Fourth and Forever

by Bert Carson

  There were scattered calls of agreement and almost everyone was nodding his head. I looked at Richard and said, “Rest easy, Denby. I’m going to answer your question, but first let’s get a few more comments. Who else has noticed something different since our conversation last week?”

  Brent raised his hand, and I acknowledged him with a nod of my head. “Daddy, I agree with everything that Richard said and I tried to do something about it. I began to write up my plans for next year’s season, recruiting, plays, schedule, everything. That kept me busy for a while, but then I noticed there was no joy in it. So my question is, I tried something that I thought would work and it didn’t; now what should I do?”

  “That’s good, Coach. And, believe it or not, Denby’s answer and your answer are the same. Before I tell you what it is, let’s get at least one more comment. I know there is another reaction that being experienced and I want to see if someone will mention it.”

  I scanned the group again and said, “I want to know what you are feeling about winning the national championship and the thing I want to hear someone say hasn’t been mentioned yet. Let me give you a hint, it’s not considered a nice thing. Does anyone have an idea what I’m talking about?”

  From up the stairwell, someone that I couldn’t see, called out, “I’m angry.”

  “Aha, that’s the one I wanted to hear. Is anyone else angry?”

  As near as I could see, everyone in the room raised their hands.

  “Okay, who said it first?”

  The stairwell voice called down, “I did, Daddy; Tom Rice.”

  “Tom, I’m not going to ask you to come down where we can see you, that would take too long, and we all know what you look like anyway. So, talk to us from where you are.”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  “First, as best you can, tell me what you’re angry about.”

  “The first thing is no one has talked to me about the game in over a week. Oh, they might say, good game, do it again next year or something like that, but you can tell their hearts aren’t in it. That’s the first thing.”

  “What’s the second thing, Tom?”

  “This one is tough to put into words, Daddy, but I’ll try. Even when they make those meaningless remarks, like good game, they don’t have a clue what we had to do to win the championship. They don’t know what it feels like to do two-a-day practices for a month. They don’t know what it means to give up everything to play football. They don’t have any idea what it feels like to play when you don’t feel like playing, to get smashed down and get back up when you just want to lie there, and to drag yourself off the field at the end of the game wondering if you will ever be able to play another game. They don’t know any of that and they don’t even want to know.”

  That brought a round of applause from the team and I noted that Meg joined in with them.

  “That is PTSD in a nutshell. You find no lasting joy in what you did and you’re angry that no one understands or even wants to understand.”

  I looked around the room and asked, “Before I talk about those two, let me ask one more time. Has any one of you felt anything else besides or one or both of those two things?”

  Everyone shook their head.

  I laughed and said, “That’s good, because those are the only two things that I experienced and I don’t have an answer for anything else. First, let’s talk about no joy.”

  I took a sip of water then said, “This can serve you in everything you do from this day until your last day. There is no lasting joy in accomplishing any objective. The joy is in the doing, not in the accomplishing. Think about our ‘being in the moment’ conversations. That’s where the joy is. Right now, we are having a conversation. The joy is in listening and learning. The joy will come back every time you apply what you’ve learned but if tomorrow someone asks if you were here and you say yes, immediately note there is no joy in the fact that you were here.”

  “If you live in the moment, you have your joy. It doesn’t exist anywhere else. You can’t capture joy and save it to be re-experienced at some future date. The answer is, live in the moment, every moment. When you are in the moment, you’ll find that you have no need to recall the joy of another moment.”

  “Now, about anger. Ask yourself this question, what difference does it make what anyone else thinks? Know that you set a goal and you accomplished it at great personal costs. You did it for yourself and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. You didn’t win the national championship for Coach Jenkins, or Jimbo, or me… did you?”

  The answer came back from several players, “NO!”

  “That’s right, you did it for yourself. So, what difference does it make what someone else thinks or doesn’t think about what you did?”

  I paused for at least thirty seconds as I scanned the room, “When you can honestly say that it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about you and what you do, then the anger will go away.”

  “That gentlemen is a two-step cure for PTSD that works. First, live in the moment. Second, don’t be concerned about what anyone thinks, says or does.”

  There was silence as they thought about the two steps. Finally I said, if I don’t see you before you leave, have a wonderful Christmas and a great New Year.”

  Chapter 32

  Missoula, Montana 2005

  Fourth and forever is a phrase that originated in football and over time has found its way into our common, everyday language. On March 1, 1992, I woke and discovered that Kathy, my wife of twenty-five years, had died during the night. For the next two weeks, I faced the choice of going on with my life or giving up. It was a fourth and forever choice.

  I chose to go for it, with no idea, promise or guarantee that I would succeed. I only had two things, the desire to live and the unwillingness to die. Beyond that, I had nothing.

  The major difference between life and football is, in football you know exactly how long you have to play, in life we have no idea how long the game will last. In that difference, life has a major advantage. You cannot afford to waste a second of it, not a single second.

