In the summer, when he worked for the city's recreation department, supervising the baseball program at the park, Daddy liked to come home for lunch and a nap. He had lemonade and a BLT, then he had me lie close to him on the sofa and he draped an arm around me. "One... two...three..." he'd count in a whisper, and then he was out, sleeping that easily.

I lay there wondering if I'd ever have arms like his. I needed both hands to travel the distance around his wrist, the tips of my thumbs and fingers barely touching. I felt the hardness of his forearm. I saw how his wedding band fit him like a strand of barbed wire on a tree whose bark had grown around it. He smelled of the grass and the sun, of green and gold days that started early and ended late.

"Were you a good player?" I asked him once, as he was coming awake.

"Was I what?"

"A good player?"

"You want to know if I was a good player?"

"Yes, sir."

"What kind of question is that?"

"I don't know. Did they run your name in the paper a lot?"

He looked at me in a way that let me know he wanted my attention. "None of it matters, John Ed. Was I a good teammate? Did I do my best and give everything I had to help the team? These are the questions you need to be asking."

I wondered how to answer them, these questions he found of such importance. Many years would have to pass before I was old enough to join a team. He pulled me close again, as if he'd just remembered something. "John Ed?"

"Yes sir."

"Always be humble."

The rest of the year he worked as a civics teacher and coach at the high school in town. The town was Opelousas, on the road between Alexandria and Lafayette, and it was just small enough, at about twenty thousand, to be excluded from Louisiana state maps when TV weathermen gave their forecasts in the evening. In the morning, my father left home wearing coach's slacks with sharp creases and a polo shirt with a Tiger emblem and the words OHS Football printed in Halloween orange on the left breast, the lettering melted from too much time in the dryer. A whistle hung from a nylon cord around his neck. It was still hanging there when he returned at night and sat down to a cold supper-the same meal Mama had served her children hours earlier. "You don't want me to warm it for you, Johnny?"

"No, baby. That's okay."

Sometimes in the afternoon, Mama drove me out to the school. She parked under the oak tree by the gymnasium, pointed to where she wanted me to go, and I walked out past a gate in a hurricane fence to the field where my father and the other coaches were holding practice. Four years old, I wore the same crew cut that my father wore. I stumbled through tall grass and out past the red clay track that encircled the field. At home, my father didn't raise his voice, but here he seemed to shout with every breath. A team manager took me by the hand and led me to a long pine bench on the sideline. I sat among Igloo coolers, spare shoulder pads and toolboxes crammed with First Aid supplies. I waited until the last drill had ended and the players came one after another to the coolers for water the same temperature as the day, drunk in single gulps from paper cups shaped like cones. The players took turns giving the top of my head a mussing. "You gonna play football when you grow up?"

"I don't know."

"You gonna be a coach like your daddy?"

"I want to."

Already I was certain that no one mattered more than a coach. I would trade any day to come for a chance to be that boy again, understanding for the first time who his father was. Give me August and two-a-days and a group of teenagers who are now old men, their uniforms stained green from the grass and black with Louisiana loam. Give me my father's voice as he shouts to them, pushing them harder than they believe they can go, willing them to be better. Give me my father when practice is over and he walks to where I'm sitting and reaches his arms out to hold me.

I WAS DOOMED from the start. If not an LSU football player, what else might I have become? Daddy was so devoted to the team that in the fall he would weigh the merits of each week based on whether the Tigers won or lost on Saturday night. He could be as thoughtful and philosophical as any other high school coach when his own team lost, but he was so devoted to LSU that he was far less understanding when the Tigers from Baton Rouge did. How many times did he leave the house late in a televised game, unable to watch another play? If it looked like the Tigers were going to lose a close one, he was especially long in returning. "Where have you been?" we'd yell at him, when he finally came back inside.

"Nowhere," he'd say. "What happened?"

In those days, LSU games rarely appeared on television more than a couple of times a year. And so we were dedicated listeners to the radio broadcasts and play-by-play announcer John Ferguson. We listened while my mother made potato salad in the kitchen and Daddy barbecued outside on the patio. He'd sit there in a lawn chair, lost in concentration as his chicken burned, a purple-and-gold cap tipped back on his head. His arms, legs, and neck glistened with mosquito repellant, and he sipped from a can of beer wrapped in a foam hugger advertising a local insurance agency. Not far away from his smoldering pit, on a narrow piece of finely manicured St. Augustine, I acted the game out with neighborhood friends, some of us dressed in Little Tiger uniforms. We played until somebody ran into a ligustrum hedge or got clotheslined by a real clothesline, and my father called for an end to the rough-and-tumble and sat me down next to him.

"Settle down now," he'd say. "LSU's on."

