Chapter 87: Now THESE Boys are Serious

The bus ride back to San Antonio from Waco started raucous and loud with overlapping conversations, and very few were not seriously paying attention. Most voices were lamenting the lack of an appropriate party to celebrate earning a spot in the state championship.

“Tim, what you think about that?”

Tim Murphy wasn’t paying attention to the conversations around him since he was concentrating on the internet talking heads discussing how badly the Rough Riders would get destroyed at the state championship. The main story described how the current number one ranked high school player in the country, Antwaun Gibbs, the six-foot eight-inch, 395 pound, five-star, senior left offensive tackle for the Duncanville Panthers, will match up against the freshman phenomenon and six-foot five-inch defensive end for the upstart San Antonio Roosevelt Rough Riders. The internet vultures could smell blood in the water. They had all put their future eggs in Mr. Gibbs’ basket. They all believed he would be the best high school football player the country had ever seen, and they had all been saying that since the middle of his freshman season. Since then, Duncanville had not lost a single game and had won three straight 6A Texas High School Championships. Number four was going to be the easiest to win.

Dave Campbell’s Texas Football had named Gibbs the best football player from the state of Texas each year he had played, including his freshman season. Gibbs came onto the high school football scene already well-known since he picked up his first few college football offers in middle school. He was a big kid and spent many summers roaming Texas and neighboring states for football camps to showcase his obvious talent and to be evaluated by the various coaching staff. Those evaluations often followed the young man from eighth-grade football into high school and various seven-on-seven football tournaments. That was unusual for a dedicated offensive lineman, but for seven-on-seven, Gibbs showcased his athleticism and all-around gifts to play football. The young man’s future was already set, and rumor had it that NFL scouts would watch Gibbs’ development as a football player during their downtime. They hoped to get a hands-up when the time came for Antwaun Gibbs to leave the world of student-athletes and finally become a professional.

“Come on, Tim! Who do you think can get the most pussy on a weeknight?”

Tim was trying to watch the discussions about their upcoming game, so he broke out with annoyance and more fire than intended, “Dudes! Shut your traps! I’m trying to fucking watch something.”

Right away, he wanted to apologize for going off on the guys, but he was really interested in the discussion. After a minute or so, he noticed the volume in the bus died off almost entirely.

“We suggest you apologize to your teammates. Explain what you were watching. You could turn their discussions toward what to expect against Duncanville,” the nanites printed across his vision. Tim did notice the nanites waited until the story was finished to make their thoughts readable. “End of message.”

Tim breathed in deeply and let it out, only looking up from his iPad slightly. He noticed a some of the others trying to look like they weren’t looking in his direction. He removed the earbuds from his ears.

“Sorry, guys. I was just watching this discussion of Texas Football, and they were comparing us and Duncanville. They are looking forward to the game.”

“Yeah, so are we,” Frank said and emphasized by punching the back of the bus seat in front of him, where a couple of JV roster fillers were seated. They jumped a little. Both Frank and Tim preferred sitting up in front rather than trying to get lost in the back of the bus. Several others agreed with Frank’s sentiment and began sharing high fives and punching others in their arms — obviously manly things to do when with other men.

“No. They think Duncanville is going to whoop our asses and send us home with our backs broken and some shitty second-place trophy.” The guys didn’t like that. “We are right now solid underdogs, and most think Duncanville will trounce us by at least two touchdowns.”

“What?!”

“That’s a bunch of bullshit!”

“What the fuck do they know?!?” The team’s attitudes quickly turned from indignant at being thought of as unworthy to ready to prove the experts wrong again.

“They’ve been wrong about us all year!”

“Yeah! We’ve been underdogs almost all season!”

“Welcome back to Dave Campbell’s Texas Football. I’m Ashley Pickle, back in the home studio after the stunning turnaround of a football game where San Antonio Roosevelt welcomed the rest of the country to their first look at Tim ‘Mayhem’ Murphy. The freshman phenom showed everyone exactly why he is the talk of Texas high school football as San Antonio Roosevelt defeated Galena Park North Shore 28-7. Let’s send you back to the booth with Greg Tepper and Texas high school football coaching legend Chuck Gibson.”

