RUN & SHOOT
By Jay Busbee
Chapter 1:
Game On
The first Saturday in September, and
the field was gleaming.
The stadium grass and the north
Georgia sky were impossible colors, the kind of green and blue that first-graders
slather with broad strokes. The bass drum of the band was thick and loud enough
to reroute heartbeats. The crowd pulsed in a sea of blue and red, the colors of
its beloved Deep South University. The sorority girls with canyons of cleavage,
the frat dudes already sweating cheap tequila through their pores, the kids
with their foam Bootlegger pistols getting a fast education in the ways of the
world, the alumni trying to convince themselves that they hadn’t picked up
inches around the waist and lost them off the hairline, the jocks and stoners
and geeks and hotties and skanks and douchebags and MILFs and everyone – all
these and more all beat in time, all with one overriding mantra: Game on, man.
Game on.
Kedrick Reed, the freshman tailback
for the Bootleggers, took a moment to stand up from his stretches and let the
noise of the crowd wrap him up tight. This was the moment he’d waited for his
entire life. All the Pee-Wee and Pop Warner leagues, changing high schools and
practicing fourteen hours a day, giving up friends and family and anything
approaching a normal school life – it had all been for this day, this time,
this crowd.
Sure, he’d been recruited by every
team in the Top 25, but the Ohio States and Notre Dames of the world could go
blow. He was playing for DSU, baby. He was playing for Coach Rip. This was
every Southern boy’s dream, playing for the juggernaut that was the Deep South
University football team. You survive DSU and Rip Thackston, baby, the rest of
your life was a sweet downhill slide of cotton candy, easy money and
thong-wearin’ hotties. Oh, it had been so much work for Kedrick to get here, so
many times he wanted to just give up and play for some second-class school. But
he hadn’t, he’d stayed strong and clear-eyed and devoted, and now it was all
paying off like a greased slot machine.
He thought of his moms, of how she’d
worked three jobs to keep him and his sisters fed, of how she’d never let him
take a play off or a day off. He thought of her as piano music played in his
head – he knew how these flashbacks were supposed to go, he knew how perfect
this moment was – and he wished she could here to see him now, at the moment of
his ultimate triumph. He looked hard at the American flag, billowing out over
the south grandstand, and he felt a single tear in the corner of his eye.
And right about then, a football hit
him dead in the nuts.
Game on, man. Game. On.
v v v v
If this wasn’t a hypercritical
season for Deep South University, it’d do until one came along. It had been ten
years since DSU had won its last national championship, ten long years in which
Florida, Texas and USC had eclipsed the Bootleggers on the national stage, and
Georgia, LSU and Alabama had taken chunks out of DSU’s once-impenetrable hide
in the SEC. The DSU talk these days across sports radio, blogs and message
boards wasn’t negative; no, it was far worse – it was indifferent.
But so far, 2009 looked promising.
For starters, the team was returning quarterback Wray Mattiece, a senior and
legitimate Heisman frontrunner. The Bootleggers boasted one of the most
devastating cornerback combos in the nation in Lyle Lerew and Davon Jeffries.
And they’d roped in the future in Kedrick Reed … although at the moment, their
future was writhing on the turf grabbing at his crotch.
The first thing Kedrick saw when his
vision refocused was Coach Rip Thackston, standing over him with the sun
silhouetting him like some ancient god.
“Now ain’t the time for a nap,
precious,” Coach Rip said. “We’ve got a football game to play.”
“Coach, I got hit in the boys,”
Kedrick said, every syllable pounding on his throbbing crotch. “I can’t – ”
“How about you stop right there
before you say something you’re gonna regret?” Coach Rip knelt down, and for a
second Kedrick thought – hoped? – he was going to give his newly-minted
backfield star a fatherly hand up. Instead, Coach Rip slapped Kedrick on the
helmet – not hard enough to draw attention from the TV cameras, but hard enough
to ring Kedrick’s bell from the other end – and motioned for him to rise.
“Get your ass on your feet, son,”
Coach Rip said. “We got us a ballgame to win.”
