Second Impact

by David Klass

  Another shadow blocked out the sunlight, and then I saw the concerned face of Dr. Anderson, who comes to all our games. He had joined Coach Shea and was kneeling over me and asking me questions: “Jerry, can you move your hands? Can you blink your eyes? Can you move your feet?”

  And suddenly, of course I could! I blinked my eyes on command and moved my feet and my arms, and I even let Coach Shea take the football out of my hands.

  Dr. Anderson started asking questions: “What day is it? Come on, Jerry, answer, what day of the week is it?”

  I looked back up at him. “Down?” I whispered.

  “What?”

  I took a breath and spoke louder. “First down?”

  “I’m asking the questions,” Dr. Anderson said with a little smile. “What day of the week is it today?”

  “Just tell me if I made the freaking first down.”

  He gave up on the day of the week. “Who’s the president? Come on.”

  “Lincoln,” I said.

  He stared at me. “Don’t mess with me, Jerry.”

  “I got stopped short? We lost.”

  “No, you made it with plenty to spare and you also got out of bounds,” he told me. “Now, don’t try to get up. We’re going to take you to the hospital for some tests.”

  They lifted me onto a stretcher and carried me away. I gave the crowd a thumbs-up, and they stood and cheered. I was feeling better, and I wanted to stay and watch the end of the game, but they loaded me into an ambulance with my dad sitting next to me and sped off to Pinewood Hospital.

  During the ride, the EMTs were shining lights into my eyes and firing off questions, but I kept asking: “Did we win the game?” Dad finally got on his cell phone and called another team dad. He bent over me and whispered: “Ryan Hurley threw a touchdown to Danny and they ran it in for two points, so you guys are still undefeated. Now, why don’t you cooperate a little bit.”

  The medics looked surprised at my reaction. I guess they’re not used to seeing someone let out a cheer in an ambulance. “Ryan Hurley, huh? How about that!”

  We reached the hospital, and the docs ran every possible test on me, including a CT scan, but all they could come up with was that I had a possible minor concussion. Except for a headache, I felt fine. I’ve been donged before. Never that hard, but it’s part of the game.

  Now they tell me they want me to sit this week out, just to be on the safe side. No practices. No playing time this Friday. They even want me to stay home from school for a few days. I don’t mind missing school, but I’m sure I could play on Friday.

  On the other hand, since it’s the Mumsford game, why not let Ryan have the start? He earned it. No disrespect to Mumsford, but we could beat them with a chicken as our quarterback.

  So you might be wondering whether it was worth my taking the risk and getting my bell donged. They tell me that I had the first down by two steps, and I should have just slid. Coach Shea was apparently standing on the sideline yelling, “Down, go down!” But I didn’t hear him over the roar of the crowd, and I had to make absolute sure of it.

  I did what I thought I had to do to win the game, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Football is not for the timid. It can be a brutal contact sport, and I took a big hit for the team. I’d do it again any old time, but hopefully not from Gonzales, the human missile.

  View 4 reader comments:

  Posted by user GOINGSTRONG at 7:23 p.m.

  Still no shower, folks! Kisses, Granger.

  Posted by user Photog_Sophie at 7:53 p.m.

  Pictures from the game are posted here!

  Posted by user MidlandSUX at 8:02 p.m.

  VICTORY IS OURS!

  Posted by user Friedman_HealthTeacher at 8:15 p.m.

  Just a quick note, kids, to remind you that daily showers, particularly following vigorous athletic activity, are an important part of a personal hygiene & health regimen.

  Posted by user @Friedman_HealthTeacher at 8:47 p.m.

  Just don’t drop the soap …

  Comment deleted by user Ms_Edison at 9:03 p.m.

  MAMMALS AND DINOSAURS

  Posted by user CARLA on November 11 at 8:00 p.m.

  Good morning, Kendall High!

