chapter one
rearview mirror

Kurt cobain was singing about teen spirit. I cranked up the volume and pulled onto the freeway. The year was 1993 and Nirvana's Nevermind was still getting heavy rotation on the radio. That August in Coral Springs, Florida, was hot and humid beyond belief. Breathing felt like sucking air through a sweaty sock. Mashing on the gas, I angled my black Ford Mustang, which was loaded with clothes, CDs, and soccer gear, into the fast lane. This was a big moment in my life, one of those crossroads that misty-eyed adults are always telling you about when they reminisce about their youth, and I knew it. I was heading off to my first semester of college at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, one of five freshmen invited to play on the school's Division I soccer team.

The FAU campus was a short thirty-minute drive from Coral Springs, where I had graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Sandwiched between Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, Coral Springs is a wealthy community where the Everglades have been battling with concrete-covered strip malls for decades and losing. But like most small towns in southern Florida, the place has retained its own special kind of quirkiness. Cranes, flamingos, and even an occasional alligator will lounge in the hundreds of drainage canals that crisscross Coral Springs. Fishermen still sell stone crabs fresh from the Atlantic on folding card tables not far from gated communities housing million-dollar mansions. And in true Florida fashion, senior citizens hungry for their early-bird specials pack the restaurants at 4:30 p.m.

Heading north to Boca on I-95, I thought about what I was leaving in the rearview mirror. Starting with my graduation in June, it had pretty much been the best summer of my life. I had done fairly well for myself academically, despite an admitted lack of effort. I ranked forty-three out of a class of around five hundred at Douglas High, with a 3.8 GPA. I had excelled in math and science. My mom and dad, who have always been really cool, down-to-earth parents, let me throw a party for about twenty of my friends on graduation night. We lived in a rambling single-story ranch house in a development called Eagle Trace, complete with a screened-in swimming pool, near a golf course where my dad, little brother, Jeff, and I would play together. Mark "Super" Duper, the former Miami Dolphins wide receiver, one half of the famous "Marks Brothers," lived just down the block from us. Whitney Houston also owned a house nearby. Let's just say her place was a lot bigger than ours.

My parents knew we were going to be drinking on graduation night, so instead of burying their heads in the sand, they allowed us to get loaded under their supervision, as long as everyone gave up their keys at the front door. All my buddies came to raise a glass, hang out, and celebrate this early milestone in our lives: Steve Nelson, a left-footer from my high school soccer team who I worked with at a restaurant called Chowders; Jeff Nickell and Frank Cava, two guys I had become close with while playing football my senior year at Douglas; and of course, Chris Igoe, Douglas High's resident class clown and self-proclaimed "pimp."

Tall, lanky, red-haired, and coated with a shotgun blast of freckles, Igoe had been a polarizing force at Douglas. You either loved or hated him. There was absolutely no middle ground. He was funny, smart, brash, and completely out of control. Igoe was obsessed with gangsta rap music, especially N.W.A. and Snoop Doggy Dog. He regularly dressed in Nike track suits, occasionally with a small travel clock hanging around his neck, which he had purchased during one of his two stints at military school. He would walk through the halls at Douglas singing "I-G-O-E" to the tune of Snoop's "What's My Name?"

His senior year, Igoe would wear what he referred to proudly as his "Black Power" glove on his right hand during football games. He would ball his hand into a fist and raise it above his head for a few seconds before each kickoff. What did the gesture mean? Who the hell knows? It was really just a driving glove that he had to hide from Coach Mathisen, who said he would boot Chris off the team if he ever wore it at a game again. Of course, Chris kept wearing the glove.

Equal parts arrogance and insecurity, Igoe acted like he was the star of a raucous sitcom and we were his laugh track. My other buddies from the football team—Cava, Nickell, Ari Levy, the McCarthy brothers—were no angels, and we all had a certain amount of mischief and mayhem lurking inside us, but we were nothing compared to Chris. No one was. Igoe was the type of guy who would go to a high school party, steal bottles out of the parents' liquor cabinet, try to have sex with someone's girlfriend in the bathroom, start a fistfight, and then take a shit in the washing machine, which was all pretty hilarious, as long as you weren't the person who had to clean up after him the next day.

Igoe didn't get into much trouble on graduation night, beyond body-slamming me headfirst into my bed, a bit of liquored-up brawling that left me wounded and woozy. But that hardly mattered. We drank enough beer to kill a mule, wrestled in the pool, blasted "I'm Gonna Be" by the Scottish group the Proclaimers over and over again, singing the infectious "I would walk five hundred miles" chorus at the top of our lungs, much to the discomfort of my neighbors.

