After gobbling another three chunks of battlement I dove onto one of the soft mattresses and examined a purple folder that lay on the bedside table. The folder contained a letter saying I would be picked up by my player-host at 6 p.m., plus informational pamphlets about the college’s departments and a history of the school. I slid out the history.
Before King was King, it was Triune College, a denominational school founded in 1844 to train Methodist ministers. Many of Triune’s graduates went on to have distinguished careers, but none more than Jedediah King, the scion of a prominent Blenheim planter family. An energetic, brilliant young man who served as pastor of Blenheim’s First Methodist Church, Jedediah was known throughout the Piedmont for his ability to recite whole chapters of scripture from memory.
When the Civil War broke out, Jedediah volunteered to serve as chaplain for a newly formed North Carolina regiment, and the town of Blenheim sent him off to battle with great fanfare and even greater enthusiasm for the Confederate cause. But their optimism was to be rewarded with bloodshed, as Jedediah’s regiment suffered one of the highest attrition rates of any in the Confederacy, and when its survivors finally returned home, the men were, as one contemporary letter noted, “wounded in mind, body, spirit.” Jedediah was said to be nearly unrecognizable with his long black beard and a limp that required use of a cane. To the shock of his neighbors, he refused to resume his duties as the leader of First Methodist and instead took over his family’s plantation.
He used the talents he had developed as a preacher to become a visionary businessman, transforming the King landholdings into one of the biggest manufacturers in the South. After he died in a railroad accident in 1880, his oldest son, Augustus, took King Tobacco’s reins and elevated the company to still greater heights—an international force that, among other accomplishments, helped open the West’s tobacco trade in China. Blenheim’s fortunes rose in tandem: it went from the one-horse town Jedediah had known as a boy to one of North Carolina’s major commercial centers, home to state-of-the-art factories and stately neighborhoods built in the Victorian style.
But Blenheim’s renaissance was not to last. At the turn of the century, King Tobacco was broken up by an antitrust ruling. What parts of the company weren’t sold off moved overseas during the next fifty years. Having lost the engine of its economy, Blenheim gradually reverted to the sleepy southern burg it had once been. Augustus, set adrift by the court’s decision, left the company’s management to his sons and set sail for a tour of the European continent to decide how to spend his fortune.
For the next two years he immersed himself in Europe’s rich cultures, and it was upon seeing the Gothic architecture of Germany’s great universities that he had an epiphany: he would found a college in the South that could compete with the world’s best schools. He booked passage back to America and bought Triune College, renaming it King College after his father. He hired the era’s finest architects to oversee the expansion of the campus, clearing the forest on the western edge to make way for new buildings built in the same magisterial style Augustus had so admired in Germany—including a 200-foot chapel complete with a 70-bell carillon and three pipe organs. The chapel stood in the center of the new West Campus, while Triune’s Georgian-style campus was renamed East Campus and became
I blinked. The hotel room’s air had gone grainy with evening, and I was so disoriented that I only belatedly realized that what had woken me was the sound of the door opening. A hulking figure stood in the doorway to my left, its big body limned by hallway light. It closed the door, merging with the room’s dark air, still looking at me. I turned my eyes to the ceiling and dug my fingernails into my palms, hoping this was a nightmare I could wake myself from. But the pain in my hands told me I was already awake, that I had indeed watched a large black man slip into my hotel room. I knew he was going to walk my way. Knew he was going to sidle alongside my bed, breathe evenly, and …
The overhead lights snapped on. The figure was, somehow, Reshawn McCoy.
Reshawn played for Archerville High School, a powerhouse program in western Oregon famous for producing half a dozen, sometimes more, D1 signees every year. Reshawn was not only Archerville’s captain but the greatest player in the pantheon of its great players—starting tailback, middle linebacker, kick returner, punt returner, even punter. He had on several occasions graced not just USA Today’s prep coverage but the front page of the whole paper, top of the fold, nestled between Davos updates and reports on arms trafficking in Khartoum. He was everything I’d failed to stop myself from dreaming I could be: an All-American, a glory of strength, size, and speed, a star who had received offers from every D1 program, some 120 schools. He was the type who kept his choice secret until National Signing Day, when TV networks would broadcast him dramatically donning a baseball cap featuring the logo of whichever program he’d chosen.
But what the hell was he doing here?
—Hey, he said.
I cleared my throat and sat up in bed.
—I’m Reshawn? he continued.
—Miles. Sorry. I
