Fathers & Sons & Sports (8 page)

At season’s end, I decided I wanted to be the kind of lineman who blows people off the ball. To gain body mass, I put myself on a diet of my own invention and began to consume carbohydrates in vast quantities—pasta, bread, rice and more pasta, bread and rice. Each night at supper, my mother let me eat as much as I wanted, but the staple of my diet was ice cream. At the K&B drugstore in town, you could buy a half-gallon carton for a dollar. Occasionally the store sold two for the price of one. On those days, I arrived early and loaded a shopping cart with the cube-shaped cartons. I paid for this haul with
money I’d saved from cutting grass, picking pecans, and other odd jobs. Peeling back the paper carton like a banana and munching from one end to the other, I often ate an entire half gallon in a single sitting.

I once ate four cartons in twelve hours and never picked up a spoon. “You’re gross,” my sisters told me.

By spring, I’d grown an inch taller, had gained twenty pounds, and had become more competitive at practice, often in view of the visiting recruiters who watched every move from behind Ray-Bans and the bills of low-riding baseball caps. Our offensive line coach, Madison Firman, liked to put us through a drill called Bull in the Ring. Six players formed a circle around a single man, positioning themselves five yards away. Firman assigned each player on the ring a number then called out the number of the man he wanted to attack the bull. The objective was to drive the bull out of the ring or, in the case of the bull, hold your ground.

Firman occasionally called the numbers of the players standing directly behind the bull. He did this because it was important for a lineman to keep his head on a swivel. The bull ran in place at the center of the ring, pivoting from side to side in anticipation of the next assault. Rarely more than a few seconds separated one strike from the next. The bull took a beating, even when he managed to remain in the ring.

Whenever Firman assigned me the bull position, I concentrated on using the first few hits to send a message to the guys on
the ring. I knew better than to rely on just a shoulder or a fore-arm; that got you nowhere. Instead, I braced my neck and speared the charging player under the chin with my helmet. This snapped his head back and took away his bearings. I completed the strike by thrusting forward from my hips and lower body, which was often enough to put the invader out of commission.

Firman liked to send the toughest players after the bull at the end of the drill, and by the time they came running at me, I’d reached a murderous state. Even after all the players in the ring had been vanquished, I continued to run in place, challenging Firman to send more. I moved my body in a tight pivot, ready for any challenge he had to offer. “Who’s next?” I yelled, still wearing my mouthpiece. “Send him. Come on, Coach. Send somebody.”

By then, I’d learned how to let my mind go, how to escape the practice field, and even as I was handing out and receiving hits, I was at home in an air-conditioned room eating a cube of ice cream in front of the TV Or at a movie with Denise Landreneau, holding her hand in the dark theater and stealing kisses whenever the action slowed.

Firman had yet one more exercise to test our toughness: a long chute made of iron pipes, standing slightly more than four feet tall and running for a distance of ten yards. Every day Firman had us run from one end of the narrow tunnel to the other. The object was to train yourself to keep your body low to the ground, to strike with more power than you would if you ran tall. Everybody hated the chute. If you lifted your head, you banged
your helmet against one of the pipes on the ceiling. The blow knocked you senseless. To make the drill even more difficult, Firman placed boards end to end on the ground to make us widen our stances. Linemen who blocked with their feet too close together had poor balance and virtually no punching power. The boards forced us to keep them shoulder-width apart, which gave us a better base from which to operate.

Players with low centers of gravity had no problem running the chute, but tall guys struggled to keep their balance. I can still feel the
clap clap clap
of my helmet clipping the pipes as I ran,
clap clap clap
as I raced to the opening. Sometimes, for sport, Firman ordered a player to greet you on the other end. The moment you cleared the last pipe, a defensive lineman uncoiled from a four-point stance. You took blows coming and going—the first to your face, the second from a pipe to the back of your head.

Firman liked to hear us growl when we ran drills: Like scores of other state high school teams that wished to emulate LSU, we were nicknamed the Tigers. “Growl,” Firman shouted. “Come on. Let me hear you.” But it was hard to growl like a Siamese kitten, much less a Bengal tiger, on a muggy Louisiana day when you were exhausted and struggling to breathe; and one afternoon our growls must’ve sounded puny and insincere. They’d put him in a mood. “Growl for me. Growl, I’m telling you.
Growl!”