And when that gravelly, iconic voice
spoke, you damn well better listen. Kedrick did, clambering to his feet and
dusting off his uniform. He had no idea that a fan had filmed and already
uploaded his crotch-shot video, that by halftime more than a million people
would laugh at him taking one to the gonads on YouTube. Sure, he’d spend the next six weeks
embarrassed as hell as the clip made the blog-nightly news-talk show rounds,
and the childish scream he’d squealed on impact would follow him the rest of
his days, but for now, he was playing for DSU, and all was right with the
world.
v v v v
Twenty yards away, DSU punter Jimbo Roy
smacked the shoulderpads of a man-mountain lineman. “Fifty bucks, Nguyen,”
Jimbo said.
“Fifty? Bet was for twenty!”
“Bet was to hit him for twenty.
Drilling the jewels cost extra.”
“Fine,” Nguyen waved him off. “I’m
good.”
“Yes you are,” Jimbo said, making a
note in a pad that he then tucked into his uniform pants. “Always a pleasure,
Nguyen.”
Jimbo might well have been DSU’s
best overall athlete, but he was without a doubt its most legendary screwup. A
fifth-year senior, he’d carved a swath of prankish destruction across campus
for half a decade. Sometimes his goofs were low-end one-shots, like yanking off
a teammate’s towel while the ABC cameras rolled in the locker room. And
sometimes they were faked-moon-landing-level conspiracies, like the time NCAA
investigators swarmed Tuscaloosa looking for evidence that Alabama had
illegally recruited a blue-chip Louisiana kid named Neon Delacroix—a
blue-chipper whom Jimbo had created out of thin air with a network of fake
emails, transcripts and message board posts.
Coach
Rip had recruited him as a quarterback, but he possessed a nasty combination of
laziness and vindictiveness; he once hung a pass to a receiver who’d stolen his
dessert that morning, and two defenders nearly snapped the receiver in half. Still,
Jimbo was too good of an athlete to boot out of the program, so Coach Rip
worked his leg into serviceable punting shape, and kept him around as
insurance. Better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent
pissing in, so to speak.
Today,
as the rest of his teammates stretched (or, in Kedrick’s case, squirmed), Jimbo
stroked his brown chin whiskers and scanned the crowd for some new tail.
Sidelight of his new role: plenty of time to focus on stacking both home and
road beef.
“Jimbo!”
The voice was deep, laced with menace, and belonged to one of the few men who
could actually throw a scare into Jimbo. Deck Talbot, defensive coordinator and
hands-down the most fearsome linebacker ever to emerge from the DSU program,
stormed through the stretching players like Robert Duvall striding across the
war-torn beach in Apocalypse Now. Six-foot-seven and meaner than ten
pounds of rattlesnakes, he’d been an All-American at DSU and later an All-Pro for
the Vikings. He’d ended a dozen careers on the field, and right now he looked
mad enough to end Jimbo’s life.
He pointed
at Jimbo, who felt his insides liquefy. Deck began yelling while he was still
fifteen feet away, and by the time he was in Jimbo’s face, he’d achieved
jet-engine volume.
“What
in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ you think you’re doing, you
dumb motherfucker? That’s the franchise right there! Good thing you got a rag
arm, boy, or I’d rip it off you!” He grabbed Jimbo’s face mask, his face a
contorted rictus of rage. His voice dropped so low that only Jimbo could hear
it.
“Goddamn,
son, that was funny,” Deck said through his teeth. “I gotta yell to keep from
busting my ass laughing. You feel me?” Jimbo, eyes widening in realization,
nodded. “Good. Now, how much you make for that?”
“Fi-fifty
bucks.”
“All
right then,” Deck said, his catcher’s-glove-sized fist still locked on Jimbo’s
facemask. “First, you gonna give me that fi-fifty. Drop it in my office ‘fore
you leave tonight. Next, look over my shoulder. See them reporters?”
Jimbo
looked – it was like peering around the side of a building – and saw them
thirty yards down the sideline, a knot of rumpled sportswriters furiously
Twittering away on their phones. Some were coiffed and greased up like used-car
salesmen; some had the stains from the press-box buffet on their shirts. “Got
‘em,” Jimbo said.
“Good.