  In football, you can waste a play now and then. In football, you can kick on fourth down if there is enough time for you to get the ball back. In life, you don’t know if you have time to waste a play. In life, when you have the ball, you cannot afford to kick it away, regardless of how far you have to go for a first down. When it’s fourth and forever, you have to go for it.

  In 1992, I thought the game, my personal game, was lost. I was wrong. A chapter had ended, but the book was far from being over. That year, through a series of unlikely events that began in 1989 when I chose to help my son learn basic football skills, I became the starting quarterback for the University of Montana. I was the quarterback through ten, undefeated and untied, regular season games, and the placekicker in the three-playoff games that culminated in our winning the Division 1 National Championship.

  The National Championship pales beside the other events of the season. Bobby and I have a relationship that few fathers ever dream of, a relationship that gets stronger every passing year. I met and, three years later, married, Meg McKinney, a woman who was willing to give her life to me, a man who needed that gift more than he knew.

  I moved from the southeast, an area that I’d known and loved for forty-four years, to a place that I knew nothing about, and it became my true home. Men, women and children who always go for it on fourth and forever surround me, and I can think of no better company for this game that we call life.

  *********

  I played four years for UM. After that first season, I never started another game as quarterback, which was fine by me. I’m a placekicker. In my career, I kicked 452 points and scored six more on a running play. In the fall of 1995, I kicked my final field goal and retired my football shoes.

  Bobby and I graduated from UM, at 11:00 A.M., May 25, 1996. Graduation night, Bobby and Janet and Meg and I were married in a double wedding at the campus chapel. Brent was my bes
t man; Patty was Meg’s matron of honor. Jerry Jefferson, “Hunk,” was Bobby’s best man, and Elizabeth Traylor was Janet’s matron of honor. The crowd overflowed onto the grounds outside the chapel where the “big sky” was a solid carpet of stars.

  Two weeks after graduation, the four of us opened, Edwards International, a management and quality control consulting firm. Our offices are in a two-story building on the banks of the Bitterroot River just four blocks from the house that I rented in 1992 and bought from Mr. Martin in 1994. The following year, I had the opportunity to buy the house next door to it, and I did. That house was Meg’s and my wedding gift to Bobby and Janet.

  Flexible led the University of Montana Grizzlies onto the field for four more years after we graduated. He retired at the end of the 1999 season. Flexible is fifteen years old now. He’s not as agile as he once was, but he still has his moments. He goes to work with us every day, and every night he sleeps beside Bobby and Janet’s bed. Their two children, Josh 8 and Megan 6, are, as Garrison Keillor says, “above average” and a continual source of wonder and delight for Meg and me.

  At the end of the ’92 football season, pro football teams drafted several of our seniors. Notable among them was Richard Denby who became the center for the New York Giants, starting every game for ten consecutive years before retiring. Richard is now enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, in Canton, Ohio.

  Jeff Samuelson, who graduated in 1994, was also recruited by the New York Giants and had an eleven-year career with them. He is now their quarterback coach and I’m confident that he’ll be voted into the hall of fame the first year that he is eligible for that honor.

  Brent and Patty left Missoula and moved to Albuquerque at the end of the 2000 season. He is the head coach of the University of New Mexico Lobos. Eric Spencer, the UM offensive coach was selected to take Brent’s place and he has done an outstanding job, leading the team to one national championship and two undefeated seasons. Jimbo, our ageless trainer, still ably assists Eric.

  During the 1993 school year, our Monday Vietnam Conversations became an official course jointly sponsored by the Psychology and the History Departments. It has grown more popular every year, expanding from its original classroom location to its current home, the main auditorium. The course meets weekly and the featured presenters are men and women who served in Vietnam in all capacities, from the military, to Red Cross volunteers and manufacturers’ representatives who worked in Vietnam during the war years. Last year a group of Vietnamese military veterans, both Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Regulars, spoke to standing room only crowds.

  Meg, Janet and Bobby are all licensed pilots. The company owns a twin engine, Beech Barron for business use and in a moment of weakness, Waylon sold us Bluebird, which we fly just for the fun of it. Everyone hugs Waylon at every opportunity. A practice that usually draws the comment, “Don’t you people ever forget anything?”

  In the past few years, Edward’s International has attracted many new clients interested in opening manufacturing operations in Vietnam. We now have an office just south of Ho Chi Minh City, still known as Saigon to most of its residents, in an Import-Export Processing Zone, where several of our clients operate branch offices. We lease a large townhouse, nearby, which is convenient when we are facilitating a client start up there.

  *******

  Is everything perfect? I see it that way. Are there still fourth and forever situations in my life? Yes, there are. Isn’t that a contradiction? No, it isn’t.

  Fourth and forever is simply an opportunity to renew one’s commitment to the fullness of life and to go for it, totally, without hesitation or reservation.

  The end.

  God be thy guide from camp to camp;

  God be thy shade from well to well;

  God grant beneath the desert stars

  Thou hear the Prophet’s camel bell.

  -James Elroy Flecker-