Friday Night Ghosts

 

In 1960, John Updike wrote a novel destined to become an American Classic. Titled Rabbit Run, Updike recorded the unfulfilled life of a 26 year old former high school basketball star turned reluctant salesman, desperately seeking a role in adult life that would recapture the fleeting fame he briefly knew as a 16 year old local athletic hero. Rabbit Run  is a dark, brooding and sad story, often bordering on the macabre, but one commonly true in a society that makes a hero of a mere child who can outrun, outjump and outthrow the best rival towns can offer. It is a sad story played out time and time again in small towns across the land: the fleeting fame of a school boy star, who at 18 years of age is slapped with the reality that the final whistle has blown, your best days now behind you. You become yesterday's hero, booted into adulthood and replaced by a new star of the local high school team. You drift to the bleachers, a few rows higher up each year, until you finally stop going at all. It hurts too much.

 To provide the promised anonymity, I will call him Isaac. "Hey man, I got to live here," he told me. In exchange for his candor, I promised to protect his identity. For that reason, we will give the town the fictional name of "Wilson," the school mascot will be the "Panthers."

Short and of average build, it was hard to see Isaac in the role he had so well played only a few years before: small town football hero. Fulfilling his now adult role as cashier, he gave me my change from a purchase of gas and sunflower seeds I had made at a non- descript convenience store in a sleepy town I was passing through late one fall night. Adulthood had mandated that he trade in his navy blue Panther game jersey for a red smock with a button attached to the right breast pocket promising service with a smile. I would never have pegged him as a local legend.

Had business not been slow on that late evening, perhaps neither he nor I would have had the inclination to progress in our conversation past the normal niceties one exchanges with the locals as a faceless stranger in a nameless town. But being as no other customer or employee was in the store as closing time approached, Isaac with no pressing job responsibilities, asked, "where you heading." Not having any impending place to be that evening myself, I had the time to respond in detail. "Cool," he told me, after I explained my wandering travels of the back roads of the nation's Heartland in search of the social meaning of high school football.

Isaac, I was to learn, was one of only a handful of African Americans in the town of 5,000. "I use to play football," he told me.

Accepting an offer to join me for a beer after work, Isaac readily agreed to fill me in on the local high school football fortunes. "I lock the doors in 10 minutes," he said. "Take me ten more minutes to clean up and close out." I waited in the car as he finished his duties.

By fifteen  minutes past 10 pm, we were both seated in a cozy corner booth of an establishment on the town square that served as the local pub turned sports bar. In a building as old as the town itself, pushing a century of use, the watering hole served as a haven for the loafers and the local sports experts, who were often in this town, Isaac told me, one and the same. It was pure small town America, both inviting and boring, but the hot stove chatter, for a high school sports fan such as myself, was fun to listen to. The pool table was in use, the one TV above the bar broadcast 24 hour sports news and the waitress who took our order had nicotine breath and called me "Hon." 

The local team wasn't doing so good, one of the pool playing patrons told me. Even though still early in the season, he blamed it on coaching.  His 8-ball partner disagreed, diagnosing the problem as one of "a bunch of lazy ass seniors. We need Isaac back out there," he said loudly as he threw his right arm around my new friend. Even as a stranger, in the company of a local legend, I felt at ease.

Our waitress arrived with our first round of beers. The tight jeans she wore might have been becoming in high school, perhaps ten years prior, but they were now stretched past the point of both comfort and appearance. In my mind, I pictured her lying flat on her bed each day in order to defy gravity and wiggle into the a least two sizes too small garment, a defiant slap in the face to the ravages of time and a reminder of the slimmer days of her long ago youth. She was  pleased to see Isaac, as were the half a dozen other locals bellied up to the well-stocked bar, bottles of beer systematically tilted back at least twice a minute. Isaac, I was to learn in the course of the evening's conversation, had carried the local squad to within "one bad half" of state regional play, hallowed turf never before or since traversed by the local team. The defeat of six years prior was still, I could tell, a bitter pill for the local populous to swallow.

