Through My Eyes (8 page)

It was a bloody mess. His bottom jaw appeared to have been split down its full length, the two pieces hanging loosely. He was missing teeth, too, I would later learn, but I couldn’t tell at the time with all the damage and blood. I looked down at his legs and realized that instead of being tucked under him as they should be and usually were, they were awkwardly splayed around him. Otis had been hurt bad, but I couldn’t figure out by what.

I gently but quickly scooped him up, put him on the seat of the car, and raced back to the house to tell the others, so we could all head to the vet. And all the way to the vet, I was getting more and more upset and more and more frustrated with the state Otis was in. Not merely upset, I was getting angry as well, because the more I thought about it, it was becoming clearer to me—he wasn’t attacked by a
what
but by a
who
. It appeared to me that he’d been struck with something repeatedly.

The vet agreed with my guess, and after he’d given Otis a quick look he suggested that it could have been the work of a baseball bat. He didn’t close the door on another object or possibly a car, but a bat or board was his guess.

“Tim, his injuries are too severe.” The vet told me that Otis’s back, legs, and hips were all severely damaged and his jaw was radically fractured. Surgery would have been extensive and expensive, and there was absolutely no guarantee that at his age he would survive either the surgery or recovery period. Plus, the extensive rehabilitation that would be required might prove to be more than he could take.

So we brought Otis home to die and laid him carefully on his bed.

Only we forgot to tell Otis that was the plan. We forgot to tell him that these were his last days.

So, every day, I carefully lifted Otis and carried him to the pool. He had grown up swimming in our pool and our pond, but this was a bit different, and he seemed to know it. He didn’t fight it, but it didn’t excite him, either, as it had in the past. I gently submerged him on my lap up to his shoulders, and for several days we stopped at that point of submersion. We just rested in the pool in that position together for a while, and then I would carefully take him back into the house. Neither one of us was prepared to give up.

When I’d been doing that for a couple of weeks, I began gently moving his back legs and watching his reaction. We took it slowly and increased his range of motion over time to help his muscles regain some tone and strength. He didn’t seem to want to move them on his own, so I would—and he let me—move them for him. Over time, I started moving my hand out from under his back legs, which would force him to begin to paddle a bit to feel like he was staying afloat. I never took my hand off his chest and never made him paddle much. Just long enough so he could take a few strokes with his legs and regain some confidence and strength in them.

It was hard to look at him, though, without feeling how painful it all must have been for him and how he still must have hurt. Missing and broken teeth. A jaw that was split and badly misshapen. Every time I looked at him, I could sense and feel the pain he was in.

Thankfully, Otis continued to get better, and over the next few months, with the regular pool workouts and lots of milkshakes—he loved vanilla—he regained the ability to walk again, albeit with a noticeable limp. He never ran again, but after an initial period where he seemed ashamed or worried that he’d done something wrong—which made me as upset at the physical injuries he’d suffered—he settled back into being himself, even though as a bit more frail version of the original Otis. But he was our Otis, no less, and the one we always knew and loved.

A couple of weeks later,
football season began. It was my second football season at Nease, and we continued to make great strides to improve during my junior year. Throughout the off-season, the guys had spent much more time on their own—weight lifting, working out, working together on drills—looking to get better, to develop that edge we needed, and in the process to help make us a better team. And it worked.

Though we’d been a .500 team the year before, our performance had been unexpected, but this year expectations were higher for all of us—including me. My playing the previous year had attracted some quiet attention from college scouts, and while I had no idea where that would take me, I did know I was looking to make that quiet attention get a bit louder.

But more important than wanting interest from college coaches, I felt a lot of responsibility for helping to make our team better and for pushing all of us to fulfill our potential. This year a 5–5 season would not be enough for any of us—especially Coach Howard. It was Coach Howard’s second year as head coach at Nease High School, and he’d had a full year to encourage us, set the bar higher for us, persuade us that his way would lead to success, and build his values and lessons into us, including one that he taught and reminded us about often: “Our job as coaches is to love you guys; it’s your job to love each other.”

