Second Impact Read online

  Actually, I want to say, here and now, that I kind of like Jerry Downing, kind of liked him even before he turned up in honors creative writing and knocked our collective socks off. I’ll never forget Spirit Week last year, when he brought the guys from the football team to cheer at our girls’ soccer game. Maybe you don’t think that was a big deal, seven varsity football players showing up to cheer? Maybe you’re one of the soccer boosters, like a certain would-be-French intellectual in honors creative writing (you know who you are, and I love you dearly, but the beret is really getting old), and you like to go on and on about how graceful soccer is (balletic, I believe, is the word I’ve heard you use, and I’m not sure it really is a word), and how European, compared to violent American football, and blah blah blah. Well, I just want to say this: you weren’t at the Spirit Week game last year, or at any other game. None of you were. We’d have noticed you—we notice whenever students come because, frankly, students don’t come. Not to girls’ soccer, balletic though it may be. Now that I can’t play anymore, and I go to the games to root for the team and, of course, to make sure the Kourier maintains the brilliant, incisive level of sports coverage (or should that be koverage?) you’ve come to expect—well, now I am more aware than ever of our tiny crowds. There are just a few loyal parents (and man, I have to tell you, I have come to appreciate my dad, who used to skip out on his office now and then to watch me play—hey, Dad, I want to apologize for having asked you to keep your voice down. I was a twerp to be embarrassed, you were great to keep coming). But you know what? Those of you who have loyally followed my writing for the last couple of years know that this is a familiar rant. So let me just say that seven varsity football players, stripped to the waist, each with a huge black letter drawn on his chest so that they could stand in a line and spell out Kendall—well, that was just about the biggest thing, in every sense, that ever happened at a girls’ soccer game.

  Jerry, I remember, was K. Of course. And I might comment (oh, c’mon, Ms. Edison, leave it in), his pecs and abs were reasonably impressive, though by no means the most stunning in the lineup. By unanimous girls’ soccer team opinion, that prize went to Danny Rosewood. Clear favorite. But it’s a good memory, overall, Spirit Week. A chilly October afternoon, fall in the air, warming up with my team, the bus from Riverwood arrives with the other team … and suddenly the air is full of cheers, and along comes the football team, jogging in formation, letters on their chests, stomping so as to shake the earth, and there’s Jerry, Mr. K himself, leading the troops.

  Well, of course, that was before he got in trouble. Back when he was, like he says himself, the big hero. But I’m not going to get into that story—that’s for him to write about.

  But what I was thinking was that for both of us, Jerry Downing and me, that was Before, with a capital B. I was in my soccer shorts and jersey and, of course, my cleats and shin guards. I used to think that was the real me, but I haven’t been that person in a couple of months. She’s gone. I lost her that day in summer soccer scrimmage when I decided to try a fancy crossover, and I came down just a little bit wrong and I felt it, I felt my knee just buckle under me, like there was nothing holding the two parts of my leg together—and suddenly, there wasn’t. Or not enough.

  Well, I’ve told this story before. I’ll probably tell it again. I’ll probably be telling it on my college applications. (My ACL tear and how I learned from it and grew and became a stronger, wiser person with better board scores. And ended my high school soccer career. So take me into your freshman class, even though I may not be playing soccer for you. Please!)

  And so here I am, not having the senior year I had planned. (My dad still can’t quite get used to it. He wanted to get another second opinion—well, I guess you’d have to call it a third opinion—even before I had the surgery. Now he keeps finding things on the Internet about athletes who made quicker than usual recoveries after ACL tears. But he’s honest about it. When he read about Jerry Rice, who came back to pro football after only fourteen weeks, he told me the whole saga—how he made a touchdown catch and cracked his kneecap on the play. My mom had some choice comments to make about that one.) But you all know my sad story. No pity parties, please. I’m a big girl.