“Thanks, Pickle, and yes, I’m Greg Tepper, managing editor of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football and your host for today’s game, alongside football coaching legend Chuck Gibson. And Coach, at halftime, you called Tim ‘Mayhem’ Murphy the best defensive lineman you have ever seen play high school football, and that second half certainly showed everybody that you are probably right. I am definitely one of the converted. The first half saw Galena Park essentially nullify Mayhem. You told us their blocking schemes were bottling him up. It seemed like they completely forgot what they were doing to try and stop him. Everything they threw at him seemed to fail in the second half. So my question to you, Coach, is what happened in the second half?”

The white-haired, well-tanned man squirmed in his seat. The longtime football coach was plainly not yet comfortable in front of a TV camera. “Well, I was glad to see I still knew enough about this game to correctly predict what the Rough Rider coaches might try, but wow, I wasn’t expecting that!”

The camera cut away from watching the two men in the broadcast booth to replays of Tim’s three touchdowns.

“Let’s take another look at what will surely become a viral set of videos on social media in the next week or so,” Tepper exclaimed.

The first touchdown showed Tim running straight down the field, passing the defender, keeping him from the ball, and catching the ball efficiently and in stride. In the next play, Tim leaped over two defenders and got tangled in limbs, causing the three defenders to fall, and Tim kept his balance to score his second touchdown. The final was a catch with no one able to keep up with him for his third and longest catch and run for a touchdown. The film then featured some of his tackles behind the line of scrimmage, including the explosive collision that brought down the running back and then them trading blink-and-you-miss-it fist bumps after helping each other up and off the field.

“Tim ‘Mayhem’ Murphy is everything as advertised. I don’t know what was happening in the first quarter, but something lit a fire under his butt, and we got a firsthand look at the terror of San Antonio high school football. He is exactly as advertised, and, if anything, they might have been underselling the young man. It sure will be fun to follow him for the next three years before he goes off to college.” The old coach slapped his thigh and laughed aloud before offering his final thoughts, “Great gosh almighty, I just had a hell of a thought,” the coach gushed.

“Lay it on us, Coach.”

“I can’t wait to see what kind of circus is going to form around that young man to try to influence his choice of which college he brings a couple of national championships!”

“Does anyone have any game film of Duncanville?” Tim asked loudly.

Troy popped up from his seat. People started shuffling around through bags and retrieving their iPads for the film.

“I just posted their game yesterday in the team folder a few minutes ago,” Coach Krebsback announced from one of the front seats on the bus. “Copy it. Don’t try to watch over the network. You’ll just clog up the whole damn thing. I’ll have a couple of their other games later tonight, but when you get home, try to get some sleep. The film will still be there tomorrow.”

The noise level dropped dramatically while the players gathered around players with bigger screens. None of the players wanted to try watching the Duncanville film on a tiny phone screen.

The film Coach Krebsback made available was a copy of the Duncanville win over the DeSoto Eagles, which they made look relatively easy. The final score was 48-0. The experts had believed this game was the true state championship and did not expect either Roosevelt or Galena Park North Shore to put up much of a fight against the winner.

The experts were expounding on their previous belief that the road to the Texas High School Football State Championship goes through Duncanville. Based on the first half of the North Shore vs. Roosevelt game, the Rough Riders didn’t have enough of an arsenal to last a full four quarters against an obviously superior football team. By the end of the bus ride home, the team’s tenor had changed dramatically.

The Duncanville Panthers had depth and talent at every position on the field. With Tanner Jones and Nyquan Jenkins, they had the number four quarterback and number three running back in the country. They also had the numbers eight and nine ranked defensive tackles in the country in Danny Prince and Charles Rogers.

. Not every starter would be moving on to a Division I school with a scholarship. Two outstanding young men chose to go to North Dakota State University. The Bison had won the Division II National championship four out of the last six seasons. The Duncanville Panthers had a significant number of their third-string players earning full scholarship rides to college based on their abilities to play the game.

