Hey, Coach

(The Real Jimmy Moyer)

 a novel by 

Alexi Mersenters

All Rights Reserved ©

Jimmy Moyer shuffles to the front of his driveway to retrieve the Sunday paper. His blue and yellow bathrobe flapps in the breeze. Coach Moyer tucks unwanted sections of the paper under his arm until he holds only the comics, then makes his way back to the garage and a La-Z-Boy recliner sitting where a car should be.

I watch him through the thinned hedge, sipping his coffee, carefully reading. Sometimes it seems like he rereads a comic three or four times. He never laughs though, only a sensible chuckle after he gets it. He eats an egg and bacon sandwich, paper still in hand, drinks more coffee.

A few days after I moved in with my stepmother, she told me the ‘old man next-door’ who arrived right after my father died, didn’t drive, stayed in his garage all day, and hardly said a word to anyone. ‘He’s some famous x-football coach who nobody likes’ she said.

Coach Moyer sat there for hours reading magazines, writing in a journal and pouring shot after shot of some very fine Scotch into his coffee, while I tried to find a new plot twist for my novel, played some games, looked for a date on Match. 

So Coach disappears for a while when the sun sets and returns with an envelope. He wanders down the driveway, a big fluffy maincoone cat in tow, drops letter in mailbox, pulls up the red thing alerting the carrier there is outgoing mail, and is back in his chair. Some good blue mood lighting turns on in the garage, night comes. The door shuts and lights go out around 115am. 

That first time I took notice of Coach Moyer, I’d been living at my stepmother’s for three days. Though I had total comfort, a stocked refrigerator, and didn’t have to contribute a dime towards rent, I was living in hell. A disgraced hell from which I saw no escape. I’d been living my fate as a pariah for four years already, so I’d mostly gotten use to it. 

Myself and I had this little agreement, that in exchange for continually feeling just a notch above miserable, you know, just straddling the fence between despair and happiness (well, my feet were definitely dangling off the despair side), I wouldn’t be pitched into the abyss. The drawback to this ‘deal’ was that feeling maybe just okay with an undercurrent of mild misery would have to do. 

For the rest of my life.

Sunday nights were never good to me because they led to Monday. Some mild and insufferable form of PTSD lingered within me from when I was a kid. See, I hated school, and Mondays meant school. It wasn’t that I was bullied or was a terrible student, I hated school simply because it was forced on me and being a natural night owl meant that I was tired for almost two decades. 

For me back then, school was a waste of time, because most everything I learned wouldn’t serve me in the profession I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I would be making a living doing: Writing. More specifically a Sci-Fi writer. 

Most writers stay up late and wake up late. In my mind, Sci-Fi writers didn't need calculus and Poly-Sci popquizs, and they certainly didn’t need to wake up at 7am every morning to catch a 7:45 bus so they can be at their desk by 9am ready for an eight/nine hour slog through a work day. 

Anyway, Miraclair Golf & Tennis community, St. Sebastian, FL, where Coach and I lived, had layers of exclusivity. You could get a big new home for $800,000, but have to fork over $75,000 up front for golf, then another $15,000 for social, then pay $10,000 or more a year in dues depending on the size of your house. The bigger houses, like the ones Coach and I inhabited, cost $3.8mil++ and were tucked away in secluded 2/3-acre lots surrounded by woods, a river, golf courses, and rings of lesser homes. 

The lots and houses were designed so that you should never have to see your neighbors, and that would’ve remained the case if a hurricane last year hadn’t thinned the substantial landscaping walls separating houses. Also, my little bungalow detached from the main house and its private patio looked directly at Coach’s driveway and garage. 

Now, a big question for you is: Why is 45yr-old man living with his stepmother in a boring town 40 miles southeast of Disney World?

That’s the story within the story...vital to the story, but let us hold off on that one for a while.

Coach Moyer performed the exact same ritual on Monday morning with the one difference being that the comics section was small and he finished it in 45 minutes, which was still a long time considering it was only one page. As for myself, I had to leave the house to maintain sanity. Thankfully, St. Sebastian was home to a legitimately good coffee place called The Coffee Sack. 

In all honesty I’d put the Sack’s coffee and atmosphere up against any amazing LA or Brooklyn or Miami coffee place. Somebody dedicated to creating a welcoming, plant-filled bright and comfortable environment owned it. 

The Sack was almost too cool for the slow-paced little downtown area of St. Sebastian, where in season, tourists loved to come and walk the Chicago brick streets and take pictures under the gangly live oaks covered in Spanish Moss. It was early May and the tourists had thinned out. Monday before noon on Main Street you could literally hear a pin drop. I know because I tried it. OK, fine, it was a nail. 

Even though I’d been in St. Sebastian for only a few days, I had a pre-loaded coffee shop routine that could be deployed safely almost anywhere around the world: 

Stake out a good table. Leave sunglasses and hat on table. Carry laptop with you to counter. Order latte in a mug, small sandwich and something like a Rice Krispy bar. Return to table. Open laptop. Cruise the internet for two hours while periodically checking phone, email, and Social Media. Feel accomplished. Open up Word. Stare at latest project. Edit a few paragraphs. Add a few new sentences. Hope someone comes by and asks: ‘Are you a writer?’ More SM. Google a word I’m trying to find better alternatives to because the built-in thesaurus sucks. Fall down a rabbit hole of current events. Four hours and three lattes later leave.      

The only person around me who did less with his day was Coach. When I got home that first Monday in St. Sebastian, Coach Moyer was still in his chair just inside the garage with his cat at his side. 

Over the next week I became more and more intrigued with Coach and his story. Turned out the ‘old man next door who nobody liked’ had a Wiki page crammed with information dating back to his high school days and the internet was overflowing with articles about Jimmy Moyer. There were even three books written about Coach, one of them being an unauthorized biography that stayed on the NY Times Best Seller List for two months. 

Even though Coach Moyer hadn’t spoken to the media in almost a decade, every year around July when ESPN and Fox Sports have little to talk about, they debate whether or not Coach Moyer should be in the Hall of Fame despite his history. Coach was the new Pete Rose, but much worse. A disgraced former master of the game who some thought could be redeemed, but the majority never wanted to hear from again.

Never wanting to be heard from again was something the ‘ole ball coach and I had in common.

Back then, sitting on my little cozy subtropical porch, looking up at Coach every few minutes, seeing him just staring out into the street or reading mags or writing in a notebook, I began to see a great personal cosmic synchronicity in it all. Here were two once highly touted men who fell from grace (yes, my reign on top was much shorter than Coach and much less significant, but my fall no less notable). 

Both of us, for the most part, denied our folly, but evidence, the law, and public opinion won. Although Coach had made a public announcement where he admitted cheating, many who followed the story suspected that admission was just the tip of the iceberg. Myself, I admitted publicly to about 10% of what I did. The rest of it I denied up, down, and all the way around. Every media outlet that gave me space, I used as a platform for denial. Mountains of facts were laid before me but I denied them all, spinning and contorting the truth so that a victory would someday come my way. 

By the time I was ready to come totally clean, no one wanted to hear it.

Rightfully, the market spoke and I was beaten both in the court of public opinion and the actual court of law. I could've handled it if it had ended there, but because I had deceived on the world stage, literally pulling millions and millions of people into my web of lies, the world saw fit to punish me extra good. 

I became an internet meme and Poster Boy for how not to conduct one’s life. My character was mercilessly ridiculed and hammered into dust by everyone from Darknet trolls to late night TV hosts. International. Domestic. It was as if human civilization had distilled all the liars in history who had ‘gotten away with it’ into me and decided I would be the one who would pay the collective price. 

My lawyer, just as she left my defense due to lack of payment, employing typical LA mental gymnastics, told me: “Of course what you did isn’t as bad as what OJ is accused of, but people hate you more. However, if there is a silver lining, it’s that you now have a ‘brand’ even if it’s a negative association, and that brand can one day lead to something. There’s really no such thing as bad publicity. Even Charles Manson got interviews.”

Me and Chuck Manson. I was nearly broke. House in the Hollywood Hills taken from me with almost all my stuff in it. They let me keep my hybrid Ram pickup and ‘95 Harley Roadking , but took the Tesla, Porsche, GMC, eight motorcycles and ‘85 CJ 7 Jeep. I think I was allowed to keep the Ram so I would have something to get out of LA and California with. 

Florida, especially a place like St. Sebastian, has a way of both speeding up and slowing down time. Weeks pass like they were never there, but then suddenly you find yourself saying ‘wow that was a long month’. May came and went, yet somehow it was the longest month of my life. It felt like exile. It felt like all the possibility and potential in my life had been drained. I was 45 and totally finished. I wasn’t suicidal or anything like that (maybe I should’ve been considering what had happened to me), I was just coming to terms with the harsh reality that I’d have to be satisfied with a basic life. 

What does that mean?

It means that most of us fantasize about living a larger life than the one we currently live. You feel like a break is just around the corner. It doesn't matter that the dream doesn't come true, it’s the potential of the dream coming true that is in many ways just as good. It’s the carrot in front of the donkey. Think about how you would feel if your dreams were taken away. I already had my ‘break’, I’d been on top and been knocked down, but I still wanted to have hopes and dreams. Back then it felt like I would never again have anything amazing happen in my life…

Wait, hold it right there. Forgive me, I’m self-loathing and losing perspective. The ‘universe’ is full of curveball destinies, life mutations, and glorious evolutions snatched from the jaws of entropy. My story is proof of this, but as the first day of June began, a Sunday, I was certain nothing exciting and positive would happen again to me.

By now I hardly paid attention to Coach. He was always there, I was always here. He never once fully acknowledged me through the hedge. He did send a few scowls my way and grumbled when he realized there was someone now living in the guesthouse, but that was it and he didn't seem to care one bit that I was almost always around and sometimes watching. The only thing he did do was pull his plush lounger, carpet, table and lamp a little deeper into the garage so that all I could see were his feet when he went horizontal in the chair. 

It was on that first day of June, that cloudy Sunday threatening rain (I did absolutely love all the rain and dark stormy skies Florida had to offer), trembling at the realization that the novel I’d been working on was a total dumpster fire, and even if it were golden, it would never see the light of day, for even Amazon had banned me from self-publishing, it was that windy day that I poured an extra shot of Kamora liquor into my coffee, pushed through the hedge, stepped into the abyss of destiny, and met Coach Jimmy Moyer for the first time.

2

“Hi, my name is Andrew Anders, but most people call me Drew. I just moved in next door.”

Coach looks at me with one eyebrow arched above his reading glasses. “You’ve been here exactly thirty-three days, that’s longer than ‘just’, Andy.”

Standing there outside the garage, my preplanned lines of conversation suddenly useless. In a social context, we humans are not used to someone responding to a greeting with an accusation. Coach’s words short-circuit my brain temporarily. 

“Well, by now I’m sure you know who I am so no need to introduce myself,” he says. “What are you drinking?”

I look into my coffee mug as if I need it to tell me.

“My father once told me that a man who is always carrying a cup is always boozing. Is that true for you?” asks Coach. 

I cycle through a dozen rebuttals. Settle on one that sends the ball back into Coach’s court. “At least I hide it,” I grin. 

Coach lets out a genuine if not muted laugh. He even smirks and looks over at his half full (or empty) bottle of Scotch. 

“Is there anything I can help you with, or did you just come by to tell me I’m an alcoholic?”

“My father was a big fan of yours.”

“Even after what happened?”

My father, along with millions of Americans, first dismissed the allegations, then when the evidence mounted, he took the tack: ‘Everyone does it, he just got caught, and we don’t know if it’s even true…’ When the evidence overwhelmed, his tune changed to: ‘the bastard!’

Coach took a big sip from his cup. “I’ve found that the wealthier, older and whiter a man, the more likely he was to forgive me and/or believe my side of story. Draw your own conclusions based on that data.” 

I entered Coach’s life at a time when he had passed the threshold, and had, as they say, ZERO FUCKS TO GIVE. His ZFTG came out in his body language, his tone, his facial expressions. He was going to tell it exactly as it came to his mind. No filter. Not quite old man belligerent, and he could still be diplomatic, but he was certainly on his way to full on ‘get off my lawn!’. 

“I’m a writer.”

Coach barely shrugs.

“I was once on the New York Times best seller list. Yup. Non-fiction. Twelve weeks. Sold a few million copies of my book. Was on every talkshow. CNN, FOX. The Today Show. I went world-wide.”

“Yeah, so what’re you doing living in St. Sebastian?”

“Google my name.”

“Andy, I don’t do ‘Google’.” 

“Well, I don’t do ‘Andy’ as a name.”

“Everyone I’ve ever known with the name Andrew, for short they use Andy.” Coach goes back to his paper.

“Can I call you Coach?”

Again barely a shrug.

“So, Coach do you mind if I stop by again tomorrow for more riveting conversation?”

Coach nods slightly and also shakes his head, “I’ll be here.”

Sundays during my first month in St. Sabastian were my ‘I’m staying home and getting sauced’ day. See, I too, like Coach, had a thing for drinking. I liked craft beer/cider and a shot of bourbon every three cans or bottles if I really wanted to feel it. And when the sun went down, whiskey on the rocks. On Sundays, when I didn’t leave my little slice of Florida heaven and just stayed on my patio all day alternating between table, hammock, and lounger, I’d drink half a bottle of Kamora mixed in with my endless cup of coffee. And cannabis chocolate or gummies. Curbs my night anxiety. Helps me sleep. Better than pills, I figure. Got a taste for it when I lived in LA. 

But I stopped that boozing ritual when I discovered that the most beautiful girl I’d ever laid eyes on worked every Sunday at the Coffee Sack. Her shift was 1-9pm (she also worked weekdays but I couldn’t find a pattern in her schedule). If the stars aligned and everything was right, I had a script ready in my head to start a conversation with her (OK, fine, I admit it, it wasn’t only in my head but typed out and reviewed extensively). 

Now before you jump to conclusions, it’s not like I was ‘bad with women’ or even that shy, I just respected her, loved the Coffee Sack, and didn’t want to be exiled to the Starbucks down the street. Also, the last thing I wanted was to make her uncomfortable in her place of work. Everything had to be organic. If it took me two months to find out who she was, so be it. I was not gonna be greedy. 

Carla greeted me with a clear and honest smile. Her short, thick chestnut hair bobbed with her head movements. Her eyeglasses were tinted. Unlike most baristas her age, Carla didn’t always wear all black and sometimes she sported a Star Wars t-shirt. Last Wednesday she was dressed like she’d just come from a renaissance festival. The outfit presented the space for me to move the dialog from ‘hi, how’s it goin, I’d like_____, thank you' and overly sincere smiles (on my part), to actual conversation, but balked and the opportunity slipped by. 

The current setup was not perfect. Carla at the register with a barista to her left at the second register (I wanted her to be alone at the registers). Another person was at the $25,000 Italian espresso machine (constant pressure and temperature make all the difference and they do not come cheap). It was a total mission abort. I drew a blank when I stepped up to the counter. Carla looked at me, tilting her head, trying to draw my order out of me. 

When I only offered silence, Carla said, “Iced medium whole milk latte one pump raw sugar and a guava/cheese empanada like always?”

“Yes!” I beamed and left $5 in the tip jar which got a very gracious ‘thank you’ from the beautiful barista.

Not the roadmap to connection I planned for, but our interaction was genuine and memorable (for me at least). Carla remembering my order really set me flying. 

I know, this all sounds weird and maybe even a little pathetic, but in the past four years I had exactly zero girlfriends and any sexual encounters were paid for at a discount rub’n’tug. And don’t we all project and live out an entire life together on 24x>>> with someone we are very attracted to? That quick and seemingly insignificant experience with Carla triggered a trace feeling of excitement, something I hadn’t felt in years. 

The next day at 11am, I pass through the hedge and step before Coach Moyer. Under my arm I carry a camping chair. 

“May I?” I ask and open the chair before getting a response. 

“Where’s you booze?” Coach asks.

“Taking the day off.”

Coach scoffs, “A day off…you lack commitment to excellence.”

“My liver isn’t complaining.” 

Right from the start, my interactions with Coach were fluid, natural, totally at ease. He had this way of just drawing the truth out of me in ways I’d never experienced before. Not going to hide anything from Coach, not going to be anything other than my absolute self. 

Now, that doesn’t mean I planned to be a disrespectful jerk, but while Coach had ZFTG to give, I only had about 10 FTGs remaining in my clip. When two people like Coach and I got together, two people who had really been through the ringer, there could be magic or war. We were magic.

Sitting in silence (but not awkward) I resisted the urge to take out my phone. Without saying a word about it, I just knew Coach was diametrically opposed to constantly checking one’s cell. He didn’t ‘do Google’, which probably meant he didn't use a computer that often and there was no cell phone in sight around him. 

Excerpts from his unauthorized bio claimed that Coach’s rejection of technology was one of the reasons he had resorted to cheating (I found out it wasn’t that he rejected technology, he just didn’t use it obsessively like the rest of us). The public narrative was that Coach was a holdover, a relic, and in order to win using obsolete tactics, he had to do something drastic or risk going out a loser. So Coach Moyer cheated. The scandal dominated the media for months, then died down, then blew up again months later with new revelations, denials, the missing Vince Lombardi Trophy, new allegations. It was impossible to ignore the spectacle. Even if you weren’t a sports fan, you cared. The story was so intriguing and populated with so many twists and subplots, you couldn’t look away. 

Coach and I often sat in silence. I started seeing it as a kind of therapy for me and maybe him too. There were few moments in my day when I wasn’t looking at a screen…reading websites, texting the few friends I had left, checking emails, writing, lurking on Social Media (I didn’t post or comment anymore) or playing some game. 

I, and everyone I knew (besides Coach), were addicted to being connected. This isn’t social commentary, I’m just pointing out the obvious truth. Some were more addicted than others. I was above average in my addiction but way better off than some people I’d met. I could, with some effort, sit for 15 minutes in total silence and not check my phone. There were people out there who couldn’t go 45 seconds. 

“You said your father ‘was’ a fan. What happened to him?” Coach asks suddenly.

The question jolts me out of my inner thoughts.      

“Died November 27th, 2014. Stress of not having to work anymore,” I reply.

Coach snorts a little laugh. “I know what that’s like.”

“He’d been semi-retired for a bunch of years. Winters he’d go to the office in town a few days a week. Summer he’d fly up to NY and work three days and come back. Then he fully retired. He literally could not handle retirement. It killed him after 15 months.”

“I wasn’t so lucky,” Coach says with a smirk and sips scotch. “What kind of relationship did you have with him?

With Coach, the questions could really cut to the heart of the matter as if you were talking to a psychologist. Years as a hi-functioning coach and leader meant he had to know people and he wasn’t afraid to ask deeply and soon.

My relationship with my father could be summed up by one story and I tell it to Coach: 

I just started 7th grade. We lived in an extremely affluent town an hour north of NYC. Our house was surrounded by 85 acres of state owned forests and that’s where I spent a good portion of my childhood. My older brother and sister were great athletes and students, class presidents and on and on. I was the little brother who always had dirty jeans and messy hair. I played sports, and wasn’t that bad. I even played football, quarterback…up until 7th grade. 

Middle School began and I found out I loved theater. Not acting or singing, but writing. I loved being in that dark cavernous room with all the empty seats and echoing voices. I loved the sets and the action…I also learned I really loved being around artsy girls. So I signed up to work on a play that would debut mid-October. 

There was a conflict. I couldn’t do football and do the play. I picked the play since I wasn’t good enough to see any playing time at QB on the 7th grade team even though I made the squad. So I quit. When my father found out he blew five gaskets (my sister was captain of her field hockey team, and my brother starting tight end for the state champion varsity football team and would go on to star in the Ivy League at Penn. Business, money, football, and news. That’s what my family revolved around. There wasn’t even room for much politics and certainly no room for the arts. 

My father thought all art of almost any kind produced after 1895 was garbage. He read business magazines and newspapers and books about management. He collected wine. His heroes were all men of finance and titans of business. My sister and brother were basically clones of him, while my mother and I were alike and drawn to the artistic side of life. On some Sundays, she would take me down to Broadway and we’d see a play or musical. Just the two of us. I cherished those moments. 

So my father called me a quitter. A loser. He even wondered if I were a ‘fag’. My mother finally stepped in but the damage had been done. Sadly, our relationship was strained from then on. My father never came to see that play or any other. I was a disappointment and nothing would change that in his mind. Because I was not going to play football and instead be involved in ‘some shitty art’, and therefore, in his mind, would never go to Warton (his alma mater and a lock for his offspring). In his mind, I was a total failure at 12. 

“That’s harsh, but you should’ve played football,” huffs Coach, I think only half-joking. “And your mother?”

My mother leaving the earthly plain wasn’t something I talked about, but I gave Coach the basics. 

“I was 14. She got diagnosed with brain cancer and was dead in ten months. It broke me. I went to the darkside. Became a goth emo weirdo. Smoked a lot of pot at school. Drank. Got arrested a few times…became the ultimate disappointment I could deliver to my father. He couldn’t even take me to company functions, and for his annual big Christmas party, I was told to stay up in my room. 

“I got back into theater my junior year, cut down on the weed and got my act together. My father married Janet my senior year. I didn’t care. I would be going off to college at the University of Miami and I was glad he’d have someone to share that big house with.”

Coach thoughtfully nods and opens up about his life. His words flow like he’s been waiting a long time to tell someone. 

“My mother left us when I was six. I hardly remember her. My father moved us to San Francisco from Redding right after then. We lived in a tiny apartment in China Town. I slept on the floor of my brother’s room for years. Raised myself on the streets. 

“I was fast, had a good arm, and could run people over, but there wasn’t any football at the school I went to. Instead, I played pickup games in the park all weekend long. My break came the summer before 9th grade when I was throwing a football around Golden Gate Park. I turned 14 in July 1968 and could throw a 30-yard touchdown on a rope and a 15 yard bullet. 

“Was right after my birthday. I was playing 7-on-7 in the park, a football coach from an exclusive private school in Palo Alto happened to be there. He asked where I played. I told him nowhere. He took my father, brother and I out for dinner. Steak, ribeye, the first time I’d ever had one. I still remember it to this day. 

“Coach Dan Fine was the varsity head coach and he saw something in me. He offered me a scholarship. It was rare in those days for high schools to give scholarships, especially to a kid who had never played a down of organized football in his life. The commute to school would be long. I’d take four different buses a day and leave my apartment at 5am, getting back at 7pm.”

Coach Moyer stops, looking like he’s shared enough. He sits back and sips his scotch. 

“What was it like playing football for the first time?” I probe. 

“My helmet was two sizes too big, my pants looked like I had a load of rocks in them, and my cleats gave me blisters that almost crippled me. The school went from 5th to 12th grade, and had Pop Warner, Middle School, freshman, JV, and varsity football. They put me on the JV team even though I was a year younger than everyone and didn’t know how to buckle my shoulder pads. 

“The first time I took a snap under center in practice, I tucked it and ran for a 70 yard TD. I didn’t know what else to do. I started the first game of the season and scored three touchdowns just running for my life. By the time I was a sophomore, I was 6ft 200lbs and was second string varsity QB. By the fourth game I was starting and won six straight including a playoff. Junior year we won the state championship. Senior year every big school in the nation wanted me. We went undefeated and won the state championship again. I chose UCLA.”

Just as Coach is about to continue, his wife opens the door to the garage. She says “Jim, it’s time,” and disappears back into the house.

“Sorry, Andy, gotta go,” says Coach Moyer. “See you around.”

I went home and furiously wrote notes about our conversation then searched everything to confirm. Not that I doubted what Coach was saying, I just had to flesh out the story. 

Jimmy Moyer was one of the top ten QB recruits in the nation his senior year. Back then in 1971 of course there was no ESPN or internet. No recruiting specialists and bluechips, but college football was huge, and big-name high school players still got a lot of attention. 

There was little surprise when Coach chose UCLA. SEC schools like Alabama, LSU, Georgia, never had a chance. While Coach wasn’t a traditional ‘Caliboy’ (he had a mullet and mustache by his senior year of high school), according to his bio, he never once considered leaving the state. 

Digging into his past, I found an excerpt from the unauthorized bio stating that Coach was given $600 cash by a booster from University of Texas. He also received a total of $1800 from boosters from other unnamed schools. The NCAA wasn’t like it is today and there weren’t many rules and barely any enforcement concerning giving money and gifts to players. The author of the unauthorized bio reached pretty far and claimed that getting all that money consequence free set the stage for a lifetime of rule-breaking and sent Coach’s moral compass spinning. 

The book Fallen Coach: The Unauthorized Biography of Jimmy Moyer was in stock at a Barnes & Noble 10 minutes away. I sat in the cafe and read most of it right then and there.

According to the book, I was living next to a legend, a bandit, a master and a monster, but all I saw was a depressed man aging poorly who couldn't seem to find an ounce of joy in his life. I could relate and I started seeing how Coach and I might be able to help one another. 

Of course, I couldn’t possibly see how big, crazy, and redemptive it would all be, but leaving that bookstore I felt that the ‘universe’ had something cooking. There was this faint tugging feeling in my gut telling me major life shifts were coming. 

3

I gave Coach a few days off from my presence. We saluted each other through the hedge but that was it. One day I decided to go to the beach. St. Sebastian has some of the nicest beaches in the US. Mostly free of condos (and nothing is over three stories). The beaches have been preserved beautifully with long expanses of white sand, green dunes, no erosion, and canopies of old sea grape trees. There’s a fishing pier out into the Atlantic and mangroves on the intracoastal where one can kayak and fish or just hang out. There’s a little commerce area at the eastern end of Main St over the big bridge where the sand begins. You can get decent pizza, flip flops, window shop real estate. 

Going to the beach became my main source of entertainment, even at night. My stepmother had the best beach umbrella and chairs that were unused until I came along. I’d bring a cooler and just spend hours at the beach. My favorite area was where a few dozen Hobicat sailboats sat up in the dunes, their lines clanking against the masts in strong winds that kept people away, which was precisely why I liked that area so much. 

On a Wednesday, I might be the only person for 80 yards in every direction, so when I saw another person in the distance poking in and out of the dunes and tree canopy, I almost turned around and went the other direction. 

Though it had been four years since my debacle began, and though I’d become a worldwide meme and a household pariah, people didn’t always recognize me, but when they did, it seemed to always be in a place where I couldn’t readily escape: a plane, mass transit, restaurant, elevator, the beach. I was once verbally attacked on the boardwalk in Santa Monica. A man and his son berated me on and off for an hour. I never went back to the pier which had been a favorite pastime of mine. 

The last thing I wanted was to spoil my new little muted slice of beach happiness. But at the same time, I was gaining strength—personal strength which had been drained from me over the years. If I ran from a possible confrontation, when would it end? 

I didn’t expect to ever find great happiness again, but the strength to stand up for myself...that I knew I could retrieve. And if I couldn’t, life would be totally unbearable. I paid my debt to society. Eventually few people would remember me and fewer would care. I could one day have a life again. It wouldn’t be anything too exciting, but it would be something other than the near unending hell I’d been through. 

My belief was that if I hadn't off’d myself yet, I wouldn’t. The worst was behind me, so now I had to find myself, rebuild, and see what happens next. Preventing myself from running away from the shadow of a possible confrontation with someone at the beach might seem like an insignificant victory to you, but for me it was huge. 

And when it turns out that person taking pictures around the dunes is my secret love crush Carla from the Coffee Sack, it feels like, no it is, a new life path opening up before me. Destiny has shined on me…or just dumb coincidence. In the moment it doesn’t matter, yet I do bow my head, smile, and say a general ‘thankyou’ to the time/space continuum for the sweet synchrony.

As I approached, Carla darted back into the dunes 40 yards away. I doubt she knew it’s me from that distance, but then again, I had no problem identifying her. I could tell that hair-profile, walk and figure from 120 yards. I set up my stuff, sat in my chair, and pretended like my heart and mind weren't in turmoil. I scanned the dunes behind me by the reflection in my phone’s screen.

Should I go up there? Should I let her actions decide what happens? Maybe I should just sit tight and use this chance encounter as an opening when I see her on Sunday at the Coffee Sack? 

Thirty minutes pass and out of the corner of my eye, I catch Carla reappear from the dunes 20 yards to the south whereas before she was north of me. She waves, I raise a few fingers in a hesitant response, then she saunters further away and back into the dunes. 

Did she realize it was me and didn’t want to interact? I’m a good customer at her place of work, just being courteous, that’s why she waved. She tried to sneak away but she saw me looking at her. I wanted to jump and run after her, yelling ‘Hiiiiiiiiiiii’ and waving frantically like Forrest Gump, hoping she’d get the reference, but I didn’t. 

The rest of my time on the beach was spent analyzing the situation until sunset, signaling my favorite time of the 24hr cycle, nighttime, was on its way. 

Ever since I was a kid, I’d been a night owl. My mother was one too while my father and siblings were all morning people and in bed by no later than 11pm on a work night and 12am on a weekend. It was a rare night where I went to bed before 1am. I was no stranger to multiple 3am nights in a row. And it wasn’t like I was partying. No, I was writing, playing games, drawing, meditating, relishing in the peace and quiet the darkness afforded me. I also wasn’t a late sleeper. If I went to bed at 3, I’d be awake by 830am. 

What about work? 

When I was seven, an investment banker in a Porsche 911 hit me when I crossed the street to catch the morning bus. It was 100% his fault and they even found cocaine in his system. I got a $650,000 settlement and only had a broken fibula, concussion, and bruises. That money was invested wisely, and by the time I had access to it on my 18th birthday, it was over $2.1million so I didn’t have to work. After a few years in NYC following college, I moved to LA to pursue my Sci-Fi writing career and my dream of creating great movies/shows based on my novels and short stories.

When I lived in LA, around 11pm I’d take a bike ride around Hollywood or take my Jeep up into the Hills then back to my perfect little bungalow to write. Now in St. Sebastian, I’d ride my bike around the vast community and through the three, 18-hole championship courses, having the whole place to myself. 

Before I moved—well, it was more like a desperate retreat—to St. Sebastian, one of my few remaining friends assured me I was going to die in FL. Maybe I’d last eight or nine months, then either leave, or succumb to the long sleep. That’s pretty much how everyone in LA felt about the Sunshine State. A place to go and die, unless you are going to Miami to party within an inch of your life, but with my fifth week living in the state coming to a close, I was actually feeling as good as I could about my new life in Florida. 

The day after my chance encounter with Carla, I go visit my infamous neighbor.

“Hey, Coach,” I say from the driveway.

He waves for me to come and sit. I’d left my camping chair so it’s waiting, positioned to the left of Coach Moyer. 

“What’s your favorite movie?” asks Coach. 

A random question and if I hadn’t been discussing my #1 in a Facebook group called Filmbuffs recently, I wouldn’t have had such a quick response. 

“Jaws.”

“What’s it about?”

My mouth opens to answer but instead I laugh. Coach has an off-kilter way of banter and joking. Very dry. Hard to tell if it’s a joke or not. 

“Why are you laughing?”

“Are you serious?”

“I know there’s a big shark, but what happens, what’s it about?”

And I spent the next hour going over the plot of the best movie ever made, spiced up by the scenes I recited in Clint’s voice, like when he yells ‘Hoopah!’ at Richard Dryfuses’s character Matt Hooper as he fails to pilot the boat correctly. Coach hung on every word, asking questions. I didn’t want to tell him the ending since maybe one day he would see it, but he insisted. It was our first true bonding experience and the first time Coach Moyer took a small step outside of his shell. It was also the first time I realized that Coach hadn’t really lived a ‘real’ life. 

In the unauthorized bio, it said Coach, while head coach of the Chargers, regularly worked 95hr weeks during the season with documented spikes nearing 120 which meant he didn’t leave the office and slept on his couch.

Every year after the season, Coach would go spend time on his ranch in Calistoga, near the Napa Valley, talking to no one, working on the next season. He literally had ZERO time for POP culture. 

Asked once what his favorite band was, Coach answered: ‘When I was a kid I liked the Beach Boys’. What about now? the reporter pressed, to which Coach replied: ‘I haven’t listened to much music since then’.

Coach hadn't seen any TV shows since Gun Smoke in the ‘60s. He didn’t even read the news. In a famous ESPN interview after 9/11, Coach claimed he knew very little about the event except that it was a terrible tragedy and it gave him extra time to prepare for the Raiders due to the cancellation of that week’s game. He caught a lot of flak, and rightfully so, for that one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Coach never learned that much about that fateful day. 

Coach couldn’t be called surly because surly implies you care about something. Coach gave me the impression he didn’t care about anything that standard Americans care about. He just did what he was supposed to do: WIN. 

Win win win. 

That was it. 

A modern American life wasn’t for him. To achieve the levels of success he’d reached, all the distractions an American Life throws at a person had to be totally ignored. The only thing close to an interest I could find that Coach had, was World War 2 history (his father had fought in the Battle of The Bulge as an 18yr old private), but according to his unauthorized bio he dropped the hobby when he started coaching professionally. 

The best I could tell, sometime in high school, Coach became a football cyborg and nothing else mattered for the next 45 years. 

“My favorite movie,” Coach blurts out when I’m done going on again about how Clint in Jaws survives the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, “believe it or not, is Titanic.”

I almost fall out of my chair, laughing. I try not to, but it’s just such an absurd admission. I mean, yeah, it’s a hell of a film, but it’s one of the last movies I thought he’d say.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s also the last movie I saw.”

“On TBS? Was on the other night.”

“No, I saw it in 1997 in the theater. I went on a date. That’s the last movie I saw. Period. Anywhere, any time.”

I tried not feeling bad for Coach. He achieved so much and to get to the top he had to jettison things we all took for granted. I’ve loved going to the movies since I was four and saw The Spy Who Loved Me and then the next day a super-dark-and-grainy 35mm Star Wars: A New Hope. 

Movies are one of life’s simple pleasures. Going inside that dark cozy expanse with total strangers or even if I’m the only person in the theater—just one of my favorite things to do. Missing out on this great part of life was just sad, but Coach had this way where you truly got the feeling he didn’t care one bit that he had missed out on a regular American Life. He was at peace with it, but at the same time it was a huge understatement to say he was in a rut. He’d been unemployed and free from football for almost eight years.

The best I could tell, was that what I saw him doing every day…was what he did every day for many years. This would also mean his marriage was one of convenience. Sharon, Coach’s wife and 11yrs his junior, spent a lot of time on the course, shopping, playing cards, going out to dinner, and darting around town in her new black Porsche Maccan Turbo. I rarely saw her. The live-in housekeeper, Luisa, cooked meals and was Coach’s caretaker. There was no one around to challenge Coach Moyer to start living. Sharon was fine with the status quo even if it meant her ‘husband’ was essentially a shut-in. Truth was, she had no say in it at all and just lived her life around him.

“Well, you can rent Titanic on Amazon, you should watch it again.”

“I thought Amazon sold books? Anyway I’ve never seen a movie twice, but if I do, it will be that one.”

I let the Amazon comment slide. “What’d you like about Titanic so much?” 

Coach’s face bunches up as happens when he’s thinking. 

“The inevitability of it all. We all knew what would happen, but it was the personal stories that made the difference. In between A and Z is a lifetime, but we tend to focus on the beginning and end. I use to instill in my players a sense of self-realization within the moment. It’s the journey not the destination kind of thing. Don’t get me wrong, the destination is the reason you take the journey, but you gotta honor each step. This is why people love sports so much. It’s living Reality TV.”

The words sunk in, spoken in such an honest way I imagine Coach captivating an entire team and organization and even a nation. It was the first time Coach Moyer let me know there was a very deep and thoughtful person behind the gruff, stoic exterior. 

Then, out of nowhere, Coach asks: “Andy, where do you see yourself five years from now?”

Unlike the answer to what is my favorite movie, I didn’t have a response in the chamber ready to fire. 

“There’s a difference between where I think my life will actually be in five years, and where I want it to be in five years.”

“OK, answer both.” Coach, ever the good psychologist, better than many I’d seen over the years and paid major $$$ to. He drew you in, softened you up, then tapped your left shoulder and appeared at your right. You were disarmed, engaged, and a little off balance but in a comfortable way. 

“I want my life to be happy and content. Working a job that I at least like and pays decent. Be with a woman who loves me. Find enjoyment in the simple little things, because I don't see myself having a lot of money. Maybe I’ll stick around here. I like it. I could make a life in St. Sebastian.” 

When I got done with the very modest what I ‘want’, the ‘where’ had to be spoken of. The future I wanted vs. the future that I’d most likely have. 

“Where I actually see myself is different. I don’t think I’ll be happy. Any job I get will be low paying and boring. Love will elude me. I’ll most likely end up in New York living in a hole in the wall.”

“I disagree, Andy… Life…life for you has other plans.” With that cryptic response, Coach grabs the newspaper and starts reading the Sports section. I take the hint, say goodbye, and get pretty drunk later on that night.

4

Sitting in the parking lot of the Coffee Sack on Sunday, a script running over and over in my head, AC blasting so I don’t sweat, classic Jazz playing on the radio. Just as I’m about to step out of my car, I scrap the whole script and almost go to Starbucks. 

