Armchair and Arena

16

A Man Named Nestor

It’s fairly strange, and damned ironic, how vivid, specific episodes of one’s adolescence can be shelved almost immediately in their time, no matter their intense consequence of moment, their pertinence, or possible future repercussion. It well may be that matters of exquisite poignancy, met when one is not yet adult, cannot be dealt with as though one is mature enough to do so – that one realizes that his faculties cannot process such circumstance-sets accurately. Better or worse, or neither, all of us harbored such a teenaged protectorate: Call it the ‘How would I know?’ quotient. So in the settled memories of that plane, which with years have moved down several layers, soon to have made it all the way from silt to igneous, too dim for recall, it is somewhat startling – very startling – for me, now fifty years old, and thirty-five years removed from the incident, recently to remember, and with great detail, one of the most far-reaching, depth-plumbing occasions of that time, or any, of my life...in new realization that I have never approached it with the emotional gravity or intellectual scholarship appropriate to the setting until now. And though it is a sports story, and will be shuffled in among the papers under the ‘sports’ rubric, there are much deeper standards and symbols at work in the expenditure of the recounting. This is a story of lives of difficulty, and of the trial encountered in the holding of oneself to high standards of decorum in big-city southern America as it was during an unsettling time; of race, and how young people apprehended it then... But mainly, it is the story of one sixteen year-old black athlete, and how all of the above conditions conspired, somewhat tragically, somewhat triumphantly, to carry him – and associatively several others – to many simultaneous brinks, on one very special, if semi-tragic day for all of us. It is a story about a choice my friend of the time, Nestor, made on a day in 1976.

Nestor was a strapping, healthy-as-hell guy – to my memory all of six-one, one-eighty-five. And though I called him ‘friend’ above, that may be more a thirty-five year rearward look, more hopeful than true. The fact was that in the mid-1970s Deep South – New Orleans, where we both were enrolled at Loyola Prep School – the races just had not yet learned salubrious mixing. Because of his physical attributes, Nestor was a natural for a role of leadership among the Afro-American Loyola contingent. This, however, was a station and status which Nestor eschewed, and for many discrete reasons: The obvious one was that Nestor had the most endearing, engaging, easy smile and manner that I’ve ever seen in boy or man; he was seemingly irrevocably happy-go-lucky. The second was that he had very deep brown skin and so apparently was acutely aware that this pressed him much more into visibility, into prominence, into a foreground of relief. He was a prideful and powerful person, but he held his quiet pride beneath the surface in surroundings in which he was not comfortable. He harbored no recognizable misgiving or vocal distrust concerning race, as he knew such a stance to be self-defeating. The third was that Loyola only just lately had begun admitting black students; the ’78 class, of which Nestor and I were part, was peopled with only about eight Afro-Americans among its two-hundred-and-fifty student-body. So what was to lead, for a black, at white Loyola anyway? Better to learn self-control, composure and the art of conversation than to get one’s back up, was how Nestor apparently perceived it. Even if among the rank-and-file of the thirty or so blacks on campus, some were on their way to racially militant grounding.

And who could blame those who did? Loyola was all cliques and majorities, as it drew its enrollment almost exclusively from three or four parochial ‘feeder’ schools – all very expensive and only with the most professional, best-paid instruction and tutelage – around New Orleans. I was in as clear a minority as the blacks: a kid coming from the public schools of the far west suburbs, who hadn’t learned how to study, or why to study, and had, as such, no business at all being in such a place...except for the small matter of my athletic prowess. Loyola, touting itself as a bastion of purism in those days, heavily emphasized the so-called minor sports of wrestling and swimming. The glamor sports – no, not as important, ran the line. Sports, as Loyola held it, should be spiritual and intellectual endeavors, to complement their obviously physical disciplines. The football team was, in fact, miserable in each of my four years at Loyola, twice winning only once in a season. But in wrestling and swimming, there was excellence in abundant precedence, so once I had become significant as a swimmer by the age of twelve – bing, such it was – and there I went. It wasn’t just recruitment that shunted me off and into matriculation at Loyola; my parents, unaware that they were in grave error, thought it a smashing idea. The only other option for the crack swimmer in New Orleans was d’Iberville High, but an option of the two couldn’t have mattered: at either place I would have been entirely ill-suited. Call it ‘extremely’ so. The number of public elementary- and middle-school enrollees at Loyola roughly equaled the number of Afro-American students there. Not only could we – publicly-schooled or black students – be part of no parochial clique, but neither had any of us even one established friendship which carried over into high school. All of the kids with whom I’d grown up, with the exception of one or two, had gone on to public high schools. My time at Loyola often seemed a sentence. I just was not of that ilk, and so could empathize with, if not befriend, a guy like Nestor. I could tell he also understood that we shared this out-of-place quality by the friendly, if reserved nod with which he met me in the halls.

