Backfield Boys

by John Feinstein

  Billy Bob saw them first. “Right there,” he said, and they hustled in the direction of the lights.

  Teel was in the driver’s seat. He nodded behind him at a car parked a few yards away. “Robinson’s there waiting on Tom and Anthony.”

  He wheeled out of the parking lot and drove carefully down the long driveway. It was no more than a mile or so to downtown Middleburg. Teel found a spot on what looked like Main Street, and they walked into a place called the French Hound.

  It was crowded, but Teel had apparently made a reservation and they were led to a table in the back.

  “They don’t normally take reservations, especially this late on a Friday,” Teel explained when they sat down. “Cost me a few bucks.”

  “Worth it,” Jason said.

  The place wasn’t that loud, but having some extra space and being near the back of the room was a good idea.

  “So,” Billy Bob said, “how was Coach Johnson?”

  Before Teel could answer, the waiter showed up with menus and asked if they wanted to order something to drink or wait for the rest of their party. They all asked for iced tea.

  At first glance, the menu looked a little upscale for Jason, but he spotted steak-frites, which he knew meant steak and french fries. There was pizza, too. He would be fine.

  “You were saying,” Jason said to Teel. “Coach Johnson?”

  Teel smiled. “It was kind of funny because most of the guys there who don’t normally cover high school ball no doubt were prepared to ask if there was truth to the Birmingham story,” he said. “Instead, the first question was whether he thought a loss like this would affect his chances of getting the Alabama job.”

  “How’d he take that?” Billy Bob asked.

  Teel shrugged. “Like you’d expect: ‘My only focus is on coaching this team and clearly we all have a lot of work to do after tonight.’ Then someone asked if the story was true and he said something like, ‘No one at Alabama has contacted me.’”

  “That surprise you?” Jason asked.

  “No,” Teel said, shaking his head. “First contact in a situation like this would be with his agent. So, technically, he’s not lying. By the way, Billy Bob, I did ask why you didn’t get into the game.”

  “What’d he say?” Billy Bob said.

  “That he thought the team’s best chance to move the football was Ronnie Thompson at quarterback and the failure of the offense wasn’t Thompson’s fault.”

  “He’s right,” Billy Bob said. “It was a team effort.”

  “I also asked him if you not playing the last month had anything to do with you calling an audible on the one-yard line at Culpeper.”

  “Whoo boy,” Billy Bob said. “How’d that go?”

  “Again, as you’d expect. He said if a player on his team is disciplined in any way it is a team matter that he won’t discuss in public.”

  Robinson, Tom, and Anthony arrived at that moment. The waiter came back and took their drink orders.

  Teel, with Robinson filling in some details, repeated what had happened during Coach Johnson’s talk with the media. The drinks arrived, everyone ordered, and Teel said, “Given that it’s almost eleven and you guys probably shouldn’t be out for too long, let’s get down to business.”

  That was fine with Jason. He’d been waiting a long time to find out what Teel and Robinson had learned. Even so, he wasn’t prepared for Teel’s opening statement.

  “Tom Gatch is a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  The four players stared at Teel, then looked at Robinson for confirmation. He just nodded.

  “Can’t be true,” Anthony finally said. “It’s 2017.”

  “Not in some places,” Teel said. “Not to Tom Gatch. Coach Johnson is Barack Obama compared to Gatch.”

  “Seriously?” they all chorused.

  “Frighteningly seriously,” Teel said. “Let me explain.”

  * * *

  Teel and Robinson had split their reporting on the TGP founder and head-of-school. Robinson had focused on learning more about the Ku Klux Klan itself; Teel had tried to find people who could tell him if Gatch had any real connection to the group.

  “A lot of people think the Klan no longer exists,” Robinson said. “And it’s true that its membership is only a tiny fraction of what it once was: into the millions eighty or ninety years ago, probably less than ten thousand today. It’s hard, though, to get a handle on actual numbers because it’s a super-secret organization and it doesn’t exactly have membership lists lying around. Or actual membership cards. David Duke was an exception.