The Duncanville Panthers looked like a collection of the best high school football players in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, all going to the same high school, most having been playing together from Pop Warner football in fourth grade through middle school and then into high school. Top coaching from some of the best coaches in the state visiting these kids in the off-season was readily available. Sprinkle on top of that ice cream sundae some of the best natural athletes in the country.

According to the internet experts, the Duncanville Panthers were scary good. Evaluations of the upcoming game for the state championship had them looking forward to watching the end of the Cinderella story from San Antonio.

The feeling of achievement was gone before the team bus had cleared through Austin on its way back to San Antonio. Several more instances of what the Panthers were able to do to their opponents on the film were discouraging the triumphant team as they returned to their home school.

Coach O’Shaughnessy could feel exactly what his team felt since the coaches were doing the same thing as the players during the ride back home. What they saw was a football juggernaut with little to no evident weaknesses. It would take a lot of work to figure out a winning game plan against this storied program. The interim coach asked himself if he should try to mitigate the worst of these feelings of inadequacies with the team now before he lost them for the rest of the weekend.

The bus was still a few blocks away, but the team saw the long caravan of vehicles making their way to the high school, steadily adding to the numbers already there despite the late hour. The coach decided to help himself and his team get a little bit of rest. The grizzled veteran of high school football got the team’s attention with a short burst of his whistle.

“Okay, ladies! Listen up, please.” Conversations rapidly died down throughout the bus. “Eyes and ears on me, men.”

Once quiet, the long-tenured football coach decided the old-fashioned “rah, rah” speech wasn’t the right thing at this moment.

“I understand how you guys are feeling. We went from floating on cloud nine after a great win against a powerful opponent to free-falling right through all the damn clouds in the sky toward open fields filled with shards of broken glass,” the coach smiled to let the guys know he was trying to be funny. It didn’t really work but for a few pity chuckles. “Those bits of film we’ve been able to find thus far do not exactly make our jobs any easier.”

Coach O’Shaughnessy started pacing back and forth up and down the bus aisle. “But I think we’ve seen enough of those. Forget about them tonight, fellas. Enjoy the win. We have one more to go for a state championship!”

The applause was definitely lackluster. “I said, hey Rough Riders, what did y’all just do tonight?”

“We punched our ticket to the goddamned state championship,” Frank jumped up and threw his arm around the coach when he got to him in the aisle. The cheering picked up a bit but was still subdued for the occasion.

One by one, the coaches told the team what they had seen the Roosevelt Rough Riders do earlier in the night. “I saw a team finally realize they were a team, and they played some pretty inspired football to knock off one of the state’s more famous football powerhouses!”

Troy stood up and led with a tried-and-true method of inspiring conformity: stomps and a hand clap.

Boom! Boom! Clap!

Boom! Boom! Clap!

Boom! Boom! Clap!

The cadence continued to grow in volume and began to speed up. The added cheers all blew into a giant frenzy as the bus turned into the school parking lot to the cheers of the crowd of family and friends who stayed up until nearly two in the morning to greet the heroes.

“Enjoy the win tonight, fellas! Get it all out of your system this weekend because Monday...” Coach O’Shaughnessy stood at the front door of the bus and pushed the lever to open the door. “We. Get. To. Work.”

He jumped off the bus and moved out of the way as the players began pouring out of the bus as well.

The band buses beat the football team by a few minutes. They hastily got into some kind of formation. While waiting for the team bus to pull into the parking lot, they started in with the school’s alma mater. It looked like they were sending the team off to begin a game, not welcoming them home after a well-earned victory.

“Come on, Mom! We’re gonna miss when they get off the bus,” Carmen said, pulling her mother to join the crowd waiting for the bus to arrive.

“We’re not gonna miss’em, sweety,” Her mom pleaded with the energetic fourth grader. The father smiled proudly, following the two ladies he loved most in his life.