  How about that Jerry Downing, guys? How about that Ryan Hurley? How about that undefeated football team? But honestly, Jerry, now that I know what I know—now that I read what you know—I have a couple of things I need to tell you. First of all, kid, think about an out-of-state school. I’m not saying you’re going to play Big Ten ball, but for right now, football is your ticket out to see the world. Go someplace a little bigger, a little stranger. Sometimes a person needs to get the heck out of the place he thinks he belongs.

  The more I read your stuff, the more I think that you should find someplace for your next act which will be harder in every way—harder academically, harder socially, harder athletically. You ought to ride that passing arm of yours to someplace where it will get goosed a little bit.

  Sorry, that’s patronizing. I sound pretty obnoxious, and I’m probably just jealous—in my own petty girls’ soccer way, I’m probably more than a little jealous. Jealous of the crowds you draw, you warriors in your armor, jealous that you got to be a hero, but most of all, jealous that you can be out there playing and running on a perfect fall day, and that you can fall down but still get up again.

  And while I’m examining my own motives, let me add that I might even be jealous of your firepower as a blogger—jealous and proud, all at the same time. Let it be known: since Jerry Downing started blogging the football season on the Kourier Web site, traffic has tripled. We’re getting hits like never before, and a lot of people are sticking around to read the other stuff as well. Comments are up, and I’m getting lots of credit for recruiting Jerry. And yes, it makes me a little bit jealous, but I tell myself that in journalism, like in sports, some serious competition can only improve your game. So get set, guys, this is going to be a long and (attention, Mr. Cooper!) superbly well-written post.

  So let’s start over. Jerry Downing’s game this week was a lot more than getting his head banged. Those four touchdown passes he threw were pretty slick, and even when we were losing, you couldn’t help being proud that we had a team capable of that kind of grace and style—the running game that Midland was playing was fierce and tough, but it was like watching our side take to the air. Like we were the soaring birds, and they were the dinosaurs clomping down below. And of course, you could hope that in the end, evolution would hold and the birds would triumph, but you knew that might not happen this time around.

  And that last drive—till Jerry got hurt—that was the kind of drive that makes you think the team can do no wrong. “We mixed up short passes and runs,” he says, describing it like it was kind of random, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was choreographed, everything clicking, every player following the script. Until Danny fell and Jerry had to move the ball himself.

  It’s funny, though. I’ve been to plenty of Kendall football games. I’ve even covered them for the paper sometimes. But knowing Jerry a little better changed my feelings about watching our players take those hits. (Or maybe it’s that now I know, in the most personal way, that high school bodies really can get broken in serious ways. Maybe it’s sitting there and every now and then testing out my knee to see, does this hurt, does that hurt. Maybe that’s part of it, too.)

  Those hits are hard. Everyone is screaming—I’m screaming, too, of course—and the noise is building as the play begins and the ball gets hiked and the day is chilly but the bleachers feel warm because everyone wants the same thing, everyone is screaming for the same thing. And then, over that crowd noise, or maybe under that crowd noise, comes the different dangerous noise of big body hitting big body, of boys hitting the earth—and when you know one of those boys, one of the ones getting hit, something in you just can’t believe that anyone anywhere is built to take this, that they’ll all stand up and walk again. (Or, again, maybe I’ve just been spooked be
cause I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes people actually don’t.)

  Watching Jerry go down was scary. Just plain scary. That guy Gonzales is a giant; you can practically feel the earth shake when he moves. He makes ordinary pumped-up jocks—like Jerry Downing, for example—look like little scurrying rabbits. Or if we’re going back to prehistoric times again, to my other metaphor, maybe Jerry could be the early mammal, trying to survive by his wits, and then, Stomp! Don’t count the dinosaurs out yet, they’re still dangerous.