  “Most people will never admit to any Klan involvement—for obvious reasons. But they do still have occasional rallies, and there has been violence involving people protesting against them in the recent past. Plus, Louisiana is one of the states where Klan groups are likely still active.”

  He turned to Teel, who picked up the story from there.

  “I found a guy, Bobby Meyer, who works for the Times-Picayune,” Teel said. “He tried to follow up on the Gatch–Duke connection after the incident at Metairie Christian. He got pulled from the story when Gatch left to go work as a sports agent, but he made some progress.”

  “Like what?” Tom asked.

  Teel held up a hand as their food was being delivered. “Hang on, I’ll get to it.”

  Once the waiter departed, he picked up the story.

  “It turns out that Duke and Gatch didn’t just know each other at LSU. They were both members of a KKK chapter located in Baton Rouge. According to this guy, Gatch got forced out of Metairie Christian not because of his connection to Duke, but because everyone suddenly noticed that the school had dropped to one African American teacher during Gatch’s tenure and only twelve African American students: eight on the football team, four on the basketball team.”

  “How’d Meyer find all this out?” Billy Bob asked.

  “He was able to get the names of the teachers who’d left the school after Gatch took over,” Teel said. “One of them—a white guy—had also known Gatch at LSU. Apparently, Gatch’s KKK involvement wasn’t a secret back then.”

  “So why haven’t you two made all this public yet?” Tom asked, a little exasperated.

  Teel and Robinson both shrugged. “One guy saying he heard someone was in the KKK—even on the record—isn’t enough. Even getting some of the ex-teachers to say they left Metairie because they thought Gatch was a racist isn’t enough.”

  “What is enough?” Jason asked.

  “A verifiable document,” Teel said. “Or a public statement.”

  They all looked at him as if he were crazy.

  “Let me spell it out,” Teel said. “You guys have gotta get Mr. Gatch to write something to you or to say something to you in public that is undeniably racist.”

  “Why in the world would he say something like that?” Anthony said. “He’d have to be insane.”

  “Doesn’t being in the KKK tell you he’s already insane to begin with?” Robinson said.

  “Different kind of insanity, no?” Billy Bob said.

  “Yes,” Teel agreed. “You guys ever see a movie called A Few Good Men?”

  All four football players began yelling, “You can’t handle the truth!”—Jack Nicholson’s signature line from the movie. In the climactic scene, Tom Cruise, as the Navy lawyer defending two Marines accused of murder, had baited Nicholson’s character into admitting that he had ordered the accused Marines to perform a “Code Red”—an often violent form of Marine hazing—on the victim.

  Jason, who remembered watching the movie on TV with his parents, laughed and began channeling Cruise’s character, paraphrasing the pre-courtroom scene when it had been suggested to him that he get Nicholson to admit he’d ordered the Code Red. “Well, that’s just perfect,” Jason “Cruise” said. “I mean, no problem. We’ll just march into Mr. Gatch’s office on Monday and tell him he needs to confess to us—four freshman football players—that he’s a card-carrying KKK mem
ber and that Coach Johnson is, thank God, also a racist. Soon as we’re done with that, we should have time before lunch to find a cure for cancer.”

  Robinson laughed without mirth. “No one said it would be easy, but—”

  He stopped in midsentence. Jason, who had been finishing off his french fries, looked up in the direction where the reporter was staring and saw why he had broken off his sentence.

  Walking toward them, with a smirk written across his face, was Coach Ingelsby. Right behind him were Coach Reilly, Coach Gutekunst, and Coach Cruikshank.

  Coach Reilly also appeared to be smirking. Coach Cruikshank looked stricken. Coach Gutekunst had his head down as if he couldn’t watch what was about to happen.

  “Well, what do we have here?” Coach Ingelsby said as he reached the table. “Boys, you must have gotten permission from someone to leave the resort. I assume you did that, right?”

