Chapter 83: Passion ... But Not Too Much Passion

Frank Robinson, the senior middle linebacker and defensive captain for the Rough Riders, saw football as his gateway to a better life for himself and his family. Frank’s younger brother Kevin, following his brother’s path toward becoming a football hero, was the current middle linebacker for the Roosevelt Junior Varsity football team. He was ready to take over as middle linebacker for his brother the following season as a Junior. Their younger sister, Janet, also gravitated toward sports, being a sophomore softball player at Incarnate Word High School, a girls-only private school. Frank’s sway over his younger siblings naturally manifested into the added burden of being a father-like figure for the rest of the family since his own father was not in the picture. Their father was out of the picture due to circumstances entirely within his control, but he failed to do so.

Fred Robinson’s fall from legendary in the eyes of his children status started the night the police busted in the front door of their home and found Fred attempting to hide a sack full of hundreds of individually packed baggies of cocaine underneath the family sofa. If the police had arrived thirty minutes earlier, they could have also arrested his boss with not only Robinson’s bag of individually wrapped baggies but also ten other bags of the same size and number all set for distribution. Before that raid, Fred’s illicit occupation had given the Robinson family a leg up. He was successful in his chosen career, but his high life quickly came to an end.

It was Fred’s so-called third strike. In Texas, that meant serious time as a guest of the state. The crime was not what ruined the legendary status of father for son. It was the way his father cried worse than his little sister when she didn’t get her way in the world. Frank lost respect for a man who could not stand up and accept the punishment for his actions.

As a result of the trial and loss of income, their house was lost, the cars were repossessed, and the family moved in with Grandma and Grandpa for a few months. Frank remembered his time with the grandparents as the most disciplining he’d ever received, but he welcomed the discipline. When the grandparents made a rule, you followed it. When you followed it, you were rewarded. It was a great way to raise children who had essentially already been raising themselves since their parents were far more interested in the children as showpieces. Fred was quick to punish, and Phileesha was quick to try to strike a deal with their kids. The children were often left to fend for themselves with minimal supervision. The parents and the children needed to grow up, but only one set had an excuse for their actions.

When they finally moved out of the grandparents’ home, Frank decided to try to keep that level of discipline over his brother and sister. Nothing too extreme., but Frank would no longer allow the minimum effort in anything. Frank led by example, and he was quick to correct a mistake rather than blame a child for the same mistake twice.

Kevin and Janet had a new father figure, and their mother noticed the continuing improvement in behavior after moving into their apartment. That gave her the state of mind to get a job that would allow her to support the family herself.

It was not her original plan. Initially, her plan was to get out from under her parents’ heel again with a temporary job and find a new man to take over supporting her and her children. It was a small conversation one morning while mother and daughter were fixing the little one’s hair for school that changed her path.

“Baby girl, why aren’t you and your brothers causing me more trouble? You used to be all wild, but now, since we moved outta Grandma and Grandpa’s, you three have been little angels. I’m not complaining, but I noticed the difference, and I was wondering why.” It wasn’t a confrontation but a plea for information.

The sheepish second-grader looked down to the ground, pulling the comb from her hair as she mulled over her answer. “Frank said we need to be good for you because we don’t want to lose you, too.”

The mother quickly wiped the tears forming from her eyes, inhaled deeply, and continued brushing her daughter’s hair. A watershed moment for a mother who’s laid-back attitude on raising children only worked when the kids saw the worst. She never raised the subject again.

That morning, Frank’s mother decided to leave her relatively simple and decent-paying job at the local mom-and-pop convenience store owned and run by family friends. She had worked there since she could legally begin working, and she knew every inch of the business and how to run it correctly.

Later that day, after the conversation with her baby girl, she had a heart-to-heart talk with the owner of the store. She was told in no uncertain terms that the convenience store was a family business and that only family would get promoted to assistant and lead managers. She was always welcomed there, but she would never be able to be in charge. It was simply their family store, and she was a well-respected and trusted employee, but she would never be allowed to run anything more than herself during her shift.

Good old dad, the store owner, knew holding her back and forcing her into making a decision was a risk. He cared for his long-time employee and knew Phileesha would need a kick in the butt to get along with her life. It was why the store owner was so blunt with a good employee.

Phileesha Robinson decided to leave the convenience store and take a risk on a new telemarketing business. Several of her friends said it was good work, and there were good opportunities for advancement.

Within three years of taking the job, Phileesha Robinson rose to manager for the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. night crew. The sales numbers were outstanding, and her supervisors were elated with the work she did. The entire branch had done so well that the corporate level decided to open a second location, and they needed a new general manager.

