I put together a diaper bag.
I need to stretch on the walk over — Tilly’s shitty sofa is a bitch on my spine — which means I’m not in stroller territory. I’m going to have to strap Donovan to my body. But that will make it easier to feed him. As long as there isn’t a diaper disaster, at least not until we get to the stadium, we’re good.
I got this. We don’t have a Take Your Kid to Work Day, so that kind of makes every day Take Your Kid to Work Day, right?
Sports reporters are gravitating around the team entrance that faces the training complex across the street, so I jog around to the stadium staff entrance on the opposite side. No one would expect the head quarterback to walk in on the wrong side, strapped with a diaper bag and a baby. This is going to work.
I don’t expect the employee entrance to be blocked by a locked, unmanned gate, though, and the only reason I’m even able to get inside is a caterer who sneaks into the vestibule there for a smoke.
“Uhh, Mr. Sinclair?” His accent is so thick it makes me unsure if he’s questioning why I’m here or if I even exist.
“Can you let me in?” I ask. “My hands are full.”
I’ve got Donovan strapped down to me in a fancy sling I found in the stack of baby supplies Tilly has. The sling is high-end — I looked it up online — and in a modern shape that makes it easier and way less intimidating than the scarf and set of metal rings that was apparently also a sling. Plus, it’s set up so, once Donovan is tucked in, his great big head doesn’t bobble around on his tiny little neck and he cansmush his cheek against my chest. He’s hugged so cleanly against me that I have full range of motion in my shoulders.
Obviously, no one’s going to be hiking a ball to me today, but I see no reason I can’t get a full day of passes in.
So, no, my hands are not full, but after a beat, the caterer nods and says, “I find security.”
It takes another five minutes to get someone who can actually open the gate. By then, half a dozen staff is gawking and cooing at me — well, more so at Donovan — and I have to do some autographing to thank them for their assistance and agreement that Donovan is the handsomest little man they’ve ever seen.
I hoof it through the stadium, figuring that the jog will get my heart rate up enough that I can claim I wasn’t late, I was just doing cardio in another part of the stadium. And I would have only been a couple minutes late except I got a little turned around. This makes sense, since I’ve never been in this part of the stadium before. It’s weird that we’re even at the stadium today instead of the training complex, but they’re doing some publicity stuff. There are kids here from the local college.
Then I get hit with the stench of full diaper, so I also have to take a detour into one of the public restrooms, in which I find the baby changing station woefully ill-equipped and plan to bitch loudly about it. Us dads deserve better than this. It’s been cleaned since the event they had here a couple days ago, and I swear I still smell the reek of piss and stale beer. Poor little Donovan shouldn’t be smelling that. It’s already bad enough he has to deal with diapers.
By the time we’ve done a diaper change as well as swapped out his outfit for something clean and covered with itty bitty footballs to match the theme of the day and I’ve donemy best to tame the crazy tuft of jet black hair on his head, I’m twenty-five minutes late and players are starting to filter out onto the field with coaches and personal trainers.
I have no idea where I am in the stadium in relation to the locker room, at least not via an elevator or anything official, but it’s not like there’s anything stopping me from hopping down from the stands onto the sidelines. When I reach the wall, Dominic Morales sees me and shakes his head in paternal disappointment before laughing and waving me to join him.
Then he cocks his head in confusion.
Then his eyes go wide.
Then he shouts as he, his personal trainer, and several others start running toward me.
That kind of sounds like there’s something terrible right behind me and they’re running over to protect me since Iamthe most valuable player, it says so right on the trophy, so I hop down quickly, landing cleanly albeit wobbily on the turf below.
The guys all stop running, and I look back up to see what it was I was running away from. I don’t see anything, though.
“What’s up?” I ask as everyone forms a circle around me.
“What . . . are you . . . doing?” Rydell Thompson asks between gusty breaths. He’s not the biggest dude on the team, but he’s a lineman, and they’re just not the best runners in general. I’ve spent years trying to get Gabe to motor, just in case I need to pass the ball off to him, but I guess at that point, it’s not about speed so much as it is the ability to keep moving forward when there’s a pile of guys hanging off you.
I look back at the wall I just jumped off. It’s a six-foot drop. I wince; stuff like that is what gets me in trouble. “Yeah, I guess I should have taken a better look before jumpingdown. I just got lost trying to get to the locker room and figured I could save some time.”
I feel like I’ve said enough to make it clear it wasn’t a stunt or anything, but they exchange looks that tell me I’m wrong.
“Oh, it’s not like I came in through our gate and got lost. I came in through the main gate to avoid the sports reporters so they wouldn’t gang up on Donovan. Did you guys see Donovan?” I grab his itty tiny hand and wave it at them in case they didn’t realize I have a baby in this sling.
“Did we . . . see . . . Donovan?” Morales asks slowly. Not winded, though.
There are the rare few quarterbacks who have made it to forty, but Morales won’t be one of them. Despite his stellar early career, he was dropped to second string at 32 and then sent to the Jugs as part of the expansion package.
But he’s spent the last two years both training and resting, stepping on the field only a couple times each season and otherwise avoiding everything that ran him into the ground his first decade in the NFL. He’s in better shape now than he was at 30. I think he likes riding out the rest of his career this way, especially with his three kids and his ridiculously young wife, but he’s ready to step in for me if he needs to.
So there’s no reason for him to talk so slowly to me. He doesn’t need to repeat my question unless he genuinely doesn’t see Donovan.
But then it dawns on me what everyone’s all up in arms about.