  Tom was the quickest thinker in the group. “Coach, no one said anything about needing permission to leave the resort,” he said. “There’s no curfew, since—”

  “Since no one had a car, not even the seniors, much less a bunch of freshmen,” Coach Ingelsby broke in. “And it was a given that no one was going to go out. Except I guess we forgot about your pals in the media.” He then looked at Teel and Robinson. “I assume you two got clearance from Ed Seaman to be spending time with these four players, right?”

  This time it was Teel who had an answer. “We’re not interviewing anyone right now, Don,” he said. “You know we both wrote about these guys during the first couple weeks of the season. We thought it would be nice to buy them a postgame meal as thanks for the time they’ve given us.”

  That, thought Jason, was pretty smooth.

  Coach Ingelsby didn’t see it that way. “Good try, Teel, but you know better than that,” he said. “You and Robinson aren’t exactly rookie reporters. You know our rules.” He turned to Robinson. “Him, I expect this kind of thing from,” he said, nodding in Teel’s direction. “I’m disappointed in you.”

  “I’ll try not to lose sleep over it,” Robinson answered, causing Jason and the others to stifle laughs.

  Coach Reilly jumped in. “I don’t know what all of you are up to, but we’ll find out,” he said. “You two guys are supposed to be big-time columnists. Why the sudden fascination with four high school freshmen—only one of whom is a starter right now?” He pointed a finger at Tom. “Jefferson, have you even seen the field yet for a single play?”

  “I’ve seen it quite a bit,” Tom said. “From the sideline.”

  Before any of the coaches could respond to Tom’s wisecrack, Teel jumped back in.

  “Which raises a question: How in the world could you guys not get Billy Bob Anderson here in the game tonight when it was clear your offense was going nowhere with Ronnie Thompson at QB and Anderson had already bailed you out twice this season?”

  “How many games have you ever coached, Teel?” Ingelsby said.

  Now it was Teel’s turn to look disgusted. “Oh, please, Don, do better than that. I don’t need to have coached to see who your best quarterback is.”

  Coach Ingelsby apparently didn’t have a wise-guy answer for that one. “Rather than ruin our dinner,” he said, “I’m going to very firmly suggest to the four of you that you get your chauffeurs here to get you back to the resort right now. In fact, I’m going to call Coach Winston and have him meet you in the lobby at”—he looked at his watch—“eleven forty-five. That gives you seventeen minutes. Which is very generous of me.” His smirk widened. “Oh, and all four of you can report to Coach Johnson’s office before breakfast on Monday. We’ll expect you at seven.”

  Jason wanted to argue but figured it was pointless.

  “We’ll get ’em back right away, Don,” Robinson said. “No need to call Winston to check on them.”

  “I’m not doing it because I need to,” Coach Ingelsby said. “I’m doing it because I want to.”

  He turned, pulled out his cell phone, and walked away. The other coaches—without another word—followed. But only to a booth a few yards away.

  The boys’ dinner with the reporters was over.

  24

  Not surprisingly, word got around regarding the late-night visit to the French Hound, and there was a good deal of needling about it on the bus trip home.

  “You guys gonna get some new running shoes? You’re probably going to need them,” was one crack.

  “Hope you’re going to make a lot of money when those guys write your book—you’ll need it when you get kicked out of here.”

  Most of the comments were good-natured, although the most repeated one was in reference to their timing. “We lose forty-five to nothing, and you go out with a couple of reporters? Are you trying to make us even more miserable on Monday?”

  That wasn’t a major concern for the soon-to-be-forgotten foursome (or so they were figuring) over the weekend. Jason and Tom were again wondering if it was time to just call their parents and go home. At least that way they’d avoid another lecture and, no doubt, quite a few reps up and down the stadium steps.

  But mid-October was no time to try to get into another school—anywhere.

  “It’s also possible we’ll have no choice,” Billy Bob said as they sat and talked on Saturday afternoon.

  It was a spectacular fall day, the leaves starting to turn, and they’d walked to their favorite corner of the campus after lunch.

  “It’s a private school,” Billy Bob went on. “They can just kick us out because they don’t like us.”

  “Which they don’t,” Tom put in.

