Chapter Four

 

Dirk had gone to the airport to visit a friend on the morning Consolidated Flight 243 crashed. Gary Lee Puckett, who Dirk had not seen since they played high school football together, worked in the air traffic control tower. He and Dirk had grown up in Hickory Junction, South Carolina. They were very athletic young men, and had excelled under the tutelage of coach Otis Kincaid.

One of the coach’s more compelling attributes was his ability to motivate his players through the use of derisive comments. Dirk had laughed out loud while driving to the airport that morning as he recalled an incident between the coach and Gary Lee.

As a defensive safety, Gary Lee was responsible for memorizing strategies, or “coverages,” to ensure that the other team did not complete passes.

During the final practice session before the season-ending game, a fifty-yard touchdown pass was completed and Gary Lee was to blame. Coach Kincaid stormed out onto the field, blowing his whistle and waving his arms.

“Gary Lee!” He began his verbal assault by positioning his nose about six inches from the mortified defensive back’s face. “I’ve got a dog. That dog’s name is Nikki. I can tell Nikki to go over there, and she’ll go over there. If I tell you to go over there, I don’t know where in the hell you’ll go!”

“Johnston, run that play again,” he scowled at his quarterback as he jogged off the field, blowing his whistle and waving his arms.

As quarterback of the team, it was now Dirk’s job to huddle the offensive players and call the same play so that coach Kincaid could determine if Gary Lee was in fact as trainable as his dog. This time Gary Lee was in the correct position and intercepted the pass, a feat which he repeated four times during the game the next night to set a school record.

At the start of Dirk’s senior year, coach Kincaid was addressing his plans for the team’s offensive strategy with his players.

“Men, I know that every other team in the conference is going to use a run-oriented offensive system this season.” He then walked over to Dirk and put his arm around his shoulders. “Now Johnston here is going to be our quarterback. Dirk can run, but the problem is he runs too long in the same place,” he continued sarcastically.

“I think our team will be more successful if we emphasize Johnston’s passing attributes. Now this type of offense will require above average intelligence on the part of the quarterback. I know what you’re thinking, but let me assure you that the dumb look on his face is just a disguise. Beneath this brain-dead dipstick expression lurks a young man of superior intellect. I’ve checked his IQ, and it’s off the charts. I expect his passing statistics at the end of this season to be off the charts as well. Now, men, good things happen to good people,” coach Kincaid culminated his dissertation with one of his favorite witticisms, “but I’m gonna let ol’ Dirk go out there and try anyway!”

Several times a week at the end of the afternoon’s practice, as his players sat drenched in sweat, many stained with blood, and a few reeking from the smell of vomit that was often a byproduct of overexertion in the hot South Carolina sun, coach Kincaid would deliver a summation of the team’s performance.

Often these pseudo-sermons were delivered in a peripatetic style, with the coach circling the exhausted players. There was something about the messages he delivered to these young men in that desperate mental state that transcended the game itself. It was as if the coach knew that the permanent lessons in life they would take from their football experiences had very little to do with defensive coverages and offensive strategies.

It was coach Kincaid’s subtle contradictions in terms that made his comments so compelling. When asked by a local reporter what he thought his team’s chances for success were against their next opponent, he responded, “Well, we may be little, but we’re slow!” The reporter’s facial expression changed three times as he tried to comprehend the full meaning of the ridiculous contradiction.

By the end of the season, Dirk’s passing statistics were indeed off the charts, resulting in school records in five categories. Gary Lee’s prowess as a defensive safety received such notoriety that he was scouted by several colleges and offered a full scholarship to bring his skills to their schools. He was elevated to celebrity status by the attention created as football recruiters from several universities flew corporate aircraft into Hickory Junction to whisk him off for weekend visits to their campuses in hopes of getting him to commit to play football for them.

Unfortunately, Gary Lee lacked the passion to play the game at the college level, and after one season he quit school and joined the Marines.

As for Dirk, coach Kincaid’s analysis of his “running too long in the same place” was shared by the college coaching fraternity as well, and no athletic scholarships were forthcoming. Fortunately his evaluation of Dirk’s mental prowess had been just as astute, and he obtained an academic scholarship and studied journalism.

After graduation, he advanced from job to job with newspapers of ever increasing readership. One of his stories on political corruption in a small Louisiana town caught the eye of his present producer in Charlotte, facilitating his transition from newspaper to TV.

Dirk had not seen Gary Lee since they graduated from high school. They ran into each other a few days prior to the Consolidated crash at their twenty-year high school reunion. He learned that Gary Lee had become an air traffic controller, and now worked in the Charlotte Terminal Radar Approach Control facility, or TRACON. Dirk had suggested the possibility of doing a story on the status of the nation’s air traffic control system, and had arranged to meet with Gary Lee to take a tour of the air traffic control tower.

Ironically, a KCLT news crew had also been at the airport to chronicle the dedication of a new garden area located between the control tower and the parking garage that was part of the mayor’s airport beautification project.

Dirk had actually been on the roof of the garage parking his car and saw Flight 243 as it ran off the runway. He raced to the KCLT video crew filming in the garden area adjacent to the garage, commandeered the camera crew from the startled reporter, rushed them to a vantage point on the rooftop, and directed them to begin filming.

After finishing the live feed to both KCLT and their affiliates, he proceeded to keep his appointment with Gary Lee. The morning’s events had drastically changed the focus of his agenda. He knew the executives from the airline would be in town soon. He would need informational “chips” he could barter with them and other key participants in the crash investigation if he was to find out why this catastrophe had occurred.

He knew reporters were initially barred from the crash scene. They were forced to rely on press releases provided periodically by investigators and company officials at news conferences. Because of this filtered and sterilized information, all the news reports turned out to be the same. If Dirk could get some chips from Gary Lee, perhaps he could use them to report more than just the news pool information from Consolidated executives. He wanted to avoid “running too long in the same place” on this story.