-ISAIAH 40:31.
I know I made it to cla.s.s that next week. I always did. I was well into my major of Family, Youth, and Community Sciences with a minor in Communication. Choosing my major was easy-I knew I wanted to be working with people and youth, possibly in a not-for-profit setting, and figured that zeroing in on that made sense. I never looked back.
But as much as I loved what I was studying, that week was a tough one. There were so many distractions, it"s amazing I got anything done. Dealing with that loss was hard enough, but what complicated things even more was the game on the horizon. The following Sat.u.r.day would be my first trip back to Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge since Coach Meyer shook his head at me from across the field before that LSUFlorida game when I was in high school. Although we were still in a stunned state of mind that Sunday, a day after the Auburn loss, Louisiana State students took it upon themselves to do their best to make me feel welcome as we prepared for our visit the following weekend.
It started with a few choice voicemails that Sunday afternoon. Not one of them was worth listening to, but sadly they needed to be heard so that appropriate measures and precautions could be taken. Messages coming in like this one: "Hey, Tim Tebow, you"d better tell your family to stay inside because we"re going to find your parents tonight and they"re going to end up in serious pain." Messages like that-uplifting, positive messages demonstrating good sportsmanship and goodwill toward all.
Of course, everyone on the team had been briefed on what to do if we got messages like that, received intimidating or threatening mail, or were confronted in any way that seemed to jeopardize our safety or that of our families, friends, teammates, or coaches. And so I contacted Coach Meyer and Officer Stacy-Officer Stacy Ettel of the University Police Department was always on hand to keep us safe-to make the coaches aware of what was happening.
By Monday afternoon, the calls were coming in constantly. My cell phone vibrated nonstop, and I had to keep it continually plugged in because the battery was dying every ninety minutes or so, without my ever picking it up at all. Hundreds of calls and text messages were being sent every hour from rabid LSU fans. Crazy, violent, or s.e.xual messages, or all three. Really weird stuff from similarly weird senders. Some of them, but not many, were even literate.
It was such a busy week for me and for us that I simply didn"t have the time to deal with getting a new phone with a new number, but I must admit, even though I was no longer taking the calls or listening to the messages, it really got me pumped up to see how much I was in the thoughts of LSU fans. I really was a concern to them and their football team, I guess. In a way it was flattering, but it got old quickly. As best I could figure, someone at LSU or in the surrounding area got my number and gave it out, and I was told that there were announcements at bars around Baton Rouge along the lines of, "This is Tim Tebow"s number. Call or text him and give him a hard time."
As we were on the bus that Sat.u.r.day afternoon heading into the stadium, Jim Tartt, our junior offensive lineman, reached over and grabbed my perpetually buzzing phone. He answered, at random, one of the many calls still coming in and exploded at the caller. It wasn"t pretty, but I was glad I had Jim on my side. The caller probably thought it was me letting him have it. Oh well . . .
I appreciated that the guys were defensive of me-we were all in this together, and now we were headed into the unfriendly confines of LSU. When we were just a few miles out from the stadium, it started getting really crazy. The place and its proud fan base were just going nuts. Fans were banging on the side of the bus as we drove by, and as we were getting closer to the stadium, more and more people were banging on the bus. To its credit, the LSU security detail, which was a.s.signed to us, was doing all it could do, trying to pull people away from our bus. We got down under the tunnel, and there were more of them-sitting and hanging from the stands above us, looking down and screaming at us.
I always made it a point to be the last one off the bus. As guys got off, I would stand at the top of the steps, in position to be able to shake all the players" hands as they came by and give each one a hug before they got off the bus. I was standing there hugging people and watching as Coach Meyer and the defense got off the bus. Coach Meyer was already fired up, when one of the fans, from across the ropes beyond which fans weren"t allowed to venture, threw a beer on him.
Everything started to escalate after that, and I thought there would be a fight right there around the bus between their fans, our players, and our fans who had also gathered there to welcome us as we exited the bus. In the middle of this ridiculous scene were our parents who were right up there at the front of everything, along with my family, of course. If it wasn"t such a potentially explosive and dangerous moment, it would have been laughable-all of this over a football game. Coach Meyer unb.u.t.toned his jacket, dropped his briefcase, and put his hands up in the air to get us, our families, and our friends fired up. Of course, it got the LSU fans going crazy too.