  “I don’t think they’ll do that,” Jason said. “Anthony’s basically a starter at this point, and like it or not, they’re gonna need Billy Bob to play quarterback to have any chance to win the conference.”

  “Winning the conference might not be possible even if we don’t get booted,” Anthony reasoned. “If Middleburg wins out, we have no chance.”

  “They still have to play Roanoke,” Jason answered. “They lose to them and we beat Roanoke, it could be a three-way tie.”

  “If we don’t lose to anyone the rest of the way,” Anthony said.

  “Which gets back to the original point,” Tom said. “At the very least, TGP needs you two guys. Jason might be able to help on special teams. I’m just deadweight at this point.”

  “Let’s assume we don’t get kicked out,” Jason said. “We need a plan.”

  They sat and talked for the next hour, coming up in the end with nothing. Jason was ready to call it quits and suggest they go to the campus coffee shop for a snack when they saw a group of girls walking back from the soccer stadium, having just played a game.

  “How’d you guys do?” Anthony yelled in their direction.

  One of them was a tall, striking African American girl whom Jason recognized immediately because he’d stared at her every time she walked past their table in the dining hall. She paused and peered over at them.

  “We won,” she said. She put her hand on her forehead to shade her eyes from the sun. “Anthony, is that you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, waving.

  She turned and said something to several of her friends, and they all began walking in their direction.

  “That’s Zoey Desheen, isn’t it?” Tom said.

  “Yup,” Anthony said.

  “She knows you?”

  Anthony smiled triumphantly. “I somehow tested into sophomore English, remember? We’re in the same class.”

  Zoey had brought three friends with her. Even though it was a cool afternoon, they were all dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops. Zoey was at least five foot ten and stunning. The other three weren’t quite as stunning but were plenty attractive.

  Boys and girls didn’t interact much on campus. The girls had their own dorm, and even though there didn’t appear to be a formal rule against it, none of the dining room tables were coed. The only place where there was any real interaction was in class, and th
at was relatively minimal. Very few of the upperclass girls had much time for freshmen. Plus, it wasn’t like being a jock made you special in a school where everyone, girls included, was a jock. Jason had gotten a brief flurry of attention after his blocked kick, but it had faded pretty quickly.

  “I thought we’d already determined your fifteen minutes of fame were over,” Tom had commented after Jason had tried to start a conversation walking out of class one morning with Andrea McIntosh, a blond-haired, blue-eyed volleyball player, and Andrea had disappeared like a puff of smoke.

  “Thanks for the encouragement, Bull’s-eye,” Jason had said.

  Now the girls walked over, sat down, and began asking questions about what in the world had happened to the football team at Middleburg.

  “They had a great quarterback, and Coach Johnson wouldn’t put Billy Bob into the game,” Anthony said. “It was pretty much that simple.”

  One of the girls, Hope—Jason couldn’t remember her last name, but she had mesmerizing green eyes—crinkled her nose. “I’ve seen you play,” she said to Billy Bob. “You’re way better than Ronnie Thompson. Why won’t he play you?”

  “Billy Bob was a bad boy,” Tom said. “He didn’t follow orders.”

  “Oh, not good,” said Toni Andrews, who Jason knew was the soccer team’s goalie. “Everyone in the school knows you don’t mess around with Bobo. The older guys talk about ‘The Bobo Rules’ all the time, and that he’s judge, jury, and—when need be—executioner.”

  “How long have you been here?” Billy Bob said.

  “I’m a senior,” Toni answered. She looked away for a moment, and then returned her focus to the boys. “Well, maybe Bobo will get that job in Alabama and you guys will get a new start.”

  “Not if they give Ingelsby the job,” Zoey said. “My friend Willie White says he’s worse than Bobo, but Gatch thinks Ingelsby is the next Bill Belichick.”

  “Well, he does have Belichick’s personality,” Jason said.

  “Oh no, he’s worse than that,” Billy Bob said. “People say Belichick has a sneaky sense of humor. Plus, I think he’s a little better coach than Ingelsby.”

  “So’s my cat,” Tom said.