Couple of those guys been giving Coach Rip some grief. You know, ‘Time to step
down,’ ‘Get the rocking chair,’ that kinda shit.”
“Assholes,”
Jimbo said, grateful for the chance to get on the same side of the fence as
Deck.
“Damn
right,” Deck said. “I been watching you punt lately, boy. Having a little
trouble with accuracy, aintcha?”
“Coach,
you point to a seat in this stadium, I’ll drop the ball in it—” He saw Deck’s
expectant expression. “Oh. Oh. Yeah, coach, I haven’t been feeling it
lately. No idea where the ball’s gonna go. I think I need a little more
practice.”
“I think you do.” Deck released Jimbo’s
facemask. “Get to practicing, now.”
Deck
turned and left Jimbo to limber up, for real this time. He walked over toward
Coach Rip, who surveyed the far sideline with the patient air of a chess
grandmaster.
“Those
Greensboro boys are getting bigger,” Coach Rip said, nodding his chin at the
Spartans doing jumping jacks.
“Another
ten years, they’ll be up to our knees,” Deck replied. “Got Jimbo showing some
love to those writers for you.”
Rip
waved indifferently at that; he didn’t have the bloodlust of these youngsters
anymore. “Your boys good to go?”
“If
we give up even ten yards of offense, I’m makin’ ‘em run till Tuesday.”
Down
among the reporters, there was a sudden commotion; they scattered as a punt
landed like a concussion grenade among them. One writer whose oversized shirt
draped him like a shroud dropped to his knees and picked at the remains of his
shattered iPhone, his credential lanyard swinging mournfully.
“Sorry!”
Jimbo called. “My bad!”
Both
coaches glanced sideways down the sideline, then refocused on UNCG. “How’s the
kid’s nut sack?” Deck ventured.
“Fine,”
Rip laughed. “Dumbass, sitting there woolgathering, doing that silly ‘I dreamed
of this’ shit in his head. Deserved what he got. Next time he’ll keep his mind
on the damn game.”
With a
sixth sense born of years of dodging curfews and NCAA investigators, Deck
spotted a cornerback loafing his way through pregame warm-ups, and stormed off
to tear the kid a new orifice. He left Rip Thackston alone near the center of
the standing-room-only stadium, the centerpiece of all of Deep South
University.
DSU
was a sprawling land-grant institution in the foothills of the north Georgia
mountains, a party school of mythic proportions, an
institution whose athletics budget dwarfed that of many Central American
nations. DSU had spawned politicians and athletes and Southern business titans,
and even the scholars who’d graduated from Deep South tended to be the alpha
dogs of their biology departments or corporate think tanks.
The place bred winners. And it all stemmed from Rip Thackston.
He’d brought four championships to north Georgia, and sent forth
untold numbers of pro ballplayers from it.
And now, as of 2009,
he’d been here forty years.
Forty
years of winning and losing, of chasing recruits and dodging investigators.
Forty years of buttering up rich boosters and activist university presidents
and arrogant media. Forty years … but what had it gotten him? Sure, he was a
coaching legend, ranked right up there with the Bowdens and Paternos of the
world. But the respect was flaking away.
Just
look at the TV schedule. DSU’s most bitter rival, the University of Georgia,
would get national airtime for its game against Oklahoma State, one whose
kickoff came before DSU’s game would end. Worse, Alabama and Virginia Tech, two
schools DSU had beaten more times than Rip could count, were playing right down
I-75 tonight in the Georgia Dome, a marquee matchup that Rip took as another
slap to the face. The DSU-UNC Greensboro match, meanwhile, was on a low-rent
pay-per-view channel. This was no way to treat a legend.
Rip first burst into the national consciousness in 1962. Back then, he was in
his first year of coaching at Stillwater State University, a South Carolina
institution long written off as “Backwater State” for its third-rate academics
and tenth-rate athletics. But Rip was lean and hungry and pretty much willing
to do anything to win, and on a hot-blanket August weekend, the nation found
out just how tough he was.