I growled as loud as I could, but as I was leaving the chute Firman cocked a forearm and slammed it against my shoulder. “I told you to growl. That’s not growling.”

A former college lineman, Firman had maintained a massive upper body, arms dense with muscle, and lean, well-defined legs into his early thirties. He didn’t hit me as hard as he could have, but the blow packed enough power to lift me out of one of my shoes. “Hey, son, you growl when I tell you to growl. Let’s go.”

I looked at him with all the fury I could muster. It was a look meant to communicate a barely controlled desire to kill him and every member of his family.

I slipped my shoe back on and started to run past him when suddenly he grabbed the back of my jersey and pulled me toward him. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“How did I look at you, Coach?”

He hooked a finger on the bottom rung of my facemask and pulled me closer still. “Don’t talk back to me, either. You know better than to talk back to me, John Ed.”

“Coach, I didn’t mean—”

“What did I just tell you?”

“But Coach—”

The recruiters were watching from under a goalpost about thirty yards away. Worse, my father had witnessed the incident. He was standing on the other side of the chain link fence that separated the field from a campus parking lot. You’ve shamed him, I thought. Daddy had left coaching several years before to become a school principal, but he still showed up for most practices, drawn less by my role with the team than by habit. Twenty-five years ago, he was the starting center at Opelousas High, now that
job belonged to me. He also played linebacker on defense, as I did. Who’d have thought that Johnny Bradley—
Coach
Bradley—would raise a son who got smart and talked back to authority?

Firman blew his whistle, ending the exercise. He ordered us to break the line in half and moved players to the defensive end of the chute. I joined this group, aware that it was an opportunity to unload on someone and redeem myself. I nailed a couple of guys as they left the chute, hitting them with such force that I could feel the air exit their lungs and their weight shift downward when their knees gave out. I glanced over at my father to see his reaction. He gave none. The recruiters didn’t seem impressed either.

We were scheduled to move to the main field for a scrimmage, but Firman shouted for us to stay where we were. “Big Hamm,” he called out. “Get over there.” He was pointing to the chute exit, where I had just been. “John Ed,” and now he motioned for me to stand at the entrance.

I considered throwing my helmet at him and sprinting for the showers, even as my teammates began to applaud and pound my shoulder pads. Donald Hammond wasn’t like the rest of us. For starters, he was so heavy he eclipsed the three-hundred-and-fifty-pound weight limit on the locker room scale. Players joked that the only way to get the correct reading was to take him to the feed store on Railroad Avenue and put him on a scale used to weigh sacks of beans and corn. When Guidry couldn’t find a helmet big enough to fit Hamm, he ordered a shell without any
padding from a manufacturer that supplied equipment to the NFL. Even that helmet didn’t fit. Big Hamm’s face poked out and pressed up flush against the birdcage.

Big Hamm was a nose guard, and it was impossible to move him off the line of scrimmage, even when we double- and triple-teamed him. He lifted guards and centers off their feet and drove them into quarterbacks, then drove the quarterbacks into running backs, then drove the whole pile into the ground. He might’ve rated as the finest defensive lineman in the history of high school football if only he were effective for more than ten plays a game. He was so big he usually lost his wind after a few series of downs, and after that his night was over. Simply jogging from the sideline to the defensive huddle was enough to exhaust him. He spent the rest of the game recuperating on the bench, an oxygen mask held to his face.

Big Hamm was a hard worker, but Guidry and Firman let him coast through most practices. And Firman inserted him into drills only sparingly, not wishing to hurt anyone, including Hamm himself, who suffered the effects of the weather more than the rest of us. To my recollection, Firman had never put Big Hamm in the defensive position at the end of the chute. It meant suicide for the charging player. I was going to my death, and I knew it as well as everyone else.

“You scared, John Ed?” Firman said.

“I’m not scared.”

“What did you say?”

“I’m not scared,
Coach.”
I added a growl to prove it.

“He says he’s not scared of you, Big Hamm.”

