When I was done, everyone was quiet. I could tell that it moved them.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“I’m surprisingly okay. I usually don’t like to sing in public.”
Dr. Carmichael just gave me a knowing look. I had a feeling that I would learn a lot here, and not all of it would be from books.
◊◊◊
We were turned over to a tour guide to show us the campus. A guy in a Clemson football jersey showed us around. He introduced himself as Cole.
“Leaving home for the first time can be stressful. Clemson strives to offer everything you will need, including great housing, dining, transportation, health services, activities—everything that makes Clemson feel like a home away from home,” he said. Then he looked at the parents. “Of course, we don’t want to lose sight of the reason the little darlings are here. Clemson offers a great education.”
“What are some hot spots in town?” Wolf asked.
“The Esso Club is a must before games. I know that the ESPN crew goes there every time they televise a game. Personally, I think it’s kind of a dump, but it’s a tradition. They’ve been around since 1933 and are close to the stadium. They have the standard bar food and cold beer. It’s not like there aren’t better places to go, but you have to try it at least once.
“For later, there’s a late-night diner, just outside of town, that’s a local hangover-avoidance remedy. Unfortunately, the folks there know me by name.”
Cole wrote down the names of the places and directions on how to get there for us.
“What can you tell us about the town?” Brook asked.
“It’s an old southern town with small-town values. It’s sort of amazing that they’ve built such a football power here. On game day, it goes from a speck on the map to the largest city in South Carolina by a country mile. Half of the 300,000 people who show up have no affiliation with the school. They are a bunch of good-ol’-boys from the Blue Ridge Mountains, farmers, ranchers, and military guys from the Second World War and Korea. Back in those days, it was Clemson A&M. They love the school and are fiercely protective of it and respectful of those who attend and graduate. You may be a ‘sissified college boy,’ but you’re their ‘sissified college boy,’” he shared.
This kid was a fount of information that I decided to take advantage of.
“What about the football players and coaching staff?” I asked.
Cole stopped our tour and smiled.
“I have a friend on the team, and he says coming here was the best decision he ever made. The coaching staff cares about the players. I have another high school friend who went to a big-time program, and he told me that they only were interested in what you could do for them. He got injured, and they pushed him to play. He ended up hurting himself worse and may never take another snap. The sad part is they’re trying to get him to transfer so they can free up his scholarship. That would never happen here.
“Coach Swank and his staff aren’t like that. They recruit character. They will pass on a four- or five-star player for a three-star if the better-ranked recruit has an attitude problem. Their philosophy is that they can coach up someone with the right attitude and work ethic. Once you commit, it’s ‘until graduation do we part.’
“From everything I’ve heard, the players love the coaches. You need to know that they don’t tolerate bad behavior. If you mess up, they’ll even send you home from a bowl game. They did that with the number-one receiver before the Championship Game with Alabama. It cost us the game, but everyone understood they were doing it for the team.
“My friend on the team says that they work hard to prepare them for possibly playing in the NFL. Coach Swank told him that only a handful will make it, so he makes sure that every football player gets the best possible education he can,” Cole said.
“I think I want to play for him,” Wolf’s dad said.
All the parents seemed to like the sound of what Clemson had to offer. I’d looked up how they ranked as far as academics for football players. They were ranked fourth compared to the top 25 football teams, behind only Northwestern, Notre Dame, and Stanford.
We were returned to the new football facility. Their head of recruiting had been sent to 36 football buildings around the country. They’d tried to take the best ideas from each to make the best facility in the nation. Two things stood out for me. They had a nap room. Hey, naps are important. You could also get your hair cut. I thought they had done a good job and didn’t see anything missing that I’d want. This was big-time football, and they knew what they were doing.
They’d also done their homework because I knew our chaperone. Terry Halsted was one of my receivers from Elite 11. My mom gave away that we’d met when she stepped up and hugged him.
“It’s so nice to see a friendly face. How have you been?” Mom asked.
He caught us up on his exploits during his senior year in Syracuse, New York. They’d made it to their state championship game, but had lost. He was currently riding the bench for Clemson but had seen some playing time over the last few games.
“I thought Elite 11 was insane with the talent we faced. I was cocky when I got here and thought because I was a star back home, I’d just step in and play day one. It was a wake-up call when I competed against players who have been in the system for three years and had developed physically. Once I figured out that the only way I would see playing time was to up my game, I started to see the field.
“Your skills will only get you so far. You have to show you deserve it,” Terry explained.
I’m not sure what I’d assumed about playing time. There would be competition, but I’d always been able to prove I was the best. What Terry said was one of those ‘aha’ moments you have when you figure out something that should have been obvious. Terry was a tremendous talent, and he hadn’t started from day one. It would have to be the right situation for me to do that. No coach in his right mind would turn the keys to his program over to an unproven quarterback, no matter how good he was.
Knowing how competitive I was, I knew that I should factor the odds of early playing time into the equation. I thought about all the schools that I’d been to, and Oklahoma stood out as a serious possibility. They had a transfer who had walked on at Texas Tech and became the first freshman walk-on to start the first game for a BCS school. Texas Tech had messed up his scholarship, and the coach hadn’t communicated it well. He’d transferred to Oklahoma, where he was forced to sit out a year. He was now their starter, and there was already talk of a possible Heisman run next year while I did my movie. I hoped they would give me a shot at the job in spring ball if I went there. I would keep them in mind if Michigan didn’t work out.
We each took our turn to meet briefly with the coaching staff. They said all the right things, and I was warming to the idea of coming to Clemson. There was no doubt that I was interested in winning national championships, and for that, right now, Clemson was a much better destination than Michigan. Football was a team sport, and a quarterback usually needed a lot of help from his teammates to push his team to the top. There were exceptions, though. I was about to watch one of them play tonight. The kid from Louisville had pulled his team up to a level where they could play with Clemson and possibly win tonight. Everyone would agree that Louisville didn’t have the athletes Clemson did.
I guess that was why going to Michigan didn’t scare me. They might not be on the same level as Ohio State or Alabama, but they were close enough that I could see them getting to the top. And a good quarterback would make the difference. Another school that fit the Michigan model was Georgia. Coach Mason had pointed out that the talent within the state should have been enough to have them competing for SEC championships. It looked like their new coaching staff had made a turn, and they were winning the in-state recruiting battles.