From all the time I"d spent with Coach Miles during recruitment, I knew this whole display would have bothered him as much as it bothered us. It looked like it was going to be a full-fledged pregame brawl. Not exactly the type of warm-up for the game the coaches usually planned-at least for us. It was stunning, some of the things that people were saying to my parents and the parents of other players. Fans were three feet away from them, calmly cursing at them with every four-letter word and more. There were girls who"d come up to my dad and mom and direct vulgarities at them, followed by, "What are you gonna do about it?" For anyone wondering, that is not what I"m looking for in a spouse.
We probably used way too much energy too early in dealing with this melee. We all ran into the locker room, still dressed in our suits and much more worked up than we needed to be at this stage in the pregame process. After we got dressed and took the field, the whole pregame was so exciting. Way too exciting. The whole student section was chanting "_____ ______, Tebow," (you can fill in the blanks-but don"t think churchy words) for much of the pregame, which got me even more fired up, if that was even possible. If anything, I probably did some stuff to egg it on too. My veins were coursing with adrenaline and anger, and I couldn"t wait to take the field and get the game started.
Coming into the game, LSU was ranked number two in the country, but we opened the game playing like the better team, while they were playing cheap. From the outset, Tyson Jackson, Glenn Dorsey, and their other defenders that made up what some say was one of the best defenses ever in college football, were all talking trash to us, and I was loving it. When they were hitting me on an option play to make the stop, they were still trying to hit me while I was already on the ground.
We kicked a field goal on our opening drive and then held them and forced them to punt, after which we drove the length of the field again, down to their two yard line. I faked the run, bootlegged out to the left, looking for Kestahn Moore in the end zone; but he was covered. I kept running all the way to the sideline, looking for someone to come free, then I stopped and backed up for just a moment and momentarily tucked the ball. That"s when the three guys around Kestahn finally stepped up for just a split second, thinking I was getting ready to run it in. At that moment Kestahn came open, and I threw it to him-pushed it into the air toward him, is probably more accurate-and he made an amazing grab around his knees for the touchdown, and the kick for the extra point put us up, 100.
That was one of my favorite plays of my entire career.
They scored a touchdown, and we tried to put together a drive after taking the ensuing kickoff but ended up having to punt. They had a few very long drives, keeping the chains moving and the clock running down. That was frustrating, but we still led, 107. We got the ball, drove to their six yard line, and called a pa.s.s play, while also antic.i.p.ating a heavy blitz. Instead, they dropped back into pa.s.s coverage, blanketing our receivers, and so I kept the ball, cutting back left, and then dove into the end zone to stretch our lead to 177. I happened to have scored in the end zone designated as the LSU student seating area, and so I took the liberty of celebrating with my teammates right there, all of us jumping around for just a while for the benefit of our mockers. No doubt some of them had placed a call or two that week also.
I may have crossed the line, then, but it had been a long week and a long day already, and all thanks to the antagonistic att.i.tude of the LSU crowd. I jogged over to the corner of that end zone and acted like my hand was a phone and dialed a number and yelled, "Who"re you all calling now?"
For some reason, that seemed to get them even more worked up.
We got the ball to start the second half and started marching right down the field on our first few plays. Then, on a play that seemed to sum up the inconsistencies of the 2007 season, I handed off to Kestahn, our most talented running back, who had already made that fantastic touchdown catch, and at the end of a beautiful little ten-yard run he simply tripped, unforced and untouched, and fumbled the football. LSU recovered.
That got the crowd back into it, and we felt the game beginning to change at that point. They drove down the field and scored to make it 1714 after a fake field goal, when just moments earlier we were looking at moving in to take a 247 lead. We kept fighting, though. We scored on a thirty-seven-yard pa.s.s to CI (Cornelius Ingram) on a well-designed play drawn up by our coaches. They blitzed us, and we read it and beat the blitz for a touchdown to CI, taking our lead to 2414.
Even after they scored to cut our lead to 2421, we had chances to put it away, but throw together a couple of drops, an off-target pa.s.s, and lining up in a wrong formation a little later, and we were punting again. They converted several fourth-down plays for first downs to keep the drive alive, and in that, their final possession, they marched down the field, scoring with just over a minute to play.
Talk about a frenzied atmosphere.
On our final possession, I ran the ball out to around the fifty, and then on the last play we had time for a Hail Mary, but I overthrew it, just past Coop"s hands, and they hung on to win by a heartbreaking score of 2824.
