It seemed like I had just fallen asleep when I was startled awake, this time by the sound of the room’s phone ringing. Now the air was a watery blue and the moon was in the window, fading in the dawn sky. Not twenty seconds after the wake-up call, there were loud knocks on our door—graduate assistants trawling the hallways, making sure we didn’t fall back asleep. Chase and I got up. He was wearing only maroon mesh shorts with a faded high school mascot on the right leg. I found something tender about the thick clusters of freckles on his chest and shoulders.
—The fuck you looking at? he said.
—Were you on the phone last night?
—No.
We didn’t talk again as we took the elevator downstairs and walked to our respective cars, teammates who needed rides trailing each of us like zombies. Once my car was full I pulled out of the parking lot and joined a two-lane road that was slowly coming to life: day laborers gathering in strip mall parking lots, greengrocer deliverymen unloading wooden crates of vegetables from the backs of their trucks. At a stoplight, a father and his daughter passed in front of me at the crosswalk. The father was a morbidly obese man in a sagging tank top and baggy swim trunks, and the daughter was about ten years old, wearing a polka-dotted bikini and matching flip-flops. They were holding hands, and the girl had to skip-walk to keep pace with her big dad.
At breakfast I sat with Jimbo and some of the other vets I’d met during the afternoon break, the only players who’d been willing to talk to me without mocking me thus far. Training Table had been a zoo during yesterday’s lunch and dinner, but it was quiet now, the spirits of the players still snuggled comfily in their Marriott beds while their bodies grudgingly scarfed down rubbery eggs and gooey cheese grits.
—Least we got one day down, said a wide receiver named Pedro.
Jimbo shook his head.
—You have played here too damn long to be saying stupid shit like that. You know you can’t just multiply yesterday by twenty and be done with it. You gotta weight that shit. Gotta account for how sorer you’re gonna be every morning. The sleep you’ll lose every night. The names the coaches are gonna call you. Today’s gonna feel twice as long as yesterday. Tomorrow’ll feel three times as long as today. Extrapolate, motherfucker.
Everyone fell silent as they crunched the numbers. Devonté walked into Training Table, wearing a sunken expression that was different from the tired faces of the rest of the team.
—McCoy is looming over D’s ass, Jimbo whispered.
—He ran with the ones yesterday, I said.
Jimbo shrugged.
—That was a courtesy, coaches thanking him for his service. Dead man walking right there.
He was right. At practice that morning, Reshawn did continue running with the second-string offense while Devonté ran with the ones, but there was no mistaking that everything was being catered to Reshawn’s edification. If Devonté carried out an assignment correctly, Reshawn would be asked by several different coaches whether he understood what had been done right; when Devonté made a mistake, Reshawn was always told why. Devonté was clearly devastated by his impending demotion, and yet he didn’t slack off during his reps, didn’t mouth off to coaches, didn’t refuse to give Reshawn advice that guaranteed his own redundancy. Instead he helped Reshawn every chance he got, talking him through assignments during water breaks and helping him with his alignments after practice. I already liked Devonté for how kindly he’d treated me during my official visit, and now I admired him for his selfless desire to help our team.
But Devonté also couldn’t have failed to see just how continental the differences were between his talents and Reshawn’s. Devonté was a small, wily tailback, excellent speed, good instincts, decent strength, the kind of player whose greatest asset is understanding his shortcomings better than his opponents and finding a workaround to those flaws. But Reshawn had no need for back doors—he came dominating through the front one positively spoiled with options: he could use his size or his speed, strength or quickness; he could use the intelligence that was allowing him to pick up the offense at an alarming pace or rely on his preternatural instincts.
When Reshawn ran, his feet barely skirted the grass. When he spun, his planter foot didn’t plant so much as tap the ground; and yet that tap was decisive, perfectly timed and calibrated to redirect a body that, notwithstanding its 224 pounds, moved as lithely as a bantamweight’s. His mistakes could be miraculous. In one play during Team period he took a handoff for a dive and tripped over a defensive tackle’s foot at the line of scrimmage, sending him tumbling to the ground. For even an elite athlete like me that tumble would have been it, the whistle blowing and me looking up at the morning sky. But Reshawn somehow transformed his trip into a somersault in the midst of twenty-one hustling bodies, and half a moment later he was back on his feet and sprinting to the end zone, barely having lost a step.
Reshawn’s talent had an affirming, energizing quality. It inspired our teammates to elevate their
