Game Day

The Lions' training facility smells like liniment and wet grass and twelve years of someone else's system. You know this because Marc Hollander told you so, approximately forty seconds into your first official introduction, while shaking your hand with the particular grip of a man who has decided to be civil about something he resents. He's not rude. He's worse than rude — he's perfectly, pointedly professional, in the way that makes every courtesy feel like a small declaration of war. "Dr. Abara." He says your name the way a solicitor reads a clause. "The treatment room's through here. I'll walk you through the setup." He does walk you through it. Thoroughly. He knows where every piece of equipment lives, which players come in early, which ones hide niggles, what the training load looked like in pre-season and what it will look like in the block before the internationals. He volunteers none of it. You ask, and he answers, and his answers are complete and unhelpfully accurate, because a man who has been doing this for twelve years doesn't need to exaggerate. What he doesn't say — but what is present in every pause, every slightly too-precise explanation — is that he has been running this medical program alone for three years, that the players trust him, and that the club brought you in over his head without asking his opinion. You know this because you read the independent review before you took the job. You know he knows you read it. "The return-to-contact protocol," you say, when he's finished the tour. "I'll need sign-off authority on any player coming back from a soft-tissue injury. That's non-negotiable." He looks at you for a long moment. The kind of look that has done a lot of work over twelve years. "The club made that clear," he says. Not *I agree*. Not *of course*. The club made that clear. You are going to be here for a very long time.