For the past five years, Phileesha Robinson had been the general manager for the second location of a nationally recognized telemarketing leader, and her children thrived under her expectations.

Frank’s need to help his family served as constant fuel for his intensity. Frank grew up seeing what his mother had done to give him, his brother, and his sister everything necessary after his father was gone. His need to take the burden off his mother’s back put it squarely on his sculpted shoulders. Besides, he was the man of the house, and he needed to take on the pressures that entailed.

Using his family situation as a justification for his emotional play, Frank lived his life with the fire and passion he felt was needed to become the one who protected his family. He played football with a passion of a thousand nuclear reactors.

When Frank saw Tim finally stand up for himself on the football field, he felt like he just watched his child graduate from college.

“Holy shit,” Frank muttered under his breath.

He pulled his teammate back away from the group of Chaparrals. They were surrounding one of their premier players, who was currently rolling on the ground, desperately gasping for gulps of air. Frank noticed none of the other team members were attempting to square off against anyone from his team, so he moved to get them back to their huddle and put space between his teammate and all of the opposing team.

Frank spun his teammate around when they reached the huddle. “Holy shit,” Frank exclaimed when they were eye to eye.

“You already said that,” Tim whispered back. Frank took a second to look Tim in the eye and saw the mischievous smile forming behind the scratched and slightly warping visor.

“Shit,” Frank muttered as he began pushing and slapping Tim’s helmet while repeatedly snarling, “Shit!”

After a few seconds, the nonplussed members of the Rough Rider defensive huddle saw Frank’s smile, so they stopped worrying about their leader abusing their best player.

Frank finally showed that he had mastered other words in his vocabulary. “That! That! That! That is how I want you to play!” The defensive captain turned to look at the rest of the huddle. “That! Is! How! I! Want! You! All! To! Play!”

Frank was vibrating with energy, and it threatened to overtake him. Each repeated word was emphasized by a hard, open-palm slap on a different player’s chest. The defense was getting even more hyped than before the game started.

Coach O’Shaughnessy looked slyly at a couple of the other coaches roaming the sidelines and gave a slight smile to each one. If he could, Coach O’Shaughnessy would have donned a uniform and joined the others on the field.

“Dude. Settle a bit before you lose it,” Tim offered to his captain. “Take a knee and a drink of water to calm down.”

The athletic trainer offered the defensive unit both water bottles and a couple of towels draped over her shoulders.

Tim looked at the group again. “Is that how you want me to play? Should I send all of them to the hospital?”

“No, of course not,” Frank stated as he began to calm down, “but what I want you...” The senior captain turned to the rest of the huddle. “But what I want all of you to do is show emotion when you play within reason. Don’t turn into an ass, but take pride in stopping the other team. Big John ain’t here to rag on your ass for celebration. You know when you make a great play, so celebrate it when you can.”

Frank raised his voice a little louder for the players on the sideline. “That goes for all of you. You do a good job, let us know. Don’t be a dick. Let’s see a little emotion.”

Both huddles quieted as an open-air golf cart drove onto the field to collect the injured White and deliver him to the waiting ambulance parked just inside a tunnel leading out of the stadium.

“Do you think I really hurt that guy?” a slightly subdued Tim asked.

“Naw. He was moving around and whatnot. Shit, look at that. He’s moving himself into the ambulance. I figure you was probably right, you just gave him a couple of broken ribs. They’ll hurt like a motherfucker for a couple of weeks, but he’ll be good to go. Where the fuck was he going to college, anyways?” Frank queried the huddle.

“Alabama” came from several players.

Frank nodded and took a final swig of water as the Chaparrals returned to their huddle, and the referees signaled the game would continue.

Tim lined up in his usual right-side defensive end position, and he got a look at the replacement lining up in front of him. It took everything in Tim’s power not to break out laughing. The kid looked like he was looking at Freddy Krueger and Jason from the Friday the 13^th movies riding atop giant sabretooth tigers.

On the ball snap, Tim barely acknowledged the replacement player as he ran through the weak shove attempt of a block. The new left tackle immediately fell to the ground while Tim tackled the running back just as he got the hand-off from the quarterback.

Tim saw an opportunity. When he got up from the tackle, he jogged right up to Coach O’Shaughnessy on the sidelines. “Coach, I’ve got them all scared shitless. Maybe we can run some stunts and get the other guys into some fun.”

“Sounds like a plan. Tell Frank and go for it.” The interim coach slapped Tim on his shoulder pads, returning him to the huddle.

