Million Dollar Throw

Nate’s dad is supposed to go to his game against Blair, but at the last minute he’s called into work and can’t make the game. Nate and his dad are both disappointed by this turn of events, and Nate’s dad tells his mom that he “hates this” (50), referring to how he’s no longer his own boss and can’t be with his family like he used to be.

That night at the game, Nate can’t throw, just like at practice. He looks up in the stands to see Abby sitting beside his mom, like usual, only Abby isn’t wearing her special glasses that filter the light. Nate knows it’s because “[t]oo many people to see that she needed special glasses” (53). Despite not being able to see clearly, Abby is “looking right at Nate now, as if she were reading his mind, not about the glasses, just knowing he was thinking about her even as he got ready for the best part of his day and the best part of his week” (53). While football usually comes easy to Nate and makes him happy, tonight he throws the worst game of his life.

The football game is tied, and Nate thinks about how his team is “still in the game despite him today” (58). He continues to throw poorly the rest of the game, lacking the precision and control that has always come so natural to him. Towards the end of the game he looks into the stands for Abby, but she and his mom aren’t there anymore. Nate’s team ends up losing, and after it’s all over Coach Rivers tells Nate that Abby had a bad fall and she’s at the hospital with his mom.

Nate meets his mom and Abby at her house. Abby is fine and only needed a bandage for her head. Abby and Nate go to her art studio to talk. Abby explains what happened to her at the game:

It was just another time, like when we were playing catch the other day, that I was dumb enough to think I can do things like I used to. So now I’m dumb and blind. Thinking I could take the bleachers two at a time, because I was in such a rush to get down to you. I missed the second-to-last one and fell sideways, like I was the lead of the dork parade (73).

The friends confide in each other: Abby says that she’s “no good at going blind” (73), and Nate talks about how bad his game was that night. 

Nate goes to Coppo Field, his “favorite place to throw a ball, at least when he wanted to go off and do it alone” (74). He wants to “go someplace—be someplace—where the only problem in his life was trying to put a ball through the hole in the tire that was so old now that you could only see the two O’s from the ‘Goodyear’ written on it” (76). Suddenly his dad shows up to the park, despite having worked late and missing dinner. Nate complains about the day, how he lost the game and Abby fell. Then Nate reveals the deeper source of his recent anxiety: “Why’d they have to pick me to make this stupid throw?” (79).

Nate’s dad accuses Nate of “moping” (80), and Nate says that he’s not, he’s just under a lot of pressure. Nate’s dad tries to give him a pep talk, but he ends up getting angry, saying: “You know what pressure is? […] Pressure is doing a job you hate, that even makes you hate sports sometimes, so you can hold on to what’s supposed to be your real job, except you can’t make a living at that job anymore” (81). Nate is confused about how things escalated so quickly, and his dad leaves Nate alone at the park and goes back home. 

That Sunday, Nate doesn’t watch the Patriots game with his dad like he usually does: “Mostly because he was having as hard a time letting go of the things that had been said the night before as he was the Blair game” (83). Instead, he goes over to Abby’s, and she shows him her new “knfb Mobile Reader” (84), a device that looks like a cell phone but reads books for her. Abby has usually been the top of her class, but with her declining eyesight she’s been falling behind. She’s excited about her new reader, hoping that it will allow her to keep up in class.

Abby probes Nate about why he’s seeming so glum, and he finally confides about what happened with his dad the night before: “[S]ometimes I’m really lousy at acting excited about making this throw when there’s so much lousy stuff going on around me. And instead of feeling excited, what I really feel is guilty” (88). Abby tries to reassure him: “That throw is the thing that we all gotta believe in, Brady, what keeps us all going […] That great things can still happen” (88). 

Nate is feeling even worse about his game against the Manorville Rams, but he keeps his feelings a secret. He’s feeling bad because his dad is going to be there, and Nate is worried about how he’ll respond to his lousy throwing. He’s also nervous because reporters from “The Today Show were there to do a feature on him, and a reporter from Sports Illustrated was on hand to write a piece about the eighth-grade quarterback who was going to throw a ball for all that money on Thanksgiving night” (89). On the way to the game, Nate confides in Abby that he doesn’t feel like he’s earned this attention since he’s only receiving it because his name was drawn at random. She says, “You don’t get to decide stuff like that. Nobody gets to decide who deserves anything” (90). Nate throws just as bad if not worse than he did during the last game, causing his apprehension about the big throw to increase:

Because the more throws he missed, the more he felt as if he had a giant spotlight on him. No matter how hard he tried, he kept looking over to the sidelines to where the cameraman from Today was, seeing him at one end of the bench or the other, watching him run down behind the goalposts one time (93).

Nate ends up running a touchdown. His team celebrates him, but he feels like a fraud. He knows he only ran the touchdown because he was afraid of messing up yet another throw.

Although Nate has doubts about his performance, his team still prevails: “Valley didn’t score in the third quarter. But they didn’t have to, because the defense continued to be everything on this day that Nate was not: confident, aggressive. Almost arrogant” (97). Nate’s team ends up winning the game despite his poor throwing. Later, Nate’s family receives copies of the Sports Illustrated issue with the article written on Nate, and The Today Show airs an episode on him. The reporter says, “Nate Brodie, the boy from a small town with a big arm. And maybe, just maybe, if dreams come true, a million-dollar arm” (103). After the way he’s been playing, Nate doesn’t feel like this is true about himself anymore.

At breakfast one morning, Nate’s mom tells him that people are coming to view the house. Nate hates “the showings, hated the idea of having to move, always made sure he found reasons to be out of the house when more strangers came walking through the front door. Moving through his world. Looking at his stuff” (105). He always hides his special Brady football when people come, and he wishes he could hide everything because “that stuff wasn’t meant for the eyes of people they didn’t know. It was just meant for Nate and his parents” (106).

Nate does some research on the computer. Later, he goes to see Batman with Malcolm and Pete, two friends from his team. Afterwards, he meets Abby for food, and she tell shim that she might be going away to a school for the blind.