Backfield Boys

by John Feinstein

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  This is for Andrew Thompson (USNA ’96) and Jim Cantelupe (USMA ’96), who taught me a lot about football but more about loyalty and friendship

  PROLOGUE

  Tom Jefferson was staring into the rapidly setting sun, hands on hips, wondering what to do next. It was just a game of touch football on a November afternoon, but he didn’t want to lose to the private school kids.

  Every Friday, eight boys met in Riverside Park for public school versus private school bragging rights. Tom and his best friend, Jason Roddin, along with Mike Roth and Marc Posnock, were the public school team—all seventh graders at Junior High School 44, which was four blocks east of the park.

  The private school guys, all kids they had grown up with on the West Side of Manhattan, went to McBurney, an all-boys school about a mile away, off Central Park West.

  The publics had the two best players: Tom and Jason. But they also had the two worst: Mike and Marc. The privates had figured out if they double-teamed Jason and forced Tom to throw the ball to Mike or Marc, they could slow Jason down—no easy task since Jason was stunningly fast. His nickname was “White Lightning”—with good reason. Like Jason, Tom had earned a nickname, too: “Bull’s-Eye,” because he never seemed to miss a target.

  Now it was getting close to five o’clock and the sun would soon be down. There were no lights in the small park, and everyone had agreed a few minutes earlier to two more possessions. The privates had scored to make it 6–6. Since there were no field goals or extra points, the boys simply counted each touchdown as one point.

  So it was now up to the publics. If they didn’t score, the game would be a tie and they would have to buy the ice creams at Carvel since the privates had won the week before. In other words, a tie was a loss.

  It was third down. Needless to say, the privates had been playing deep to keep Jason from getting behind them. They’d gladly give up an open pass in front of them to either Mike or Marc. Tom had to figure out a way to get the ball to Jason.

  “What do you think?” he asked, as the four of them stood in a small circle a couple of yards behind where the ball sat on the ground.

  The privates were standing back from the ball, hands on hips, taking deep breaths. Everyone was tired.

  “We got two options,” Jason said, because the question was clearly directed at him. “We can throw it underneath and then try to score on fourth down, or go for all of it now.”

  “No way they’re going to let you get behind them,” Tom said.

  Jason grinned. “Don’t look up, but you know the trash can down by the trees?”

  “Sure,” Tom said. The landmark was far down the right side of the field.

  “Fake like you’re going to throw it to me underneath, and then just throw it right at that can.”

  Tom understood. Marc and Mike both nodded. Their job was to spread out as far as they could to keep the defense at least a little bit honest.

  Steve Holder, the slowest player on the privates, picked up the ball and flipped it to Jason—the touch-football version of a snap. Steve would slowly count to five and then rush Tom, forcing him to throw the ball whether or not someone was open. Tom could pull the ball down and run, but he wouldn’t get very far. Speed was not his forte.

  Tom took the snap and instinctively spun the ball so his fingers were across the laces. He had done it so many times in his life that it required no thought. He dropped back a step, just to clear a little space between himself and Steve as he heard him counting.

  “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand…”

  Jason had started from the right, running about ten yards up the field—which ran roughly fifty yards between the oak trees at either end that represented the end zones—and began to cut toward the middle. Kenny Medley went with him, Johnny Strachan lying back as a deep safety.

  Just as he heard Steve say “Four-one-thousand,” Tom faked, beginning his throwing motion, then stopping. Jason, who had paused for a split second as if expecting the ball, suddenly pivoted right and was past Kenny in the blink of an eye.

  As he sprinted in the direction of the goal line, Johnny, who had hesitated for an instant after Tom’s fake, scrambled to get back. It was too late. Jason was a blur. Tom came up on his toes and let go of the ball, feeling absolutely no strain on his arm or shoulder, wanting it to drop into Jason’s arms just as he went past the trash can.

  The ball arced through the darkening sky, and Tom could see Jason running under it with Johnny helplessly trailing him. Jason made the catch in full stride, raced past the tree, and held the ball up triumphantly.

  Tom threw his arms in the air, doing his best Tom Brady/Peyton Manning imitation as he raced across the grass and dirt to congratulate his receiver. All four of the publics gathered to high-five one another. The privates stood and watched, then joined the circle to exchange handshakes and fist bumps.

  Johnny bent over, hands on his knees, still trying to get his breath back.

  “You know something,” he said between gasps. “You two should play real football someday. You’re pretty good together.”

  “Yeah,” Kenny said. “Bull’s-Eye to White Lightning. You guys could make history.”

  “History?” Jason said.

  “How many great quarterback-receiver combinations had the black guy throwing to the white guy?”

  Tom and Jason looked at each other.

  “Should we make history?” Tom said.

  “Yeah, we should,” Jason said. “Let’s talk our mothers into letting us play real football when we get to high school.”

  Tom laughed. “You’re right,” he said. “That would be making history.”