  But I don’t know—maybe confession is catching. I just read over “Game Day” one more time, and I have something I want to tell you, something I’ve never discussed in all those pieces I’ve written about soccer, or even about my ACL tear. Here’s what “Game Day” makes me think: how sure he is. Oh, I know he thinks this is all about making up for what he did, and I know he prays, they all pray, but he never thinks, not for one minute, Oh, what the hey, if it’s not me, it’ll be Ryan Hurley quarterbacking, and that’s fine, too, and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, whoever’s playing. That’s not Jerry. He wants to be the one with the ball. He really wants it.

  And the funny thing is—this is what I want to tell you—I don’t know if I ever felt that. I love suiting up. I love playing. I love looking for my moment, and moving fast—let’s face it, I love being a striker. But even as I’m writing this, I keep wondering if I should be putting it all in the past tense (I loved taking a pass from midfield, I loved scoping out the goalie and planning my shots). Because here it is: when I came back after my injury, they let me sit on the bench, of course, and they tried their best to include me, and so I sat there. And you know what? It was okay. I wasn’t playing, so Jeannette Markowski got serious time as striker, and she did really well. And when she flubbed a penalty kick, I didn’t think, Oh, I would have made that. I thought, Well sure, that happens. It’s her turn.

  And that confirmed something that I think I had already begun to suspect about myself—that I’m not an athlete the way some of the other girls on the team are athletes. I think I always knew there are limits to how far I was going to go with this. (My parents disagree—big-time—about whether I will ever play seriously again. My dad is a big believer in getting back on the horse, and my mom keeps pointing out that after one ACL surgery, you’re at an increased risk of another injury and another surgery. And she reminds him how, after the injury, I was in such bad pain. And then he gets upset, too, because my dad can’t stand to see his child in pain. And I just try to stay out of the conversation because what’s clear is that I won’t be playing soccer this year, so what I need to do is get into college, without soccer, and figure things out for myself.) And when I felt my knee fold under me, I think some part of me knew right then that there are limits to how far I am going to go.

  On the other hand, when I sit down at my laptop, I don’t think there’s any limit whatsoever. When I start writing—when I think of all of you out there reading my writing—I feel I could do anything. I could go and go, I could write and write. Well, you know that about me. But I feel like I could do things, like I could make everyone listen to me. I could change lives. I could remake the world. (Oh, no, I think I’m writing a college essay again—I want to end world hunger and violence against women, that’s why I want to be a writer. And sure, while I’m at it, I’d also like to fix the environment and maybe reopen the factory in Kendall so everyone could have their jobs back.) But that’s not the real point. The real point is how I feel when I sit down to write. And you know how Jerry says about the football game, that he can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it? That’s exactly what it’s like.

  View 5 reader comments:

  Posted by user Photog_Sophie at 10:03 a.m.

  Click here for photos from the girls’ soccer game last Saturday. Photos from last year’s Spirit Week are available here. Take the online poll to vote for which player has the best six-pack! And, Carla, I’m not too worried about your college application essay.

  Posted by user Ms_Edison at 10:23 a.m.

  Thanks for posting photos, Sophie. The poll is no longer active, but the pictures are still up.

  Posted by user @Ms_Edison at 10:45 a.m.

  You never let us have any fun!

  Posted by user No_Poll_Neede
d at 11:07 a.m.

  Rosewood’s the clear champion. AMIRITE?

  Posted by user GOTIGERS at 11:43 a.m.

  WOLVERINES SUCK!!!

  DING DONG

  Posted by user JERRY on November 10 at 6:00 p.m.

  Last week, when Carla asked me to write a blog on the Kourier, I didn’t know if I should do it. I was afraid it might seem like showing off. But the reaction to “Game Day” has been very positive, and it’s important to me that people know the truth.

