Guys Read: The Sports Pages (19 page)

“
D
erek Jeter must die,” I announced.

“Uh, Wes, don't you think that's a little extreme?” Nate said as he struggled to get his backpack off his shoulder without letting it smash against his right arm.

I stood up from our table in the school cafeteria and paced back and forth next to my seat. I considered what Derek Jeter had done to me, and also to Nate for that matter, his arm in a cast and sling. Then I thought about Jeter's stupid smiling face after he got base hits that drove in runs and won games, and how he was able to go on with his life as if nothing at all had happened.

In case you don't know who Derek Jeter is, which is unlikely, he is the All-Star shortstop for the New York Yankees, five-time World Series champion, former Rookie of the Year, beloved hero to pretty much all Yankees fans worldwide, the most liked and praised baseball player in the whole league for almost twenty years, and also likely the most overrated jerk ever to hold a baseball bat.

“Hey, catch!” someone called out.

An eighth grader, walking by with his group of friends, tossed me his pint of milk. It caught me by surprise and, despite my best efforts, bobbled around in my clumsy hands for a couple seconds before landing on the floor with a splat.

The kid and his group of friends laughed. And when other kids nearby saw it was me who had dropped the milk, they all laughed, too.

“Nice catch, butterfingers!” some kid yelled. “Someone check the internet, Jacoby Ellsbury might have just gotten his leg shattered.”

This was followed by more laughter, of course.

I sighed and sat back down. I looked at Nate. He was fidgeting with the top bun of his chicken patty sandwich with his lone functioning arm, trying to simultaneously pretend that he was just there by accident, that he wasn't really my friend, and that that whole incident hadn't actually happened. Like he always did.

“No,” I said to him.

“Huh?” Nate asked, barely able to make eye contact.

“You asked me if what I said was a little extreme. My answer is no. In fact, it's not extreme enough if you want my honest answer. Derek Jeter must die!”

“Yeah, but you don't really want him dead-dead, do you? I mean, that's …”

“No, of course not,” I admitted. “But I am going to kill his career, ruin his reputation just like he ruined mine. Mark my words: Derek Jeter is going to pay.” Then I looked north in the general direction of the Bronx and said, while clenching my hand into a fist, “I will destroy you, Derek Jeter.”

The place smelled like stale cinnamon and boiled hot dogs. If I didn't need help so badly, I probably would have turned and left right away. But as it was, curses aren't something you can just give to people as easy as handing them a dollar. A trained professional was needed for these things.

“Hey, kid, do you have an appointment?” A man was sitting on a single chair in the middle of the room. He was wearing a white T-shirt with no sleeves that said
THIS IS WHAT A COOL GRANDPA LOOKS LIKE
, even though he was only, like, thirty years old. Also, he was greasy, like he wouldn't have been out of place at all in some diner's kitchen, flipping over giant piles of hash browns. To be honest, he wasn't really what I'd expected.

Then again, I'd never been to a witch doctor before, so I didn't really know what I'd expected.

The witch doctor stood up as we approached and then saw Nick's cast and sling and shook his head. “Hey, I'm not that kind of doctor, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, handing him a printed copy of the confirmation email he'd sent me. “We have an appointment.”

He peered at it for a while as if he'd never seen it before.

The witch doctor went by the name Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz, according to his website. He had pretty good references and everything. Well, if you can count a couple of online reviews posted by people with handles like “spcehed111” and “nachosnachosnachos” and “tUbEmOnKeYgOaT” as good references, that is. And I tend to think you can.

I'd gotten the idea from the years of suffering for Red Sox fans I'd heard my grandpa complain about every Thanksgiving. The Boston Red Sox, who have been my family's favorite team going way back to, like, my grandpa's grandpa or something, had this curse on them for a really long time. The Curse of the Bambino.

Basically, this curse began the day the Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees back in 1920. And for almost one hundred years, the Red Sox didn't win a single World Series. Some Red Sox fans, like my great-grandpa, lived their whole life and died without ever getting to see them win a championship. But then this dude named Theo Epstein came along and became their general manager and broke the curse, and the Red Sox finally won a World Series in 2004.

Apparently, the Chicago Cubs have an even worse curse on their team. They haven't won it at all since 1908! And it's pretty much proven to be the result of something called the Curse of the Billy Goat. They still haven't figured out how to break it. They stole away the Red Sox curse breaker, General Manager Theo Epstein, but even he hasn't been able to crack that one yet.

Anyway, that's where I got the idea to go to a witch doctor. I saw on some message board that secretly that's how Theo was able to break the Curse of the Bambino. Some people say it was through good farm-system development, others claim it was a series of good trades, and most believe it was a combination of those two things plus truckloads of money used to buy up all the best free agents. But I found out the truth from this dude online who goes by the name BucknerMustDie86. He said his brother's neighbor's gardener's cousin's best friend's wife's masseuse's former T-ball coach's nephew's mailman's sister's ex-boyfriend's mechanic was old college roommates with Theo and that Theo Epstein actually visited a witch doctor at the start of the 2004 season. And that proof of this could be seen when the Red Sox came back to win from being down 0–3 in the Division Series against the Yankees, something no other team has ever done before or since in baseball's 150-year history.

So I figured if a witch doctor can break a curse that powerful, then surely he could make a curse that powerful, too.

“Basic curses are fifty, and hexes are thirty-five. Payment up front,” Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz said.

“I want the full fifty.” I handed him the credit card I'd borrowed from Nate's dad's wallet the night before. His dad had dozens of credit cards for some reason, so he'd never even notice.

