The Origin of High Power
By Naguabo
Author's Note: In a perfect world, Coach Taylor would be fluent in Spanish. However, even the worlds created by us fanfiction writers aren't perfect. So this is what you get. While reading another story, I got an idea for this one (hooray, finally cut a chip off the writer's block!). Thanks to ICSAT for inspiring the context and a couple of characters in this story. The Silver Bowl and Prescott University are figments of my imagination. Enjoy!
September 1990
Eric Taylor was enjoying his first head coaching job. Never mind the ninety-degree Texas heat or the practices that started at 6 AM sharp. Or the fact that he was coaching kids who were barely four feet tall. He was twenty-four years old and he was in charge of a team. Not as an NFL quarterback, as he'd dreamed for years, until his junior year at Houston, when an injury had ended his playing days. And he had his best friend since high school, Slaton Donner, the defensive end who'd tried to sack him a thousand times in practice, coaching defense alongside him.
These were kids who had to be taught the fundamentals. Catching, throwing, holding onto the ball and not dropping it, blocking, tackling. Then on to the refinements: positioning, running routes, learning plays, reading defenses, recognizing formations, and more. There was so much to learn, so he realized he had to make it fun if he wanted these kids to enjoy the game.
"Jimmy, put your weight forward when you're making the throw, you need to get some zip on that ball! Chris, don't hesitate, run straight for the line, hit the hole before it closes! Stanley, block the guy right in front of you, don't look around to see where you want to send him, just get in his way! Nice catch, Richie!" The words were coming out of his mouth faster than he could think them. It was like working at game speed, but in a different way.
And that was when he saw the other boy watching the practice from just outside the fence. Short, probably no more than five or six years old, with black hair and medium-brown skin, still growing into a faded red t-shirt and shorts that used to be black, obvious hand-me-downs. And that look in his eyes.
Eric had never believed in mind reading. Anybody who'd ever told him they could read anyone else's thoughts – including his own wife, Tami – he'd always scoffed at that. This time, though, he could tell what this kid was thinking from twenty feet away. I want to be in there. I want to try what these other kids are doing.
So why not give him the chance to do it?
Eric blew his whistle. "Good work, boys! Time for a break! Go over to the corner there and everybody grab yourselves a juice back. We'll start up again in five minutes." The usual pandemonium ensued, with shouting, kids running all over the place, and the occasional pushing and shoving.
Eric walked over to the fence where the boy was standing. This time, he could see it as well – the kid had thought about running away and decided not to. He bent down and made sure to put a smile on his face.
"Hi there, son. You want to join us here?"
The answer to that was a blank look and "No hablo inglés. No... espeak English."
The boy had to be a recent immigrant from Mexico, or maybe Central America, Eric thought. Now what was he going to say? He found himself wishing he'd been paying more attention in Spanish class back in high school, but with Tami Hayes, now Tami Taylor, sitting right in front of him with her long hair spilling over his notebook, that had been really hard.
"Quieres... jugar?" His accent made Eric cringe internally. "Football americano, muy bueno."
"Ellos son más grandes que yo. ¿Puedo, señor?" Something about the other guys being bigger, right? Had to be that. Time to test out his Spanish a bit more while he thought up a way to answer.
"¿Cómo te llamas?" At least he pronounced that one pretty well. Mrs. Tejada – no, Señora Tejada, as she'd insisted all the students call her, would have been proud.
"Jaime." The boy's voice was just above a whisper.
"Jaime, hijo.." dammit, what was the right word again? Forget it, skip the verb. "aquí, aquí. Quiero hablar... hablarte." (I want to talk to you)
The kid, Jaime, actually grinned and climbed the fence right in front of him. In just a few seconds he was standing right in front of Eric, who was too impressed to tell him that was dangerous and to run around to where the gate was. Besides, no way was his Spanish up to saying all that.
But somebody else's was. At one of those wild college parties during freshman year, Slaton had seen some guy dragging a beautiful Latin American girl who was barely able to stand into a bedroom. He could hear her try to protest and the other guy just pulled her harder. As he told Eric later, Slaton went straight into monster mode. That girl wasn't going to end up like his cousin. One shout of "Hey, man, what the hell do you think you're doin'?" and then the punches flew. The guy ended up with three broken ribs and would have ended up much worse if Eric hadn't recognized Slaton's voice and rushed to pull him off. Slaton got a two-week suspension, a private "Good for you son, the rules don't let me say this but I would've done the same thing" from Coach McFarlane, and the longest and sweetest kiss of his life from Mariana. Now the two of them lived right across the hall from Eric and Tami, who were going to be their best man and maid of honor next month.