In his mind, the football team represented the entire state of Louisiana, and the way the team performed gave the rest of the nation a snapshot of what kind of people we were. Notre Dame's boys might be bigger and stronger than ours, but we weren't afraid to line up against them and see who wanted it more. USC might have better talent-okay, he'd concede that-but you needed more than talent to beat LSU. The Tigers often were underdogs, just like the state of Louisiana. Our players scrapped and hustled and always showed good sportsmanship, never more so than when they lost. On defense, they fought off larger opponents, swarmed to the ball, and made spirited gang tackles, and on offense, everyone gave a second effort, including the quarterback, who wasn't afraid to lower his shoulder and block a player twice his size if that was what it took to win.

Daddy had no use for showboats and loudmouths. He believed that humility was equivalent to class in a man, and nothing pleased him more than to hear a player deflect the praise he'd earned and credit his teammates instead. Players who danced in the end zone after scoring were buffoons. Those who calmly handed the ball to an official were to be admired.

Opelousas produced few athletes who went on to play in Baton Rouge. Those who did carried a large part of my father's identity with them. I remember when John Weinstein and Skip Cormier played on LSU's defensive line in the early 1970s. Both made big hits in important TV games that we watched as a family. Every time the announcers mentioned either Weinstein's or Cormier's name, Daddy turned in his seat and faced his children. "He's from here," he said.

When Jeff Sandoz, a football and track star at Opelousas High, signed a scholarship with LSU, my father drove me to his house one day after school and parked by the curb in front. We sat there a minute looking at the place, even though we'd seen it a thousand times before. I didn't have to ask him why we had stopped there. When we returned home, he had me go inside and get a football. We spent the rest of the afternoon throwing passes in the yard.

There were great Americans who came from Opelousas, but in my father's mind, none were greater than the town's football players. Alamo hero Jim Bowie, for instance, spent a large part of his childhood in Opelousas. He invented a knife that was good for gutting wild game, but remembering him would've been easier had he played on Saturday in Baton Rouge. Rod Milburn, the track star who won a gold medal in the 110-meter hurdles at the 1972 Munich Olympics, grew up in Opelousas and returned home for a parade in his honor. Daddy enjoyed watching Milburn run, but I'm sure he'd have liked him even more had Milburn used his speed to haul in long passes from quarterbacks in yellow helmets. Paul Prudhomme, the Cajun chef, was another Opelousas boy. In the 1980s, Prudhomme's signature creation, blackened redfish, became so popular that the redfish population in the Gulf of Mexico was threatened with annihilation, prompting the state of Louisiana to impose limits on harvesting it. Prudhomme was a student at Opelousas High when my father was coaching there. One day I asked Daddy what he remembered about the man, and he said, "Well, he wasn't a cook then. And he wasn't a man. Everybody called him Gene."

"That's what you remember? That he wasn't a cook or a man and his name was Gene?"

He shrugged. "What do you want me to tell you?"

"What kind of person was he? What was he like?"

"Like any teenager. I don't know-he was a young kid."

"So he was Gene, a young kid who wasn't a cook or a man yet. That's what you remember?"

"Don't get smart with me, boy."

There was another Prudhomme from Opelousas who went on and made everybody proud. He was Paul's cousin, Remi Prudhomme. At LSU in the early 1960s, Remi earned three letters as an offensive guard. He later played with the Kansas City Chiefs and the Buffalo Bills. In 1970, when the Chiefs faced the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV, my father pointed out Prudhomme with a finger as he lined up to cover on a kick. I kept one of my own fingers on Prudhomme as he ran down the field trying to make a hit on the return man. When I removed my finger, there was a thin trail in the dust moving west to east, perfectly bisecting the TV screen.

The next time the Chiefs kicked off, we watched as the Vikings' returner fumbled the ball and Prudhomme fell on it. I gave a shout and danced around the room, but my father showed no emotion. The recovery had set up good field position for the Chiefs, who later would score. "He's from here," I said.

"Yes, he is," Daddy answered, failing to register that I was being smart with him.

"Went to the high school."

He got it finally and flicked a finger against the top of my skull.

A year or two later I rode with him one Saturday afternoon to pick up something at Jimmy's Cash Store on the Old Sunset Road. You crossed some railroad tracks and the little package store was there on your left, directly across the blacktop from where Mr. Alfred Lagrange had his yam kiln. Parked out on the white shell lot in front of Jimmy's was a shiny new car growing less shiny by the minute. Every time a vehicle passed down the road dust rolled up and tumbled over in a cloud. It was fine for my father's truck to get dirty-it was a 1963 GMC with rust holes in the bed and dents in the hood-but it was hard to watch it happen to something as pretty as that car.

I waited outside. The store had plate glass windows plastered with white butcher's paper advertising sale items in black and red ink: pork chops, boudin, hogshead cheese, a four-roll package of toilet paper, a box of 12-guage shotgun shells. Tired of waiting, I let myself out of the truck and went in. I could hear my father's voice coming from the rear of the store, back near the beer cooler. I found him talking to a huge, muscle-bound man wearing a black shirt and blue slacks. "John Ed, come over here, I want you to meet somebody."