Nestor was a natural, but I didn’t know it for a couple of years, until we were thrown together into the same hour’s Physical Education class. One simply figured that the bona fide athlete would participate on the school’s varsity teams, regardless of his life’s variables or personal decisions. Before seeing him play, when I noted that this guy was on no varsity team, I assumed he probably didn’t have the skill to do so. I couldn’t have missed the mark more widely, for the reality was that Nestor simply had no axe to grind; he felt no need of proving anything to anyone, it would turn out, including himself. But all of that in its story-order... As I said, the major sports of America were in low profile at Loyola: The football team was awful; baseball wasn’t all that good; basketball, though a decent squad, hadn’t a single player over 6’3". Worst is, that of all three sports combined, when I look back at the team pictures in the yearbooks of ’75 and ’76 today, I see ONE black face in the varsity football picture and ONE in the basketball photo. Why would a black athlete attend Loyola when there were several high schools, public and private, around town, which would unroll veritable red carpets to him? Why, indeed? Many to most of Loyola’s students were legacies, whose fathers, uncles, brothers, et cetera, had studied there. The blacks, obviously, didn’t have such histories. Perhaps the whole thing was contrived – I don’t know and don’t want to know, but what I DO know is that because the major athletics’ teams were so successless, many of the truly gifted athletes at Loyola, among whom Nestor would be in a short-list pantheon, took their talents to the Physical Education classes instead of into school colors.

For example, I remember playing in remarkably tense seventh-period basketball games, in ’74-’75, my freshman year, on the asphalt apron courts in the main building’s interior enclosure – a parade ground-cum-parking lot. There was a white guy playing out there named John, who was six-two and could handle the ball better than anyone I’d ever seen. He could set his dribbling level anywhere he wanted, at any tempo, and take the ball on the move, with or without dribbling alteration. I was a pretty fair country player myself, so John and I got into some serious one-on-one entanglements. I couldn’t go out for the team due to the rigorous, even inhuman demands of swimming – it drained all my time – but that John didn’t play on the varsity was something I couldn’t understand, as he routinely had the best of me in our playground battles. Evidently coerced into it at last, he did try out in his junior year, made the team, summarily was elevated to starting point guard, and quickly became integral to the team’s success. The guy was plain dynamite, but though a great shooter, he rarely shot for the varsity, after arriving. The coach of the squad wisely determined John’s higher team value to be his ball handling and passing. My point here is not just to extol this individual, but to illustrate that the competition at Loyola that went on out of the floodlight glare and pageantry was as tough – if not tougher – than that of the sanctioned games and teams. I remember John’s and my fierce tussles fondly; had I not been a swimmer, I also could have played varsity ball. One of my most rueful thoughts, then and now, is that I didn’t get to don the blue and white to play alongside John and Cris, the latter being the truly great player Loyola had at the time. John, in fact, went on to become a very successful novelist and college English professor, which hardly could fail to elicit the reverence and mild jealousy of this impoverished hack, your humble scribe of other subjects...

