by David Klass
The nightmare stayed with me as I took a shower, dosed myself with maximum Advil, and got dressed. I remembered my real car crash and being helped from the wreckage, feeling my arms and my legs and being surprised that each of them was okay and I was functioning fine. Then I had realized that the ambulance crew was focusing on the accordion of a car and someone still inside it was moaning. That had been the beginning of my very real-life nightmare, and this bitter cold day was supposed to be the end of it. This was the day I had been looking forward to for months, redeeming myself by working hard and keeping my nose clean and bringing a state championship home to Kendall. Unfortunately, I felt like total crap.
I dragged myself around from class to class and period to period, and I kept drinking hot liquids every chance I got. Coach Shea had the school nurse check me out during my lunch period, and she announced that my temperature was two degrees above normal. “He’s not perfect, but he can play,” she told the coach.
“He looks like death warmed over,” Coach grunted.
“Thanks,” I said. “Real flattering description. But I’m really feeling much better.”
He stared back and growled: “Don’t blow smoke at me, Downing. You think I haven’t seen my share of flu over the years?”
Then we were on the bus, zipping down the highway, and I was sitting next to Danny. He had his headphones on and was listening to something, but I was watching cars roll through the ice and slush around our bus and trying not to think about how I should be feeling. I should have been feeling excited and primed, with that tension that builds all day in your gut on game day till an hour before start time you can barely sit still. But my stomach felt empty, as if someone had drained it with a hose, and instead of electric excitement there was still more than a tinge of nausea.
“Let me see what you’re listening to,” I said, and pulled Danny’s headphones off and tried them on for size. The volume was real low. “What the hell?” I asked. “I can barely hear the words.”
“The words don’t matter, it’s the beat,” Danny said, pulling his headphones back.
For some reason I remembered when we were at his house, watching mixed martial arts, and he had kept turning the sound lower and then switched the set off. “Loud volume still bothers you?” I asked.
He gave me a look, as if to say that was ridiculous. “I’m just in a mellow mood. Never been in a state championship before. Hey, check that out!”
And there it was. MetLife Stadium, home of two professional football teams and the venue of our state championship football game. Even from miles away it looked enormous.
“Ever been to a game there?” Danny asked me.
“A couple of times. You?”
“Never,” Danny shook his head. “It’s huge,” he whispered, a little awed.
“I never thought I’d be playing inside it,” I whispered back.
By then other guys on the bus had spotted it, and you could feel the excitement kick in.
You work for months, three or four hours a day, in the pouring rain and the freezing cold. You start out in August, on a patch of grass in a hick town in a corner of New Jersey, a bunch of guys doing push-ups and squat-thrusts and running the plays from last year. And you tell yourselves that if you do everything right, you will one day find yourselves on a grand stage, playing for the bragging rights of the whole Garden State, but all along it still feels like a crazy dream.
And then, bam, it happens—we were inside MetLife Stadium, which holds more than eighty thousand fans. We were down on the emerald turf field in the bright lights, gathered around Coach Shea. It occurred to me that this was the last time I’d hear him give his pregame talk—everything that happened now would be for the last time.
“Downing’s gonna start,” he said, “and we’ll see how long he can go. If Hurley goes in, that’s great, too. We have two fine quarterbacks on this team, and either one can beat Albion. Right?”
“Right!” we roared back at him.
“You guys want it, don’t you?” he asked.
“Yeah!” we thundered.
“You deserve it for all the hard work and pain and blood and guts you’ve put into this year, don’t you?” His voice seemed louder than all of ours combined.
“YEAH!” We matched him decibel for decibel.
Then his voice dropped low, to almost a whisper. “Then go out there and take it. Go out there and play like the proud men of Kendall that you are, and take it from them!”
And we were roaring, and jumping, and slamming each other on the pads, but even at that moment when I was carried away by emotion, I felt the flu bug stirring.