  Sweating and laughing, they all grabbed their jackets and backpacks and crossed Riverside Drive, heading in the direction of the Carvel two blocks away on Broadway.

  PART 1

  1

  The fields just kept rolling past the car, mile after mile.

  “Did it take this long the last time we came down here?” Jason asked.

  He was sitting in the back of the Jeffersons’ silver Honda Accord. Mr. Jefferson was behind the wheel, a smile on his face even though they were more than five hours into the six-hour drive.

  Riding shotgun, Tom laughed at his best friend’s latest complaint. “Last time, we flew to Washington, remember?” he said. “We rented a car in D.C., so the drive was two hours, not six. But I promise you we drove past every one of these fields.”

  “All these cows, too?” Jason asked.

  “Yup. And the sheep and chicken farms.”

  Jason laughed. There was no way he would be in this car right now if not for Tom, who had convinced him that going to a jock boarding school in Middle-of-Nowhere, Virginia, was a good idea.

  Jason and Tom had grown up five floors apart in an apartment building on West End Avenue near Seventy-Seventh Street. They had met in the first grade at PS 87 after Tom’s father, Alan Jefferson, a salesman for an athletic gear company, had been transferred from Chicago to
New York. Tom’s mother, Elaine, an elementary school teacher, had found work as a substitute teacher at PS 87, just over a two-block walk from the apartment building.

  Jason’s family had lived in their apartment since before he was born. His dad, Robbie, was a New York City police detective. His mom, Julie, was also a teacher, working at a nearby private preschool.

  The parents became friends through their sons. Almost from the beginning, Jason and Tom were the best athletes in the PS 87 schoolyard. They started out playing punchball—smacking an orange rubber ball with their fists, rather than a bat, but otherwise following the rules of baseball—and soon graduated to stickball, basketball, and touch football.

  It wasn’t until they crossed Seventy-Seventh Street as sixth graders to go to junior high school that the two boys were part of any organized teams. There was no football team at their school, but they were starters right away on both the basketball and softball teams. Both badly wanted to play football. Their mothers weren’t in love with the idea, but their fathers were.

  One night, when the two boys were in seventh grade, the Jeffersons rode the elevator from the eleventh to the sixth floor for what the parents called “cocktails,” although the mothers drank wine, the fathers drank beer, and the boys drank soda. They all sat around the Roddins’ living room and talked about a football summer camp that Mr. Jefferson had heard about from some of his coworkers.

  “They’re called seven-on-seven camps, because it’s not real football but skills football,” he explained. “You don’t have linemen, except for a center to snap the ball. Everyone else is either a receiver or in the backfield at quarterback or running back. There’s no real tackling either.”

  “How is it football if there’s no tackling?” Mr. Roddin asked.

  “First question I asked, Robbie,” Mr. Jefferson said, smiling. “The camp is about helping kids develop their skills—running, throwing, catching, running pass patterns, defending pass patterns, reading offenses and defenses, things like that. There’s almost no hitting at all.”

  Jason and Tom both loved the idea. They were determined to play for a real team when they got to high school, and this was a chance to enhance their skills.

  The mothers weren’t quite as enthusiastic.

  “Okay, there’s no tackling at this camp,” Mrs. Roddin said. “But why aren’t we sending them to a basketball camp somewhere, or a baseball camp? Aren’t those the two sports we want them to focus on?”

  “Maybe,” Mr. Roddin said. “But I think that’s ultimately up to the boys, isn’t it?”

  “Since when?” his wife said almost instantly.

  Jason still winced at the memory of how sharp his mother’s tone had been.

  “Well, if Jason wants to play football or doesn’t want to play football, I think that’s up to him, Julie,” Mr. Roddin said. “I think Alan feels the same way. I don’t think we’d ever push either one of them to play football—or any other sport—but I don’t think we should tell them they can’t play a sport.”

  Mrs. Jefferson had said very little up until that moment. Now she jumped into the fray. “You don’t think we could say no?” she said. She looked at Mrs. Roddin. “Julie, have you and Robbie ever had that conversation about football? Alan and I haven’t.” She then turned and looked directly at Mr. Roddin. “How can you possibly act as if playing football is the same as basketball or baseball or any other sport? Have you been living in a cave the last few years? Aren’t you aware of how dangerous the sport is?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve studied the stats pretty carefully,” Mr. Roddin said. “And for all the panic going on, the fact remains that the odds one of the boys will get a concussion or suffer a severe head injury are pretty low. Even with all the new technology that makes it easier to identify a concussion, the rate for high school football players is, according to most studies, only about twenty percent.”

  “Twenty percent!” Mrs. Jefferson practically jumped out of her chair. “Robbie, I want you to think about this for a minute: If the boys were about to get on an airplane and the pilot told you there was a twenty percent chance it would crash, would you let them get on it?”

  There was a long pause. For a moment Jason thought that question would end the debate.

