By the end of the third quarter the Bears were leading 42-0.
Coach Williams had been feeding substitutes into the game since halftime, but the Bears kept marching on. And now, in the opening minutes of the fourth quarter, the Moose and his teammates were standing on the Tigers’ five-yard line, about to pile on another touchdown.
The Moose saw his substitute, Larry Hinden, getting a slap on the behind and then running onto the field. The Moose turned to leave.
Then he heard Larry tell the referee, “Hinden for Holbrook.”
Holbrook? Chad Holbrook, the fullback?
Chad gave the coach a funny look and jogged off the field.
Larry joined the huddle and said, “Coach says the Moose at fullback and give him the ball.”
Dan Blevins said, “Really?”
“Really.”
The Moose was giving his grin—“sweet,” some of the teachers called it; “nice,” others said.
“I want to do an end run,” the Moose said.
Dan looked at the sky a moment, then said, “What does it matter?”
The quarterback took the snap from center, moved back and to his right while turning, and extended the ball to the Moose.
The Moose took the ball and cradled it in his right hand. So far, so good. He hadn’t fumbled. Probably both Coach Williams and Dan were surprised.
He ran a couple of steps and looked out in front and said aloud, “Whoa!”
Where had all those tacklers come from?
The whole world seemed to be peopled with players in red jerseys—the red of the Benton Heights Tigers. They all were looking straight at the Moose and advancing toward him. They looked very determined, and not friendly at all. And there were so many of them. The Moose had faced tough guys in the line, but usually one at a time, or maybe two. But this—five or six. And all of them heading for him.
The Moose screeched to a halt, whirled, and ran the other way.
Dan Blevins blocked somebody in a red jersey breaking through the middle of the line, and the Moose wanted to stop running and thank him. But he kept going.
His reverse had caught the Tigers’ defenders going the wrong way, and the field in front of the Moose looked open. But his blockers were going the wrong way, too. Maybe that was why the field looked so open. What did it matter, though, with the field clear in front of him? This was going to be a Cakewalk; the Moose was going to score a touchdown.
Then, again—“Whoa!”
Players with red jerseys were beginning to fill the empty space—a lot of them. And they were all running toward the Moose. They were kind of low, with their arms spread, as if they wanted to hit him hard and then grab him.
A picture of Jerry Dixon dancing his little jig and wriggling between tacklers flashed through the Moose’s mind. How did Jerry do that? Well, no time to ponder that one right now.
The Moose lowered his shoulder and thundered ahead, into the cloud of red jerseys. Something hit his left thigh. It hurt. Then something pounded his hip, then his shoulder. They both hurt. Somebody was hanging on to him and was a terrible drag. How could he run with somebody hanging on to him? He knew he was going down, but maybe he was across the goal. He hit the ground hard, with somebody coming down on top of him, right on the small of his back.
The Moose couldn’t move. They had him pinned. Wasn’t the referee supposed to get these guys off?
Finally the load was gone and the Moose, still holding the ball, got to his knees and one hand, then stood.
He heard the screaming of the crowd, and he saw the scoreboard blinking.
He had scored.
His teammates were slapping him on the shoulder pads and laughing and shouting.
The Moose grinned, but he had a strange and distant look in his eyes.
He jogged to the sideline, the roars of the crowd still ringing in his ears.
“Okay, son?” Coach Williams asked.
The Moose was puffing. He took a couple of deep breaths. He relived for a moment the first sight of a half dozen players in red jerseys, all with one target—him. He saw again the menacing horde of red jerseys that had risen up just when he’d thought he had clear sailing to the goal. They all zeroed in on him, the Moose, alone.
The Moose glanced at the coach, took another deep breath, and said, “Never again.”
Thomas J. Dygard
Thomas Dygard began writing about sports for the Arkansas Gazette (now the Democrat-Gazette) in his hometown of Little Rock when he was a senior in high school, and then covered sports for the Associated Press in little Rock, Detroit, New Orleans, and Birmingham. He later served as chief of the AP bureaus in Little Rock, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Tokyo. He and his wife have always enjoyed foreign travel and have visited twenty-nine countries in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. They now live in Evansville, Indiana, near their two married children and four grandchildren.
In 1977 Mr. Dygard published his first work of fiction, a novel about a football quarterback with a strong fear of being injured, appropriately titled Running Scared. Writing fiction on weekends, usually in the mornings, Mr. Dygard produced more than a dozen sports novels before he retired from the AP in 1993. The most popular of these books are Halfback Tough and Quarterback Walk-On. His most recent novels are The Re-bounder, a story about an outstanding high-school basketball player who injures another player and the difficulties he faces as a result, and Infield Hit, a story about the problems a high-school baseball player encounters in comparing himself with the father he hardly knows, who was a major-league star.
The event depicted in “Just Once” is based on an incident described to Mr. Dygard by a lineman friend, who told him how scary it was to have everyone on the field trying to knock him down.
It began as something different for Patrice and her father to do. Nobody expected it to change the way she viewed the world.