  Anyway, I was close enough to see that the coach was signaling Jerry to go down, close enough that I thought, even at the time, that Jerry was making some kind of crazy decision to run it out. So I’m taking the liberty of telling him that taking one for the team is all very well, but if he makes choices that get him badly hurt, everyone loses, especially the team. Agreed, football is not for the timid. But while I would never say football is not for the dumb, on the whole, quarterbacking is not for the extremely foolish. Your team needs you and your school needs your team and even those of us who don’t think we’re going to war against Midland or Mumsford think that your town needs your team. And if redemption is really what you have in mind, you’ll want to stay in one piece and win some games. So next time, Jerry, no making eye contact with college scouts who are maybe a little over the line already in terms of their level of contact, if you know what I mean. Pay attention to your coach instead. For all of us.

  Okay, you all know the score. I mean, literally, you know that thanks to Jerry’s first down and then Ryan’s touchdown pass and conversion we beat Midland 36–35, leaving us still undefeated, ready for the Friday game against Mumsford, who has only won two so far this season. Catch tomorrow’s issue of the Kourier for an interview with Ryan Hurley about strategy.

  I’m thinking I might follow up on Jerry’s “Ding Dong” theme with an interview with someone who does sports medicine, partly because of what happened at the Midland game. I went with my dad—he isn’t actually from here, as you may know, and for the first couple of years we lived here, he was actually kind of snooty about the high school football scene. I mean, kind of snooty about that whole tradition that Jerry talks about, the century of football, the glass case full of trophies. My dad loves football, but what he thought he meant was that he was pretty happy to have his turn at the corporate box at MetLife Stadium. You know, big-ticket professional stuff. In college, he never missed a game, but of course, that was the Ivy League, boola boola.

  It took a couple of years living in Kendall before he made it to a Kendall home game, and I think he was pretty knocked out by the intensity of it all—the intensity of the playing, the intensity of the cheering. And then for a while (sorry, Dad, but this is just the kind of lame thing you do) he pretended to think it was some kind of good public relations for him to go to high school football games—like he was mixing with the people and they would be thrilled. Except, of course, nobody was thrilled, nobody ever even noticed. And after a couple of years, Dad was just plain hooked. He was entering every game on his expensive little electronic calendar and offering to drive me to away games. He was a fan—that old Kendall magic had him in its spell.

  So sometimes I go with him to football games. Other times, of course, I go with friends from the soccer team, or with kids from the paper. Sometimes my mom goes along, but she works a lot of evenings and weekends these days.

  I don’t think my dad would mind me telling you this (and, anyway, we have a standing joke in our house that nothing is ever off the record when your daughter is an aspiring journalist), but after we moved here, he went through a phase of wanting me to go to private school somewhere. It’s kind of typical of my father that we would live in a town at least partly because it was supposed to have a good public high school and then he would start to worry that maybe it wasn’t really good enough for his own daughter. My dad is the guy who asks the hotel clerk whether there’s a category of deluxe rooms. He believes the more expensive wine always tastes better than the cheaper wine (Ms. Edison, I don’t know if I’m allowed to admit this in public, but when my parents open a bottle of wine at dinner, my dad always gives me a taste and asks me to describe it—and it is therefore my somewhat educated opinion that most wine tastes pretty much like most other wine, and someday I am going to challenge my dad to a blind taste test, and there will be a ten-dollar wine, a twenty-five-dollar wine, a fifty-dollar wine, and a hundred-dollar wine. I guess it will have to wait till I have $185 or so to waste, and maybe till I’m old enough to do my own buying. And if this is going to get my father arrested, you can just cut it out). [Edit by user Ms_Edison: I don’t think your father is actually breaking the law, as long as he only offers the wine to you, at home, under strict parental supervision, so I think you’re safe.]