  It was Mr. Jefferson who finally responded. “If that flight was the only way they could get where they wanted to go, yes, I would.”

  “Well, then you need to have your head examined,” his wife answered.

  * * *

  And yet, here they were, on a Sunday evening eighteen months later, on their way to Thomas Gatch Prep School in central Virginia, just outside the tiny town of Scottsville and not far from the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

  TGP had been started by a sports agent named Thomas Alan Gatch and several partners in 1999—in fact, a twentieth-anniversary celebration for the school was already being planned for 2019. Mr. Gatch also now served as head-of-school, the equivalent of a public high school’s principal.

  The way Mr. Gatch had explained it to the boys and their fathers when they first arrived on campus for the seven-on-seven camp in the summer prior to their becoming eighth-graders, he’d gotten the idea to start TGP from his former employers at IMG, the giant sports-management agency that represented hundreds of athletes, ran professional sports events, and in the 1980s had purchased a tennis academy in Florida with the intention of turning it into a full-fledged high school—one where every student was an aspiring college athlete. The IMG Academy had been hugely successful, and Mr. Gatch believed he could not only copy it but better it.

  “The difference between us and IMG is that we really do stress academics as much as sports,” he had told the boys and their fathers on the day they arrived. “My background is in education. I was a history teacher once and then a high school principal. That’s why we’re smaller by design, so we have a better teacher-student ratio. We pay our teachers as well as we pay most of our coaches, so we get better teachers.”

  Jason had googled IMG Academy and was stunned to find that more than twelve thousand athletes passed through it every year—though only half of them attended full-time and lived on campus. The tuition was more than $70,000 per year—plus living expenses.

  Gatch was considerably smaller—about fifteen hundred full-time students—and had only recently added golf and tennis to its curriculum. The focus was on team sports: football; boys’ and girls’ basketball, soccer, lacrosse, and swimming; plus baseball for boys and softball for girls, since softball was a scholarship sport for girls in college. The school website boasted that TGP fostered traditional values in its “student-athletes,” on and off the playing field.

  It wasn’t quite as expensive—tuition was $55,000 plus expenses. But, like IMG Academy, it offered scholarships for especially gifted athletes whose families didn’t have that kind of money. Jason could still remember the two fathers’ eyebrows going up the first time Mr. Gatch mentioned that. He knew there was no way either his dad or Tom’s could afford to spend that much money a year to send their sons to high school.

  The deal the fathers and sons had made with the mothers was simple: the boys would be allowed to attend the summer seven-on-seven camp, and once it was over they would all reconvene. The brochure for the camp explained that doctors and trainers were present on-field for every practice or game. If a boy had suffered any sort of prior injury, he needed a doctor’s letter clearing him to play. That soothed the mothers—somewhat. Jason was pretty convinced they were hoping that one of two things would happen: their boys wouldn’t like the camp or they wouldn’t do well enough there to consider going on to play high school football.

  But Tom and Jason had both loved the camp. Jason enjoyed playing wide receiver and especially enjoyed catching passes from Tom. Through their Friday touch football games in the park, and later in the JHS 44 schoolyard, they had figured out that Tom had the stronger arm—though Jason’s wasn’t bad either—and that Jason was considerably
faster and was a little better at catching the ball.

  During the camp, every kid played every position at some point. The goal was to learn the skills needed to play anywhere on the field and then figure out later exactly where you would end up playing.

  “The more versatile you are, the better your chances are of playing on Sundays,” the head coach, James “Bobo” Johnson, told the campers, using coach-speak for playing in the NFL. “And when you start playing real football, being able to play on special teams will also help you greatly as you go up the ladder.”

  There was no special-teams play—kickoffs, punts, field goals—at the camp. There were, Jason learned, camps that specialized in kicking. What’s more, special-teams play was considered so dangerous that there had been talk in the NFL about abolishing kickoffs because so many injuries happened when twenty-two players ran full speed right at one another.

  There was nothing Jason enjoyed more about the camp than the speed drills—or time trials. He won the time trials in the 100-yard dash, the 40-yard dash, and the 10-yard dash, beating everyone among the 150 campers on every timed occasion. His 4.58 forty drew oohs and aahs from the coaches and the other campers, and he enjoyed busting the stereotype that white boys couldn’t run fast.

  “Wait till they find out you’re Jewish,” Tom joked. “They’ll want to drug-test you.”

  Tom’s forty time was 4.77, which put him midpack among the other campers. But he had the most accurate arm in the camp—maybe not the strongest, though it was strong enough—but without doubt the most accurate.

  By the end of the camp, they’d both made their mark and Coach Johnson had told them he’d be in touch with their parents.

  “You boys belong here,” he’d said to them. “You could be a great team, and you could help make us a great team.”

  He then made it clear to both boys that he wouldn’t let money stand in the way of their enrolling at TGP for the ninth grade. A subsequent scholarship offer for each boy changed everything.