To no one’s surprise, it turned out that the under was the right call.
It took a few days to pin down the IDs on the remaining players. Not wanting to raise any eyebrows, they spread out their research. Some of the work of putting faces to names was easy—walking casually through the locker room before and after practice and taking note of guys standing in front of their lockers.
In other cases, they had to ask specific questions. Most of the players they didn’t know were upperclassmen, since most of their classes were with the other freshmen. So there were times when they’d just say to someone they knew: “Who’s that?” pointing at a player in the hallway between classes or on line in the dining room.
“Ted Harvey,” would come the answer. And another name would be checked off the list.
The most awkward moment came when Billy Bob asked a kid he knew from Alabama, a junior wide receiver named Robert Alonzo, to point out his roommate to him.
“He points in the direction of a locker where there’s an African American guy standing who I don’t know,” Billy Bob recounted, “and he says ‘It’s Joey Allen.’ For a split second I thought we finally had a black-and-white room. So I nod where I thought he was pointing and, since the guy was huge, I said, ‘Oh, so you room with a lineman, huh?’ He looked at me like I was insane and said, ‘You mean Willie White? No, dummy, I was pointin’ at Joey—right there.’”
Billy Bob then explained that Allen had been walking past White when Tommy pointed. “I just said, ‘Oh, yeah sorry, easy mistake to make, I guess.’ He gave me a look and said, ‘Not if your IQ’s over a hundred. You see any black guys and white guys rooming together around this place?’ He walked off laughing like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.”
“Probably was,” Anthony said.
* * *
By Wednesday night they’d gathered back in Tom and Anthony’s room to go over the list. They now had all eighty-one remaining players sorted. Of the thirty-eight double rooms, there were nineteen rooms with two white guys and nineteen with two black guys (still including Jameis Almonte and Kendall Franklin, since that was the original room assignment).
And it turned out that the one question mark among the players in single rooms, Tony Jones, was black; he was a star linebacker who was being recruited by every top program in the country.
“Some of the guys told me he was talking about transferring for his senior year,” Anthony said when Jones’s name came up. “All of a sudden, the school found him one of the singles.”
“That’s interesting,” Tom said. “But more important, we found what we thought we’d find: every double room has either two black or two white players in it. Our case is still just circumstantial, but it’s a lot stronger.”
It was Jason who played devil’s advocate. “We’ve only proved what Robert Alonzo and everybody else already knows. It’s not like we can march into Coach Johnson’s office and say, ‘Hey, Bobo, we know you haven’t got a single biracial double room among the players on your team, and this proves you are a racist SOB.’ Coach Johnson is just going to smile and say, ‘Is that true? I had no idea. The admissions people handle the room assignments. We just give them the names of our players and ask that they all be allowed to room together because we like our players to become close away from the field. How they handle those assignments is up to them.’”
Billy Bob nodded. “They can come up with some kind of explanation for every individual thing. They can say that the white quarterback thing is coincidence, that they didn’t know about rooming assignments, and that Coach Johnson knowing Tom wasn’t Jason’s roommate was because he’d heard they’d complained about not being put together.”
“So we need something else,” Jason said. “A smoking gun.”
“How do we get it, though?” Anthony said.
“It’s worth thinking about,” Tom said. “But for now, our next move is to figure out a way to meet with Teel and Robinson again, and see if they’ve found anything out.”
“Well, they’re not coming to the game Friday night, and we aren’t allowed off campus without a good reason on Saturday and Sunday,” Billy Bob said. “So we need to come up with something.”
“Think there’s any way to convince them to come Friday?” Jason asked.
Tom shook his head. “If South Hill is as bad as they say and they show up, won’t the coaches want to know why?”
“Maybe they want to see if Jason will be the hero again?” Billy Bob said.
“If I am, the entire team will probably be on lockdown all weekend,” Jason said. “Coach will not be happy.”
They all nodded. He was right.
* * *
Tom texted Teel anyway to tell him they needed to talk. He said nothing about their research, paranoid enough by now to think his phone might get confiscated at some point if they got much further with the investigation. No sense giving the coaches or the school any written evidence of what they were up to.