  Mr. Cooper thinks it’s a great idea and said that if Carla and I want to blog back and forth about the season—“narrative blogs,” he called them—we can get credit for his class. “But the writing has to be polished,” he said. He warned me that there’s a lot of lousy prose out there on the Internet. He won’t give me any credit if I just spew or post supershort blogs with sentence fragments and inside jokes that only my football teammates will get. “If you want to do this,” he told me, “write it for a general audience, for people who don’t know you unless you introduce yourself and won’t understand your story unless you tell it well.”

  So I’m going to try to tell our team’s story this football season in that kind of blog—as honestly and personally as I can—and what happened last Friday night in the Midland game is a great place to start.

  Just for the record, Carla, I can’t claim credit for our team turning out at your soccer game last year during Spirit Week. My buddy Danny had a thing for one of your teammates, and he suggested it. But I admit the letters on our bare chests was my idea, and I’m glad we didn’t horrify you with all the hair and flab.

  I wouldn’t be too modest about your soccer ability. I admit I’d never seen a girls’ soccer game before, but I remember you as being the best player on the field that day. Both goals that you kicked were bullets. That’s really tough luck about your knee. It’s easy for me to say this, but when it heals, I’m on your dad’s side—I think you should give soccer another try. You gotta get back on the horse after it bucks you.

  Which brings me to today’s blog posting. I’m calling this one “Ding Dong” because I got my bell rung really good on Friday. I didn’t get dinged because I was wearing my helmet and suit of armor, so there were only a few minor cuts and bruises. But I did get donged, and even now, three days later, the chimes are still ringing.

  You may be wondering what it feels like to get donged, or why I didn’t just go down on my own before the hit. As you probably know since you’re reading a football blog, if a quarterback goes down voluntarily and slides feetfirst, opponents can’t hit him. But in a tight game, with the whole season on the line, sometimes it’s harder to go down than to stay up and take a massive hit.

  I know a lot of you reading this were at the game on Friday, so I won’t bother with a recap. You know it was a perfect fall day, a great crowd. I don’t usually pick out faces from the crowd, but I couldn’t help noticing that there was a coach from an in-state college I visited last spring sitting there taking notes on a pad. I wanted to give him a show. Our offense was clicking, and my arm felt strong—in three quarters I threw four touchdowns.

  The only problem was that Brian Dumars, better known as the Midland Express, ran for five. I couldn’t blame our defense—the guy’s unstoppable. So when I trotted onto the field with three minutes left in the fourth quarter, we were trailing by seven points. The math was real simple. If we got a touchdown and a two-point conversion, we would win the game and stay undefeated. If we didn’t, our season and all our championship hopes would go down the drain.

  Three minutes sounds short, but it’s actually plenty of time for a final drive. When we huddled up, I could see how nervous some of the underclassmen were. “Okay, guys,” I said, “before we talk football, I’ve got a more important question.” They looked at me, waiting. What could be more important than football at a moment like this? “Granger,” I asked, “have you taken a shower yet this season?”

  Granger is a giant lineman who has muscles the size of cantaloupes, but I don’t think he’d mind me saying that he’s not exactly known for his personal hygiene. He wears his sweat and grime the way soldiers wear their medals, and he considers it a point of pride not to take showers often. “I got caught in the rain two weeks ago,” he said, playing along with the joke. “Does that count?”

  I saw a couple of the sophomores crack smiles.

  “Rain doesn’t count,” I told him. “There’s gotta be soap involved. Change places in the huddle. Stand downwind, next to Peters.”

  “No way,” Peters, another senior, said. “I got allergies, and he sets me off.”

  There were laughs and grins, and I could feel the mood lighten. I said, “Okay, guys, let’s talk football. We’re gonna march in for a touchdown and not make any stupid mistakes. Since they’re guessing pass, we’re gonna start it off with a run.”

  We mixed up short passes and runs and were soon over the fifty, steaming full speed ahead into enemy territory. Their defense was worried about getting beat with a long pass, so they were giving our receivers too much room at the line. I kept hitting Danny and Glenn Scott with crossing patterns, gobbling up seven or eight yards with each play.

