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Her question has its intended effect.
An ache pierces through my chest and I feel a bit like I’ve been punched right in the gut.
On the outside, it seems like a simple enough question. The Nash family is an elite part of this league.
But on the inside, there’s a lot more depth to it. The night I ended things with her, the last thing she asked me was whether my father purposely hurt her father in some effort to break the two of us up.
I couldn’t admit to her that she was right…not when my father was adamant that the private conversation between us where he admitted he took her father out of the game would forever stay between the two of us.
But then she told me I was letting him win if that was what happened, and she left me with a final question: was that what was going to make him proud of me?
That question remained heavy in my mind around the days and weeks following our break-up.
We never spoke again—a difficult feat given the fact that we were next door neighbors and attended the same high school, but the Bailey family moved away, which made it easier to pretend she’d just been some crazy dream.
I put in a hell of a lot of extra hours on the field. I worked hard, stayed late, and made it through to graduation. Workouts started a week later, so I headed off to college to get started on the next segment of my life.
And somehow it’s been two decades and the last words spoken between us were whether what I was doing was making my father proud.
I have no idea how to answer her question.
I’m not sure anything will ever be enough for him to respect me and my choices. Maybe he blames me for losing his best friend since he apparently did what he did to protect me…who knows. I know I blame him for losing mine.
It should be ancient history at this point, but there’s more to it. It’s not that simple.
It wasn’t just her dad sustaining a career-ending injury caused by my dad.
They were best friends, and they had a shared dream.
They dreamed of opening a sports bar together. They had a vision that it would be a place for players to hang out in the off-season and for fans to hang out during it. When their vision became a reality, they named it Rivalry.
But when Joseph got hurt, my father wanted to buy him out. Since the Baileys were moving to Arizona for Joseph’s rehab and would no longer be around to help with the decision-making, my father felt he had to go. He had a different vision for the place than Joseph did. Joseph wanted to make it into a barbecue joint while my father had visions of making it into a sports bar.
Little did we know that the name of the bar would end up becoming the truth between our families.
Joseph felt like my father even asking him to sell was a betrayal that caused the final rift between our families. Joseph held onto his stake as a way to get back at my father. He dragged his feet on every business decision, making it all the more difficult given his distance from the actual location of the bar.
My father did what he could to keep the place afloat, sinking his life savings into it, but Joseph’s stubbornness made it an uphill battle that eventually turned into an ugly legal battle with both sides slinging mud at each other in court. After years of struggling to keep the place running, my dad had no choice but to throw in the towel. The bar was bankrupt, and my father has always looked at it as one of his life’s greatest failures.
It’s another source of contention between our families. Her father’s stubbornness over the bar is what eventually sank it, and it left my father essentially in financial ruin. It was his dream to run that bar after he retired, and I’m the only person in the entire world who knows that it was karma coming back for him after what he did to Joseph.
“That’s a question for my father,” I finally say with a clipped tone in response to her question. “Thank you for your time today.”
Jack stands. “Great interview, Bailey,” he says to Jolene. “I can’t wait to see what you do to paint our new coach in the best possible light.”
“Of course, Mr. Dalton. Thank you again for this opportunity.”
Her voice fades away behind me as I walk out of the room.
Most exclusives end with some off the record pleasantries, but I don’t have it in me to do that with her right now. Not after the last question she asked.
Not now that I have to prepare for my press conference with her on my mind.
CHAPTER 14: JOLENE
I rewind the film as I listen to my own question.
“Is your father proud of you?”