It was Remi Prudhomme. He had dark, curly hair kept in place with Brylcreem or some other such product and his face was burned by the sun and showing black stubble that tracked downward to the bottom of his neck and upward to within an inch of his eyeballs. Daddy told me to step closer and have a look at his Super Bowl ring. Remi Prudhomme held his hand out. "You want to try it on? Here. See how it fits."

It was a gaudy thing that sparkled and flashed when you moved it against the ceiling lights. He pulled it off and handed it to me. I could've slipped two fingers into the ring. "You gonna play football when you get older?"

"Yes, sir."

"Who you gonna play for?"

"LSU Tigers."

And then he did what they all seemed to do. He gave the top of my head a shake.

I got another look at Prudhomme as he was leaving the store. He was carrying a flat of beer with one hand up by his shoulder, the way a waiter carries a tray. He slid the case into the front seat of the sedan then got behind the wheel and started the engine. I watched as he lit a cigarette and took a long drag that boiled in his lungs awhile before issuing from his nostrils in fast-moving parallel streams.
"I thought you said football players weren't supposed to smoke?" I said to my father. We were heading home now.

"They're not. Cigarette smoke cuts your wind. Come the fourth quarter, your lungs feel like they're about to explode."

"How about beer? What does that do?"

"Nothing good, either." He seemed to anticipate my next question. "Remi's not thinking straight today, John Ed. He's got a lot of God-given ability, but he must've left his thinking cap back in Kansas City."
We went down the road a ways, headed for Delmas Street. "I don't really like the Chiefs," I said.

"You don't like Lenny Dawson?"

"He's all right, but I don't want to play for Kansas City."

"I don't blame you." He shook his head. "What did you think of Remi's Super Bowl ring?"

"I don't like jewelry, either," I answered.

"Neither do I," said my father, "especially on a man."

THE EARLIEST INDICATION that I might have a future as a college football player came in the spring of my sophomore year at Opelousas High. The fantasy had long been there, of course, but so few boys from my school received scholarship offers that I was certain I'd never get one. This belief was based on many factors, not the least of which was a strong personal conviction that I wasn't any good.
At six-foot-two and a hundred and eighty-seven pounds, I was hardly the bulky Neanderthal recruiters envision for the center position, and I didn't run particularly well, either. The year before, in a postseason bowl game with a small school from the parish, I replaced the starting center at the beginning of the second half and promptly gave up two sacks. That I gave up no more the rest of the afternoon had nothing to do with my ability to rebound from adversity. Desperate to neutralize a nose guard who threatened to single-handedly wreck our chances to win, head coach Mickey Guidry schemed to have both guards help me out in passing situations. When our quarterback dropped back to throw, three of us were assigned to block one man, and while this left the lanes on either side of me open for blitzing linebackers to exploit, the defense was committed to dropping back to protect against the pass. I got a lucky break that day. Had the other team seized the opportunity and rushed its linebackers, I would've given up more sacks in one half than the average lineman does in his entire high school career.

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 drug store 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 forearm; 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..."

There was a smile on his face. He reached over and felt the ice pack to make sure it was still cold.

"You hate it? You hate football?"

"Yes, I hate football."

He was quiet for a time, and I looked at him in the light of the dashboard. "You want to quit?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

He nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. "Well, if that's what you want you can call Coach Guidry and Coach Firman in the morning and let them know. When we get home, you can tell your mother. You can tell your brothers and sisters too."

"I didn't say I was going to quit. I said I wanted to quit."

"Then I'm mistaken?"

"Yes, sir."

"You won't need to call your coaches?"

"No."

"No what?"

"No, sir."

He parked in front of the house and killed the engine. I could see Mama at the kitchen window and behind her Donna on the phone. A year ahead of me at school, Donna was a cheerleader and one of the most popular girls in her class. No one was prouder than she of my place on the team. Now Bobby entered the picture, standing on his tiptoes to look out the window and see who'd pulled up out front. He vanished and a few seconds later I spotted him at the door, waiting to find out how practice went, to check my arms and legs for new cuts and bruises, evidence of collisions with teammates.
At that moment I understood something that I was sure my father had realized long ago. There comes a time when quitting stops being an option, when quitting means quitting on those who are counting on you and quitting on your destiny, and although I was still groggy from Big Hamm's hit, I understood this with absolute clarity. It was too late now to quit the team. It would always be too late.
My father never wore a hat in the house. He took his cap off. "I don't want to make you think you have to play," he said. "Everybody gets knocked down. Not everybody gets up, though. Today you got up."
"You don't need to tell me that. It would be better if you didn't say anything." I pushed the door open and stepped outside. "What'd Mama cook for supper?"

"Mixed meat and rice and gravy."

"I hate mixed meat."

"When you're done eating, you're going to thank her and tell her how good it was. You hear me, boy?"

"Yes, sir."

He took his time walking around to my side of the truck, and together we started under the pine trees for the house. I wasn't feeling any better, so he held me by the elbow and made sure I didn't drift.