The waiter returned with our drinks.
—King Football, Mr. McGerrin said, raising his drink and taking a long, thirsty pull after we clinked our glasses. Who knew I’d be so happy with three damn wins? We lost two games—two— the entire time I played. Four All-Americans my senior year. But then the slide started. Gradual, like frogs in water. In the eighties we’d make bowl games, but the bowls kept getting worse. The nineties were Dark Ages—winless seasons, losses against 1AA teams. FSU beat us by eighty points in ‘ninety-eight. A lot of alums threw up their hands and said we should just go full U Chicago and cancel the program. But that was fatalism, Miles. I knew there was a cause.
Mr. McGerrin had clearly recited this history a hundred times, and it was his great talent as a speaker that you didn’t hold it against him that what he was saying was canned. He was also proving to be a prodigious drinker, and without being asked the waiter replaced his empty glass with a fresh scotch.
—Augustus King founded this place to be the South’s premier school, he continued. When people hear that, they focus on the word “premier.” But you know what’s the really important word? “South.” That’s what makes King special. That’s what makes it different from the other elite colleges. We have a culture we can draw from, like a natural resource. I’m from Jacksonville. Born and bred. The South is in me, and that was true for just about everyone else in the program when I played here—most of the normal students, too. But a couple years after I left, something called the Porter Commission was set up to evaluate how King could stay competitive into the twenty-first century. They came out with a report saying the school was in danger of becoming “regional.” That was code for the school being “too southern.” Does anyone at Yale say it’s “too northern”? Hell no. But people from the South, we’re taught to carry this shame with us, and the commission exploited that. The college started aggressively recruiting students and professors from around the country, and every year what made this school special, what made King King, got diluted a little more. The culture here started to be no different from what you’d find in Massachusetts, for God’s sake. I’d come back to campus and hardly recognize the place. Antiapartheid idiots chaining themselves to chapel doors. Boys holding hands like we’re at some San Francisco faggot parade. Women’s Studies. It wasn’t one bit of a coincidence King Football started slipping around the same time. We got infected by the university and hired coaches outside the South, men who had no way of valuing what made King Football stand apart. We started saying our graduation rate was as important as the number of bowl games we’d won, if you can believe that.
—Count it: the last thirty years, we’ve had twelve head coaches, and ten of them haven’t been from the South. When we fired the last doofus, I had the chance to give input into the search for the next coach, and I came right out and asked each one of the candidates: “Where are your people from?” I knew Zeller was our man when I heard him go down the line: South, South, South. He’s got a framed letter Stonewall Jackson wrote to his great-great-grand-daddy. He’s the foundation, right there. And now that we’ve got that—that base? I’m happy to use materials from anywhere to build the rest of the program. I mean players from Colorado, like you, Miles. Players from Oregon, like Reshawn.
Our food arrived. The scotch had sharpened my appetite, and the buttery scents flooding my nostrils made me light-headed. Mr. McGerrin sawed off a slice of steak and dipped it into his bowl of creamed spinach, leaving a little blood on the greens.
—How’s Reshawn? he asked me, chewing.
—Fine, sir.
—Just fine?
—He’s got good grades, too.
—But are you saying he’s having trouble adjusting?
Mr. McGerrin hadn’t taken his second bite; he’d rested the tips of his knife and fork on the edge of his plate, watching me. I realized that I hadn’t been invited to dinner because Chase had spoken so glowingly of me. Mr. McGerrin knew I was Reshawn’s roommate and wanted to use me as a way of checking on his investment.
—Well, sir, I began, not sure how honest to be. He’s got a lot of responsibilities.
—He’s got a lot of fucking attitude is what, Chase said. I was walking to class with a group of players on Thursday and we passed him on the sidewalk. He didn’t even look at us, Dad.
—You think he’s unhappy? Mr. McGerrin asked me.
—I don’t know, sir. We don’t talk much.
—Unhappy? Chase said. Come on. What could he be unhappy about? Coach Zeller would give his right nut if Reshawn asked for it. I want to tell him, “You chose to be here, asshole.”
Mr. McGerrin still hadn’t taken another bite.
—Do me a favor, Miles, and get my cell from Chasey. You think there’s anything, anything out of the ordinary wrong with Reshawn, I’d appreciate you letting me know. We want to make sure he’s happy at King.
—Yes sir.
We finished the main course, and when Mr. McGerrin learned I had never eaten crème brûlée, he insisted on ordering one for each of us. I’d always wanted to try the dessert, but by now I was ready to leave. I was coming to dislike Mr. Lucas McGerrin, whose faux-innocent questions about Reshawn nettled me, and whose theory of King’s sullied southerness became more incoherent the more I thought about it. The man said he’d made his fortune in “plastics”—what the hell did that even mean?
If anything good came from dinner, it was the confirmation that Chase didn’t know the role his father had played in bringing Reshawn here. Seeing Chase duped by his own father made me feel all the more tender toward him.
Spirits were high as we entered