The pressure situation I’d put myself in is threatening to short-circuit my mind. Carla, based on what I know about her (which isn’t much, but like Coach, I’m good at reading people), is the perfect woman for me. I’m immensely attracted to her, she’s witty and intelligent, a hard worker who also likes Renaissance Fairs. She is the perfected ‘geek girl’ and the kind of woman I have been searching for since I was 21. 

The mere potential of her and I being together is enough to keep me going. If it turns out we have no chance, a major blow to my well-being will be dealt. 

I was a fragile man back then, but as I said already, on my way to getting myself sorted out. I’d calibrated my wellness based on my interaction with Carla. I know, foolish and childish, needy and the exact opposite of what most women want in a man, but it wasn’t like I was going to tell her all this. 

I walk into the Sack and meet a long line. Carla doesn’t notice me and I try to just concentrate on my phone, occasionally looking up to see if we can catch each other’s gaze. For a second I think we do. I nod and smile but she is rushing around to fill orders and it’s like she looks right through me for a split second and then her gaze is gone. 

Seven people until my order and I realize I have a 50-50 chance of getting the other register manned by a guy named Peter. I stand there with a forced constant look of content on my face hoping to catch Carla’s eye. Then it happens, we meet eyes, Carla winks and smirks. 

I can’t help but beam, but my sails deflate, when despite trying all kinds of mental jujitsu to make sure Carla is the one to take my order, fate or chance decides that it’s Peter’s register to open up first. I almost ask the person behind me to go ahead, but it would be too obvious. Just go with the flow.

I take extra long to order, hemming and hawing, but not too much to seem super indecisive, but enough to increase the odds of Carla talking to me. I can’t stall any longer and before I know it, I’m at another counter waiting for my order. Then just as all seems lost, Carla grabs my egg and cream cheese croissant sandwich from another barista and rushes over to hand it to me as my coffee arrives simultaneously.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“I have a 15 in 20. Can we talk? I’ll meet you out back.”

Some autonomous resource gets me to say ‘OK’ and Carla moves quickly back to her register. 

Over the past few weeks the back patio of the Coffee Sack has become my refuge. I’m too self-conscious to sit inside and feel pressure to always be looking for Carla. The patio is better than inside anyway—a shaded lush oasis with comfortable furniture and wooden swings and fans to cool it down. There’s almost always someone playing chess. 

Sitting with my right shoulder parallel to the door, my stuff spread out, pretending it is just an ordinary Sunday (but I set a timer for 18 minutes). Time moves in sluggish increments.

Right before Carla is due to arrive, I decide that I’ll let her do all the talking. It’s the only plan I can get all my inner voices to agree on.

Carla appears through the service entrance, catching me off guard. I manage a ‘Hey’, stand up, pull a chair out for her. It’s all autonomous. If I had to willfully do anything it’d be a disaster. My main focus now is forcing myself to not be a weirdo or seem needy and nervous…which of course I am all of those things. 

“Sorry I didn’t come say hi at the beach the other day, but I didn’t want to bother you, and I was in my own space, you know what I mean?”

“I understand.” Perfect response. 

“And I know who you are, Andrew.”

Nothing can keep the frown from bending my mouth. I prepare for the boom to be lowered once again and my world to be totally shattered. 

“No, no,” Carla reaches out and touches my wrist. Her hand is warm and soft and strong. Her touch sincere. 

“I’m not here to beat you up over it. I mean, when you first showed up I thought I knew your face, but you used the name Mike, and like some Jedi mind trick, I forgot about it. Then last week, I looked at your creditcard. There was your full name. I was a senior in college when your story went viral. We talked about you in my journalism class all semester.” 

In the past, it always went down like this: I meet someone new, a friend or potential lover, at a coffee place, use my middle name Michael, and things are good, then they Google me, two-and-two come together, and it’s all downhill from there. Most of them treated me like I was a war criminal, word spread, and I was exiled from another cool coffee place. It happened exactly like that five times in LA. They literally refused to serve me once they found out who I was. Starbucks was my only option since they had such a high turnover of employees and workers there just didn’t care that much. But at real and cozy coffee houses like the Sack, I was personanongratta.

Instead of saying anything, I start to pack up my stuff. 

“Did I say something wrong?” asks Carla.

“No, but I know the next step. Even if you’re not here to ‘beat me up’, you still don’t want me hanging around. It’s OK, happened a bunch of times. I’ll go to Starbucks.”

“Now that would be cruel,” we both laugh. “Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I used to work there in college. That job helped lessen my student debt, so I’m grateful, but it’s fast coffee. A Chipotle of coffee which is a glorified Taco Bell. They treated me well. Have some good stuff there, but it’s corporate to the bone. Some people don’t mind that.”

I pause packing up and pounce on a conversation starter, “Where’d you go to college.”

Carla smiles broadly exposing some glamorously crooked natural teeth and makes a ‘U’ with her hands, “Go Canes…”

I haven’t been pulled back from the abyss, no, I’ve jumped in and discovered it to be a bridge to another side. We share an alma mater. A most fortuitous turn of events. 

“So that’s why you talked about me all semester. I minored in Journalism there as you probably know. Majored in Creative Writing. I’m pretty sure they removed that big plaque and all the pictures of me. I got an email telling me that they took my name off the Creative Arts study lab I paid for in 2013.”

“I loved that place!” Carla practically yells. “The leather couches were incredible. That was a nice gift. Even if your name isn’t on it, people still use it every day and night and love it.”

A wave of good feeling washes through me. Over the years I’ve become so very accustomed to its dark cousin the ‘wave of disappointment and fear’, that I’d forgotten what it’s like to...feel good. 

“OK, I gotta make a phone call, but I just want you to know you’re welcome here and I won’t tell anyone else.” Carla stands and I follow. 

“Thanks, that means the world to me.” 

Then an amazing thing happens. Carla reaches out and hugs me. I lightly hug back, then she squeezes and I give her a taste of my inner bear and squeeze which her strong body soaks up. I feel her open, kind heart sending me positive vibrations. We separate and she grabs both of my upper arms. 

“See you next Sunday?”

As impossible as it was to contain my frown earlier, the ear-to-ear smile can’t, and shouldn’t be contained. “Most certainly.”

Suddenly there were two massive synchronicities occurring at the same time in my life (Coach and Carla) and it was almost overwhelming. The ‘Universe’ as some people like to call it in place of ‘God’ or ‘Destiny’ or ‘Providence’, had decided it was time for my life to change in a good BIG way. Or maybe it was all coincidence, which is just co-in-ci-DANCE… The creative dance of life. 

That’s how I choose to see it all. It’s a dance, a tango, and it takes two. If the universe is pitching and I’m not at the plate, it stops pitching. On the other hand, if I’m just standing at the plate and no one is on the mound, there’s no game. For me, life is a co-creation. For me it’s a mix of unshakable destiny, chance, divine guidance, folly, and self-directed action. 

But also I’m not so sure existence as we know it isn’t a hologram and maybe we’re super aliens from the extreme future who created the ultimate virtual reality that we immersed ourselves in—immersed in a world that actually happened millions of years ago and we super aliens discovered all its data flowing in the vacuum of space and we recreated 6000 years of it to continually live in, because, why the hell not. A living holographic time-loop. (It’s a story concept I’ve thought about writing…)

When I visit coach the next day he asks, “Did you win the lottery?”

“Sort of. I met someone incredible, it’s a work in progress, but it’s full of potential.” Coach and I had dropped most formalities. I no longer stood there for a few minutes before sitting. I’d just come right in and plop down. We withstood long stretches of silence and I never took out my phone. Instead, I’d read one of the many magazines he had piled up. The car/motorcycle mags and FL Sportsman being my favorite. 

Coach looks up from his crossword puzzle, “Well, I’m sure he’s a great guy.”

“Ha, ha, no, she’s a great girl, not that there’s anything wrong with it if it were a guy.”

“I didn’t say there was,” Coach says with a smirk. This is his kind of humor. So subtle it’s barely there. He seemed to be amused greatly by it.

Along with many other negative things, Coach Moyer had been labeled homophobic. His unauthorized bio dedicated a page to the issue and claimed there was no evidence that he was. Several former players who ‘came out’ after their NFL days were over, defended him vigorously, but the landslide couldn’t be stopped. Popular opinion had him labeled as a homophobic asshole (among many other unfavorable things). Last I checked that was the prevailing notion and no one seemed interested in contesting it. 

“Can I be totally honest with you?” I ask.

Coach glares at me, his green eyes hardly faded by time, boring into me above his reading glasses. “A lot of people think you are homophobic. I don’t think you are, but saying things like that, some people won’t see the humor in it.”

Coach slowly folds up the paper and leans forward. 

“Nine. Nine players during my coaching career came out of the closet to me and only me. Some were married with kids. They trusted me with their life secret. Of course, some of them it wasn’t such a big secret, others it was something they’d take to the grave. Yeah, I looked at them a little differently, but never less than before, in fact, I ended up respecting them more for it, because, in case you hadn’t noticed, the NFL was not and is not a nurturing environment for gays.

“When my story blew up, enemies scoured my history for anything they could use, and they found an interview I gave to ESPN in 1995. Back then it never even registered, but when I became news, big news, that video was plastered all over the place and they convicted me in the court of public opinion without thinking twice.”

The 35sec clip went like this: A very young-looking Coach Moyer with his iconic mullet, stash, and visor is standing in the Southern California heat. It’s the second week of two-a-day preseason football and Coach’s first year as offensive coordinator for the San Diego Chargers. The reporter, off screen, asks coach what he would like to see his team do in the second, tougher week of preseason. Coach responds:

“Stop pussy-footing around. If someone smacks you in the mouth, you smack back. We look like a bunch of retarded faggots out there gettin’ beat up by the defense. Everyone has to get tougher. From QB on down.”

Unacceptable in today’s hyper socially aware PC atmosphere where words do in fact break bones like sticks and stones, but hardly hate speech in my opinion, just the words of a man who grew up in a different age. 

“Look,” Coach says intensely, voice full of power, “I have never cared what someone does in their personal life so long as it’s on the up and up, know what I mean. I had guys with three girlfriends, a wife, six kids. That was their business as long as it didn’t mess up their commitment to the team. Sometimes it did, then I’d get involved. 

“I got guys out of some sticky situations and I also at times had to throw my hands up and let nature take care of things. I never protected a criminal and I never turned my back on a guy who needed me. That’s the reality I lived, most of that crap on the internet is second hand garbage and not how it really was.”

This was the first time I experienced a taste of the legendary Coach Moyer fire. He could yell, it was said, in a way that would make you rather hear a thousand fingernails scratching a chalkboard. He could just explode, make your blood curdle. When he yelled, you shook. But now, after he spoke with that power, it drained him. He sinks back into the huge chair, sips some scotch. He incessantly clears his throat and starts coughing. 

Coach was still a dragon, but his tail had been clipped. 

“I’m sorry to bring it up.”

Coach waves it off. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Just make sure you get all this right.”

Coach Moyer erupts into a long coughing fit. Luisa his caretaker appears with two bottles of medication and some kind of medicated liquid. She casually administers the drugs and Coach asks me to come back tomorrow between coughing fits. 

That night I started writing this book. I made the fully conscious decision to form my interactions with Coach Moyer into a cohesive story, though, I didn’t have even the slightest notion, as I’ve said, as to just how incredible it would all get. 

He said: Just make sure you get all this right.

The words echoed. Coach was directing me to write his story, his authorized bio. He knew I was a writer, but did he know who I was, what I’d been through? What I did? 

I wouldn’t be anyone’s fifth choice to write their story, but Coach didn’t exactly have many options, and unlike me who had no idea what was coming, Coach Moyer knew fully what was going to happen. He had a gameplan. He’d been working on it for over a year. The ‘Universe’ had given him the final sign that it was go time. That sign...was me—a down on his luck writer who more than anything, even more so than redemption and acceptance—wanted to write a good story. If Coach Moyer had ever displayed to me any kind of understanding of the occult and magick, I’d have sworn he was a master Wizard who drew me into the situation, but that wasn’t the case, and I was to benefit as much as he, so maybe I ‘drew’ myself to him, who knows, it didn’t matter then and it only matters a little bit now. 

Now.

Happening.

Accepting things as they are. Accepting the world as it is. It’s not a judgment call on how good or bad things are, it’s an acceptance. Once you accept the world as it is, then you can decide on its merits or lack thereof. Many people, they start judging before accepting and it causes all kinds of problems. 

Accepting the life-calamity that happened to me, and what I did to make it happen, allowed me to carry on, to wake up every day and sleep good enough. There’s a special kind of Zen involved in acceptance. It flattens out the emotional spectrum and I think creates space for healing and evolution. It’s a ‘Carry On, Don’t Panic’ kind of thing.

I accepted fully that Coach Moyer and I were starting a Life Tango. 

However, if you asked me if I knew how it would all shake out, would I still have been so ‘accepting’? Probably not, but that’s the beauty of it. The future is kind. It hides itself from us so we don’t get scared and run away, missing out on destiny, but then again, who’s to say running away isn’t the destiny? 

It’s been said ‘Nature Loves Courage’, well maybe, but She also does a damn good job dropping you off on the beachhead under enemy fire without any warning. What I mean is, She forces you into a situation where you must be courageous even if you don’t want to be. There were multiple times with Coach Moyer that I wanted to run, just run away and go back to my little life in the guesthouse getting drunk and high every night, but I literally couldn’t. My back was to the ocean and the only way to live was to get off the beach. I found courage, yes, but it was forced on me. Collapsing into a heap wasn’t an option because I was too stubborn. Forward into my co-created, real-time destiny was the only option.

5

A few days later I found out Jaws was playing at the local Cinnemark. Studios release classics to be seen on the Big Screen in bunches of eight. You could also see the Maltese Falcon, Grease, Rainman. The pretty massive synchronicity of Jaws appearing so soon after talking about it created an upwelling, this burning feeling in my gut and root where the deep thoughts, the ‘weights of life’, hit me all at once. 

A very lucid moment (and thankfully only a moment) where I could ‘feel time’ acting as a continuous wave stretching out for near eternity. Gone were all the little hashes—seconds/minutes/hours/days—we etch into this continuous wave. I got the feeling that time isn’t something we created, we simply created the measuring of it, and our measurements are the hashes and dashes that only appear to break up this constant piece that we label ‘time’, and in many ways, these measurements aren’t real at all. 

When you think about it, what’s a minute? Is it a natural thing or totally created by humans? Does a minute exist in nature? No. Seasons and cycles do, but not ‘time’ as we describe it. This is all tackled by Einstein and Relativity, and then later expanded on by great quantum physicists like Sir Roger Penrose who blend philosophy with science (because let’s be honest, anyone who knows even a little about the quantum world can admit it requires more art and philosophy than the macro sciences do). 

So time is also relative. The Chinese had 64 ‘qualities’ of time. Ever watch water boil? That three minutes is longer than three minutes spent walking. Now scientifically speaking, both three minutes are exactly the same, but we all know ‘relative’ to our experience that is simply not true. And an object in motion experiences time differently than an object at rest. 

My father forced me to work at the GAP in high school for two months before they fired me for chronic lateness. Four hours there was like eight. Brutal. Four hours spent working on a play…more like 1.5hrs in feeling. So the ancient Chinese accounted for this kind of stuff. We don’t, at least not officially.

Synchronicity. For a word I and others use so liberally, it is hardly understood and was only recently included in spellcheck! Synchronicity, coined by the great Carl Gustav Jung, means ‘experiences that exist outside the accepted mainstream and conventional modes and mechanism of reality’. More simply put, it’s talking about Jaws, and then 48 hours later Jaws is being shown at the local movie theater. That is synchronicity.

I think synchronicity is literally the melding of the conscious mind with the subconscious, which knows no bounds and is not rooted in the time/space/gravity matrix. This is all science in my opinion, but we are yet to fully understand it and don’t yet have the tools to measure it, so for now it’s theoretical and only recently recognized as a word by Apple.

Coach lit up like a scoreboard when I told him about Jaws. We’d see it Thursday at 730pm. Coach had not left his house more than ten times since I’d moved in, and they were always with his wife and had the feel of doctors appointments. Coach did not drive, at least that I knew of. 

After I told him about Jaws, Coach asked if I wanted to watch a football game. From the early 2000s. A playoff. I was caught off guard and unprepared for our relationship to go to this level. Coach struggled to get out of his chair. This was the first time I had to help him. 

Coach Moyer’s home is huge with 25-foot ceilings and white marble floor with razor-thin grout. Main areas are sparse, but with cozy rooms and a jungle backyard and pool all contained by a two-story screened enclosure. Beyond the enclosure sits a big pond filled with birds, then some woods, and then the Wakefield Course, the nicest of the three courses which exist in Miraclair. 

Coach’s office is starkly different from the rest of the pristine house. The walls are paneled in dark oak with two floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookcases. The carpet dark green and plush. A huge chocolate brown Chesterfield sofa takes up one wall. An executive desk sits in front of a bay window adjacent to a sliding glass door. The windows and doors are covered by plantation shutters so it’s dark and cool. A green bankers lamp adds some light. The room is filled with memorabilia, trophies and plaques, framed pictures, footballs, some in cases some not, and books and more books about coaching, football, management, success.

Coach sits at his desk and I on the couch. The 75 inch screen built into the wall bookcase comes to life as a DVD plays a sped-up, wide-angle view of a football game recorded for coaches to analyze postgame and not for the public to ever see.

“At Steelers, January 12th, 2004,” says Coach as he fully closes the shutters with the touch of a button. The room gets even more cozy in the darkness. “Seven degrees at kickoff. Snow. We were +7 dogs.”

Instead of color, the game is in high-contrast black and white so you can really see what’s going on. Coach is silent as the first quarter ticks by. Before I know it, Coach’s Chargers are down 17-0. 

“We were frozen. It was setting up to be one of those home field AFC Championship massacres. NFL history is filled with them. You know, 42-10, 45-13.”

I did know. I watched a ton of football from 1st to 7th grade and most of it with my father and brother and even sister until she hit 13 and couldn’t be bothered. We always watched the playoffs and Super Bowl no matter who was playing. Great memories of cozy cold Sundays in our family room with a fire going and my mother bringing us snacks and my father beer. Our family’s team was of course the NY Giants (although I had a thing for the Miami Dolphins because I loved Florida). 

Family football Sunday ceased when I stopped playing football in 7th grade. My father still watched football, but in his office with the door closed. My older brother would go to friends. Remembering and feeling the loss of that family tradition is one of those painful life situations that don’t go all the way…away. Even now writing this, I feel bad for myself. For my father. We missed so much life together, but it was his own doing. While I didn’t help with the way I handled things, he was a man and a father, he should’ve known better. 

By the time the whole thing blew over a year later and we were on better terms, my father and I were both unwilling to go back to our Sunday ritual and I stopped watching football altogether my freshman year of high school. I never saw any of Coach Moyer’s Super Bowl wins. I didn’t even know that much about him until seven and a half years ago when his story went viral and EVERYONE knew who Coach Jim Moyer was. Almost four years after Coach’s foray into infamy…I joined him.

Midway through the 3rd quarter, Coach’s Chargers have cut into the Steelers lead. The score: 35-24 with the Chargers driving. 

“Why am I showing you this?” asks Coach rhetorically, “because this game was cited as the first evidence of my cheating.”

After the game, an assistant coach with the Steelers claimed that someone on the Chargers staff was somehow listening to communication between the Steeler’s sideline and the coaches in the booth. The story didn’t gain much traction until after the Super Bowl (which the Chargers won) when an ‘employee’ of the Chargers went public saying he was paid to steal opposing team’s communications.

The game ended with the Chargers kicking a field goal in double overtime to win a trip to Coach's second Super Bowl as head coach. Even to this day it’s considered to be one of the best AFC championship games even with the allegations.

“It was a different time back then,” says Coach as the video continues to run showing the postgame activities. “No social media, 9-11 was still fresh. The claim that we were listening to their conversations was almost totally ignored until a few weeks after the Super Bowl. Yes, we were listening, but that’s not what helped us. We figured out their hand signals, which is totally legal if not a little unethical in the public’s eye. The Steelers, I think they were just crushing everyone they played so badly, including us in the first half of the AFC Championship, that they didn’t bother changing their signals for the second half. 

“Now-a-days plays are given to the QB in the huddle by audio, and on defense the middle linebacker gets the call via his helmet. Back then, we still used hand signals to call plays, audibles, and player assignments. You had two, maybe even five sets of hand signals so that no one could find a pattern in your calls. For the second half you ALWAYS switched it up…but the Steelers didn’t. 

“They hadn’t all year. We knew this going into the game. By the 3rd quarter we knew almost exactly what they were going to call on offense and defense. Even with this massive edge, they were hard to stop. So yes, we had an advantage but it wasn’t because we were listening to them.”

Coach gets out of his chair. “From now on when you’re with me have this on when we talk about important things, ok?” He hands me a digital recorder after hitting the stop button. Everything he’d just said about the game has been recorded. 

Over the next couple of days we meet and go through our garage routine. Coach would then ask me to watch another game. We’d talk, I’d record. I wanted to talk to Coach about my life, what happened to me, but the opportunity didn’t present itself. He had a computer in the house, he could search me even if he didn’t ‘do Google’. He wasn’t tech illiterate, and he knew Amazon sold more than books. Maybe he knew my story and didn’t care, maybe he didn’t know and would think I’m a total loser if he found out.

On Thursday I walked through the hedge at 645pm and there was Coach ready to go to the movies as we arranged. He wore khaki pants, a loud red and gold Hawaiian shirt. Gradient lens perception sunglasses, a short-brimmed Panama hat and blue boat shoes completed his look. He looked ready to go to the club for a $9.99 prime rib. 

For most of his life, Coach Moyer was known for his mullet, mustache, and visor. In 2002 he changed his look, some claimed, due to a rather mean-spirited Saturday Night Live skit about a football coach sporting the mullet, stash and visor look that Coach Moyer favored. In the years after his ‘retirement’ he went back to the mullet but added a go-tee. (In my mind, Coach so proudly again wearing the mullet was his way of giving a big FU to the world…even though hardly anyone saw it.)

I drove the giant new white Escalade that he and his wife used when they went out together. 

Coach walked into the bustling lobby of the movie theater without hesitation. I thought he’d be awed or cautious, but I was wrong. In reality here was a man who had walked into stadiums filled with 85,000 people, the eyes of the world on him. Jimmy Moyer was known for his near fearlessness. A longtime assistant coach who traveled up the success ladder behind Moyer, said: 

“At times I would think Jim was either too stupid or too crazy to be scared. He’s not stupid, so that leaves only one option. He’s nuts, certifiably crazy and probably sociopathic too. He hides it well. And he’s cunning. The most cunning person I’ve ever met. He lulls you into this daze with his California easy-going dude act, but in reality he’s owning you, dissecting your mind, finding out what makes you tick and what you want most. Many people loved Jim, some hated, all feared, but that fear was at such a deep level few could even talk about it. We all just accepted it, because Jim knew what was best for everyone he came into contact with. It was some kind of 6th Sense. He might have been nuts and cunning, but he was good to you. He made a lot of people very wealthy and famous. He wanted what was best for you…well, as long as it helped him too.”

If Coach was some crazy cunning sociopath, I hadn’t perceived it. I too, was cunning and sometimes people wondered if I was stupid or crazy based on the things I did with no visible fear or even second thought. I could see these traits in other people. Besides Coach maneuvering me into a life-changing adventure, I never once thought of him as crazy or even that cunning. Maybe in his past to get to the top he deployed these traits, but when I knew him, he was sometimes melancholy, over-medicated, and usually with half a load on. He was also honest, full of dry wit, and very likable. Yes, he held things back that would deeply affect me, but he didn’t do it to hurt me. It was all part of the gameplan. I was his QB. He knew what was best for me and he wanted only great success for me…but it had to benefit him too.

“They show commercials at the movies?” Coach says as we wait for Jaws to start. The theater is less than half full when the lights dim. Coach refuses popcorn or something to drink. I, on the other hand, have a tub of popcorn, nonpareils and a large club soda. 

Jaws starts immediately with no previews. Coach is tense as the opening scene ends and the girl is killed by the massive great white. As the movie progresses, I can tell Coach is analyzing it. He’s way more animated than I thought he’d be, nodding, shaking his head when he doesn’t like something, muttering, looking over at me smiling or looking terrified; thoroughly enjoying the film. 

When Clint tells his fellow shark hunters about his trials on the USS Indianapolis, Coach is transfixed. When the famous line: ‘We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat’, comes up, Coach repeats it over and over under his breath. When the final credits roll, Coach stands up and claps loudly, startling the audience. 

“That,” Coach says pointing to the screen, “is my new favorite movie.”

Walking to the car, Coach talks about his favorite scenes like an excited teenager, then, as we enter the SUV, “Can we go to one of those seafood places on the intracoastal with Tiki huts and Christmas lights, grab a bite?”

There were many of those kinds of places within a 10 minute drive, but only one, The Captains Table, was worthy. 

The Captains Table had been around since I was a kid. Back then it was hands down my favorite place to eat dinner. With its giant aquariums filled with colorful fish and even sharks, a stream that ran through the restaurant, the boardwalks, pirate island, wood covered in inches of yellowed lacquer, dark tiki-themed bar and cool breezes coming off the water, there was nowhere a 10yr-old me on vacation would rather dine. But now it was the last place I’d want to go. The food was decent enough, but conch fritters and grilled Mahi sandwiches weren’t really my thing anymore. 

Driving to the restaurant, I made a wrong turn, and Coach, doing his best Clint voice in a thick Boston accent, yelled, “Hoopa!” and pounded the SUV’s roof, mimicking the scene in Jaws when Richard Dreyfus’s character ‘Hooper’ pilots the boat poorly while chasing the shark and hears about it from the surly captain.

“I don’t have to take this abuse any longer,” I replied in my best Groucho Marx impression just like Dreyfus in the movie.

The round driveway leading to The Captains Table is grand enough to impress anyone, and when I was a kid, it felt like the portal to an exciting adventure. Tiki torches light the way. Lush tropical landscaping hides the restaurant behind a wall of green vegetation lit with colored lighting. You cross a bridge over a pond stocked with Koi fish.

“I’ve wanted to come here for years,” says Coach as we wait for the hostess to return. 

We sit out on the deck built over the intracoastal. Parts of the deck are lucite giving you a view down into the illuminated water where wild fish swim. We order two Dark & Stormys and of course their famous conch fritters. Coach also orders a fish sandwich. 

A few people seem to noticed either Coach or I. Their eyes quickly dart away when I stare back. For someone who hardly goes out, and if the internet could be believed, still either very much hated or loved by the population, Coach is totally at ease. 

Coach’s apparent total lack of giving a shit about what the people around us think of him is the same kind of behavior I experienced when hanging around Special Forces operators. They had been through combat, so regular life happenings totally did not register on the action meter for them. When I actually did assemble a team of retired operators (as opposed to the fake team I wrote about in the book, more on this later will clarify), and before we went into Syria to try and rescue orphans (using the money I made from book sales and donations to my charity), I went through two weeks of training with the unit in Jordan. I learned to never run when a grenade lands close (you get prone real fast with your feet towards the explosive, cross legs tight and smash hands against back of head), I learned that there is no good place to get shot (getting shot in the shoulder, an old Hollywood target zone, is almost as bad a place to get shot as is the chest), and trying to find shelter from bullets behind a car or anything other than reinforced concrete, was a death sentence. 

Men and women, who operate at the highest levels where mind body and soul fuse into this diamond-like structure called being ‘Born Again Hard’ (an old Marine Core euphemism), exist on a different plane of life than the rest of us. Coach was ‘Hard’ there was no doubt. He had been through the crucible of life at such intense a heat that hardly anything registered with him. 

I also found that Hard people, in a strange paradox, had a difficult time living normal life without the heat and pressure. A deep and vital part of their essence had been covered in molten iron. They lost part of themselves to gain great power. What they lost to become a diamond was that soft pliable suppleness that makes life more enjoyable.

It’s the old ‘when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ syndrome, and when society won’t let you hammer everything you see, when you’re no longer on the battlefield or in the boardroom or coaching a Super Bowl winning team, life flattens out and you have a very hard time finding lasting joy in the simple or even complex pleasures. 

I saw it happen to my father. He operated at the top of his game for decades, commanding thousands of workers and cultivating a company so that its stock price made investors billions. When the fiery fury is gone and all that remains is a peaceful breeze and silence, and there are no more nails sticking out, and even if there were, you’re not allowed to hit them, the hammer is lost.

Coach Jimmy Moyer was lost. Going to see Jaws and having a meal at a fun restaurant made him happy, but it wouldn’t last. And in my mind the happiness never reached a deep level. It was just a movie and meal, after all, not love or purpose or inner work that leads to greater self-awareness. Truth was, to The Hard, love/purpose/self-awareness, these things paled in comparison to the burning crucible. Long ago, The Hard gave up seeking a life in that soft trinity. They found life in the fire. Nothing would ever come close.

We eat, talk about the movie, a man comes over asking for a picture with Coach. Coach denies and the man goes back to his table and gets loud about the fact that he was denied. The check comes and Coach swipes it up. 

“One more drink, at the bar?” Coach asks.

The bar at the Captain’s Table is built to resemble the dark hold of a 19th Century dreadnought. They even pipe in creaking sounds. The bar was built back in the day when only real materials were used. The wood is all heavy sea-grade and all the ropes and iron would been good for any vessel at sea. The lighting dim, red, green, and blue glass fixtures hang from frayed rope. The bar itself extends for 30 feet and is covered in an inch of lacquer. A low cabinet, filled with oddities the owners has collected over the years, partially hides whoever is behind the bar. We sit at the end in comfortable wooden stools that have been there since I was kid. 

A few seconds after we sit, I notice Carla behind the bar serving drinks in frosted hi-ball glasses stacked with fruit and finished with little paper cocktail umbrellas. 

I freeze up.

Am totally unprepared for this ‘chance’ meeting. 

She jokes with patrons, works effortlessly at making drinks and looks stunning dressed in black tights and black tank-top complimented by shiny Doc Martins. A slight gap between tights and top exposes her midriff (which is my favorite part of a woman’s body). 

This is the first time I’ve gotten a really good look at her body. Carla, 5.7 tall with toned thighs and a glorious butt that I simply can not look away from, supple arms, toned and sharp shoulders, long neck, and radiance like a shining star. Her short, hi-lighted hair bobs around her full face. 

When I’m attracted to a woman, I never want to undress her with my eyes. I never fantasize about sex with her, but being a very hetero man—a man who finds the female body to be one of the most beautiful sights in Creation, and while I will not dishonor her with my thoughts—I can not rob my senses of her beauty.

Carla moves down the bar to the next patrons and looks quickly at Coach and I signaling we are on deck. She smiles and turns away, then her head snaps back to us. She does a triple take, exaggerating like a cartoon, then mimes ‘wow, what are you doing here?’ to which I mime back ‘the conch fritters’.

“You know her?” asks Coach.

“It’s her, the girl I told you about from the coffee place. But don’t let her know I mentioned her to you.”

Carla’s profile, black and curvy, stands out in the dim hazy light. I think she catches me eyeing her bottom half but I never look up from my conversation with Coach to see if it’s an issue or not. 

She comes for our order, leans over the bar, kisses my cheek. Her left hand touched the back of my neck and my central nervous system crackles.

“So now you know my super alter ego…Mistress of Libations at the world famous Captain’s Table.” Carla faces Coach. “Hi I’m Carla,” she says, hand extended.

“Jimmy Moyer, pleasure to meet you.”

Carla raises an eyebrow. 

“Former coach of the Chargers? My brother was a HUGE Chargers fan. I mean we grew up outside Chicago, and everyone, including my dad was a diehard Bears fan of course, but when we were really young my parents took us to San Diego and my brother fell in love with the place. My dad bought him a blue Chargers jersey…and they became his team. My dad let it slide because The Bears were NFC, Chargers AFC. Anyway, very good to meet you. Awesome, so what can I get you gentlemen?”

We order two more Dark & Stormys and Carla asks if we were the ones who ordered them earlier. In her opinion, the Dark & Stormy is a very respectable drink, and that a dark and storm beach day is one of her favorite things in the world. I concur as it is one of my favorite beach days too.

After serving other customers and glancing my way several times with a smile, Carla comes back over.

“Mr. Moyer, you live around here?”

“I do, and you can call me Coach.”

“OK, Coach, is this your first time here?”

“It is.”

“Can I have a picture to send to my brother?”

For a second it seems like Coach will say no, but instead he accepts and Carla takes a few selfies until she’s satisfied with the outcome (I lean out of the way so I’m not in pic). She flashes us the screen then bounds down to the other end of the bar to take an order.

“Oh, you’ll take a picture with that chick, but not me?” The guy Coach had earlier denied a photo with enters the bar with his three friends. They’re all early to mid-30s, well on their way to being drunk, total basic douchbags sporting identical corporate haircuts and the ‘I’m here on a boys golf vacation and I live in Manhattan’ swagger. 

Coach totally ignores the guy, but my Spidey senses start tingling telling me the chump isn’t done.

“You think I wanted a fucking picture because I like you?” says the guy, his voice raising with every word. “Hell no. I was gonna post it and say: ‘Look who I found hiding out in Shitville Florida…the worst cheater and loser in sports history’.”

In his left hand, Coach turns a napkin into petrified wood, but other than that, he is stoic, looking ahead, drinking his drink

The shitlord isn’t done even though his friends try pulling him out of the bar. 

“You are worse than Shoeless Joe Jackson. Worse than Pete Rose. A total fucking disgrace,” spittle flies out of his mouth. “Where’re you hiding that Super Bowl trophy, huh? Give it back you filthy thief.”

I spring off the stool faster than I thought possible. During my ‘top of the world years’ I trained weekly with a former Green Beret officer at his exclusive gym in LA. We did traditional weights and cardio, but also hand-to-hand combat (mostly the very effective Israeli no nonsense Krav Maga) and even spent time at the range training 3-Gun, which is an aerobic workout where you use three guns: handgun, shotgun, assault rifle taking out targets at close range like John Wick. 

Unlike many people who trained, I actually had to deploy what I learned several times over the years when coming into contact with the likes of current douchbag who thought it was their civic duty to accost me totally unprovoked. I’d even been arrested and then cleared after smashing a man’s collarbone into seven pieces with an outer hand chop. It was self-defense and the Law agreed. 

“Get him out of here, now,” I command the chump’s friends.

“What are you gonna do about it?” says the douche.

“Tell you what I’m gonna do,” I maneuver between coach and my targets. “I’m gonna knock your front teeth out with the heel of my right palm. Shatter them to hell. They’ll be picking pieces out of your lips for six hours. Then if that doesn't convince you, I’ll break your jaw at the left hinge so that you have life-long pain. And I’ll do the same to each one of you. And guess what? I don’t have any money so when you sue, you’ll get nothing, and I’ve already spent time in jail three times, I can do it again if it means shutting your mouth. I’ve got nothing to lose, chump.”

People gasp. I see Coach’s smirking face in a dark mirror. Carla looks intrigued and nervous. The douche crew take a few steps back. Thankfully, the manager and two doormen come and pull the group out and put them in a Uber.

One thing I’d worked hard on while training was tending my adrenaline flow. You want a flow, not a dump. Not easy since it’s controlled by the ANS (autonomic nervous system) but it’s vital in a hairy situation to get adrenaline under control. My head was full of heat and I was clenching my teeth when I walked back to the bar, but I hadn’t lost my cool. 

“Wow,” Carla says and gives us two drinks on the house. 

As the adrenaline pump lessens, I’m suddenly very worried that Carla is turned off, or even worse, scared of me. Coach is stoic. He puts his big hand on my shoulder, gives me a sincere squeeze and pounds his drink. 

“Carla, absolute pleasure to meet you, and I’m sorry about the drama,” Coach slides off the stool and squeezes my shoulder again, saying softly “I’ll be out front”.

“I’m sorry too. They asked for Coach’s picture when we were out back, he said no. Coach looks tough, but he’s just an old guy trying to get by, he doesn’t have any friends—”

Carla leans over the bar and kisses me lightly on the tip of my nose then lips. She cups my face with both hands. 

“You two are quite the duo.”

The saying ‘on cloud 9’ is a cliché but it’s also totally true. Carla’s thick and soft lips leave me spinning and floating. I manage to say that I’ll see her Sunday at the Coffee Sack, thank her again and again for being great and amazing, back out of the bar bowing and giving her little waves bye-bye.

On our silent drive home, I decide that on Sunday I will ask Carla out. Dinner and a movie. 

That slight kiss sealed the deal for me. Carla is interested. Then of course my dark side shows up with a machine gun shooting cold wet blankets. 