Tim informed the middle linebacker of the coach’s order. “Ooh. Fuck yes! Sounds like fun. Anybody else want in on the fun?” Several grunts in the affirmative came from each member of the defense. “All out blitz. Let’s just destroy them right here. We’ll give them all an early taste of the college game. Ready. Break!”

The next play could have been on the goal line or even on their one-yard line. The Rough Riders did not care. They were crazed dogs going after a fresh kill.

The Chaparral coaches did not recognize the dire straights their team was falling into. The next few offensive plays from the Austin-area football team had absolutely nowhere to go. No player could hold their blocks. The wide receivers could not get an inch of separation from their defenders. The running back seemed like he constantly guessed wrong as to where his offensive line was going to open holes for him. The quarterback needed all his athletic ability to catch the snaps from the center for the rest of the game before they could sail over his head. They looked like a Pop Warner team of ten-year-old boys playing against the latest Super Bowl winners.

The halftime siren was a blessing.

The game in the second half was more of the same from the end of the first half. The life had been sucked out of the Austin Westlake Chaparrals. When their star, left tackle Jayshon White, hoisted himself into an ambulance, the demoralization of the rest of the team was immediate.

One interesting change came from the interim Rough Rider Head Coach Marty O’Shaughnessy when the teams came out after halftime. Tim switched from the right side to the left side. The coach also ordered his superstar defensive end to forget about speed and rushing the right-side tackle of the offensive line.

“You’ve already scared the living shit out of those kids! I want you to bum-rush the rest of them. A lot! I want you to take somebody and push him into the stands on each play. Don’t give up until the whistle blows. Do you got me, son?” Coach O’Shaughnessy challenged a smiling and nodding freshman football phenom.

On the Chaparrals’ first offensive play of the second half, Tim Murphy pushed someone’s beloved child against their will forty yards behind the line of scrimmage until the whistle blew, signifying the end of the play.

The quarterback was smothered by the ample backside of one of his offensive linemen. The running back was being demolished by Frank Robinson, who made the tackle for a loss and had shot right through the second-string left tackle. According to the player reports the team read all week, the backup left tackle was a young man with potential, but he was going through an actual learning experience in this game.

Frank was barking and howling at the moon in a closed stadium. The scoreboard operators must have done some reading ahead of time since they had an excellent short video of the moon to show on the jumbo TV screens dotted around the field.

The final score was 84 – 0, a devastating score for any game but especially for a regional finals playoff game.

The Rough Rider defense took home the respect of the football experts around the state, and thanks to the Holdin brothers and their excellent recap videos of the game that went viral throughout the following week. The videos each started with the video of Tim Murphy confronting the collection of buffoons from Austin Westlake at mid-field, where he answered their taunts by popping a brand new football.

An industrious person fished the deflated ball out of a trash can in the visitor’s locker room soon after the game. The Holdins’ camera was in the right place at the right time again, and a still shot of the exploded football, with an embossed Westlake Chaparrals football logo featured prominently and jutting precariously off the edge of a table, put a big, bold exclamation point on the video.

After the game, Westlake’s head coach and the athletic trainer visited Jayshon and his family, who were visiting from Austin, in a nearby hospital.

“Jayshon, son, how are you feeling?” the coach asked a prone Jayshon, lying on a hospital bed with a cold compress atop his chest.

The head coach thought Jayshon looked pathetic on the hospital bed. His parents, who were waiting with him in the tiny nook of the emergency room, had done their best to remove the majority of pads and accessories from their son. He was stuck wearing the game pants with their thigh pads still in them and the cut-off t-shirt he wore underneath his shoulder pads.

“Did you catch the end of the game?”

“Yeah, coach. My dad let me watch for a while on his phone, but I kept getting madder and madder at what I was watching,” Jayshon exclaimed. “I mean, I’m sorry I lost the state championship for you, Coach.”

“No, son, you didn’t lose us a state championship. We simply ran into a team that wanted it more and were rewarded for their hard work. But Jayshon let me ask you ... have you ever played against a better opponent?”

Jayshon didn’t trust his voice or emotions to hang onto his masculinity if he tried to answer the question. So he shook his head no. The head coach simply patted him on his legs and agreed. “I don’t think in all my life, I’ve ever seen a player like that before. And I’ve coached NFL players and even number one ranked recruits in the country.”

After a few moments, the emotion tempered down, and Jayshon could speak again. “I tried everything, coach. After the first play, I felt just how strong he was. It was like hitting a freakin’ moving brick wall. He was so strong, and he was so athletic. The film did not show just how fast his first step was. I mean, I was hitting him with everything I had, and he just rolled with it and continued on his way.

