Wake Forest – Joseph S. Davis

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.

It was forest green.

This couch appeared even darker situated in the bowels of our partially completed basement. It owned the wall where it was centered for no other reason than it was the largest piece of usable furniture in the room. Nobody retreated downstairs to stretch out on its cushions, read a good book, or catch the big game. Its domestic placement seemed more like banishment than well-designed feng shui.

The piano rivaled it in size. Their gross weights likely teetered the scale within ounces of one another. The only thing larger was the homemade train table that sucked up the majority of basement floorspace. It least that created a desirable sensation through amusement and entertainment. “Big green” was more akin to a torture device.

This davenport of death frightened me as a child. First and foremost its thick, rough fabric caused my skin to itch within seconds of sitting down. It made wool army blankets feel like cashmere. Even as a husky child, I did not sink into its cushions. The sturdy construction manifested a sense of practicality rather than a feeling of comfort. It was like sitting on a steel gurney wrapped in 20 grit sandpaper.

In the same utilitarian vein, it also converted into a sofa bed.

I’m pretty sure its construction used more steel than the majority of modern day automobiles. Maybe as an adult, I could pull out the steel girders and springs that supported the flimsy two inch mattress. If you were not exhausted and ready to lay down before undertaking this task, you certainly needed the respite afterwards. Not that the bed was any more comfortable than the sofa.

More than once, I caught my finger inside one of its bending metal retractable brackets. You’d be safer to intentionally place a finger or a toe inside a snapping turtle’s mouth. Each moving part inside the hidden bed potentially acted as a small digit guillotine.

Amazingly I never noticed any blood stains on the metallic components.

Nobody maintained these parts and they looked mechanically safe. However, the screeching twangs of popping metallic springs and grinding bars, brackets, and bolts emitted a symphony of discord. It sounded kind of like how I feel when I crawl out of bed these days.

Closing the sofa bed back into a couch seriously took on a Herculean effort. As difficult as it was was to open, the closure more than tripled the levels of physiological output. It felt like trying to squeeze, press, and manipulate a kingsize bed inside a crib.

However, when it comes to longevity, this beastly contraption possessed the capacity to outlast lesser furniture construction designs. I think we could have dropped it off the roof of our house and it would have remained unscathed from the fall. Of course, getting it on the roof would have necessitated a crane. Still, it would have been worth the money to see the forces of nature thwarted by human craftsmanship and engineering.

When I knew him, Al Groh dressed in black and gold.

Not so much by choice, but by design. In the mid-1980’s, Coach Groh held the position and title of Head Football Coach, Wake Forest University. Black & Gold represented the university’s official school colors. Al Groh represented the embodiment of a first time division one collegiate head football coach.

I arrived on the Wake Forest campus in July 1985, ready to embark on my academic and athletic life. Yes, I earned a full athletic grant-in-aid scholarship to play football, but the recruitment process stressed the importance of education and how that translated to future success more so than playing a sport. Maybe I wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but that selling point struck a chord with me.

Like all head coaches I’d known, Al Groh represented a man to be feared and admired. Not even 18 years old yet, the last thing I wanted was to draw an angry eye from my head coach. Praise from him reigned down like gold nuggets, while his ire could emotionally impoverish you. They say you play for your teammates, but if the coach doesn’t like what he sees, playing is not an option.

Beyond the gridiron, Coach Groh spoke incessantly.

Not in a jovial, back-slapping kind of way. Not like he always had a funny story to share. He rambled more like a verbose hostage taker. Older players warned the freshman of his Friday night pregame speeches. Nothing in my life prepared me for these orations and the sense of internment they fostered.

Sitting through the talks evolved into a ritualistic rite of passage. At least as redshirt freshmen we received a captive audience reprieve since we did not travel with the team for away games. Besides having five years to complete our degrees, we understood this to be the greatest benefit of a redshirt season.

He literally blathered for well past an hour.

By the end, nobody still listened to the words spilling out of his mouth. The room filled with glazed over eyes and vacant stares. It’s difficult to understand how he didn’t realize he’d lost all of us after the first twenty minutes. Yet he stuck to the same monotonous, communicatively ineffective, droning mantra week after week. It actually became physically painful to listen.

By the end of the second semester each player met individually with Coach Groh in his office. I was not spiritually connected at the time, but I prayed it would not entail the same discomfort of the Fall’s Friday night talks. I took the meeting for its intended purpose – a chance for the head coach to talk some more and for me to nod my head and agree with whatever he said.

But he said something that I never saw coming.

With a wry, crooked smile he told me that academics had nothing to do with my attending Wake Forest University. He said, “Let’s be honest. Football is the only reason you’re here, not school.” Like a dumb 18 year old, I blankly nodded my head.

Technically he was correct. Without a football scholarship I never would have been academically competent or financially able to attend that institution. However, Al Groh sold me on the importance of education and how that would impact the rest of my life. The educational opportunity was just as much a factor in my choosing Wake Forest University as was its football team.

For the first time in my life, l recognized that an adult male I blindly trusted, who held me in subjugation, lied to me. He sold me a bill of goods as a teenager and now slyly acted as if we both always understood what he really meant. I’ll never forget his words or the smug, arrogant look on his face that day.

The couch’s design met a need and was likely a handsome piece back in the 1950’s. However, you’d think coziness would factor in on the design and implementation phase. I don’t think Al Groh is an evil or bad man. However, you’d think honesty and integrity would factor in when dealing with kids. Whether it’s dated couches or deceptive coaches, the whole thing just makes me, well, uncomfortable.

Tag: Wake Forest

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The Dissimilar Delineation of Dated Couches & Deceptive Coaches