Why the hell would Carla want to date me? In the bar I said for all the world to hear that not only do I have no money, but that I’ve been in jail and have nothing to lose. Details every woman loves to hear about a potential suitor. Only thing I left out was that I lived with my stepmother. Sure Carla gave me a little kiss, but it was friendly. She felt bad for me but was also intrigued. I’m likable, ruggedly handsome as I’ve been told, and interesting, but not relationship material. 

“You OK?” I ask Coach as we pull into his driveway. “Hope that didn’t ruin your night.”

“Andy, I can’t count how many times that’s happened to me over the years. And no, it didn’t ruin my night. What was different this time, is that someone stood up for me. 

“I didn’t stop going out because I couldn’t take the abuse, I stopped going out because I was going to kill someone with my bare hands. I got tired of having to contain myself and not having anyone on my team. Someone says ‘fuck off and die’ then spits in your face, it’s hard to not beat their head in, so you just pack it in. Andy, you were good back there, real good. I respect that more than you probably realize.”

I knew all too well what Coach was talking about. After a while you just find it harder and harder to not beat someone who throws shit in your face.

As I walk back through the hedge, Coach calls out, “Hey, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.” 

6

The next day I cut through the hedge at 11am and was met with a closed garage. For the first time I went to the front door and rang the doorbell.

“Hi,” said Luisa.

When I asked where Coach was, she said: “Mr. Jim and Mrs. Sharon go to Miami for weekend. They be back Sunday night.”

I thought it was a little odd that Coach didn’t tell me he was going away for the weekend, but then I had to check myself. We were getting to be close friends, but as open as Coach Jim Moyer seemed, he hid a lot. More than most people. He was a deep vault. It was something he was known for: amazing memory, ability to recall that memory, and a depth where he could just tuck it all away until needed. His feelings went down into the depths as well. 

Robotic, Coach was called by people close to him, but he wasn’t cold, no, the exact opposite; Coach was warm, welcoming, sharp and quick...but yes, he was robotic in many ways. Warm and robotic presents a unique challenge for most people to navigate. We aren’t used to this pairing. 

Calculating and accepting. That’s how I could best describe Coach using only two words. He sized you up, and at the same time he didn’t judge. He wanted to know who you really were, and again, not so he could judge, but so he could get the most out of you. For your good AND for his. 

During his coaching days, time and time again, Jim Moyer gave guys a 2nd and 3rd chance. Most of them stepped up to the challenge and remade their careers. One, Mika Johnson, became a Hall of Famer and an anchor on a network Sunday NFL pregame show, another, Joey Williams, is serving life in prison for double murder. 

Coach’s reputation took a big hit when Joey Williams was arrested for murder. It happened during the off season of Jim Moyer’s second year as head coach with the Chargers, which was 1999. Joey Williams killed two men who tried to stop him from abusing his girlfriend. Shot them to death outside a bar in Dallas late one night. He shot and wounded the woman who then became a paraplegic. He also shot at police until running out of bullets. He snapped in terribly spectacular fashion. 

Joey showed no remorse and even threatened a judge and prosecutor. He just kept doubling down and let the world know that he truly was a very bad person. (He didn’t even try to blame his madness on concussions). He received a 65 year sentence with no parole and lost all his money due to civil suits.

The Joey Williams story was a shocking fall from grace. People had a hard time at first figuring out how someone who was on top of the world could just throw it all away. Then Joey’s history of violence came to light, and the best explanation anyone could come up with, was that Joey was just a bad guy, and on that one night his inner demon broke out, and the resulting carnage couldn’t be hidden. 

Two years before the shooting, that very same woman had been hospitalized after Joey assaulted her. He was arrested and thrown off the Packers. It was a different era. Before the desperately needed increase of Domestic Violence awareness and action. Joey sat out only six months, then Coach picked him up, signed him to a one-year veteran minimum contract and put him on the field.

Joey was a pass-rushing defensive end. When he wanted to be, he was unstoppable. In Joey’s first season with the Chargers they won their first Super Bowl. Joey was three sacks away from breaking the league record for a season. His contract was up for renewal. He cashed in with a $38.5 million deal. Back then in 1999, it was a massive contract for a defensive end and was a huge story. Five weeks after signing and receiving $9 million of that money upfront, Joey Williams was arrested for murder.

The tragedy was a nightmare for the league and for Coach. Somehow, people believed the 2nd chance that Coach gave Joey caused the tragedy, but truth was, Joey Williams had been a bad guy for a long time. The very public 2nd chance Coach gave was actually more like Joey’s 25th chance. He’d been given a free pass for violent behavior since middle school. 

At Auburn, where he was a two time All-American, Joey threw a kid down concrete stairs, almost killing him. Nothing came of it. No less than ten women claimed Joey either sexually assaulted them or just assaulted them. Nothing came of it. He once shot a college teammate through the cheek with a stolen 9mm for not paying a bet and the school hushed it up, only suspending him for a game. 

Joey robbed, cheated, beat and abused his way through life. It wasn’t Coach’s fault. (Pro sports, everything from golf to football, in my opinion, are filled with ‘bad guys’ who have been given free passes their entire lives. It’s a disturbing ‘inconvenient truth’ that America will not address.)

Where Coach failed, was that he would do almost anything to win. He didn’t have a conscious like you or I. 

Remember: a warmblooded robot. 

He cared about his players, and they, for the most part, loved him, but he had little loyalty. If you couldn’t do your job like you used to, but were a really good guy, you were out. If you were a bad guy who could play, you were in. 

The NFL ecosystem doesn’t allow teams and coaches to be even the slightest bit soft. The entire culture of the NFL would have to change, and it has in many positive ways, but even today, bad guys, if they can play and don’t get in obvious trouble like having it on video or in texts, will always have a job. 

After finding out Coach was away, I went back home and dedicated a few hours of writing to what you are reading now. The idea of writing a non-fiction book was totally incomprehensible, yet there I sat doing it. I’d written four novels, a short story collection, five screen plays, a dozen treatments, and three books of my Sci-Fi series, The Shard. I never once considered non-fiction. It wasn’t in my blood. It wasn’t my truth. But every day I’d open up this document and write about my experiences and interactions with Coach Moyer. 

The writing was autonomous, like the book had already happened and I was just living the memory of writing it. 

There’s gotta be inertia, something vital to writing a book, and one day you sit down and realize you’ve written 35,000 words and 65 pages. You just keep going. Its not a grind, but a flow. Ideas that aren’t going to work, they feel like a grind and you get rid of them. If every page is a struggle, you better find something else to write. But writing about Coach was effortless. 

(To my fellow writers reading this, I’m a firm believer in just hiding word count and page count. You should only check after writing a lot, I mean for a month or even three. Then maybe take a look and see where you are. Another thing…I like to keep things I'm writing close to the vest. I don’t tell people what I'm writing about until the 1st Draft is complete. I may drop some hints when I'm 75% done, but that’s it. It’s like if you tell the story out loud, that vital pressure and inertia leaves the piece and you may lose momentum. And I also don’t let anyone read until it’s a 3rd Draft.)

Saturday was a restless day since the next day I would be asking Carla out. So much would be revealed. Either my life trajectory would direct towards a new beginning and something to look forward to, or it would falter. 

If Carla said no for whatever reason, the hit to my well-being would be big. I didn’t want to bank so much on a relationship with her, but Carla was the most amazing woman I had possibly ever met. I was hugely attracted to her. Just being friends wouldn’t be enough for me. I know it might sound a little predatory, but that is the undeniable truth. 

I also prepped my psyche for the very real possibility Carla would decline right there to my face. I discovered that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I wouldn’t go nuts or anything, just the disappointment would be too much to bare in public, so I decided I’d write her a note (it made sense also because putting her on the spot right there at the register would be unfair, and waiting for her to take a 15min break like a stalker wasn’t a good plan either). So I would hand her the note when she took my order...and leave. 

I managed to get myself to agree that I would sit out back after giving her the note and leave that way. There was a good chance she wouldn't read the note till an hour later. Handing her the note and hightailing it out of the Coffee Sack was not the kind of life I was trying to cultivate. I’d already broken down and decided against a face-to-face ask out. I wouldn’t allow myself to take another step backwards. If she came out back while I was still there and had read it, and she said yes or no, I would deal with it. 

I went to work on the handwritten note.

My handwriting was terrible. I’d get to the third sentence and lose concentration for a second and scrub a Y or reverse a D (damn dyslexia) and have to start over. A bunch of times I got to the last few words and messed something up. Sometimes I scrapped the note when I realized the writing was all crooked or looked too much like a 4th grader wrote it. Obsessive, yes. Weird, a little. But it’s what happened. 

Finally after 12 ‘drafts’ on the stiff little stationary cards, I had the note. I drew a few little cartoons on the card, put a yellow rose pedal in the envelope (for friendship, my thinking was that red would be too presumptuous; but the note made it clear how I felt without sounding desperate). The note went something like this: 

             Dear Carla,

             Over the past seven weeks you’ve helped make my transition to St. Sebastian an amazing experience. I came from LA (which for everyone I knew was the agreed upon Center of The Universe) and was certain that in FL I would not be meeting anyone who could match the interesting, intelligent, happy, fun, beautiful people I interacted with everyday in Cali. You have eclipsed all of them. You and your radiant smile and your liquid real eyes. Hearing your voice makes me happy. Knowing I will see you, makes me happy.............So.........would you like to go to dinner and a movie with me? 

If this isn’t something you’re interested in, or can’t, I won’t be weird about it. I will be disappointed, that I cannot deny, but won’t be weird. I cherish our growing friendship and one part of me didn’t want to write this in case this note damaged that friendship, but at the same time I’ve learned that when something feels so REAL and TRUE, I have to move into it. Embrace. Act.

Txt me or call: 561.435.2253

I’m free whenever you are

Andrew 

That night I watched the Blues Brothers (for the 50th or so time). Grilled a steak. Drank an Opus One Cabernet from my father’s collection that in a restaurant would cost $5900. Sleep came in fits. I didn’t have anxiety on a regular bases, but when something big was going down, my patterns changed. I became anxious and nothing I could do besides meditation and breathing exercises helped. 

At 12pm sharp Sunday I departed my house for the Coffee Sack. I sealed the note in a little envelope, which assured that Carla would not open it right there at the register. 

Concerning delivery of note, I didn’t just want to hand it to her, turn my back, and hustle out back, but at the same time if I alerted her as to what was in the note it would be like asking her out and the purpose of the note would be diminished. I had to find a smooth way to convey that the note wasn’t just some friendly little thing, I was actually asking her out on a date in it. 

Suddenly, I was stressing out about finding the right way to do it all, so as I sat there in the parking lot, I decided I’d talk to her as I normally did, and when I was done eating, drinking and hanging out on the patio (I would cut my usual 3hrs down to 1hr), I’d then go back inside, buy something else, hand her the note, smile, bow and leave.

The art of the situation would be in not feeling too awkward about the whole thing when I first saw her. She wouldn’t know I had something up my sleeve and it would be hard to not give a few ‘tells’. In the end I settled on just letting it all be organic. 

Everything lined up perfectly without me having to micromanage. There was a short line and Carla was taking orders. She looked up and gave a little wave. I ordered my usual and stole my typical five or six quick glances at Carla. 

Looking at her, just being in the same space with her, it made me instantly happy. Nothing like it had ever happened to me. Carla lifted my spirits. Powerful and scary magic. Not infatuation. Not obsessed. This was genuine free and clear honoring of a massively beautiful soul. I knew a very special human when I met one. I already loved Carla. The love was without condition. I wasn’t ‘in love’, although I knew that if she and I got together, that would happen as well. 

I left through the rear door, caught Carla’s eye, waved, and went out back. 

That ‘relative time’ thing happened in a big way. Every second was like five. 1hr finally ticked by, and with all my courage, I went back inside. 

Carla was nowhere to be seen. I stood there for a few minutes hoping she’d appear but she didn’t. The pressure was too much,, losing the organic feel of it all. I was on the cusp of being a weirdo, so I left. 

“Hey! Leaving so soon?” says Carla as we nearly smash into each other as I rush out the front door. 

She’s just come back from her 15 minute break. Probably took a little walk around the park across the street as she often did. The fact that I didn’t account for her break is a major tactical error, but I’m in it now, dropped on the beach. I have to make my move.

“This is for you,” I hand Carla the note. Her eyes light up and it’s obvious her mind is working out the possibilities of what is inside. 

“It’s pretty self-explanatory. I gotta go. Bye.” I give her a quick peck on the cheek. She walks to the front door of the Coffee Sack working to open the note (thank you well-made stationary glue) and I quickly get in my car and practically peel out.

And I wait.

And wait.

By 8pm no text, no call. 

At 11:47pm a text from a number I don’t know arrives. It has to be her. I sit in the dark with the phone next to me like it’s a box holding a German cat. 

Right there in that little black rectangle awaits my destiny. There are three possibilities: good, bad, or neutral. It could be a yes; a no; or a ‘well, right now’s not a good time for me...’. I’ve gotten and given that one before. You’re not saying no forever, but for now, even entertaining the idea of a relationship with anyone, isn’t possible. For me that would be almost as bad as a flat out no. 

A little red 1 in the upper right corner of my message icon alerts me that the point of no return has arrived. 

If it’s a no, I’ll have a tuff time with it, that I cannot deny. Life will again look grim. There’d be nothing to look forward to. Potential, one of the most important things for me, would be greatly diminished. 

I glance at the text just to confirm it was sent by Carla, but don’t dare focus on what it says. I’m borderline irrational. Have to force myself to not drop my phone in a drawer until morning. Finally I build up the courage to face my destiny. 

The text reads:

            What a beautiful note thank you! I can’t even remember the last time anyone hand-wrote me anything! OK, so to the point....dinner and a movie would be a little much right now. And not that I don’t think we’d have a great time, it’s just, I don’t know how else to say it....just a little too much. Know what I mean? I hope you do. I care about you Andrew really do, I want to be totally open and honest with you.

            My heart sinks. I put the phone down. There’s more to the text, but I not ready to read it. She’s right, dinner and movie, too much. I’ve over-reached. The sun has burned my wax wings. I should’ve just asked her to walk on the beach at sunset. I rushed things. Too much. Fuck. 

             The rest of the text reads:

             So I have an idea....on Wednesday there’s a drum circle in the downtown park. It’s fun. Lots of people. I like to drum and hoop so I go. Would u be interested in meeting me there? 8pm? It goes til 11. Let me know. Hope to see uuuuuu....

Hold on a second, all is not lost. Well, 91% is lost, but at least I have something to hang onto. 

Her suggestion is obviously better than a no and somewhat better than a ‘not now’. I’m pretty sure she is leaning towards a ‘not now’ but genuinely is interested in me as person and doesn’t want to totally close the door.

A few minutes after reading her text for the 10th time, I text back:

            Yes, I used to drum all the time. Been awhile, but sounds like fun. And I get to see you hoop :) thanks for invite. see you then…..

            A minute later a response comes:

             Awesome :)))))))))

Very happy with myself that I didn’t play games and wait till morning to text. And even happier when she quickly sent a response. I slept well that night.

7

Monday morning Coach is back in his chair reading the paper.

“Hey, Coach.” I sit in my camping chair, grab a section of the paper Coach has discarded, read with him in silence. 

Finally I say, “You know Carla from the other night? I asked her out.”

“Did she say yes?” he asks without looking up.

“Well, she thinks dinner and movie is a little too much right now. So instead we’re meeting at the park downtown Wednesday night for a drum circle.”

“What’s a drum circle?”

“Bunch of people get together...in a circle...and drum.”

“Hippie stuff?”

“Sort of.”

“So then, it’s not really a date.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way yet. It certainly was not a date. We were simply meeting at an event. She was nice enough to ask if I would like to be someplace she would also be at. No date. Shit.

“So, can I come?”

It has been said many times about Coach Jim Moyer that you could not say no to him. I hadn’t yet said no to him. Not even a ‘no thanks’. Having a wingman wasn’t a bad idea. We were good together and Carla seemed to like the ‘ole ball Coach. Having him around took a ton of pressure off when we randomly met her at the Captain's Table. 

“Sure. We’ll leave 730.”

After awhile of silence, Coach says, “I missed the 60s. Hell, I missed the 70s, 80s, 90s, and whatever we call what happened since then.

“I was born 70 miles from Haight Street, but it might as well have been a million. Everyone around me was conservative. They hated San Francisco. After my mother left and we moved to China Town, I saw all of that Flowerpower madness happen with my own eyes. I was 13 in early 1968. I would hang out in Golden Gate park throwing the ball and have to step over hippies. 

“The Grateful Dead would be playing a free concert and I’d be organizing football games in the next field over. The hippies were always trying to get me to smoke pot, take LSD. 

“To me they were degenerates. I mean, what kind of adult asks a 13-year-old kid if he would like to take acid? And on top of that, my father said he would cut fingers off my throwing hand if I ever tried any of that stuff. But truth was, these weren't adults. They were kids themselves. Hardly any of them were over 18. They didn’t know any better. 

“A lot of my friends though, they got sucked into it. I lost people. Kids just dropped out. Twelve, 14-year-olds. You’d see them turned into hippies overnight. It scared the crap out of me. Most of them never got their life together. Taking LSD was one thing, and though I don’t think kids should try it, I don’t consider that a drug, but for a lot of kids they went on to actual drugs and didn’t make it. A few adjusted. Went to college. Made a life. The rest are long dead.”

Coach Moyer was known to be somewhat conservative, as were most football coaches, but he wasn’t politically involved. When asked about politics, Coach took the tac that both parties represented a small percentage of the nation (the 1%), of which, due to the vast sums of money he made coaching football, made him a member of, to which he played the old Charlie Chaplin ‘I don’t want to be in any club that would have me as a member’. But none the less, he was a member. 

Coach made tens of millions in salary and made many more tens of millions being a terrific investor. He invested heavily in tech in the ‘80s and ‘90s and again caught the second wave in the late 2000s. He had commercial real estate all over the country. He had a charitable foundation that helped kids go to college (unfortunately the foundation closed when the cheating scandal broke). 

But by all accounts, Coach didn’t really care about money. He didn’t have super fancy cars or take big trips. Coach had the very nice house in St. Sebastian and the ranch in Calistoga. He wore Hawaiian shirts, khakis or cargo shorts, wore a straw hat or baseball cap. He favored grey New Balances. He had a Brietling watch and a thick gold chain around his neck. He owned a new full-size luxury SUV. His wife had a Porsche. That was it. 

“Anyway, want to watch a game? My Rose Bowl. Junior year at UCLA. It’s a classic.”

Coach’s dark cool office is extra inviting due to the hot sunny day. On his desk sits an 8mm reel-to-reel projector and a screen is pulled down over his vast bookcase. I assume my position on the couch and hit record. I’ll let Coach tell you about his college experience from here, word for word, no editing, just a transcript of the recording:

“I was recruited heavily by every school west of the Rockies. Big Ten and SEC weren’t that interested. Only school in Texas that offered me anything was University of Texas. University of Virginia and Rutgers were the only east coast schools to offer me a scholarship. Still, I was a top 5 QB on the West Coast and I narrowed my choice down to USC, Washington, and UCLA. 

“UCLA was a better school than USC, but it was known for basketball not football, but I loved the campus and the way they ran the program. Very structured, intelligent, efficient. 

“It was 1972 when I signed my letter of intent to UCLA. The Vietnam War was still hot but you could tell it was winding down. The peace&love of the ‘60s had been replaced by a conservative grittiness. Most of the hippies now wanted to make money and get on with their lives. I was an observer to most of this. Just watching and playing football. 

“So UCLA, yeah, beautiful place, and lots of girls. Now, I wasn’t a surfer dude, which was a culture gaining a lot of traction those days, but I was a tall built football player with a mustache and a dimpled chin, so I did fairly well with the fairer sex. And I partied. Lot of hard drinking and pot smoking, so much so that my position coach after my freshman year, which I redshirted, told me to cool it. My grades were C+ and some B’s. 

(Note: Redshirt works like this, you get five years of eligibility to play four. You can’t touch the field that redshirt year or you lose your redshirt and your four years of actual playing time begins. So your first year is called your ‘redshirt year’, your second year is called your redshirt freshman year and your four years of playing eligibility begin.)

“People always asked me what it was like playing college football compared to high school. The difference is speed and hitting. Everyone is fast, everyone can hit. I gained respect because I could take a hit and give it out as well. I was getting stronger and I even grew a little. My arm was powerful. I could roll out and whip a ball on a rope 25 yards no problem, but I didn’t have what was called a ‘big arm’, meaning I couldn’t arch a 60 yard TD. I was learning the offense. Going into my redshirt freshman season I was third string. I traveled with the team, even ran a few plays when we were blowing out a bad team. 

“We went 9-4, played in the Independence Bowl. Beat Florida 35-17. 

“Going into preseason my sophomore year, my biggest weakness was that I wasn’t very competitive. I was laid back, coasting, my will to get on the field wasn’t that strong. There was little doubt that Jack Pardon, a junior and a hell of a football player, would get the starting job. My position coach and even our head coach made that clear to us. I would be a solid number two and get my shot senior year. 

“Truth is, if I had my headgame right, I could’ve beaten Jack out and started. Life, it’s a headgame as much as it’s a body or soul game. I was beaten before we even stepped foot on the field for the first practice of preseason. 

“I did find the field that season, and even played most of a game when Jack got hurt. We lost that game to Washington, but it was a hell of an experience and gave me a ton of confidence. We went 10-3, winning the Cotton Bowl against Texas. In the offseason we were the talk of the Pac 10. Some wondered if this was the year we would beat USC and make it to the Rose Bowl. 

“Offseason my sophomore year I started taking it all much more seriously, but I didn’t want to fight Jack to become the starter. It would be his senior season. We were roommates along with three other guys and I really liked him. We talked about it. We had a secret pact that I would not compete for starting QB. Jack maintained the starting job and all was well. He deserved it and led our team to a 3-0 record.

“Against California, at their stadium, Jack Pardon took a hit on his right knee. The second it happened we all knew it was bad. I was prepared physically to enter the game, and I knew the gameplan, but my head was not in it. We lost to a vastly inferior team. I played OK, but the loss pretty much fell on my shoulders.

“By Sunday afternoon it was clear that Jack Pardon’s career was over. We didn’t have MRIs then but it was obvious that he had torn both his ACL and MCL with lots of cartilage damage. 

“I was thrust into the starting spot. 

“Coach Willis, our head coach, sat me down Monday before practice. He gave me the ‘this is your team now’ speech and ‘we are 100% confident that you’re our guy’. Fact was they had little choice. The kid behind me, Hunter Bailey, was a redshirt freshman and not ready to play. He had the best arm out of anyone on the team, but he wasn’t ready. This was my team now, and in my mind for another season as well. When I got that into my head, everything started clicking. 

“We ran the table leading up to our final regular season game against...USC. Whoever won would be playing in the Rose Bowl against Michigan. The Rose Bowl would possibly decide the National Championship. (Spoiler...it didn’t due to a one-loss Notre Dame beating an undefeated Texas in the Cotton Bowl, who was then crowned Champion.)

“The game was played at USC. Was a record attendance, 82,000. Nationally televised on ABC. Everyone was asking me all week ‘are you nervous?’ and I always said ‘No, I don’t get nervous about anything’. The media loved that one. They painted me as this easygoing Cali surfer kid. Everyone who knew me, understood that wasn’t the case at all. By then I had become a cold calculating surgeon. I was motivating my teammates. I was in control. I wasn’t easygoing at all when winning mattered. I was focused and intense. And on top of all that, I’d never even tried to surf once in my life.

“I took a beating that game against USC. Most hits I’d ever taken. Threw two INTs but ran for 85 yards, threw for 285 and three TDs. We won 31-21. I was campus hero. Rose Bowl here we come. It was the greatest time of my life...”

Coach starts up the projector and a view of the field in black and white appears. He sits back in the big chair, dims the lights, sighs, sipps his spiked coffee. 

The Rose Bowl stadium is jam packed as the opening kickoff happens. UCLA and Coach get the ball first. He drives them down to the Michigan 25 and they settle for a field goal. 

Michigan scores a TD on their first drive and both teams are off to the races. Coach is on fire. Watching him scramble, allude hits, throw on the run, take big hits, get in players faces, it really wakes me up to a new level of respect for the man. 

Coach Moyer sports one of those insane one-bar face masks that offers almost zero protection, and for the first time, I truly understand that I’m in the presence of a...legend. A living legend. Yes, cursed from coast to coast, but a legend none the less. 

By halftime the score is 28-27 UCLA in the lead. 

Coach changes reels. He watches the second half as intently as the first, like he hasn’t watched it in a long time, maybe decades. (I never asked, but it wouldn't be a bad bet that it was the first time he had watched the game...ever.) 

When the 3rd quarter ends, UCLA trails by 10. Michigan had blocked a punt and returned it for a TD. Coach also threw an INT that was returned to the UCLA 23 and resulted in a field goal. To make up for the mistake, Coach ran for an amazing 22-yard TD and got his team another field goal. 

Coach Moyer looks like a magician playing QB. It’s how he got the moniker ‘Magic Moyer’. The Zone. He was not only in ‘it’, Coach Moyer WAS THE ZONE. He was…right there.

I look back at Coach a few times. He’s smiling, frowning, bobbing his head as he watches a former incarnation of himself avoid tacklers. In the gray light given off by the screen, I can tell his eyes are red. He’s been tearing up. 

With 2:45 left on the clock and down seven, backed up to his own endzone, one time out, Jim Moyer drives his team down the field with such art and skill it transcends greatness. On the drive he goes 8-for-8 and caps it off with a smash-mouth four-yard TD run. The crowd is crazy. The reel-to-reel has no sound but you can see tens of thousands in the stands are ecstatic. They are one giant undulating mass of grey and black. 

I’m on the edge of the couch when Coach pauses the projector. 

“Score was now 45-44 with Michigan still in the lead. Highest scoring Rose Bowl until 2006. Highest TV rating of any college football game up till then. Back then there could be ties. There was only seven seconds left. If we kicked the extra point the game would end in a tie barring some miracle kickoff return by Michigan. After I scored and was done celebrating, I ran back towards the sidelines. There was a lot of confusion, but coach Willis was still as an oak in a hurricane. He looked right at me, put up two fingers and slanted his right hand down across his body. 

“The crowd went wild seeing that we were going for the win. When I got into the huddle, I was in another world. It was for me...a religious experience. I could hear individual people cheering or cursing me. I was then floating about 30 feet above my body. I mean an honest to goodness ‘out of body experience’. Never had that happened before, never since. I was looking down at the field, the huddle. I was afraid I was dying. 

“My eyes must’ve really been bugged out, because our center, Jim Beacon, the single toughest guy I’ve ever met, blood all over his white jersey, grass stains, dirt on face, missing three fingernails and a pinkie smashed to a pancake between two helmets, grabbed my facemask, yanked it down, jabbed me in the gut and smacked me in the helmet. 

“I literally snapped back into my body. That’s what it felt like. A snap. I don’t remember calling the play. We only had three plays for that situation. Run, pass, or option. Coach called a pass option. It was a naked bootleg where almost everyone would go right, faking that we were going hard right while I would sneak left. A tight end would hold a block for two seconds, then release, giving me someone to throw to if Michigan didn’t buy the fake.”

The projector starts up and I can tell Coach is a little weak in the knees in the huddle. I watch as the center steps over to his QB and grabs the facemask. The huddle brakes and the crowd settles down. Coach gets under center, stomps his left foot. A player goes in motion left to right. The ball is snapped. Coach mishandles it for a split second but quickly gets the ball under control. 

For those who have never played football at any level, the hardest thing for them to understand is what an actual play is like. They simply can never understand. I mean a real 11-on-11 game with full equipment and keeping score and referees. A play only lasts five to eight seconds, but it’s a furious distilled amount of seconds. Again, it’s a play on time. Different time. To accentuate this time-warping, Coach puts the projector on extra slow-motion for the final play. 

Magic Moyer fakes the handoff right. Everyone on Michigan bites on the fake except for the right defensive end and a saftey. The DE remembers his coaching and ‘stays home’. His only mistake, and this cost Michigan the game, is that he attacks Moyer who effortlessly sidesteps him, pushing the DE face-first into the turf with his free hand. 

The play is expertly executed, but has one flaw which is also vital to it working. Coach, if he has to throw, will have to awkwardly throw across his body since he is running hard left and throwing with his right. A bootleg to Coach’s right would’ve made more sense and Michigan probably would’ve been ready for it and stuffed it. But rolling left, it’s not Coach’s best play. The TE releases and now the saftey has to make a decision. He’s on an island now that the DE is on the ground. Two against one. 

Then...the TE trips, stumbles, falls, taking himself out of the play. 

Moyer has only one option now: head for the pylon marking the endzone. It’s a footrace. He and the safety meet head-on at the pylon. It’s a ferocious collision. The entire crowd jumps to their feet. 

The Michigan player is a little smaller than Moyer but has more momentum. On the screen Coach reaches the ball out over the goal line and hits the turf almost simultaneously. 

The referee standing right there hesitates for two seconds, then throws his arms up singling the conversion is good. UCLA fans pour onto the field. Jim Moyer disappears under a pile of people. The Michigan coaches are going crazy, saying Moyer’s knee was down. This was a time before replay. The play would stand based on the call on the field.

UCLA 46 Michigan 45. Coach Moyer is now being carried around the field by students. Pure pandemonium.

“My knee was down, it was down half a second before the ball crossed the goalline,” Coach laughs. “I’ve never told anyone that. It wasn’t a conversion. What happened is I was so certain that I’d throw it instead of run, that I slowed my rollout so I could get off a better pass. When the tight end went down, I had to shift gears. I didn’t have enough speed going towards the pylon. Back then, they only had a few cameras per game, even the big games. There is no footage, as far as I know, showing my knee down, but it was. I admit it. Doesn’t matter one bit, we still won.”

Coach looks at the now white screen. Right hand stroking his chin. 

“Michigan coach Bo Shembeckler talked about it for years and he was instrumental in getting replay for the college game. We met once and he flat out asked me if my knee was down. I told him ‘no, no coach it wasn’t’. He slapped me hard on the back and told me we deserved the win whether my knee was down or not.” 

Coach Moyer stops the projector. 

“I soaked it all in, but not as much as I would’ve if I knew that would be the last game I ever played in.”

8

Coach seemed exhausted when the game ended. He asked if we could reconvene the following day. It had been an emotional experience watching himself in that big game. Now about it being his last game, we’ll get to that later. 

When I got famous, the only things I wrote were short articles and updates to my website and Social Media accounts. For years I didn’t write anything longer then a few paragraphs. I was just too busy. Then when my life imploded I had tons of time to write, but what I wrote was terrible. The two novels I wrote and tried to get published were not good enough. It didn’t help of course that my name was poison (I also tried querying with a pseudonym but didn’t get any traction), whatever the case, those books had no chance. 

But when I was writing about Coach, I wrote with depth and quality. I wasn’t struggling to move a plot along because it moved itself, I was just reporting. The work flow was epic. I’d sit at my little desk, read over some notes or listen to the recorder and just hammer away. What I was writing then was more stream of consciousness than the structured story you are reading. I just had to get it all out. 

The next day I find Coach in his chair reading the paper as usual. Sitting in his lap is a football. 

“Want to have a catch?” 

Coach, in his robe and Crocs, warms up by swinging his right arm around. He tosses the ball up over his head in a perfect tight spiral. Coach waves for me to move closer, then closer again and again until I’m only 15 feet from him. 

“Don’t want to pull something, been a long time.”

“How long?”

“Twelve years since I’ve really thrown.”

Before I could be shocked that Coach hasn’t thrown a ball in 12 years, the leather oblong egg comes zipping at my head. 

As for me, it hasn’t been 12 years since I caught or threw a football. In LA before my 45 minutes of fame and shame, I played flag football every Saturday from September to January. 

So, from 3rd to 7th grade, I played QB. My father paid for the uniforms and was assistant coach. He insisted I be under center even though there were three kids who were better than me. I was what they would call in the NFL a ‘serviceable QB’ or ‘a game manager’. I could only throw the ball 15 feet and wasn’t fast but I never made mistakes and we were champions three of my four years playing, with my greatest moments coming in our legendary undefeated 6th grade season. (For the record, I understand Glory Day reminiscing stops at high school. It doesn’t extend into middle or elementary school. Regardless, I still have dreams about playing, and my 6th grade MVP trophy is one of the few personal items I’ve been able to hold onto through the years.) 

The 7th grade team was when all the elementary schools in my area joined and became one. There was no way I would be starting QB, especially since dads were no longer making up the coaching staff or buying uniforms. Tryouts lasted three days and they were brutal. Coaches and kids actually laughed when I threw the ball. By the end of tryouts I was 4th string QB and would’ve been 5th string if there were another QB on the team. I made the team, but only because I was Thomas Anders son. 

Unlike elementary school ball, in middle school there was no rule stating that every kid on your team had to play at least five plays a game. I would be so deeply buried on the bench no one would even see me. And on top of this, there was the school play which I wanted to be part of.

So I quit. You already know how that went over with my father. 

Years later I made it my mission to learn how to throw the perfect pass. It took me two years, but I learned how to throw a perfect spiral 30 yards. I paid the $300 team fee for the flag league, made myself the QB, assembled a team, and led my squad to four straight playoff appearances. One year we made it to the semifinal. I won most improved player. We all took it very seriously, and for me, those years of flag football provided much needed sports redemption. 

I toss a soft pass back to Coach. Not my tightest spiral but it still has zip on it. He snatches the ball out of the air with his big hands. 

“Not bad,” says Coach. He tosses the ball back and moves closer. “Ever read that article about me called ‘The New Age Coach’?”

It was an article in Vanity Fair after Coach won his first Super Bowl in January 1999 (1998 season) and it went like this:

Coach was known to utilize very unconventional means to achieve excellence. Beyond mediation and visualization, it was said Coach went to Tarot card readers, psychics, gurus, astrologists, sweat lodges, studied sacred geometry, and some claimed he even spent a week in the Arizona desert taking Peyote. It was also alleged that Coach employed a Voodoo priestess known as a Mombo who sacrificed goats and chickens for his benefit. Coach flat out denied everything, except to say once, ‘Where there’s smoke sometimes there’s a fire, but there’s also a lot of bullshit’.

The unauthorized bio claimed that some of it was true. It was a subject I desperately wanted to talk to Coach about, but didn’t know how to approach it. I tuck the ball away, pull out the digital recorder and dramatically shove it in his face like a beat reporter would.

Coach laughs, “I talked a few times about ‘higher self’ and ‘destiny’, I did yoga, and someone once saw me mediating before practice. I talked once how I thought I saw a UFO from an airplane flying over Texas. The media found out that after college I’d gotten close to a guru and went to India. They found an angle and created a story where there really wasn’t one. All kinds of weird and untrue narratives appeared. Honestly, I liked the aura of weirdness and confusion that set around me, so I didn’t even try to counter all the BS. I liked being the mysterious weird guy, I thought it gave me an edge.

“In college, I started seeing a guru to help me deal with what happened to me my senior year at UCLA. His names was Shiva Swarat Anananda. A girl I was dating introduced me to him. This was LA in the late ‘70s, and the place was teaming with gurus and yoga and ashrams as all the people who got washed out by the ‘60s needed something to guide them. 

“Growing up I was never a religious person. Sure, we celebrated Christmas and Easter, but no church, and we were pretty much always too poor to get gifts. Religion was just boring, but I did believe in God. Now when I say ‘believe’ and ‘God’ I don’t mean them in a traditional religious sense. I feel like there is an intelligence built into the fabric of Creation. And I think it communicates with us through LIFE LIVED. Know what I mean? I don’t think it actually speaks to us in our heads, but I mean it speaks to us through nature and life and destiny and things that happen and that don’t happen. Maybe the more you tune into this, the more God ‘speaks’? 

“Shiva Swarat had this little ashram in the Hollywood Hills and he taught me something called Transcendental Meditation (TM). It sounds complex, but it’s really just about repeating a mantra in your head. Finding the right mantra and remembering to do it are the hardest parts. With TM, the mantra doesn’t really matter as much as you think it does, but you can’t very well just repeat ‘I like Pepsi’ over and over. In Hindu there are powerful words that help unlock inner and outer wisdom. So all day, and before sleep, and when I woke, I repeated a mantra. 

“TM helps balance the mind and thus the world around you. Studies have shown it to have amazing effects on the world when many people join in. But I wasn’t interested in how it affected the world, and to be honest I am still not that interested. I wanted it to help me.

“Naturally I started doing yoga. I started smoking pot again. I grew my hair long, well at least the back of my mullet got longer. I graduated from UCLA in December 1976, and by April ‘77 after no NFL teams drafted me or even called me for a workout, I went to India and Nepal for a few months trying to find the meaning of life. I came back to LA and went to Shiva Swarat. I asked him what I should do now. 

‘Be a football coach’, he said. 

“Becoming a football coach was the last thing I wanted to do. When my senior season ended, I was done with football. I felt free. For the first time since ninth grade I didn’t have preseason football. No more daily practice for four months, no more weight room and sprints and long hours. I missed gameday, but that was eight hours once a week. All the other stuff, I was beyond happy to put it behind me. What I really wanted to do was make a fortune in real estate. 