And as time passed, they did just that with all the players, and we did with each other. It all began to make a difference—both on and off the field. We could tell that we’d improved in the off-season through 7-on-7 touch football tournaments that we played in. From Jacksonville to South Georgia to North Carolina, we won every tournament, and as an added benefit, improved our passing game timing. In the process, games got to be more fun. We had enthusiastic, energetic fans. Students started coming more regularly and ended up creating what I still think is one of the coolest cheers around. When we had scored and were getting ready to kick off, they would begin chanting, “Mo . . . Mo . . . Mo . . . Mo, Mo, Mo, Mo,” getting faster and faster until the ball was kicked. The idea was that momentum (“Mo”) was now on our side. They then began raising one hand, spreading all five fingers toward the sky, acknowledging Coach Howard’s goal that we get the ball back—and score—within five minutes of kicking off.

We were scoring quite a bit, really rolling and undefeated headed into our midseason game against St. Augustine. We had improved and knew we had a good chance to beat them. In fact, we led until the very end. They scored a touchdown with about twenty seconds left in the game to take a 33–30 lead, after which we ran the kickoff back to around our own thirty-five yard line. With only a few seconds remaining, Coach Howard called for a Hail Mary pass, but my attempt landed harmlessly at the goal line as, once again, St. Augustine won. However, the combination of our effort during that game and the continuously improving football culture at Nease High School helped me gain even more interest from colleges, which began to take note of me in larger numbers. It didn’t hurt the interest that the ball had traveled seventy yards in the air on that final throw against St. Augustine.

Throws like that may have put me solidly on the radar screens of many college recruiters that season, but as a team, we played football that was worth remembering.

In the first round of the playoffs, we played Citrus High School, from Inverness, Florida. Coach Howard had asked my dad to do the chapel service for the team. Dad mixed together Bible verses with clips from
Saving Private Ryan
, a combination that apparently worked. One of Robby’s college teammates, Angel, drove up from his home in Miami for the game, but unfortunately for him, he arrived a few minutes late, and by then it was all but over. I threw for three touchdowns in the first five minutes and seven in the first half, resulting in a 55–0 score at halftime. Setting numerous records in that game, we coasted, resting and playing all the members of the team, to a 76–6 final score.

In the next round of the playoffs we faced our nemesis, St. Augustine, again. We were so jacked up and believed we were ready for this game. It was going to be the perfect setting for finally breaking through to beat them—we had lost twelve straight games to them. Looking back on that night, I think Dad should have gone with
Saving Private Ryan
again. It was back and forth early, then our turnovers contributed to their taking a big lead. We were so far behind by halftime that it seemed like we had no shot at getting back into the game. To our credit, though, nobody in our locker room lost heart or turned it in, and we continued to scrap and battle, slowly chipping away at their lead.

Finally, we had driven close to their end zone and trailed 35–28 with just seconds left on the clock. The danger in calling a running play in that situation, of course, is that the clock would continue to run unless we got the ball out-of-bounds. We had enough time remaining, however, that we knew that even if we didn’t score, we could still line up quickly and spike the ball to kill the clock and be able to run another play, or simply quickly line up and run one more play without having to stop the clock.

I kept the ball on a power-keeper play and lunged halfway across the goal line in the middle of a pile of bodies. The referees never made a call one way or another, continuing to unpile players, and while they were unstacking players, they never stopped the clock. When they finally got to the bottom of the pile, they should have found me with my entire upper body and the ball across the goal line, but somehow they didn’t see it that way, ruling that the ball never got across the goal line.

No touchdown.

No time left.

Game over; 11–2 for the season, with both losses to St. Augustine.

St. Augustine raced off the field jumping up and down, cheering and hollering in celebration, while we stood there, in stunned silence, our season over.