They kicked off, and we started on our own twenty. I looked around the huddle and saw my old friends and comrades, and I tried to squash that flu bug and rise to the occasion. “Guys, we’re gonna do it just the same way that got us here. Let’s start with a short hook to Rosewood and move the chains.”
I dropped back into my pocket, and he streaked off the line and then buttonhooked back, but my pass was three feet short. I could blame it on the strong wind or the numbing cold or the flu, but it was an ugly pass. We tried a run up the middle, but Magee got tripped up by two guys behind the line. You could see that this team, Albion, was for real. They were talking to each other, psyching each other up, not the biggest guys in the world, but they believed.
Third and eleven. I called a long slant to Glenn Scott, but he was blanketed by the coverage. I checked off to Danny, but he had two guys on him. I looked for a screen to Magee, but there was no time. Albion’s pesky rushers had broken through my wall, and I felt their hands grabbing me. I took a step and wrapped up the football and someone spun me around. I tried to break away, but three of them had me now and they knocked me to the turf and piled on top. It wasn’t a hard tackle, and when they got off I rose to my knees. Then I threw up in front of thousands of people, not to mention the cable TV audience.
We punted, and I stood on the sideline wrapped up in a coat and a blanket, sipping something hot. Coach Shea walked over and took one look at me, and said: “Sorry, Jerry, but you’re done for the day.” He always called me Downing, so I knew he really felt bad about it.
I didn’t even fight him. I just nodded and lowered my head.
Ryan Hurley went in the next time we got the ball, which was six minutes later because Albion marched it down with short runs and tic-tac passes and scored a touchdown.
And Ryan tried. They all tried. Magee tried to bull it up the middle, and Glenn Scott got us two first downs, and near the end of the second quarter Danny made a one-handed catch and ran it all the way in for a touchdown to put us on the scoreboard. But by then we were trailing 21–7.
Danny came right over and sat next to me, still breathing hard from his long sprint down the sideline. “How ya doing, Jer?”
“I’ve been better,” I told him. “Nice grab.”
“When I caught it, I knew I was gone,” he said. “It felt like I was flying.”
“You were flying,” I told him. “You ran away from their whole team.”
“To tell the truth, they’re not that fast,” he said, sounding a little perplexed. “And they’re not that big, either. They really don’t seem like they should be as good as they are.”
“The only problem is, nobody told them that,” I replied softly.
We headed into the locker room at halftime down 31–7. The Kendall fans were quiet. Even our marching band had fallen silent. I saw my parents, and my mom looked concerned. Dad gave me a “fight on” fist pump, and I shook my fist back, but it felt like we were just going through the motions. I spotted Carla sitting with her parents on a bleacher right smack in the middle of the Kendall section. Good for them for showing up. Our eyes met, and she mouthed something. I think it was “Good luck” or “Fight hard” but it might have been “You suck.”
And there was no doubt that we had stunk it up. After the first half against Sand River, we had trailed 14–3, and that had seemed like a big mountain
to climb. But an eleven-point comeback was doable, and we had never stopped believing in ourselves. Now we were down twenty-four points to a really good team, a team that was supersolid in every phase of the game. I saw a lot of heads hanging as we trudged off the field for halftime.
Cold never bothers me during a game, but this time it felt good to be indoors. Coach gathered us around, but he didn’t give us his usual fiery pep talk. “I want you to know that I’ve decided to retire,” he said. “This will be my last game coaching Kendall. These guys are tough, and we didn’t have a great week to prepare, and we’ve lost our starting quarterback, so if we want to make excuses we’ve got a boatload of them.”
He broke off and let out a long breath. He looked a little old and tired. He said softly: “But that’s not how I want to go out. And I don’t think that’s how you guys want to go out. We can do anything in one half of football, if we set our minds to it. Right, Leo?”