“Is this really your card?” he asked. “You look a little young.”

“Of course it is,” I said.

Of course we both knew it wasn't. I mean, I was twelve. And I didn't even look old for my age. And Nate looked even younger than I did. But at the same time, if the witch doctor called me out, then he wouldn't get paid.

A short time later, after Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz had run the card and put on a hat that looked and smelled like it was made out of old KFC chicken bones, we went through a small door back into his “office.”

“Do you have an object that belongs to the subject?” he asked.

“Uh, I have this,” I said, and handed him the autographed picture of Derek Jeter that I'd gotten the day after he ruined my life.

Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz looked at the picture and was barely able to hide a grin.

“Close enough,” he said. “What do you want done? What are the specifics of your curse?”

“I want him to go into an epic slump,” I said. “I mean, like the sort of thing that forces him into retirement. I'm talking below-the-Mendoza-Line bad. I don't even want him on the Interstate by the end of it; I want him way below that. Make him go one for his next eighty-seven at bats. No, one for the next hundred and eighty-seven! And throw in seventeen errors while you're at it. I want him to cause the Yankees to lose every game in September and miss the play-offs. I want people to see him for the washed-up old hack he really is instead of some sort of treasured national hero. Send him into retirement where he belongs.”

“Jeez, kid,” Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz said. “Well, I guess you're lucky I'm a Mets fan.”

Then he started chanting something in a language I thought I recognized as Klingon from
Star Trek
. I exchanged a glance with Nate, who made a face like he wanted me to call out Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz as some sort of fraud. But I didn't. If I did, there'd be no curse.

The doctor finished chanting after a few minutes and then tossed some old chicken bones, a few feathers, and what looked like red hotels from the board game Monopoly into a wooden bowl. He set it on top of the autographed picture of Derek Jeter and said one final Klingon phrase.

“Okay, kid, you're good to go,” he said.

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

“So, like, when will his slump start?” I asked. “Tonight?”

“Sure.” Doctor ZZ handed me my picture and showed us to the exit.

That night, Derek Jeter went 4 for 4 with two home runs, a double, and seven RBIs. And Boston's supposed ace, Jon Lester, had been the starting pitcher. And Jeter supposedly had the flu that night, which had those saps at ESPN praising him even more than they already would have. I bet they have a whole room that serves only as a shrine to Derek Jeter at ESPN headquarters, and all the employees change into Yankee pinstripe uniforms and Derek Jeter masks and go in there once a day to light candles and sing the seventh-inning stretch song.

“I don't get it,” I said to Nate the next day at lunch. “The curse was supposed to start last night!”

“Where did you find that witch doctor guy again?” he asked.

“The internet, remember?” I said.

“Oh, yeah …”

“Maybe it will start tonight?” I suggested, ignoring his cynical tone. When you've only got one friend left in the world, you have to make such oversights sometimes.

“Maybe,” Nate said, but I could tell he clearly didn't think so.

And Nate was right, of course. Over the next several weeks, Jeter went on a hot streak of historic proportions. He hit an astounding .562 with seven home runs, eleven stolen bases, and nineteen RBIs. It was the best eleven-game stretch of his career. Maybe of anybody's career, ever. There was even talk now on ESPN that Jeter might be in the running for MVP since he was doing all his damage in September, when it mattered the most considering the Yankees were right in the middle of the play-off race like always. If he did win, he'd be the oldest MVP in baseball history. As if he needed another record or more reason to be worshipped.

At one point, this guy on ESPN—a skinny, bald dude with three names—actually drooled all over his tie when he was showing highlights of Jeter hitting for the cycle. Which, yeah, he did hit for the cycle a few days after the curse supposedly started. I would have asked for a refund from Doctor Zanzubu Zardoz, but it wasn't my money, and he'd already done enough damage as it was.

To make matters worse, somehow Nate's dad did notice the charge on his credit card bill a few days after we'd placed the curse. Apparently, Nate got yelled at pretty bad and grounded for several weeks. And his dad took away his TV, which had to really stink since that was pretty much Nate's only source of fun anymore with the broken elbow and being grounded and all.

But what mattered even more than all of that was that the failed curse meant I'd need to take this to the next level if I really wanted to get my revenge on Derek Jeter.

So, you may be wondering just what exactly had Derek Jeter done to me to deserve this kind of wrath? Well, I'll tell you.

It was my birthday, and my favorite team, the Boston Red Sox, were in town for an important late-August four-game series with the Yankees. My dad had been lucky enough to score us some amazing seats about eight rows back, right off of third base. It was perfect; I'd get to see the Red Sox pulverize the Yankees in Yankee Stadium on my birthday with my dad and best friend, Nate.

And it was the night before my seventh-grade class voted on class president. The most recent polls showed that I was all but guaranteed to win. As class president, my popularity would get a major boost. I had already prepared my acceptance speech.

And to top everything off, Sara Hernandez, who I'd had a crush on since first grade, was sitting just a few rows behind us. As we sat down, she smiled and gave me a little presidential salute.

Basically, my life couldn't have been more perfect that night.

Until the fifth inning, that is.

That's when Jeter came up to bat for his third plate appearance. The score was 4–2; Boston was winning. Jeter was hitless so far. He fell behind in the count quickly, no balls and two strikes looking. Then the old, desperate man that he is, he just started swinging at everything. He fouled off four straight pitches. I was screaming at Lester to throw him a curveball or two. Or at least throw him something off the plate.