“I told all this to Shiva Swarat. He said, ‘No, be a football coach. It is your destiny. You cannot escape it, so it is better to work with it. Go East to begin…so that you may end West’. 

“My destiny or the one I created, hard to tell, but he saw the world and people in ways unlike any person I’ve ever met. Numerous times I experienced true bonafide mystical events because of Shiva Swarat. I could not deny them then...or now. 

“Witnessing these true and mystical events made me want to experience more and more of them. I pushed the idea of becoming a football coach into the back of my mind, bought a Honda motorcycle from a friend, and rode around the Southwest, hoping for adventure and enlightenment. 

“By August 1977 after several months of riding, I ended up in Tucson, AZ. I was living in a tent and sneaking into the student commons at UofA to use the bathroom, shower and steal food. One day I was running around the track. An assistant football coach for the Wildcats recognized me, not through the long beard and hair, but by recognizing my gait...the way I ran. 

“After telling him what I’d been doing for the last eight months, this coach, John McComb, the defensive coordinator for the Wildcats, who I beat badly when I played for UCLA, asked if I wanted to join the coaching staff as a graduate assistant. Grad Assistants get paid practically nothing, but you get to go to grad school and have room and food taken care of. The catch is you are the lowest man on the coaching totem. I was out of money, couldn’t even afford a gallon of gas to ride back to LA. My tent had been battered by a storm. My sneakers had 10 holes in them. I smelled. My clothes were stiff and filthy. 

“‘You have to shave and cut your hair, only the kids are allowed to be hippies’, McComb laughed. I took the offer. 

“Now, in my opinion, the funny thing about destiny, is that it wants our conscious collaboration, but it DOESN’T NEED IT. You don’t always have to be willing, but you have to put yourself in play to make it happen. What I’m getting at, is that you don’t want the ‘universe’ or God or Higher Self, Providence, whatever you choose to call or not call it, to work very hard making your destiny happen. And once you’ve been presented with real, irrefutable evidence that time, and space, and Higher Self are working as a conspiracy ON YOUR BEHALF, you have to take notice. 

“You have to alter your ‘life think’. I’ve spent a lot of time working through all this. It’s like if you see a real UFO, and I don’t mean just some weird light in the sky, I mean you see a flying saucer hovering over your house. It will change you and you will want to know more. It will also open up the very real possibility that there are a lot of other amazing and weird things going on in the world. My experiences with Shiva Swarat were like seeing the UFO hovering over a house; total and irrefutable evidence that the world is way more interesting and strange than what we’re told. 

“The mystical and impossible had been proven to me and I saw how the universe was acting as a conspirator on my behalf. 

“I was given a university van to go back to LA and pick up my meager belongings I’d stashed in a friends garage. First, I went to see Shiva Swarart. He’s gone, they told me. Went back home. When I traveled to India in 1979 to search for him, the best I could gather was that Shiva Swarat had either died, flown away on a spaceship, wandered off into the Himalayas to live in a cave, or moved to Mumbai to start a company in the fledgling tech industry. I never found him.

“At AZ I studied Real Estate and more Psychology, getting my graduate degrees in less than two years. Then the head coach was fired and the entire staff was laid off. I went back to LA in 1979. 

“I’d saved up over $6,000 that I would buy a rental triplex with. I’d live in one unit and rent out the other two. I got my real estate license and was on my way to becoming a property mogul. That was my vision. Coaching was always in the back of my mind, like a virus, but I would not let it front and center. I worked the real estate angle and was making very good money. Even bought myself a used Buick Riviera. It was the newest car I ever had. I purchased another rental unit and life was good.

“Then in 1980 one of those life pivot moments arrived. It was a few weeks before Christmas. You know how LA is that time of year...it’s just pure magic. There’s a certain feeling, can’t totally put it into words, but I think you know it. It’s mid-afternoon and I’m just about to go out for a run when the phone rings. It’s Coach Charlie Adams, my college QB coach. A year after I left UCLA, he took the head coaching job at William & Mary, in Virginia. He needed a new QB coach and heard I was on the up and up after my Arizona stint. Pay wasn’t good but they would rent me a furnished apartment and meals were covered. He said the team was about to break out and they had a freshman QB who was the real deal but needed to develop. 

“He wanted to know my answer in three days. I didn’t know anything about W&M, or Williamsburg the town, or even anything about Virginia. I’d only been on the East Coast a few times, and those were only for football games, and I went to NYC for two days when I was nominated for the Heisman after my terrific Junior year. I came in 4th place but it was a great experience. 

“Begin East to finish West. 

“I called Coach Adams the next day and took the job. I had to report in three weeks. A trusted friend would manage my properties and I’d give the coaching thing a try. My contract was for two years. If it didn’t work out, I’d at least given it a real shot. I packed up my Riviera and headed for Virginia a day after New Years.

“Cold, grey, sleet, that’s what greeted me when I pulled into campus. After a week of that weather, I came very close to jumping in my car and running back to the LA sunshine. I mean, just eight days earlier I was sitting on the beach drinking beer at a bonfire with a beautiful girl in each arm. Now I was getting physically ill and feeling homesick for the first time in my life. 

“Then thankfully the kids came back from winter break and football started up. I was on the road recruiting and in the weight room and holding QB meetings every few days. I had a nice office with a window. Spring came and the sun returned. It felt good to be on a team again, but nearly every day I said to myself that I’d finish my two year contract and then move back to LA. Coaching wasn’t for me. 

“Then preseason hit, we started playing games and I got hooked. I was designing gameplans and calling plays by the fourth game. I loved being the chess player and not just the piece. Autumn was beyond spectacular. We would fill that 4,500 seat stadium every game. The atmosphere was great. It was every bit as passionate and intense and fun as UCLA or any big-time college football, just on a smaller scale, and in someways a better scale. 

“The kids gave total effort. No one was a star, no premadonnas. The community loved their Tribe and opened their homes to us. It was very wholesome, like high school with homecoming dances and spiked punch bowls. 

“Near the end of my second season, I was asked to sign for another two years. We had just made it to the second round of the Div I-AA Playoffs and lost a tough game. I had molded this kid Tony Spirewise into a good QB. I loved the town and the school and the people I worked with. I learned that I truly loved being a coach. In some ways I liked it better than being a player. 

But it didn’t matter, I was not going to take the offer. I wanted to be wealthy. Being an assistant coach in Div I-AA or even I-A back then was not going to get me into the 1%. My fortune awaited me back in LA. 

“I’d gone east, now I had to go back west. It made sense.

“The night before my meeting with Coach Adams where I would tell him my plans to go back to the West Coast, I was at Tillahooks, a local restaurant, drinking a beer and eating a burger, when Jenny walked in. She was flat out the most beautiful radiant woman I had ever laid eyes on. She was a funny, honest, highly intelligent Southern Girl with a very kind heart and also an edge. After introducing myself we had a good meaningful conversation about life. She was a Psych major. We hit it off. She wouldn’t give me her number but promised to meet me at Tillahooks same time next week. 

“The next day I agreed to another two years at W&M. Coach Adams was actually surprised but he never said so. Hell, I was surprised. I stayed not because I wanted to coach, but because I wanted to be with Jenny. I just knew...just knew we would be together. 

“After meeting at Tillahooks four more times, Jenny agreed to an actual date. Dinner and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back at the drive-in. She let me hold her hand and we talked instead of watching the movie. She gave me a sincere hug when I dropped her off at her sorority.

“Jenny would absolutely not officially date me while she was still an undergrad. But two days after she graduated we were officially going steady. I went back to Richmond to meet her parents in mid July. They were an old aristocratic family and they did not cotton to their youngest daughter dating a football coach, especially one from California. Her father was pretty hard on me, but I held my ground and a week later Jenny’s mother called saying they approved of our relationship. 

“My third season at W&M, in what still seems like a miracle, we won the national championship after grinding out four wins in the playoffs. We won the championship by one point. A missed extra point came back to haunt Montana State. The parades and parties that followed were legendary. A local GM dealer offered me a new Riviera, all I had to do was pay the tax and do a radio commercial. 

“I was barely done celebrating when the phone rang one Tuesday morning. It was Stan Franks, the head coach of the Virginia Tech Hoakies...a prominent Div-1A football program and the state’s big-shot team. Coach Franks and I had met a few times and hit if off over some beers. The Hoakies needed a new offensive coordinator. Theirs had just moved on to Tennessee. The job was mine. I didn’t even need an interview and the pay would be more than double what I was making plus they’d give me a furnished apartment rent free. 

“Blacksburg was only two hours southwest of Williamsburg. It wasn’t a major change in scenery. I talked to Jenny. She said I had to take the job, and I felt my dream of being a multi-millionaire LA real estate mogul slip further away. 

“Jenny stayed in Williamsburg since she still had a year left of grad school. We talked every night and she would drive down almost every weekend. 

“Almost right from the start VT was a disaster. The athletic center was under construction and so was the stadium. I shared an office with three other coaches. The players were more ‘country’ than the kids at W&M. That’s the best way I can put it. VT ran a very simple kind of offense and that was the culture of the program that even exists to this day. Smash-mouth football, good special teams, stout defense. My wing-and-a-prayer style was not suited for the program. I was running a ‘West Coast Offense’ before there was such a term. At VT we were in an I-formation 90% of the time. I had to work within the confines put forth by Coach Franks and ‘the system’. 

“I had a great offensive line to work with and three big tough running backs and a fire hydrant of a fullback. Our tight end wound up having a 12 year NFL career. QBs? I couldn't get one of our three QBs to throw on target over 30 yards. They weren’t built for it. I had to change my entire coaching strategy. 

“My first season we went 3-8. It was the worst season of football I had ever experienced. The team was fighting among itself, coaches were getting drunk to deal with the stress. My relationship with Jenny was under serious strain as I was so busy we hardly got to see each other. Season two was a little better. We went 5-6. Then my seat started getting pretty hot. It was the first time I’d felt the fire and of course not the last. 

“A ‘hot seat’ is as much a part of coaching as is calling plays. You win or you get fired. Plain and simple. After winter break, where Jenny and I spent nine days in Orlando and Miami, Coach Franks told me flat out we had to have a winning season or I would be out. 

“Most of the time, I’d say 90%, when a coach gets fired, it’s because the team is losing. The rest is personality conflict. 90% of the time it’s totally not personal. 10% of the time it is. My first thought, and I’m ashamed to admit it, was ‘Good, LA I’m coming home!’. I saw little chance that team could have a winning season. I told Jenny that when I got fired I wanted to move back to LA. She said the only way she would go too was if we were engaged. 

“As much as a part of me wanted to just let it ride, get fired, and start up my life again in LA, a deeper part, the part that runs things, would not let that happen. I decided to change. I became a hardass. My coaching life up until then was all about being the opposite of Coach Willis at UCLA. Instead of being a stoic hardass, I was a softass coach. 

“I was friends with my players. I was the coach they could come talk to when things weren’t going right with other coaches. I was good cop, always. Laughing and joking; being a friend and peer were my goal. All of that had to end if I wanted to win. And I started doing something I rarely did before...I started yelling. Barking orders and plays and chewing guys out for not doing their job. I uncovered a personality that had been hiding. Being a Cali kid, you didn’t yell. You didn’t get fired up. You used your mind and skill. I would use those too, but I would also yell. 

“My co-workers were shocked, my players were shocked. When spring football rolled around, I was a mad dog on the field. I acted more like a defensive or offensive line coach than a coordinator, who were always supposed to be stoic, especially on offense. I saw immediate positive effects. I was grabbing facemasks, throwing footballs at players, yelling myself horse. We went 8-4 that season. Won the Gator Bowl against Tennessee. 

“A few days before Christmas I got a call from someone named Nate Stern. He had a one-man startup sports agency in DC. He asked if I had an agent. I said no, hadn’t needed one. He said I would and to keep his number.

Right after the New Year, 1987, I got a call from the Washington Redskins head of personnel saying I was on a shortlist of men wanted to fill a vacant QB coaching position. There would be three rounds of interviews with the first one starting in a week. I never fully said I would be there but she gave me all the info I needed, even faxed me a list of hotels close to team headquarters. I went to Coach Franks home and we talked it over for an hour. 

“In the business of coaching, especially in college, it is fully understood by everyone that when you get a shot at a head coaching job or the pros, you take it. No questions asked. Now if I went in there saying Alabama had contacted me needing a new QB coach, that wouldn’t have gone over very well. Even though Alabama was a bigger step up from VT, it was a step down position wise and a slap in the face to Franks and VT. That’s how you make enemies in coaching. You piss of an entire program and its alumni. It can come back at you sideways, sometimes years down the road. I’ve seen it happen many times. But the NFL...it didn’t matter that I was stepping down in a big way position wise. The pay would still be four times what I was making at VT and the opportunity to coach at one of the best franchises in pro football could not be passed up. 

“Myself and two other guys made it to the third round of interviews. Both were from other NFL teams and when we would all be out there in the waiting room, I could tell I had them beat and they knew it too. Everyone knew me, knew my story. People still talked about my Rose Bowl victory and the great turn around I helped engineer at VT. I even signed a few autographs for UCLA alums who worked for the Redskins. 

“After a short meeting with the great Joe Gibbs, Hall of Fame Head Coach, I was offered the job. I could seal it with a handshake. That’s how things were done back then. Agents came in later, where as today it’s agents first. They asked if I had an agent. I said no but had someone in mind. I gave them Nate’s number. The deal was pretty standard, but as the old saying goes ‘only a fool has himself for an agent’, I thought it best to let a professional take care of my contract. 

“Right after I took the job and after I called Jenny, I went to the old RFK Stadium, out onto the field. It was a cold and windy winter day but with blue skies. I knelled there on the 20 yard-line, rolling the brown grass between my fingertips, soaking it all in looking West. 

“I would be making more money than I could selling real estate in LA, and any money I invested would go into LA property and stocks. I had friends working in the tech industry in Silicon Valley and all they talked about was Apple Computer, Microsoft, Telecom, and that was where I should invest. 

“That moment on the field, I fully let go and accepted the life trajectory I was on all along. 

“Jenny and I got married June 10th, the month football coaches all across the country call their vacation. We rented a big house in Maryland, furnished it (which was the first fully furnished home I ever had) and settled into married life. Those weeks before my first NFL training camp were the last truly sane happy days I would experience. 

“I sat out on the deck BBQing and drinking beer, mowing the lawn, planting flowers. Neither of us were working. We were flush with cash. That time was truly my happy place. Just living, not doing anything. No plans or schemes or pressure. I had no idea what lay before me. Until we’re in the crucible, we can’t know, we can only wonder about it or think we know what it’s going to be like, but we can’t fully understand what life in the crucible will be like. 

“Over the horizon brewed a life tornado that would take me places I couldn’t even dream about or have nightmares about. So I just sat there in a deck chair watching fireflies thinking I had really made it. I was in the NFL now, maybe not as a player, but I had made it.”

Coach ends abruptly. “That’s all I got for now, Andy.”

We said our so-longs and decided to leave for the drum circle the next day at 730pm. As I left the garage I looked west. There was a Life Tornado waiting for me over the horizon, I felt it, but in no way could I imagine what it would be like to live it. 

9

Wednesday was a wash. I couldn't write or do anything other than gameplan the evening. Carla already knew I was into her. I played my hand but Carla exposed nothing to me, then she tossed a chip on the table by inviting me to the drum circle. She wanted to keep playing which was a victory in itself. I would have to straddle the line between passivity and action. I could be happy if I knew she was committed to building a friendship, maybe not dating, but spending platonic time together and seeing where things went. Now, if it turned out she wanted nothing more to do with me than having short conversations at the Coffee Sack, that would be very hard. 

I did have a few things going for me. Since Carla had seen my cards and knew how I felt, I had nothing to hide. It might be awkward at times, but I didn’t have to play cool or coy. I could just be myself, albeit hopefully the best version of myself. If we were to be just friends for now, maybe that would work best. 

We could build a true friendship that blossoms into something more. I mean, it’s not like I was a prime catch living in a 385sqft bungalow next to my stepmother’s house. And I had some serious issues that I was still working out. What I’m getting at, is that even though I was nervous, I wasn’t worried. I prepared myself for the very real likelihood that Carla just wasn’t into a romantic relationship with me. I spent the day preparing for this scenario. 

At 730 sharp I passed through the hedges with my trusty old djembe drum, two camping chairs, a canvas beach bag filled with water, some IPAs in a cool pouch, and a Mexican blanket. I wore a black linen camp shirt with the sleeves cut off and sandals. Coach was waiting in the garage. He wore a very loud Hawaiian shirt, sunglasses and white Terrycloth-lined sneakers. He sipped from his steel coffee mug. He looked ready to play a few rounds of shuffle board under the lights. 

I circled the park twice, checking out the scene. The drum circle was just getting started and I did not see Carla. Coach and I took two trips carrying stuff because he could hardly carry anything. He didn’t look weak, but he was more unsteady on his feet tonight than usual. I blamed medication and booze, he blamed neuropathy. I set Coach up in a chair and joined in with the drum circle.

Over 30 people of varying skill smacked away at their drums. Like most drum circles I’d ever been to, the beginning was always a discordant ramble, but no one was there to judge or tell anyone what to do. Classic drum circle etiquette. Eventually the grooves would be found. I sat on my drum which was made of mango wood and the goatskin head still had its fur around the side. I’d bought it 12 years ago from a guy named Smurf who made drums and lived somewhere deep center Utah. I banged away, keeping an eye out for Carla. Finally, she showed up, hugged a bunch of people she knew, noticed Coach and I, got excited and rushed over. 

“Hey, you came! And two of you! That’s awesome!”

Like there was a chance I wouldn’t come.

“Are you having fun?” she asks.

Coach and I nod simultaneously. Carla hands Coach a little drum and asks me to follow her so she can introduce me to some friends. 

The fourth person she introduces me to I’m certain she’s about to say ‘and this is my boyfriend’. He has a short beard, manbun, thin tall muscular, yoga-guy, dressed in his best neo-tribal. He doesn’t seem like Carla’s type since she’s more artsy organic pin-up girl meets rennfest LARPer, but the feeling I get is ‘boyfriend’. When she doesn’t say anything about them being together, I ease up and give the guy a side hug. 

“So we do this every Wednesday, been coming for about a year. Well, not every Wednesday but a lot,” Carla says.

In my experience, there are three kinds of women who attend a drum circle: girls who drum, girls who hang out on the peripheral just enjoying the scene doing acroyoga or hooping, and those who dance in the middle of the circle. Carla’s a drummer. She carries a big heavy mahogany djembe over to me, puts down a little stool, and starts hammering out loud, steady beats. The entire energy of the circle shifts for the better. 

It’s been awhile since I drummed, but I easily fall into place playing next to Carla. It’s pure joy. Our eyes are closed most of the time as we feel the drumbeat, but once in awhile Carla and I look at each other at the same time. Magic. I can tell Carla’s happy to see I have some drum skills. Then she starts hooping behind me. I can only steal glances at her. The rhythmic vortex of Carla’s hips mesmerizes me. A break in the drumming finally comes and we both turned our attention to Coach.

He sits there with a huge smile on his face, eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses. He taps the small drum and sips his tumbler full of decaf and bourbon. 

Coach is just happy to be out of the house. He doesn’t need our attention. The drumming starts again and on we go for two hours with only short breaks to change the pace. Coach takes a walk around the park, returns, taps on his little drum. It is for certain the first drum circle of his life and he seems to like it. Carla has a harness attached to her drum which allows her to play standing up. I take her seat and that’s how we finish up the drumming at 10pm. My hands are swollen, shoulders burning. Carla and I retreat to the blanket and open two IPAs. 

“You’re a great drummer,” I say. There’s so much more I want to add: beautiful, smart, kind, cool, happy, sweet, sexy…

“You’re good too, and not even that rusty.”

“Tomorrow I will be in pain but it’s worth it. Thanks’ so much for the invite.”

Carla smiles and scoots closer. “Can I tell you what my major near-term dream/goal is?”

I try not to shout YES! instead I say “Yeah of course”.

“My goal is to open up...a medieval theater company right here in St. Sebastian. I have the place picked out. Just off of Main in the old movie theater. The towns already given me grant money and the landlords giving me a huge break on rent. It’s NOT going to be one of those ‘medieval times’ diner and fighting knights kinda places. My vision is a real theater where we put on medieval plays. And the crowd can wear their best renaissance fair gear and get involved. And I’m not talking Shakespeare, he wasn’t medieval at all. I’m talking 900AD to 1300s. I’ll have a bus pick people up in Orlando and Winterhaven. That’s what I’m doing. Saving up, maybe find some investors. I mean it’s not a tech startup, but I have a viable business plan and it’s sustainable.”

All I can do is nod and smile. It’s one of the most original business ideas I’ve heard. “I think it’s an epic idea. Original to the core. How close are you?”

Carla frowns a little. “Minimum a year at this rate. But it’s okay. I don’t want to get a bank loan.” Then she puts her hand on my folded knee. “What’s your dream/goal or at least a major one?” Her hand half touches skin, half shorts. The heat and energy make me both comfortable and nervous. 

“Can I get back to you on that one?”

Carla shakes her head.

“Okay...to somehow redeem myself in the public eye so that I can get a book published. To not be a pariah anymore. And to have a house on the intracoastal overlooking a mangrove preserve and have a 50ft Beneteau sailboat and a 23 foot Mako fishing boat docked out back.”

“You’re not a pariah,” says Carla sincerely. “I wouldn’t be sitting here with you if you were. Yes, you made some mistakes and you then doubled down on those mistakes, but it’s not like you’re OJ Simpson. So are you currently writing something?”

I had a friend in LA. He hung out in our group of aspiring writers. He ‘made it’ in that he got a job doing rewrites for Warner Brothers. He got an actual office on the lot with credentials and a 401K. He was also working on an original fiction script that the studio would most likely be optioning. Once he got the dream job he disappeared from our group where he’d been a mainstay for three years. He didn’t have time to hang out in a coffee house all day, but more so there’s a phobia among the people in LA who ‘make it’ in that they don’t want the ones who ‘aren’t making it’ to drag them down or alter their rise. 

When you ‘make it’ in LA, you leave most of your old fiends behind. It’s a pretty standard action out there. This guy invited me to parties now and then, because, in his words I “wasn’t struggling like the other guys” and he knew I wouldn’t get all weird at an industry party and try to pitch every person I talked to. 

Anyway, this friend had a very strict motto: Never Talk About Something You Are Writing Until A First Draft Is Complete. NEVER.

It’s a motto I adopted.

“I don’t talk about plot or subject until I have a first draft done. It’s this complex I have, I feel that if I talk about the piece, the energy of it flows out. It’s like the story needs to be told and if I talk about it, it’s been told and doesn’t have to be written. So, I can’t tell you what I’m writing other than it’s non-fiction.”

“Do you have something I can read of yours?”

I hand her my card. On it is my old phone number scratched out and replaced with my new one and a link to my new website where I blog to no one and post short stories and parts of the novels I’ve written (my old site had been hacked and DDOS’d so many times I just let it go). 

We talk more about life and science and some metaphysics like the Mandela Affect. Talk about our favorite Sci-Fi authors (mine Philip K. Dick, her’s Neal Stephenson). I study Carla’s face. Absorb her mannerisms and ticks. She does this thing when she smiles and really agrees with something. She nods with her whole body. I find it extremely endearing. Sometimes we try to pull Coach into the conversation, but he isn’t interested, or I should say he’s interested in letting Carla and I focus on each other. He’s a good wingman and his mere presence takes a lot of pressure off the situation.

As 11pm arrives, there are the three of us and some kids playing acoustic music nearby. We decide to call it a night. I offer to walk Carla to her car, she accepts, and we leave Coach there.

At her Nissan Morano we load her gear and stand on the sidewalk as the restaurants all around us finish up the night. 

“See you Sunday?” asks Carla.

“Of course.”

After some silence, Carla says, “Andrew, this might sound like 5th grade, but I like you, I really do. Talking to you, being around you, it’s effortless and right.” 

She chooses her words carefully but it doesn’t seem like she’s censoring herself. “I look forward to seeing you. I really look forward to you walking in that door at The Sack. I’m just very happy to get to know you. And I’m at a stage in my life where ‘knowing’ someone is HUGELY important to me. And I truly hope we get to know each other a lot better, and I think we will. What I’m trying to say, is that I’m happy and I want to keep building on this vibe with you. Know what I mean?” 

Carla reaches out, pulls me into a powerful hug, she kisses both of my cheeks. Our noses are an inch apart. I go for it. I kiss her lightly on the side of her perfect mouth. Right where the corner of her lip curves up. I kiss her three times then our lips meet fully for a sustained moment and then our mouths both open slightly. Our foreheads touch. I caress her back. 

“See you Sunday,” I whisper. Carla grabs my hand and I walk her to the drivers side, open the door, tuck her in, blow her a kiss.

I float back to the park and lay down on the blanket. 

“How’d it go?” asks Coach.

A flood of endorphins leave me in a rainbow unicorn wonderland. All I can say is ‘good’. We drive home in silence. When I have the SUV unpacked and my stuff on the other side of the hedge, Coach calls me into the garage.

“Andy, thanks for inviting me. Was a nice night. And I’m happy you and Carla are hitting it off. Tomorrow be here at 11. I want to show you another game and talk over a few things. Does that work for you?”

Coach’s wording is a little odd but I’m so euphoric I don’t think anything is amiss. I go back to my bungalow, where to my massive delight a text from Carla greets me:

Great time. Goodnight...PS you have very soft lips :)

I write back:

             So good….I really enjoyed drumming with you (and the kissssssssss). Can’t wait for next one. See you soon....

I add some cute colorful weird emojis to the end of the text and go to bed rather early for me.

10

The next day I step through the hedge at 11am sharp. The garage is closed so I go to the front door. To my surprise, Coach's wife Sharon greets me. She motions with her head that Coach is in his office. Sharon and I had only shared a few words. She was living her own life beyond Coach. She was gone most of the day and often out late for dinner or at a bar with friends. She and Coach seemed perfectly content with their arrangement and she seemed happy that Coach had found a friend (me).

“Andy!” Coach erupts when I walk into the office. It’s the most upbeat and energetic I’ve seen him in the almost two months we’ve known each other. “Come, sit.”

I assume my usual seat and Coach begins a video. It’s the last game he ever coached, Super Bowl 45 2011, more than seven years ago. 

The game is being played in the Dallas Cowboys new stadium, a $1.3 billion shrine to football and opulence. I remember being awed by this stadium and its one-of-a kind 60 yard-long dual LED screens. 

Coach’s Chargers run out onto the field through smoke and fire cannons a minute before their foe the Green Bay Packers do. Outside the stadium more fireworks go off. 

“The day before the game,” says Coach as the kickoff commences, “there was an ice storm, and four hours before kickoff it was still sleeting. We got to the stadium an hour and a half late, giving us less than two hours to get ready.”

The Coach on the sidelines resembles the Coach sitting behind me, but back then he had a more chiseled face, less bloating and redness and the little dark circles under his eyes were nothing like the heavy dark bags he has now…aka a picture of health compared to his current condition. Hard drinking and medication will do that. You can’t escape how they change your face permanently. It made me sad to see how much he had degraded. 

Coach begins talking so I break out the recorder....

“It was a tough season. I could feel my age more than ever before. I was sleeping much less, drinking too much coffee and started mixing bourbon in there to take the edge off the caffeine. I hadn’t worked out for three years due to the total absence of cartilage in my right knee, a hitch in my left hip, and a pinched nerve in my lower back, bulging disk in my neck. I was always in pain and sometimes I’d forget things. I was chomping down five Percocets a day, you know those round ones with the words ‘Watson’ stamped on them. I’d break them up into quarters and I’d just pop a piece every 30 minutes. Very bad.

“I had to work doubly hard to accomplish what I used to do with half the effort. Sometimes I was putting in 17-hour days. All that extra time got me to my baseline coaching ability. 

“On top of all this, our owner Dirk Burnwell The II, aka ‘Jr.’, who’d taken over complete control when his father died a few years earlier, was breathing down my neck like never before. His father, Dirk Senior, or ‘Sr.’ as we called him, loved me like a son. Jr. always hated that fact. Jr. was a bad seed, a dark soul, and before the 2011 season we were clashing over everything. 

“I was exhausted and emotionally drained, but the team was one of the best I’d ever coached, so even though I was flagging, the team was so good and my staff so good that it didn’t matter. We found our groove and pretty much coasted to the playoffs, getting home-field advantage. If winning would’ve been more on my shoulders, there is no way we would’ve made the playoffs. 

“The organization and team were practically on autopilot. We had won four Super Bowls and were going for our fifth Lombardi Trophy. 

“Despite Jr. trying to make drama everywhere he could, which created big distractions, like threatening to move the team if we didn’t get a new stadium, we were a juggernaut. I had instilled a culture at the organization that players and personnel down to the secretaries and equipment guys believed in. CHARGER POWER! we said it to each other as a greeting and goodbye around the complex. The crowd would yell it at the top of their lungs, rattling the stadium. One part of the crowd would call CHARGER then the other would answer POWER. It would go back and forth like that. Very intimating. We had one hell of a home-field advantage that made up for the perfect weather we had for pretty much 15 years straight. 

“I’d been playing or coaching football since 1968, six decades, but by age, I wasn’t that old for a head coach. In 2011 I was just shy of 60. Coaches were getting younger and younger, and I was in the top six oldest head coaches, but I should’ve felt like I had another six or seven years in me. Instead I felt like I could drop dead at any moment. 

“My goal was always to coach until 65-67, then retire to my ranch and do studio analysis in LA once a week for FOX. My agent, still going strong with Nate Stern, had it all worked out. I was taking broadcasting lessons in the off-season. I also accepted that with Jr. being such an asshole, I might retire sooner, which honestly I could deal with, but not right after Super Bowl 45! As the second quarter ticked by, instead of my head being in the game, I was wondering if I would collapse right there in front of a billion people.

“Super Bowl 45 would be my last game but not due to my health. You know the allegations: I paid $75,000 to a contract IT guy working for the Packers to steal their gameplan which they stored on their network. I used that stolen data to beat the Packers and win my fifth Super Bowl. I’m not going to address any of that right now, but soon enough you will get the real story. No spin, no excuses, no bullshit. 

“So there I was, feeling like a spectator on the sideline. My assistant coaches were running around and doing all the real coaching while I stood there stoically, eyes hidden behind my bronze sunglasses, hat pulled down low. I didn’t wear a headset anymore. I always had an assistant next to me wearing one to communicate upstairs. But that was all just to keep me informed what plays were being called and to get suggestions and run things by me. 

“I installed a gameplan and we stuck to it 100%, so I knew what was going on. As for actual situational play-calling, I’d given that up four years earlier. We had the best offensive coordinator in the NFL. I let him figure all that out, but I still had some fire in me as you can see. Bad calls, good plays, fuck-ups, they got me going, but then I’d simmer down real quick. 

“Super Bowls go by quickly. By the time I got into the game, it was halftime and we were down by seven. The game had pretty much been going according to script. The Packers got some calls their way, but overall we were happy with the way things were playing out. We were known to be a great second half team. The locker room was calm and I was set to give a short speech before we went out for the 3rd quarter. 

“It would be my last halftime speech. I’d given so, so many. Most of the time it wasn’t necessary, especially in the pros, but you just did it anyway. I’d say the same kind of things: Keep executing, stick to the gameplan, know your workflow, stay loose, be tougher than the guy across from you, keep hitting, no mistakes. 

“But for this speech, I got emotional. Some part of me knew it would be my last game. I actually cried, I mean I was on the verge of weeping. I didn’t say any of the typical things, instead I talked about my life and how grateful I was to be with the men in that room. How grateful I was to God for the life I’d lived. Everyone was shocked. 

“Total silence even some concern. I got so choked up that my defensive line coach had to jump up and finish for me. He was a rah-rah type guy, and he got that locker room fired up like nothing I’d seen. Then the dam burst, and I became a crying puddle. Almost every player came up to me as they headed for the exit, patting me on the shoulder, telling me they loved me or whatever. I had to stay behind to gather myself. I heard the crowd roar as my team charged out of the tunnel hooting and hollering.

“This young coach, James White who was always next to me on the sidelines with the headset, stayed behind along with two trainers and Jr. who lurked in the background. I barely made it out for the second-half kickoff. All this was used against me six weeks later when the cheating story broke. It was said I came out late because I was so busy altering our gameplan to fit the Packers adjustments, which I knew they would make, but had to figure them out manually using the stolen data. The claim was that even though I had their gameplan, I still had to work out all the scenarios for the second-half. According to the media, the only reason we were down seven was because I let that happen as to not create any suspicion.”

“The third quarter was a surreal dreamscape. Have you ever had such an emotional outpouring that it creates a lasting ‘high’? That was my state. For as ill and terrible as I felt in the first half, I felt equally as blissful in the second. I found myself staring at the crowd which swirled into this unified mass. It was beautiful. Sound was 5-dimensional. I’d taken a high dose of very pure LSD once in 1977 and this was very similar.

“As the 3rd quarter progressed, everything went our way and we were up seven going into the final 15 minutes, and that’s when James White poured a cup of ice-cold water down the back of my shirt. I snapped out of my bliss and the reality of my situation dropped on me like an anvil. I was head coach for a team trying to win an unprecedented fifth Super Bowl, we were winning, but our opponent was driving and looked like they would score. 

“I then started coaching for the first time all game. I put on a headset. The Packers had that QB, man he was on fire but we held them to two fieldgoals, and with five minutes left we were up one. We got into fieldgoal range and were preparing to kick and get a four point lead with 3:36 left on the clock. It was 3rd down and nine. The situation called for a run to the left to set up our kicker on his good hashmark. 

“I over-rid the call, and called a flea-flicker, which is when you hand the ball off up the middle and then the running back tosses it back to the QB who passes it to a wide open receiver. It’s called a ‘trick play’ and wasn't even in our gameplan. 

“The play drew such ire from the staff that we had to call a timeout. I insisted. Someone called me a crazy old asshole over the headset. Even our players couldn’t believe we’d do something like this. Our QB looked at me, smiled, shook his head and gave the call in the huddle. We’d practiced it once every week all season but never run it in a game. The Packers had no idea what was coming. Everyone in the stadium and watching on TV anticipated a dive up the middle. 

“We executed the play perfectly. The Packers coaches saw it at the last second and were screaming PASSSSSS! but the DBs had been sucked in by the tailback diving up the middle and our receivers sold it. We scored a touchdown and sealed the game. I got my Gatorade bath and my post-game speech in front of a mostly full stadium. I drank so much champagne that night I could not get out of bed the next morning and insisted the flight home go on without me. I chartered a plane and was flown back to San Diego the next day. 

“Of course, the flea-flicker, an unprecedented playcall in that situation, was used against me when the allegations started flying. Proof, they said, that I was so confident of a win because I knew the Packers plays both offense and defense, that I’d call a play no one in their right mind, with the Super Bowl on the line, would ever call.”

The video stops and we sit in the cool dimness. Coach receives a text, stands, and asks me to follow him to the garage which is closed.

Coach hesitates for a minute, then he punches the door opener. 

Sitting in the long driveway is an RV. Not a regular camper, but a brand new three-axle bus converted into an RV by a company named Prevost. It’s blue, silver and gold with lots of chrome. A stunning machine. A man stands outside it. The first thing that comes to my mind, is that Coach and his wife are going to take a roadtrip and he wants to show me the amazing new ride. 

The man hands Coach the keys and leaves in a waiting car. Coach and I enter the RV. Inside it is the lap of the lap of luxury. Hand stitched leather seats and couches and two bathrooms and two bedrooms (one the master suite). The cockpit looks like it belongs in a spaceship with its touch screens and dials and switches and cool lighting. We sit at the dining table and Coach opens a bottle of fine bourbon that is in the stocked bar. 

“What do you think?” 

“Incredible, I’ve always wanted to see what one of these is like on the inside.”

Coach sips his bourbon. He stares at me until I have to say something.

“What’s going on here, Coach?”

“Andy, I need your help.” Coach pauses as he likes to do. The pauses keep you engaged, on the edge of your seat with him in total control. “Let me preface this by saying this is the most important situation I’ve ever been in. And this important situation cannot happen unless you are a part of it.” Another long pause. “I need you to join me on a trip in this RV across the country. Three weeks, maybe four. It’s all planned out and I will pay for everything.”

I open my mouth to say something, but Coach starts talking again.

“And I’ll pay you $250,000 for joining me. $100,000 up front, the rest when we are done.” Coach looks at his watch. “In fact, the money’s already in your account.”

Speechless. Coach asks me to check my account. Sure enough, added to the $4390 I have in savings and the $645 in checking, which represents every dollar to my name, is $100,000. I mouth ‘how?’ and ‘wow’.

“Let’s just say I have a good relationship with your bank, which is also one of my banks,” says Coach. “And please forgive me for taking one of your bank statements out of the mailbox.”

