Bigger Than Beckham (48 page)

“Okay. So, tell me,” Nate said.

So Tony did, even including the handshake
deal he’d just made with Derek Kavanagh. “The damn thing is that I
can’t match Steam Train’s money,” he said in conclusion. “And it
would be bloody impossible for her to leave a million and a half on
the table. Not with her jackass uncle breathing down her neck.”

Nate’s mouth twisted as he nodded. “I don’t
want to tell tales out of school, but over dinner I think Martha
came to the conclusion that she’s got no real choice but to sell to
Steam Train. For exactly the reason you just said.”

Shit.

Nate’s confirmation hit Tony like a mule kick
to the gut. Now, even his last-ditch gambit with Kavanagh wasn’t
going to rescue him. Disappointment blanketed him like cold,
driving snow. Though he couldn’t blame Martha, somehow deep down
he’d always thought he’d be able to pull out a victory in the end,
because he almost always had. Tonight his prospects looked worse
than bleak and God only knew how this would impact their
relationship.

He stayed silent, unable to utter anything
worth saying.

“But it’s not quite a done deal yet,” Nate
continued quickly. “Martha’s still waiting to hear from you one
last time.”

Tony took little comfort from those words.
Yes, he’d thought Martha would wait, but he got the impression that
it was more of a courtesy than anything else. He narrowed his eyes.
“I thought I might convince her by giving her the guarantee of jobs
that she wanted. But it seems that was just wishful thinking.”

“Probably, but I’ve got another idea, man.”
Nate got up suddenly and ambled over to the window, drink in hand,
gazing out into the night. “It’s a little wild, but sometimes you
gotta think outside the box, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” Tony responded cautiously. He
watched Nate study the glittering view of Jacksonville at night,
then his impatience broke free. “If you’ve got some kind of bloody
lifeline, you better throw it to me quick. I figure I’ll be going
under for the third time as soon as I talk to her.”

Nate turned around to face him, but leaned
back against the big window. “Let me ask you something first.”

Tony gave him a grim nod by way of reply.

“Do you know why Martha’s been so determined
to keep running the team? You know it’s not about money, Tony. The
team’s been a financial disaster, and Martha was doing great with
her sports writing career, anyway.”

Nate’s question seemed a bit out of left
field, but Tony was going to humor him. “Martha hates to fail at
anything. That’s obvious as hell. And she’s as driven as anyone
I’ve ever met. Hell, she might be as driven as me,” he finished
with a snort.

Nate shook his head but didn’t say
anything.

Tony frowned. “She wants to hold on because
people in the sport don’t take her seriously, and she’s bloody well
determined to prove them wrong. I admire her for that.”

Nate shook his head again. “All that may be
true, but it’s not the whole answer. Not even the main answer.
Nope.” He ambled back from the window and sat down again. “I asked
Martha today if she’d ever told you the real story, and she
admitted she hadn’t. She said she wanted to, but couldn’t seem to
ever manage it. She thought you’d think it was….I believe her exact
words were, ‘sentimental and stupid’.”

Tony was about ready to strangle Nate if he
didn’t finally get to his point. How could Martha have ever thought
he could find her stupid? And he’d never regarded her as
particularly sentimental. In fact, the words that immediately came
to his mind in describing her would have been ones like ‘tough’ and
‘resilient’.

“Bloody hell, just tell me, you wanker,” he
growled.

“Keep your shirt on, I’m getting to it,” Nate
said, making the stop signal with his hand. “I knew her dad, Will
Winston, pretty well. The guy was a good man and a good father, if
you ask me. But he was…eccentric. Weird, even, in some ways. The
guy was totally nuts about soccer, and he had this dream about
someday buying and running his own team. When he made a bit of a
fortune with his paper business, he took the plunge and bought the
Thunder franchise. And because he insisted on becoming the
full-time CEO of the team, he needed to turn over operational
control of his company to somebody.” Nate raised his arms out to
his sides like a preacher. “And guess which somebody he
picked?”

Tony immediately thought of Winston’s
brother, Geoffrey. But was that likely, given what an idiot
Geoffrey obviously was?

