Hardly had Chris Bideau tossed his cap into the sweaty air that blanketed the seven-hundred-forty-five black-robed graduates of Goodness of God College then his older brother, Lucas, tugged at him. “Boy, daddy has a job just waitin’ for you. Between that fancy learning you got at GGC and that big body of yours, you will do just fine.”
Chris’s size and agility landed him a football scholarship to Goodness of God, where he excelled as a linebacker for three of his four years. In the beginning, he had loved to hit oncoming backs. Defensive Coach Moss Henderson pasted a special star on a defensive player’s helmet every time he took an opponent out of the game. Five stars warranted a cash bonus. Chris’s helmet was festooned with stars. He’d started a small bank account with the bonuses. But the hitting and hurting wasn’t about the money. It was about pleasing his daddy. For a time, Rufus Bideau was pleased. “You showed ’em you had balls,” his daddy once told him.
Affection turned to distaste in Chris’s last season when he got hurt in a stunning collision with ULC’s Archie Mayberry, a massive fullback on his way to the NFL. Mayberry got up, shrugged his shoulder pads and smiled while Chris rolled on the ground in agony. He had partially torn the stabilizer in his right knee, technically called the anterior cruciate ligament or ACL in sports jargon. As Chris writhed in pain on the field, Rufus got up from his stadium seat and left. He sought no information about his son’s condition. In Rufus’s mind Chris had been beaten, and losers didn’t rate consideration.
Chris missed two games but returned from therapy just in time to face ULC’s Mayberry again in a post-season bowl game. The clash was inevitable. Mayberry was going to go straight for Chris, if the chance came up. Mayberry knew the defensive back was hurt and figured he would want no part of a second collision. Mayberry knew that fear was a powerful weapon.
Mayberry got the call he wanted, a handoff to pick up three critical yards. A hole in the line opened. The only obstacle was Chris Bideau. Mayberry went straight at him. Mayberry didn’t know that Chris wasn’t afraid.
The two-hundred-seventy-pound fullback outweighed Chris by thirty pounds. As Mayberry charged forward, he thought he saw something in Chris’s eyes, and it wasn’t fear. Hell, I’ll carry that bastard over the fucking goal line, if he stays in my way. He certainly had the strength to do it. Chris would just be some extra baggage. As the fullback’s huge arm came up to swat Chris out of the way, Chris pivoted sharply, dipping his left shoulder just low enough to catch Mayberry’s knees from behind. Using his low center of gravity, Chris drove hard into Mayberry’s exposed joints. He felt Mayberry flip over his back and land with a deep grunt on the turf.
“You shit! Next time I’ll bust your ass,” Mayberry moaned from the ground.
“Nothing personal,” Chris replied with a smile.
Defensive Coach Henderson, known to his players as The Wedge, was not a man for sophisticated hits. “You should have taken that boy head on and shown him who was the man in this house. That dancing around is nothing but pantywaist bullshit. We are playing football. We hit head on. We bang. We show them who is the man, so they don’t come our way again…so they show respect. Respect is everything!”
The Wedge commanded little of the respect about which he preached. The team and most of its management long ago had concluded Henderson was the dumbest coach on the GGC staff. Some long gone quarterback had nicknamed him The Wedge, because it was one of the simplest tools known to man. The term became part of the college’s vernacular. If a student was called “a wedge,” it meant he was the stupidest kid around. If someone did something really dumb, he was said to have “wedged.” But Coach Moss Henderson was the college president’s brother-in-law, so he would be there as long as the president of GCC remained.
Chris was smart enough to know that as far as professional football was concerned, he was damaged goods. His take down of Mayberry came at a price—knee surgery. Chris enjoyed what was left of his senior year, screwing cheerleaders and tossing down beers with the guys.
It was hard not to like Chris Bideau. His face projected a good-looking innocence, abetted by pale blue eyes that twinkled with mischief, all topped by a shock of golden hair. His daddy, Rufus Bideau, knew these qualities would be assets to the family business.