EPH AND D’ARCY decided to take in a Devon Devils football game against a visiting team from the Ivies. Maybe eight thousand spectators were in a stadium that held sixty. The crowd looked mostly like some local Havenport kids and some die-hard alumni.
Once, Devon had been a national power, but that time had long passed. Now the school struggled for attendance, especially since the students were largely indifferent. Sometimes they came to tailgate, but would get drunk and never make it out of the parking lot. It was debatable whether many even knew the rules. Eph overheard someone nearby say that someone had committed a “foul.”
What no one, Eph knew, living anywhere near the Acela line could ever understand was the role football played in places like Alabama. They might nod their heads like they understood, like it wasn’t news to them: they like football down there. But they don’t get it.
They don’t get it at all.
The thing is, there isn’t much to do in small-town Alabama. There are no art exhibits, no visiting lecturers. There’s no High Line and the Dave Matthews Band is definitely not playing at the American Legion Hall on Saturday night. There are no women’s marches, peace marches, antiglobalization marches, or any other marches (unless you count that time parents had a demonstration about that sex ed class, but that was a while ago). The New York Times is not available for delivery, and no one would do the crossword or read the Sunday Review even if it were.
But there’s football, and in Alabama that means two things: Auburn and Bama, otherwise known as the Crimson Tide. As a good citizen of the Yellowhammer State, one is obliged to pick one of these teams as one’s own.
Pick? No, that’s not right. You inherit them, depending on family ties and geography. Then you bleed for them, the way you’d bleed for God or country. Ashley was Auburn country as the university lay just a piece up Route 29. The easiest way to start a fight in Ashley was to walk into a bar with a ROLL TIDE shirt.
One of Devon’s linebackers laid on a tremendous hit, prompting the crowd to cheer (and D’Arcy to wince). Despite Devon’s retreat from football excellence, the players were bigger than ever. Eph wondered why that was.
As an adult, Eph stayed in decent shape. He could run a mile in maybe seven minutes and put forty miles on his bike some Sundays. But as a kid, football was one on a long list of sports in which he’d been found wanting, although to be fair, his last data point was at the age of ten.
He developed late. A shade over six feet as an adult, he wouldn’t reach that height until almost twenty. As a kid, he was scrawny and short. There are many reasons a boy doesn’t want to be scrawny and short, but in Alabama, athletics would top the list. Not that Eph had anything against sports, even then. Many a night he’d lain in his bed longing for the golden arm of a quarterback or the graceful power of a wrestler. God, or random fate, wasn’t on the same page.
Pop Warner was the only year of football he ever played. He shuddered at the memory.
Ashley’s youth were automatically sized up for a position. Big and fat? Offensive line. A little less big? Defensive line. Really fast with a low center of gravity? Running back. Really fast with large hands? Wide receiver. Tall with a good arm? Quarterback. And so on until you got to kids like Eph: undersize, slow, and scared. They tended to get splinters in their asses, as the saying went, from riding the bench. At the Pop Warner level, though, the coaches were obliged to play everyone. This always enraged the dads of the better players, who thought that any second their boys weren’t on the field undercut their chances at a Division I scholarship. That anger radiated off the sidelines like heat from a furnace. Eph, a sensitive kid, picked up on these things, and it only added to his sense of dread at being called into a game.
Usually, they stuck him in the defensive backfield and hoped to avoid disaster. A defensive back didn’t get hit much, but Eph found every moment on the field terrifying regardless. He still remembered this one black kid named Jesse Greer. Jesse played running back for a rival team and must have outweighed Eph by forty pounds. To Eph, André the Giant had nothing on Jesse Greer, and the last place you wanted to be was standing between a guy like Jesse and the end zone. Not just because he was huge, either, but because he played with a sense of urgency, like he knew football was his only ticket out.
Even at age ten, on some inchoate level Eph could relate to Jesse that way, although football was never going to be Eph’s particular ticket. One time he got hit so hard the rim of the helmet cut into the edge of his forehead and he needed stitches. It left a small scar.
Eph’s mom, Millie, was always supportive and said the right things after games. But Big Mike, he never said much at all, except after Eph got the scar. He said it was something to wear with pride. Red Badge of Courage, or something like that. Generally, though, Big Mike’s strategy for dealing with a wimpy, book-loving son was not to say anything at all, as if Eph could interpret silence in any way other than a crushing blow.
Whatever Eph was, he wasn’t Jack. That much was clear. Jack was his older brother. He was good at football. He was good at a lot of things.
Sometimes, the rare times Eph dwelled on it, he thought that one interception—just one—might have changed the entire trajectory of his life.
He was eternally thankful it never happened.