I was more concerned that Beau’s motivation to play had something to do with keeping Chris’s memory alive. I thought of William, and his comment that sometimes you just have to live through things to truly understand them. I’d experienced something similar when my father died. Friends had lost parents, and while empathetic, I hadn’t understood the pain that could accompany that loss until my own father died.
I also did not want Beau to play college football. Most of his high school years were just before the CTE studies came out, before the movie Concussion with Will Smith hit the big screen. Elizabeth and I didn’t know what we didn’t know. Beau played the game undersized, but relentless, and he’d paid for it with injuries. He’d already had the one concussion. We hoped he would quit, but Beau had to make that decision for himself.
Beau and I jumped on a plane to Los Angeles, rented a car and a hotel room, and went through the recruiting process, which was an eye-opener. When we showed up at the first camp, I could see Beau’s nerves in his demeanor. Big, athletic players surrounded him. To make matters worse, the first thing the college recruiting team did was instruct the recruits to remove their shoes and shirts to get weighed and measured. They then handed each recruit a T-shirt with a number on it and herded them out the door to the practice field to be timed in the forty-yard dash and cone drills.
As I sat with other parents sweltering on metal bleachers and slathering on sunblock, I watched this process and felt sick to my stomach. I remembered the passage in William’s journal about his indoctrination into the US Marines, how he had been treated like a piece of meat, all individuality stripped away, everyone handed the same gray sweatshirt and sweatpants with a number that would be his new identity.
I looked down at the field and watched Beau going through another drill, doing bear crawls, rolling, getting to his feet, shuffling left, right, forward, back, then running to the back of the line to prepare for the next drill, and I realized that Beau, too, was a commodity for the coaches to mold and make bigger and stronger, and to indoctrinate on how to think and take their orders at face value. I worried about my son, my boy.
When Beau finished the camp, we went back to our hotel. In the morning we would drive down the I-10 freeway, and he’d perform at a two-day camp attended by coaches from multiple schools. I refrained from saying much to Beau about the camp that afternoon or the upcoming camps, except “Do your best and don’t worry about the rest.”
When Beau came out of the shower, I asked him how he felt the camp had gone. He told me he didn’t think the coaches even noticed him.
“I was just a number,” he said, and I marveled at how my son had become so intuitive. We talked about grabbing some dinner, but Beau, a kid never cheated out of a good time, immediately got on his computer and after a few minutes said, “The Dodgers are playing.”
I loved baseball, always had, and I’d never been to Dodger Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I could check it off my bucket list. And seeing a game with my son would be priceless. I only recalled attending one game with my dad, at Candlestick Park, to watch the San Francisco Giants and Willie Mays. Create memories, I heard Elizabeth say.
When we arrived at the stadium, I approached the ticket counter. Tickets ranged in price from expensive to very expensive, but you could buy bleacher seats in the outfield for just ten dollars.
“Let’s just get those,” Beau said, and I knew he meant it.
“No. We might never see another game here,” I said to Beau, though inside I had a deeper debate. I was working a job I was not passionate about. At the very least I would enjoy the opportunities the money allowed me to afford for my family.
I bought two tickets three rows behind the first base dugout. The temperature was heavenly, hovering around eighty degrees.
Neither Beau nor I had eaten, so before getting to our seats, we bought Dodger Dogs, fries, and Cokes. Beau had a big smile on his face when we reached the seats, and we asked a guy sitting behind us to take our photograph. That photograph remains on a corkboard in my home office with the ticket stub.
We settled in to watch batting practice and eat, wiping mustard from the corners of our mouths. Yasiel Puig, the Dodgers’ right fielder, launched baseballs high into the air and far over the center field wall. Each crack of his bat hitting the ball sounded like a gunshot that echoed against the stadium’s still relatively empty seats.
Vin Scully stood on the field and I was just about to point out the Dodgers’ iconic announcer when Beau said, “I don’t want to play anymore.” He turned and looked at me. Even behind the sunglasses I could tell he was fighting tears.