“I was basically guessing, Coach. His body positioning gave away nothing. I mean, I couldn’t even see if his knuckles were white when he lined up in his three-point stance. Nothing was working, but do you want to know the worst part, Coach?”

The coach was quiet, listening to one of his star players admit his problems after a horrible game. “The only thing that kind of pissed him off ... oops, sorry, Mom,” he apologized to the stoic woman sitting quietly beside him, with his father, holding her son’s hand. “The only stuff that seemed to rattle him was when we tried to poke his eyes while under piles of guys.”

“You did what? You did that on purpose?” Jayshon’s mother was no longer stoic but screaming at her son. She threw down her son’s hand, it bounced off the handrail of the hospital bed, and when she noticed him wince in pain, she gently picked it back up and caressed it lovingly. “Sorry.”

“No need to apologize to the young man. It is an old school practice we teach the boys to do if they feel their opponent is too much for them to handle. Of course, we also preach not doing it unless there is no other way,” the coach apologized. I don’t think you’ve ever had to use that tactic before, have you, Jayshon?”

Again, his masculinity felt to be leaving him, so he shook his head again.

The doctors returned with the results from their tests and x-rays. “Well, son. I heard your friends couldn’t pull out a victory for you after you got hurt. I know it hurts, but there will be other games for you to play. I understand you’re going to play ball at Alabama next year. Is that right?”

“Yes, sir. I signed my letter of intent right before the season started. I didn’t want to have to deal with all of that extra stuff during the season,” Jayshon answered. Then, a fearful thought flashed in his mind: “I’ll be able to play next year, right? I’m not going to get pulled off the field with this injury.”

“Oh no, son. No. This kind of injury usually take about four to six weeks to heal, and you’ll be good to go. I don’t think you’ll be back until like mid-January or so. Just take it easy, and no lifting weights until you get the okay from your personal physician. I’ve already sent a copy of the film to the email you gave me for your doctor. Call him on Monday and set up an appointment to go deeper into the injury if you’d like. Be careful, though! Two broken ribs aren’t something to take lightly.”

Jayshon looked like someone had just walked over his grave. Everyone noticed. The doctor looked up, put down the clipboard he was reading off of, and went for the stethoscope hanging around his neck. “He told me so,” Jayshon mumbled quietly under his breath.

“What was that, Jayshon? We couldn’t quite hear you?” The doctor got closer and placed the stethoscope on Jayshon’s chest, looking for something new wrong with his patient. Jayshon could no longer hold back his masculinity as tears began streaming down his face and fear set in his eyes.

“He fucking told me on the field, before everyone got to me, what he had just done.” Jayshon was turning even more pale.

“Speak up, son. We can’t hear what you’re saying,” Mr. White said from the other side of his son’s hospital bed.

“Mayhem! After he beat my ass. He fucking told me, ‘I only broke two of them; you got 22 more left to deal with,’” Jayshon told the room of concerned people.

The coach looked at the athletic trainer in surprise and then asked, “Doc, have you ever heard of somebody who could tell how many ribs he had just broken on someone after the hit?”

“No, I can’t say as I have. I’ve known people who could hit you and tell you they broke your ribs, but not a specific number. That is admittedly strange,” the doctor answered.

He hung his stethoscope back around his neck, picked up his clipboard once again, made a couple of final notes, and stated, “Well, son, you are cleared to go home. Sorry about your team losing tonight, but congratulations on a fine season, and earning the opportunity to play at the next level.”

He waved to everyone in the room and backed out to see another patient.

Jayshon’s mom moved to the foot of the bed and began working to put his cleats back on his feet. They were the only shoes he had with him. Jayshon’s father collected his wife’s belongings and made his way to the nurse’s station to fill out the last of the paperwork before they left.

“I trust you’ll be all right going home with your mom?” the coach said to his star. He placed his hand on one of his legs, still encased in their uniformed pads. “The doc was right. You had a great four years of football for Westlake. We ran into a team that was better on this night,” the coach said, trying to cheer up the Alabama commit. It just didn’t work. The coach saw it didn’t work, so he patted the young man on his thigh and signaled to the trainer for them to leave, and they did so after shaking Jayshon’s mother’s hand.

She watched the two men, clad in identical school polo shirts and blue jeans, exit the emergency room. “I never did like that guy,” Jayshon’s mom whispered.

Jayshon began to chuckle but quickly thought differently when the change in breathing did not agree with his injury. His mom pampered him for a few more moments as they waited for Mr. White to return from filling out papers, which didn’t take that long.

“Okay, everybody. You two ready to blow this taco stand and head on home?” Mr White appeared at the door with a nurse pushing a wheelchair.