. . .
The following Monday I returned home from school to find magic waiting in our mailbox: an envelope with the University of Colorado’s address on its upper left corner and the school’s leaping buffalo mascot beneath.
Dear Miles,
I was impressed by how you bore down and played your butt off in the fourth quarter against Highlands Ranch. That’s the kind of heart we look for at the University of Colorado.
Sincerely,
Hank Woodruff
It was the kindest, most considerate, most eloquent, most genuine letter I had ever received. I rushed into the house and reread the thing at least a hundred times that afternoon, relishing the phrasing, admiring Coach Woodruff’s blocky handwriting, and when my parents returned from work that night, I beamed as I handed over the letter. We celebrated by ordering a pizza—an extravagance for us back then—and as we ate and laughed, I had no doubt this was just the beginning of a flood of interest I’d be receiving from D1 programs.
That spring, I was nodding off in the back of my history class when I was slapped awake by a loudspeaker announcement summoning me to my head coach’s office. I leapt out of my seat, knowing there was only one reason why this would be happening, and when I reached the coach’s office at the back of the gymnasium, I found an overfed, hastily shaved white man in khaki pants and a polo shirt with the University of Utah’s logo stitched to the right breast. The Utah coach extended his hand to greet me, and I knew to keep my whole body rigid for what came next: not merely a handshake, not only a greeting, but a sanctioned form of groping in which the coach would simultaneously squeeze my hand like a fruit he wanted to juice and use his other hand to pat me first on my right trap muscle, then on my shoulder, then encircle my arm with his fingers so he could touch both biceps and triceps. He was testing my musculature, seeing whether this boy was made of the man-stuff that’s a must for this game. He nodded, but then asked the dreaded question.
—What’s your weight?
I was beginning to appreciate the world-historic injustice of skipping the second grade. It had made me a year younger than the players I was competing against for a scholarship, made me a good ten pounds too light for an outside linebacker—and this regardless of the fact that under Coach Johannsen’s supervision I was eating a daily fourth meal we called “superdinner” and drinking wretched sludgy protein shakes whenever my stomach had the slightest vacancy. In theory I could have lied to the Utah coach about my weight, but to have lied to a coach was unthinkable to me in those days. So I told him the truth and watched the light die in his eyes.
—Well, he said, trailing off. You still got some time to grow.
I did have time, and did grow over the next year—not to mention having another excellent season—and yet remained undersized and watched as the quality of the programs sending letters to my house and emissaries to my high school grew more obscure. By my junior year, panic began setting in. Now college coaches were allowed to call me on the telephone, one coach per program, but as fall turned to winter, and then winter to spring, I only received calls from programs from the lower divisions, 1AA and 2, places I wasn’t interested in. That summer my parents pooled funds with Coach Johannsen to make a hundred copies of a highlight montage of my greatest plays, and when the tapes were ready, the four of us sat around our dining room’s drop-leaf table and stuffed them into padded manila envelopes addressed to every D1 program in the country, as well as every football-recruiting rag that could be found in the Sports rack at Barnes and Noble. Yet all this did was get my okayness entered into the public record: I was described as a “small but promising” linebacker in those magazines, and I heard nothing from the schools.
Senior season was the best of my career. I was selected first team All-County and second team All-State. Letters arrived by the dozen, and I received calls from coaches almost every week, since they were unrestricted for seniors. But the only scholarship offers were from 1AA and 2 schools, and to the consternation of my parents I declared I would never consider anything other than a D1 ride and would attend college only when I was in possession of one. I knew my parents needed the financial help more than ever, but I also knew, knew, I was D1 caliber and was convinced that to choose a school in a lesser echelon would have been to deny my destiny.
At last, mercy. One of those highlight tapes we mailed landed on the right desk, and the night before the final game of high school I received a phone call that, while not ending with a scholarship offer, did end with an invitation to make an official campus visit that coming January. The call was from the King College Monarchs, about which I knew precisely three things: 1) King was in Blenheim, North Carolina; 2) it was one of the best academic schools in the country; and 3) it was the very worst football program in all of Division One.
King’s first emissary was a chocolate chip cookie cake propped up on a tripod. The cake was shaped like a castle turret, and beneath the parapet were letters in alternating purple and gold frosting that spelled out
WELCOME TO KING COLLEGE
I broke a chunk off
