Fun fact. I went to high school with Hoda Kotb.
Me and about 1200 other hormonal teenagers. I was a lowly underclassman, while she was the senior homecoming queen. Hoda successfully navigated high school and attained royalty status after four years. I represented the underclass, a serf freshly flushed from the bowels of middle school, just beginning my high school odyssey. She sat atop the food chain while I was lower than whale poop at the bottom of the ocean. Actually, it’s quite serene down there.
I perused the alums from Hoda’s graduating class. A couple of names stick out in my mind, but I cannot definitively say why they’re familiar. Maybe we played football together. If it wasn’t for the Today Show, I likely would not remember Hoda Kotb anymore than she’d know me. Regardless, it’s neat to see somebody from the old neighborhood making the big time. That’s assuming fame trips your trigger, which you know it does.
Commoners do not typically intermingle with the noteworthy people.
If we did, we wouldn’t be common. I scanned Hoda’s X account and ran across another familiar name from Fort Hunt High School, Mike Novogratz. I remembered him immediately as a wrestler, but that’s about as far as my memory took me. Upon further internet inspection, it appears Mike killed it in the financial world after graduating from Princeton. My wikipedia page is yet to materialize. How common of me.
Hoda and Mike graduated in 1982 or thereabout. By the time I donned the cap and gown in 1985, Fort Hunt High School ceased to exist. As a member of the final graduating class, I witnessed firsthand the death of the 22 year-old school. Zealous politicians, busy pushing their personal agendas, murdered Fort Hunt High School all in the name of community progress. Now the campus is an oversized middle school complete with a massive parking lot for all of those 13 and 14 year old drivers. Well thought out, councilmen.
But that’s basically it for all of the famous people I know, except for a few former NFL players I lost touch with. Once I hung up my cleats midway through college, that life stayed in the rearview until I recently looked up William & Mary. They recruited me for football, but I didn’t consider them because I thought it was too small of a school. Without the modern conveniences of the internet, I made a hasty collegiate judgment from high school guidance counselor pamphlets. Shrewd, very shrewd.
Fun fact. William & Mary’s green and gold school colors matched my high school.
I could have attended Bill & Mary without having to adjust to a new color combination. If I had been good enough, maybe the Green Bay Packers would have drafted me, too. Green and gold throughout high school, college, and the National Football League! Sure, that’s a bit presumptuous to assume the NFL loomed as a possible career choice. It would have been a great wikipedia storyline, though.
I closed the door on college athletics for what seemed like really good reasons over three and half decades ago. When I decided not to return to Wake Forest for my third year, I had just turned 20 years old. The WFU road looked dauntingly difficult and I allowed the passion for the game to slowly ooze out of me. At the time, leaving felt like a relief. However, the weight of reality quickly replaced my athletic scholarship burden. Ah, the freedom of naïveté.
It turns out the game wasn’t a heavy lift.
Motivating myself to play football was the heavy lift. In the spring of 1987 a new head coach unexpectedly moved me from the defensive line to the offensive line, which left me feeling totally unprepared and ill-equipped to succeed. I could have stepped up, put in the work, and seen where that took me, but I chose to quit. Of course I used different verbiage like, “leaving the game” and “pursuing academic interests without football”. A good rationalization can go a long way if you say it convincingly enough.
I watched teammates languish on the bench, their whole college career spent in the scout team trenches. My freshman season of this was enough. Additional seasons spent on the scout team appeared as pure, unadulterated torture. The prospect of forever sitting as a failed offensive lineman terrified me. Not to mention, I hated playing offense and I was no fan of the new coach, freshly fired by Virginia Tech. I hit the campus in July 1985 with high personal expectations. By May 1987 I wanted out. If only a transfer portal existed way back when.
Feeling utterly defeated and lost, I decided to throw in the towel rather than swing another wild, inaccurate punch.
It’s hard admitting this, even three and a half decades later. I buried it because it brought shame. I was there. I played. But I didn’t finish strong. Truthfully, I didn’t finish at all. At least not football. The year after I left, Wake Forest beat North Carolina in Chapel Hill. On TV I saw my former teammates, exuberant on the sidelines, jumping up and down. Nothing felt better than beating the reigning in-state powerhouse, particularly when you’re the conference cellar dweller. At least that’s how it looked on ESPN.
I felt proud for the Deacs, but a big smattering of envy sat on my plate as well. I opted out of my 1987 fall semester and worked a blue collar job. Seeing Wake beat North Carolina while I sweated and froze my tail off on the Ronald Reagan Airport tarmac didn’t sit well. The grass wasn’t greener on the other side and “real” work was far less glamorous than playing college football, even though I got to wear a new uniform. A puke green shirt with my name above a breast pocket and matching pants became my occupational polyester nightmare. I started to miss the concussions.
I can’t piss and moan too much.
I went back to school and graduated from George Mason University. For 33 years I worked a job that I dreamed about in my younger days. And I still haven’t quit or retired! And I’m doing it in one of the most beautiful states in the union, Colorado. None of this would probably have materialized if I stayed in Winston-Salem, NC. And if I hadn’t quit back in 1987, the three most important people in my life would forever be lost to me – my wife, my son, and my daughter.
I hope Miss Kotbe and Mr. Novogratz don’t think too poorly of me for walking away from the adversity I chose to side-step and the new positional assignment I so passionately dreaded. If they do, oh well. Fear can be debilitating and it’s a daily challenge still. But I suppose celebrities and billionaires understand and are real people, too. Nah! That can’t possibly be true. That never gets mentioned on their Wikipedia pages.