I stutter a few words and Coach continues.

“If you say ‘No’, my lawyer will take the money back and sue if you try to keep it. This isn’t me, it’s him. He has power of attorney, is my trustee, and is totally ruthless. He acts in the interest of the trust and that’s it. So, we leave tomorrow at 11am. I’ve taken six lessons how to drive this thing and all of its operations. Also, there’s an iPad loaded with an interactive helpdesk and 24-hour chat or 800 help line is available. You’ll get the hang of driving. It’s easy. I have campgrounds mapped out from here to California.”

The first thing that pops into my head is my budding relationship with Carla. Leaving for four weeks could totally squash what we’re building. 

“Coach, I, um, I’m kinda at a loss here.”

“Andy,” Coach gets serious, “you’re the only real friend I’ve had in a long time. The only person I would or could do this with. I don’t beg, but this is as close as I will get. Please.”

“I don’t—”

“$500,000. Okay. I don’t care. I have more money than I could ever know what to do with.”

“What, what, what...about Carla?”

“Tell her everything and invest in her theater company with some of the cash. She’s a real person, she will understand. And on top of all this...the book you’re writing is going to the NY Times Best Seller List, I promise you. This is redemption, for both of us. This is the path. This is what people want to read. If this trip wasn’t going to be massively beneficial for you, I wouldn’t even try to convince you. The book is good now, but it needs an adventure.” Coach pounds on one of the unbreakable windows, “and this is the adventure.”

For the first time with Coach, I feel like all the people he’d dealt with over the years must’ve felt: Like you had no choice.

Coach reaches across the glossy mahogany table, grabs my right hand, squeezes so hard my thumb might pop off. 

“Deal?”

Three, four weeks on the road with Coach, getting material for that missing component to the book and $500K?

Carla would wait. 

“Deal.”

Coach slaps me on the arm. “I knew I could count on you. I’ll give you our itinerary when we get on the road.”

I immediately text Carla when I get back to my house:

             Can we meet? Something amazing has come up I want to talk to you face to face. Anytime today is OK.

My stepmother had already gone to the Hamptons for the summer, but I did text her that I was going on a trip. Then I started packing. Twenty minutes after texting her, Carla responded. She’d be at The Captain’s Table working the bar starting 7pm until 12. I could come whenever I wanted. 

I checked my account balance again using my laptop. I sat there staring at the six figures and then I superimposed with my mind what $500,000 would look like in a few weeks. Within the span of a few minutes my life had radically changed. Getting a lot of money suddenly can change everything, unlike most things in life which are gradual. 

Suddenly, major life issues were solved, i.e., having no money. I was a week or two away from applying for a job at Lowes and signing up for Uber. And then...POOF! total reversal of fortunes. All I could do was laugh and thank the ‘universe’ for being a conspirator on my behalf. 

I packed a suitcase, carry-on, and a small leather duffel. I had my camera, computer, iPad, my acoustic guitar, a half dozen pairs of shoes in a double Whole Foods bag. By 8pm I’d basically thrown almost everything I owned into a bag to bring on the trip. We had enough cargo space for seven people so over-packing wasn’t an issue. 

At 8pm I stood outside The Captain’s Table gathering my thoughts. I would offer to invest $50k in Carla’s theater. I would say it was with no strings attached. My decision to tell her this now wasn’t totally altruistic. I wanted to make sure there was a thick thread connecting us while I was gone, something more than a budding relationship and a good kiss. When I entered the bar, Carla asked the other bartender to cover for her. She came from behind the bar smiling but concerned. We hugged and double-kissed on the cheeks, then she led me out back behind the kitchen. 

“I’m going on a three, maybe four-week roadtrip with Coach to California in a giant RV and he’s paying me a lot of money to do it, fifty thousand of which I’m investing in your theater. He told me today. I had no warning. There, that’s it.”

Carla laughs incredulously, looks stunned, pats me on the shoulder. “Wow, just like that. He is something else. And about the investment, I haven't really worked out how that would—”

“It doesn’t matter. No strings attached. Just accept it,” I slip her an envelope with a check in it. “It says ‘personal loan’ on check but that’s just for tax reasons.” 

Carla laughs to herself, mutters ‘wow’ over and over then kisses me, deeply. 

“You’re a madman...you know that?” she whispers in my ear. “You don’t try to be mad, but you are, and I love it.”

No woman I’d ever been with had admitted to loveing my maddness, let alone acknolged it. It’s a passionate madness. The good kind of madness. Like The Fool.

“I’ll send you pics and updates by email and text and you can friend me on FB and IG. I only have 43 friends so I don’t update. I’ll leave it up to you. You’re an amazing woman and just seeing you makes me happy and I will miss your face, but to know you will be here when I come back from this journey...it makes everything even more right.”

We kiss again, soul-hug, and I leave.

11

I stand in front of the RV at 1040am with all my luggage. July 10th. The garage door opens and Coach appears in the dimness. Very dramatic. He holds his cat, petting the furry Maincoon and nuzzling his head. Coach’s wife and Luisa stand behind him. Coach wares his best Panama Jack costume: red Hawaiian shirt, clunky sandals, white shorts, big-brim hat, huge aviator sunglasses. Coach lets the cat go, hugs his wife, then caretaker. They stay in the garage while Coach comes out to meet me. There’s a noticeable spring in his step, still a little hitch due to injuries, but overall he looks as healthy and happy as I’d seen him since we met.

“What does your wife think about all this?” I ask quietly.

“She’s…come to terms with it,” he says cryptically, then turns and waves to the women in the garage. 

Coach motions to Luisa who has more than a dozen freshly dry-cleaned Hawaiian shirts slung over her shoulder. “I thought it’d be good to look like a team, so I picked up 15 XXXL ones for you. And two pair of white Terrycloth sneakers. I think I got your size right, thirteen, right? They are the most comfortable things you will ever put on your feet.”

I load my gear and together we board the bus. Coach has a lightness about him that I’d only glimpsed before. Clearly, he’s elated to be getting out of his house and going on a roadtrip. 

The two leather captains seats at the front of the RV move in 12 different ways, have heating/cooling, and a massage function which I’m using two minutes after sitting. We ride lower than the rest of the bus in a cockpit complete with four big touch screens and so many switches and dials I’d be spending hours figuring out what they do. 

Six outside cameras help us navigate the RV out of the driveway and through the winding residential streets. People watch as if a tank were driving through their neighborhood as it’s against the rules to even have an RV enter the sprawling development. Coach must’ve paid some people off.

When we get out of Mirabella, Coach pulls over right before the FL Turnpike entrance. 

“The dealer went to Whole Foods yesterday and stocked the fridge for us. We have enough steaks and fresh food for two weeks, snacks, beer, bourbon. TotalWine made a delivery and stocked the wine cooler. I added a few choice bottles from my own collection. We can pick things up along the way.” 

This is the clearest I’ve yet to hear Coach’s voice. No coughing or clearing his throat. Almost gone is the gravely roughness I’d gotten used to.   

Coach drops the bus into drive with the turn of a dial and swings the RV onto the ramp, through the Sunpass lane, and onto the Turnpike heading north. 

The bus rides so soft and true that Coach hardly has to do anything except just hold the steering wheel lightly. He seems more lucid than usual and is plenty competent behind the wheel. Every bump is absorbed by shocks in the chassis and seats. The engine hums and has tons of power left at 65mph. Coach looks very happy captaining the big rig. We ride in silence to the outskirts of Orlando before I start asking questions.

 “About our itinerary. Can I know where we’re going and what we’re doing?”

Coach follows the GPS through the maze of highways around Orlando (a holographic heads-up display cast onto the windshield makes following directions effortless). When we clear north of the city, he pulls out a folder from his left.

“There are five main stops. Our final destination is my ranch in Calistoga,” he hands me the folder.

Drawn on a laminated Google Map in red marker is a winding, zigzagging journey up and across the nation. Our first two main stops, Richmond, Virginia, and Canton, Ohio, and last, Calistoga, are marked with big red splotches. We will be taking a westerly route up the east coast, staying far away from I-95, which Coach detests in an almost unnatural way. 

I pretty much know why we were going to Richmond, but Canton is a head-scratcher.

“OK, Coach, what are we going to do in Canton?”

Canton, Ohio, is the home of the NFL Hall of Fame. It’s football’s Mecca, if I can make such a crude analogy. Coach was a shoe-in for Canton until the scandal hit. Now, even almost a decade since the scandal, every year 15-20 voters go out of their way to actually vote AGAINST him (but there are two anonymous voters who always cast votes FOR Coach). 

Sports media during the slow summer months when the new class of Hall of Fame inductees gets ready for their yellow jackets (everyone entering The Hall gets the ugly yellow jacket and a bronze bust of themselves in The Hall along with game jerseys and other memorabilia), always bring up Coach and the debate about whether he should be let in. It’s a moot point because there is nearly ZERO chance Coach will ever get inducted. 

Coach signals that he’s pulling off into a rest stop. The bus glides to a stop.

“I have something I need to take care of there.”

It was right then that I realized I was on a ‘need-to-know’ basis concerning the trip. Information would be given to me as Coach saw fit. In some ways I was an employee. I had to get right with this reality real quick or the next few weeks were going to be hard. As we got ready to hit the road again, Coach opened up about where we would be spending the night.

“Beautiful campground three hours south of Atlanta.”

The bus ate up the miles in total gilded comfort. We hardly talked and Coach drove the whole way to the campground. We pulled into our spot right before sunset and needed three people to help us figure out how to hook everything up, extend the living room, roll out the canopy, engage the emergency break, and turn on the anti-mosquito system. 

I found a 18x10 roll of fake grass hidden in a special compartment, laid it down, put out some plush camping chairs, a painted aluminum table which looked like NASA built it, and started a campfire. A gas grill swung out from a compartment under the bus on such a complicated mechanical arm that it was surely a $9000 upgrade. I cooked steaks that night with grilled corn. We opened a terrific bottle of Barolo and had a perfect dinner under the stars (there were over two-dozen very highly rated wines in a climate-controlled compartment under the cabin. I even noticed a few wines that cost well over $10,000 a bottle). 

We drank out of huge bulbous crystal glasses. Our plates were fine China. When I drove cross country from LA to FL, my ‘Tour de’Defeat’ as I called it, I ‘camped’ in cheap or free places. I slept in a camping chair with a sleeping bag draped over me. I ate chips and hotdogs cooked on a stick. I drank $2 wine from paper cups. 

I stoked the fire and Coach broke out the 24 year old scotch and two nice mild Cuban cigars. Stars twinkled above, crickets chirped, a slight warm breeze blew. In the distance someone played acoustic guitar. I texted Carla a few times. 

“It’s time you told some of your story,” Coach says between puffs. 

I knew what he meant. He wanted me to include my side of my story in this book, but I balked. 

“I tried. I wrote an article for Vanity Fair, which they asked me to write, that totally came clean, but they never ran it. I tried explaining myself on Twitter, Facebook, on my website. Nothing altered the narrative.”

“That was then, this is now. Just open it all up. All truth.”

“Coach, level with me here, you know what I did.”

“Andy, it’s like with Jaws. I know the basics.”

OK, well it’s a long story and it goes like this:

After college at Miami, I move to NYC and try making it as a playwright. That lasts four years. I just couldn’t take the winters (and couldn’t stand playing to off-off Broadway theaters with three people in them even if there were only 20 seats), so I pack up right before 9/11 and go west, to LA, intent on writing novels and then creating a show for HBO. The HBO angle is my true vision. I want to be a ‘showrunner’, someone who creates a show from the ground up and carries it forward. 

I fall in quickly with a group of struggling writers. We’re a living cliché. I’m not ‘struggling’ in the typical sense because I have my settlement money. While everyone else has two roommates in a tiny apartment, I have my own little bungalow in North Hollywood. I have a car and money to do things. For someone with as much free time as I have, I should be much more prolific. I do write some good scripts and treatments, and in those first few years I get some meetings with studio people. Back then HBO is really the only game in town, unlike now where you have Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and FX and USA .etc all really creating Grade A content. 

Nothing materializes, and next thing I know I’ve been in LA for eight years with little to show for it and a dwindling supply of money. 

Three more years tick by and it’s January 2012. I leave town for almost two months and go sailing in the Caribbean. I get back to LA in March and realize I have a years worth of cash left, but I don’t want to deplete my savings so I need a job. I’ve been going to Corner Coffee for years. It’s very hard for me to go in there and ask for employment, but when I do, they hire me (thankfully, since it’s the only thing I’m qualified to do). 

The only drawback is that now, after more than a decade of being on my own time schedule, I suddenly have to...work. Be up early, be on my feet eight hours, get home at midnight. The first month is very tough, which sounds pathetic based on what many people have to do to get by, but it’s the truth. 

In mid April 2012 I’m on a break with a coworker and he shows me an article about orphaned Syrian children whose parents were killed in the civil war which has spiraled out of control. There are hundreds of orphans with many more certainly to be created in the coming months and years if the war doesn’t stop. 

That night I go home and start writing an article on the Syrian orphan situation. 

In a few days it turns into a fiction book about a guy (me) who goes into Syria to rescue orphans and brings them to Germany. 

A month later that fiction book turns into The Challenge...a book I later sell as non-fiction, but which is 100% fiction. 

I write more than I have in my entire life. Every time I sit down at my computer, I hammer out 7 to 10 pages. It’s effortless. 

Again, as it’s well known, all of it is total fiction, but I write like it’s NON-FICTION, like I have really done what I’m writing about and that’s easy. In some strange twist, I don’t sit there trying to move the plot along, it moves itself as if it HAS happened. What I’m getting at, is that I didn’t sit there thinking it was fiction, thinking that I was making it all up. I truly convinced myself that it was real. Now of course on a rational level I know I didn’t go to Syria to save children, but when you write, the rational mind isn’t always present, and it certainly isn’t always needed, or even wanted. 

I have a book proposal ready by mid-June and sent out to over 35 agents. Selling fiction and non-fiction differ in one very big way. Often a non-fiction book only exists in a detailed proposal form and is purchased and then written, whereas fiction MUST be a finished piece to be sold. I’m ahead of the game because my book is nearly finished and I also have a strong proposal to send out. This means that when/if I sell the book, I can present a finished draft very quickly. 

I also simultaneously create a 501-c3 non-profit, have a professional website made that takes donations, and start crafting myself into the ‘character’ I am in the book. The book proposal includes forged travel documents showing that I’ve traveled to the Middle East in early January 2012 and returned to the States mid March 2012. 

An agent, who takes me on as a client July 18th, has the book sold to Simon & Schuster by August 22nd (with one condition). It’s a perfect storm and I’m suddenly living the dream. 

The Challenge, a work of fiction but presented as non-fiction, features me, the hero, using the last dollars to his name to assemble a team of former Australian SASR soldiers (Special Air Service Regiment, like the Navy SEALs or Army Special Forces) who swoop into hostile territory, dodging death and destruction to extract 24 orphans from Syria. Under heavy fire and being chased all the way to the Jordanian border, we make it back to safety and transport the children to Germany via Turkey. 

The condition set forth by the publisher is that my two editors must speak with and see the credentials of the SASR Major, who in my book I have as the one assembling the team and leading the mission. He’s a real person, thankfully. I found him through a search of anti-terrorism forums where he posted often. He’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan and his credentials were legit (albeit redacted in my book). I contacted him through his anonymous email address to get technical help when writing the book in April-June. 

When I find out about the editorial ‘condition’, I contact him immediately. He’s running a security crew protecting shipping off the coast of Yemen. I come clean, telling him what I’ve done. He says he’ll cover for me...for $75,000 wire transferred to an account in Monaco. 

I’ve dwindled my savings down to $109,000, which is still a lot of money to 99.5% of the people in the world, but the last thing I want to do is give away more than half of it. I take a great leap of faith and wire him the money. 

‘Dean’ as he is known (I never knew his real name) is very good at communicating with me. As soon as the wire goes through, I get an email from him. He gives me his satellite phone number and says he will email his heavily redacted credentials to my editors. I’m relieved, to say the least, that he doesn’t just take my money and run. 

The editors really want to meet Dean in person, and they even consider waiting to publish the book until they do, but as I later find out when everything goes sideways, pressure from their manager makes them put aside their better judgment. A phone call and emailed credentials will have to do. 

Dean corroborates my entire story. I’ve sent him a transcript and it appears that he read it. There are some things that don’t add up, and the editors press him about them, but Dean keeps dropping the call which sidetracks the whole interview. He then calls back 10 minutes later claiming bad reception. It happens a dozen times. I’m right there listening. The editors get so frustrated they tell Dean ‘thank you very much, that’s all we need’. 

As for the 24 Syrian children I claimed to have rescued and sent to Turkey (via Jordan) and then Germany, of course no records existed, but the EU has very strict privacy laws concerning children. Any inquires are met with official responses stating that Germany is accepting many orphaned children from the Syrian conflict and is not responding to individual inquires and will not be. As for Turkey, they have over 1 million refugees in the country by mid 2012. There is no way for anyone to verify anything. 

Jordan is trickier, I have no plan for how to deal with that major part of the lie, but when the editors try digging there for info, they get nowhere and drop it. 

The Challenge goes on sale October 20th 2012. 

The first run they print 10,000 books, a decent amount for a first-time author. 

NY Times review is very favorable and impressed with how much of a ‘page-turner this non-fiction book is’. 

By January 2013 we have a second printing (50,000 this time), donations are flowing in ($750,000), and I’m about to start appearing on CNN, FOX, and if they go well, the Today Show wants me. 

I am now...famous. People who know me are astonished to learn of my (fake) double life. Over the years in LA I’d taken acting classes and appeared in a few infomercials. I even got a few callbacks for minor roles in some pretty major movies. Of course, my acting career never panned out, but that training and experience enabled me to become someone else; to become the role I created in The Challenge. 

Only one friend doubts the whole thing from day one. Craig is his name. We hold completely different views on the world and reality, we’re antagonists but friends. He flat out tells me that the whole thing is ‘bullshit’ but he won’t say anything. I just laugh and tell him he’s wrong and jealous…then a few days later I give him $35,000 cash from the Foundation’s account to make sure he keeps it all to himself; promising him more if he complies. 

February 17th 2013 I appear on the Today Show and the floodgates open. My book sells out all over the country and a third printing of 150,000 is ordered. I now have $1.7 million in donations with more coming in every minute of the day. I appear on three late-night shows (my favorite is Conan). I’m suddenly on the other side of the glass, on the stage instead of in the crowd. Surreal doesn’t even describe it. And the people love me. They stop me wherever I am and thank me, many give me small cash donations right then and there. When Social Media picks up my story, The Challenge goes viral and the rest is history. 

April 2013, one year after I began writing The Challenge, I’ve sold over 500,000 books, becoming a millionaire (again) and getting on the NY Times Best Seller List. The foundation has raised $4.8 million and counting. I’m practically a household name. Vanity Fair does an article on me titled ‘L.A.’s Angel’.  

I can say this in absolute humbleness: The Challenge is a very good book. It’s a great story, exciting with twists and turns. It tugs on the heartstrings. There’s courage under-fire and of course the kids are scrappy and determined to get to a better life. I will never know if it could’ve sold as a novel, but there’s one thing NO ONE ever said: ‘Oh, that book sucks’. 

By summer 2013 I’m flying around the world and country promoting my non-profit. It’s a cash cow. Money just keeps coming in. There’s now over $18.5 million in the Foundation account, most by small donations. I have a publicist, two lawyers, two secretaries, five-full time employees and many volunteers for the foundation. I rent a loft office in downtown LA. 

Two sticky points are the other board members (I made up two people to sit on the board with me when I created the foundation) and an accountant. I’m the sole signer on the non-profit account and answer to no one. My lawyers want me to get an accountant immediately. I hold them off. It’s not that I’m wasting the money (well, that’s not entirely the truth but more on that later), it’s that I’m in total control and unwilling to let my baby be taken over by a bunch of people with letters after their names. 

I singlehandedly create a Frankenstein and it makes millions and gives people hope and makes me a celebrity. 

Fall 2013 it becomes clear to me that I will have to actually do something for Syrian orphans. I remember an email I received two months earlier from a German NGO that runs a makeshift orphanage in the southern part of Syria. Children in the warzone to the north are sent south to a relatively peaceful region, but the conditions are harsh and the children need to be taken out of the country.  

First person I call is Dean. He laughs for a few minutes when he picks up the phone, stunned at my success. We’ve emailed some but this is the first time we’ve talked since the book came out. I tell him that I want what happened in the book...to become reality. 

Dean says he can assemble the men to pull it off and also he has the connections in Jordan and Germany. The entire mission will cost $3 million, of which he will need $1.5 million up front to get started. His total fee will be $450,000 (half up front plus a $1500 per diem while working the mission), and each man will get $100,000 up front when they sign on and a mission completion bonus of $85,000 if we succeed in bringing orphans back (six former SASR soldiers will make up the team along with 10 former Jordanian security personnel who will be paid $20,000 each). I don’t hesitate since I have over $20 million now in the Foundation and counting. I then contact the German NGO. They are ecstatic and the planning begins. 

I meet Dean face-to-face in NYC early January 2014 to finalize the mission. Over the past year-and-half I’ve only seen fuzzy pictures of him with a hat on and sunglasses. He has a wild red beard and red hair. The lines in his face make him look 15 years older than he really is (though I never saw his passport, I guessed him to be mid 30s). The media had begged me over and over to reveal him, or to at least put him in contact with them. I refused, mostly because Dean had refused when I emailed him about it. 

Dean is boisterous and good humored, but he also has this way of looking at you that can make you feel very uncomfortable, like he’s a leopard sizing up his prey. He’s a highly trained special forces solider who has seen some serious action. He has killed people and been shot twice as well as wounded by shrapnel. He’s laid friends to rest and suffered and bled for his nation and world. His handshake is iron and his word is too. Dean is not anything like civilian people you meet day in day out. Nothing he says to me is bullshit. No spin, no angles. He isn’t over confident like most mediocre people I know (even though he has every reason to be). Dean is just...a real great man. 

The Mission is top secret. No one at my Foundation knows of its existence except that I’m going to be gone for over a month doing ‘special work’. Rumors are that I’m going back into Syria, and the day before I leave the office to fly to NY and then Cypress (where we will stage and do more planning before moving to the forward operating base 20 miles outside of Aman, Jordan), my staff and volunteers ask for me to give a speech and they hold a little party in my honor. 

People have brought their families, friends; there’s a lot of love in the room. The way they all look at me...like I’m a savior. I eat it all up. I have become the hero from my book. Each person in that room comes up to me, swears their alliance to our cause, hugs me, kisses me, gives me protection amulets and crosses and POP culture things. 

On March 3rd, I fly first class to Cypress from NY. The ticket costs $24,000 billed to the Foundation. I have custom body armor with plates that can stop rifle ammo, a custom ballistic helmet (Dean has forbidden me from carrying a weapon). When outfitted I look the part, like a military contractor. I also have a case of GoPros and all kinds of ways to attach them to our crew to document the mission. My thinking is that when the mission is successful, actually doing what my book said had been done, no one will ever look into the fake mission.

In Cypress we stay at a 5 Star resort. For 10 days we go over the plan and get to know each other. The SASR guys are a terrific bunch to be around. We drink heavily, party with beautiful women, it’s the most male-bonding I’d had in years. 

The second we touch down in Aman, the mood changes. I realize that’s how Special Ops guys operate. The closer to mission go time, the more focused they become. Dean has rented a walled compound in the desert outside the city. It’s a far cry from our 5 Star treatment in Cypress, but we have two cooks, a cleaning crew, and all the space needed. 

Jordan is my first time in the Middle East. My first impression: wow, this place is wound up pretty tight. The guys always talked about Qatar, and Oman, and other Gulf States and how much fun they were and how many beautiful women were around and money and on and on. Aman isn’t like that. Jordan is a tightly ruled monarchy with a powerful military and an all-knowing security apparatus. They have good relations with their neighbors and don’t allow any kind of radicalism (or much free-speech). No one steps out of line, and if they do, they are imprisoned. ‘You do not fuck around in Jordan’, that’s what I’m told. 

After 10 days at the compound, it becomes obvious our hard departure date for Syria will have to be soft. We only have three of the seven vehicles needed. Our weapons, fuel and supplies are being held in a government warehouse 30 miles away and will not be released until the 48-hour window to cross the border opens. Dean is constantly going into Aman with a driver meeting with government people, paying some guy off, trying to find the best deals on vehicles. He’s the most reliable, honest person I’ve ever met.  He’s working very hard, but a top government official, who we’ve already paid $30,000, wants more and is holding us back. 

I pay up. And I pay more, and then more. After 18 days at the compound, I’ve wired more than $2 million to various organizations and individuals for equipment and bribes, going way over budget. We have all the vehicles now and will sell them once we return from the mission, so some $530,000 will come back, but we already lost one of the SASR guys who just up and left one night. On top of that, our Jordanian security team, who is to make up the bulk of our force, is now a rotating group of men. Every time a new guy rotates in, we have to train him. It’s just a bad situation. Also, it’s getting hotter by the day.

Dean comes into my office/room one night. It’s about 95˙ with a hot wind coming in from the southeast.  

He drops two very cold cans of Fosters on my desk and stands in front of the fan. “Waiting for a mission dulls the knife’s edge, get it, Mate?”

I nod and drink the gloriously cold beer.

“We need to get this thing moving within the next five days or it has to be scrapped. That is my professional recommendation. And we won’t even have a choice since three more of the boys will be leaving if we don’t go in five days. Can’t go into Syria with a bunch of lackeys and a trust fund fellow who wrote a fake book that fooled the world.” Dean winks and smirks. He likes to take shots at me now and then. I never take it personally. 

“Not a trust fund, it was an insurance settlement, and the story isn’t fake anymore. We’re making it real.”

Three days later, and another $75,000, we are geared up at sunrise inside the compound, all our vehicles packed to the gills with supplies, fuel and weapons. We have three MRAP armored vehicles (one of which is nearly as big as a bus), three Toyota pickups, and three old Range Rovers that look like they have become one with the desert. 

I sit shotgun next to Dean in the big MRAP. The idea is that the kids on the return trip will mostly be in here, like an armored school bus. Our target ‘orphanage’ is two days ride into the southern badlands of Syria. Most of the fighting is taking place north and in the cities and now in Iraq, which has just been shocked to find 2800 ISIS fighters send 35,000 Iraqi troops on the run and take the vital city of Mosul. The whole world suddenly knows ISIS. 

The area we travel is lawless but controlled by Bedouin tribes who hold no allegiances. The German NGO has a decent relationship with the Syrian government and has gotten us assurance that if we are in and out within seven days, that no one will drop a bomb on our convoy. Just in case, we paint symbols on our vehicles to let them know from the air that we’re on a humanitarian mission. 

The going is slow. At the rate we travel, we’ll need three days to get to the target, and another three to get back to Jordan. Every minute in Syria is a minute closer to something going wrong. People in ‘towns’ we pass look at us with suspicion but not hostility. This part of Syria is mostly untouched by the war. 

The first night is epic. Stars are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. We find a rocky valley to camp in and dig into our rations. I ask Dean if it’s alright if I climb to the top of a jagged ridge. We have two drones up with thermal cameras and they see nothing except a herd of goats so he okays it.

It’s been two years since I started writing what turned into The Challenge. Being up there alone with my thoughts and in that ancient-feeling land...looking back on all that happened...all I can do is marvel at life and the universe and God if you like, and especially my own ability to manifest this wild ride. 

Up there on that ridge, I fantasize that soon I will become the world’s most powerful and daring philanthropist, beloved by the world, a legendary historical figure.

Like many people on the edge of a dangerous abyss, I don’t know that I’m on the edge of it. Instead, my ego superimposes a lush valley of milk&honey over the painful and grim reality which actually awaits me. 

At sunrise we ready to leave and find one of the smaller MRAPs won’t start no matter what we do. We abandon it. The day is scorching, 118˙ and the wind kicks up dust storms as the heat compounds upon the desert floor. 

We run into the first sign of trouble after 2pm. Blocking the road are two pickups. They aren’t ‘techincals’—a term which means a pickup with a .50 caliber or more machine-gun mounted in the bed—but they are packed with Bedouin warriors. They sit there, studying us, then after 25 minutes with no communication, they leave the road. 

Driving by them, Dean says: “That's not good. They sized us up.”

“What do we do?” I ask. 

“Mate, we keep moving.”

We camp at the foot of a rock outcropping made of chalky white jagged stones about 75 feet tall. We’re very exposed. Everyone is tense. 

I’m asleep in the big MRAP, when at 3am, Dean comes in and quietly asks me how much cash I have on me. 

“$92,000.”

“I’m gonna need most of that.”

“What’s going on?”

Twenty pickups full of Bedouin surround our camp. Several of them are techincals, meaning they have heavy weapons trained on us loaded with rounds our armor cannot stop (I find out later that one of the guns is a 35mm autocannon that can knock out a tank). 

In the darkness I see dozens of robed and turbaned men moving about. One of the Jordanian soldiers is arguing with the Bedouin. Scott, one of the SASR guys, speaks the language and reports that the Bedouin want our vehicles, supplies, and weapons. And the cash of course. Dean is trying to negotaite just the cash. Let us keep our gear and vheciles. We were there to save children. We would send them a helicioter full of cash in two weeks for letting us go.

The situation turns into this protracted back and forth debate with the Bedouins. They will not budge and right before sunrise they start shooting. Not really at us, but there are still bullets flying in our general direction. They let loose with rounds from the big guns into the rock wall behind us. The sound of those Russian heavy weapons, the rattling THUDTHUDTHUD and crackling shower of white rock and dust will always be with me.  The Bedouin just want our gear. Killing us will bring heavy reprisals from the Jordanians and our governments. Also, they don’t want to destroy the vehicles and gear. 

A few bullet fragments stick in my right arm and rock shrapnel wounds my cheek and neck when some genius fires an RPG rocket at the wall, raining pulverized rock down on us. Everyone else also has similar superficial wounds. 

Dean crawls over and says two words: Abort mission.

No!

ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT! There was no way I was about to surrender our mission, and anyway, if we give up the vehicles, I yell at Dean over the gunfire, how will we get back to Jordan? Dean ignores me and slithers away.

It’s a hopeless situation, and with no heavy weapons or backup, with the sun baking us to the core, we surrender. We beg to keep the big MRAP so we can drive home, but they refuse. The Bedouin leave us with some water, food, and a tarp. They also let Dean keep his sat phone. 

We are now in very serious trouble, I can see it on the faces of the SASR guys, men who have been in real combat many times. When they look concerned, you know it’s for real. We have no weapons (save a few sidearms and knives) and very little supplies. We are exposed and the Bedouin tell the Jordanians that other ‘less friendly’ tribes are sure to find us. They will kidnap us, maybe sell us to ISIS or ransom us directly to our governments. 

The lot of us, covered in white dust and blood, thirsty, hungry, tired, nervous. It was the most scared I’ve ever been. 

Thankfully, Dean has already been working on our evacuation even before sunrise. Now he is communicating to his contact back in Aman that we are in grave danger. Three helicopters will come in low and fast after sunset. A single green flare will mark our exact location. It will cost me $685,000.

Those eight hours waiting for extraction are brutal. At any moment I expect to get kidnapped, sold to ISIS and ransomed. Dean and his men will either die fighting or end up butchered on YouTube. I know I’m not the only one with such dark visions. We all stick close to the sliver of shade offered by the rock wall and are very quiet. The Jordanians pray. The SASR guys prepare for a fight to the death.

At 10:10pm the sat phone rings. The rescue choppers are inbound. ETA 10 minutes. Nine minutes later Dean fires a single green flare. Almost immediately three Blackhawk helicopters roar in. Out in the distance I see the silhouette of two other helicopters. They are Apache gunships covering us. Six Jordanian Special Forces spill out and gather us up. We are up and away in four minutes. We must be a sight to see based on the looks the Jordanian soldiers give us.

Turns out the King of Jordan himself oversaw the rescue to ensure it went right. It’s a big story in Jordan...and the world. The US media picks up on it, with the headline: 

Stranded Philanthropist And His Special Forces Escort Kidnapped In Syria!

My staff is hysterical when I call a day later. The story is huge. Donations by the millions start flowing into my Foundation again. I’m already planning another mission. Dean is game. He says the money is too good to pass up even if we’ll probably all die next time because we’ll have to go through the Turkish/Syrian boarder and right into the warzone. I also immediately pay all the men their bonus plus another $30,000 (I also give the Jordanians another $15,000 each). 

Before heading back to LA, I spend 14 days at a 5 Star spa in the Austrian Alps. Then go to Venice, Italy, because I’ve always wanted to go, then onto Monaco and finally St. Tropez to party. All of it 5 Star and all of it paid by the Foundation.

When I finally get home to LA, there is a party waiting for me at the office. Everyone dotes on me like I’m a holyman. I’m now even more famous and revered than before. My publisher wants another book. I have to turn down dozens of interviews. 

The first sign of trouble is a call in mid June from an investigative journalist. He wants to talk about my incredible story and clear up some things. I say of course, but need more time to get myself together after all the drama.....

Coach has truly been on the edge of his seat. He finally leans back and drinks his scotch. “Andy, only you and I, two people who took the world for a ride, could understand each other.”

12

The day after our first camp, we stopped at the new Atlanta Falcon Stadium, which Coach wanted to see. A stadium manager, who worked 11 years at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego now worked at the Atlanta Stadium, was still loyal to Coach and was happy to show us around the place, which combined art and football, a trend I thoroughly approve of.

Driving was mostly just the two of us staring at the road ahead, not talking much until I put on some classic Grateful Dead shows. Through the bus’s 19 speakers the music sounded incredible. Coach told me several stories about his interactions with the band and their fans when he was a kid in Golden Gate Park. He liked the music but didn’t understand at all the fanatic zeal that swirled around The Dead. We camped two more times before reaching Richmond. Around the fires I made every night we drank and talked about all the POP culture things Coach had missed over the past four decades. One night I pulled down a screen on the side of the bus and projected the Blues Bothers movie on it. Coach loved it.

We pulled into Richmond late in the morning. Coach sent a few texts, punched an address into the bus’s GPS, and we soon arrived at the gates of the famous Hollywood Cemetery. The bus wouldn’t fit through the gate but there was a grounds keeper in a golfcart waiting for us. 

Hollywood Cemetery is a couple-hundred-year-old sprawling landscape of mausoleums, tombs, and generational plots. Rolling hills hide the immenseness of the place. Towering trees shade the countless headstones. We came to a stop at one generational plot surrounded by a rusting iron fence. Three main tombs made up the plot with over two dozen other smaller sarcophaguses and graves. A name in ironworks hung from the arched entrance to the plot: Turner. 

I followed Coach through the gate and to a large tomb. A marble angel with massive wings sat perched on the granite sarcophagus. Coach found a seat on a small marble bench and I pressed record.

“It was 1987 and my first season with the Redskins. I had to again change the way I coached. The hardass coach had to go, along with the rah-rah-run-when-you’re-on-the-field-yell-my-self-hoarse coach. This was the pros. These were grown men working for a living. They did not need motivating, especially on that team. We were a topnotch organization and favored to win our division. 

“The days of the ‘Hogs’, the ‘funky bunch’, of Riggins and Theismann were over, but the team was still stacked with some popular holdovers from that early ‘80s era. It was a veteran team and very tough. The defense was one of the best I’ve ever been around. Plus, we had the legendary Joe Gibbs as head coach. Our starting QB was an unlikely player named Jay Schroeder. He was 26 but looked 43. He couldn’t run but had a terrific arm and was very smart. There wasn’t much I needed to do with him. His backup was a legendary player named Doug Williams. He and I quickly became friends. 

“A quarterbacks coach in the NFL is a job where you spend the majority of your time in a dark room watching film with three quarterbacks and joking around to pass the time. We kept to ourselves, even on the practice field. I was working 90-hour weeks. Then…after the second pre-season game there was a player’s strike. It lasted 24 days and shortened the season by one game. The players came back in mid September and the regular season began. 

“One big thing that was very different from the college game was the level of organization and the money spent on the team. We had our own plane. We stayed at nice hotels. I was given thousands of dollars worth of official Redskins gear. I had a secretary. All I had to do was focus on coaching. Against this backdrop, Jenny and I were trying to have a baby. Nothing we did worked. We decided to wait till after the season to see a doctor.

“An NFL game differs in so many ways from college it’s not even worth listing them, but one way I will tell you about is the feeling. Sunday NFL football at times felt like a religious happening, and I don’t mean in a Godly way, but in the tradition, the bigness, the pageantry. The ritual of it all. The rivalries. Our nemesis were the Cowboys and Giants. When I was there the Cowboys were bad and the Giants good, so the Giants were the ‘must-win’ big games.

“With so many moving parts, from trainers and equipment mangers, to security and back-office personnel, you’d think Gameday would be chaotic, but with everything taken care of, all you had to do as a coach was show up and…coach. At VT I had to iron my own pants, make my own gameplan copies, little things like that which added up and took my head away from football. That wasn’t the case with the Redskins. 

