Junior Year Box Set

I found an empty table. My teammates knew my pregame ritual and left me alone. I was happily eating my dinner when someone sat down next to me. I turned and was surprised to see Jeff Delahey, my favorite reporter. Turning off my music, I pulled my earbuds out.

“How did you get back here?” I asked.

“I have my ways. Care to give me some pregame quotes?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, and he pulled out his phone to record me.

“Tonight is a big game between two of the best teams in the nation. Since you’re not rated nationally like King is, do you even have a chance tonight?” Jeff asked.

“That’s why they have us play the game. If you asked the people that know these things, they’d tell you that King should handle us easily. They haven’t been challenged by any opponent so far this year. I think I saw where they’ve outscored their competition by an average of four scores each game. They have so much talent that we’ll have to play perfectly to give them a game.”

I gave him the ‘aw shucks we’re lucky to be here’ routine, and he even let me mention God. When we finally finished, he gave me a smirk.

“Just between us, how badly are you going to beat them?” he asked.

I noticed he hadn’t put his phone away, so this was on the record. He and I had this fun little game we played, and I usually guessed pretty close. I just shook my head.

“Just between us,” I said, and raised my eyebrows. “Honestly, this will be the closest I’ll probably get to play against college-level competition until I actually get there. We’re in for the fight of our lives, and I plan to raise the level of my game. I’m confident my teammates have my back. Our coaches have done a tremendous job to get us ready, and I have faith in what we can accomplish together. I predict that we’ll win, but it’ll be a close one.”

Jeff put his phone away.

“Okay, now we really are off the record. How big will you win?”

“We’ll win by at least two scores. It’ll be tight early, and we may even get down, but in the end, our conditioning will carry us through. King hasn’t played anyone who simply will not give up. My biggest fear is that someone might get hurt.”

◊◊◊

We had an 8:15 ET kickoff. ESPN planned to use this game to highlight their sister station ESPNU and had them featured during the pregame telecast. I’d set the broadcast to record, and when I got to watch it, it was a little embarrassing when they talked about me. They set this up as the ‘David and Goliath’ game. Yes, they portrayed me as David. If you watched what they said about our two teams, they compared our game to the college rivalry of Navy vs. Notre Dame. The Midshipmen had beaten the Fighting Irish once in the last 50 years, so it was possible. The last time had been in 2007 when Navy had broken a 43-year losing streak to win in triple overtime. Navy’s previous win came in 1963, with future Heisman Trophy winner and NFL quarterback Roger Staubach at the helm.

Fortunately, we hadn’t seen any of this, or we might have just gotten back on the buses and gone home. We came out for warm-ups, and I marveled that we would actually play on a field used by an NFL team. ESPN had been smart in that they put the fans for each team on the same side of the stadium. They’d split them at the 50 yard line. While we had traveled well, I would guess we had about seventy-five hundred fans; King must have had twice as many. It helped highlight the narrative ESPN had portrayed.

What King didn’t have was our damned cowbells. For once I was glad we had them because with them we made more noise than King’s fans did.

Shortly after we took the field to begin to stretch, King came out. My back was to them as I led my team in warm-ups.

I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“You’re going down, Dawson!” Todd Davis, their five-star linebacker, yelled.

I turned around.

“Sorry, Todd, but I can’t put small objects in my mouth, or I’ll choke!” I yelled back.

Oh, boy, that pissed him off. Even his own teammates laughed, probably because they’d seen him in the shower.

“Screw you!”

“No, thanks, I don’t want to get the clap!”

Okay, that was a cheap shot, but that did it. Luckily the King High coaches had seen what was about to happen, and two of them grabbed him before he could get to me. I bounced around like Tigger, from Winnie-the-Pooh, and motioned for him to join me on our side of the field. At that point, Coach Zoon grabbed my facemask and marched me back to where our team had started to run pregame drills.

“Did you forget you have a mic on?” he hissed.

I just grinned at him. I suspect Coach Hope had told him that he couldn’t actually hurt me or I might have been in trouble. While I threw passes, Wolf came over.

“Do you have a death wish?” he asked.

“Remember freshman year and how mad Kevin would get?”