"Jaime, mira." Eric really needed to take some remedial Spanish course. That would come in handy for teaching. "Ellos... más grandes, sí. Tú... rápido y... smart, intelligent... buena cabeza." He tapped the side of his head with one finger. "Puedes jugar si quieres." (You can play if you want)
Jaime's small face lit up. "¿Qué hago?" (What do I do?)
"Slate!" Eric yelled in the voice he'd used to call plays in a crowded stadium. "Come over here and help this kid out. He speaks Spanish."
Eric gave his Spanish one last workout as Slaton tried to make his way through the crowd of kids without knocking any of them down. "Hombre grande negro es mi amigo. Habla español bien, tiene mujer mexicana." (The big black man is my friend. He speaks Spanish well, his wife is Mexican)
Within a minute, Slaton had a football in his hand and was explaining a few basics of the game to Jaime in Spanish.
Fifteen months later
Coach Taylor called the last timeout for the first half and gathered the offense around him. If the Bullets managed to score on this play, they'd end the half with a five-point lead and would be getting the ball back to start the third quarter. If they could score on that first possession too, they had a good chance of winning the Regional Championship.
"Bullets, we're going with three wide receivers, one tight end, one running back. Max and Titus, you're on the outside. Max runs a deep cross, Titus slants and goes. Richie, I need you to stay in and block." Seeing his tight end's downcast look, Eric slapped him on the shoulder and added "Hey, blocking is important. Without blockers, the quarterback has no chance to do anything. We need to give Brandon the time to make his throw. You'll get chances for catches in the second half. Jaime, you're in the slot. Go loco on them. Double and triple moves, hitches, just make sure you stay around the middle and keep getting deeper. Sam, pick up the blitz and then go for the post. Don't forget, once the ball goes to a receiver, y'all get down there and block for him, that can make the difference to get us in the end zone. If we play smart football, this game is ours. Get 'em now!"
Brandon took the snap from the center, a Samoan kid whose name was way too long so everyone just called him Hal. Eric watched the action unfolding downfield. The Stallions had both Max and Titus covered. Jaime kept switching routes and sides of the field, which made the defense have to keep changing which defender covered him. Perfect - nobody was covering Sam.
"Twenty!" Eric yelled. That was code for "throw to the running back." Number twenty wasn't on the field at that moment. His team, like all kids, liked the idea of having secrets. Brandon, the quarterback, heard him and set off a perfect pass to Sam's front shoulder. The opposing coach shouted for his players to head straight for the receiver. Sam kept going forward, but then he was about to be tackled ten yards out. Jaime screamed something in Spanish – Eric had no idea what, it sounded kind of like "it's cared of" – and Sam lateraled the ball to his left, where Max caught the ball and after a steamrolling block from Richie took the cornerback out of the play, outran two more Stallions to the goal line. Touchdown!
The Bullets scored three more touchdowns in the second half and Eric won his first championship as a coach. That was his last game coaching the Bullets, though: three months later he found a job teaching social studies – nobody called it history or geography any more – and working as an assistant coach at a junior high school in Odessa, so he and Tami had to move across the state. This would be the first of several times that a new job would force him to leave his players behind and start over with new ones.
January 1, 2006
New Year Day's barbecues were a Taylor family tradition. Until a year and a half ago, Eric and his family had had to give the tradition a miss, because they'd been living in various places in East or South Texas, but now that they were living in Dillon, it wasn't hard to make the trip to Uncle Drew's house near Lubbock. That meant at least a dozen adults, between Taylors, spouses, and the occasional in-law or invited friend, plus more than twenty kids, roaming around Uncle Drew's acreage. The rules were simple: do whatever you want as long as you don't cause any damage and stay out of trouble, come right away when someone tells you there's food served or work that needs to be done, and if you skip any food that's on you, there might not be any later. The weather was actually good enough that Drew's son Max was wheeling a big screen TV into the backyard so anyone interested could watch the day's bowl games outside. Eric was working on linking up the extension cords.
