Chapter 5

“Super Bowl Loser”

I was so frigging scared I thought I might die. Anyone who tells you they weren’t scared or nervous, anxious before playing the Super Bowl, they’re full of crap. Everyone on the team was amped up. Our mouths were dry. Our hearts were pumping. I must have pissed 5 times before we hit the field. It was the biggest game of my damn life, everything I’d dreamed of since I was a little kid.

I didn’t sleep a wink the night before. I was running on fumes. It was pure adrenaline and passion. I was just so amped up...

But once I hit the field, it became another game. However, the hits were harder. A lot harder. The intensity was certainly higher, super-charged, really, but the game was no longer an idea, no longer a fear; it was a game. It was the game I knew well, every movement, every formation, everything was inside me, in a physical, damn near spiritual language. I was a cog in the team machine. And we were in motion. We were grinding, and I was pushing and moving as my body had for years.

Until the final drive. That was something else. I’d never been so excited in my life. The rush returned. My mouth was filled with salt. My mouth was like a damn desert, it was so dry.

And I felt alive, so goddamn alive! There was a divine power running through me, a feeling like some sort of superhuman strength, like when a mother can lift a 10,000-pound car to save her baby. This is how I felt. I think I could have picked up a semitruck and thrown it across an ocean. That was the energy I had. That was the voltage thumping and surging through me. A force of God was pumping through my veins.

I remember trotting onto the field after that long Super Bowl commercial timeout. I remember my eyes were squeezed to slits. In the huddle, I was shaking, I was so fricking amped! The crowd noise was deafening. I can still hear its hiss, like an airplane engine, I can hear it; it’s blurry, but I hear it. Goddammit, when I have the flashbacks, when I have the dreams, I hear ... I hear the hiss...

We were playing in the Georgia Dome, and usually, for Falcons games, that place was quiet as a library, aside from when they pump in fake crowd noise, but for this game, this noise was real, and running like a power saw in my ears. This was the damn Super Bowl, and on that final drive, my ears were in pain. Dammit, I’m not lying, I think my eardrums were ready to bleed.

We were fighting, pushing and scrapping, charging our way down the field. I wasn’t letting their sack specialist DE have any piece of my QB. I was pancaking his bitch ass like nobody’s business. They talk about the NFL being a “family game,” but, let me tell you, the stuff that’s said on that field would make a nun faint.

And, dammit, you should have heard the trash talk in that game. Their superstar DE, goddamn, he was cussing, talking the worst trash talk I think I’d ever heard. He was talking about my mother. He was talking about my ugly horse face. He was calling me a fag and a bitch and a honky chickenshit motherfucker and everything under the sun.

He was one to talk. He was one ugly sumbitch. A teen wolf looking motherfucker, looking exactly like Michael J. Fox in that shitty 80s movie. The dude looked like a fucking werewolf, with his big buckteeth. I think he really was a goddamn werewolf. He was one mean man, a tenacious competitor. Hell, I hated the shit-talker but respected his game. He was fierce.

But I kept him in check. I pushed him off on every play. I was a wall, I was a man of steel, I was a barbed wire fence, I was standing taller than a wall surrounding a prison or an army base, dammit. I was Fort Knox.

Dammit, fucking dammit, I felt invincible that whole game. I didn’t allow a single sack. We scored 28 points. 28 points. It should have been enough. It should have been...

My senses were so heightened that game, that day. I’d played football my whole life, but I never really noticed the stink of the game. I’d never noticed the smell of piss, shit, vomit, sweat, farts, blood, any of those, probably because I’d be so super-focused on the game. But in that game, especially that final drive, my nostrils were flaring, burning with smells...

We were neck and neck the whole contest. Then they kicked a 52-yard field goal, right after the two-minute warning, and seized the lead.

Then ... that last drive. It was magical, like it was in slow motion. We clawed down the field. Our QB was throwing bullets. He was throwing daggers. Precision passes. It was surgical. He was Tom Brady. He was Joe Montana. He was cold-blooded, sweating buckets of ice water. He was stoic. Methodical. Moving us like soldiers. Inching us forward, inching us forward, yard after hard-earned yard.

I was feeling it. I was tasting the champagne. It was that storybook ending. We were going to Disneyland. We were fucking going to Disneyland, I kept ensuring myself. It was my mantra...

Then the last play, from the 15-yard line. Shotgun formation. Then the snap. Then the throw. The catch and the dive. The receiver wrestled down, the receiver reaching out his long wiry arm, touching the ball toward the goal line. From my vantage point, I thought he made it, I jumped up and roared. I thought we were going to goddamn Disneyland. I was there. I was on a float in a parade. I was in fucking Disneyland!

But when the refs waved it off ... But when the refs shook their heads, when they shook their heads and slashed their arms, when the confetti fell and THEIR side ran hooting and jumping and dancing onto the field. I stood in disbelief for a couple minutes. I was thinking there had to be more time, one more play, just one play, just one more play, dammit, that’s all we needed.