October afternoons, past and present

Why do these memories pop into my mind?

I was sitting in the living room of a townhouse on the campus of Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, watching the football team from the state university in Athens, Georgia receive a butt-whooping from the football team from the state university in Knoxville, Tennessee. Some of my daughter's friends were sitting around with us, along with a couple other parents, drinking refreshments and eating potato chips, watching the game.

Suddenly, the synapses in my brain were drawn back to a weekend in late October or early November in 1978, I don't remember which, when my parents drove up from Atlanta along the spine of the Blue Ridge to Lexington, Virginia to watch my last home game as a college football player against Emory & Henry, another small college in western Virginia. My college football career was in its last year and this would be the last time I would play on Wilson field before the friends and faculty and family assembled that beautiful Fall afternoon among the orange and scarlet leaves and soft, cool breezes of Rockbridge County, Virginia.

We only had one year in which we came close to winning more games than we lost during my entire college football career. Most years we struggled from week to week, only looking forward to two or three weeks of our schedule when we were confident we could win the games those weeks. My senior year was no different.

In previous years, we had lost two straight games to Emory & Henry. In 1976, they had brought a strong team up to Lexington in the first week of the season and defeated us handily. In my junior year of 1977, we played them in Emory, Virginia and lost 7-6. It seemed like every game in my junior year was the same. We rarely scored. On defense, we would allow one long drive in which the other team would score and then our offense would fumble or throw an interception near our goal-line which would lead to another score. In that game, I remember I had been introduced as Tom Bynum from Dinwiddie, Virginia, and I had yelled my fruitless objections to a rainy, windy sky and an uncaring crowd in Emory, Virginia. No response availing, no correction given, we lost that game in the usual way, by a close score, only allowing one touchdown from the opposing team in the muck and rain, after the inevitable fumble by our own offense inside our ten yard line.

Anyway, as the fall of 1978 wound itself out, we again had lost more games than we had won, despite the fact that we had a new coach, whose program and prodding had promised success somewhere in the future. Nevertheless, that week we faced an Emory & Henry team that was fairly evenly matched with us. Their offense had little running attack and they depended on a quarterback with a strong arm to compensate for the lack of defense and running offense.

As the game began, our offense miraculously scored three times unanswered, and we led the game 18-0 at half time. The first half was so promising. After gaining little by running on first and second downs, the Emory & Henry quarterback would invariably take the snap, roll to his left or right, only to find Greg Lilly or myself in his face, or, even sometimes, on top of him for a loss. Even if we didn't sack the quarterback, we often raised our arms in the air to block his passes.

During that first half of football, there came a number of moments when the furies that can awaken in one's mind and body when the emotions you are feeling match the goals in your mind and the collective struggles of the teammates around me and I found myself tackling the quarterback sharply into the green turf to the approval of my teammates and the parents and students in the stands.

There was a play in the first half of that game which I will never forget. The ball was snapped and the movement of the backfield moved away from me in an option play to the opposite side of the field. As I trailed the ball from behind like a shark toward a school of baitfish, our strong side linebacker penetrated across the line of scrimmage and pounded the quarterback from the side, spinning his body around so hard that he swung around and he faced me in my line of pursuit. As I came up from behind, I hit him with all I had at full speed and drove his head back, backward until the back of his helmet found its way to the hard ground. When I got off of him, I noticed his body twitching and jerking as his mind was lost into the interiors of his consciousness. I stood over his body and took extreme pleasure, like some predator in the forest, in the lack of intelligent and controlled movement coming from his being.

As I stood there, I began to exult over the product of my effort and the competitive air of conquest breathed deeply through my nostrils. But then, as I returned to the defensive huddle and watched the trainers for Emory & Henry examine the prone quarterback, I stopped and considered the true result of my actions, and realized that here lay another college student, just like me, who was lying on the field, and would be carried off by stretcher to find a clean bed in the local hospital, for observation. The struggle of my emotions at that moment caught me and caused some introspection that you don't often get on a football field.