Through the off-season
and the summer, we kept growing together as a team, and by my senior year, in 2005, we were an incredibly tight-knit group—brothers-in-arms ready to go out together to face whatever was before us. We had all gone to camp together that summer to work on our football, a commitment that some had avoided in the past. We began meeting every Wednesday night and talking about important things, something pretty rare among high school students, even rarer especially since we were guys. We were truly trying to live out Coach Howard’s mantra:

CHARACTER
STRENGTH
HONOR

Coach posted those words on the locker-room wall. Every day they were right there, in our faces. After that 11–2 record of improvement capping my junior year, we now had even higher expectations for my senior year.

At the same time, there was a lot of attention on me and whether I would perform at the level everyone expected. In the lead-up to the season, I’d learned that Ken Murrah of Ponte Vedra Beach wanted to film a documentary about me, which was scheduled for broadcast on ESPN. It certainly fit within the framework of the admonition of Proverbs 27:2 to “Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.” It was very flattering that they would want to do that, and even though it was very well done, I couldn’t help but be pretty embarrassed by its filming. And the title was the worst part of the embarrassment.

The Chosen One.

They interviewed coaches, teammates, and other key people from my life. And while I didn’t really want the extra attention, it turned out to be really fun and led to other guys getting scholarships because of all the attention focused on our program. It was also a great Christian witness, because the final documentary showed my dad reading Bible verses.

But I’d have at least changed the title.

Luckily, though, the attention from the documentary didn’t get in the way of our team’s ability to focus. This was critical as we were immediately put to the test, opening with the first nationally televised game on ESPN at Hoover, Alabama, against the Hoover High School Buccaneers, who at the time were nationally ranked. We stayed close for most of the game, but after tying the score, we gave up twenty-one unanswered points and eventually lost, 50–29.

We breezed through the rest of the regular season, with scores like 70–21, 49–13, and 53–0.

St. Augustine was a different story. We spotted them twenty points to open our game, and in a steady rain, our rally fell short, 20–14. We had battled back and forced a punt late in the game to give us a chance, but we were penalized for roughing the punter and never got the ball back. We simply dug too big of a hole for ourselves early in the game. The then head football coach at Alabama, Mike Shula, watched it all from the sidelines, as some of the Florida coaches sat in the stands.

Same outcome as always when it came to St. Augustine. I joked that I didn’t want to have something like that in common with Peyton Manning, who had a great college career but whose Tennessee Volunteers could never beat the Florida Gators in their four tries. I was wrong, as I lost four times to St. Augustine.

Hopefully I can find other ways to mirror Peyton’s career.

It wasn’t funny at the time, however. Losses crush me. I work so hard off the field and am so physically exhausted after games that I’ve been known to cry at times after losses, and occasionally even at wins. That night one of my coaches at Nease, Wesley Haynes, noted that crying wasn’t at all unusual for me after a St. Augustine game. I just get so exhausted after games—not to mention that I’m pretty sensitive and seem to wear my emotions on my sleeve—that all the emotions just flood out of me, much to the delight of opposing fans, it seems. After that St. Augustine game, my brothers were trying to surround me to stop St. Augustine fans from taking pictures of me crying. It just happens. It’s the way God made me.

Of course, plenty of people have seen the other side of me as well, the way that I get so intense and fired up during a game. That’s a challenge for me, becoming so intense and yet still staying in control enough to show good sportsmanship. That’s something my parents have worked on with me for years.

Two weeks later, while we were playing Columbia High, I heard a pop in my lower leg, but I didn’t want to come out of the game. Coach Howard asked if it was broken, but I didn’t think it was, mostly because I had already been down this path two years earlier.

My sophomore year, in 2003, we’d been playing Menendez High, and I’d thrown an interception right at the end of the first quarter. As I was releasing the ball, a defensive lineman hit my right leg, which was planted, and I heard a snap. I hobbled off the field as our defense headed out.