“Martha.” Tony didn’t have to make it a
question.

“Give the man a prize,” Nate drawled. “Yep,
Will picked his sportswriter daughter. A daughter who had zero
experience with the company other than menial summer jobs in one of
his plants. For all his fine qualities, the guy was eccentric to
the point of lunacy sometimes.”

Tony shrugged. “I can understand that a man
might want to keep the business in the family. And Martha was his
only child.”

“True enough. But Martha obviously had other
ideas. She was already a pretty big star in her corner of the
world, and she got even bigger as the years went on. Heading back
to small town Georgia to run some paper plants was not on her
agenda.”

“So, she said no to her father.”

Nate nodded. “It practically killed her to
have to do it, even though she knew it was a hare-brained idea. And
her refusal absolutely devastated Will. To make a long story short,
he wound up selling the business because he knew he couldn’t run
both it and the team. At least not in the way he was used to
running things. He was a real hands-on guy, and he sure wasn’t
going to leave his idiot brother in charge.”

Tony was getting the picture. “I suppose her
father couldn’t forgive her for letting him down,” he said with an
impending sense of doom.

“Well, things were pretty rocky between Will
and Martha after that, but eventually they forgave each other. In
fact, they grew really close again in his last couple of years. It
totally wrecked Martha when he told her he had terminal
cancer.”

Tony thought he could imagine Martha’s shock
and grief. He’d gone through something like that years ago when his
brother Cliff committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.

“Her father should never have asked that of
her. Martha did nothing wrong by saying no,” he snapped, outraged
on her behalf.

“No argument from me on that, man. But
fathers aren’t always perfect, right?”

Nate’s revelations put a different spin on
Martha’s behavior, at least regarding the team. He and Martha had
shared relatively little about their personal lives. Tony certainly
hadn’t wanted to open up about his life growing up, even though
she’d tried to pry it out of him once or twice. Someday, maybe,
he’d tell her what it was like to be raised in an abusive home,
with a mercurial father that regularly beat the hell out of his
wife and every single one of his five children. A home in which
each child’s accomplishments—whether in school or on the sports
fields—could never measure up to his father’s drink-fueled,
overblown expectations.

“No argument on that score, mate,” was all he
could finally manage as he yanked his mind back from
Middlesbrough.

“Not long before Will died, he begged Martha
to move here and take control of the team. And, man, then it was
like a goddamn delayed replay of the fight they’d had four years
ago. Martha was a mess about it, but this time she couldn’t bring
herself to refuse him. Turning him down once had practically eaten
her from the inside out, and she just couldn’t do it to him again
no matter what the cost. So, she said yes, even though taking over
the Thunder was the last thing she wanted to do.”

“Ah, hell,” Tony swore, disgusted with
himself. “I had no idea.”

Nate tossed back the rest of his bourbon
before continuing. “It gets worse. Will split the shares of the
team between Martha and Geoffrey—but you obviously already know
that.”

“Martha has eighty percent, Geoffrey
twenty.”

“That’s right. But then he threw the kicker
at her. He made her swear that no matter what happened, she’d make
sure control of the team stayed in the Winston family.” Nate gave a
little snort. “He even told Martha that he dreamed her children
would one day run it, and he pleaded with her to do everything she
could to make that dream come true. He literally extracted a
fucking deathbed promise out of her.”

The puzzle that was Martha Winston finally
locked into place, and Tony felt his chest grow tight. “It was
obvious to me from the start that she was putting a ton of pressure
on herself, and I couldn’t understand why. But she might have told
me that story herself, mate. It sure would have helped.”

“I get why you’d say that, but look at it
this way. Yeah, you two got chummy in London, but you never stopped
trying to maneuver the team out from under her, did you? On that
front, you guys have been adversaries from day one, and you still
are. So, why would you expect her to blab something so personal to
you? She hates being exposed like that, anyway.”

Tony shrugged, not wanting to admit his buddy
spoke the truth.

“Besides,” Nate continued in a dry voice, “on
some level I think she’s embarrassed as hell about the whole thing.
She doesn’t want to have to explain her relationship with her
father to anybody. She thinks people wouldn’t understand.”