My dad, who has worked in the food business for most of his life and is a genius in the kitchen, partied with us, working the grill, barbecuing steak and chicken all night long. At one point, he was giving my friends and me some "wise" words to live by. "When you are ready to pick a wife, never marry a girl with fat ankles," he said, only half kidding. "If she has fat ankles as a young woman, you know she is going to be a big lady when she gets older."

Later, he was half in the bag himself when he helped us concoct a drink that we called the Goodnight Irene. Here's the recipe: Pour four or five fingers of vodka into a tumbler. Add ice. Stir. Drink. Repeat. After a few of those, it was goodnight Irene.

The night ended with beer cans, plastic cups, and empty plates littering the patio. People were sleeping on every available couch or chair while my dad, Nickell, and Igoe floated around on air mattresses in the pool, drunk as lords, pontificating on the past, present, and future. My dad is a stocky guy and looks like a hairy fire hydrant with arms, legs, and a stiff, round belly. He doesn't talk a whole lot, unless it's about cooking or golf, and isn't big on emotions, but when he speaks, he says exactly what he means. That night, he congratulated my friends on their accomplishments and then got strangely serious, offering up this bit of advice, which, true to his nature, was short, sweet, and to the point.

"Life is going to be hard, guys," he said softly as dawn splashed pink streaks across the flat, dark Florida sky. Igoe and Nickell were listening intently, probably staring down at their own blurry reflections on the water's surface. My dad took a sip of his Goodnight Irene and said, almost wistfully, "You have no idea what you're in for."

I wish I could have heard my father's speech. He's a self-made man from a blue-collar background who doesn't open up very often. His childhood was a lot harder than mine. Unfortunately, I had passed out on my bed.

what was i like during this period of my life? Compared to my friends, I wasn't as sensitive as Steve, as morally insane as Igoe, as academically disciplined as Nickell (who got straight As in the advanced prep classes we shared), or as kindhearted and caring as Cava, who was ferocious on the football field but a big teddy bear in real life.

My friends would probably tell you that I was quiet, intense, loyal, and very physically fit. While most kids hated practice, I took training seriously and knew if I put my time into strengthening my body, it would pay dividends on the field. At the end of my senior year in high school, I was five feet nine, 172 pounds, and strong for my size. I could run the fifty-yard dash in 4.7 seconds and would often jog six miles home after lifting at the gym. A mile circuit around Eagle Trace took me five minutes and change to complete.

I was also a workaholic. During summer training for football season, we would run drills in the morning and lift in the afternoon, then I would hop in my car, drive to the soccer field, and practice with my club team in Boca for a couple of hours in the evening.

While I loved playing football and watching it on TV with my dad and little brother, soccer had always been my primary sport. Igoe likes to refer to it as "commie ball," but there is a reason that it's known as "the beautiful game." Soccer is truly a thinking man's sport, where intelligence and finesse are often rewarded over aggression. But then again, nothing equals the brutal beauty of football. Burying your helmet into another player's chest and knocking him on his wallet is one of the best feelings in the world. With football, you get to mainline intensity with hot shots of adrenaline. While soccer is more free-form, fluid, and organic in pacing and the way the play builds, football is more scripted, regimented, and organized, like a military campaign. If soccer is jazz, then football is rock and roll with the volume turned to eleven. My experience on the soccer field made me a better player on the gridiron, and vice versa. Each game spoke to a particular part of my personality.

But what I liked most about both sports was the team camaraderie, the lifelong friendships forged on the field. To win at either game, you often have to sacrifice yourself for the ultimate benefit of your squad. At the same time, every team needs a superstar to make the big play when it counts. If you're truly a good player, your time on the field is a tightrope walk between selfishness and selflessness. You have to pick your shots carefully or risk alienating your teammates. The best guy on a squad always makes the people playing with him look better. This is the glorious democracy of team sports. With both soccer and football, it ultimately doesn't matter how good an individual player is. No one player can win a game by himself. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

That summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, I was in love with more than just athletics. Her name was Kati Hanson. She was a green-eyed brunette with tawny skin, a quiet laugh, and perfect white teeth, the type of girl who would draw a small heart to dot the "i" in her name when passing you a note.

Kati was a year younger than I was and she was on the swim team. We had started dating my sophomore year, when I moved to Coral Springs from Pewaukee, Wisconsin. She would make me peanut butter and banana sandwiches and leave them in my car so I had something to eat between football and soccer practice. While most of my friends would be out raising hell on the weekends, I would often stay home with Kati and watch a movie. Or we would double-date with Steve Nelson and his girlfriend, a petite brunette named Dana Lewis, who worked at Chowders with us. After a while, I got Kati a hostessing job there as well.

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Zupan and Tim Swanson.