That particular weekend, Rip was sitting in his office trying to work up any
kind of offensive set that his boys—who were slower than a Friday afternoon
clock—could run without getting pulverized. The televisions and papers those
days were full of the civil rights struggles exploding a few states away, but
for Rip, buried neck-deep in Xs and Os, they might as well have taken place on
the moon. Several hundred miles away, right as the sun was setting on a little
Mississippi hamlet by the name of Prosperity, a black teenager by the name of
Miles Lee made the unforgivable mistake of knocking a bottle of corn syrup to
the floor of the local general store. The bottle shattered, the corn syrup
spilled in ropy waves over Miles’ feet, and the store owner came out from
behind the register with bat in hand.
What happened next was a matter of some dispute. The owner contends he was only
waving the bat to scare young Miles, and had no intention of swinging it until
the boy leaped at him like a mad dog off the leash. Miles and his friends,
along with a local schoolteacher shopping two aisles over, remembered it
somewhat differently. As they told the New York Times a few days later,
the owner took one swing, then another, then another at Miles—who dodged them
all with air to spare, neat as you please. And even then, Miles might have been
all right had he not decided to laugh at the panting, red-faced owner. But he
did—right as the county sheriff happened to be walking up on the store’s front
porch.
The sheriff drew out his blackjack, and Miles, he ran. Christ Almighty, did he
run. He ran past the sheriff and a deputy, he ran home to kiss his mother
goodbye, he ran into the woods steps ahead of the lynch mob that burned his
family’s house to the ground. And thanks to a Life magazine
photograph—one which showed the reed-thin boy, terror in his eyes, a step ahead
of the bat-wielding shop owner and the sheriff reaching for his sidearm—Miles
ran straight into the nation’s consciousness.
In his office a few days later, Rip saw that picture, saw the look in the boy’s
eyes, and booked himself on a train to Mississippi. He brought Miles, his
momma, and his two sisters to South Carolina, put them all up in university
housing—this was long before the NCAA would have lumped him in with Hitler for
doing such a thing—and set about making sure that one dumb mistake wasn’t going
to cost a kid his life.
“Shoot, I didn’t do nothing anybody else wouldn’t have done,” Rip would say at
a banquet years later. “Now, I ain’t gonna lie to you. I ain’t sayin’ that boy
didn’t deserve a smack,” Rip would laugh. “But me, I’d have stopped at one. I’m
not sure those Mississippi fellas would have been quite so restrained. You tell
me, Miles—you ever go back and ask ‘em what the fuss was all about?” And
everyone in the ballroom—gathered there in the Spartanburg Hilton to celebrate
the fortieth anniversary of Stillwater’s national championship season—laughed
at the absurdity of it all, United States congressman and Heisman Trophy winner
Miles Lee loudest of anyone.
If
Rip had looked hard enough, he could see Miles up in his skybox now, settling
in to watch the start of another. But it was five minutes to kickoff, and Rip
had other matters on his mind.
v v v v
Wray Mattiece stood on a bench and
looked out over his team, fidgeting and twitching with anticipation. Over at
the far end of the sideline, Kedrick Reed was puking up the last of his pregame
meal. Lyle Lerew and Davon Jeffries were placing their private bounties on UNCG
receivers. And Jimbo Roy was texting three different women at once, staggering
liaisons for later that evening with the practiced air of a military tactician.
“Circle
up!” Mattiece finally bellowed, and when one of the most famous quarterbacks in
the land called you out, you showed up.
“Where we at?”
“DSU!”
“Who’re we?”
“BOOTLEGGERS!”
“Who we gonna beat?”
Murmuring among the players. What
was UNC-Greensboro’s mascot, anyway?
“Spartans, y’all,” Wray sighed.
“SPARTANS!”
Wray stuck his golden throwing arm
into the mass of Bootleggers, and the entire team crowded around to touch the
hem of his jersey. Wray nodded in approval. “Triple Boot on three! One two
three!”
“BOOT BOOT BOOT!” the team shouted
as one. All around them, a crowd of 100,000-plus screamed so loud that the
noise wasn’t even audible, just a physical force shoving the Bootleggers
forward, headlong toward inevitable victory.
And
for one of them, it was the last time they’d ever set foot on this field.
Game
on.
Next: DSU @ Ole Miss