"I came here the spring before my senior year," Isaac said as he began to spin his story of gridiron glory. "I grew up in KC with my mom and stepdad. Never played many sports. I quit football my freshman year. Didn't like the coach. The team was terrible. Everything about playing football there was bad. No equipment. Crappy fields. We played our games on Saturday mornings and nobody came to watch us. Coaches didn't care. Half the time the officials wouldn't even show up. I was a waste of time."

 Unoccupied time, though, for an unsupervised street kid such as Isaac had become, was a problem. "Too much freedom. I hit the streets and ran with the wrong crowd. I was on my way to the State Penitentiary, for sure. We did dumb stuff. Break out car windows and do $600 of damages to steal a pack of cigarettes we could see on the dash." He was twice caught by the police his sophomore year of high school for theft and twice taken to juvenile court. "I called myself a sophomore because I wasn't old enough yet to drop out, but I had pretty much by that time quit going to school. If it was real cold out or I was hungry and wanted a hot breakfast I might go, but I wouldn't stay. No one ever came looking for me. Just one less dead end nigger they didn't have to worry about, I guess."

Isaac's second brush with the Juvenile Court system landed him a 30 day stay in a county youth lock up facility. "They called it a school, but wasn't nothing more than a jail. Bad, Bad, Bad. I was in with two 15 year old dudes that had shot and killed a kid right in the front of my high school in broad daylight. They knew (because of their age) they was only going to be locked up till they turned 21, but man they had the rep now on the street, know what I'm saying. Dudes didn't care. If you weren't strong and wouldn't fight, well come night time, they would make a punk out of you. Wasn't going to happen to me. I'd fight. So most were cool with me."

The month long incarceration was an eye opener for the 16 year old. "Set me straight and it wasn't anything the system did either. The school in there was a joke, worse than my public high school. But man, I could see myself as a future con, in and out of the system, if I didn't get it together."

Upon his release, Isaac had a heart to heart talk with his mother. "She was only 15 when I was born. She had been in and out of foster care herself. She was more like a big sister to me. I never gave her the respect one should their mother, know what I am saying? She never talked about my dad much. I never met him. I heard he was a very good athlete himself in the kid programs, but couldn't stay out of trouble when he got to high school, so he never played, just ran the streets and got into the whole gang thing deeper and deeper. The same road I was going down my momma pointed out. I think my dad is in prison now, but I really don't know for sure."

"Hon, you'll need a refill?" I bought a round for the whole house, including our waitress. Four at the pool table, four at the bar, me and Isaac. Eleven beers, $26.75, total.

"My mom had a cousin who had married a white girl from Wilson and moved here with her," Isaac explained. "I came to live with them after Christmas my junior year. We thought a small town and a fresh start was what I needed. We never even thought about football. It didn't work out (with his first host family), but by then I was pretty well known in town and one of the teachers let me move in with her and her family for my senior year."

It didn't take long for Isaac to show his new hometown that he possessed the one ingredient that had for years been lacking with the Panthers: speed. "I ran track my junior year, "said Isaac. "I did it for something to do, to get out of school early and to flirt with the girls, both ours and at the other schools. Only time I really saw many sisters," he said with a laugh.

 "It took a while to get me eligible with all the paperwork that had to be done because of my transfer. It was almost the end of the (track) season before I could run in a meet, but I remember I broke the school record in the 200 (meter dash) and that opened some eyes, including mine. To be honest, I don't know how they (local school officials) got me eligible, what with me having basically no grades for about a year and a half, because I was not going to school on a regular basis. But somehow they did and I am glad of it." 

It took only the first carry of the first football game the following fall for Isaac to find his true athletic calling, running a football.

"I didn't start the first game (of the season)," he recalled. "But I went in the second time we got the ball. 

"The plan was for me and another back to share time as the main running back," Isaac said. That plan was soon forgotten as Isaac scored a touchdown the first time he touched the ball. Later, when I talked to the man who was, and still is, the head coach of the Wilson Panthers, he spoke with a sense of awe of how quickly Isaac grabbed the role of savior of the local team. "We threw him a pitch out around the right end,"  the coach told me. "We (coaches) had questioned some Isaac's willingness to get hit. He never was much of a practice player, but that first time he touched the ball in a live game, we knew we had something special."