Not just “people” in general—Tony in
particular. The implication was pretty clear to him.

The vise that gripped his chest in its jaws
tightened with Nate’s every word. Tony knew better than anyone how
screwed-up the relationships between fathers and kids could be.
Bitter secrets in his own family were to be forever hidden from
outsiders, and some promises—spoken and unspoken—were to be kept
close to the heart. Sometimes it was the only way to survive.

But would it have made any difference if he’d
known about Martha’s promise to her father? Would he have acted
differently? Maybe. But all he could do now was deal with the
situation as it stood. “My heart goes out to her, Nate. Honest to
God, it does. But nothing you’ve said changes the fact that she’s
up against the wall with Steam Train.”

“No, but that’s where my idea comes in. I
thought you needed to know all the facts first.”

“Got it,” Tony said with a grim smile. He had
no idea what was coming next, but he hoped like hell Nate had some
kind of miracle stuffed in the pocket of his sodding Armani sports
coat.

“The way I see it,” Nate said, “the only way
you and Martha can get yourselves out of this friggin’ mess with
some kind of win-win is to work together. Join forces, instead of
fighting while Steam Train walks off with the team. Sure, Martha
wants to keep control in her family, like she promised. But she
also knows that idea’s history now because she’s out of money and
out of time. As for you, you’ve insisted all along that nothing
short of full control of the team is acceptable, even if it’s that
proposal you made her in London.”

Tony frowned at his surprising mention of
that idea, but said nothing.

Nate ploughed ahead. “Tony, I know you’re not
interested in becoming a minority owner, and I can’t blame you for
that. But what about an equal partnership? Why not buy out
Geoffrey, and then you and Martha run the team on a fifty-fifty
basis? That way, neither of you would have full control, but in a
real sense you both would. She couldn’t do anything without your
agreement, and vice-versa.”

Nate leaned forward, as obviously earnest and
sincere as Tony had ever seen him. Martha clearly had a way of
building a profound loyalty in the people who cared about her. He
got that feeling in spades.

“The way I see it, all the new cash coming in
from your investment would keep the team afloat for the foreseeable
future,” Nate continued, “and give you guys breathing room to
rebuild.”

Tony’s instinct was to give a disbelieving
laugh. How could business ever get done with two equal partners?
Especially partners with no history of working together, and such
divergent backgrounds. How would a dispute between the two be
settled—by a bloody coin toss? If the partners always had to agree
before anything could happen, that sounded like a surefire recipe
for stagnation and disaster.

Ten minutes ago he probably would have
thanked Nate for his surprise visit and told him to shove off so he
could call Martha with his last-ditch, no doubt doomed-to-fail
proposal. But, beyond all reckoning, Nate’s wild idea started to
resonate in his gut, if not quite in his brain. After all, Martha
didn’t want the sale money for herself. She’d no doubt be happy to
keep most of her share invested in the team. So, to buy an equal
share of the Thunder, he would have to put up only half the 13.5
million dollars that Steam Train had offered. Tony was sure
Geoffrey Winston would just as soon sell his twenty percent to him
if he matched Steam Train’s price, and Martha could sell him thirty
percent from her share. Everyone would be happy except the bastards
at Steam Train. And sod them.

Then, of course, there was Rex. Rex would not
be happy. In fact, he would think Tony had completely lost his mind
to have spent almost seven million dollars and still not own or
even fully control the team. Well, maybe he
had
lost his
mind, because he was furiously thinking through Nate’s staggering
idea.

Tony simply could not stomach the idea of
losing, especially to a corporation like Steam Train that didn’t
give a sweet damn about his beloved game of football. Even worse,
he hated the idea of letting Martha down. Allowing the team to go
to Rance Malone and his band of beer-making assholes would
constitute a terrible failure, both on his part and on
Martha’s.

“Jesus, I’m trying to get my head around it,
Nate,” he finally said. “Think of the practicalities for a minute.
In the end, someone’s got to be in charge, or otherwise nothing
will get done. I couldn’t be having a debate with Martha every time
a move needed to be made, could I? How the hell would that ever
work?”