High school football in these communities is vital. Chapter 9 in NEVER SETTLE, entitled “Forever Friday,” centers on this topic. During the chat, the impact of high school football teams on rural communities was broached. I recently discussed all of this during a speech about my first book, NEVER SETTLE: Sports, Family and the American Soul, with a quarterback club group in Birmingham, Alabama. Young love and the playoffs.įor a moment your sleepy town is electric. We never had a plan, just livin’ for the minute… Talkin’ ’bout cars and dreamin’ ’bout women…
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You smile because that smell and that scene place you back on that dirt patch practice field deep within those mountains at dusk, dirty fingernails and a runny nose and a stretched-out sweatshirt that smells like month-old sweat, preparing for the state playoffs, thinking about how you’re going to call that girl. The forest bursts in vivid oranges and maroons and golds.
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You’re easing down a backroad with the windows down and the kids in the back, now, engulfed in the crisp autumn air, and the scent of an active chimney nearby fills the cab that distinct smell mixed with chilly air that signals seasonal change. It’s nearly impossible to know until years later when it unexpectedly jumps up and bites you. In most cases, you don’t even know you’re living those moments while you’re in them. Hudson was one-up due to your laziness? Son, that was a bad day for you. And if you didn’t bring it by later, he knew your old man would swing by soon enough for a pack of Marlboro Lights, an Oatmeal Crème Pie, and a carton of chocolate milk. You pull onto the interstate nestled deep within the tranquil confines of that RAM or that Rover, looking in the rearview past three decades of wrinkles on your own face, directly into the twinkle of that sweet little grin on hers.Īnd you think what a long road it’s been to get here from the windows-down hillbilly symphony that was the way-too-damn-expensive-but-man-I-can’t-live-without-‘em BF Goodrich T/As humming on the blacktop like a swarm of cicadas in July.Ī gallon of gas back then cost you 89 whole cents at the Super Val-U over in Newport – and if you didn’t have the change just then, Mr. And let me tell you, in this crazy 2020, that’s a hell of a sweet place to be on a Friday at 3 p.m. She was a two-door, four on the floor diarrhea-gold monsterpiece with an analog Sanyo aftermarket tape deck that constantly drained the battery but never failed you when That Summer or It Sure Is Monday came on WPSK 107.3 FM.Īs you leave carpool, that’s your headspace. We got a little crazy, but we never got caught…Īlan’s singing, and in your mind, you’ve traded your current-day RAM or Range Rover, with its limitless NASA-like amenities, for the ’85 Chevy S10 Blazer Outdoorsman you drove in high school, the one that (no-lie) came equipped with a custom Winchester 30-30 rifle and a pair of racks to hang it in the window. Or what about the way the first few bars of Chattahoochee instantly transport you back three decades? One minute you’re idling in suburban car seat carpool line agony, but the next, you’re in a Nowhere, Virginia IGA parking lot, adjacent to the Pizza Hut, listening to Alan holler “Ahhhh-ha!” And it’s three hours to kickoff. And you all know that if your moms knew you were dipping that mess, it would crush them. Nobody in the group would ever dare admit it, but you all know that if your dads knew you felt that way, it would crush them. You confess that somehow those wins seem to mean more to your daddy than they do to you. Somebody mentions the mounting pressure of winning on Friday night. Where you and the boys sat around on muddy tailgates, talking girls and guns and ballgames, shooting arrows at hay bales with a compound bow in the moonlight, while detailing a distinct fear of rejection should you summon the bravery to ask for her number, while simultaneously considering the unsuppressed euphoria you’d experience should she actually take a writing utensil and form those numbers for you on notebook paper.Īnd, on top of that, my Lord, the sheer terror of her daddy answering the phone if you actually did dial those numbers she so elegantly scribbled. The way it embeds in your clothes and your hair and takes you back to the cornfield bonfire, out by the island in the river you swore your parents couldn’t possibly know about but did. For me, it can be something as simple as campfire smoke.
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