...particularly of Nestor, which is sort of my paean and a brief genuflection to all those great athletes one never will know, or hear of, due to whatever strange and private reasons. I watched it happen again and again at Loyola, and in fact, throughout the entire town of New Orleans when I was teenaged. The burnout syndrome then was rampant, even epidemic; the seriously great athlete of my time and city seemed to hear the call of life – as apart from upkeep in the sporting disciplines – very loudly in his ears. Perhaps New Orleans is (or was) unique in this; I know I have nothing concrete to which to attribute it. Football is the one sport, though, in which I thoroughly understand non-participation; anyone electing that maleficence as his sporting field would have to be dotty, or at least hell-bent on proving something in which not only should proof never be undertaken, but finally, without any interruptive question, cannot be. Maybe the broken bone is an honor badge: I don’t know. Maybe it’s an ‘I’ve got spirit’ stigma holding over from the early twentieth century. God must love football, but why man does, it becomes increasingly difficult to say. We make our penitential bows as we do, as fervently as we can, while we’re here. And mine, at present is: This story necessarily is about football – happily not the bone-jarring, knee-crumpling, tissue-scissoring variety, but the (again) asphalt-grounds, touch-football sort which, if resembling the gridiron example to a degree, is able to retain a pastoral, even somewhat genteel aspect. So if I’d never played, nor would, helmet-and-pads, mud-and-grass-stains football, I had played in an awful lot of neighborhood ‘touch football’ games in the streets over the years. Thousands of games, in fact. After this many-years apprenticeship, I suppose I was prepared for the occurrences of the spring of 1976, though for this particular one, I neither was ready nor aware of what a pressurized fishbowl into which I unwittingly had stumbled.

Loyola’s heritage, and ongoing societal pose and duties, was decidedly militaristic, as per the bellipotence of old Ignatius and the Jesuits. As such, a boy had this choice for his class scheduling: a period either of sports (P.E.) or of military drill. More than half chose the latter, which left only about sixty or seventy of us per grade to compete in the games. This not only winnowed out those with little or no athletic acumen, but also ensured that the quality of play would be high in those games – that the weak links, so to speak, wouldn’t be weak at all. I have already reported on the basketball of ’74-’75; we were about to go one further in the football of ’75-’76. As I say, all of it overtook us sort of innocently. On the first day of every semester’s P.E. class, one would glance around to identify both his competition and his potential alliances. For me, the game was always basketball; football was barely an afterthought: dumb fun, when best, and a mild crisis, replete with heavy egos and loud shouting, when worst. At least I never broke a bone in football, blessedly. I just didn’t think much about football and, unlike in basketball, in which I held myself to an insanely-raised bar of expectation, in football I had none. In fact, in my first two years at Loyola – 8th and 9th grades – I’d been very close to a non-entity during P.E. or recess football games, lacking either a sufficient arm for quarterbacking or the loud mouth and hubris to be a visible, favorite receiver. I caught maybe two or three passes a week, only having the odd one thrown to me when all of the other receivers were covered. As I say, it didn’t mean much to me, and I wasn’t even sure that I could perform at a high-level if singled out. A low profile on the gridiron suited me.

Anyway, comes the time in early March, with the end of the cold, when the indoor games end and the outdoor, among them football, begin. The teams are picked; Nestor is a captain, and chooses me first in the draft on the basis of my basketball skill. I admonish him under my breath as I go to the ‘chosen’ side of red rover. Not that good at football, Nes...you should have taken Billy or Geoff. He looks at me a moment, incredulous. I don’t believe you. Except it’s true, and he finds out, as he makes himself quarterback and quickly gets to know who is and isn’t competent among his pass-catchers. I don’t know why it is I did not excel in it; I was a kid, and still loved pro football – college ball to a slightly less degree. I’d idle into the secondary, sort of providing a last-ditch safety valve if Nestor needed one. For his part, he never really looked my way. He didn’t let having wasted his first-round pick fluster him. He just accepted, vaguely, that for some reason I wasn’t one of his clutch guys; that my basketball faculty did not translate to this game. In fact, because I played lackadaisically, without investing myself more than I felt necessary, I was almost as apt to drop even a soft pass as I was to catch it – not exactly Nestor’s Mr. Reliable. Besides, there were two or three other guys on the team who wanted Nestor to throw the ball their way every time, and they certainly let him know it. It seemed that if you talked enough, everyone else believed you were able to play. And I never talked, not believing.