The game was ultracompet.i.tive, ultraexciting, and one of my favorites to play in because of the atmosphere that surrounded every aspect of it, from the week leading up to it, the bus ride in, the rowdy stands-everything. Annoying as those phone calls were, the LSU fans made it awesome. Really. And we came away with our health, which is why I can probably be so generous with my praise for their totally unacceptable behavior in civil company.
At the same time, the loss was also devastating to me and to all of us, because we felt like we"d played one of our best games up to then. Statistically it didn"t look like much-we only scored 24, and we lost-but, still, to do that against a team of their caliber was something. We just needed to find a way to finish it off and win the game. It was crushing for all of us to come so close and do so many things well as a team yet just not do enough to win.
That game reminded me how the little things can change a game. That"s why as a team and as the leaders on a team, you can never take the little things for granted. The things that lose games are not necessarily an individual drop or breaking a tackle or something like that-that"s going to happen in every game-but what"s going to change the game is an error of going the wrong way or not having the ball high and tight. Those are mental errors.
We didn"t make big mistakes in that game; it was just a series of little things that tripped us up. That always gets me, because it"s not for a lack of talent. It"s that I didn"t focus quite enough or consistently enough, didn"t care enough in my mind to tell myself to do it the right way every time. And that"s what was so frustrating- we had so many opportunities on both sides of the ball to do some little thing here or there to win the game. To execute a little better. To make a better block or a better read in pa.s.s coverage. On one of those fourth downs, or when they faked the field goal and got a first down, if only we could have read the play sooner and stopped it, we could have won the game. If we had executed better on any of our drives offensively, we could have won it. If we had put it in the end zone just one more time, if Kestahn hadn"t fumbled, if CI hadn"t gone the wrong way, if I had stepped up and made one more play, seen one more open receiver. There were so many what ifs in that game. And so many things that should never have happened. Things we gave away-they weren"t taken away by better play-we just didn"t execute fully when we could have.
Maybe, too, the pregame frenzy had sapped just enough of our mental edge by the time all the screaming and voicemails had stopped.
One of the biggest differences between my soph.o.m.ore and junior years was that we wouldn"t tolerate those little mistakes any longer. We used those experiences in 2007, like those we recounted and remembered from the LSU game, to learn and grow and get ready and better for 2008.
As dejected as I was with our inability to perform those little details that could have won the game for us, I walked away from the LSU game feeling really good. To go into a hostile arena like that at LSU, with that pregame atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a knife, to face that kind of adversity and play the way we did-fighting all the way to the end-there was something satisfying in that. And to lose because we just weren"t finishing off some of the small things left me feeling confident that, with some adjustments and better attention to some of those little things, we"d be able to handle a lot of challenges from there on out.
We had a bye week before we played Kentucky, and during the bye week, Kentucky beat LSU. Go figure. We headed to Lexington the weekend of the game, and Kentucky was particularly focused on this being their second big game in a row, since it was us and they hadn"t beaten the University of Florida in two decades. They were ranked thirteenth in the country at the time, and after that LSU game, we certainly weren"t going to take them lightly. Their quarterback, Andre Woodson, had been playing really well for them, and they had other good offensive players and a pretty good defense to boot.
We went three and out to start the game, and then Andre Woodson threw a thirty-three-yard touchdown pa.s.s. It was clear we were in for a ballgame. If we hadn"t been ready to go up until then, that was a pretty good wake-up call. When we got the ball back after their kickoff, I told Coach Meyer to give me the ball. The first play we threw an option run-pa.s.s/stretch play to the right, and I just punctured it by breaking several tackles, gaining about twenty-five yards. From that point on, we really started moving. We drove them backward down the field and closed out the drive when I threw a ten-yard touchdown pa.s.s to CI. They couldn"t move the ball against our defense, and when we got the ball back, I threw a sixty-six-yard touchdown pa.s.s to a wide-open Louis Murphy. It was a lot of fun to be in a game like that with both teams playing well, and scoring. We led 2110 at the half.
We scored on our first possession of the third quarter to make the score 2810, and it went back and forth for a while after that. Early in the fourth quarter I carried the ball, and after a gain, I hit one of their players as I continued the run, bouncing off him and throwing me off balance; then when I reached down to put my hand on the ground to brace myself, another player hit me right on my outstretched shoulder. Right away, I could tell that the hit had done some pretty significant damage to my shoulder. I couldn"t even lift my right arm. My nonthrowing arm, thank goodness.