According to the coach, that first carry has become a part of local lore. "We counted on the film; he got hit 14 times and never did go down. He had two on his back he was carrying when he crossed the goal line. We still show that tape several times a month. He went 70 yards for a touchdown, but I swear he ran 150 yards, back and forth across the field, on that one carry. I still get chills thinking of it."

The town had a new hero, and the recipient of the adulation was more than willing to play the part. "I still can't believe how lucky I was," said Isaac. "None of this was planned. I just wanted a new start where I could get my education and stay out of the Penitentiary. And then, wow, I am the star. Overnight. Talk about being in the right place at the right time."

 Isaac's rookie game showing was no fluke. He went on to break the school rushing record. More accurate, he demolished the school record by over 500 yards, finishing the season as one of a handful of backs in the state to gain over 2000 yards that season. Just as quickly as it began, it was over. "We lost a couple of games during the year, but we got into the playoffs and were really on a roll, and all of a sudden, the season was over." One bad half in the third round of the playoffs burst the bubble. "We were up two touchdowns at the half," recalled Isaac, "and then everything went wrong. Fumbles, penalties; you name it, if it was bad, it happened to us that night." The locals fell by two touchdowns. "I was just in shock after the game," Isaac reminisced six years afterwards. "I remember sitting after the game, just sitting alone in the locker room not wanting to take off my uniform, not believing it was all over."

For Isaac it was the end of a dream. "I remember how I couldn't wait to go to school each day. Man, would my teachers back in KC been amazed. Me wanting to be in school," he said with a chuckle. "Girls, girls, and more girls. I ended up in the back seat of many a white girls’ daddy's ride. Know what I am saying? I was in heaven. You know what is funny; I still see a lot of those same girls today, white girls with money. See 'em when they come home from college. They wave, but don't really have time for me. But I remember, and I know they do too."

His eye popping stats had put Isaac on the recruiting radar screen of many smaller colleges. His high school coach tried to keep his expectations reasonable. "People around here have such tunnel vision. They see a local star and think he is on his way to the NFL. They don't realize how many good players are out there. In some of the better big school programs, Isaac might have never even made the team. Isaac was a very good small school player and I wish we could have had him all four years. But his size and speed said he should be playing at the D II or D III level (smaller school classification of the NCAA) in college. But Isaac kept waiting for Nebraska, Texas and Oklahoma to come calling, and that just was not going to happen. But you know what, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that for one magical run of a couple of months, Isaac was 'The Man.' He owned this town. How many people can say that?"

As it turned out, the point of what level he could play on was moot. Isaac's lack of academic achievement came back to bite him. He could not muster the tests scores needed to qualify for an athletic grant-in-aid. Both his ACT national test scores and his local grade point average were insufficient for him to play at an NCAA school.  Junior college was an option that was explored by Isaac and his coach, but eventually they settled on an NAIA school whose admission standards were not as stringent as what the NCAA held. It was a bad fit from the start. Isaac remembers, "Coaches there were crazy. I mean it, they were nuts. Some of the stuff they did in practice was just stupid and dangerous." Isaac's lackadaisical attitude towards practice, coupled with the higher level of competition on the college level, was a combination that doomed the young man who had not been raised in a "football culture," not programmed to accept competition as a challenge to improve, to fight through adversity and show the coaches he had the desire to pay the price to play college football. "I remember my position coach called me in and told me 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going,' and that is just what I did, got going right back to Wilson," Isaac recalled with a chuckle.

Returning to the only town where he had ever been told he mattered, even if it was just because of football, Isaac was back in Wilson before the end of September. "I found a few odd jobs to keep me going and I loved going up to the school every afternoon to watch practice. And I just couldn't wait until 7 pm each Friday and game time. People knew me and spoke to me with respect."

