Chapter 17

Jeff

I understood what Coach was doing. He was taking me out of the game to make sure I was still healthy for next week’s game.

I understood the decision, but that doesn’t mean I had to like it. Adrenaline was flooding my body, so any pain I’d feel the next day was a non-issue right then.

But I also thought it was cruel to send Scooter out there. It wasn’t just Deerwood; everyone in the stadium knew that we were running the ball. With a guy Scooter’s size, it seemed to me that we should only be putting him in on plays where the defense thought we might pass. That way, they wouldn’t have so many players looking to pounce on him.

It was better to have our QB sacked by whoever got to him first than to have eight guys pile on top of Scooter. At least Joey was a big enough guy to be able to take a hit.

I give Scooter credit though. It took courage for him to take that handoff.

Either that or it took stupidity.

Once he had the ball, Scooter managed to squirm through a crack in the offensive line.

Then, a mass of Deerwood bodies closed in on Scooter.

But Scooter emerged on the other side of the pile. To this day I don’t understand how he did it. The entire defensive line had thrown themselves at him in one giant clump of players. It was pure chaos, with limbs flying everywhere and Scooter buried somewhere in the middle, but then out of nowhere Scooter emerged, somehow unscathed. It was surreal—almost like an old cartoon where the hero emerges from the middle of a giant fight, leaving the bad guys to continue beating each other up. Scooter ran away from the pileup of other players and scampered down the sideline.

There were two Deerwood players left to beat—the free and strong safety—but he had nowhere left to run. The sideline cut off any escape route except going out of bounds. And that’s exactly what I expected him to do. Sure, running out of bounds would stop the clock, which we didn’t want to do. But honestly, Scooter had done more than enough. This was supposed to be a one-yard run. Instead, he’d turned it into a thirty-eight yarder. The next thing to do was step out of bounds and run another play.

But that’s not what Scooter did. He planted his foot and turned back into the field. The two safeties arrived at the same time, and they did indeed bring him down—but somehow he wriggled his body so that neither defender hit him very hard.