“Of course, the fact that you’re texting with a reporter at all would probably convict you if it ever got to that,” Jason pointed out as they were walking off the practice field on Thursday.
Tom knew Jason was right, but he wasn’t that concerned. Part of him wanted a confrontation of some kind with the coaches. As the week had gone on and he continued to get very few “reps”—as the coaches called plays—in practice, he’d found himself having more and more regret about not jumping at the chance to go home the previous Saturday.
Another part of him, though, he had to admit, was being a little jealous about Jason’s new status with the team. Jason had gone from being as invisible as Tom, day in and day out, to being a full-fledged hero. When he’d walked into the locker room before practice on Monday, almost everyone in the room had stopped to clap for him, and then they’d crowded around to congratulate him and ask him how he was feeling.
The answer was fine. Dr. Mazzocca had taken him into the training room for his concussion protocol test before he was allowed to join everyone else on the field. Soon after they finished stretching, Jason came jogging onto the field—in uniform.
He reported to Dave Billingsley, the trainer, and Tom saw Mr. Billingsley pat him on the back, point him to where the quarterbacks were gathering, and then walk over to report to Coach Johnson.
As Jason jogged past the circle of wide receivers he slowed for a second and said to Tom, “Passed with flying colors. My brain’s still intact.”
“Still?” Tom couldn’t resist saying—earning him a glare from Coach Reilly, who couldn’t hear what was being said but clearly didn’t see any reason for any conversation at all.
When they scrimmaged that day, Jason was the number three quarterback, even getting a few reps with the second-stringers. Billy Bob was still taking more snaps with the twos than with the ones, which annoyed him and confused everyone else.
“Coach Johnson just doesn’t want to admit he was wrong starting Ronnie Thompson last week,” Billy Bob said on Wednesday when the depth chart for Friday’s game was posted in the locker room. Thompson was again listed as the starting quarterback.
“You’re right,” Tom said. “He knows he can get away with playing Thompson this week. If, by some chance, they make it a game, you come to the rescue again.”
Billy Bob gave Tom his Billy Bob grin. “And I can’t even claim race is involved, can I?”
They both laughed—one of Tom’s few laughs during the week.
On Thursday night, after he’d gotten into the relatively brief Thursday scrimmage—most of Thursday practice being devoted to special teams—for a grand total of two plays, Tom went to Juan and Jimmy’s room to keep his promise by explaining to them why he’d asked for the rooming list.
“You’re kidding,” Juan said. “You didn’t have to go to all that trouble. All you had to do was ask us. You think there’s some secret reason why we’re roomies? You think there’s some secret reason why there’s always an even number of Hispanics on the baseball team?”
Jimmy took it a step further. “We’ve got two Asians on the basketball team this year—one from China, one from Korea. The Chinese kid can really play—every big-time school out there is recruiting him. The Korean kid can barely dribble with one hand. But TGP recruited him…”
“So that the Chinese kid would have an Asian roommate,” Juan finished.
They both nodded.
“If that’s the case, then it isn’t just Coach Johnson—it’s the entire school,” Tom said.
“It’s not the entire school,” Jimmy said. “It only takes a few bad apples. Especially when they are big apples.”
“You’ve researched Coach Johnson’s background, right?” Juan said as Tom nodded. “Have you googled our beloved founder, Mr. Gatch, at all?”
They hadn’t. It had never occurred to Tom or to his other three friends that the issue might go beyond the football team. They knew Mr. Gatch was from the South—he didn’t have a deep accent, but you could hear it when he spoke—but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Billy Bob was as Southern as they came, and so were a lot of the other kids he’d met at TGP who clearly couldn’t care less about skin color. One of the things Tom had figured out growing up as an athlete was that race pretty much disappeared when you were playing ball. Not always. But most of the time.
He remembered a quote from the great basketball coach Red Auerbach, who was the first coach in professional sports to start an all-black lineup back in the 1960s.
