up shop and retires to his apartment upstairs. I pull the cashier’s stool up next to Tubsy, and I lay out all the basics about the modern NFL. Every Super Bowl champion since his death; the Manning, Brees, and Brady era; Brett Favre’s stints with the Jets and Vikings. Along the way, Tubsy peppers in his two cents, even if he has never heard or seen of most of the players I mention. A takesman to the bitter end, I suppose. I tell him of Mike Vick’s meteoric rise and fall, Tony Romo’s fumbled snap in 2006, and the Saints’ bountygate scandal, which Tubsy responds “all’s fair in love and football,” a phrase he tells me he coined during his third divorce.
I sit and explain the rise of the run-pass option in the league, and Tubsy is delighted to hear this, saying he was pining for Paul Johnson and his option offense to run the Bears in ’97. A surprisingly progressive opinion, I think to myself, from a man who is seemingly a mascot for the Good Ol’ Days.
I catch him up to now, the current season, the most pivotal knowledge in his new position of Hot Tix Creation Agent. Mahomes, Jackson, the Watts. Antonio Brown’s revival in Tampa Bay, where Tom Brady is now the quarterback. Dallas looks like they did when Tubsy ate the undercarriage of a Steinway.
We run a few mock tickets. Give me one for Kansas City. Tubsy spits out a ticket, which has our standard Hot Tix backdrop of a sold-out Arrowhead Stadium before kickoff. I grab it from what I suppose is now Tubsy’s mouth, and rub the foil off the card with the side of my key.
The ticket reads “Give Clyde Edwards-Helaire 30 carries a game, for God’s sake. Run the ball, control the clock. Control the clock, win the game.
I sigh. This is close, but doesn’t exactly—
“It’s hot, though, isn’t it? Listen buddy, I’m almost never right. That’s not the business we’re in.” I can’t say I disagree. The hot take business is rarely about accuracy, but about who’s the loudest. And even in text, you can hear Tubsy through his tickets.
The lesson continues. The devaluation of the running back is covered, a topic that Tubsy is unsurprisingly shocked by. We go deeper. I explain the safety precautions the league has taken in the last decade. The concussion protocol, the blue tent on the sideline, the new targeting and roughing the passer penalties.
“The league’s soft now?”
If you want to call it that, yes. But it’s safer.
Tubsy the Talking NFL Hot Tix Machine lets out a mechanical sigh, the machine contracting and expanding with the soul’s deep breath.
“I always promised myself,” the six-foot-by-two-foot box of aluminum starts. “That if the league I love, the National Football League, became a soft babyshit league for pussies, I would take my Desert Eagle to my head and–boom. You can’t see it but I just pretended to shoot myself.”
Well, Tubs–you’re already dead.
“My body is dead. Tubsy Briggs, the writer, the dad, that guy’s dead. But I’m still very much alive, my soul. That little ball you see flying around. And I can’t let that soul live in a world where the NFL is run by a bunch of bitches.”
This, like the entire evening, is new. I’ve never had to talk anyone off a ledge before, and especially not the talking soul of the half-dead, and especially not one that has taken shelter inside one of my machines.
“It’s football. It’s not supposed to be safe. If you want to be safe, be an accountant. Go push pencils somewhere. I don’t wanna watch flag football.” Typically, a man of Tubsy’s mindset has come around to the new rules by now, but this is a man who has been at least one kind of dead since the Clinton administration. I try to let him talk through it.
“Big hits. That’s what I wanna see, baby. Mama, it’s gonna rain, bring the clothesline in!” This, he explains, was his signature call for big hits during radio broadcasts of local high school football games. “You’re telling me if my finger gets in the facemask of the QB, it’s fifteen yards?” Yes, it is. “Fuck that. Fuck all that. I can’t do this.” Tubsy’s voice gets low. “I made myself a promise.”
In this moment, I feel helpless. The soul of a man, maybe not a great man, but a man, wants to shuffle off our mortal coil, for once and for all. Sure, the circumstances are strange, and his reasoning stranger, but perhaps this is a man who has suffered enough. He was flattened by a piano, for God’s sake. And now his favorite league, his pride and joy, had gone soft. I relent.
“I never quite caught your name, but whoever you are, I appreciate you. But I gotta go.”
And like that, that familiar blue glow emanates from the machine, and out pops Tubsy’s soul. “Before I finally die forever, at least let me rest in peace knowing the Bears have a good quarterback.” Our lesson had been interrupted before I had a chance to go over this year’s Bears squad. I don’t want to go into the specifics of Justin Fields and the situation the Bears find themselves in, one of uninspired playcalling and poor playmakers surrounding their rookie signal caller. I spare him.
They do.
The orb floats through the locked front door of the store. I watch as it flutters above the city sidewalk, bobbing and weaving between passersby. Tubsy’s soul floats around aimlessly for a bit, enjoying its last few moments of life. Then, in a flash, his soul inhabits a nearby squirrel. Tubsy the Sidewalk Squirrel quickly darts in to the street.
A white Mercedes-Benz Metris, a nice one, but a few years older than mine, comes down the street. Odd Job John, Handyman at Service, the side door reads. Tubsy’s new form dashes in front of the van’s front tire. He disappears for a second, then a small puff of blue smoke appears. Rest easy, you old bastard.
Damn fine van to get killed by. Dashboard is all cluttered, though. Not mine.
MONEYBALL GANGSTER 