  So my dad went through this phase of thinking I should go to Something Academy or Somewhere Country Day, and I said no. We moved around an awful lot during my first years of elementary school, and I learned to make friends pretty fast, and I had already made friends at Kendall back in middle school. My whole fantasy at that point, you might say, was about living in a place and belonging there and going to school with my neighbors. Most important, I had met Sophie West, and we were clearly going to be best friends forever, and no way was I changing schools one more time, let alone getting on a school bus every morning in a stupid little plaid skirt (Something Academy) or even worse, a blazer (Country Day, you know who you are). So here I am, and was I right about Sophie or what? I mean, here we are in our senior year, still so tight that, as you probably know, she’s the photo and technical editor of the Kourier. She took that photo of Ryan Hurley lofting the winning pass that you’re looking at right now on your screen. Anyway, what I am probably getting at here is that I chose to be at this school because I wanted to be at this school. And maybe my dad did go through some phase of thinking I was the princess deliberately choosing to be educated democratically with the common people, but he got over it. By this time, by this year, by last weekend when we went to the football game together, I think we were just father and daughter being true to our school. My mom was working, and I thought about her as we climbed to that place in the bleachers not so far behind our bench. I wondered, Does she give this a thought, does she think about the beautiful fall day and the bite in the air that tells you to enjoy the football season, because after football comes winter? Or is she thinking about law and legal papers and things that have to be filed?

  Right after my dad and I sat down, somebody waved to me and started heading in my direction, walking along the bleachers. And for a minute I wasn’t sure who it was—a short, dark-haired woman, younger than my dad, with her curly hair gathered back into a big bushy ponytail, wearing jeans and a bulky white cabled sweater and expensive running shoes.

  My dad recognized her before I did—of course, he’s seen her a lot more than I have. “Dr. Abbot!” he said. “I didn’t know you lived in Kendall!”

  “Now I do,” she said, and stuck out her right hand, almost aggressively. My dad shook her hand. “I just bought a place,” she said. “Over on the west side of town, right near the park. Moved in last week.”

  Now that I knew who she was, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized her. I mean, I’ve only seen her a couple of times, but they were what you might call “key encounters,” deeply fraught for me with pain and tension. The kinds of encounters that you would think you would remember. It’s as if I had walled them off in my mind, pretending they happened in another world or something.

  Anyway, that’s next week’s piece—the final surgery is happening on Monday and, as promised, I will blog it, so whether you like it or not, you’re going to get all the gory details. For now, let me just say that I first met Dr. Abbot in the emergency room right after the ER doctor had looked me over and done an X-ray and probably wasn’t so very glad to realize that my dad had already been on his cell phone and demanded to have me seen by an orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Abbot was pretty cool about it. She
was wearing blue scrubs and a long white coat, and you couldn’t really see all her curly hair; it was pinned up behind her head. She spent about ten minutes or so with us, and there was something about the way she talked to my dad that really impressed me—and really impressed him, too. It was like she was saying, “You are the head of the hospital, and I’m sorry your daughter is hurt, but I have a patient waiting to go to the operating room, so right now my time is more valuable than yours, and don’t pull anything.” And he didn’t. He said “Yes, Doctor,” and “No, Doctor,” and “Thank you, Doctor,” and she did her stuff with me and went off to operate.

  So I saw Dr. Abbot that first day in the emergency room, when I was so dizzy and scared and confused, and then again in her office a few days later, and then two weeks after that, and now we’re scheduled to go back later this week for the pre-op visit. But instead, we ran into her at the football game, and she sat with us and cheered like a maniac.

  I said something to her about how hard the hits were looking to me, and she explained some technical stuff about protective equipment and showed me how the tackles were actually angling themselves in specific ways—I mean, football tackles always look a little basic and brutal, but she showed me how the tackles were trying to keep their heads up. You tackle what you can see, she said, you never tuck your head down, and she explained some things about the shape of the skull and the way it fits on the spine. There’s more science and skill to this than most of us realize, and she got kind of excited, yelling out when someone did a perfectly positioned tackle, like she’d just watched an Olympic dive. Once she even yelled out for a Midland tackle, then apologized to me. “I’m kind of a sports physiology geek,” she said. “I guess you can tell.”

  At the end of the first quarter, Dr. Abbot got up to go look for some of the other hospital people she thought might be at the game.