Out came his surprise guest, Leo Keller, the only guy from Kendall to ever make it to the NFL. He must have been fifty, with some white hair, and he had a slight limp. But he still had the rugged frame of an outside linebacker who had played ten seasons in the NFL. He looked around at us, and then he chuckled. “No, I’m not sure that is right, Coach. You fellows look whipped,” he told us. “Don’t pretend it’s the cold weather. It’s not your preparation, either. Those boys from Albion just want it more. They stuck it to you in the first half, and if they go out and score one more time it’s over. Simple as that.”
He pulled a chair into the center of our group and sat down. “So how do we change the momentum?” he asked. “Tell you what. I was part of one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the NFL. In Chicago, on a day a lot colder than this, we came back from thirty-five down. How does a thing like that happen? You can’t explain it by more passing yards or better running plays or new tactics that the coach sends in. It was none of those things.”
Again, he was silent, looking around at us. His brown eyes were intense, measuring us. “I can still remember that Sunday, crystal clear and cold. We were getting crushed, and then we turned it. Not all at once, but you could feel it happening. The other team could feel it, too, but they just couldn’t stop it. And it wasn’t one play, or a lucky break, or something that fate handed us. Nah.”
He stood up and folded his hands over his big arms so that his two Pro Bowl rings flashed, and his voice got a bit louder. “Here’s what it is,” he told us. “Sometimes something a little freaky happens and a team decides not to lose a game like this. They make that decision in their hearts, as a group, that they will not lose. Then they go out and, play by play, they impose their will. They turn the momentum. They put their shoulders to it, and they slowly shift it. Somebody toss me a football.”
Somebody threw him one, and he caught it and held it as if he were going to run with it. His hands were so big that the football almost disappeared inside. “Man, I love this game,” he said. “I gotta tell you, I miss it terribly. I was there on Tuesday night when that sad man from Connecticut said that football is dead. He got that wrong, but he got most of it dead right.”
Leo Keller looked down at the football. “You can’t change this sport by making the helmets more cushioned or the tackling safer. Football is what it is, for better or worse. Somebody smacks you, and you smack ’em back. Somebody knocks you down, and you get up and hit them even harder. The beauty of the game is its ugliness. It’s a fight in an alley. So if you guys want to win, you gotta decide, as a group, that you’re gonna get up off the floor and start punching back.”
He held the football up in his right hand and turned it so that the laces caught the light. “That’s all I have to say to you. Fate has stamped you as the losers tonight. Everybody in this stadium feels it. Hell, your own parents feel it. And I can tell you feel it yourselves. I see it in your eyes. If you want to be state champs, you’re going to have to put your shoulders to this game and turn that fate play by play, till you remake your own destiny.”
“Everybody kneel and link hands,” Coach Shea said, and we did. Danny was on my right, and Leo Keller was on my left. My hand seemed to disappear into his huge paw. “Two minutes of silence,” Coach said, and we were quiet. I could feel Leo’s two Pro Bowl rings.
It was a strange thing, but those two minutes seemed to last a very long time. Instead of shouting at us, Coach had given us a chance to look inside ourselves, and I was surprised by what I saw.
Maybe it was the fever, but kneeling there, I had the craziest thoughts. I remembered the Pee Wee game when they first tried me out as quarterback and I threw four touchdowns. The way the parents had all gaped at me. I remembered my dad’s tight face when he was laid off, and how he kept going out looking for jobs and coming home and not saying much. And for some reason I thought of my grandfather when he lay dying and I went into his hospital room to say goodbye. He smiled at me and said, “God bless you, Jerry,” and reached out and touched me with his hand.
“Okay,” Coach Shea finally said, and he sounded a little choked up. “This is going to be my last half as a coach, and whatever happens, I’m really proud of you guys. Now let’s go play some football.” We stood up, and the guys started to head out.
Ryan Hurley walked out the door first, and they all followed him. Nobody said anything.
I took a step toward the door, but Leo Keller grabbed my arm with his left hand. In his right, I noticed he still held the football. “C’mere a minute, Downing,” he said softly, and drew me a few steps away. Then he let go of my arm, and we were facing each other, alone in the large locker room. “I got bad news,” he said. “It has to be you. Know what I mean?”