This game was a struggle and became more so as the game progressed. I remember play after play when the other team seemed to throw multiple players in my path as I tried to slip past them, over and over again, to try to take hold of the quarterback before he threw. I remember stout fullbacks and tall, heavy tackles running at me and my efforts to take them on, to throw or give slip to them to the left and to the right, meanwhile trying to catch a glimpse of the progress of the quarterback as he hid himself behind their bulk and tossed pass after pass downfield.

The second half seemed to play out in the same way, play after play. Our offense managed no more points in the game, and Emory & Henry continued to march down the field toward the end zone as we tried to defend it. Pass after pass went over my head toward some ill-defended receiver. I managed to sack the quarterback one time, when he rolled away from me and I ran past the tackle, my foot speed compensating for his superior size, to find the backside of the quarterback, driving my facemask into his backbone, pitching his body into the grass before he threw downfield. Another time, he turned and tried to lateral the pigskin toward a halfback on a sweep, who missed the ball, and I was able to roll and cradle my body around the loose ball, recovering a fumble and ending another drive toward our goal.

But it was too little. When the final horn sounded, we had lost 20-18. I remember wandering off the field toward our lockerroom underneath the stadium. As I found my home locker for the last time, the emotional response to that loss and all the effort for nothing, the experience of the last loss at my personal locker built under those stands at my alma mater, hit me, and I sat heavily down on the bench seat in my grass-stained uniform and wept deeply into my hands. As I sat there and cried, one of the defensive coaches who had been in the coach's box above the field during the game, came up to me and put his arms around my shoulders and tried to console me. He told me that my effort had been amazing. And I think he cried too.

The locker room was silent or nearly so. It was as if someone or something had passed on. Players struggled to remove their uniforms and pads and trudged off to the showers. I took a small bar of ivory soap and a white cotton towel and walked like a zombie to the showers. I know I showered and dried my body off and dressed in my street clothes. I know I walked the short walk from the deserted stands to my apartment after the game, but I don't remember any of it.

I do remember opening the door to the apartment I shared with four other athletes to find all of our parents sitting in chairs around the living room, sharing some time together as their sons arrived, one by one, from the field. I am sure I was the last one there. I remember cutting my eyes toward my parents and mumbling something about needing to lay down. My mother and father followed behind me to my room. I undressed and lay down under the comfort of the sheets and my blanket. My mother stroked my temples and said they would check on me later. I fell asleep.

Later, my parents came in and asked me if I wanted to go to eat with the group. I couldn't; I was aching and felt the flue symptoms that came from the release of so much adrenalyn and emotion. They left me in the dark of late October outside my windows and the comfort of my bed.

Only later did I recover enough to want to feed the hunger which my body had developed, which had been hidden from me by the warring of chemicals and electrical synapses running inside my body and my mind.

I have only had two other football games which caught me up so strongly. One game occurred when I was about nine years old, playing little league football in Atlanta. The other occurred in the third game of my senior year in high school at North Dekalb Stadium in Chamblee, Georgia. In the first one, we came away with a hard-earned victory against a team roughly our equal. In the second one, we played against the best team in Dekalb County, a team which would later find their way to the state championship against Thomasville High School sometime in December of that year. At the end of that game, the coaches drove us back to the parking lot on the north side of Dunwoody High School and back to the lockerroom. I pushed my forehead on the bus seat in front of me and moaned my misery in the hearing of the player in front of me. As the bus pulled into the Dunwoody parking lot, I exited and trudged back down toward lockerroom. Suddenly, all of the pain and misery of the evening welled up inside and spilled itself onto the pavement of the parking lot. After releasing the bile collected in my stomach during that game all over the parking lot at Dunwoody High School, I at least was named Dekalb County Defensive Lineman of the Week.

But this weekend in Virginia was the last chance to give everything in a game in such an effort. From here out my struggles would be more intellectual and academic. Only the opportunity to say goodbye to my parents on the Sunday morning following the game and the promise of the next weekend's trip to watch me play on the fields at Georgetown University offered any solace for my efforts on that gorgeous Autumn day in Lexington, Virginia.

This is what I remembered suddenly in the living room of a townhouse in Clinton, South Carolina on October 6, 2007. Just a brief moment's memory, but so many years to travel.