Brownian Motion
Patrice
The whole adventure began as a diversion, a simple intermission between high school and college. My dad asked me to take a scuba diving class with him. It was the first novel thing that had come along in quite a while. For a couple of years I’d thought about going to medical school, either that or doing physics research, but all those plans had begun to look like an awful lot of effort. Coming very close to the end of high school, I was having senior burnout. I’d already been accepted at the university, with a pretty big scholarship, so my next four years were planned. Scuba looked like a wonderful interruption.
As it turned out, there was far more to it than that.
Jim
February was nothing but rain and snow and slush, cars needing jump starts in the morning, people out of the office with the flu. The exercise bike wasn’t as much fun as it had been when I bought it. I needed something different, and scuba diving caught my attention one day, in a window display I saw from the bus, which I was riding because the car had been buried by the snowplow. The display had colorful fish like in a Jacques Cousteau film, and a scuba diving guy and girl with bubbles coming up from them. The sign said, SCUBA DIVING—THE ANSWER TO THE WINTER BLAHS!!!
I signed up as soon as I could, and the woman in the store asked me if I’d be bringing my own buddy to the classes at the Y. My wife, Susannah, wasn’t especially interested, and Sandy’s only eleven. My older daughter, Patrice, would be the perfect buddy, I said to myself. She’s strong and agile, and she’s a science nut, which I figured would be helpful in scuba. And frankly, she looked like she could use a break from her studies. About the time the fourth storm of the season put a foot of clean snow on top of two feet of dirty, the idea seemed better every day.
Susannah
With the entire night shift at the hospital ready to quit if the policy didn’t change immediately, I was in no position to do anything as frivolous as go underwater and breathe from a tank. It was a perfect time for Patrice to take classes with her dad before going off to college next year.
Sandy
I wish it had bee
n me. I’m old enough in my mind, just not in their rules. They wouldn’t know I was only eleven if my dad didn’t tell them.
Patrice
With three essays due by the end of March and the physics tutorial I ran twice a week and the knowledge that I was setting myself up for another decade of study after high school—I was ready for a change. Nothing at school was very exciting. My friends and I had agreed that the boys in our class were too immature even to bother dating anymore. Worse still, our bunch of girls was beginning to be tired of each other.
Shifting my schedule around gave me eight Wednesday nights free to meet my dad at the Y and learn to dive.
Susannah
Jim and Patrice began to approach Wednesday evenings like a couple of children who’d formed a new club.
Patrice
The first time we were supposed to clear our masks underwater I did it, and the self-confidence felt great. Add to that the familiarity of Boyle’s law, Charles’s law, Dalton’s law, and Henry’s law—which are pretty basic physics stuff—and Wednesday nights were pure fun. Even in the pool at the Y, where the underwater sights are extremely dull.
The self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, or scuba, pioneered by Jacques Cousteau himself, is one of those simple-but-complex things that make the difference between what human beings can do by themselves and what they can do with an imaginative device. The tank and regulator make breathing underwater as comfortable as breathing in air. Fins provide sleek mobility, the snorkel and the buoyancy compensator (BC) are there for safety, and with some knowledge of the hazards and of how to keep from dying of air embolism and other terrible things, off you go.
In fact, the course was mainly a set of lessons in safety. Kind of like driver’s ed. Getting in a car and starting it are pretty simple things; the crucial part is knowing what to do with all that power.
Jim
Well, on Saturday mornings I started hanging around the dive shop where I’d first seen the window display. I’d go in there and plan which regulator I’d buy, and I’d read diving magazines, and I’d compare different kinds of BCs, and I’d talk with the divers. I was learning the lingo: “First rule of diving: Never, never, never hold your breath.” “Plan your dive and dive your plan.” “There are old divers and there are bold divers. But there ain’t no old, bold divers.” “S A.F.E. means Slowly Ascend From Every dive.” They tell you to ascend sixty feet per minute to keep your lungs from exploding. I even filled out a ticket to win a diving trip to the Caribbean and dropped it in the little treasure trunk sitting there on the counter. I began to daydream about going to a tropical island. Me, who’d never been to one.
Patrice
For my dad, converting Fahrenheit to Centigrade and vice versa was a little bit tricky, but what really stumped him was the gas laws. He understood the nitrogen-oxygen-carbon dioxide relationships, but I had to keep reminding him of the decreased volume-increased density connection. I gave him sample exercises to do after class, as we sat at the kitchen table drinking the banana milk shakes I had been making all winter long. He passed every one of the quizzes. We were good diving buddies; the water exercises were designed to equip us to cope with various kinds of emergencies, and we learned buddy breathing and BC use and decompression rates.
Susannah
The phone call came while Jim and Patrice were away for an entire Saturday doing their open-water checkout dive. Neither Sandy nor I had any idea that Jim had even tried to win a trip to the Caribbean, let alone filled out the lucky ticket. We had six hours to plan, to get the suitcases out and put them in the dining room, to go out and buy ourselves snorkels and fins, and to decide just exactly how we’d announce it when they got home.