“And unlike college, in the pros every game has a ‘big game’ feel. Every game is televised with multiple cameras, and when it’s a big game, meaning us at 8-1 vs. a 8-1 Giants, there are half a dozen network trucks parked outside the stadium and flyovers by F-16s. Monday Night Football was also huge. It was the only non-Sunday game and only night game back then. I thoroughly enjoyed my first MNF experience, a home game against Seattle.

“We made the playoffs with home-field advantage throughout. I was getting some notoriety due to how good our QB was playing. Next thing I know we’re in the Super Bowl to be played in San Diego against John Elway and the Denver Broncos. I can admit that I hardly did anything to get us in the Big Game. The team felt like it was on auto-pilot. I worked hard, but if I had done half the work, there is no doubt we still would’ve made it. 

“This ‘work yourself to the bone’ mentality became my least favorite thing about the NFL. If you weren’t putting in 90-hour weeks, that was unacceptable, but did it matter? We had no life during the season. Some nights I slept in my office, leaving my loving, beautiful wife alone in that big house. For what? So Coach Gibbs could see my car still in my spot when he pulled in at 730am? So he could see me bleary-eyed drinking coffee and eating donuts when he walked in the complex?

“But I was a young coach and that’s how the NFL was, and still is. You put your time in so that you can move up the coaching ladder. Yes, from watching hundreds of hours of film over and over of opposing teams, I discovered a hitch in someone’s step or a tell in the way some player held his hand which told me what the play was going to be. I’d pass on that info up the chain of command. Little things like that help a team win, and I quickly got the reputation as a ‘details guy’, which was funny since I had never been like that in my life. I was just observant and able to connect dots then extrapolate and deduce. Plus, as a former QB, I liked watching film. 

“So there I was, my first season in the pros and I’m in the Super Bowl. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t an amazing experience. When I met John Elway I felt like a fanboy meeting his idol. We were both Bay-Area Cali kids and I’d followed his career closely. Also, the game was changing and the production value was changing too. Technology was being rolled out that no one had seen before. 

“Before that game was the first time I heard about the Internet, which wasn’t being used by the masses yet, but our team had an IT manager and he told me about this network where you could talk to other people using your computer. Us coaches all had giant desktops but we didn’t know what to do with them. In fact I never even turned mine on all season. The IT guy said that by next season we would all be communicating with our computers, sending messages and notes, that kind of stuff. 

“For me it felt like we were soon to enter a New Age. I went to a news stand one day and looked at the tiny section where the tech magazines were and learned more about Apple and Microsoft and many others. I asked the team investment adviser to invest some of my paycheck in technology stocks. He said that was a big mistake but did it anyway. 

“We won the Super Bowl 42-10. The outcome of the game was never really in doubt. We had them beat from the first drive onward. After the game I didn’t even get to touch the trophy, but I was a Super Bowl winner and I got my first ring.

“Jenny and I went to the Bahamas for 11 days in February. We’d seen a fertility doctor and he gave us all kinds of advice and natural remedies before trying more drastic measures. Jenny was certain she was pregnant, but when we got home, her pregnancy test came back negative. The news hit her hard. Children, a family, that’s what she wanted more than anything. I wanted a family too, but as is the case I’ve found with many men, especially of my generation, we are bystanders to the whole operation. Having a family wasn’t the driving force behind my life. Career, success, notoriety, money, these were the things that I strove for. I saw family as a byproduct of my success, a natural part of it, but not the main factor. 

“The situation was stressful, but I was always supportive, and in March we both underwent a fertility test. Our doctor didn’t want that to be the first, or even fifth thing he did. He told me in private that a fertility test can be devastating to a couple if it comes back that one of them is unable to conceive. He liked to try almost everything else before going to that test. It turned out that Jenny had blockages in her fallopian tubes. This wasn’t a terrible situation, he told us. We could have children, just that her condition had to be taken care of. A combination of medication, diet, and ultrasound should do the trick, he promised. The drawback was that we had to wait at least nine months before trying to conceive again. 

“In April of 1988 I walked into my office and was shocked to learn our QB Jay Schroeder had been traded in a blockbuster deal to the Raiders. The day before, Jay and I were talking and he didn’t let on in the slightest way that he was about to leave the team. I mean, management knew, and Gibbs surely knew, but I was in the dark. That’s the NFL right there…business.

“The season started and we had a giant target on our helmets. Every team brought their A-Game against us. Mid way through the season, Jenny and I tried to conceive again. It didn’t work. She was devastated and I was losing focus at work. Gibbs called me into his office one morning and I spilled the beans about what was happening in my private life. He didn’t offer any solutions, I mean what could he do, he just wanted to know where my head was at. The best he could offer was the name of a doctor who helped his son and wished me the best of luck.

“The season spiraled into mediocrity and we lost five of our last six games. That was the most brutal six weeks of my coaching career. All we had to do was win three of six games and we were in the playoffs. We couldn’t do anything right. Work was hell, home was depressing. After the season ended, our doctor referred us to a specialist who did in vitro fertilization. Jenny hated the concept, but she went along with it. 

“When in vitro didn’t work, Jenny faded. She had to be treated for depression. Then we started talking about adoption and that pulled her out of the spiral. She made her peace with the fact that, at least for the foreseeable future, she was not going to get pregnant, but she also decided to put off adoption for at least a year and looked into getting her doctorate in psychology. 

“In mid December, with two games left on our schedule, both must-wins as I said, my agent called. Syracuse needed a new head coach. I told Nate I wouldn’t talk to anyone until the Redskins season was over. The season ended and I talked to Syracuse. They offered me the job at our first meeting. The only reason I got the job was because the school wanted someone ‘with a name’ and I was the cheapest guy they could get who ‘had a name’. I was 34 when I was announced new Orangemen head coach in January 1989. 

“To say Jenny hated Syracuse would be an understatement. She was constantly flying back to Richmond. I was fine with that since now I was working 115-hour weeks. Syracuse was in the Big East back then, and for the three years I coached there, we had to face Miami three times. They were the toughest team I had ever had to coach against. I mean that. College or pro. 

“I loved our home field, the Carrier Dome, still to this day the only dome a college team plays in that is exclusively theirs. It was always loud and cozy in there. Outside it was endless snow and dark freezing nights. I swear, when November came, it got dark at 415pm. Pitch black by 445. Terrible. 

“I did the best with what I had, and in each of my three seasons we went to a bowl game and won. I caught the head-coaching bug. I needed to be in control. Have everything be in my vision. I knew what my main life goal would be: Become an NFL head coach, whereas in the past I thought I would make my living being an assistant coach. 

“My main highlight at Syracuse was in November 1991 when we almost beat the Miami Hurricanes in the Orange Bowl who were the No.1 team in the nation and would go on to win the National Championship. Leaving that warm sunshine, blowing palms, and ocean breezes and coming back to dreary Syracuse got me on the phone with my agent. I wanted out. I wanted back to the NFL in a warm city. He would look into it.

“It was January 1992 when Jenny had some routine bloodwork done. They did a 70-panel test. There were some abnormalities with her white-blood-cell counts. Three weeks later, February 17th, she was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. She was 30 years old. 

“The shock was nearly unbearable. I immediately resigned from my head coaching job and we moved to Richmond where Jenny would undergo treatment. Six grueling months treatment lasted. Total unparalleled hell. But through it all, my dear Jenny was brave and so full of courage. I was the one always breaking down. She was always consoling me. 

“In September 1992, Jenny, my wife, the only woman I truly ever loved with all my heart, was given six months to live, and that was a very generous timeline. She didn’t even cry. She knew, she knew what was happening inside her. It wasn’t a surprise. I, on the other hand, lost my mind. I wept in ways I didn’t think possible. To say I was devastated would be analogous to simply calling a hydrogen bomb an ‘explosion’. Yes, it is an explosion, yes I was devastated, but those words don’t even come within a billion miles of actually describing what the real thing is. It’s ‘mistaking the menu for the meal, the map…for the terrain’. Seeing a picture of Paris, and pretending that looking at the picture is as good as actually going to Paris. 

“My wife, Jenny Turner Moyer, the most beautiful, funny, caring, kind-hearted artistic person I ever met, passed away in her sleep November 18th, 1992 surrounded by family. I laid her to rest right here four days later. 

“In February 1993 I got a call from my agent Nate. He asked if I was interested in a job. The San Diego Chargers had contacted him about hiring me as assistant offensive coordinator. I said yes without giving it a second thought. It was either take a new job or end my life. I flew out to San Diego for the interview and was hired two days later.

“I had gone East, to come back West…just as Shiva Swarat had said all those years before. He just left out how much it would all hurt.”

Coach stands and hugs the granite tomb. At the foot of the tomb he opens a granite box closed with a combination lock. He pulls out a bag and removes two pairs of 1980s white hi-top cleats. Stitched in red on them is ‘Just Married!’ and ‘Jenny & Jimmy Moyer Forever!’. He asks for some time alone with his wife. I move out of earshot and sit in the golf cart where I start taking notes. The sky darkens, thunder claps and it starts to drizzle.

Coach spent over an hour at the grave. When he returned to the cart, the cleats slung over his shoulder, he looked satisfied. I drove straight to Ohio with Coach sitting next to me just staring out at the road with a very content squint in his eyes.

13

Canton, Ohio, is the birthplace of football, but other than that it doesn’t have a lot going for it. I was driving and Coach asked to take a spin past the Hall of Fame. He had of course been there several times when former players and Dirk Burnwell Sr. (the owner of the Chargers), were inducted into the Hall. I couldn’t understand why we were there. We were essentially at the last place on earth Coach was welcome. 

We found a plush RV-only campground outside of the city. We got fresh food and I grilled up salmon steaks and made a giant salad with my famous olive oil/lemon/Dijon mustard/ripe avocado dressing. After dinner at our sit-by-the-fire-drink-and-chat-time, I pressed Coach on why we were in Canton.

“Tomorrow we’re going to get a special tour of the Hall,” was all Coach would say. He then told me to pull out the recorder, he had a story to tell.

“Label this one: My senior season at UCLA.

“After the Rose Bowl win I was the most popular guy on campus, was voted co-captain for the upcoming season, and was ready to enter UCLA legendary status with Kareem Abdul-Jabar. Sports Illustrated even did a feature on me and I was on the cover with two other Heisman contenders when the SI College Football Issue came out in August 1976. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Spring football for college takes place around March. It’s when coaches find out what they lost to graduation and when the new class of seniors takes over. At the end of two weeks, teams have a scrimmage. We had four QBs on the roster. Two of the four were not in my league. One, however, was, and in fact he was better than me in some ways. 

“Hunter Bailey was his name. He’d just completed his freshman year. Was the prototypical Cali QB: 6.4, flowing blonde hair, built like a statue with a massive cannon of an arm. While I stood 6.1, had a mousy brown mullet and mustache, was built more like a Lay-Z-Boy, and had a .357 for an arm. I was faster in the 40 and quicker from point A to B. I also had experience and a nickname everyone in college football knew…Magic Moyer.

“First three days of spring ball I’m leading the first offense. On the forth day, Coach Willis calls me into his office before practice, tells me I’m going to split time today with Hunter.

“For the rest of spring practice this was how it went. I took snaps, Hunter took snaps. We were both intense competitors and it was the hardest I ever had to practice, though I never once thought my starting job was on the line. I was Magic Moyer who beat USC and won the Rose Bowl. I was a legitimate Heisman contender. The way I saw it, was that the coaches wanted to push me, make sure I didn’t get soft with all my fame and success. That’s what I told myself.

“Off-season I worked hard, and when preseason came around in August, I had hardly taken a day off. I only needed six credits to graduate so my school workload would be very light. I was ready to go undefeated, win the Heisman, win the National Championship, and get drafted in the first round by the Oakland Raiders. 

“Preseason starts out in just helmets and shorts. It’s hot. You sweat 12lbs of water a day. You practice in the morning for 2.5 hours, take a break for lunch and rest, then hit the field for another 3 hours. It’s a bonding experience as you are fully immersed in the team. 

“To my surprise when we start running 7-on-7 drills the second day of practice, I’m sharing time with Hunter. Coach Willis and I had talked a few times about what was going to happen once preseason started. According to Coach, I was 100% the starting QB. Hunter hadn’t even been around that much all summer. His family was very wealthy and they spent the summer in Santa Barbra, whereas I practically lived at the UCLA facility. I was big man on campus. It was my place now. My team.

“On the field, Hunter was full of confidence and bravado. Joking, laughing, so loose and carefree. I was wound tight. Angry. Scared. And it showed in my play. 

“After two days of this, I went to talk with Coach Willis. He flat out told me again that I was #1. He just wanted to make sure Hunter was ready to be #2. That calmed me down and I started playing better. We put pads on and started hitting the second week of practice. When I broke the huddle on the first 11-on-11 full-contact drill, I only had ten plays, three of which were running plays, before Coach pulled me aside and inserted Hunter. He immediately threw a 30-yard TD that wowed everyone. 

“I knew right then and there I was in major trouble.

“My game was all about making things happen under pressure. Coaches and teammates called me ‘Tark’ for Fran Tarkenton, the great and elusive NFL QB. I could drop back and make throws of course, but I liked to run and gun. 

“I noticed Hunter getting a lot of one-on-one office time with Coach Willis. The door would be almost totally closed, which was something Coach seldom did, and never did with me. I kept my mouth shut. 

“For our first full scrimmage of the preseason I started and played good enough for 16 snaps getting a TD and a field goal, then ceded the offense to Hunter, who threw three TDs against the first team defense. 

“Opening game, home against Washington, was in nine days. Depth charts, meaning who was starting, were going up before practice. When I walked into the locker room some of the guys averted their eyes, others looked at me and shook their heads. My close friends on the team avoided me. 

“I stood there in front of the bulletin board outside the equipment room in total fuming shock. I was #2 QB for the opener. This terrifying rush of anger, fear, shame, and hate coursed through my body. I’d done well to keep that side of myself tamed, but seeing the depth chart just made me snap. I rushed up to Coach’s office, was met by my position coach Charlie Adams in the hallway. He tried to calm me. I pushed right past him and burst into Willis’s office. 

“If they were testing me, seeing what I was made of, I failed. I cursed Coach Willis out for five minutes. Did a lot of ‘do you know who I am’ bullshit about the Rose Bowl, Heisman, team captain and so on. He didn’t flinch. I wanted to punch Willis in that big giant head of his, mess up his perfect fucking hair. 

“Only an hour of sitting in a closed meeting room with Coach Adams calmed me down and prevented me from leaving the facility and missing my first practice. Coach Adams told me they were going to see what the ‘kid’ was made of. See if he could do what he was doing all preseason in a game situation. Adams told me that Coach Willis wouldn’t take anything I said personally; he understood I was passionate and a serious competitor. Don’t worry, he said, surely, I’d get playing time against Washington, and as captain I had a whole team to think about.

“Facing the team out there at practice that day was painful. Getting only nine reps under center with the first team offense was brutal. I wanted to cry. In the locker room guys I didn’t know well kept their distance and my friends tried to console me, but no one really knew how to deal with it. I had even broken up with my girlfriend to focus on football, so when I went home, I was alone. 

“Magic Moyer Benched! the LA Times reported. 

“In that article, Coach Willis said that the team was ready for a different direction, and based on the type of skill players we had, a traditional pocket passer with a big arm was needed and he was incredibly lucky to have such a great backup like me ready to take over if needed. In the article, Willis kept saying I had ‘filled in’ the previous season, and ‘as a backup had done better than anyone could’ve imagined’. That sent me through the roof. But even through my anger I saw his thinking.          

“With me at the helm they got one season. With Hunter they got three as it was rare for QBs to leave college early back then. And no one could deny that he outplayed me in preseason, myself included, but I was never about being the best on paper or even in practice. I was a gamer. 

“Gametime I was a different player and that’s when the magic happened. The whole situation had gotten to my head. I had failed every test they threw at me. I was a shell of my former Rose Bowl self. I lost my BMOC status. Girls weren’t flocking to me but they were all over Hunter. Nerdy guys weren’t asking to carry my backpack or offering to do my homework. Suddenly, I started getting parking tickets on campus for parking in faculty spots. It was like the entire school had turned against me. 

“The whole experience was a very hard introduction to the politics of football. Myself and Coach Willis were never ‘friends’ but we had a good relationship. Now, it was total shit. I actively hated the man and let everyone know about it. My attitude was terrible and I was warned that if it didn’t improve, I would lose my captainship. I felt betrayed and lied to. Maybe if Willis had met with me in private, telling me before posting the depth chart that I wouldn’t be starting, I could’ve dealt with it. In reality that might have been worse. I literally might have attacked him. 

“I started drinking and smoking pot again. Even though I understood the thinking behind starting Hunter, I felt loyalty was more important, and it wasn’t like the team would be bad with me at QB. 

“I failed to see that football at that level isn’t about loyalty or friendship, it’s about doing what’s best for the team and program and also business. At the pro level this is true but times 1000. Head coaches have careers to think about. They have bonuses and new contracts and massive pressure and assistant coaches who rely on them to keep their jobs. In the end, head coaches will do what is best for their careers, and starting Hunter was what was best for Coach Willis’s career. 

“I didn’t play that first game. Or the second...or third. I was impossible to be around. I was missing meetings, workouts, just totally messing up. I openly wished that Hunter got hurt so I could take over, one of the worst crimes a football player can commit. I lost my captainship after the fourth game. 

We were undefeated and going into some tough games and they did not need my sulking misery messing up team chemistry. I was demoted to 3rd string behind a decent player but who was nowhere near my level. We lost one game and went to another Rose Bowl, but weren’t playing for a National Championship due to two undefeated teams ahead of us in the polls. 

“Before the Rose Bowl, I wrote Coach Willis a letter telling him how much I hated him and how much he betrayed me, but that I understood now, thanks to him, the business of football. I also wrote a letter to Coach Adams thanking him for being good to me all those years.

“I didn’t even bother attending the Rose Bowl because I had just graduated and they couldn’t hold anything over me for failing to show. My plan was to train and get drafted. I knew I could play in the NFL, someone had to give me a shot. I would put the nightmare of my senior season behind me. 

“I didn’t get drafted, in fact, no teams even gave me a tryout. Coach Willis had essentially blackballed me. Not actively, but when teams contacted him about me, he told them what had happened. No organization wanted a guy like I had become on their roster, especially since I wasn’t even able to start my senior season. I was not Tom Brady, after all.” (Tom Brady was benched his senior year at Michigan and was drafted in the 7th round by the New England Patriots.)

Coach stood up and walked outside the ring of firelight and down to a small creek. I knew the background of what happened his senior year but not the details. In many ways, his coaching career, especially at the higher levels, was molded by that experience. His loyalty was always first to the team, program, organization, himself...coaches and players were a distant second and he expected everyone to fall in line with this paradigm. It proved to be a winning formula, but there were causalities. People who worked for and with Coach were either still fiercely loyal, or full of grievances, with there being more grievous people than loyal.

After breakfast the next day I expected Coach to say ‘get ready to go in 30 minutes’. Instead we just sat around taking our time. When I asked what time we were going to the Hall, Coach said, “It’s a special nighttime engagement. We leave here at 10pm.”

I reasoned that we were going so late because Coach couldn’t be seen walking around the Hall in the daytime, not for a second did I think he had something up his sleeve. 

The front-gate security at The Hall waves us through without so much as showing ID and I park the RV at the loading dock behind the building. Coach asks me to grab a big black duffel bag and a smaller backpack in storage under the bus. In the duffle is something heavy and encased in some kind of molded packing material. I lug it up the ramp and into the building where the head of security meets us.

“Coach Moyer,” says the guard, “right this way.” He points to a cart and addresses me. “You can put the bags on it.”

The Hall is a combination of a domed, old yellow brick building and new construction. The entire place is dimly lit. I follow behind Coach and the guard, pushing the handcart. We move through the foyer, where on a wall hang every team’s helmet since the beginning of the sport. Jerseys hang in glass cases. Game balls from historical NFL moments are everywhere. 

We enter the most hallowed ground at Canton...The Hall of Champions. Bronze busts of the sport’s greats, from legendary players to legendary coaches and even owners, sit three deep and staggered. A little stage has been set up complete with red, white and blue bunting. There’s a podium and five chairs set before it where I take a seat. 

The guard opens the bag and pulls out...a bronze bust of Coach Moyer. Coach takes the stage and a pinpoint spotlight shines on him. I press record and snap some pics. 

“You said I’d never make it here...well...you were all wrong,” says Coach in a big voice. “Yes, I have sinned against the game but who here has not? These men are here because they sacrificed EVERYTHING for football. I am no exception, even sacrificing my integrity all for the good of the team. And the ultimate good in football is winning. I did what it took to win. I coached in the NFL for 25 years and would’ve made 30 had I not sinned. But my sins were not mine alone and the truth will come out.”

Coach turns around. On a Lucite ledge, the guard has placed Coach’s bust and covered it with a blue satin cloth. Coach pulls the cloth, revealing his bust which doesn’t quite match the others but is good enough. 

Gazing at the bronze head, smiling, nodding, triumphant, Coach is in his own world as he rambles on about great victories, lessons learned and his favorite players. Then he takes a series tone.

(Unfortunately here the recorder stopped recording, but I will summarize what he said.) 

Coach gave a speech about how he often felt like a general sending men into battle, knowing they were all going to get wounded one way or another. It weighed on him, he said, knowing many men suffered irreversible brain damage due to his instance that they hit harder, play through ‘getting your bell rung’, and his belief back then that a concussion wasn’t a big deal. He talked about forcing men to fight through injuries and forcing doctors to pump players full of painkillers. He focused on hand, foot and leg injuries, how they seriously affect everyone who has ever played in the NFL and get little attention, but cause lifelong problems that in many ways are just as bad as CTE. 

When he finished, I clapped loudly. The guard joined in. Our slaps echoed throughout the Hall. Coach then left the stage, slung the pack over his shoulder, and took a stroll around the Hall of Fame with the guard and I in tow. 

“You’re not going to leave it there, are you?” I whisper to the guard.

“Nah.”

“And how’d he convince you to do this? I mean, are you gonna get in trouble?”

“Coach Moyer paid off my son and daughter’s school debt. Over $120,000, and he paid each one of us guards $8000 cash to let this happen. It’s a good deal. The cameras are off. No harm, no foul.”

We spent three hours at the Hall, and for most of it, Coach was out of sight. When he had his fill, we got on the bus and I drove us out of the city heading southwest towards a campground. 

“So you made it into the Hall of Fame, many congratulations. If/when ‘they’ read about this, ‘they’ will have a conniption, you know that.”

Coach sat with his customary smirk just staring at the dark road. “Good. The bust I know won’t stay, I wouldn’t want to disrespect the men there, but, ah, there are a few other Easter Eggs I hid around. They’ll have to tear the place apart looking for them. I made it into the Hall, and I’m going to stay.”

14

Our next destination: Denver. 

Coach didn’t tell me what we were going to do there and I didn’t ask. We camped more and ate and drank and I played for Coach some of the good music he’d missed out on the past 40 years. Movies as well. He loved Splash! with Tom Hanks, The Godfather, and the all-time classic Predator.

I took a lot of pictures on that leg of the tour, sent many to Carla as a way to document what we were doing. My texts to her acted as my tour-log. I figured one day I would use them to provide proof of my journey with Coach and as a pictorial timeline of events. 

We drove through Denver and into Boulder where we pulled into our campground right before dusk. There are few towns nicer than Boulder, especially in mid July. Fireflies lit up around the bus as I started a cookfire to grill some fresh brook trout we bought at the local WholeFoods. After dinner, Coach gave me that look as he tugged on a cigar. The look said: enough small talk, it’s time to go deep.

“You’ve got a story to finish,” he says and sits back for story time.

Well, OK, here we go again……….

The call from the investigative journalist alerted me to the fact that I had to deal with some hassles beyond those I’d already dealt with. I’d been interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security, by the FBI, by two men from a branch of military intelligence, and a woman who met me at a coffee house, and although she never confirmed, I’m certain she was CIA. 

I thought because I’d been through all that and survived (my lawyer assured me she would’ve gotten wind of anything bad coming my way from those interviews), that meeting this two-bit journalist would just be a matter of answering some more questions. And I thought it would work in my favor to get my narrative out there through a small channel, then say a big one like the NY Times. I thought I could control the narrative, that’s why I agreed to meet with ‘boywonder independent investigative journalist extraordinar’. 

Whatever the case, I’d continue to lie and spin as I’ve been doing, and then go on another mission in October to Syria to free orphans and the whole thing would just take care of itself. That’s my plan. Ignore/spin/lie/deny.              

My foundation makes back all the money spent on the failed mission, and by early August 2014, I’m doing my media rounds. People fawn all over me. The word ‘hero’ is tossed around. I start writing a new book. My agent has it sold before it’s more than just 15 pages of rough ideas. I get an $850,000 advance. 

By August, the Syrian crisis has become front-page news and the war with ISIS is in full swing. I don’t want to pat myself on the back, but I think if there’s anything positive that came out of my debacle, it was to help bring awareness to the suffering and hellish situation in Syria for the civilians caught in the middle. 

The new mission is in its final planning stage by the end of August. We will have a bigger force, 12 SASR guys, 15 vehicles, 35 Turkish support mercenaries and reconnaissance drones. Dean has even made a pact with the Peshmerga, the military arm of the Kurdish, whose land we would be traversing. ISIS is all over the place and our target ‘orphanage’ is in a town constantly besieged by ISIS but held by the Peshmerga and a small unit of British Special Forces. The total cost is $7.6 million. I go on the Today Show September 2nd asking people to donate. We raise $9 million in seven days. 

Right after the Today Show, I finally meet with the freelance investigative journalist and my lawyer. My lawyer insists all questions be seen two days prior to meeting and no questions absent from the list will be answered. Now, my lawyer, I won’t name her even though it’s public record, doesn’t know my secret, but she suspects something since I have confided in her that some of the things in the book are slightly stretched truths. 

Also, I’m still balking at hiring an accountant. I satiate the lawyers by saying I will hire one after the next mission. About the two non-existent board members, I explain that they are at sea with Sea Shepard for the next 16 months. It’s a pretty lame excuse, but I just force it on them and give email addresses for the two fictitious board members which are controlled by me. If the lawyers make a stink, I will just fire them. 

My modus operandi is: kick the can down the road, and keep kicking. 

The journalist is a kid two years out of Colombia School of Journalism who runs his own investigative podcast. He does his homework and ten of the 25 questions my lawyer rejects. They are about accounting, trying to pin me down on exact dates (which I’ve already told my lawyer are not necessarily correct), and questions about details in my book that don’t add up. 

I practice the questions I will be answering and when we meet I run through them quickly. Then, thinking I’ve got the kid on my side (control the narrative), I answer a few of the the questions my lawyer had rejected. Hubris extreme. I stumble a few times, and he catches me in a few lies. 

I talk waaaaaay too much, trying to right the sinking ship. The look on my lawyer’s face is one of total indignation. The kid records it. I ask him what he’s planning on writing about since there’s really no story here. He says he has more work to do, and that while he admires me and doesn’t doubt my story, he has read through some threads on Reddit claiming that I’m a fraud and those claims needed investigating.

I blow a gasket. REDDIT!!! He’s coming at me because of internet rumors??? I smash his phone to pieces, which was recording the interview, and physically throw him out of my lawyer’s office. I have become very aggressive due to all the training I’ve been doing for the mission. Add in stress, traveling, and little sleep, and I’m a timebomb. I don’t hear anything from the kid again.

I’m training hard every day, even doing 3-Gun, which is an aerobic exercise where you carry a handgun, a shotgun, and an assault rifle. Right behind you is your instructor and you rush around a range firing all three guns at targets. It’s a hell of a way to get in shape. In my power stupor, I’ve instructed Dean that if anything happens on the mission, we will fight to the death. No more surrendering. I’m becoming more and more delusional. He says “OK, Mate”. 

The mission is to begin in Turkey on October 28th, 2014, with us going into Syria on November 16th. I’ve already paid out $4.9 million. We’re even going to have a reporter from VICE embedded with us and will livestream the whole thing. 

On October 9th at 8:45pm, I get a call from my lawyer. She says she’s received a heads-up that the next day at 8am London time, an article is going to appear on itercerpt.com, a site created by Glen Greenwald who broke the Edward Snowden story. The article will flat out accuse me of fraud. That’s all she knows. She has already contacted my media people and they are formulating a response, which will of course be to deny everything.

I obsessively hit refresh on the Intercept website, until at 8am their time, midnight my time, the story drops. 

It is much worse than anything I could’ve ever imagined. 

The article contains solid proof that my story is a fabrication and that my foundation is a fraud, squandering millions of dollars in donations. The article shows how the two other board members are fake and that the foundation lacks any accounting. It addresses the failed mission in April, claiming it was just a publicity stunt to raise more money for the fraudulent foundation. There are even a few sentences alluding to the possibility I’m involved in child trafficking. He even had a secret second recording device that captured me smashing his phone and throwing him out.

The article ends by calling me a ‘failed writer living off a trust fund in LA who fabricated a hero story because nothing else he tried to sell for 15 years had found a publisher. Andrew Anders preyed on the plight of the most vulnerable to achieve financial and public success. He is a total and complete fraud and should be persecuted for his crimes’.

The AP picks up the story around 11am EST. It goes viral shortly after. 

Rush over to my lawyer. She is in crisis mode as my public relations management company tries to put together a statement. The foundation office is besieged by the media. My lawyer demands $500,000 for a retainer. I write her a check right then and there from the foundation’s account. 

I go to the office. Thankfully there is a parking garage I slip into. The mood is dismal. I hold a meeting, telling everyone that the article is a ‘hit piece’ and full of inaccuracies. The IT guy asks if my book is a lie. I shout an emphatic NO! and ask everyone to gather around like a football huddle. I say some bullshit inspirational stuff I learned at a management course, tell everyone they can have the week off, and offer a $5000 bonus to everyone for having to weather this storm. I also remind them that they all signed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). The office clears out, and then I make a really huge mistake. 

The throngs of media go into a frenzy when I appear on the sidewalk. There are dozens of them. Questions and accusations pummel me. I stand there, stoic, absorbing it all. Then I launch into a now famous tirade about some Russian conspiracy to derail my efforts because they are pro-Assad and believe I’m an American agent smuggling weapons into Syria for the rebels who are anti-Assad. (I’m ahead of the curve on the ‘blame Russia for everything’ narrative.)

The media eats it up. During the speech, I’m very animated and make a face which someone turns into a meme. If you want to react to something absurd, you post my face. Mouth open and crooked, tongue out, eyes wild, hair crazy, hands and fingers twisted near my face. People still use it. There are gifs of the speech too that were all the rage back then.

Right after the ‘press conference’ I rush over to my bank. I have $28 million in foundation money and my own there (majority of it is the foundation’s, which I treat as my own). I go to my private banker and demand $5 million in cash. Before he can offer a rebuttal, I run down to my safety deposit box and remove $200,000 in gold and silver and another $700,000 in cash. My plan is to buy a boat and go to Costa Rica. I’m in a frenzy and not thinking right. My phone is blowing up with hundreds of texts and calls. On Facebook and Instagram I have 1800 messages! 

I hustle back up to see my banker. The branch manager appears. He says of course it’s not possible to get me that cash right now. I go nuts, ranting on and on about the evils of fractional reserve banking and all this conspiracy garbage. 

The bank manages to scrape up $245,000. I demand more. An argument ensues. I make some threats and push a banker to the ground, then grab the money without signing for it. I go home and pound a bottle of Chateau Margaux 2001, draw the blinds, and hunker down. I find a sailboat on Craigslist. I’m a good sailor, but I’m not certain I can make it all the way to Costa Rica. I decide I’ll first stop in Baja, Mexico.

At 5pm my lawyer calls. The FBI is at her office. They want me to come down and talk with them. I tell my lawyer I can’t. She says this is non-negotiable. I panic. I have lost all sense of reason.

A few months before, I’d bought a cabin with cash up at Big Bear and put it in an LLC so no one knows about it. My plan is to hide out there for a week or two, then when everything blows over, I’ll buy the boat and eventually get to Central America where I will reorganize and then fly to Turkey for the mission (yes, I know, totally irrational but it was my plan). I pack up my Yukon Denali XL and make a run for it. Little do I know that the police are now looking for me because of my actions at the bank (assault, terrorist threats, and removal of large sum of cash without signing for it). 

On I-10 heading east, a cop pulls up behind me. After a few minutes his lights go on. I’m drunk and sipping on another $2500 bottle of wine. I refuse to pull over.

Before I know it two dozen police cars are following me. It’s a low-speed chase, ala OJ Simpson. Three news choppers follow above. My phone is blowing up again. I have pretty much blanked out what I was thinking then, but since I’ve suffered some kind of break with the rational world, maybe it is along the lines of ‘this is all a massive misunderstanding, I’ll just keep driving, they will realize the massive misunderstanding and leave me alone’. 

After 14 miles I run over road spikes and come to a slow, undramatic stop. I stay in my vehicle for over an hour. Police have their guns drawn. I contemplate suicide by cop. I have three guns on me. I can do it. It will be over in seconds. 

I hold a .45 in my lap. My entire life flows by at hyper-speed in my minds-eye, stopping for a moment at important events. I see a future life for myself. This is not the end. I will make it through this. Now, perhaps if I knew how bad it was going to get, maybe I would’ve jumped out with my gun drawn, but I don’t know, and instead surrender without incident. My pathetic mugshot becomes another meme.

I’m now a big international news story. They give me a private cell reserved for celebrities. After a few hours my lawyer shows up. All she can do is shake her head. I have turned a really bad situation into a roiling epic disaster. Nine days later I make bail and am greeted by throngs of media outside my home. I call Dean but get no answer. I email him saying I still believe the mission can continue, he responds ‘Sorry, Mate, it can’t’. 

I ask Dean to return $1,000,000 of the $2.9 million I’ve sent him. He doesn’t respond. I write back that it’s OK, he can keep it all.

My family are besieged by the media. My father’s health is already flagging and this disaster certainly doesn’t help. He and my brother/sister refuse to talk to me. 

Then the FBI comes knocking. Two men and a woman sit down at my dining room table, my lawyer sitting next to me. They want the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Nothing I say will be used against me...unless the FBI finds reason for a federal indictment like racketeering or wire fraud or RICO.

I come totally clean against the advice of my lawyer. I need to tell someone. The agents are genuinely interested in my story (one of them has even read The Challenge and donated money). They take notes but do not record. Afterwards they tell me I have broken some federal laws but they are mostly interested in making sure I wasn’t involved in human trafficking, money laundering, or financing terrorism. 

A few days later all my accounts are frozen by a federal order. It is standard procedure says my lawyer. She then puts in a request to free up money for my defense and health and well-being. It takes five weeks for the judge to look over my request. I’m buried under an avalanche of bills. I can’t keep up. My father dies late December 2014. I find out through a Facebook post made by my sister. My siblings block me from attending the funeral. It’s just all too much and I seriously contemplate drowning myself in the Hollywood Reservoir. 

From October 2014 to April 2015, I watch my life unravel...actually, the whole world watches my life unravel in real time, just tune in when they want for the latest on my fall. 

All the cash and precious metals I had with me in the SUV are now evidence. My bank accounts frozen. Credit cards canceled. My home and vehicles are levied with liens so I can’t sell anything to raise some cash. The only thing I have is the cabin. Every time I go, I play this cloak and dagger game. The cabin is listed under a shell LLC and cannot be traced to me, but I still don’t want anyone knowing where I’m going. 

If not for the cabin, I would’ve never made it. Not that I would’ve killed myself, no, my heart would’ve given out. My kidneys, something would’ve snapped. Maybe it would’ve been my mind that completely broke. 

In June 2015 my first trial begins. By then the feds have released some money to me so I’m not penniless, but the foundation office has been closed and all the foundation money is totally frozen, so anything I spend on lawyers is from my own accounts. 

The jury hates me. It takes them 20 minutes to find me guilty of conspiracy, wire fraud, and misuse of foundation assets. The judge berates me for half an hour, I’m ready to go to prison for three to five years...and then he gives me four years probation instead. Everyone is shocked. I still have the IRS to deal with and three civil lawsuits, but getting off with just a slap on the wrist is a monumental victory in a sea of defeats. 

When I look back on it, the judge thought I was a pathetic, sorry lying loser who eroded the public’s trust, but not a threat to the public—just someone who made seismically bad decisions. Society had punished me enough, and would continue to for the rest of my life, the judge even said so in his closing words. 

Those are tough months, spent dealing with lawyers and my cases (I move down to a public defender for my remaining lawsuits), but by February 2016 the air clears, well at least when it comes to lawsuits. I’m a pariah. I can’t show my face anywhere. I still have my house, but I’m unable to pay the latest tax bill and will lose it eventually. I refuse to sell the cabin to free up some much needed cash. I’m eating rice and beans and ramen, using the WiFi at the local Panera and have my electricity and water shut off continually. I’m selling all my stuff to get by. I have depleted all the money I made from my book. The publisher sues me to get back the $850,000 advance, and when I can only return $285,000 they sue again and I have to claim bankruptcy. 

