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intervention followed by a six-week stay at a treatment center masquerading as a five-star spa in Austin.
    At the time, I only knew what Mrs. Carr had told me: that my mother was sick and needed to go away for a little while to get better,and that Lucy and I were going to share a bedroom and be like real sisters. I missed my mother, but was relieved to be in a happy home where there was always someone to play with and grown-ups acted like grown-ups. I loved how orderly everything was—supper served promptly at seven, prayers said aloud at night, beds made every morning. I loved the way Mrs. Carr was always in a good mood, singing in her sweet, high soprano while she did housework. Most of all, I loved how football imbued everyday life, elevating the ordinary, making everything feel important and vivid. I was already a big football fan, but it was during that time that I really learned the ins and outs of the game, going to practice with Coach, watching games with him, studying his play diagrams, even learning to draw the Xs and Os of the easier ones myself: the end-around, the Hail Mary, the blitz, the triple option.
    As time passed, and my mother returned to her old self, my childhood adoration of Coach Carr morphed into a different kind of reverence. I still mostly saw him as Lucy’s dad and a close family friend, really the only man in my life, except for my mom’s occasional boyfriend. But at times, especially during the football season, my affection for him verged on hero worship.
    When I got to college, I was shocked to discover that Coach Carr had groupies—some of them
my
age. Girls would talk about how hot he was and literally tremble when he passed us on campus, swooning as he stopped to ask me how everything was going and if I’d heard from Lucy. Although he seemed not to notice the adulation, their giddiness still annoyed me. I chalked it up to the usual disdain I felt for silly sorority girls, but, deep down, I think I felt a little territorial about my longtime idol.
    After graduation, when I went to work for my alma mater, I no longer gave the subject much thought. I took for granted that Coach was the sun, and that everyone else, myself included, orbited around him. It’s just the way it was in Walker, Texas.
    Then, about three years ago,
Sports Illustrated
did a big cover story on Coach Carr titled “The Little School That Could: How WalkerRuns With—and Beats—the Big Dogs of College Football.” In the piece, Alex Wolff talked about our quiet and quaint campus, our small and homogenous student body. Considering that we had the fourth smallest student body of any Division I school—ahead of only Tulsa, Rice, and Wake Forest, none of which were synonymous with football—Wolff marveled at our ability to land players from lower-income areas around the country, given our high academic standards, preppy students, and location in a sleepy town with more churches than bars, halfway between Waco and Dallas. He threw out some of the usual theories about our huge endowment, state-of-the-art facilities, and idyllic red-brick campus, but ultimately chalked it up to Coach Carr’s charisma and recruiting “wizardry.”
    I knew from watching Coach in action that he actually embraced our Achilles’ heel, finding a way to spin the negative into a positive with parents of his recruits, especially the mothers, who in most cases made the final decisions about where their sons would play. It was a central part of his pitch. After charming everyone in the living room—and often the entire neighborhood—he’d explain, usually once the kid was out of earshot, that there was plenty of fun to be had, but not so much that a kid could get himself in trouble. He’d then highlight Walker’s staggeringly high graduation rate and the fact that it was virtually unheard of for any of his players to end up on
SportsCenter
for anything other than football. In Coach’s entire tenure as head coach, there’d been no