“You, little miss, will never get to drink any of your father’s coffee ever again, that’s for sure!” Raymond was now openly laughing. A few other parents overhearing the conversation were also giggling. “You are definitely going to sleep when we get home!”

Carmen was off to the side, dancing with similarly-aged children waiting for their football family members. They weren’t really dancing; they were more like dissolving into full-body spasms, desperately fighting off tiredness with every ounce of their beings since it was nearly two in the morning. The parents laughed more because of that than anything funny that might have been said aloud.

The players piled out of the bus, gave the fans several high fives, and basked in the glow of the fans’ congratulations. Off to the opposite side of the group from Tim’s family were several people wearing Spurs jerseys. Aside from the gang uniform, they were just as involved with the celebration as everyone else.

“Timmy! Timmy!” Carmen was desperately trying to get out of her mother’s death grip on her arm. That grip was released when she saw her son exit the bus.

As usual, Tim was one of the last people off the bus, and the crowd fired up the volume when he appeared. Tim’s parents had learned to wait for the public to welcome their son first. Tim’s little sister knew that but chose to ignore the others to ensure her place with her big brother. Tim knew to look for the precocious fourth grader to come steamrolling through any crowds to reach him. Tim knelt after a few steps off the bus and pulled his little sister into a swinging hug, eventually placing her back on the ground.

“Hey, did you have fun at the game,” Tim asked his little sister.

“Oh, yeah! But the ride home was soooo long,” she complained but then put her hands on her hips and an annoyed look on her face. “What happened with the first half?”

Tim smiled, picked her up, and placed her on his shoulder while the many onlookers smiled at the regular showing after games. “I’m sorry, little one, but did I make up for it?”

“Okay. Yes, you did.”

The crowd was all grins and chuckles. Tim smiled and thanked everyone for coming out for the team’s win and return home. He finally noticed the Darq Squad members in their Spurs jerseys with their leader, Tommy, cheering and clapping along with the rest of the crowd. They made eye contact, and Tommy raised his thumb to Tim, who acknowledged the congratulatory thumbs-up with a wave of his own. They all seemed genuine and gave no evidence of being insincere with the joy of the victory.

Soon enough, Tim finished receiving congratulations from almost every Roosevelt family and was able to join his parents at their car. Carmen kept her spot, overlooking everyone from atop her brother’s shoulder. Tim brought Carmen down so she could claim her spot in the car. Then, the football superstar hugged his mother, Juanita, and got a brief hug from his proud father.

When the two Murphy men hugged, Tim whispered, “Did you see the Darq Squad?”

“Yeah, I saw them, but I also saw them at the game, and they seemed like regular fans cheering on their school to victory,” Raymond answered, and Tim nodded with understanding.

While getting squared away in the car for the trip home, Tim felt the familiar buzz of his phone in his pocket. He pulled the device out of his pocket and smiled. A simple text from Olivia King congratulating him on a great game. “Saw you on ESPN. Great job! Keep up the great work. Want to make it for the championship. No promises yet!” She added a ‘thumbs up’ emoji at the end of her text message. A feeling of what Tim could only describe as warmth filled his body.

Tim wiped the goofy smile from his face and returned her text. “Kewl. Lemme know!”

“What you got there?” Tim’s father queried before starting the SUV.

Tim showed his father the text and who sent it. Raymond smirked and handed the phone back to his son, and the women in the back seats missed the entire conversation.

Tradition dictated the Murphy clan stop on the way home to pick up some food for Tim and ice cream for everyone else. The only difference this time was that there was no ice cream for Carmen since she had fallen asleep in her seat just after they left the school parking lot.

Since it was well after midnight, most places were already closed. However, Raymond knew of a restaurant still open. It was off of IH-35, a main highway skimming around and cutting through the city that also ran near the turn-off to the Murphy home.

The intersection at Rittiman Rd., even at this time of night, was tumultuous at best, with drivers impaired by either drowsiness, drunkenness, or simple stupidity. While waiting for the light to go underneath IH-35 on Rittiman, Raymond Murphy never saw the other car as it rammed them from behind.