It seemed like an elaborate explanation for a simple little limp, but I could have been wrong about that too.

“You have to be more careful of your back,” my mother said severely. “The Lord—”

“Mom, could we watch the game now?” I asked.

“—only gives you one,” she finished.

“Yes, Mrs Guilder,” Arnie said dutifully.

Elaine wandered in. “Is there any more juice, or did you two coneheads drink it all?”

“Come on, give me a break!” I yelled. There had been some sort of disputed play at second and I had missed the whole thing.

“Don’t shout at your sister, Dennis,” my father muttered from the depths of The Hobbyist magazine he was reading.

“There’s a lot left, Ellie,” Arnie told her.

“Sometimes, Arnie,” Elaine told him, “you strike as almost human.” She flounced out to the kitchen.

“Almost human, Dennis!” Arnie whispered to me, apparently on the verge of grateful tears. “Did you hear that? Almost hyooooman.”

And perhaps it is also only retrospection—or imagination—that makes me think his humour was forced, unreal, only a façade. False memory or true one, the subject of his back passed off, although that limp came and went all through the fall.

I was pretty busy in myself. The cheerleader and I had broken it off, but I could usually find someone to step out with on Saturday nights… if I wasn’t too tired from the constant football practice.

Coach Puffer wasn’t a wretch like Will Darnell, but he was no rose; like half the smalltown high school coaches in America, he had patterned his coaching techniques on those of the late Vince Lombardi, whose chief scripture was that winning wasn’t everything, it was the only thing. You’d be surprised how many people who should know better believe that half-baked horseshit.

A summer of working for Carson Brothers had left me in rugged shape and I think I could have cruised through the season—if it had been a winning season. But by the time Arnie and I had the ugly confrontation near the smoking area behind the shop with Buddy Repperton—and I think that was during the third week of classes—it was pretty clear we weren’t going to have a Winning season. That made Coach Puffer extremely hard to live with, because in his ten years at LHS, he had never had a losing season. That was the year Coach Puffer had to learn a bitter humility. It was a hard lesson for him… and it wasn’t so easy for us, either.

Our first game, away against the Luneburg Tigers, was September 9th. Now, Luneburg is just that—a burg. It’s a little piss-ant rural high school at the extreme west end of our district, and over my years at Libertyville, the usual battle cry after Luneburg’s bumbling defence had allowed yet another touchdown was TELL-US-HOW-IT-FEELSTO-HAVE-COWSHIT-ON-YOUR-HEELS! Followed by a big, sarcastic cheer: RAAAAYYYYYY, LUUUUNEBURG!

It had been over twenty years since Luneburg beat a Libertyville team, but that year they rose up and smote us righteously. I was playing left end, and by halftime I was morally sure that I was going to have cleat-mark scars all over my back for the rest of my life. By then the score was 17-3. It ended up 30–10. The Luneburg fans were delirious; they tore down the goalposts as if it had been the Regional Championship game and carried their players off the field on their shoulders.

Our fans, who had come up in buses specially laid on, sat huddled on the visitors” bleachers in the blaring early September heat, looking blank. In the dressing room, Coach Puffer, looking stunned and pallid, suggested we get down on our knees and pray for guidance in the weeks to come. I knew then that the hurting had not ended but was just beginning.

We got down on our knees, aching, bruised and battered, wanting nothing but to get into the shower and start washing that loser smell off ourselves, and listened as Coach Puffer explained the situation to God in a ten-minute peroration that ended with a promise that we would do our part if He would do His.

The next week, we practised three hours a day (instead of the customary ninety minutes to two hours) under the broiling sun. I tumbled into bed nights and dreamed of his bellowing voice: “Hit that sucker! Hit! HIT!”

I ran windsprints until I began to feel that my legs were going to undergo spontaneous decomposition (at the same instant my lungs burst into flames, probably). Lenny Barongg, one of our tailbacks, had a mild sunstroke and was mercifully—for him, at least—excused for the rest of the week.

So I saw Arnie, and he came over and took dinner with my folks and Ellie and me on Thursday or Friday nights, he checked out a ballgame or two with us on Sunday afternoons, but beyond that I lost sight of him almost completely. I was too busy hauling my aches and pains to class, to practice, then home to my room to do my assignments.

Going back to my football woes—I think the worst thing was the way people looked at me, and Lenny, and the rest of the team, in the hallways. Now that “school spirit” business is mostly a lot of bullshit made up by school administrators who remember having a helluva time at the Saturday-aftemoon gridiron contests of their youth but have conveniently forgotten that a lot of it resulted from being drunk, horny, or both. If you had held a rally in favour of legalizing marijuana, you would have seen some school spirit. But about football, basketball, and track, most of the student body didn’t give a shit. They were too busy trying to get into college or someone’s pants or trouble. Business as usual.

All the same, you get used to being a winner—you start to take it for granted. Libertyville had been fielding killer football teams for a long time; the last time the school had had a losing record—at least, before my senior year—was twelve years before, in 1966. So in the week after the loss of Luneburg, while there was no weeping and gnashing of teeth, there were hurt, puzzled looks in the hall and some booing at the regular Friday afternoon rally at the end of period seven. The boos made Coach Puffer turn nearly purple, and he invited those “poor sports and fair-weather friends” to turn out Saturday afternoon to watch the comeback of the century.

I don’t know if the poor sports and fair-weather friends turned out or not, but I was there. We were at home, and our opponents were t e Ridge Rock Bears. Now Ridge Rock is a mining town, and while the kids going to Ridge Rock High are hicks, they are not soft hicks. They are mean, ugly, touch hicks. The year before, Libertyville’s football team had barely edged them out for the regional title, and one of the local sports commentators had said it wasn’t because Libertyville had a better team but because it had more warm bodies to draw on. Coach Puffer had hit the ceiling over that, too I, I can tell you,

This, however, was the Bears” year. They steamrollered us. Fred Dann went out of the game with a concussion in the first period. In the second period, Norman Aleppo got a ride to the Libertyville Community Hospital with a broken arm. And in the last period, the Bears scored three consecutive touchdowns, two on punt returns. The final score was 40-6. All false modesty aside, I’ll tell you that I scored the six. But I won’t put realism aside with the modesty: I was lucky.

So… another week of hell on the practice field. Another week of Coach yelling Hit that sucker. One day we practised for nearly four hours, and when Lenny suggested to Coach that it might be nice to have some time left for doing homework, I thought—just for an instant—that Puffer was going to belt him one. He had taken to jingling his keys constantly from hand to hand, reminding me of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, I believe that how you lose is a much better index into character than how you win. Puffer, who had never been 0–2 in his coaching career, reacted with baffled, pointless fury, like a caged tiger being teased by cruel children.