"Hey, congrats on getting the head coaching job for next year, Eric!" Randall boomed and slapped his back. Randall was married to Eric's cousin Lisa. Eric and Tami's daughter Julie had met their twin six-year-olds an hour ago and was currently watching them climb trees near the north side fence. "You're going to take those Dillon Panthers far, I know it!"
Eric linked up the last set of cords and turned to face his cousin-in-law. "Hey, Rand, thanks. How's the business going?" Randall ran a contracting company together with a friend of his.
After the usual updates on wives, children, work, and any other news, the Taylor extended family concentrated on the important business of the day: getting food in the proper condition to eat, and what football games were going to be watched that day. The biggest bowl games would be on in the late afternoon and evening: the Rose Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Fiesta Bowl, never mind whatever corporate sponsorship names got attached to them each year.
"What're we starting with, guys?" Max asked Randall and Eric. After some brief consultation, they turned the channel to CBS to watch the pre-game show for the Silver Bowl, the first bowl game of the day. Wake Forest was playing against Prescott, a school from Colorado that had made it to the first bowl game of its history.
"I tell ya, Al, one of my favorite parts of covering these games is finding out some of these young men's stories," one of the announcers was saying, "and some of them are truly fascinating. We just heard how Wake Forest's Craig Jeffries used to spend every summer since he was twelve repairing boats on the Mississippi to save up for his college tuition. Now let's hear from one of Prescott's players, their free safety Jaime Valdez, known as 'High-power Jaime' for how hard he runs and tackles. Leonard's down at the sideline with him. Over to you, Leonard."
The screen switched to a man in a tan suit and green tie holding out his microphone to a medium-height player in a dark red and silver uniform, wearing the number 23. The young man had straight black hair that fell just below his earlobes and a round face.
"Thanks, Al," Leonard started speaking, "so, folks, I'm here with 'High-power' Jaime Valdez, the senior free safety for the Prescott Rangers. 114 tackles this season, four interceptions, three forced fumbles and two recoveries, one of which was run back for a touchdown. That's quite a year. Jaime, why don't you tell our viewers how you first got into football?"
"Well, when my family first settled in the States in 1990 – we'd been going back and forth several times since then, since we lived near the border and my parents were looking for work – at the time we were living in the Houston area. I hadn't even gotten registered for school yet and didn´t know almost any English, so I was wandering around and found a playfield where a kids' football team was practicing. The coach – Coach Eric Taylor – noticed me standing outside the fence..."
"Holy tomatoes, did that kid just say your name on TV?" Randall turned to Eric with a shocked expression on his face.
"Oh my God!" Eric smacked himself in the forehead. "It's that Jaime! The kid from the Bullets!"
"... the assistant coach, Slaton Donner, helped me learn football English so I could communicate with my teammates, I taught the other guys a bit of Spanish to use like a code in trick plays, and in my second year we won the Regional Championship," Jaime went on, "I played wide receiver back then, but in high school I switched to defense because I guess I liked figuring out plays and busting them up rather than making them..."
"Congratulations, Eric!" Uncle Drew walked up with a can of beer in his hand. "Looks like you made a winner there. Maybe in a few years another one of those kids you've coached is going to be in the NFL giving you credit for it."
Eric accepted the beer with a wordless nod. The television camera had already switched away from Jaime, and was showing Al and his fellow announcer in the broadcast booth talking about the upcoming game again. Before Eric could notice, Tami had crept up behind him and was giving him a hug.
"That's what you do, Coach Taylor," she said to him softly. "It's what you did with him, and with Jeff and Lucas and Aaron, and what you're doing with Jason Street now. You touch these boys' lives. And I am proud to see it."
Eric Taylor had never been good with words. He wanted to tell Tami that he just made these kids work at something, but she gave him the courage and strength to keep at it. He wanted to tell her that knowing he would come home to her a few hours later always made him enjoy his work more. Actually, with how he felt her body pressed up against him, he wouldn't mind taking her to one of the spare rooms and showing her all of what he felt for her, without words.
But Eric Taylor wasn't good with words, so he just turned around and hugged her back.
"You two gonna make out here or watch the game?" Randall teased.
"Why not both?" Eric shot back.