I know my body pretty well, and as the game wore on and the pain remained, I knew this was going to nag me the rest of the season. But the pain wasn"t disabling, and as we expected, it would require the standard course of treatment as any bad sprain requires.
Kentucky came back to score, cutting our lead to a single score. We needed to mount a drive, and we did. I hit Kestahn Moore in the flat for a big first down. Then we called Trick Left 51 X Pause, and they manned up on Percy Harvin. He beat the guy on an inside fade, and I hit him on the fade at their four yard line.
On the following play, I scored but paid the price again when I lowered my right shoulder to hit a guy to get in there. I remember the agony I was feeling. The sprain didn"t get any better with that blow to the shoulder.
But more important, that drive and score sealed the game, as we won a close one, 4537. The next day I had an MRI on my shoulder, and we found out that it was AC separation (acromioclavicular joint separation) and a sprain. The usual course of treatment for such an injury is icing, anti-inflammatory medication, and physical rehabilitation. I got to work, trying to rehab it and recover as quickly as possible. The problem, of course, was my inability to give either of my shoulders a lot of rest. The activities of daily living were hard enough, but then add football-well, no rest for the weary during the season.
Though I knew this could be a season-lingering injury, I was unwilling to accept that. I expected it to resolve itself and heal within moments of being diagnosed and beginning the required course of treatment. It wasn"t to be-at least not as I hoped. By using my shoulder, I wasn"t doing anything that would make it worse in the long term. The only issues before me were the pain level I faced and the functionality of the shoulder to be able to execute the plays. That"s when I started getting shots before every game and as needed before practice to help with the healing, flexibility, and usability of my shoulder, because it was during this next week that we had to get ready to go play Georgia.
I prayed regularly for my shoulder to heal, a process which was way too slow in coming. I had a few why? moments-not so much "why me?"-but "why not go ahead and heal it now, Lord?" I wondered what lesson I was supposed to be learning through this-I thought I had gotten a bit better at patience. But the truth of the matter was that as much as I loved the scripture verse from Isaiah, I wasn"t always real good at embracing it in my life: Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary.
I get the "mount up with wings like eagles" part-I have felt His power and protection in the midst of some of the most difficult of moments-in the Philippines, at LSU, in dealing with trouble from others, and making decisions for my future-like the one that led me to the University of Florida. I get the part about "they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary"; I have felt His hand on my back in moments when I didn"t understand what was going on and why, and in situations where I wasn"t sure I could go one step further.
But I wasn"t real good at the "wait for the LORD" part. You would think that when we stop and take a look at all He has done since the beginning of time and throughout the universe-let alone in my life-it would be easy to "wait." It would be easy to understand that His timing should be our timing and that ultimately everything He does is for our benefit and our good-even though at the time it may not seem so and we may not understand. For example, my life, from fetus stage to my birth, if left to the "wisdom" of some doctor sitting before my mom and dad, would never have happened. G.o.d"s timing, G.o.d"s will. In my better moments I knew that.
I wasn"t there yet, but in my heart I wanted to be, and day-by-day I was working and praying to get there, with Him and for Him.
The LSU and Kentucky games continued to reinforce my place in the Heisman Trophy discussion, because we had put up some big numbers against good teams. Part of the big numbers we were posting reflected all the talent around me. Another part of them may have been due to our inability to get our running backs on track, resulting in my carrying more of the running load than the coaches had originally antic.i.p.ated. As the season progressed, though, it had been getting harder for me to keep up the running load, because more and more defenses were keying on me. And with my shoulder a bit dinged, it became another personal and team challenge for us to overcome.
As we were getting ready for Georgia, it was clear that my impinged shoulder had become a bit more than a slight problem. I could no longer raise my right arm above my head. The coaches wanted to try to game plan where I didn"t have to run, but since without me our running game wasn"t solid, that wasn"t going to work. We had some good pa.s.ses and play action in the game plan, so we felt confident that I wouldn"t have to do too much in the way of running. Even though I wasn"t close to 100 percent, it was exciting to go back to Jacksonville-my home-for the annual battle between Florida and Georgia.
