Saturdays in the Fall
Despite all that’s crooked and upside-down across the landscape of collegiate sports, Saturdays in the fall are still for football. I love the precision and near perfection of teams that line up on Sunday, but there’s something about the next-in-lines who take the field the day before that I’m drawn to even more. Most everything looks a little bit harder on Saturdays. Passes aren’t always caught. Tackles aren’t always made. The players aren’t nearly as crisp, the play not nearly as clean. And yet, I can’t take my eyes off the Saturday scene. From the public pledge of college campuses dotted with gothic halls to the potential of young men in 21st-century armor laying it all on the line for one another (as well as packs of people they will never know), college game days make promises they both can and cannot keep.
The Sooners enter the field.
Photo by Julie Lazalier Harvey (CC2.0)
Perhaps that’s what lures us in. Maybe our team will ____ (fill in the blank) – show up, show out, deliver, disappear - maybe they won’t. The sticky ooze of sports on every level probably always starts right there. But in college football, particularly, everything seems twice its size.
This past Saturday, amid the pomp and circumstance of Oklahoma’s maiden voyage into the Southeastern Conference, the future took a hard left for a young man in a crimson jersey stamped with a bright white number fifteen. Kendel Dolby, a senior defensive back from Springfield, Ohio, whose assignment is always to hunt and take down the ball-carrier, found himself rolled up under an opposing offensive lineman who was simultaneously engrossed in his job, working to open a hole. When the ball-carrier hit the ground, thanks to Dolby’s efforts, both the protector and the pursuer were injured on the play. As trainers from both squads rushed to the field, it became clear that Dolby’s ankle injury was of the gruesome sort. The kind, reminiscent of Theisman’s, that they don’t replay on TV.
As medical personnel administered physical aid on the turf, coaches encircled the athlete to hold together the pieces and parts that can’t be surgically repaired. After the trainers placed Dolby on the medical cart, Brent Venables, Oklahoma’s head coach, spoke directly into his ear. Tears fell from Dolby’s eyes. At first the D-back looked straight ahead while listening, then he dropped his head into his hands, his 190 lb. frame bobbing as he sobbed. Kendel Dolby’s ankle had shattered, but so had his competitor’s heart and his most palpable hopes and dreams.
I was fortunate. As a competitive athlete, my entire career was basically injury free. The closest I ever came to even missing a practice due to physical trauma came courtesy of a broken nose. At 5’4” I’m just tall enough to jump up into the space where post players’ elbows go, so it was bound to happen and it did. But I’ve never been the one carried out of the ring.
As a coach for over three decades, however, I endured injury on a regular basis. The howls of many a broken heart echo inside of my mind, still. And every time I see another fall, the neurons re-ignite. My worst moments were the ones where I held an athlete whose pain I couldn’t cure.
The entire Oklahoma sideline huddled in prayer during the Sooner/Vols injury time-out, then they rushed to the field and surrounded the cart where Dolby sat in disbelief. When the officials, after a bit, called for the team to disperse so the game could continue, the medical cart made its way toward the tunnel and 90,000 people roared.
The athlete responded in-kind with a courageous gloved thumbs-up.
He gave his team and his fans what they wanted: permission, even encouragement, to “Go On!” Then, just as the world around him resumed, Kendel Dolby viscerally folded in half. His solitary journey was at hand.
Rarely is an athletic injury life-threatening, or even career-ending. Most are simply detours that lengthen the road and try the spirit. The committed typically face them with the same gritted teeth and anchored jaw that have always been the essence of their motor. But, for an athlete, not playing is the pain. A relentless pursuit of excellence hi-jacked from out of the blue is a dagger laced with salt. The injury pales in comparison to the wound.
I feel certain Kendel Dolby will be back. And odds are he’ll be even better than before, even if he’s not as fast or nimble. He’ll have an inside somethin’-somethin’ that has already been birthed. But the road ahead is steep and lonesome. It’s not a glitzy climb.
Next week, color-coded demigods will once again run out of smoke-filled tunnels onto fields of green in stadiums across campuses everywhere. Legions of fans will flock, and college football will do what it always imperfectly does. It will keep and break its promises in larger-than-life style.
And we will watch, hoping for more kept than broken on Saturdays in the fall.