  Fifty yards turned into forty, then thirty. I threw a short square out to our super soph Mike Magee, and he was supposed to step out of bounds and stop the clock, but he tried to stretch it and got dropped inside the line, so we had to burn our last time-out.

  Fifty seconds left. Fourth and three from the twenty-seven. I knew they’d think we were going for the first down, so I wasn’t too surprised when Coach Shea sent in a play from the sideline. He decided to gamble everything on a stop-and-go to Danny. It’s just what it sounds like—he runs out three steps, stops, and turns. I pump him a fake short pass. And then he goes—straight out to a corner of the end zone.

  We got to the line, and I waited an extra beat, conscious that this was it—our whole season was on the line. Then I took the snap and Danny sprinted out three steps, stopped dead, and turned. I rolled to my left and sold the pump fake. Their defender bit hard, and at the moment he jumped in to try to break up the short pass, Danny started running again, switching gears and directions in an instant. We had them exactly where we wanted them. I was about to loft the ball into Danny’s hands and start celebrating our victory when I saw that the unthinkable had happened.

  Danny is normally as sure-footed as a mountain goat, but when he stopped and started, he lost his balance, his arms windmilled for a second, and he fell down right on his butt. Suddenly I had no target to pass to, and I could feel the pressure coming behind me. One of their pass rushers got his hands around my waist, but I spun free and looked for Glenn Scott, my secondary target. He was covered by two guys who were draped all over him.

  There was only one thing to do. I’m not exactly the fastest runner in the world, but when I need to pick up yards the hard way I can usually do it. I started downfield, slanting for the sideline. I had to pick up three yards to get the first down, and then I needed to get out of bounds to stop the clock. A Midland tackle had a clear shot at me. I was about to try to juke him, when he dove at me for a leg tackle. I saw him coming low and vaulted over him, and somehow came down running again.

  Time slowed. I could hear the roar of the crowd. I took a stride. I was pretty sure I had picked up the first down. The sideline was less than five feet away, but Gonzales, Midland’s all-league humongous defensive end, was speeding right at me. Drop, I told myself. Slide, feetfirst. If I had picked up the first down, there was time to get to the line and spike the ball to stop the clock.

  There was only one problem: I didn’t know for absolute sure that I had made the first-down yardage. If I went down voluntarily and they marked me short—even by an inch—the game and our season would be over. So instead of going down, I stayed up and kept moving forward and tried to get out of bounds.

  I saw Gonzales getting ready for the hit, and I knew I had made the wrong decision. He was as big as a mountain—at least four i
nches taller than me and fifty pounds heavier. He had been sprinting right at me at top speed and now launched himself at me like a guided missile. No doubt about it, he was going to rip my head off.

  I wrapped up the ball in both hands, hugged it tight, and lunged for the sideline. The hit came so fast and hard that I felt no pain. There was a flash of light and a bone-jarring reverse thrust that I felt with my whole body—my spine, my ribs, my teeth—as Gonzales’s mass and momentum smashed me backward to the turf, and all I could think was, Hold on to the ball. Don’t let it go.

  That single thought became a rope, a lifeline, tying me to daylight and consciousness with a sense of purpose, even as it frayed to a cord and finally a single gray thread stretching over a chasm. But the thread never broke, and I never completely blacked out. I felt the ball in my hands the whole time and never let go of it—not even when Coach Shea was standing above me asking me questions and trying very gently to take the football from my grasp.

  I was lying on my back, watching the sun filter around his face, which seemed to mushroom larger and shrink down again like a character in a cartoon. “Jelly?” his voice said. “Jelly?”

  But it wasn’t jelly, it was Jerry—my name. “Jerry, are you okay? Can you hear me? Can you talk?”

  I could hear him and see him, but there was some kind of a disconnect. He was speaking into a tube, whispering into a windy echo chamber, and someone had stuck a vacuum down my throat into my chest and sucked the air out of my lungs, so I couldn’t make a sound in reply.