Patrice
The bay was cold and murky. We wore full wet suits with hoods, we could barely see our diving instructor, and the old cans, rusty anchor chains, and mossy boat hulls were genuinely disappointing. For this I spent eight Wednesday nights of my life?
Jim
We passed the open-water checkout dive, Patrice and me, and we came out with our certification cards. It wasn’t the kind of diving I’d been reading about in the magazines at the shop, but we were in the water and we were breathing, and we checked out. We walked in the door ready to show our brand-new cards and take Susannah and Sandy out for pizza.
Sandy
I got to watch for them out the window and call Mommy when I saw the car. We had our bathing suits on under our clothes and we stripped off our clothes fast and put on our snorkels and fins and stood in the dining room shivering when they walked in the door. Mommy pretended to sound mad. She said, “Jim, something has happened. We’ve had to change our plans. Something has come up.” She was trying to go on like this, all upset, and Daddy and Patrice were holding little cards in the air and looking shocked at how Mommy and I were all undressed for the beach in the dining room, and Mommy’s upset voice collapsed and she started laughing and we both told.
“First time I ever won anything in my life! This is not a dream! We are going to the tropics to dive the reef!” Daddy was so excited he was like a kid and I was like the parent because I knew hours before he did and I wasn’t all bug-eyed in surprise.
Susannah
We made our plans for the girls’ spring break. I took one of the several weeks of vacation time I had coming. Let the nursing staff tend to their own unrest without my coddling them and soothing their feelings for a week. I was off to the Caribbean. Just like that.
Jim’s boyishness has given me a lot of treats over the years, I’ll admit. I was overjoyed to think about a week of snorkeling and reading and resting in the shade of a palm tree.
Patrice
From senior burnout to a week in the tropics was an easy switch to make. I put my schoolbooks and winter clothes out of my mind. Sandy and I bought new bathing suits in the Cruise Department. We each tried on about a dozen suits and came home giddy in the pouring rain, wearing our new sunglasses and smiling at everybody on the slushy street.
My friends were delirious with envy, of course. I promised to send postcards.
Sandy
At the dive shop where I went with my dad they said there would be plenty enough to sec with snorkel and fins, and Daddy bought me a plastic fishwatching book. It has pictures of hundreds of colorful reef fish in it, and it’s waterproof so it can go underwater. I would get to be the one to hold the book when we would go out in the boat to the reef and Daddy and Patrice would go diving down deep. At the store the man showed me in the book twenty different fish I’d be able to see just with a snorkel if I could hold my breath pretty long. I proved to him I could hold it a long time.
Patrice
Looking out the window of the airplane, I understood the word “aquamarine.” The Caribbean is aquamarine. The most placid shade imaginable—and yet so exciting. Real scuba diving in real water in the real world.
Susannah
The hibiscus were wonderful, big and rich in the tropical sun. And the coconuts. And the sea grape trees. And the water! I never was in such water in my life. Clear, warm, gentle, buoyant, with black, spiny urchins and glowing, pink conchs close to shore, and an entire school of squid that lived just under the dock of the hotel.
Jim
I went down there and had to laugh at what we’d had for our checkout dive. Here, the visibility was forty, fifty feet in front of us, with sunlight. And the varieties offish and other wildlife were too many to count, all swimming back and forth right in front of our eyes.
As we went around down there I got to thinking about my life. I spent my childhood walking to the outhouse and back. When the car broke down we walked till we could afford to get it fixed. I saw a lot of the side of the road. It was a world with rules, and I learned how they worked. The big guys ate the little guys, and if you were a little guy you hustled to try to keep ahead of the big guys. I never went outside the county I was born in till I was eighteen, and then I joined up. And I saw that world too, and it has its rules and
I know how they work. The big guys eat the little guys and the little guys hustle. When I got out, I went to work, and it was the same thing.
On the outside, if you’re just looking in, it all looks pretty. Underneath, there’s all that eating and hustling going on.
And that’s the way it is down under the water in the tropics. It’s beautiful, I’ll say that for it. It takes your breath away. It lets you be a little kid, wandering around staring and playing. You can gawk all day long at this peaceful-looking scene. It’s a panorama, that’s what it is. You have to look close to notice the predators and the prey, but they’re right in front of you.
Patrice
It was heaven. From my first sight of a three-inch purple and orange fairy basslet slipping in and out of lacy little coral windows, I was hooked.
A young yellowtail damselfish with jewels for spots on its electric blue sides hovered in front of me; I went close up, staring through my mask, and the fish slid past my face, a silky breeze of fins—a miracle of a meeting in the bright sunlit Caribbean afternoon.
Jellyfish. Some are built like bells and maybe they even ring, in voices only they can hear. When they lose pieces of themselves, they replace them. Their cells can reconstitute a whole new body amazingly fast. Researchers use hydra and hydroid jellyfish to study growth and regeneration.
Ultimate Sports Page 17