I hold out hope that I will get the cash and gold/silver back from the police, but without a lawyer, it sits in ‘evidence’. If I can just get that money, I’ll be OK, I tell myself; I’ll go to South America for a year, take ayahuasca in the Amazon, backpack my way around the continent. 

Over the next two years, new lawsuits keep popping up. I don’t even bother answering and I’m sure it’s something I’ll have to deal with sooner than later. The cabin is discovered and I’m forced to sell. 99% of that money is taken from me. I’ve sold my big house a year before and am living in a tiny efficiency off the Strip. I have the Ram, old Harley, my ‘85 Les Paul and a few other personal items but that’s pretty much it. Everything of value, all the art and cool things I’d bought over the last 2.5 years are ‘clawed back’ and used by the state of California to settle some of my debts stemming from lawsuits. 

In January 2018, with just $9,780 left of all the millions and no way to support myself since no one will hire me to do anything, I file an appeal to my parole board asking them to allow me to leave the state and move to FL. They oblige and in mid April I start driving to Florida. I take the long way, crisscrossing the country. I finally land in St. Sebastian the end of April. Thirty-three days after I arrive, I walk through the hedge to meet my new neighbor...

Coach claps slowly. “What a world, my friend, what a world. How the two of us got together is just one of those amazing things that happens in life. As you know I’m not religious and I don’t often talk about ‘God’, but if there is some greater power in the universe that’s aware of us insignificant grains of sand, it put us together so that we may find redemption.”

Then Coach pours more wine and informs me we’re going south to Colorado Springs in the morning to meet his brother.

15

The next morning, GPS directs me to a nice suburban street in the hills outside of Colorado Springs. We pull up to a modest ranch home sitting on over an acre. Coach instructs me to drive up the driveway. It’s Saturday, he’s certain his brother is home. 

Coach says, “Tell him what’s going on and that I want to talk to him. Tell him I have one point five million in bonds at five percent that I want to sign over to him. That will get his attention.” 

Greg Moyer is three years older than Coach, and according to Coach’s unauthorized bio, he and Greg had a typical brotherly relationship with the older beating on the younger until one day the younger got bigger than the older and a shift in power occurred. They were very competitive and raised themselves on the streets of San Francisco. Greg was a talented yet undersized defensive back who played collegiately at Stanford University. He still holds the school record for most interceptions in a season (6) and total (22). Greg was drafted in the second to last round in 1974. He played five seasons for the Denver Broncos where he quickly became one of the league’s best punt returners and all-around special teams experts. He made two Pro Bowls for special teams and was a captain for the Broncos. Before his 6th season began, he was in a car accident and dislocated his right hip. His career as a player ended but he almost immediately got into coaching. 

When the bus stops, its airbrakes make a lot of noise, which draws Greg Moyer out of his home. I make my way to the front door. Greg Moyer meets me halfway, trying to figure out what is going on.

“Can I help you?”

I decide to cut out the chase. “I’m a close friend of your brothe—” 

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.” Greg Moyer pushes past me to get a better look at the bus. Even though the windows are tinted, Greg can see his brother sitting shotgun. “He sent me an email three weeks ago asking if we could meet. I didn’t respond, because,” he raises his voice so Coach can hear, “I DON’T WANT TO EVER TALK TO YOU AGAIN, ASSHOLE!”

With growing hostility, he says, “Get off my property.”

Quickly I rattle off, “Wait please, he has over a million dollars in bonds he wants to give you but you have to talk to him to get them.”

Greg Moyer laughs and shakes his head, “And how much is he paying you?”

“A lot.”

“You know, he’s been paying people off since we were kids. He didn’t have money then, but he had candy and pop, which he stole from the corner store, that kinda stuff. He would use it to get kids to do what he wanted. He’s a user. He uses people like they’re a tool, a tool to help him get his way.”

None of what Greg says is new or a surprise; he’s basically just repeating what he told the unauthorized biographer. 

“So he paid you do drive him here? Where else have you been?”

“We visited his wife’s grave and a few other places so far. From here I think we’re heading to California.”

“She was good for him, but when she died, he became a dangerous man.”

“So you’ll talk to him?”

“Yeah, I will, for the money.” Greg starts towards the bus, then spins around. “Hey, I know you…Anders. I watched an entire Dateline NBC about you a few years ago. Trustfund kid who made up a fake story about saving orphans. My brother had an entire Dateline about him too. How the fuck did you two get together?”

“It wasn’t a trustfund and he’s my neighbor in Florida.”

“Well listen up Anders, listen real good. Jimmy is going to put you up against a wall sooner than later. He’s going to ask you to do something that will challenge you to your core. I’ve seen it time and time again with him. To get you to do his bidding, he will toss money at you until you agree. He has something up his sleeve. He doesn’t have friends, he has people around that do things for him, that help make his vision happen. Yeah, he was a great coach, one of the best, but he left a trail of broken bodies, hearts, minds and lives. Look at me, I’m one of them.”

We enter the bus. Coach is sitting at the table with an open bottle of Glenlivet aged 34 years. He motions for his brother to sit across from him.

“Hi, Greg. This is Andy, he’s my travel companion and he’s also writing a book about us. He’ll record our conversation if that’s OK with you.”

“Whatever, record it all. Let me see these bonds.”

Coach goes into his briefcase and pulls out a folder. “There’s a catch, though.”

Greg Moyer lets out a big laugh, “Of course there is, Jimmy, there always is with you.”

“I want dad’s football.”

Greg eyes his brother hard, his mouth was a millimeter away from a sneer and it seems the football is a deal-breaker, then without a word, Greg jumps up, limps back to his house (I learned hanging out with Coach that all old football players limp, how badly they limp depends on things like the weather and medication), and return with a half-inflated worn and scuffed Wilson football that looks like it's from the 1930s.

“My dad had this with him when he lay in a frozen shallow foxhole for three weeks outside of Bastogne,” Greg Moyer says to me as he hands the ball to his brother. “Believe it or not, but his platoon, in between German artillery barrages, would play snow football. My father would’ve been a pro QB, I have no doubt, but he went to fight a war instead of going to college.”

Coach holds the ball like a baby. He nods to his brother and lays the ball on the table. Coach slides the folder over to Greg. He has signed-over a bond portfolio with Goldman Sacs to his brother. All Greg Moyer has to do is call the banker and he will officially take ownership. For someone who just won the lottery, Greg doesn’t seem very happy about it, but he takes the folder and says, “OK, let’s do it.”

Coach pours us each a glass of that fine Scotch and adds some fresh chipped ice, “I’m sorry, Greg, I’m sorry for all that I did to you.”

“That’s it? Came all this way just to say that and get the football? You’ve said you’re sorry a hundred times. You didn’t mean it then, you don’t mean it now, so what’s the difference?”

“I always meant it and I still mean it.”

Greg turns to me. “Do you know what he’s talking about? What he’s sorry about?”

I shake my head even though I know the story.

“After his second season at San Diego, Jimmy got me a job as an assistant. He pulled me out of my dream job at Stanford where I was a DB and special teams coach. I didn’t want to move up to the NFL, I’d played there, I knew what it was about, but as you know Jimmy here is very hard to say no to, so I took the job. 

“When he became head coach in 1998, he made me special teams coach. We won our first Super Bowl in January ‘99. Jimmy became the first man in the history of the NFL to win a Super Bowl his first season as head coach. We won our second in 2002 and our third in 2004. (Note: the games were played in January and February 99, 02, 04, but the seasons were 98, 01, 03.)

“Then the cheating allegations popped up for the first time in March 2004. Jimmy was accused of hiring people to film our opponent’s practices, infiltrate their practice facilities to find out about injuries, and also have our guys intercept communications at home games, which were the least of what we were actually doing. 

“He pinned the entire cheating scandal on me. And now keep in mind, what they were accusing Jimmy of doing was just the tip of the iceberg. So anyway the press conference was perfectly timed since I was on a fishing trip in the Cayman Islands with my wife and couldn’t defend myself. I actually didn’t have a clue what was happening until three days after he threw me under the bus. So, he told the world I was the cheater and immediately fired me. When I got back to San Diego, the beautiful bay-front condo rented to me and owned by the team had changed locks. All my stuff had been packed up and moved to storage. My wife had a nervous breakdown. She then left me and filed for divorce. 

“The Chargers sued me. The league investigated me non-stop. Then, late one night three weeks after I got back from my fishing trip, sitting in a motel, alone and drunk, I get a call from Jimmy’s lawyer. The guy tells me to meet him at a 24-hour Burger King. I meet him, and he transfers to me $500,000 in Apple stock from an LLC escrow account owned by the lawyer to ensure I keep my mouth shut and take the fall. 

“Keep my mouth shut about what, you ask? Well…all the allegations were true and there were a ton more they didn’t find out about, but I won’t open up a can of worms here. 

“Jimmy had me in a corner. I had no home, very little savings, no one would ever hire me again as a football coach. I took the bait, gave an interview with ESPN where I admitted that I was the one who schemed to get inside info about our opponents, and my brother and everyone else at the Chargers had NO IDEA whatsoever what I was doing. I insisted nothing I did helped our team win and even denied the whole idea of us stealing in-game communications as a wild conspiracy. Spoiler alert…it wasn’t a conspiracy. 

“I sold that stock and moved to Colorado Springs where I opened up a mortgage business, bought this house, and have made a life for myself ever since. But if I would’ve held onto that Apple stock it would be worth $22 million by now, but hey, gotta eat. That’s how it goes.

“So here’s the Ole Ball Coach, all these years later saying he’s sorry again, but he’s still in control. The money, he uses it to control everyone and get his way. He’s cunning and super intelligent but he’s without a conscience. It died when Jenny died. He’s a ruthless master tactician, but his sins caught up to him. He’s sorry alright, sorry that he couldn’t pull any more people in front of him to take bullets. Put all this in your fucking book. All of it.”

Coach is stoic as ever, with that famous pokerface that so many people over the years have tried to find a crack in. It never cracked. It never would. Coach Jim James ‘Jimmy’ Moyer only let you know his true feelings if he wanted you to know, and even then you couldn’t be sure if those feelings were just another layer of his game. 

I think it’s possible that Coach didn’t know anymore where his game ended and his realness began; I say this, because I’ve been accused of a similar affliction. If Coach and I ever played poker against each other it would be a showdown of blank faces. Maybe for us it’s all game, even the times when we’re supposed to be ‘real’, is a game to us. I can’t tell anymore. Maybe there is no line separating game and real. Maybe we’re sociopaths, just doing whatever we want without any concern for what it does to people, while at the same time we think we are taking everyone’s feelings into account and helping; certain that we are the good guys when in fact we are the destroyers. And now we seek redemption through truth. Laying ourselves bare for the world. No more game, and not because we don’t want to play, but because no one else will. It’s just Coach and I with no dealer sitting at the table. No one wants to play. Who can blame them?

Greg and Jim Moyer sit in silence for a while until Greg says, “Are we done here?”

“I love you, brother,” whispers Coach.

“Hollllly shiiiiiit, did you find Jesus? Is that what this is about?”

“No, I’m just trying to make things right. Please accept my apology.”

“Make things right?!”

“Please…Greg.”

“Is that part of the deal? Accepting your apology? Are you going to cancel this transaction if I don’t?”

“Those bonds are yours now no matter what you say.”

“I’ve forgiven you, Jimmy, in my own heart and mind, and that’s better than accepting your apology, it’s more real if you have any idea what that means, and yes, I love you too as you are my little brother no matter what, but you’re still an epic asshole. I had to forgive you or it would’ve eaten me up, put me in the grave, but I do not accept your ‘I’m sorry’. Just words, and I know while in this moment you might mean it, I know that if you had to do it all over again to save your own ass, you’d throw me under the bus again, and you’d do it again, again, and again.”

Greg Moyer left the RV without another word. Before Coach retreated to his bedroom with his father's football, he told me to set course for Southern California, San Diego to be exact.

16

The bounce in Coach’s step, the lightness in his mood, the positive good energy that had been emanating from him, was gone after we left Denver. He spent most of the trip to San Diego laying down. When we stopped, he ate very little, wasn’t in the mood for movies or chatting, and was even drinking much less. His health was deteriorating before my eyes. I attributed it to depression. An ex-girlfriend of mine suffered from severe depression. It would drain her. She would age before my eyes. I thought that’s what I was witnessing with Coach. I hoped the sunny warmth of San Diego would lift his spirits.

Our campground was 30 minutes east of the city in the San Mateo hills. We parked under a huge oak and I went to work setting up our camp. At 1pm two black SUVs pulled up. A rush of fear hit me. The vehicles looked just like ones the FBI would drive, but it turned out it they were from a rental car company dropping off a vehicle for us. 

Coach informed me that we were going to first drive southeast into the mountains, then head west to the old Charger’s stadium which sat vacant and unused after the team moved to LA two years ago. What we were going to do at both locations he would not elaborate. 

In the SUV, Coach punched an address into the GPS. Everything he did, even the little tasks, seemed to take great effort. He huffed a lot, groaned, breathed deeply. I would ask him if everything was OK. He didn’t really answer. I figured if he needed help, he would let me know, so I stopped asking eventually.

A half hour drive into the mountainous area around a small town called Jamul, the GPS informed me to turn onto a dirt road called Silver Canyon Run. We kept going and going, passing ranches and scrub dotted with trees. The GPS stopped receiving data, but Coach informed me our destination was just another mile on the left. 

Finally we came to a fading white, yellow, and blue painted wooden fence that enclosed a big property called ‘Blue Mesa’. The drive was blocked by a gate. Coach asked me to open the gate and gave me a five-digit pin to use. When I hesitated, Coach said, “It’s one of my properties.”

The driveway wound down into a gully where hundreds of giant Dogwoods lived off the stream that ran through it. As far as I could see there were no dwellings on the property, it was just land. 

“You had that cabin no one knew about, well, this property was my ‘cabin’.”

We left the SUV. The sun was brutal and beating down on us as we left the drive and hiked onto the crusty ground. Thankfully, we both sported super dorky giant brim hats making us look like an old couple terrified of the sun out for a stroll. Several times I had to assist Coach as we navigated a trail down deeper into the gully. We stopped under a tree for a water break.

“OK, what are we doing here?” I demanded. 

“You know how I was accused of stealing the Super Bowl 45 Trophy from the display case at Chargers Headquarters?”

Every sports fan and even most non-sports fans knew the story. 

“Well, the accusation is true. Except I’ve never considered it ‘sealing’, I see it as ‘taking’. I took the trophy, didn’t steal.”

Coach led me down to the stream bed and we crossed a makeshift bridge. Across the stream Coach stopped at a well-hidden utility box set into the ground. He opened it and pulled out two shovels. I thought it was overly optimistic that he thought he would be able to dig since he seemed to be getting weaker and weaker by the hour. 

We walked a little further and up a slight hill, finally stopping at a towering Dogwood. Coach slammed his shovel into the dirt under the tree as hard as he could which was not very hard. 

I dug, dug three feet down and hit something. Carefully I unearthed a duffel wrapped in several heavy-duty garbage bags. I tore them open and revealed a blue Chargers equipment duffel. I opened it and there sat the Vince Lombardy Trophy. I couldn’t help myself. I hoisted it up. Its weight surprised me. While I always thought it looked like a heavy trophy, in reality it felt like it was filled with lead. Its platinum coating was dull and scuffed. 

“OK, let’s go,” said Coach. “The stadium is an hour west.”

Coach teetered as he walked, very unsteady on his feet like I had seen him several times back in Florida. This was more than depression. Something was physically wrong with him and getting worse. Again, I reasoned it away. He was an alcoholic, let’s just call it what it was, and he had cut down majorly on his drinking the past three days. He was having withdrawals. When we got back to the bus, I made him a nice strong Irish coffee. Made myself one too. 

The old Chargers Stadium stood out like a relic from the 1960s against the blazing blue sky. In fact, it wasn’t ‘like’ a relic from the ‘60s, it WAS a relic from the ‘60s. The Chargers were the only team besides the Oakland Raiders (soon to be Las Vegas Raiders) to not ever get a new stadium. It had been renovated a few times, but by any measure it was antiquated. Compared to the Atlanta Falcons new stadium, the Chargers stadium was like a pale-yellow rotary phone next to an iPhone X. 

The people of San Diego would not vote for a new stadium even though their team was one of the best in the history of the sport. Of course, the cheating scandal was certainly part of the reason they constantly voted it down since 2011, but in truth, the Chargers needed a new stadium since the ‘90s. After Coach left the team in 2011, the franchise fell on hard times. Seven losing seasons in a row since then with no end in sight. On the bright side they are soon to have the most beautiful football stadium ever built. It opens for the 2020 season in LA. They will share it with the LA Rams. 

As for ownership, Jr. sold the Chargers in 2014 when he failed again to get a new stadium. 

At the rusting fence surrounding the old stadium a Ford Explorer security vehicle is waiting for us. A guard opens the gate and I drive onto the giant empty parking lot. I follow him to a utility entrance and then into the stadium, stopping just short of the field in the southwest end zone. The Explorer circles around, the guard salutes us, and leaves Coach and I alone. I’m continually surprised how Coach, who hardly uses technology in his daily life, has arranged everything so smoothly (he only used his phone to call his wife for a few minutes every couple of days and send some texts. He never browsed). 

Finally I ask, “How did you arrange all this?”

“Andy, you’ve got to have good people around you who believe in your vision. And when you pay them a lot of money, they are extra motivated. I gave my lawyer a list of what I needed to happen for this trip. He had his assistants do all the legwork. Of course, he charged me for everything. Every email and phone call and even texts that were sent. I don’t mind...I don’t mind paying people for doing what I need them to do. You know this.”

“Am I just another employee?”

Without hesitation, Coach responds, “Andy, you’re different. You’re on my level. Few people have ever been. We’re partners. Equals. Don’t ever doubt that.”

I believe him.

Together, Coach and I ascend into the stands and stop at the 50 yard-line, 15 rows up from the field. There are still seats in this section and we sit with the trophy between us. With our big hats, sunglasses, and Hawaiian shirts, the trophy between us, in the big empty old stadium, it’s a Pulitzer Prize winning shot. I take a few selfies, but it’s the faraway shot that I wish I had. 

Coach strokes his go-tee, nods to himself, open and closes his hands. I pull out the recorder and sit back as he starts talking. (My notes from then say that Coach's voice had returned to a thick gravelly hoarseness. He was also coughing again and clearing his throat nonstop.)

“Zero-point-five, and two-point-one-six. I gave all this up for those insignificant amounts. I blew up a dynasty and ruined my life for stats. I’ll start by admitting that I never ran a clean program here with the Chargers. Never. As for what happened at the places I coached before here, I will not talk about them. 

“How things work in the NFL and college, is that as a head coach and organization, you bend and stretch the rules to get an edge. Everyone does it. It’s part of the game at every level and in every sport. It’s all ‘cheating’ on the base level, but as a society we look the other way, only calling it actual cheating when it has a lot of moving parts and extra premeditation, and especially if there’s money involved; and of course, it’s only really cheating if people find out about it. 

“A coach knowing what a hand signal means because a disgruntled grounds keeper at your opponents practice facility who’s been fired contacts you and tells you what he knows to get back at the organization that fired him, is not cheating. But if you go and seek out that guy to pick his brain, that is cheating. If you pay him, it’s a scandal. 

“When I got here in 1993, it was a huge shock to see how different things where than back in Washington. Now, it being California things were going to be more laid-back, but what I'm talking about is how the organization was run from top to bottom. It was a free-for-all. Ask ten people the same question and you get ten different answers. When was the meeting? 830am, no 910, no 920. Sorry, it’s actually tomorrow. I go ask trainers needing status on a player, ‘Uh, well, he seems OK, go ask him yourself’. 

“They screwed up my paycheck so many times I had to go and have them cut me checks in person. There are dozens of other examples. What I’m getting at is that the team was wide open for someone like me to come in and do whatever he wanted. Our head coach was an older guy who didn’t always seem like he wanted to be coaching anymore, and he certainly didn’t want to deal with players and their numerous intricacies. Sr. was just happy to own an NFL team. But, when it came to Jr., I found an antagonistic kindred spirit who really wanted to win at all costs.

“The Chargers were one of the teams from the AFL. Before 1969, there were two professional football leagues. There was the NFL, which had been around since the 1920s with all the old-guard teams like The Chicago Bears, The Green Bay Packers, NY Giants, Detroit Lions, Redskins, Browns, Dallas Cowboys, Baltimore Colts. And the AFL which began in 1960 with all new franchises, teams like The NY Jets, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, Oakland Raiders, New England Patriots, and The San Diego Chargers. The Chargers had been competitive at times over the decades, but had never been to a Super Bowl until that streak ended when we met the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl XXIX, 1995 in Miami. That 49ers team was one of the top three teams of all time in my opinion. They crushed us 49-26 and it wasn’t even that close.

“Getting back to how the team was run. Sr. had owned the team since 1973 when he bought it for $1.6 million cash and a handshake. He’d made his money wildcatting in Texas back in the ‘40s and he owned dozens of wells around southern California by the time he bought the team. He knew nothing about football when he bought the Chargers, and not much more when I was hired. He was one of those owners who just liked having a football team. Sure, he wanted to do well, but just having the team was his main goal. The team also made him a lot of money. Sr. was the quintessential ‘hands off’ owner. 

“Jr., the vice president of football operations, was not hands off. He was ‘hands in’; hands in everything. He wanted to win. He wanted it more than anything. 

“By 1995, due to some fortuitous events, I was promoted to offensive coordinator. I was in shouting distance of becoming an NFL head coach. I didn’t know if it would be with the Chargers, but I knew it was coming. My offensive schemes were getting a lot of notoriety and at the end of the ’96 season my name was being floated for several vacant head coaching jobs. My agent did get one call for a job, but it was in Cincinnati. No way was I going back to that kind of climate. Plus, they played on artificial turf, which I hated with a passion. Didn’t even like watching games played on it. 

“I felt like I was in total control of my destiny and I would not just jump at the first opportunity. I had nothing going on in my life but football. I could do whatever I wanted. My brother said I became dangerous when Jenny died. He’s 100% right. I’d become a ruthless coaching machine. I didn’t care how we won. Now with that said, I did care about my players, but if they couldn’t help us win, they were out. I had a rubber stamp for the good players, a zero-tolerance policy for the mediocre. 

“As I’ve said to you before, I’m sorry about being like that and ask for forgiveness for letting some players off the hook who should’ve been held accountable. I have to live with those bad decisions and there’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t wish I did some things differently.

“In early 1997 when our head coach announced he would retire at the end of the season, Jr. set up a meeting with me at the country club he owned. He wanted me to have the job, and he could convince his father, but I had to be ‘his guy’, meaning my allegiance would be to Jr. and not his father. I agreed and took over as new head coach of the Chargers January 1st, 1998.

“There is only one person, bedsides myself, who I will name, implicate, and indict. That person is Jr. I’m going to spill all the beans here. 

“Before now it has all been rumors, and most didn’t even get close to what was actually going on. I admit it, I was open to doing whatever shady, underhanded things would help us win, but it was Jr. who instructed me to actively cheat. He’s the one who weaponized cheating. He’s the one with the slush fund and safe houses. He made cheating a secret team doctrine. We weren’t just casually cheating; we were doing it on an industrial scale. Like I said, every NFL team cheats one way or another, but what they don’t do is make it part of their official, but hidden doctrine and strategy. 

“What other NFL teams don’t do is hire a former CIA field officer to form an Espionage Division, what we called ’The Unit’. These guys would go out and find the disgruntled grounds keeper; find the ex-girlfriend of a player, or a former coach who might know something. We wanted to know relationship statues of opposing coaches and players, see if we could find the guy who was getting a divorce, target him in a gameplan, have our guys on the field say they we’re sleeping with his wife. Real dirty stuff. We knew which guys barely made it through college and had a 0.8 GPA. We’d get in their head, calling them stupid and ignorant all game. I specialized in deconstructing the psyche of the opposing QBs. My entire life was consumed with this. I had no social life, no women, nothing but running a football team that had a secret Stazi police state within it. 

“Jr. and I turned The Unit against our own team sometimes to motivate players or break down a guy so that we could get a better contract out of him, or have a guy we wanted to get rid of, but couldn’t due to a contract, have him do something that voided his contract. 

“A ruthless dirty CIA blacksite was what we were running, and all of it organized from Jr.’s country club office, and I’m ashamed to admit, to which I was the main accomplice.

“We won the Super Bowl in 1999 (the 1998 season) against the Broncos. I was 44 years old and the first coach to win the big game in his first season. I had achieved everything I set out to do. I was on top of the world. Financially, I was hitting on all cylinders. I had bought and held tech stocks from the early ‘80s-90s like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and thankfully avoided the .com stocks which would soon crash. I had tens of millions worth of stocks and millions in real estate. I had nothing else to spend my huge salary on, so I just kept dumping more cash into those stocks and more valuable real estate up and down the state of California, especially in the Bay Area. 

“After winning my second Super Bowl as head coach in 2002 (the 2001 season), Sr. invited me for a week-long cruise on his yacht down to Baja. It was my first vacation in over a decade. I hated every second of it, not because the company was bad or the sights, and the yacht was a 195-foot marvel, it’s just that I couldn’t stand being away from my work, my routine. I had earned the reputation as the ‘hardest working coach in football’, which was just asinine media fluff in my opinion. I had hardly anything else going on. Football was my everything, so of course it appeared that I was the hardest working man in the NFL. 

“There are many men who have a decent balance of family/personal life and football. They deserve the credit and I still don’t know how they do it. Anyway, it was on that trip that Sr. told me he saw me as a son. In many ways he detested Jr., because his son was a conniving evil son-of-a-bitch with three children to three different women who he hardly took care of—the exact opposite of who Sr. was. 

“Sr. was a good man, kind, generous, happy. There is ZERO doubt in my mind, and I really want to emphasize this, ZERO DOUBT that Sr. had any idea what was going on inside his team. By 2000, he was 85 years old. He was just a happy, slack-jawed grandfatherly-type figure who told corny jokes and just wanted someone to talk to. He signed a lot of checks and liked to toss the coin to start a big game.

(Coach asks if we can move to the shade provided by an overhang. He lets me carry the trophy.) 

“Our institutionalized cheating really found its groove. We created our own computer network within the organization and compiled massive amounts of data. We had four full-time data-mining specialists living and working in a safe house paid for from the black accounts Jr. had hidden all over San Diego. I could pull up data on any player or coach in the NFL. Every team we played against, we would deconstruct the entire organization. 

“In 2004 (the 2003 season) we won another Super Bowl against The Carolina Panthers. Before the game we found out that an important player was having an affair…with another man. One of our agents sent him a certified letter saying his affair would be exposed to the world after the game. We then targeted him all game and he played terribly. I now had three Super Bowl victories as a head coach and one as an assistant. That’s four rings. I had achieved a mircodose of happiness, but true happiness, since Jenny died, alluded me and I didn’t suspect it would ever return. 

“Then in March 2004, one of our Unit guys who filmed our opponent’s practices and worked on the stadium communications intercept team, tried to blackmail us. Jr. would not budge. I wanted to pay him off. He wanted $750,000. A drop in the bucket. I was just going to pay him myself when suddenly he went public. Jr. and I sat in his country club office brainstorming. Our CIA guy offered to kill the blackmailer, bury him in the Senora Desert. It was too late, and that would be revenge, which I wasn’t altogether against, but it would do nothing to stop the scandal which was consuming the news. And on top of all this, what this guy had leaked wasn’t even 10% of the evils we were doing, so I thought we were actually ahead of the game.

“That’s when I hatched the plan to pin it all on my brother. He was not innocent, but anything he did, he was acting on my orders and he became immersed in the operation because it was either be a part of it, or leave. There were three other coaches who knew to some degree what was happening. Both of them we shut up with cash and they haven’t coached again since leaving the team in 2004.

“I cried at the press conference when I implicated Greg and that got everyone on my side. I felt terrible doing it, especially since it all went down so soon after our father passed, and my brother didn’t deserve to suffer like he did, but the way I saw it, I had no choice. It was either implode the entire organization and seriously injure the league, or sacrifice one man. I chose the latter. One man goes down for the greater good. The NFL imposed some fines, took some draft picks away, but that was it. This was before Social Media, before everything had the potential to become a HUGE STORY. 

“The seasons between 2004 and 2007 were rebuilding and retooling years. We made the playoffs once but other than that we were mediocre. In April 2007, Sr. died. It was his time, he was old. No tears shed. He lived a great life. Jr. was now president and CEO of the organization. Sr. had confided in me a few years earlier that he hated leaving the team to his son, but his daughter had nothing to do with the team and that was that. We dedicated the season to the old man but didn’t make the playoffs. 

“On a bright Sunday Afternoon in February 2008, Jr. and I sat in his country club office—he liked to use that office because it was away from any prying eyes and open ears—and were given a presentation by an MIT Professor of analytics. Jr. was obsessed with technology. Whereas I liked the tech staples and just bought and held my stocks, Jr. was always looking for the next tech play. He failed a lot and had a few hits. He never admitted it, but it’s my firm belief that he planned on creating a big-time business out of the predictive algorithms cooked up by the MIT Professor, use the Chargers as the guinea pig. 

“Zero-point-five. That’s how many victories every year the last ten years our scheming and cheating had gotten us, that is, according to the Professor and his algorithm. He crunched all our data, input into his system all our wins and losses, everything: scores, yards rushed, punt return yardage, player’s ages and weights and salaries and just every bit of data from The Unit that could be used.

“The way he put it, we were using a shotgun when we should be using a sniper rifle. He could all but guarantee us, if we used his new system, one-point-six more wins a season using analytics. That got my attention. That’s the guarantee of one win with the high probabilty of second. Games are hard to win in the NFL. Getting that kind of edge felt like magic to me.

“His algorithm, once all the data was fed into it, would pump out a coefficient, a number between 1 and 15. Teams registering 11 and above, we would deploy the full brunt of our espionage program against. Teams 10 and under would not get any extra attention. It would be a HUGE shift in strategy. We deployed tactics against EVERY team we played. Yes, some got more treatment than others, but every team got a steady dose. 

“The Professor’s process streamlined our operation. A sniper rifle. Targeted attacks. A condensation of our resources. We would need fewer ‘agents’ and thus reduce our exposure. I was all for it. Jr. liked the idea of spending less money. We were sold. 

“We kept our CIA guy, two field agents, and two of the data-miners who would feed their data to the Professor’s private servers at his home in Cambridge. Before the season, he would provide us with a number for each team we were to play. If they registered over 11, there would be a paragraph describing the best way to attack them. The list would also update before every game just in case a team somehow went from an 8 to a 12 or vice versa. And in the event we made the playoffs, the team we were to play would be analyzed. We went all in on it. I still don’t know how much Jr. paid the Professor. 

“We won the Super Bowl again that season (2008 season, Super Bowl played February 1st 2009). Only two teams that season registered 11 or above. One was in the regular season, which we defiantly needed all the help we could get to beat, the other our Super Bowl opponent the Arizona Cardinals who we didn’t need any help beating. And I promise you on whatever God or gods or whatever you want to call witness, our scheming had nothing to do with the outcome of the Super Bowl. We would’ve won regardless. We were a much better team top to bottom. 

“Now, I was a four-time Super Bowl winning head coach with no end in sight. I was 54 and had no intention on slowing down even though I felt like hell pretty much 24/7. I was at the top of the heap. A-number-one. The term ‘genius’ when referring to me was now liberally tossed around. Local media even started a petition to rename the Lombardy Trophy after me. Nothing changed for me. I didn’t even celebrate the win that much. I was ready to reload and make another run. A month after the game, I met Sharon at a wine-tasting in Sonoma. We hit it off the most I could and got married two months later. She was fully aware of what a life with me would be like. It wasn’t love; it was necessity, it was attraction. I needed someone to take care of me physically, she needed to be taken care of financially, plus, she was a big football fan. It was a good match. During the season she even stayed up at the ranch while I worked in San Diego. 

“The 2009 season was a bust. Our QB got hurt and we went 8-8. In truth I was happy to miss the playoffs. I needed rest. That season we had three teams register 11 or above. We lost to two of them. Draw your own conclusions. I was happy to have scaled down The Unit, but at the same time it had become a crutch. To only use our system one or two games a year made me queasy. Cheating had become part of my very being. I didn’t even see it as cheating, just the way we conducted our business. 

“And this brings us to that fateful season of 2010. We had the best pre-season I could remember. This was the year, I could feel it. We would win an unprecedented 5th Super Bowl if we stayed healthy. By now Jr. and I had worn very thin on each other. He hated the fact that Sr. thought of me as a son, it ate him up. Jr. knew how his father felt about him and he was always looking for ways to take his anger out on me. 

“I, of course, wouldn’t stand for any bullshit. He might have been the owner, but I was the heart of that organization. The city loved me, they only tolerated Jr. and some even hated him for his ‘new stadium’ obsession and threats to move to LA every few years. It got to the point where we were getting openly hostile to each other. It was unhealthy for myself and the team so I called a truce. We saw each other as little as possible. 

“We were laying waste to nearly every team we played even though every week was a major struggle for me. I’d been playing or coaching since 1968 and it had worn me thin. My only solution was to just put my head down and push forward. Work three times harder, pop more painkillers and drink more scotch. There was no other option.

“At 11-0 the ‘undefeated’ conversation became big sports news. I was happy to lose the next week to shut everyone up and take some pressure off. Two teams we played in the regular season had a number 11 or higher and we handily beat both of them. We pretty much breezed through the playoffs and BOOM! we’re in the Super Bowl once again. Already an official dynasty, now we were going for absolute legendary status. Our opponent, The Green Bay Packers, only registered a 10 on our scale. I couldn’t accept that because my own analog rating system had them at a 15. I took things into my own hands. The worst decision I’ve ever made.

“I went direct to our CIA guy who we called Bob. I never knew his real name or anything about him. He even used disguise whenever we met so I doubt I could even pick him out of a lineup. He had been with us since 1998. He made millions being our dark agent. Talk about a man with no scruples. I only knew a little bit about his CIA background based on what Jr. told me, but I was certain he had killed, and maybe many times. 

“On January 23rd 2011, thirteen days before the game, I contacted him to get me an edge against the Packers. Any edge. He was surprised that I was bucking the system we had religiously been following for three seasons, but he agreed and went to work on it. I did not tell him what to do, he had to find the angle. I had no idea what it would be. When we met at a hotel in Vegas on January 31st, I was stunned when he passed me over the Packers Super Bowl gameplan. Totally shocked. 

“He found a contract IT worker who had done work for the Packers and been recently ‘let go’ by his own company. The guy had maintained his credentials and didn’t even have to hack the team’s network to get in. The passwords hadn’t been changed in two years. The guy did have to do some hacking to get through security protocols and to the gameplan, but according to Bob, it was nothing. Took 25 minutes to do. Bob paid the IT guy $75,000 from one of our slush funds. 

“I sat with that folder on my desk for several hours, just staring at it. This was way above anything we had ever done. This wasn’t just cheating; this was criminal espionage on a whole new level. Something like this, if it ever got out, could do serious lasting harm to the league and nation. A gameplan isn’t just what plays will be called, it has very detailed and classified injury reports, schemes, scenarios, extensive notes and even what color pants coaches are to wear on gameday. 

“A day after I got the gameplan our team was to depart for Dallas. I dropped that folder into my very sturdy and lockable desk drawer. I never studied it. Just a quick leaf through it, not focusing on anything. I learned nothing from it. On Jenny’s grave I swear to this. I should’ve burned it.”

Coach had exhausted himself. The story wasn’t over, but he had to quit and finish another time. We left the stadium and made it back to our campsite by sunset. I ordered a pizza for dinner. Coach had a slice and a glass of wine then went to sleep with the trophy next to him. I texted with Carla for an hour and a half. I told her I was concerned about Coach’s health. She said maybe I should take him to a doctor. I decided that I’d observe him for a few more days before doing anything unless he really deteriorated. 

17

The next day I packed up camp and we headed north on I-5. Coach put in coordinates for LA. At first I thought maybe he was going to return the trophy to the Chargers, but as we got closer to the city it was clear we were going to the UCLA campus. 

When we arrived on campus, Coach wobbled out from his room. His face was hollow. His skin sallow. Sounded like he was coming down with the flu. In a mere 24 hours his health had crashed. Alarmed, I suggested we go to campus medical. He refused, saying he had a stomach virus and that it happened every once in a while. He’d be better in a day or two, he insisted. 

I didn’t believe him but I dropped the issue for the moment.