Nestor, meanwhile, was incredible. He was a dead-shot rifle-arm like I’d never seen, and when I say he could burn it in, I ain’t covering nearly enough metaphorical ground. But for him to be as accurate as he was, too, strained belief. I knew the varsity quarterback, and was familiar with what kind of arm he had; Nestor’s was better by far. In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I felt Nestor’s quarterbacking skills the equal of any schoolkid’s in New Orleans at that time. It was sheer pleasure to watch him draw back his right arm and fire in one perfect ball after another to his receivers. I began to wish myself a football player, if secretly, just because of Nestor’s presence on my team. What was I doing wasting time? Well, it was too late: We were several games into the season, and I very early had been pegged as an underachiever or an incapable – no one, including me, knowing which. But we were winning; in fact, we won them all, mainly because we had a quarterback who should have been the varsity starter – rarest of luxuries for an intramural team! And if no one was open, Nestor would take off, a nearly uncatchable broken-field runner. If I had his ear today I’d ask him if he didn’t play for the school team because of the ethnic situation or because the team was so damned lousy that he could have been badly hurt. Whatever the reason, we had him in our league where we – we alone! – could appreciate the exceptional talent. Early, it was like a campus secret, but it wouldn’t stay that way for very long.

Allow me to interrupt for a paragraph to go real time on you briefly. All of the foregoing, until now, has been inexhumably buried under the myriad accumulations of time and its billions of minutiae. Football has begun to feel alien to me of late, though I recall it as an extraordinarily enjoyable pastime of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. No longer so attuned, I definitely had shut this episode off, along with all other memories of the pigskin, mostly comfortably, but somewhat not; as I said, I never participated in the violent, uniformed version of the sport. However, when a neighbor at a recent music festival in North Carolina produced a ball, and we middle-agers went out to romp on the sward a little, and heave it around a bit, mostly clownishly, my predominant emotion was joy – the joy of the easy motion of the arm; of letting the ball go and following through, no matter whether the passes were accurate. The effort of lunging for a pass not on target proved more fun than catching a perfectly-thrown ball, anyway. This was the impetus – that half-hour’s return to youth – which aided me to uncover this mostly happy, somewhat troubling, and definitely decisive moment of my life. I realized, in preparing to write the story, that the game of football itself was my thematic catalyst, the quiet center of the story, even if its satellites – the emotions of the teenaged boys involved – were the prime matter. I doubt very much, had I not been asked to throw that ball around the meadow in Chapel Hill two weeks ago, that this pivotal episode of my life would have become so brightly illuminated – so vibrantly, visibly, vividly re-imagined. And I likely never would have written the story. It was the first time I had touched a football in fifteen years; I verily felt I was recovering innocence in the easy-toss, if only for the duration of the exercise. And now that I no longer subscribe to football, of all of the days, or issues, or loves of my life, in writing this single particular story, I am that much closer to the frailty of each of them.

Returning to the fogs, vintage ‘76...About halfway through the schedule of ten or so games, our team actually played one that was tensely close. The other team was a clutch of hooligans – strutters, chest-thumpers and shouters, all of whom fancied themselves superior sportsmen. It was as though the entire ego of the Loyola student body was on display in these ten or a dozen kids. But as they were good players, the game’s outcome, as I say, hung in doubt. Very late in the class period, with the score tied, we have the ball deep in our own field-end; the play begins, and Nestor looks into the secondary, poised to fling one. He sees no one, so scoots this and that way, giving ground back into his end-zone due to pressure. I look over my shoulder and see that there isn’t anyone deep downfield, our player or theirs. As I haven’t caught even one pass during the game, I think perhaps that I can slip furtively into the wide-open deep area, since coverage of me might be little attentive. Exactly this happens; soon I’m standing fifty or so yards away from Nestor with no defensive player within forty feet of me. Within a quarter-second’s flash of spotting me, Nestor whips a terrific heave skyward. Oh Lord, the game’s going to be on my fingertips... except: The throw is too strong. It’s sailing goalward, probably sixty yards in the air (almost the length of the concrete field). Can’t catch it, I think, but move backwards fast, as though I can. The air starts coming out of the high pass a little. I’ve got one shot: to stop the momentum of the ball by leaping, with one hand way over my head, hoping to graze it enough to knock it straight up into the air, then catch it if it returns to earth anywhere near me. And this unlikely scenario unfolds exactly as I have prescribed it; I shuffle casually into the end zone as the entire playground goes bananas. See! Nestor shouts at me as we make toward each other. I knew it. I knew it! All right, this is what we’re going to do... On the merit of this one catch, I instantly have become his go-to receiver. Give me strength, I remember thinking. What in the hell have I gotten myself into?

