By: Alan Berger

“Did you see that kid throw?”

If Packer heard that once, he heard it a million times. One hundred bucks, times a million, he thought in his financial research wheelhouse first rate mind.

With that kind of money, he could cure cancer.

But Packer was not wanted to cure cancer, Packer was only wanted on the football field, and not in lab class. That would be a distraction from, “Keeping his eye on the ball”.

During his last football game for his school, Packers arm put the team so far ahead that he asked to be taking out of the game.

He said his arm hurt but it was really was because he wanted to add some things he thought of during the game that he wanted to add to his science paper home work assignment instead of playing more, “Stupid ass football”.

While he was on the bench, working on his papers with his helmet off and way off to the side, coach, as usual charged over and grabbed his papers, ripped them up and threw Packer and his helmet back on the field.

“Tell your teachers coach ate your homework”, was the play the fuckhead coach put on Packer’s playing field.

Packer got on the field. He would remember what was ripped from him.

He would lie in bed, and think about why we can’t we cure this, or replace that but, “Don’t worry world of disease, I’m coming”. He would begin the next morning like all the other mornings during stupid ass High School football practice by heading into the science lab class first.

This was the first class of the day. He would go to the teacher and tell him of his latest ideas. The teacher thought it should be the other way around. Packer should be the teacher and he the student.

He would be a student that Packer might not even give a B to. One day after school, a recruiter was waiting for him in the living room with his father. That did it.

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree but this one rolled light years away.

His father introduced the diabetic looking recruiter to Packer by pointing out to his son how many players got to the N.F.L. thru this guy.

Packer’s father would punctuate his every point with the football he always carried around like the fucking Holy Grail.

After the recruiter completed his pitch, Packer told his father and the recruiter he was not going to play football at his college or any college unless Harvard Medical has one.

The recruiter shook his head and got up left without a word. Packer’s father hit the roof, the basement, the walls, all the time not letting go of his precious football. The football he threw good but not good enough to have his own fucking football career.

He yelled and shouted so loud that he started to choke and choke bad. He even dropped his football. Fumble?

He wound up on his back, flopping like a fish on a pier. Packer started CPR, but his father kept
choking and was turning blue from the red his face was a minute ago.

Packer took out his silver surfer pen and performed a beautiful tracheotomy on his father’s
throat.

The doctors congratulated Packer as his father looked on from the wheelchair he was in as they
rolled him towards the exit of the emergency room.

One or two doctors wanted to mentor Packer

They did not speak all the way home but when they got there and walked in the living room. Dad
saw his football and picked it up and threw it in the gas burning fireplace and tuned it on.

He looked at his puzzled kid and said, “What’s up Doc”?