Did Booby Miles Ever Play Football Again
By H.One thousand. Bissinger
Special to Page 2
From the volume "Friday Night Lights." Copyright � 1990. Reprinted by organisation with Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Grouping. All rights reserved.
The preseason scrimmage in the late Baronial twilight had barely started when Boobie peeled off a run that gave glimpses of why the college recruiters were afterwards him, why Texas A & M and Nebraska and Houston and all the others routinely crammed his mailbox with heady testimonials to his magnificence.
"Y'all have been recommended to us equally an outstanding prospective major college student-athlete."
Boobie Miles provided his uncle L.V. the shot at glory he never had.
"You had an outstanding junior year at Permian and I am sure your senior year volition be even better. You are in a state of affairs that many young athletes dream about."
"The entire Houston Cougar football game staff has been in the process of putting together the elevation listing of high school senior football game players in Texas. . . . Booby, we feel that you are one of these few select players."
"James -- nosotros are in New York preparing for the outset classic and enjoying the sights. Good luck in your first game. Looking forward to watching you play later this flavor."
They weren't interested in him just because he was big and looked imposing in a football compatible. There were a m kids in Texas who fit that description. Information technology was something else, more than simply force or speed, a kind of invincible fire that burned within him, an unquenchable feeling that no one on that field, no 1, was as adept as he was. "Miles had the attitude," said one-time teammate Art Wagner with admiration. "He thought he was the best."
He had played his junior yr with a kind of seething emotion that sometimes dissolved into quick frustration and discouragement. He hands got rattled, particularly when things weren't going well, and there were times on the field when he seemed as frazzled equally a kid. But there were other times when that emotion made him spellbinding and untouchable.
It had been there during the Abilene Loftier game when he gained 232 yards on 8 carries and scored touchdowns of 62 yards, lxxx yards, and 67 yards. His father, who lived in Houston, had been in the stands that night. They had been separated for some fourth dimension, and information technology was the commencement fourth dimension James senior had ever seen his son play football at Permian. He was almost unprepared for what it felt like to lookout man his own flesh and claret out there on that field. "Oh, man," he remembered. "The first I seen him conduct that ball, he busted that line for fourscore yards. Exercise you know how yous feel when you come across your son doin' good, doin' somethin' special? It kind of put a lump in your throat. Man, that boy ran that ball that night!"
The fire had been at that place during the Arlington game in the playoffs, later on he had come up off the field with tears in his optics because one of the opposing players had called him a northward-----. Coach Gary Gaines tried to comfort him and told him the other team only wanted to get him worked up so he would get himself kicked out of the game. And so he saw a alter come up over Boobie equally if something had snapped, the injure and humiliation giving way to a raging anger. He only carried the brawl twelve times that day for forty-eight yards, but it was his savage blocking that made the recruiters up in the stands take notice, the way he went later the Arlington defenders with uncontrolled vengeance, the manner he flattened a linebacker and rendered him semi-unconscious. It proved to them that Boobie had more than merely the requisite size and speed to play big-time college ball. He had the rawness, the abandon, the unbridled meanness.
When in compatible, Boobie Miles was head and shoulders above his teammates.
"He's strong as snot," Mike Winchell said of him.
"He'due south the best football player I've ever seen," said Jerrod McDougal.
Boobie himself was well aware that all eyes were poised on him this flavour, and while he luxuriated in it, he seemed most carefree about it. Holding court in the trainer'due south room shortly after the practices had begun in the Baronial estrus, he bantered with the ix-year-sometime son of one of the coaches every bit if they were best pals in grade schoolhouse together, calling him "waterbug caput," asking him if he had a girlfriend, grabbing his head and giving him a noogie, telling him that when information technology came to "the shoe," Adidas would never hold a nickel next to the almighty Nike. He lay on i of the brown trainer'southward tables, simply it was impossible for him to keep still. With his head hanging over the table, he ran his fingers along ane of the crevices in the wall and started to practise a rap tune.
He asked one of the pupil trainers to dial the telephone for him and call his girlfriend. The student held the phone out as Boobie, shaking with laughter, yelled from across the room, "What's the deal, what'southward the holdup on comin' to the firm?" When Trapper walked in, Boobie chosen him "cuz" and "cat-daddy." A few minutes later he was handed a list of defensive plays to written report. He looked at it for several seconds, the droning terminology of numbers and messages as highly-seasoned as Morse Lawmaking, and started to read it aloud in rap to give it a little flavor, a piffling extra pizzazz.