We fumbled on our opening drive, and they took it down the field, scoring easily. That"s when a fight broke out on the goal line, or at least that"s what it initially looked like to us. We saw Georgia"s players on the sideline racing onto the field as if there was a fight, but then we realized they were jumping up and down and celebrating, merely acting like Pee Wee League players. Except that I couldn"t remember ever seeing any little kids actually doing that. They were celebrating, dancing all over the field and making gestures to us, the stands, and, I suppose, the national-television-viewing audience.
If we"d have been a more mature team, I think we would have handled that moment differently than we did. Instead we took it as an affront. That was frustrating to me because instead of merely taking it out on them on the field, we had some guys who wanted to go out there and respond to their goal line antics by engaging them in a fight.
It all settled down quickly enough, thanks to the referees and coaches from both teams. We took the ensuing kickoff and drove the ball right down the field, closing the drive when I hit Louis Murphy for a touchdown. Tied, 77. Unfortunately, Georgia had a great game plan for us on offense, which we watched throughout the afternoon as Knowshon Moreno emerged as a top college running back with 188 yards and three touchdowns. On defense, they knew I was hindered by the injury to my shoulder and couldn"t be myself, so they started dropping more and more people into coverage, believing I wouldn"t run very often, if at all. Eventually I started to run the ball a little, even with my shoulder, and I ended up running in one for a touchdown to finish a drive. My shoulder was killing me. It was tough. We had other guys out there for us playing with their own dings and sprains and at less than full speed or strength and with some pain. It was simply something we had to do-the only difference being that my injury was more noticeable and, as such, was highlighted more frequently by opposing coaches, players, and the media.
By halftime, I could barely lift my right shoulder at all. Toward the end of the first half I had been catching snaps with basically just my left hand. We were trying to fight and bounce back. A lot of things weren"t going our way, but we were battling, and we were still right there in the game, at least for a while.
The second half produced one of the worst plays of my college career. We had a tight end post route with another player running an under route, coming underneath the post route. Their defense bit on the underneath route, so I had Cornelius Ingram wide open on the deep post. I missed him. Threw it about three yards over his head. Had I been accurate, it would have gone for at least fifty or sixty yards, if not a touchdown. Instead, we got nothing on that drive. My fault. It didn"t help with turning the momentum either.
We just didn"t have all we needed to make a strong statement on the field that day. We struggled to stop them on defense, with their running, primarily Knowshon Moreno, for big chunks of yardage, taking time off the clock. And also scoring at the end of the drives. We had guys who came to realize, through that game, that they were out of shape and not as disciplined as they needed to be. Unfortunately, for every guy like Louis Murphy or the Pouncey brothers, who made sure they prepared themselves and took care of themselves during the week in preparation for the game, we had some other "leaders" who didn"t and who, worse, were a little too eager to stay out on Thursday nights and as a result ran out of steam in the fourth quarter. And in the end, it cost the team. Those concerns, which showed up early in the year as we headed into spring practice, were still with us. We were talented, but we had some really soft spots within the team that showed up in that game. We struggled to find what we needed and to fight through the difficult moments.
That night after the FloridaGeorgia game, I stayed at home on the farm in Jacksonville with my family, and we went out to eat. I take losing hard, but being around my family has always helped put things into the right perspective. Even so, I wasn"t very hungry. The next day I drove back to Gainesville with my brother Peter. It was one of the worst drives back ever for two reasons: I still couldn"t get rid of the sickening feeling I had about the result of the game, how it had happened, and how frustrating it was to endure that 4230 loss. And then there was my shoulder, which I had reinjured during the game. On both fronts I was upset and concerned. Things seemed to be heading in the wrong direction for us.
It"s funny. I"m not sure that we weren"t as close-knit as that 2006 team or as well prepared, but the 2006 team had mature leaders. We gutted it out, though, and turned our frustrations toward our next opponent.
Chapter Fourteen.
The Heisman.
You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.
-MATTHEW 5:14.
The following week we played Vanderbilt, who made the mistake of showing up that day. The coaches had helped us to mentally and emotionally turn the page on the previous week and had also prepared a good game plan for us. We were able to spread the ball out more to others; because of the possibility that Percy Harvin might not play, the coaches had to game plan for that possibility. Even with as great a player as Percy was for us, the tendency is to key on one person too much, which doesn"t always make that person or the team better. We managed the ball very well in the Vanderbilt game, in both the turnover category and in making the necessary plays when we had to. Those are the things we needed to continue to do better as an offense.
