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Chapter 1: Asher Nash
I Fucking Love Wild, Unpredictable, Spontaneous Asher Nash
I glance up at the scoreboard as the two-minute warning is upon us.
We only have two minutes left, and we’re tied. But we don’t have the ball.
This is it. The Forty-Niners either force overtime or try to win, and they’re not going to give us the chance to beat them.
I’m right. They take it down the field. They run the clock down to three seconds, and if the kicker succeeds in getting the ball through the goal posts, they win. We lose.
My chest is tight as I watch helplessly from my position on the sidelines.
This is it. We’ve worked our asses off to get to this point, but so have they.
I feel it slipping away.
It’s my first full season playing on the Vegas Aces, and it’s about to end one game too early.
The ball is snapped to the holder, who spins it so the laces face out. The kicker sprints toward it, plants his foot, swings his other foot, and extends it after making contact with the ball.
The ball sails through the center of the goalposts, giving the Forty-Niners the victory with no time left on the clock to give us a chance.
Desolation fills me. Over the next few days, we’ll be told what a great season we had. There’s always next year. We worked hard.
All the shit that doesn’t give us the win.
It should have been us celebrating on our home turf. Instead, it’s them.
I shake my head in disgust. It was a team effort. We made some mistakes, but we played hard. We played to win. We just didn’t pull it through.
And now we get a little time off.
Unofficial workouts off-site start next week, but I don’t know if I’ll go.
I’m not really close with anyone on my team except my brother Grayson, who is probably about to announce his retirement, and my other brother, Lincoln, who’s the head coach. I don’t have the respect of my teammates because of a stupid lack of judgment I made a year and a half ago that cost me an entire season on the field.
And because of that, even tonight, I think I’ll probably head home after the game rather than out with the guys. I’m not really in a party kind of mood tonight, anyway.
I beeline for my bedroom as soon as I’m home so I don’t have to face the jeers of my father, who, in a strange twist of fate, is my roommate, and in the morning, I head out before he’s up.
I get to the practice facility long before exit interviews begin, and I clean out my locker. I get in one more workout. Most guys start showing up a little before ten, when our team meeting begins, and they look hungover after staying out far too late.
And it’s only a few minutes later that I stare at my brother as I try to make sense of his words, but I’m failing.
Lincoln Nash, head coach of the pro football team I play for and my oldest brother, just told the entire team the morning after a season-ending loss that our offensive coordinator took a head coaching position for another team.
The OC is leaving, and he’s taking his playbook with him—the playbook we’ve worked our asses off to memorize and execute this season.
League rules state he couldn’t interview until our season was over, and he already took a new job this morning.
He can’t rip the plays we’ve memorized over the last two years from our brains, but hecantake his plays and move elsewhere.
I’m sure Lincoln is happy. He never got along with our former OC since Mike’s plays leaned on the conservative side. Lincoln is a risk-taker on the field, and I grew up worshipping his shadow.
When he scored the head coaching job here in Vegas, he pulled me from Indianapolis to play for his team. But then I did something stupid, got myself suspended for an entire season, and let him down.
I’ve been back a full year now, though, and still, the chatter hasn’t faded.
