Not until the second and third linebacker slammed into him, and in the dream, he didn’t feel the pain, the hits didn’t hurt.
Until they did.
And somehow, he was on the ground, bleeding, and the worst part, his leg, the thigh bone bent at an odd angle, blood soaking his uniform, the horrified eyes looking out through the other team’s helmets.
And then the horrified eyes of his buddies on his own team. His friends. His homies. The guys he did everything with. In season and out of season. Man, he even vacationed with some of them.
But now, in the dream, he lay on the ground, his leg twisted, and the pain began, shooting up and down his leg, out his arms, through his fingertips, pounding in his head, but the worst pain was his heart.
Because when he looked at his buddies and held his hand out, asking for a hand up, they looked at him in horror, shaking their heads and turning away.
Suddenly, the stadium was empty, and he was there alone, bleeding and unable to move, unable to get up...
And there was no one to help.
That’s when he woke up. That’s when he always woke up.
Even after a little nap in the middle of the day, sunlight streaming in through the hospital window, beeping coming down the hall, his door half cracked... The lights were out, but the hospital never slept.
Therefore, neither did he. Not even at night. People bustling in all day long—he was a hot commodity after all, and no one wanted to see anything happen to him.
They didn’t know that the dream, or nightmare as it was, had become his biggest fear.
Being alone.
He stirred, shaking the last remnants of the dream from his head, and the paper that lay on his chest, the one he’d been reading when he dozed off, crinkled.
He gripped it, not in a normal way, and he made his fingers relax.
Funny, he was in the hospital because of a car accident, but that was never a part of his dream.
The injury, and the traction devices on his leg right now, were not from a football injury but from the car accident.
His dream always had it messed up.
Running a hand down over his eyes and across his cheeks where the stubble scratched his palm, he took a breath and tried to gather himself.
He wasn’t alone. He would never be alone. It was something he’d been taught in Sunday School, although it had been a while since he’d been in church.
Still, he supposed it was a natural feeling of people who didn’t have stable families.
He’d seen it in his teammates, seen it in the way they self-medicated.
Some of them had enough natural talent that it didn’t matter.
He’d never been able to do that. He knew, if he took his focus off football, even for a second, someone else would have his job.
He hadn’t gotten to where he was because of talent.
He’d gotten there because of determination, and sacrifice, and hard work, and the grit to never quit, to do what no one else would do, to work when everyone else stopped, to push himself where no one else would go, because without football, his life was a mess.
Dante Tolzien held the paper in his hand open in front of his face, adjusting his body, ignoring the throbbing, sharp pain that burned up his leg.
Sometimes, if he was very still, he could get the pain to stop. He’d heard there were switches in his brain where he could turn the pain on and off.
Most of his success had been mental, so he believed it.
It was something he’d been working on in the long hours as he lay in the hospital bed, with nothing to do but watch TV and occasionally talk to the guys who came to see him, although most of them had gone home after they’d lost their last playoff game in January, and the coaches as well, the ones who weren’t fired or who hadn’t left, but he’d not been kept up to date because the season was over.
There’d be the normal shakeups, position changes, trades, new draft picks, and retirements.
But he had every intention of continuing to play for the Galveston Grizzlies through the rest of his contract and had no reason to think that the team would cut him, unless he couldn’t keep up in training camp.
He had a few months.
His eyes focused on the handwriting on the paper—whimsical curls and loops screaming the author was a woman, long before he’d gotten to her signature.
One of his coaches had signed him up for some kind of pen pal program. He hadn’t known. He certainly wasn’t interested in replying.
The woman obviously had no idea he was a football player, and he would guess, from the tone of her letter, that she knew nothing about football and even less about sports in general.
He wasn’t interested. He wanted a woman who understood him.
“Hey there, Dante,” Coach Jacobs said as he walked in the room.
Tim Jacobs wasn’t actually a coach. He was more of a coach’s assistant. Coach Shea, who coached the offensive line, was the coach that Coach Jacobs most often worked under.
There were a lot of personnel involved in making a professional team successful.
Dante loved the family-like atmosphere. But he wasn’t fooled. It was all about money, and as soon as the money didn’t flow, people left. Or got fired.
Coach Jacobs had been around as long as he had been—six years. Which was an eternity in professional football.
“Hey, Coach.”
“Could have used you today. Got some guys that think because they’ve got ‘professional ballplayer’ beside their name they don’t have to work anymore. Needed an old-timer who can show them that’s not true.”
Dante grinned, reaching up and bumping Coach Jacob’s fist as he stopped by the side of the bed. “I’m an old-timer?” He said it with humor in his voice, but he cringed inside. Twenty-eight was old for a professional ballplayer. Most guys didn’t last past five years. And here he was having completed six.
His body felt every second of those six years. Plus the four years of college before that. And on and on.
“Yeah, got a bunch of kids here looking at the team and thinking they can make it big-time based on talent alone. You try to tell them different, but most of ’em don’t pay attention.”
Dante nodded. He’d seen it. Same as everyone else. Technically, the season was over, most of the guys scattered.
Dante didn’t have family, so he hung out in Galveston during the off-season. He and Coach Jacobs were as good friends as a coach and a player could be, he supposed. Eventually, he’d like to coach too. He’d probably end up starting at an assistant position the way Coach Jacobs had. His professional career hadn’t been as star-studded as Dante’s though, so maybe he’d be offered a better position straight out of the gate.
He definitely didn’t want to be an announcer, the way so many ballplayers ended up.
He didn’t want to be in front of a camera, speaking. He wanted to get his hands dirty in the action. If he couldn’t play, coaching was the next best thing.
“See you got a letter. The Big Dude signed you up for that.”
Coach Samuels. The head coach. Everybody called him The Big Dude.
“Coach Samuels? Why?”
Coach Samuels did some odd things, mostly based on his religion, similar to Tony Dungy maybe, although Coach Dungy was before Dante’s time. Still, he’d heard the comparisons and figured them to be accurate.
“He thought you needed it. He and the guy who runs that program went to college together back in the day. Stone ages, I guess, for you. Coach was worried about you, still is. Up here.” Coach Jacobs tapped his head.