Torn between leaving the only support system he had ever known, but still wanting to follow his college football dream, Isaac once again tore himself away from Wilson and for the second semester of his freshman year, enrolled in an out of state community college. "I liked it all right. Since it was winter, the football was not as intense yet. We lifted and had off season workouts, but it wasn't hard core and I liked my teammates. I was at a school in a small town without many blacks, a lot like I had experienced here and that was cool with me. Tell you the truth, in that environment, being black, I felt kind of special." The problem with this stop in Isaac's pursuit of a football home was academic. "I just couldn't get the book work done. I tried, I really did, and I didn't do badly, I just didn't do well enough. At the end of the semester, the coach called me in and said that my grades were good enough to stay in school and good enough to be on the team, but since I was from out of state, I had to have a higher grade point average to keep my scholarship, and I didn't have it. If I was to come back to play in the fall, I would have to pay my own way, and I just didn't have the cash to do that."

As a two time loser in the college placement game, Isaac's choices were now limited. He and his high school coach finally found an NCAA Division III school in the north that could parlay a combination of loans, grants and local scholarships to help Isaac generate the $40,000 plus it was going to cost him to attend this private institution with a great academic reputation. "It was the chance of a lifetime, I know that now," he says as he looks back with five years of hindsight. "It was an environment that I have never been in before. Money, money and more money. I think I was the only one who didn't have much. Even the other brothers on the team came from families with money. My (black) roommate's parents were both lawyers. But people were cool with me. I was treated good."

Isaac still has a hard time explaining why he left. "I blew it. I could have stayed. I had a good year, not a star, but a good freshman year of playing ball. But I just couldn't make myself go back. It just was not the same as in high school. The coaches wanted to win. But not like we wanted to win here. If we lost in college, that year, it was no big deal. By the next day we were over it. Academics were more important (than football). You could miss practice with no penalty, if you needed extra time for a class. That would have never happened here (Wilson). And nobody came to our games. People around school didn't treat me special because I had a good game. I was just another kid in history class. That whole summer leading up to the next year, back in Wilson, I just couldn't get myself motivated to work out. I kept telling myself, 'tomorrow I will get started.' But I never did. By the first of August, I finally was honest with myself and told people I wasn't coming back. I know I let a lot of people down."

Isaac returned to his adopted hometown knowing that for all practical purposes, his football career was over. "I continued to work out, continued to dream, but deep inside I knew it was over. And I knew that without football, my life didn't mean much."

Isaac continues to help the local team in a peripheral way. He has considered coaching, but knows that without a college degree and a teaching certificate, all he can do is volunteer work with younger players. "I still go to practice a couple of times a week. And I help out with the little league program on weekends, but it just isn't the same. All I want to do is play. You know what is funny about football? When your school career ends, that's it. You are done. With baseball or basketball you can still continue to play. slow pitch softball or city league basketball. The outlet is still there. But with football, it is gone in a flash. I was at the top of my game in that regional, and then bam! We get beat and no more. I know I will never play again. I have accepted that. But it still hurts. What I wouldn't give for just one more week of practice.  It doesn't have to be a game. I just want to feel special again. But ain't going to happen.

"The worst time for me is when that first cool front comes in about the end of September, when you need a jacket at night. It just takes me back, back to that fall. It was magic and I know I will never feel so needed, so purposeful again in my life. On Friday night game nights, about 6 pm the lights go on at the stadium. I can stand outside the store, look across town and see the glow. I close my eyes and remember. It is like I am back there, padded up and ready for war, but in control because my life has meaning again. Everyone in town, young and old, -the whole town - at the game, coming to see me perform. It is my time and my world. It is the best feeling and the worst feeling, all at the same time, all wrapped into one."

Our waitress returned. "Getting late guys. Ten minutes to closing time. One last round," she asked as she cleared from the table our night's work of empties.

The pool game concluded and one of its' four players, an overweight middle aged white gentleman with an amble paunch, approached our table. "Let me tell you something," the intoxicated man slurred, as he reached down to hug Isaac. "You should have seen this boy run that football. That is what is a matter with 'em boys up at that school house this year. No speed. What we need is another little monkey like Isaac."

Amongst this backdrop of dead end drunken losers the greatest running back to ever lug the pigskin for the glory of the Wilson Panthers, sadly shook his head side to side in quiet resignation to his fate. After a long swig to empty the final bottle of beer of the evening, he stood and headed for the door.