Coach told me to park the bus in back of the UCLA athletic center. He paid a parking enforcement officer $500 to let us stay there. She happily obliged. Coach donned his dark sunglasses and pulled a baseball cap low on his head as we entered the sprawling athletic center. We took an elevator down into the basement where athletic relics not on display were stored. After following Coach through a maze of halls that lit up as we entered them, we came upon a student sitting behind a cage. 

“I’m Jimmy Moyer,” Coach said to the kid who responded with a blank look. 

“Oh, right, OK,” the kid jumped off his stool. He came back two minutes later with a box. Coach passed an envelope through a slot in the cage and the kid handed him the box. 

Coach and I walked slowly through the main campus promenade. UCLA has one of the most beautiful campuses in America. It was summer so the campus was only a quarter full. We found a shaded bench and sat.

“Here it is,” he said opening up the box and pulling out a powder blue jersey with gold stripes on the shoulders and grass stains. Made of durable cotton (all new jerseys are made of nylon) with a big number ‘7’ front and back, and ‘Moyer’ stitched below the collar. A stiff Rose Bowl patch was heavily sewn to the left shoulder. “They had it proudly on display until 2011. No one will miss it.”

One part of me wished someone would notice Coach. I thought it would lift his spirits for a 20somthing to walk by and be like: “Hey, it’s Magic Moyer!”

That didn’t happen, it wouldn’t happen even if we sat there for two weeks during the first month of school in September. On our trip across country more people recognized me. To make sure that didn’t happen currently, I too had on sunglasses and a hat. Again, the two of us on the bench in our Hawaiian shirts and white Terri-cloth-lined shoes would’ve made a great picture. I broke out the recorder and Coach continued where he left off in San Diego. 

“So, I got the gameplan but didn’t look at it. That is the truth. We won the game. You know that story. I had my sixth overall Super Bowl and 5th as a head coach. The dynasty was set in stone. The argument for me as the greatest Coach since Lombardy was in full swing. As I’ve told you, I celebrated big time after that win. It was real happiness. But history repeats itself sometimes. It would be my last game, just like the Rose Bowl was my last game even though I didn’t know it. Having the Packers gameplan in my desk drawer was always in the back of my mind. I told myself I’d take care of it, shred it into a billion pieces. 

“But instead of doing that, I just kept putting it off and I couldn’t just give it to one of the secretaries to shred. We had our parade and then we wrapped up the season at our headquarters. Players and coaches got their exit interviews. Bonuses were handed out. We would be shutting down the offices for a month to rest, then we’d all meet back in mid March to fire up the engines and start planning for the draft in late April. I sat down with Jr. for ten minutes giving my own exit interview. We agreed that we were on top of the world and that a new stadium amendment would surely pass in November. 

“I left that damn gameplan in my desk even though I had a hundred opportunities to remove it. I just kept telling myself I’d do it another time. 

“I flew up to my Calistoga ranch and began to plan for the upcoming season. That’s how I did things my entire coaching career. One season ends, then right to work on the next. Two weeks later, February 25th 2011 at 9:22am, I get a frantic text from my agent: PUT ON ESPN!!! 

“ESPN was running a breaking story started by Yahoo! Sports saying I acquired the Packers gameplan before the Super Bowl. Details about the massive scandal scrolled across the bottom of the screen as the talking heads bloviated.

“A terrible tingling sensation washed my body, I will never forget it. The room started spinning. Very few people had my cell number, but if more did, it would’ve been like yours when your big bad news hit. ‘Blowing up’ as you said. Sharon was in Carmel visiting a friend. I was alone in that big house on that big property in total shock.

“I read the article. Someone in the Chargers organization had ratted me out. It could only be one person… 

“Next thing I know, Jr. has called a press conference. The country waited patiently until 1pm PST. I saw it coming a mile away. When he held up the Packers gameplan in a plastic bag with big red stenciled ‘EVIDENCE’ letters on it, most of my blood pooled in my feet. My heart skipped many beats and I was pretty sure I was about to keel over. 

“Jr. was playing the knight in shining armor, surrounded by Chargers staff and some players, claiming that he discovered what I had done two days ago and called me, begged me to come clean. I had refused, leaving him with no choice. The integrity of the game was in danger, he cried. The hardest thing he’d ever have to do, he proclaimed. 

“I texted Bob, but suddenly the number no longer existed. He’d disappeared. I called and texted Jr. but he blocked my number. I called my agent. First thing he asked was if it was true. I denied it. He sounded very disappointed that after all the years together I couldn’t be honest with him in my most desperate moment.

“Sharon called. I denied everything and rushed her off the phone. I jumped in my car and headed for San Diego. I wanted to fly, but the idea of showing my face in public terrified me. By the end of the day, I was the worst person in America. I was the new ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson. 

“In America you can lie, kill, steal, lie more, kill more and steal. You can be as crooked as John Gotti, but don’t you dare cheat at professional sports. Our professional sports leagues are institutions that many people cherish more than their houses of worship or government, and I had sinned against the most powerful and popular of those institutions...the NFL. 

“On my drive down, I formulated a plan. I’d give my own press conference and explain everything that had been going on since 1998. I would pull the temple down with me. The internet was already full of rumors, some of them right on the money true. People would believe the incredible claims I would make. I was guilty, yes, but it was Jr. who was the true evildoer. I had a ton of incriminating evidence that I’d held onto as an insurance policy just in case something like this happened. I carried it all in a bag on the seat next to me.

“I picked the downtown Marriott. I paid cash for a conference room and contacted the local media. The hotel was swarming with reporters 15 minutes after I’d sent out the message about my press conference. I’d caught Jr. off guard. I knew he was panicking but there was nothing he could do to stop me, well, maybe have Bob shoot me. 

“I stood at a podium on a small stage before a packed room. The police were there to keep order. Five minutes before I was to start, standing there scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad and rearranging all my evidence, I got a text. I almost ignored it but decided to check it out. The text read:

             You know who this is. I’m going to ask you to NOT do what you’re about to do. Instead, I’m going to ask that you take the fall, take all the blame. If you do what you’re going to do, you will destroy the league. You will ruin countless lives. You will cost people fortunes. In 2004 you sacrificed your own brother to maintain league integrity, now you must sacrifice yourself. This is your one chance to do some good. Yes, you will be ruined, but at least two men in the world besides you will know the truth, and one of them will honor you for it. The only honorable choice is to fall on the sword. Jr. did what he did not out of spite, but because the IT guy was going to go public any day. We had to preempt him. This was the only real option, just as you have only one real option. I am sorry, and for what it’s worth, I assume my share of the blame.

“All eyes were on me. I’d given countless press conferences, but this was the first time I was nervous. I almost called it off. Maybe that would be as good as taking the blame. Maybe if I just road off into the sunset that would be enough. Instead, I dropped my notes into my bag and started talking.

“I fell on the sword hard and took all the blame. This was such a huge scandal, and my admitting to it so rare, that no one officially questioned anything else. No one delved deeper into our organization because the narrative was that I had come totally clean. I cried at that press conference, genuinely cried. It didn’t win me much sympathy. 

“I told the media how I contacted the IT worker and paid him $75,000 for the gameplan. I insisted that I barely even looked at it and gained nothing from it. 

“No one believed me. 

“As for all the other allegations, I denied them over and over. In the back of the room, I noticed a man in a low-slung Chargers hat and sunglasses tip the lid at me. He then quickly left. I have no doubt it was Bob. Maybe he was there to take me out if I didn’t follow his instructions? I’ll never know. The Chargers announced my firing a few hours later. 

“Later that night when I got to the Chargers facility at 1am the place was dead. There were some media trucks outside, but they were dark. Our night watchmen met me at the gate. He didn’t want to let me in, but I told him I needed some personal things from my desk, especially my deceased wife’s wedding band which I had fixed to a picture frame of the two of us. I slipped him $3000 and he let me in. 

“I got that picture and some other important keepsakes…I then went into the security office and turned off the cameras…Then I went into the trophy cabinet which displayed our five gleaming Lombardy Trophies and I took the most recent one, the one we now have in the bus with us. 

“I drove up into the hills to my secret property, buried it where you and I found it. To this day, I still can’t fully explain why I did it. Was just totally irrational and out of context for me, but I did it anyway. It’s the truth of what happened.

“The next few months were essentially me hiding out in Calistoga and refusing media contact day after day. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Sharon was very loyal and stayed with me never asking too many questions. One day I asked her to leave for a few weeks so I could be alone. She did whatever I asked of her. She is a good woman. My agent was in a legal battle with the Chargers. For firing me they owed me $7 million. There was no ‘cheating’ clause in my contract. No one had ever thought about putting that kind of language in there. Jr. finally broke down and paid, probably figuring he owed me big time. 

“The league struggled with what to do about our Super Bowl win over the Packers. The House of Representatives were threatening to investigate the entire league. The owners met behind closed doors, minus Jr., for three days in Houston trying to find a solution. When they emerged, their decision was to keep things the way they were, but there would forever be an asterisk next to our win against the Packers saying it was disputed. Our 2004 Super Bowl win would also get an asterisk. As punishment to the team, no Super Bowl rings would be given out and player bonuses for the win, which averaged $85,000, would be clawed back and given to charity. Punishing the players, that was very painful for me.

“It was also decided that the Super Bowl 45 trophy would be taken away from the Chargers. When the league reps went to repossess it, and discovered it missing, boy, what a shitshow that was. No one had noticed that it was gone from the trophy case. The FBI came and searched some of my property looking for the trophy, but with 95 acres and backing up to a 17800 acre preserve, they didn’t expect to find anything. They interrogated me, but I pled total ignorance on the matter.

“By the time August 2011 came around, I was delirious. I hadn’t left the ranch in months. This was also when preseason was in full swing. It had been decades since I wasn’t involved in football at this time of year. When the season started, I watched every game through my DirectTV. Hours upon hours of football. I watched the NFL Network, leaving it on nearly 24/7. Sharon could not deal with me. I told her to go buy a big expensive house somewhere in Florida. She complied. 

“Watching games like a regular guy, sitting through commercials or fast-forwarding through 80% of the game if I recorded it, on my couch, drinking heavily, popping pills, eating terribly. Those were dark days. In December 2011 I moved to the first Florida house and hardly left the sunshine state since.”

I asked, “Instead of spilling the beans in 2011, you’re spilling them now. What’s the difference?”

“The difference, Andy, is time. Time heals. Time sets people up for the truth. The Chargers I coached don’t exist anymore. Jr. sold the team in 2014. Everyone in the organization has been shuffled out. No coaches or players from that 2010 team are with the organization, not even a trainer. A few coaches who were with me then are still in the league, but they knew nothing. A few players are still around, but again, they are totally innocent. Jr. died in 2016. 

“So...it’s OK now, people can know and accept the truth. The ridiculous irony of it all, is that the cheating hardly helped us. We would’ve been the greatest without it. I honestly don’t think all that cheating helped us win 30 minutes of a game if even that.” 

(Note: Many of you will dispute this claim—and I don’t blame you—but Coach Moyer genuinely believed that his cheating was not nearly as instrumental in his success as public opinion insists, and I agree.)

18

Trying to leave LA we got stuck in a six-hour traffic jam on the 405. It was if LA didn’t want to let either of us go. I didn’t hate the city like many people who had lived there and left, but it did sicken me at times. 

When I first moved to LA, I felt a deeply romantic pull to the city. For a while I would see the city circa late ‘40s superimposed atop the 21st Century version. Movies that took place in LA around the ‘40s were some of my favorites, like LA Confidential. I never liked comparing cities since each had its own realities, but if I had to choose NY or LA, I’d chose LA 8 out of 10 times. With that said, I was very happy to abandon LaLa Land once again.

We stopped to camp in the Sierra Nevadas, near Yosemite. Coach asked if we could drive through the park. His health had stabilized but that wasn’t really a positive thing since it stabilized at a pretty low point. The good news, he wasn’t crashing anymore. His mood improved, and I felt, with our journey nearing its end, that we would finish on a very high note.  

Yosemite was beautiful as always if not a bit crowded with summer traffic. Coach was happy just sitting on a bench watching the world pass by. He mentioned a few times how stupid it was that he had never been to the park before, but using his pragmatic logic, he thought it was best seeing it now for the first time. The old ‘better late than never’ mentality.

Men like Coach, like my father, like millions of others men who spent their lifetime working to achieve success, it’s like they wore blinders. The things the rest of us were involved in just didn’t penetrate their life-space. POP culture especially. 

My father knew very little about POP culture and so was the case with Coach. I had only seen one movie in the theater with my father, and that was the original 1980s Clash of The Titans. He wanted to leave after 20 minutes but I wouldn’t let him. I can’t say men like my father and Coach ‘missed out’ on life, I mean the POP culture that I grew up obsessed with, the movies, comics, video games, music, news, I know no life without it all. It’s part of me, I’m part of it. As much as my father and Coach ignored it all, I was equally as immersed in it. The only things you could talk to my father about were business, finance, and current events. Sports, exclusively football, he enjoyed to watch but talking about it wasn’t his thing. He never watched sitcoms or dramas. Coach was the same way. 

My father died soon after he fully retired. Coach was hanging on after his forced retirement, but just barely. We hadn’t talked about what would happen when our trip ended, but I figured we’d spend some time at the ranch, donate the bus to charity as had been discussed, and fly home. I’d work all summer on the book. Spend time with Coach, develop a love affair with Carla. I was looking forward to it all, and suddenly being wealthy again made it extra sweet. 

As we sat by what I thought would be our final campfire, I was feeling very good about the future. Coach even mustered a few good words about what the future held for him, especially along the lines of how the book would change the narrative about him. 

We made it to Calistoga before sunset and stopped at a gourmet market. Coach was like a kid in a candy store. He was pulling things off the shelves and demanding we buy fish, steaks, chicken, four kinds of ice cream, tons of snacks and a homemade strawberry-rhubarb pie. 

The entry to Coach’s ranch was closed off with an intricate and beautiful iron-works gate. Gold lightning strikes pulsed through the gate, painted with real gold. The driveway, long, manicured on both sides and shaded by big trees, weaved down to the main house, a huge and artistically-designed one-story dwelling with large windows everywhere and a wrap-around porch. The property was well maintained from what I could tell. Looking into the house through a big bay window, I could see that all the furniture was covered in dropcloths. My understanding was that Coach hadn’t been here since 2011. 

To my surprise, Coach told me we would not be entering the house tonight. He wanted to camp out again. I’d been looking forward to a big bathroom and just having some more space to myself, but I could deal with one more night in the bus. 

Coach informed me that he wanted to eat a massive, celebratory dinner to mark the end of our journey. He wanted fish, chicken, and steak. He wanted corn and grilled zucchini. He wanted a salad and pie with four scoops of ice cream. 

Though the last thing I felt like doing was prepping a huge meal, I wasn’t about to start complaining. This was the final push, our last official night on the bus, and anyway, some of the stuff I bought was prepared already so I didn’t have that much to do and I was glad to see Coach with a good appetite. 

For the record, Coach still looked like crap. His skin a sickly pallor. Eyes glazed, cheeks sunken. He seemed to be in constant nagging pain, but due to his toughness, he didn’t make a big deal about it. A couple of times over the past week when he moved the wrong way he let out a yelp and had been subconsciously holding his left side. I decided that tomorrow I would bring him to a doctor. I would not take no for an answer.

I pulled out our grill one last time and made a fire in the pit which hadn’t been used at all as far as I could tell, but it was marked off with big granite rocks and had carved wooden logs to sit on around it. 

After dinner Coach disappeared into the bus, then returned with the best bottle of wine we had, a coveted 1980 Château Lafite Rothschild, two huge bulbous glasses, and the two finest Cuban cigars from the humidor. It was a celebration night. We’d done everything Coach wanted to do and didn’t get in any trouble. 

Coach poured me a glass, which at 5oz cost about $2800. We toasted and lit our stogies. The stars were brilliant and a warm breeze blew from the southwest. The fire grew huge as I added several logs I found stacked near a stone and redwood gazebo. Embers danced up into the darkness 45 feet above. 

Even though we stayed up past 2am, we didn’t talk much, just enjoyed the silence and the peaceful environment. Neither of us had any more stories to tell. We got good and drunk. Coach opened the second bottle of Rothschild. 

If you’ve ever had really good wine, you know that it is a total sensory experience. Even the buzz is superior to other alcohol or lessor quality wine. The taste and aroma is pungent and dense with woody flavors and it just makes your sinuses tingle with every sip. 

Coach stumbled into bed with my help around 230am. I stayed up to burn the fire down. I passed out in my chair, then woke an hour before sunrise and went into my bed.

I’d forgotten to turn on the AC unit so the bus was hot and stuffy by 9am. Coach wasn’t in bed and not outside the bus. I looked around for him but to no avail. The large door on a US Steel utility building big enough to fit the bus, was wide open. It was surely closed when we arrived. I made myself some coffee, donned a pair of dark shades, pulled out a chaise lounge, and dozed off in the shade. 

19

At 11am I awake to the sound of a tractor rumbling down a dirt road which leads up a hill and into the property. Coach sits in the driver’s seat bouncing along like a real farmer. A sight to see. The tractor, bright green with yellow accents, looks like it hasn’t seen much use over the years. It has a front-loader and a backhoe. A canopy shades the cockpit. 

Coach pulls up and motions for me to join him, but I’m hesitant, splaying my hands out to say ‘what the hell is this, Coach?’. He earnestly waves me on again. 

I hold onto the side of the tractor as we climb the hill and ride deeper into the property. Huge old-growth trees are everywhere; sprawling oaks and elms and even some redwoods. We bounce and shutter off the road and to an area of the property abutting the state forest. 

Near a great tree, Coach brings the tractor to a stop. The area is the very definition of serene and peaceful. Chirping birds, buzzing bees in a meadow, a slight breeze rustling the leaves. There’s a big mound of fresh dirt nearby with the Lombardy Trophy sitting proudly atop it. The UCLA jersey hangs off a branch on the big tree. Under it is the old football, the cleats removed from the tomb, and the picture frame with the wedding bands fixed to it. My first thought is that Coach had unearthed something else he had ‘taken’. Something rather big. I didn’t have an internal explanation for why he had brought all these things out here. Then I thought maybe he was going to bury all of it.

I help Coach out of the cab and to two camping chairs he set up under the tree. How he managed to maneuver the tractor and dig the hole was beyond me. I just wracked it up to Coach being a man of many talents with an extraordinary ability to wake up without a hangover. 

Coach eyes me a little too intensely. He’s breathing heavy and wincing in pain when he adjusts himself in the chair and I decide it’s the perfect time to tell him I’m bringing him to see a doctor today.

“Glad to see you had the energy and strength to do all this,” I say.

“I gave myself a double steroid shot. It’s wearing off fast.”

The admission of a shot takes me very off guard. “Well, I don’t know what that’s about, but I’m taking you to the doctor after breakfast. I won’t take no for an answer.”

Coach laughs a little, swigs off his flask. “That won’t be necessary, Andy.”

“No, it is necessary. You aren’t well. I’m not going to let this slide anymore. I’ve done everything you’ve asked, now just do this one thing for me.”

“Andy, I’ve been practicing how to say this…” His voice is a tone I’d heard once before. It sends jolts through my body. “…I’m dying. There is no other way to put it, and there is no helping me.”

Before I can muster a coherent response, Coach continues, “Pancreatic cancer with a bile-duct kicker. The same kind that took Walter Payton. I was diagnosed 20 months ago. They gave me only nine months to live then. It was that advanced. What has kept me alive is an experimental cocktail of drugs that cost $30,000 a month. The main drug in the cocktail is what really keeps me alive, but at a great price. You think I’ve wanted to sit in that chair in my garage all day? That’s pretty much all I could do, just sit around and drink, but it kept me alive long enough so that the miracle of you and I could happen, and that I’m eternally grateful for. But it’s over. I haven’t taken any medication in over two weeks. Originally, I felt amazing getting off the drugs, but they also kept me alive so that’s that.”

I’m 14-years-old again having my mother tell me she’s going to die very soon. I jump up, pulling myself out of an emotional spiral.

“No! We’re going to the doctor right fucking now and getting you back on your meds. You had your fun, now it’s back to work, Coach Moyer. You’ve never given up in your life. Now is no exception. Come on, I will drive the tractor myself if you make me. I will tie your ass up old man. There is no option here. You’re doing what I say.”

And then I hear that same tone and voice that my mother used to sooth me with. It’s a certain tone a human musters when they are reaching down into the depths of their soul to try and convey some very deep truths and emotions. It is a tone of voice you cannot ignore and it cannot be faked or called up unless it is the most serious of times. It’s a hushed tone, drawn out and breathless.

“Andy, please, this is it. There is no other choice. Even if I didn’t stop taking the meds, I’d be dead in eight weeks, suffering terribly the entire time.”

Though I try valiantly to prevent it, I break down and am my 14-year-old self, crying and begging for more, more time, more time. 

“I need you in my life, Coach. Please. I can’t, I can’t. Two months is good. A cure could be found. Some new drug will come out, give us more time. Please.”

Coach reaches out and hugs me. I’m now weeping. He strokes my hair tenderly. I didn’t know he had such gentleness in him.

“I’m going to call an ambulance, get you help!” I blurt out.

“Why?” Coach asks very calmly, “so I can lay in a hospital bed drugged up and crapping into a bag and die soon anyway? That’s not going to happen and you know it.”

I roll out of my chair and lay faceplanted in the dirt. Then I roll over and gaze up at the sky which is strewn with perfect white clouds. 

“The plan, Andy, is to leave me next to this tree. When I die, you need to put me in the grave and cover me up. For doing this brave act, I have included you as a beneficiary in my trust. You will receive a $350,000 distribution every year and keep the $500,000 we already agreed upon. I’ve also instructed the trust to lend you $2 million to buy your dream home, that one on the water you’ve talked about, and pay your yearly tax bill. It’s a ten-year loan at $50 a year. When it comes to term, you will owe another $100 and receive title. I’ve also given my lawyer $500,000 as a retainer for any legal issues this situation may create for you and to take care of any you have lingering. 

“And finally, I want you to take my cat. I’m going to hold the trophy, but when I go, I want you to return it to the Chargers. I wrote a note and left it in the bag. Just drop it off at the front desk and get out of there. Then you are to text my lawyer telling him that I am gone. You can leave the bus at American Charity Auctions in LA. You’re on the title so just sign it over.” 

It feels like I’ve been cast into a Twilight Zone episode with an extra dark and disturbing twist at the end. 

“He was right,” I whisper and laugh under my breath.

“Who was right?” Coach’s face is a mask of pain and his voice becomes weaker by the syllable.

“Your brother. He said you had something up your sleeve. He said you would back me against a wall and ask me to do something that challenged me to my core and that you would toss more money at me to comply. Those were his exact words before he entered the bus. I thought you would ask me to change something in the book, or make something up. I didn’t see this one coming.”

Coach is silent for a while then says, “You know what this is, Andy. You’ve been around death. This is real. Yes, I hid the truth from you, but nothing changes the fact that this is it for me. Please, let this be smooth. You know this is real. Dig deep. Find your strength.”

I sit up shaking my head. “No, I can’t—”

“ANDREW!” Coach erupts, somehow calling up a terrifying amount of power. His voice makes me shudder. It’s the first time I’ve been on the receiving end of the famous Jimmy Moyer intensity. As a professional coach he only opened up that can of ass-kicking on special occasions so people knew he really meant it when it happened. “I NEED YOU. It’s time to dig deep and find the courage to do what has to be done. That’s it. This isn’t a debate. Don’t let it be like this at the end.”

20

Coach sits cross-legged under the tree, smiling but also wincing from internal pain. He wears his UCLA jersey, cradles both his father’s football, the trophy, the cleats, and the picture frame. I found the strength needed to get me past the initial shocking phase of the situation. I don’t know how long this strength will last. 

Coach told me that the main drug keeping him alive did so by keeping his pancreas from poisoning his blood. Without the medication, he would be poisoned to death by his own fluids. It had been slowly happening over the past two weeks, which explained his failing health. A person of lesser strength and greatness wouldn’t be as functional as Coach has been, I mean they’d probably already be dead, but it still took all his effort to do anything, even breathe it seemed. His doctor was adamant that two weeks without the medication and he would die. According to what Coach said, we were at the far end of that equation. 

I left with the tractor and returned with wood for a fire as per Coach’s request. Then, in a scene out of a very dark comedy, Coach told me how to work the backhoe so that I could bury him. We both broke out in hysterical laughter. It was the hardest I’d ever heard him laugh. 

As sunset arrives, I light the fire and sit with my back to the tree, picking my teeth with a stiff stalk of grass.

“Andy,” Coach’s voice is a gravelly rumble, “tell me a story. Tell me about the best story you wrote.”

“OK, OK…I was certain it was ‘The One’, the novel that sells big with movie options and awards and critical and popular acclaim. I really thought it would go. The best story I wrote was about a nerdy scientist working at these radio dishes up in the highlands of New Mexico. A real lonely job scanning the heavens for data. One night a meteor streaks across the sky and crashes against a mountain close to his house. At the crash site he finds a spaceship and this beautiful alien woman passed out in the wreckage. He brings her back to his place, nurses her back to health. It turns out she’s an inter-galactic thief... (*I don’t want to expose too much of the plot here, you know how I am)… Anyway, I spent years trying to sell that novel and also made it into a screenplay, calling it an alien Splash!. Nothing came of it. Nothing at all.”

“That’s a great story, Andy. I think when you get our book published you will sell that one eventually. It will be easier once you have been forgiven and accepted back into society.”

“Coach, I love your optimism, but I’m not going to hold my breath.”

The night grew longer. Coach’s breathing became very labored and he was whispering. I kneeled in front of him. “What do you want me to do?”

“Hold my hand.”

I comply.

“Hey, Coach,” I say softly, “you’re the father I always wanted.”

“Andy, you’re the son I never had.”

So I sat there very close to him, my back to the tree, holding his left hand. At first he squeezed, but then the grip got lax. He was still alive but on his way into the unknown. As Coach had said, I knew what this was. I had been around death. A person—as their life-force readies to pass from this reality we call life—can become very calm. I’ve read that even people who were dying from a traumatic situation, they were still calm beyond reason as chaos swirled around them. Some people, it had been reported moments before they died, broke out in laughter, and said things like ‘So, this is what all the fuss is about?’'

20

Chirping birds wake me. The sun is just peaking over the mountains to the east. Coach and I still hold hands but his skin is cold and bluish. I gently remove his hand and feel for a pulse just to make sure. He’s gone. I don’t cry, not even sniffle. I have a lot of work to do. 

The grave is at least eight feet deep. Instead of just dumping Coach in, I lower him down by wrapping a rope around the big tree and using it as a pulley. Coach lands almost face up. Good enough. I drop the items he wanted with him into the grave. It all feels somewhat unceremonious but I have few options. I take a knee at the foot of the grave. Struggle to find something to say. Then the words start flowing.

“Coach, you truly were the father I always wanted and the friend I finally had. You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met. One of the most real also. Generous and a little crazy. I hope and pray I can write this book, put it all together into a coherent story that people like. The country needs to know who you really were. They need to accept your case for redemption. May the Universe accept your soul and guide you into the next life.” 

I’m not proficient at all with the backhoe and it takes a long time to fill the grave, but I work methodically and finally get the job done. I then pat the dirt with the frontloader. I gather shrubs and branches and whatever I can find to obscure the grave. When I’m done the grave is well concealed and would become even more so with time. I’m not too concerned about anyone looking for the grave. Maybe his wife will want to know, but in a day or so she will be getting a visit by Coach’s trusty lawyer who will tell her everything. Of course, she knew about his health and had come to terms with it. Maybe she even suspected this trip would be his last. She would be taken care of financially very generously for the remainder of her life. I hold back from texting Carla. I don’t even return her emojis, but I will tell her soon.

I decide that instead of dropping the bus off in LA to be auctioned for charity, I will drive it back to Florida and do it there. I need time on the road. 

Dazed isn’t the best way to describe my mental state, maybe detached sadness? I just buried Coach Jim James ‘Jimmy’ Moyer on his own property after driving across the country with him. And yet, it felt very normal. I guess I’ve spent too much of my life in Edge City. I’ve been in some unique situations, and this one was just par-for-the-course in some ways, though a very intense Par 5. In other ways it was totally off the charts surreal. 

At a rest stop on the highway heading south, I call Carla, tell her everything. She gasps but says nothing as I recount what happened. She consoles me the best she can, speaking through tears. That’s when the uncontrollable sobbing hits me. 

I park the bus at a WalMart in San Bernardino. Then take a $165 roundtrip Uber to the Chargers front office and practice facility in Costa Mesa. I exit the Uber, assuring him I will only be a few minutes. A guard eyes me as I enter the offices but doesn’t stop me. I walk up to the front desk, and not wanting to think I was dropping off something nefarious, I open up the bag, show the receptionist the trophy, drop Coach’s note on the desk and hurry out. I leave just as a big commotion gets going and hear someone saying ‘holy shit!’ over and over. My ride, with me in it, pulls away just as two men come running out the front door but no one follows the Uber. 

The trophies return is all over ESPN in a few hours. I text Coach’s lawyer as I have been instructed to do. The lawyer will release the news that Coach Jimmy Moyer has passed away. He also transfers $400,000 into my savings account and texts me that the $350,000 yearly distribution will begin on September 1st. Also, when I find the house I want, all I have to do is contact him and the trust will purchase it.

I’ve finally became a ‘trust fund kid’. I have ZERO complaints. 

At my campsite in Nevada, I watch ESPN. There’s full coverage of Coach’s passing and the odd occurrence at the Chargers facility. ‘Speculation’ is that the two events are linked. They even show security footage of me dropping off the trophy. For a second I think I’m in trouble and text the lawyer, but as far as he knows no one is looking for me, they were just showing how it happened. 

Montages of Coach’s collegiate playing career, and his college and pro coaching career play all night on sports news channels and sites. He’s both being heralded and abused. The typical round-table discussion debating his Hall of Fame status is on every sports channel. There’s always one person for him, one very much against, and the rest leaning one way or another ready to be convinced to change the way they are leaning. Standard-issue sports talk. I yell at the screen several times that Coach is already in the Hall, so screw you all!

Although terribly sad to lose Coach, for the first time in a long time the future was clear to me, was exciting, and very importantly, lacking anxiety. I wasn’t projecting anxiety forward into my future. That nervous voice which is always asking ‘how’ and ‘when’ and ‘why’ had been subdued. I now had more money than I needed or even wanted. I would get my dream house. I’d get (hopefully) my dream girl and help her start her dream business. My fortunes had radically changed for the better. But that had happened to me several times already in my life. I was very ready to stay up and not cycle down. 

It’s been said that in order to free oneself from the endless cycle of karma, one must make sure the future does not repeat the past, and yet that’s what nearly all of us do. We repeat the past. Not only mistakes, but triumphs. A time-loop. I wanted, NEEDED to do life differently. Not in some radical ways, but just make sure my future kept remaining different than my past (which perhaps is the most radical thing of all to accomplish). The concept seemed doable. Only time would tell how successful I’d be. 

Coach lived his life totally on his terms. In similar ways I’ve done the same. We’ve just pushed ahead, not always caring who suffered because of our vision, and if we did care, it wasn’t enough to stop us. 

Having a vision for your life is a great thing. Implementing that vision step by step makes life worth living and entertaining, but when you leave a trail of wreckage in your wake, you have to stand back and take notice. I would’ve loved to have had this self-awareness two decades ago, and I’m sure Coach would’ve liked too as well. We both left a lot of wreckage, from family to lovers to friends to employees, and we both paid a heavy price for our actions, but many of those we wrecked paid an even heavier price, and they didn’t even get a Wiki page about them as payment. They didn’t have a ‘brand’ that could one day be resurrected. 

A fundamental shift in my attitude towards life occurred due to my relationship with Coach. Over the past four years I had become more and more bitter, hating people taking too long at the checkout, or mumbling to myself about someone’s look; just a general grumpiness that would surely soon enough turn me into a mean old man before my time. 

My journey with Coach, and I don’t just mean our time on the bus, but since I first met him, made me a better person. I used to pride myself on my ‘self-awareness’. I used to say it all the time in interviews, so proud of my inner work, but that awareness meant that I was just ‘aware’ of how much of a self-centered asshole I was, nothing Zen about that. 

Life has to be about more than getting your way. Not everyone has this issue, but for people like Coach and I, our ambition had to be satisfied at any cost. I had to become a famous writer; Coach had to become a famous coach. How we made it happen didn’t matter.

Thankfully, Coach figured out very important truths about this life before he left the earthly plane. I, too, figured out deep truths due to my interaction with him. I now consider these new understanding about who I am and my place in the world to be some of the greatest gifts I could receive. I want to heal, not hurt. I want to give and teach, not take away. I want to spread Wisdom. It helps having my needs taken care of, Coach saw to that, and I will not have to worry about where I get money to eat, so I will spread positivity and realness, make it my mission to help others achieve the life they want while maintaining a healthy degree of self-awareness and righteousness. 

I fell, Coach fell. We descended into Hades so that you don’t have to. Only by the grace of some radical form of destiny did we get the chance to climb out. I’m here to report that you don’t have to plumb the depths. It’s been done so many times. Instead, how about touching the heights?

So I say to you, Dear Reader, move through life with purpose and sometimes have no purpose. Be kind to the world, its people, animals, plants, waters, and air. This doesn’t mean be a pushover, no, being kind is an epic act of courage in this day. It takes true toughness. It is easy to destroy and hurt, much more difficult to build, heal, and share. We need more healing builders. 

It’s said that the Universe, or whatever you choose to call it or nothing at all, only knows how to say YES. For better and/or worse, it always says YES. Give it good positive things to say YES to. 

Your reality is asking for you to coach it, it wants you to tell it what to do. It needs a head coach. Coach it to make life beautiful, healthy, happy, wealthy, exciting, heartfelt and courageous full of lovers and friends, good times and charity. Then go out and be those things. Act. Live. Make your world how you want it to be, it’s waiting for you to do it, so start coaching.

Epilogue  

It’s been more than two years since Coach died, and he was right, the book would take less than a year to write and then sell. It helped that the media knew Coach and I had become friends and taken a cross county road trip. Everyone knew that I was with him when he died and that it was me who dropped off the trophy. I was even invited back on the Today Show where I dropped the news that I was writing a book about the whole saga. I had agents calling, practically begging to represent me. That was a strange twist. 

I ended up choosing a small agency based out of Brooklyn who found my book a home at a Brooklyn-based publisher who wasn’t afraid to give me a platform to tell the story exactly as it happened without any changes (though they offered no advance).

My book, this book, sold 17,000 hard copies in its first week, triple that in electronic form. I made the NY Times best seller list and spent 10 weeks there. And as of this printing, which is our fourth, Hey, Coach: The Real Jim Moyer, has sold over 380,000 copies including electronically. I have donated almost all the profits to the Moyer Foundation that I created, which helps people, through a grant process, pay off student and other kinds of ‘forever loans’. 

I was invited back to all the Late Night shows, but only went on Conan whose jokes about me back when my life imploded in 2014 weren’t cruel. 

Carla and I have forged a friendship and a love story. I got the house that backs up to a preserve with a dock and a motor boat and a sailboat. Coach’s cat, Mortimore, is happy to bat at fish in the canal all day long. Carla opened her Medieval Playhouse. She just completed her first season. It was a smashing success. 

For the most part, America accepted me back. There were those in the media that would not forgive me, but what can you do. I still get hate mail, but the love mail beats it 5-3. I’m just happy people still take the time to hand-write letters and actually send them out. 

Hey, Coach has been optioned as a movie. I sold it for less than it was worth in order to maintain creative control. Word is we will begin production next year. I’m also in talks with Netflix to turn my alien Splash! into a series. It looks like it will happen.

As for America accepting Coach, it’s more complicated than my case. When people learned what he was really up to all those years in San Diego…it was not good. 

Coach Moyer sinned in such a way that for many people they could never forgive. There were some former players and coaches who spoke highly of Coach even after they found out what he had done. Many others hated him for it or had no comment. With Jr. and Coach gone, there was no one to go after and I think that made people a little extra crazy. America likes its revenge. Some of those seeking a scapegoat came after me to ‘shoot the messenger’. None of it found much traction. 

Time passed and America digested what I reveled in the book beyond the shocking parts. The general vibe about Coach became one of cautions sympathy mixed with muted anger. This year he even got seven ‘yes’ votes for Canton. No one expects he will ever officially get in, especially after the stunt he pulled with me, but he’s there anyway. To my knowledge no one has found any of the little things he scattered around the Hall.    

And finally, I would like to take this moment to thank you, Dear Reader, for your time and attention. Reading is still one of our most sacred and intimate forms of art & entertainment. And it is entertainment, let’s be honest, but it is also so much more. Spending this time together, my words in your head, we’re connected. You’re in my head also, you know me, and through some extraordinary alchemical process, I know you as well. Without you, what I write would just be collecting digital cobwebs in the dank recesses of my hard drive. 

Once again, thank you, and may your life be full of peace, adventure, love and good coaching.

~Andrew ‘Andy’ Anders~