My coaching career, if I ever have one, started that day. We had a third down and three yards to go for a first down early in the game and deep in Vandy"s end of the field. As we huddled on the sidelines, they called the play, but I didn"t really like the call.
"How about if we run a naked bootleg and then pa.s.s to (wide out) Jarred Fayson?" I suggested. Coach Meyer wasn"t sure it would work, but he said he trusted me and to go ahead and go for it. They came out in exactly the coverage I"d had a hunch they were going to run. Fayson was wide open, made the catch, and walked into the end zone for a touchdown. Coach and I laughed about it afterward, and I gave him a hard time, telling him, "This coaching stuff isn"t that hard. I like this gig. Maybe there"s a coaching job for me at Florida one day."
But whether you"re talking about being a coach or being a player-the thing that"s hard is leadership. In the past, I have worked at casting a vision and modeling appropriate behavior, but this season, I was faced with the challenge of getting through to guys who were wired differently than I was. I had to keep finding new ways to motivate others.
South Carolina was up next. They were a good team with talented players, and we had the distraction of Percy Harvin all week. Will he play or won"t he? He was having migraine headaches, and the coaches were putting together two game plans again. South Carolina had almost beaten us each of the previous two years, and we definitely weren"t going to take them lightly. They had a good defense, and they could score points-especially if the "Old Ball Coach" had anything to say about it.
Speculation surrounded us all week. How bad was Percy"s illness? It went right up to the last minute. We flew to Columbia without him, but there was still a hope that he could either be on another flight or someone was going to drive him up later in time to play. The coaches were concerned with not only his health, but with having to develop an alternate game plan without him, simply because he was such an explosive player.
As for me, I told Coach during our usual Friday-night talk-he and I always sat down every Friday night at the hotel to discuss the upcoming game-that we"d be fine, we"d spread the ball around more to others, and that whoever we had with us in Columbia would be sufficient to win this game.
After our talk, I got treatment on my right shoulder that night from AP-Anthony Pa.s.s, our head trainer. It was getting better, the inflammation was going down, and AP was doing ultrasound on my shoulder. He had applied the ultrasound cream to my shoulder and then had draped a towel over it while he was working on it. I wasn"t paying any attention to what was happening with my shoulder, but instead I was looking away and talking to other guys who were in our training area. After a while, my shoulder started tingling and then hurting. I was surprised at how effective the ultrasound felt that night. AP pulled the towel back and looked stricken when he saw my shoulder. He just started saying, "I"m so sorry," over and over.
At that point, I saw it. There was a bad burn on my shoulder-it looked like some skin had melted away. It really started hurting about then, but I could tell AP felt terrible about it, so I said, "It"s all right, man; it"s not a big deal." But I knew when I put the shoulder pads on the next night it was going to be a rough night.
I certainly have made sure to remind him over the years what he did to my shoulder that night in Columbia and how dressing and playing the next day with the "sunburn" he"d laid on me was no picnic. And whenever I had the chance, I would make sure that anyone and everyone within listening distance heard the story about the "trainer-inflicted sunburn." He did so much to keep me healthy and on the field for my career that it was fun to give him grief over this accident.
In the end, Percy wasn"t able to play. It was an ESPN Sat.u.r.day-night game. We always loved Sat.u.r.day-night television games, except this one turned out to be one of the coldest games I ever played in my college career: somewhere around game time, it was freezing. Other than the temperature, there was a really good atmosphere, a little bit like the Louisiana State game but not quite as intense or personally vindictive. Still, their fans knew that without our team"s blocking a field goal at the end of the previous year"s game, they would have kept us from winning the National Championship. They were giving me a hard time during pregame and I loved it. Being ha.s.sled always gets my compet.i.tive juices flowing. Some guys prefer home games, and I do love a home crowd too. However, there"s something about quieting a noisy road crowd that gets me going. I had a great feeling about that game, and I had a lot of friends and family who made the trip up to support us.
On the opening drive, I scored on a third-down play, plowing into the end zone through another good-size hole our line had opened up and then ending the run on a pretty big collision too. It was one of my favorite plays that game, in no small part because my shoulder held up, despite both the separation and the burn. We went up quickly, 70. On their possession, they turned the ball over, and I threw a touchdown pa.s.s to Jarred Fayson, a fade route into the corner of the end zone that made the score 140.