Big Hamm smiled and buttoned his chinstrap, and then he lowered himself to a four-point stance. I hesitated a moment before getting in position. By now my teammates, standing all around me, had reached a near hysterical state. They screamed and laughed and threw fists at each other’s pads. Players and coaches came running from other parts of the field, many of them letting out war cries. I glanced at the recruiters then over at my father. They stared back with the unflinching stoicism you see on the faces of pallbearers at a military funeral.

“Go on my count,” Firman said. “On two …” He held an invisible football in front of him, imitating a quarterback who was waiting to receive a snap from center. “Blue seventy-eight,” he called. “Blue seventy-eight. Hut
hut—”

I came blasting out of my stance and hurtling down the chute as fast as I could run, taking short, choppy steps to keep from catching my cleats on the boards and growling with such ferocity that I surely would have impressed a real tiger. My helmet smacked a pipe on the ceiling and gave my neck a jolt, but I continued forward, gaining speed and momentum. Then suddenly I was in the cool and the dark of a movie theater with Denise Landreneau, sharing popcorn and a Coke as we watched Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in
The Way We Were
. Hubble Gardner was the name of Redford’s character, and I
recalled how much I disliked my own name, and of course I made a mental note to ask my parents why on earth I had to be called what I’m called when they could’ve gone with Hubble, and then the movie screen went black as I cleared the last pipe and Big Hamm exploded into me.

He came up from down low and caught me in the exact spot where I myself aimed when I wanted to hurt people—the chin. It seemed he’d crushed my jaw and shattered my teeth even though I was wearing a mouthpiece. The second blow came from behind me, and it was every bit as devastating. Big Hamm had me pinned against the pipes. He pushed through me as he’d been taught to do, aiming his helmet at a spot just behind me. The chute came up off the ground. When I finally came to, half a minute later, it was to the cheers of my teammates.

Firman lifted me off the ground, and I registered the look of surprise and admiration on his face. Each player took a turn slapping my helmet. This was their way of congratulating me, but each slap sent an electric shock from the top of my skull into my left shoulder. The last player to slap my helmet was Big Hamm himself. I dropped to the sod again.

The scrimmage was out of the question. Somebody hoisted me up and walked me to the locker room carrying a good share of my weight. I was deposited on a padded table and our team trainer, Colonel Dudley Tatman, put an ice pack on my tender, stinging neck. When practice ended and the rest of the squad
joined me, I was sitting on a metal folding chair in front of my locker, naked but for a jockstrap and the Ace bandages that kept the ice pack in place. I noticed the recruiters watching me from across the room.

My teammates later told me that the collision with Big Hamm sounded like a shotgun blast. I snapped his head back and he staggered a step in reverse before recovering and making his kill.

“You’re a brave man,” one said. “I want you to remember what I’m telling you today. Are you listening?” “Yes, I’m listening.” “You’re going to play for LSU.” “Get out of here.”

“Hey, just remember what I’m telling you.”

I was the last player to leave. I’d missed a ride home with my neighbor Timmy Miller, a starting receiver on the team. Guidry offered to drop me off, but when we walked outside I saw my father’s pickup waiting under a streetlight in the parking lot. He himself was leaning against the old heap as a cloud of insects flew in the hot, yellow air above him. Cold water from the ice pack drained down my back and settled in the seat of my pants as I limped to the passenger side and let myself in.

“Thank you, Mickey,” my father called out.

“Good to see you again, Coach.”

Each gave the other a wave and Guidry secured the locker
room door. I was looking back at coach in the side-view mirror, waiting for my father to start for home, when he cupped his mouth with his hands. “Hey, Coach Bradley” he shouted.

My father wheeled around and brought a hand to his ear.

“John Ed’s going to be one hell of a football player.”

We started down Judson Walsh Drive, passing under the heavy branches of pine and oak trees that lined the road and formed a tunnel, each of us holding an arm out his open window. The air smelled of evergreen mixed with honeysuckle and gardenia from the old Humble Village neighborhood that had been abandoned decades before and now stood black and overgrown, a ghost town on the side of the road. I wanted to go to my room, get in bed, and hide under the covers until I was so old that the day had been erased from the memories of everyone who witnessed it. My father hooked a right onto the Old Sunset Road. He started working through the gears, and by the time he reached third I couldn’t keep a lid on it anymore. “I hate it,” I said, stuff leaking in a torrent from my nose. “I hate it, I tell you. I hate it, I hate it …”