Disclaimer: TC Williams High School belongs to the city of Alexandria, VA. The Heisman Trophy belongs to whoever last won it, Michaelangelo and Charles Atlas to themselves, and the Super Bowl to whoever makes money off it. I also don't own Cornell University. Mr. Vernon belongs either to himself or to Disney, depending on whether Coach Boone really did ask him to help.
Author's Notes: This fic is independent of my other story, You Ought To Be With Me. I would have loved to write Mr. Vernon in that story as defensive line coach, but I got the idea for this long after I had begun that other one. Ah, well, such is life! :D ~Ara Kane
MAKING THE TEAM
"Excuse me, Mr. Vernon; a moment of your time, please?"
I used to think that I was one of God's great jokes. The Almighty gave me the heart of a Heisman Trophy winner, great football instincts, and an all-encompassing love for the game. However, He also gave me weak eyesight, poor lungs and the classic physique of a shrimp. I could have posed for Michaelangelo's "98-pound Weakling."
Yes, sir, the good Lord has quite a sense of humor.
But before I learned to laugh about it, this mismatch gave me over half a lifetime's worth of grief. As a small—very small, as well as very clumsy—boy growing up in football-crazy Virginia, I was always the last to be picked anything in gym (assuming I got picked at all) and the first to be picked on in the playground. But I loved football and went out for the team every year.
The coaches laughed in my face, of course, but I huffed and puffed through the drills, and willingly let guys three times my size beat the living daylights out of me. All the while I prayed that the qualities that I had inside—heart, knowledge of the game, endurance—would outshine my external deficiencies and I would, somehow, make the team.
I never, ever made it past the first round of tryouts. "I think you already know whether you made the team, Vernon," one coach had said during my sophomore year.
"Well, sure, Coach Boone; what can I do for you?"
The constant rejections definitely hurt, but I always went home vowing to show them all next year. I watched all the football I could to build my knowledge of the game. I slept, ate, and exercised well, trying to bring about a growth spurt that never came. I tried every physical growth program this side of Charles Atlas, sent away for exercise equipment that promised to bulk me up in six months, and would have even tried some kind of Chinese miracle cure if my mother hadn't found it first and used it on her begonias. (They died.)
Nothing worked, and I showed up at football tryouts every year to go up against guys increasingly bigger than I. I finally realized that I had a snowball's chance in hell of ever making the team.
But I still tried out anyway. I went out for football every year until my senior year in high school. It became enough for me to wear the uniform for a day and pretend I was in the Super Bowl.
"I was wondering if you knew anything about football."
Off the field, I poured all my energies into my schoolwork. If I couldn't excel as an athlete, then I would excel as a student. I was a National Merit Scholar and won a full scholarship to Cornell, where I majored in Mathematics and graduated cum laude. My parents were very proud of me, and I was happy to have brought them that much pleasure, but a part of me knew I should have been a smart jock instead of just plain smart.
"Why, yes, sir, I happen to know a bit about the game."
"I hope you don't mind, then, if I asked a favor of you."
I was pleasantly surprised when Coach Boone asked me to review the Groveton High School game films. This man obviously wanted to prove himself to the whole world. He obviously wanted people to see him as more than a black upstart, because he knew there was more to him than that.
He apparently also saw that there was more to me than what everyone around me saw. To Coach Boone, I was more than the mousy number cruncher with the thick, horn-rimmed eyeglasses. To him, I was someone with a unique talent.
And I did. With my understanding of both statistics and football, I could help him spot patterns and probabilities. He would be able to anticipate his opposing coaches' strategies and head them off at the pass. He would be able to prove to the town that an integrated football team led by a black coach could win.
Someday, I used to tell myself, someday, I would make the team. I just never knew that it would not be as a player.
Could I join the team as a coach? Coach Tyrell, who had been on the faculty at Hammond High School, was obviously very unhappy with integration. I didn't have that problem.
For once, I was certain that I would be making the team when I tried out next year.
"It would be my pleasure to look over those game films for you, Coach Boone."
THE END