Nestor was a man of few words, but in the interest of success in the games, he now dumped a few dozen on me. It’s perfect...you’re a secret weapon. Here’s how we’ll use you... His plans were stratagems reserved for the professional ranks. I’d never be his first choice; he wasn’t even going to look at me as, verily, he hadn’t all year. The talkers and the shouters would continue to draw the heaviest defensive attention. There would be times, though, when we would need one; he would just look at me in the huddle to let me know I definitely was going to get the pass. I was to go into the secondary; as soon as Nestor’s eyes had fallen upon me, I was to break toward the most open zone of asphalt near me. As soon as I had made my break, Nestor, noting the direction, would lead the pass that way. When I say that the passes always were on, I mean they NEVER were not right on target, perfectly led, no matter pressure, coverage, or any other difficulty. What was to do in such an arrangement – being thrown to by one of the truly great teenaged quarterbacks I’d ever seen – but to hang onto every one of the passes? So I did just that...became his clutch end. Still, Nestor did not touch upon our liaison more than two or three times per game. It was an under the radar connection. This, he explained to me after class one day, was because we didn’t want ‘those bums’ – the team of loudmouths we’d beaten with the miracle bomb – knowing where our new strength lay. It already was fait accompli that the game considered the championship would be a rematch. We would be undefeated – or more aptly, Nestor would be – and their lone loss would be to us. So Nestor was laying chicky with me and my rôle – hiding me from the pundits, so to speak – which was tough to do, as the gossip about our little league flew around campus like airborne dandelion seeds. The loudmouths owned Loyola; this was the main reason I unfailingly opted for introversion.

So that’s how it went for the last few games – we crushed hell out of every opponent, as did the loudmouth gang theirs. Over the season, I probably caught no more than fifteen passes, but a good half dozen or more were touchdowns. I wasn’t so sure we were under the radar anymore, and when one day, I overheard my name in classmates’ discussion, I knew better than to think it still so. But whatever... It was Nestor they’d have to worry themselves silly about, not any of the rest of us. And worry they did: The doomsayers and the naysayers came out in the days prior to the big game; this contest, evidently, was for a tall stack of chips. In a certain, very tangible way, this was bigger than a Loyola varsity game. Several of the guys on both teams would not only have been able to play on the tackle team had they wanted to, but some would have started, and one or two – Nestor, unquestionably – even may have starred. The psychological crap flew around us, but Nestor and I were of the same low-keyed, reticent stock; we’d just nod, my quarterback and I, to one another when we passed in the hallways between school periods. We didn’t have to plot to pump ourselves up; we knew what lay ahead of us. If the varsity team had been strong, our intramural league would have been of little relative notice, but the opposite seemed to be the case: The weakness of the school team ensured this P.E. game would be one of legend. I didn’t think much about it; it still was all fun for me, so I didn’t allow it to excite me overly. I didn’t know what Nestor felt or thought, but he had to have been under moderate pressure. Whether he cared deeply, this was his baby – his coming-out party.