He connected to play with the wall and then turned onto his tummy before flipping over again on his back. He spoke in little snatches.
"My final year . . . I want to win State. Yous become your picture took and a lot of college people wait at you.
"When you get old, you lot say, you know, I went to State in nineteen fourscore-eight."
He dreamed of making information technology to the pros, just as long every bit it wasn't the New York Jets considering he didn't like the color greenish. And equally he flipped onto his stomach 1 more time, he said he couldn't ever, ever imagine a life without football because it would be "a large zero, 'cause, I don't know, it'south just the way I feel. If I had a good task and stuff, I yet wouldn't be happy. I want to go pro. That'south my dream . . . be rookie of the year or some-thin' similar that."
He moved off the line against the Palo Duro Dons and everything was in pulsating move, the legs thrust high, the hips swiveling, the arms pumping, the shoulder pads clapping wildly upwardly and down like the incessant beat out of a calypso pulsate.
He went for fifteen yards and it was only a scrimmage just he wanted more, he always wanted more when he had the ball. Near the sidelines he planted his left leg to stiff-arm a tackler. But the leg got caught in the artificial turf and so someone fell on the side of it and when he got up he was limping and could barely put whatever pressure on it at all.
The team medico, Weldon Butler, ran his fingers up and downwards the leg, feeling for broken bones. And so he moved to the knee.
Boobie watched the trail of those fingers, his eyes ablaze and his mouth slightly open. With the tiny vocalisation of a child, he asked Butler how serious it was, how long he would be out.
Butler just kept staring at his knee.
"You lot might be out six, eight weeks," he said quietly, well-nigh in a whisper.
Boobie jolted upright, equally if he was wincing from the force of a shock.
"Oh f---, human!"
"We won't know until nosotros x-ray it. It may exist worse if you don't stop moving that leg."
"Y'all tin't be serious, man! Yous got to be total of s---, human being!"
Butler said nothing.
"Man, I know you're not talking about any six to viii weeks."
Boobie was placed on the red players' demote behind the sideline and his black high tops were slowly untied. The leg was placed in a blackness bag filled with ice to assistance cease the swelling. He turned to Trapper.
"Is it gonna f--- upward my season, man?" he asked in a terrified whisper.
"I certain hope not," said Trapper.
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But privately, Trapper's assessment was different. Every bit a trainer he dealt with knee injuries all the time. His gut told him information technology was something serious, an injury that might forestall Boobie from ever playing football again the fashion he once had.
Boobie lay downwards and several pupil managers took off his pads. In his compatible, with all the unlike pads he fancied, he looked a little similar Robo Cop. Merely stripped of all the accoutrements, reduced to a greyness shirt soaked with sweat, he had lost his persona. He looked like what he was -- an eighteen-year-old kid who was scared to death.
"I won't be able to play college football, man," said Boobie in a whisper as the sounds of the game in the gauzy light -- the hits, the whistles of the officials, the yells of the coaches -- floated over him, had no effect on him anymore. "Information technology's real important. Information technology's all I ever wanted to do. I want to make it in the pros.
"All I wanted to do," he repeated again. "Make it to the pros."
When the injury occurred, L.V. could only picket with silent horror. He had stayed frozen in the stands, not wanting to have it or confront it, hoping that it would go abroad afterward a few nervous moments. But in that location were too many people around Boobie, looking at his knee as if it were a priceless vase with a suddenly discovered crack that had just made it worthless.
He had ever feared that Boobie would be seriously injured ane solar day, just not like this, not in a scrimmage that didn't count for a single statistic, non when he was nigh to have it all.
He had pushed Boobie in football game and prodded him and refused to let him quit. He did information technology because he loved him. And he likewise did it because he saw in his nephew the hopes, the possibilities, the dreams that he had never had in his ain life when he had been a male child growing up in West Texas, dorsum in a tiny town that looked like all the other tiny towns that dotted the plains like footling bottlecaps, back in the place the whites liked to call N-----town.
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From the book "Friday Night Lights." Copyright � 1990. Reprinted by arrangement with Da Capo Press, a fellow member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.espn.com/espn/page2/story?page=books/fnl/excerpt
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