“I can’t stand black players,” Auerbach had said. “I also can’t stand white players, red players, or green players—if they can’t play. They all look the same to me until they get on the court. Then I decide who I like and who I don’t like.”
Tom’s father had given him a book about Auerbach to read a couple of years earlier. Reading it, he had learned that Auerbach had made Bill Russell the first black coach of a major professional sports team when he’d handed the Celtics over to him in 1966. It was hard to believe that more than fifty years later, race could still be a factor in who got coaching jobs—or who played quarterback.
Or who roomed with whom.
“So what am I missing about Mr. Gatch?” he asked Juan.
“He’s from Louisiana,” Jimmy said.
“So?”
“There’s more,” Jimmy said. “Go and google Gatch; then we’ll talk again.”
“Why so mysterious?” Tom asked.
“Not being mysterious,” Jimmy said. “But it’s easier for you to read about it than for me to try to explain it.”
Tom sighed. Every time he thought they had answered a question, new ones popped up. He headed back to his room to look into Mr. Thomas A. Gatch.
* * *
There really wasn’t anything shocking—at least that Tom could find—in the biography of Mr. Gatch.
His Wikipedia page was brief and had obviously been written by the school’s communications department. It was glowing, talking about his career as a teacher, then as an administrator, and then as a “player management representative” (in English that meant he’d been a sports agent) before his “groundbreaking decision” to found TGP. In truth, Tom thought, it was hardly groundbreaking: IMG Academy and others had already fostered the concept—for better or worse.
Remembering what Jimmy had said about Mr. Gatch coming from Louisiana, Tom started looking at websites from there for more information. There appeared to be nothing. Finally, having gone to the website of the state’s largest newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Tom found something. It was a one-paragraph mention, buried deep within a story headlined PREP SCHOOL PERSONNEL. The seventh item in the story, after mentions of football coach hirings and firings in the area and a couple of paragraphs about new department heads, came under the heading “Metairie Christian Names New Head-of-School”:
Thomas A. Gatch, 35, has been named to replace Harold D. Samples as head-of-school at Metairie Christian School. Gatch is the headmaster of the Louisiana Boys School in Baton Rouge and was formerly head of the English department there.
The date was August 1, 1985. Tom quickly did the math in his head and was a little surprised to learn that Mr. Gatch was sixty-seven years old. He’d have guessed closer to sixty.
A few minutes later, Tom found Mr. Gatch mentioned in a second clip. This one was considerably longer and bore the headline HIGH SCHOOL HEAD-OF-SCHOOL DEFENDS DUKE INVITATION.
The story was dated December 2, 1989. It only took a couple of paragraphs to figure out what Jimmy and Juan had been talking about:
Thomas A. Gatch, the head of Metairie Christian School, said yesterday he will not back away from the invitation he has extended to former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David E. Duke—now a member of the Louisiana State Legislature—to come and speak at the school.
Duke, who was once a member of the Nazi Party, won a special election earlier this year, running as a Republican. Gatch insisted again yesterday that Duke’s invitation to speak to the 335 students at Metairie was not an endorsement of his politics.
“He’s an elected official who has a political point of view that the students can learn from—regardless of how they feel about that point of view,” Gatch said. “You don’t always learn by listening to people whose views are inside the box. I’ve known Mr. Duke for a long time. I don’t have to agree with his views to respect him as a communicator.”
The story went on to mention that Gatch and Duke had been at Louisiana State University together.
There were no more specifics.
Tom found another clip—from two days later—announcing that Gatch had reversed himself and withdrawn the invitation to Duke “under pressure from the school’s board of trustees.”
Tom found one more clip, dated a month later, announcing that Gatch was resigning from his job at Metairie Christian to “pursue other opportunities.”
The trail ended there. Tom sat back in his chair. Anthony was asleep, snoring softly.
The man who had founded TGP had apparently known a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who was also a onetime member of the Nazi Party. And he had apparently been fired for inviting him to come speak to his students at the school where he was head-of-school.
“Wow,” he said softly to himself. “What now?”