Yet our optimism was also prophylactic, since we knew it wasn’t just the days that were about to get colder and darker—we were staring down our final, most vicious stretch of the season, in which we would be facing three consecutive nationally ranked teams. Our ninth and tenth games were massacres: Boston College and Boise State both deployed defensive strategies with the sole aim of pulverizing our running game, and here I use “pulverize” with the highest definitional fidelity, in that our offense started out a solid, single unit that was pounded into eleven pitiful particles, the defenses stacking the line so that two, three, sometimes four defenders would have already flooded our backfield by the time Reshawn took the handoff, buffeting, broadsiding, and barraging him, leaving his body decorated with shining rug burns and crisscross cuts from fingernails and face mask corners. We were forced to pass, and since our quarterback was so bumbling I’m not even going to ask you to memorize his name, those passes either fell fruitlessly to the ground or found their way into the hands of defenders. Before we knew it, our defense would be jogging back on the field, and though Coach Zeller in his time as defensive coordinator had made this unit considerably stronger than our offense, they were still emasculated—a term that, again, I’m using more literally than you might think, as the offensive lines of both BC and Boise State had sadistic predilections for punching, slapping, and yanking their enemies’ genitalia. In the game film, you’d see the refs’ shoulders hunch empathetically before they reached into their back pockets for flags.
Boston College
48
King College
3
Boise State
61
King College
16
Up to now, we had managed to play well enough to keep the King student body’s sneering impulses in check. But all bets were off after the blowouts. On the Monday following the Boston College game, the student newspaper, the King Herald, featured two large photographs that could only have been featured to embarrass us. One showed our Y receiver, JaMarcus Stephens, upside down in midair, arms extended helplessly beneath him like a bungee jumper whose cord has snapped; the other depicted our punter, Gunter Atkinson, as a kind of gridiron Tantalus straining to reach for a fumbled ball while a Boston College player was holding on to the back of his jersey. We faced Boise State at home on a blasting-cold afternoon, and our student section was empty save for an anarchic undergrad improv troupe called the Court Jesters who’d come armed with signs mocking our team and belittling chants whose cruelty was rivaled only by their cleverness. We did our best to ignore these kids, but by the middle of the fourth quarter Graham Robbins, one of our graduate assistants, finally lost his composure and ran into the bleachers to assault a flat-footed sophomore trouper. It was the best part of the game, watching Robbins pummel that kid, but even this modest solace was spoiled when SportsCenter featured footage of the assault in that evening’s broadcast. It was the first time we had appeared on that program all season, and the last time Robbins coached in Division One.
It seemed the worst was yet to come. Our final game was away at the University of North Carolina, a rival we hadn’t beaten in sixteen years, currently ranked number 8 in the country. I have to admit I wasn’t totally excited to learn that, because UNC was an eighteen-minute drive from Blenheim, bottom feeders got to travel. I wasn’t sure I needed to witness our asses getting handed to us a third time in a row.
Yet there I was on Friday, dressed in my silence suit, taking a seat in one of the shuttle buses that would drive us to the Marriott. The shuttle was quiet as we pulled away from the Hay, but that lasted all of thirty seconds before Fade blurted:
—The fuck?!
We were driving down a little West Campus road that served as the unofficial border between the school’s athletic and academic regions—passing, in fact, the same castle-shaped Gothic dorm that Reshawn and I had walked through during our official visit. I looked right and saw what Fade had seen: a bedspread suspended from the windowsill of one of the dorm’s second-story rooms, these words handwritten in thick permanent marker:
Go King Football! Beat (the Spread Against) UNC
The whole bus turned to look, players leaning over seatmates to see if they could spot the student who’d hung the fucking thing. But the only students in sight were the ones standing in front of the dorm pointing at the sign and laughing.
At dinner that night in the Marriott ballroom, the players at my table talked of nothing else.
—Maybe a UNC student hung it, Cornelius said.
Jimbo blew a raspberry.
—That’s someone in your fucking class who did that. Same somebody who asked you to help move their couch.
—People look gloomy as hell, Fade said, surveying the room. Zeller needs to bring that shit up.
This was the consensus opinion, and in every meeting and film session that night we waited to hear our head coach give marching orders to the elephant in the room. But Zeller didn’t say a word about the bedspread, and so superstitiously routinized were these meetings that for a player