I shook my head.
We were standing near a long polished wooden bench and a row of gray metal lockers. He smiled at me and said, “I see how it is. I know how sick you are. I’ve been there. But without you it doesn’t work.”
“Ryan can do the job,” I told him.
He shook his head. “You’re the man.” He flipped me the football he’d been holding and shot me a wink. I’m pretty sure he was telling me: here, this belongs to you. Then he turned and walked out.
We kicked off to Albion to start the second half, and our defense held them three and out. I thought about what Leo had said and then I walked up to Coach Shea and told him quietly, “I want to try going back in for one set.”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Not gonna happen, Downing. You look like a corpse. This is Hurley’s game now.”
They punted and we took over the ball, and I was still standing on the sideline. Ryan Hurley stayed in at quarterback, and he tried to shift things in a hurry. He threw three long passes, but none of them connected, so we had to punt it back to Albion, and time kept ticking down.
Coach Shea was standing next to Coach Horton, going over defensive formations. “Hey, Coach,” I said.
“Busy,” he grunted.
“You gotta put me in,” I told him.
“I’m gonna put you in a hospital, first chance I get,” he said without looking up from his clipboard. “You’re sick as a dog. Let it go, Downing.”
I grabbed his arm so that the clipboard fell to the ground, and I turned him. Coach is not an easy man to turn. He glared at me. “What the hell?”
I met his eyes. “Put me in the game or…”
“Or what?”
“I’ll kick your ass.”
His sandblasted face twitched. “Yeah?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He looked back at me a second more, and then his lips twisted up in a tiny grin. “Okay, Downing. I don’t want to get my ass kicked in my last game as coach. One piece of advice. If you puke again, try to puke on one of them.”
Our defense held Albion, and this time Coach sent me out. There were ten minutes left in the third quarter. When I stepped onto the field, the Kendall fans let out a roar, and our band played our fight song.
We stood in the huddle, and I could see that the guys wanted to believ
e. They were waiting for me to start throwing bombs. And suddenly I understood that if they were waiting for it, Albion must also be. “They know I’m a passer,” I said. “They’ll think we’re desperate. So let’s cross them up and get our running game going first.”
Sure enough, they were guessing pass, so when Brian Hart took it right up the middle, he gained fourteen before they brought him down. Next play I ran an option and they were all waiting for the sideline pass, so when I flipped it to Magee, he had plenty of daylight to run.
I only threw two short passes on that whole drive, and it wasn’t exactly pretty, but we played smashmouth football, and our line outmuscled theirs in the trenches. All those hours in the weight room paid off, because foot by foot we shouldered and shoved them backwards. We scored on a draw, with Hart running seven yards straight up their gut, and it was 31–14. We were still down two touchdowns and a field goal, and our drive had eaten up seven precious minutes, but we had started to turn it.
Next time we got the ball, we stayed with the running attack and made two first downs. Now they were sitting on the run, loading up the line. In the huddle, I glanced at Danny. “I hear these guys aren’t so fast,” I said.
“Nope,” he agreed.
“Then let’s smoke ’em,” I said. “I’m gonna fake it to Glenn short and hit Rosewood on a streak.” A streak is a straight sprint toward their end zone, where our receiver challenges their coverage people to a fifty-yard dash and lets it all hang out. There’s nothing fancy about a streak—it’s pure speed. I looked at my pass protectors. “For this to work, you guys gotta buy me a few seconds.” I could tell they were plenty determined. We broke the huddle, and Danny and I didn’t so much as glance at each other. We’d been doing this too long to give the defense any clues.
I got the hike and stepped back into my pocket, and my wall held for a second, two seconds. My pump fake to Glenn froze their defense and bought me a third second. Then I looked long. They had their fastest cover guy on Danny, and their free safety was slanting over to help out.
