Published: January 05, 2008 08:57 pm         

Life’s a rollercoaster, on and off the field

What do you mean, there’s no justice? The numbers prove it exists.

When I was younger, I wasn’t sure if I had been born into the right place or even into the right time. I understood very little about life, and it bothered me.

Plato said wisdom begins with the awareness of what you don’t know, and I have grown wiser. I still understand very little about life, but it no longer bothers me. I am able to think about something and, if appropriate, not give a damn.

It has become my custom to stand on the Freedom Fighters’ Deck, contemplating life, the night sky and the universe, while smoking my weekly Freedom Fighter Cigar. (It’s a long story and you would find it boring, but it’s basically a reformed cigarette smoker’s way of joining a completely legal demonstration of defiance against the government.)

My latest Contemplation Event was on New Year’s Eve, and I considered the fact that not once during all of the hours I have spent contemplating the night sky and the universe have I seen anything that could even remotely have been considered an Unidentified Flying Object. Some of my friends have, but that’s all right. I’ve had to contend with ghosts, and they haven’t.

I try not to spoil my Contemplation Events with significant thoughts, but they still manage to creep in.

One blustery afternoon beside the farm pond where Frank Calemine and I spent many hours when the fishing was always great, even if the catching wasn’t, a rainbow appeared. It sprang from a hilltop near the place where I’d shot the biggest buck of my hunting career and arched up into the clouds, disappearing from view to end who-knows-where. I might have been the only person alive who saw it.

I remembered how the late Jackie Gleason said that the harder you look for something, the less likely you are to find it. It’s only when you stop looking for them that things begin to find you, and I decided that this is what has happened to me.

As I smoked my New Year’s Eve Freedom Fighter Cigar, I thought about Gleason and some of the people and circumstances that have found me in recent years. I have no idea where my own rainbow will take me before it finally comes back to earth.

And so, on New Year’s Day I was on the back of a motorcycle, riding with some of my new friends to Hancock for breakfast. You can do this if you know how to dress for it, and I’ve spent my share of time out in the cold. (A friend once told me that on a frigid morning during deer season, he had to perform an act of relief, but he was wearing four layers of clothing and had only three layers’ worth of relief equipment available.)

We took old Route 40 and its winding curves to Hancock, but on the way back we rode part of the way on Interstate 68.

That meant we roared through the top of the Sideling Hill cut at 65 miles an hour, leaning our bikes sharply into a tight turn in 30-degree weather, straight into the teeth of a wind that had been blowing a gale at the foot of the mountain. Even my eyeglasses were vibrating from the force of it.

Then we burst out of the cut into the full view of the most amazing vista you’ll see in this part of the country, banked hard to the left and began a steep dive down the mountainside.

It’s a superhighway version of a rollercoaster ride, and if you are any kind of a self-respecting adrenaline junkie, you want to howl and shake your fists in the air, and you crave to do it again and again.

But if you’re an aging adrenaline junkie like my friends and I are ... maybe not too often.

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If you wrote a movie or TV script about it, even the estrogen-oriented channels would probably reject it as too improbable or corny:

After his team loses a game in which it is favored by four touchdowns — and blows a chance to play for the national championship — the head coach quits and goes to another school that he thinks offers him a better opportunity (and more money).

In doing so, he bails out on his players before a bowl game in which they are scheduled to play what may be the best college football team in the country.

The associate coach who takes over on an interim basis has been a head coach only once before, more than a decade ago, at a small school where his teams won fewer than a third of their games.

Very few people, except for his players and the fans who have lived and died with them for years, give them even a slight chance. The ESPN viewer poll favors the other team by a margin of 4 to 1.

So what happens? They literally blow the other team off the field. Their 260-pound fullback actually outruns its defensive backs for a 57-yard touchdown.

After the game, the interim coach’s players tell a national TV audience about how much they love him and the way he inspired them and led them as a family. They say they want him to be the new head coach.

For all the chance they have to woof on the coach who abandoned them, they have only good things to say about their interim coach, their loyal fans and each other. Shortly after midnight, the school offers the job to the interim coach and he accepts — with a handshake.

Reporters’ calls to the former coach are not immediately returned.

Bill Stewart, the new West Virginia University football coach, is a native of the state. When he spoke at an alumni dinner I attended a few years ago, I decided this about him:

If I had a kid who was an athlete, I’d want him to play for Bill Stewart and his program, regardless of what sport it was. If I were a high school athlete, I’d want to play for him. I’d love to have him move to Keyser and go to my church.

Anybody who believes there’s no justice left in this nasty little world needs only to read these numbers:

West Virginia 48

Oklahoma 28