At last the day and there we all were, both teams, in the gymnasium locker room, togging out in P.E. gear. By this time, no one was doing any talking, but it was exceedingly obvious that Nestor, who dressed quietly in a corner, was the complete attention-center. He looked away from everyone. I knew to wait for him to come to me; any strategy we were going to employ had to come from him. If he didn’t say anything, then I knew we’d just stick with the status quo...with what had gotten us to this game without a loss. I felt loose; this was going to be fun, right? Maybe I’d catch passes, maybe not; that didn’t matter. But I did want to win quite badly, if only to shut down the braggadocio. It was just football, dude. I faced worse nerves and fiercer competition every single time I got onto the swimming pool blocks for a start in either the high school season or the community league. So let’s have a little light-heart here, a little fun. I seemed to be the only one in such a mind, though. To the rest, the game was grounds for manhood-establishment. Grief! Okay, let’s get out there at last, anyway. We make it to the cement lot and there are about fifty or sixty in school-day khaki along the sidelines. Any kid who had a free period was out there to watch the clash of champions. I looked around a little nervously, getting into that spirit at last, kind of casting my eye around for Nestor. Surely he’s got something to say to me, if not to all of us – some instruction for the game. And there he is...and he does. He looks fairly severe, not at all his usually serene self: All right man. Listen: All day long. All...day...long. You’re my man. Just watch my eyes. You’re my first choice on nearly every play... Though I had prepared for such a station, and had sort of guessed it was coming, I gulped hard, but the confidence he had in me kept me calm. We play...

They get the ball first and start by completing a few passes. They move the line down to close to our goal. Their quarterback drops, sights his receiver and fires. From where I’m standing across the field, it looks like a sure touchdown, but at the last moment, a super-streak – a blur of ebon and blue – bolts over to grab the pass. Nestor has intercepted, and rolls up the sideline to midfield before he is touched – a beyond-acrobatic play. The sidelines throng buzzes loudly. We move the ball a bit; Nestor does not throw to me on the first few plays, obviously first wanting to check with what intensity I am to be covered for the day. Comes the fourth down play from about their fifteen yard-line. Nestor drops back, but has no open receiver. He thinks to scramble for it, so jockeys from side-to-side, looking for a running lane, but the pressure has him hemmed. There is no clear path. The play is too broken for us to employ our eyes-meet-and-break pass, so I sort of dawdle just inside the goal line, feeling hopelessly out of the action. Wary defenders stand closely to either side of me. A couple of seconds more, and the moment arrives when Nestor must release the ball or take a loss, which turns the ball over. Just before he does, he spies me, covered well, still near the goal line. He uses this moment to fire his pass, banking on that the defenders will be surprised that he is throwing to a blanketed man. This unpredictable angle gives him the split-second he needs to complete this unusual, if even somewhat illogical, sally. And does he let it go! He knows he hasn’t the luxury of any time on either end of the play, so fires it off as though from out of a bazooka. It’s out of his hands and I have to adjust to it instantly. This is the adjustment: Even from twenty yards away, the pass is far too hard for me to think I can catch it with only my hands, if at all. The spiral is coming in at eye level, at about a hundred damn miles an hour, so my one chance at it is to leap in the air, sacrifice my shoulder or part of my chest to the bullet, taking what will be obviously heavy punishment from the nose of the ball in doing so, and hope like hell that I somehow can get my hands around it. The defenders don’t move, paralyzed half by Nestor’s brilliant strategy and half by their awe in having become spectators, watching his unbelievable athleticism.

