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He speaks from the heart. I’ve heard a lot of these first-day speeches, and believe me, it’s more common than not for them to seem formulaic, straight off boilerplate. This is not like that at all. Terry is intense, fiery, and enthusiastic. I never get the feeling he is saying things for effect. It seems so authentic, the way he makes contact with everybody in the room and jacks up the decibel level. Even when he dabbles in clichés—“We’re going to do things the right way”—you can’t help but feel his passion and energy. Terry is a small man and doesn’t have an imposing presence when you first see him, but he is powerful nonetheless. The essence of his talk is simple: “Everybody says we’re going to stink. I hear it over and over. I think they’ve got it all wrong. You want to come along as we prove them all wrong?”
Terry talks for twenty minutes or so, and by the time he is done, all I can think of is: This is a guy I’m really going to enjoy playing for.

     
     

CHAPTER THREE
     

    FAITH ON WALNUT
     
    S ome kids are fighters. Other kids are scrappers. I am a scrapper. I spend two extremely scrappy years—fifth and sixth grades—at St. Edward School, and the trend continues into the seventh grade at Wright Middle School, where the kids are bigger and stronger than me, but not too many have less regard for their bodies. I don’t worry about pain or getting hit or getting knocked down. I just get back up and come back at you like a boomerang. My goal when I fight is simple: I want to give more than I receive. This doesn’t make me proud. It’s just what it takes to survive, and in seventh grade survival is what I’m all about.
    Fights aren’t an everyday occurrence in my neighborhood, but I seem to have more than my share of them. I fight to defend myself, to right a wrong, or to settle a dispute. I’m not picky. I figure out early that in a school where smoke billows out of the bathroom and pregnant girls walk the hallways, you don’t want people thinking you are wimpy.
    So I learn to act tough when I need to, and sometimes when I don’t need to—which gets me into trouble. In the lunchroom one day, I get up from my seat. You have assigned seats at Wright at lunchtime, and strict rules about leaving them, the school’s effort to prevent the cafeteria from turning into WrestleMania. But I need to get a homework assignment from a classmate, so I get up and walk across the lunchroom.
    A monitor corrals me and says, Get back to your seat.
    He’s kind of nasty about it. I don’t appreciate his tone. I cuss under my breath. Not loud, not a bad cussword, but an audible obscenity, no doubt.
    Now he doesn’t appreciate my tone.
    Come with me, young man. You are going to regret your garbage mouth.
    He’s right—I am going to regret it—because this is Tennessee in the mid-1980s and corporal punishment still rules the day. The monitor escorts me down to see Mr. Tinnon, the assistant principal in charge of paddling. He conveniently keeps the paddle by his desk.
    Bend over, Mr. Tinnon says.
    He wallops me hard on the butt three times, then informs me that I have been suspended for three days.
    Three days? For one little whispered cussword?
    I don’t think the punishment fits the crime—I know kids who had full-scale brawls in the hallway who didn’t get suspended for three days—but my viewpoint does not get a forum.
    Three days, he says.
    I serve my sentence, but whether I learn any enduring lesson from it is far less clear. I have my first fight in seventh grade two weeks later. It’s against a big, fat kid whose name I never learned. I have no idea how or why we wind up in the Wright parking lot behind the school, but somehow he crosses me, or I cross him, and there we are, a couple of dopes with our dukes up, ready to rumble. I follow my usual strategy, which is to barge right in and see what the guy’s got, and watch carefully to see if he closes his eyes when he throws a punch. Most