From that point on, the game turned into a pretty good little shoot-out, with each of us scoring in turn. Aaron Hernandez had his coming-out party that night by having his biggest game of his freshman season. We had a chance to build a bigger lead on them but couldn"t do it and instead fumbled the ball and kept them in the game.
We went into the locker room at halftime up 2714, but they were still in the game. In the second half we stayed with our game plan and kept executing. I was so into what we were doing as a unit that I wasn"t paying much attention to the score. In the fourth quarter we needed a separation score to seal the win. On fourth down and goal to go, I ran it, smashed into two guys on the goal line, and piled over them to get it into the end zone for the touchdown. We knew we had it wrapped up. Finally, we added another touchdown on a pa.s.s that I threw to Bubba Caldwell for a 5131 win.
It was a good night for all of us. I later reminded Coach that I"d told him we"d step up even without Percy. I think it was a good growing experience for us as a team to be on the road without one of our best players against a very good team and to win. Not to mention they also had Coach Spurrier on the other sideline, who always seems to figure out a way to beat people. Their best receiver, Kenny McKinley, had a big night in receptions and yards gained, but our defense stepped up and we were fortunate to keep him out of the end zone.
After the game, a reporter asked me how it felt to score all those touchdowns. I knew we"d had a big night but didn"t realize I"d had a hand in seven touchdowns-five rushing and two pa.s.sing. South Carolina was the game that probably did as much to influence the Heisman voters as any game we played that year, but I didn"t realize it at the time. People were talking about it, but it really didn"t enter my mind. I didn"t have any control over it, so I stayed focused on the next game. South Carolina was quite a game for all of us and, thanks to the rest of the guys on the team, for me personally.
The next week we continued on a roll as cohesive units on both offense and defense and beat Florida Atlantic in a game that was a tune-up for the Florida State Seminoles" visit to our place the next week. One interesting note from the FAU game is that both starting quarterbacks-Rusty Smith and I-attend First Baptist of Jacksonville. They played us tough but in the end, we won the game. Percy missed the game again.
But Percy was back for the next one, and FSU was talking their usual brand of trash all week. Of course, I was always ready to play Florida State, but having their senior weak-side linebacker, Geno Hayes, quoted as saying, "Tim Tebow is going down. We can go out there and shatter his dream," helped fuel the fire for all of us. My dream, really, was to beat FSU-badly.
For as much as they were trash talking, we forgot that they were coming in at 74, having finished in the middle of the pack in the Atlantic Coast Conference standings. By the time of the pregame warm-ups, they were dancing around. At least they never danced on the F in the center of our field-there were several of us watching for that, especially after Georgia"s shenanigans on the goal line after their first score a month earlier.
On our very first drive, the referee called a false start, but we had already started the play, so I continued and rolled out to my left before they blew the whistle. After they blew it, Geno Hayes slapped me in the facemask, and then head-b.u.t.ted me after we had all clearly stopped, and was in my face, talking trash, with spit flying everywhere.
Not a good idea. At all. I had started out irritated with them and him, and now I was playing angry. The next play was a third down and sixteen. It was supposed to be a pa.s.s play, but n.o.body was open when I looked around, so I tucked the ball under my arm and ran for a long gain and a first down. Oh, and by the way, during the run I made FSU"s trash talking, face-mask slapping, and head-b.u.t.ting linebacker, Geno Hayes, miss.
As much as I would never find myself rooting for FSU, that university and its football program have turned out some fine players and people through the years. People like running back Warrick Dunn and linebacker Derrick Brooks, both of whom I have the utmost respect for and have looked to as role models for how to live life. Warrick Dunn bought houses for families who needed them but couldn"t afford them. Derrick Brooks helped children, in so many ways, to be the best they could be and took them on trips to stimulate their thirst for learning. It"s hard for me to imagine either Derrick Brooks or Warrick Dunn saying or doing some of the things we experienced that day from some of those FSU players.
Although the score was still 00, the game was over at that point. Trust me-we knew it was over. We just kept playing for the fun of it.
We were driving, and on a play-action pa.s.s from their twenty-two yard line, I stood up after faking the handoff and saw that their defensive end had come free (unblocked) and had me in his sights. I saw him at the very last second and ducked, taking a quick look at him as he flew over my back, and then I spun out and ran it in for a touchdown. I vividly remember running right and then cutting back to the center of the field at the ten just to run over one of their defenders who was there. I did and finished the run into the end zone.
