Michael Koryta - The Prophet

Second snap. A brutal collision. Three yards. First down. Now out to the fifteen.

“I was waiting for a change here,” Kent said. “I figured we’d gotten our backs away from the goal line, would open it up a little bit more. But…”

Prophet left.

This time Angola brought a safety on a blitz, and he got through the line almost simultaneously with the handoff and dropped the runner. Chambers went back into promise package, back to prophet left. Gained four yards. Walter Ward refusing to blink.

Sixth carry, prophet right, fifteen yards, first down. Adam hit an Angola linebacker so hard going around the end that, two decades removed, Colin Mears winced. Seventh snap, prophet left, a bigger hole this time, fourteen yards gained, getting across midfield. Even on the poor audio of the old tape, you could hear the buzz in the stands, because everyone got it by now—Ward was going to make Angola prove they could stop this.

Eighth snap, nine yards, and the Chambers fans were beginning to roar.

“He has a broken hand from this point on,” Kent said.

“Your brother?”

Kent nodded. “I was the only person who knew something was wrong.”

“How did you know?”

Kent picked up the remote and rewound. “Adam used Jim Brown’s technique.”

Colin understood, because they’d talked about it before. A lot of kids—a lot of pros, even—liked to pop up after suffering a massive hit, to show how tough they were, show that they weren’t hurting. The problem with that approach was that sometime you were going to be hurting. Then the defense knew, and they fed on it, grew strength from your pain. Jim Brown, the Cleveland legend, who took more abuse from defenses than maybe any other running back in history, had developed a system for that: he stayed down, rose slowly, and limped back. Every play. The defense never knew when he was hurting because he looked the same after every hit. He gave them nothing emotionally, nothing they could feed on. It was very different from the way Kent coached football—speed, speed, speed—but if you had the hitters, it was effective. Demoralizing. The defense played to hurt you, and they wanted to know when they had.

“Adam had a lot of adrenaline,” Kent said. “Getting up slow was hard on him. So he developed this technique where, once he was down, he’d make himself squeeze the turf, first with his left hand, then with his right. It slowed him down. On Saturday mornings, he had to spend twenty minutes digging dirt out from under his nails. Because of course he refused to wear gloves. Or long sleeves under his jersey. He was one of those. Now watch what he does here.”

On the replay, Adam cleared the hole, then got blown up by a linebacker and tumbled to the turf. One of the Angola players looked down—pointedly, obviously, and stepped on his right hand, then twisted the cleats.

Colin hissed in a breath. “Nobody saw that?”

“No. I missed it, even. But I saw this.”

Adam was down, supporting his weight with his right forearm. He reached out and dug the fingers of his left hand into the field, then reached out and did it again.

“Left, left,” Kent said. “He’d never done that before. That was when I knew.”

Back on his feet and back to the line, and now it was prophet right, six yards, Adam dropping a 250-pound defensive tackle, just splintering him as the tailback scampered through behind, clear and untouched until he stepped out of bounds.

Angola thirty-two-yard line now, clock under six minutes, and the Angola coach was screaming at his guys. They can’t run over us! They can’t run over us! Show some heart!

Prophet left, twelve yards, and Colin said, “They’re not even watching your vertical routes anymore. Those guys are open by ten yards.”

He was right. The safeties were in the box and now even the cornerbacks were cheating down, trying to help stop the bleeding. All Pete Underwood had to do was throw it out there. But promise package was promise package. It told no lies.

Adam was the right player for it, no question. Last one into the formation every time, always with that bouncing swagger, and if anyone spoke to him he didn’t respond, his focus was total, and he warned you of it with every step. I am the hammer. You’ll feel me shortly.

“Coach Ward told me once that Adam should have been a boxer,” Kent said. “That he would have been a nightmare, because he fed on the taste of the canvas.”

“Meaning, what, he liked being knocked down?”

“It fired him up, at least. We scared teams with him out there. You’ll see it by the end.”

On the screen the action had paused, because Angola took a timeout. The defensive coaches were screaming at their guys, telling them this was it, stiffen up and shut them down, show us some heart!

The first play after the timeout was from the twenty-six, and it was prophet left, the eleventh straight running play, and on this one the instruction from the Angola coaches during the break showed itself. The linebackers weren’t trying to separate the ball carrier from the ball anymore, they were trying to separate Adam Austin’s head from his body. Two hits from two different directions, one a blatant helmet-to-helmet shot, and Adam rocked up and over and was on his back under the lights as the ball carrier ducked and spun and carried it to the fourteen.

Down on the field, Adam rolled over until his face mask was resting on the ground, and reached out with his left hand. Squeezed the turf twice. Rose.

Second and two, clock under five minutes. Prophet right and they lost a yard—the Angola defenders driving Adam straight backward and into the ball carrier to make the tackle.

Facedown again, two squeezes with the left hand, then back up. Third and three. Prophet right. The offensive line blew it again, they were getting tired. Gained a yard.

Fourth and two.

The Chambers crowd was quiet. Down on the sidelines Ward stood impassively, arms folded, and next to him a fifteen-year-old Kent Austin stared at the ground.

“Watch this,” Kent said softly. “Watch what Adam does.”

Back into promise package, only Adam didn’t get down into his stance. He stood up tall and began bouncing on the balls of his feet, and against his sides he shook his hands.

“He was screaming, ” Kent said. “You could probably hear it at the top of the stands. Everyone thought he was just getting them fired up, and he was, but it was from the pain, too. See what he’s doing with his hands? He’s got broken bones sliding around at this point, and he started to shake his hands like that to call up the pain. He wanted to feel it, needed to feed on it. This was it, this was the ballgame, we had to get two yards.”

The crowd saw Adam and heard him and found confidence in him, and now the roars were back, and feet were hammering on the aluminum bleachers and the play clock was counting down, and finally he dropped back into his stance, and then they went prophet right.

Helmet to helmet, the impact staggering, and then one linebacker was down and another rose to replace him but fell as Adam drove forward and Evan Emory, the tailback, came in tucked behind him, chasing the tornado’s wake. They blew out of bounds with a gain of four—first and goal from the nine.

For just a moment they’d been together then. Adam and Kent. The force of the play had carried Adam down out of bounds and right to where Kent trailed Coach Ward. When Adam got up, they were face-to-face, and Kent had said, “Nice hit,” and he remembered that his voice had seemed impossibly small and weak. Adam spit out his mouth guard and a streamer of blood came with it, and he said, “We’re almost there, Franchise. Almost there.”