At the top of my leap, the spheroid explodes into my shoulder like a cannonball; as it punches painfully into my body, I somehow do get my hands wrapped around it to stop it, and descend harmlessly to earth. Touchdown. The most improbable playground touchdown any witness to it has ever seen. No sideliner makes a sound, which is startling and ominous. It’s six-to-nothing; that’s all. I’d have felt proud of the catch in the moment if it hadn’t been for the weirdness of no one’s raising a cheer. It was downright eerie. Had there been wagers made? What was going on out there? My shoulder felt separated, but whatever. Archie Manning, who quarterbacked the New Orleans professional team at that time, MIGHT have been able to make such a throw. The victory was Nestor’s. And no one cheered it. Helluva catch, he tells me. You kiddin’? Helluva throw, I come back. Now the loudmouths have it again, and they’re really yapping this time. The sideline comes to life. Oh, I see! It’s a partisan thing...but why? Well, the cliques; that’s got to be it. Long-time loyalty and all such supremacy-folderol. The team-tandem of the black guy and the publicly schooled, free-spirited, independent rube was going to disarm the power of historical, upstanding, superstitious, parochial New Orleans. Fancy this, would you? Quarterback play worthy of a professional, and not one voice cries Hallelujah! Except mine, sotto voce. Okay, on we go. The loudmouths drive again, down to near our goal once more. Damn good team, good athletes. On what is to be their first scoring play, though, wouldn’t you know, and who couldn’t have guessed, Nestor steps between the receiver and the aired-out ball. That’s two interceptions and a touchdown pass in the first ten minutes of the class period. And I thought I had seen him play at high pitch before! This was verging on ridiculous. We were going to lambaste these turkeys. It literally already was all over but the crying...and the zealots now were fully shushed.

As possession changed, I walked over to the water fountain, already winded. I dropped my head into the basin to drink, but was harshly interrupted by a blast of commotion behind me, followed by a bout of screaming. What the hell was going on over there? I looked around. It was Nestor who was in the middle of it, though he wasn’t directing anything at anyone in particular. I couldn’t grasp it; this was so far away from his character that it just wasn’t possible. Some bizarre twist had occurred; had someone taken a run, in frustration, at him? Good! We’d really bury those patzers now. Fifty-to-nothing, Nestor would be so worked up. I was ready. To the game, to the line: Nestor still in screaming exchange both with some opponents and a few of the sideline loudmouths, as the scrimmage line forms for the hike. But he still isn’t directing his frustrated tirade at a particular kid. What has happened? Something truly heinous has gone down; he begins snapping at the guys on our team! The ball is hiked to him. He doesn’t even wait for his retinue to flood downfield before he heaves a sixty yard pass way over everyone’s head. I watch its wastefully diabolical parabola as the ball sails well out into no-man’s land. Well, that’s cool; he’s proven he’s upset and it has only cost us one down. He’s giving an odds, a handicap: He’s telling them we can beat them with an arm tied behind his back. I kind of internally chuckle and salute the weird gesture. But he’s still mad, still baiting them. He’s absolutely still as mad three minutes into the confrontation as he had been at its onset. And he instantly flings the second-down pass utterly disgustedly out-of-bounds. Hey, man, I say to him softly, feeling like I’ve earned a spokesman’s word, but he turns and cuts his eyes hard at me, as though to say, Stay the hell out of this, which I damn well do. He wastes third and fourth downs, in rapid, impassioned succession, throwing the fourth down pass at the ground at the defensive line’s feet. The loudmouths will play the ball deep in our zone. It dawns on me: Someone has salted the air with a racial epithet – now or earlier – or with words equally idiotic or cowardly. Oh, I see. We’re going to forfeit because of it? Maybe he’ll come out of it.

My bewilderment was matched only by my regard for him in making the stand he did, which was matched only by the hurt I was experiencing that we wouldn’t get to show the blackguards up on the scoreboard. Hey, Nes, I’m coming in to quarterback, one of our guys says. No you AIN’T! he fires back imperiously, and continues the intentional scatter-arming of footballs to any spot no player stands when we again get the ball. Come on, Nes, I’m thinking. Give them a lead and then let’s see if we can come back. But he doesn’t; it’s a thorough and unrelenting sabotage. The loudmouths don’t know how to handle it, but after they score a couple of gift touchdowns, even they realize it’s a forfeit and their touchdowns are not just tainted, but fraudulent. Aw, shit, it’s over, one of the loudmouths says. There is no joy in cementheadville, and no one says a following word. The air is dead. No one looks at anyone else or debates anything as we quit the game less than halfway through the class period, and head back to the gym locker room to get into classroom duds. No one points an accusatory finger, and no one, for much more than certain, proffers apology.