It"s not often that I shy away from contact, and there are some games where I just like to go right at people. This was one of those games, and as I scored, I thought, This is going to be a great day.
On defense, we were flying around and hitting people. We stopped them, got the ball back, and drove down the field. I hit Louis Murphy in stride in the back-right corner of the end zone-he did a great job getting a foot down and in the end zone for the score. That was probably one of my best pa.s.ses that year-and Louis was a big part of that. We went up 143. Then it was a bit of a back-and-forth battle, except that our defense was keeping them out of the end zone, making their only option a string of field-goal attempts.
On the next drive, I threw an out pa.s.s to Murphy, and although the ball got away from me a little, Murph made a slick, reaching, one-handed catch. We finished the drive and went up by a score of 216.
In the second quarter we drove down the field again and ran a Mickey (our renamed Power) up the middle from the five yard line, and while I was stiff-arming one guy in the facemask at the one yard line, and with my right hand pressed against his facemask, another guy missed me and hit my right hand, pinning it between his and the other"s helmet. I felt something crack but only as I was getting up and celebrating a new lead: 286. I celebrated with the team but didn"t tell anyone about my hand.
While we were on defense, AP came over to me, grabbed my hand, and saw my reaction. He wanted to examine my hand further, but he knew I wasn"t coming out of the game anyway, so instead he sprayed a cooling spray on it. That stuff was great-the marvels of modern medicine-as it kept me comfortable and able to stay in the game. Every time I"d come over to the sideline, AP would spray it again to give me relief. Percy and I were able to do whatever we wanted to on offense, and Louis Murphy, Bubba Caldwell, and our backs had good games as well. It was really cool. When I threw a touchdown pa.s.s to Bubba Caldwell to make it 3812, Bubba threw the ball up into the crowd-farther it seemed than I had thrown it to him. I was able to finish the game, and we dominated it in all aspects, ending up scoring some more and eventually winning, 4512.
The last four minutes on the field, as we were running the clock out, the stands were full as the whole crowd was still there in full force and doing their thing-going just a little bit crazy. There were guys there dressed in Heisman shirts and carrying Heisman signs. The buzz seemed to be increasing about that award with each pa.s.sing game. And the Florida State game was a big game to be able to play really well as a team and individually, as so many of us did-it was a wonderful feeling and night to enjoy.
After the game we went to get an X-ray of my hand and found out that it was, in fact, a complete break. I asked AP what the stuff was that he"d been spraying on it and learned that it was some sort of antiseptic, like Bactine or something.
"But what about what it did for the . . ."
AP grinned. "Nope. No medical value for breaks at all." And then he laughed.
He laughed way too long as far as I was concerned. He really enjoyed that story-I suppose it was a bit of payback for my telling the trainer-induced sunburn story so many times.
They threw a tiny wrap over my hand to keep the outside world from knowing it was broken. When they were done, we hopped into my dad"s Altima and drove over to the UF track where we had our traditional family tailgate gathering with the Heavener family, good friends of my parents from their college days. My family figured out that something was not right, however, and asked what happened to my hand; they were surprised to hear that I"d broken it in the second quarter.
And so I had a night hanging out with friends and family. They kept asking if I"d rather go out and see what was going on in Gainesville that night and celebrate the big win. I preferred a quiet evening. For that quiet evening, we ended up hanging out in my buddies" apartment, playing Catch Phrase until late, watching the West Coast college football games.
The next morning a group of us headed to the Cracker Barrel at the intersection near I-75 and Archer Road in Gainesville for breakfast. There were probably eight of us-my two brothers, along with Robby"s friend Angel from Miami, a couple of other buddies, and me. The hostess was kind enough to seat us in the back, but before long, someone spotted us. I enjoy interacting with folks a bunch, but sometimes a little privacy is good, because otherwise it gets hard to do just simple things-like eat and talk with family and friends. This was one of those times, as people started coming up one at a time to get my autograph.
People were bringing over napkins and whatever they could find. Then people started heading out into the gift area of the restaurant and coming back into the dining room with their bags of goodies and getting in the line that had now formed in that area of the restaurant. We spent the rest of breakfast signing.
And by "we," I mean all of us. It was funny actually. After a few minutes, somebody mistook Robby for our tight end, Tate Casey, and somebody else thought Angel was our punter, Eric Wilbur. For some reason, we never corrected the mistake, and before long, the other seven were signing as Gator players-that they weren"t.