to tell Bruce the news. Charlie said, “Hey, good to see you, man. We beat Chatham!”
The senior captain came to present the game ball to Bruce. Quickly all you could hear was play-by-play game moves from the night before. It was important to Bruce. He knew the Chatham players well. Lots of laughing and celebrating went on all around his bed. Before long the guys left.
After the guys left Charlie stayed behind and asked, “How are you really doing, man?”
Bruce rolled his eyes and said, “What do you think?”
“Just checking. There’s something I need to tell you. Man, you’re not going to like this but your girlfriend showed up at the dance last night with some guy from Morristown.”
Bruce felt as if he’d taken another blow to his gut. He felt betrayed and dishonored at a whole new level. “What? You’ve got to be kidding me?”
“No, man. We took care of it though,” replied Charlie.
“What do you mean, you took care of it?” asked Bruce.
“No one spoke to her at the dance. We take care of our own, Bruce. She left early because everyone turned their backs on her and we got the guy alone outside and roughed him up a bit. That’s how we look out for our own, man,” explained Charlie.
Charlie finally left and Bruce felt disappointed and depressed. “Things can’t get any worse than this,” he thought.
Just then he heard a noise outside in the hallway. He looked up and saw his girlfriend standing in the doorway of his hospital room. This was the last straw! Bruce yelled for the nurses, “Throw her out! I don’t want to see you or talk to you!”
She tried to reason with him and explain her side of the story but he wanted nothing to do with her and he wasn’t open to listening to her. She said, “You don’t understand.”
“I don’t want to listen to your excuses. Nothing you can say or do will change my mind,” he responded.
As far as he was concerned she had betrayed him and nothing justified her actions. “It’s over,” he said with finality.
Crying, she turned and ran leaving Bruce alone in his room. He began to rationalize his situation and thought to himself, “What are girls anyway? Girls are a distraction! Now I can focus on what’s important.”
He wondered, “Now what am I going to do? I’m not an active jock anymore and I don’t even have a girlfriend.”
Then he began to worry about his father. “What am I going to tell him? He’s been out of town and he didn’t want me to play football in the first place. He’s going to kill me!”
Bruce’s Dad was stern and tough, a “take no prisoners” kind of man. He was on the road and away from home a lot as a Regional Sales Manager for a large pharmaceutical company. Bruce convinced his Mom to agree to sign the papers to let him play football this season. He realized that his Mom and Dad didn’t have secrets, but his father had never come to one of his games. Now what?
Bruce was still in the hospital and it was Sunday evening. He had been sleeping and when he woke up there he was, in the flesh, his father, bigger than life, large and intimidating. He felt his disapproval immediately and cringed under the look he gave him. No sympathy or compassion was coming from this man. He was angry.
His father’s anger was palpable and directed at him. He knew that if “looks could kill” he was already dead. He simply stared looking down at Bruce lying in his hospital bed, beat up and in a cast. Without saying one word to him, his father turned around and walked out of the hospital room leaving Bruce feeling devastated.
Talk about feeling all alone—in that moment all Bruce felt was pain, physical and emotional. Alone with his thoughts he wondered, “How am I supposed to fulfill my mission? I thought I knew. It’s time to re-evaluate and re-define who I am and how I’m going to move forward with my life. I won’t be getting a football scholarship to Cornell either. How can I make lemonade out of these lemons? What am I going to do?”
As he closed his eyes and began to drift off to sleep he remembered a ride home with his Dad a year earlier after the Chatham game. They talked about overcoming adversity. It seemed just like yesterday. Bruce played for Chatham as a freshman and ironically after moving a year later played for Madison against Chatham as a sophomore.
He remembered everything about the conversation on the drive home. The weather was dreary, wet and cold and by the end of the game it was raining so hard you couldn’t see out of the car window. Madison lost at the last minute and Bruce took a lot of verbal abuse from his former Chatham teammates and friends. He remembered some of their mean and cutting comments: “Why are you playing for Madison? You’re a traitor, Bruce.”
Bruce wasn’t the only one who heard the taunts. His father heard them too. Looking back Bruce saw how upset his father was as he watched the game. He saw Bruce hit and pushed after the play whistle sounded. He heard their mean and nasty remarks and saw the dirty looks aimed at Bruce, spitting on him as he walked by. All of the abuse was specifically aimed at his son, Bruce, whom they considered the enemy. The officials didn’t do anything about it. “No wonder he didn’t like me playing football,” he thought.
On the drive home after the game he remembered that his father had tried to make small talk with him but he was so caught up in his own world he only responded with one-word answers. After a while his Dad gave up and grew silent, no longer looking over at Bruce at all. The silence was almost painful. All you could hear was the back-and-forth swishing of the windshield wipers—back and forth, back and forth. The sound was hypnotic and mesmerizing.
Then Bruce remembered his Dad suddenly pulled off the road and stopped. “What’s going on?” he asked.
Ready for a confrontation his Dad said, “Hey, Bruce, do you want to know what the measure of a real man is?”
Bruce said, “Yeah.”
His Dad went on: “Anyone can look good when times are good but the measure of a real man is how well he behaves when faced with real adversity. That’s when your true nature comes out and you know what you’re made of.”
At sixteen Bruce didn’t fully understand or appreciate his father’s wisdom; however, it stuck with him for the rest of his life. He was so self-absorbed he suddenly realized what a jerk he was and said, “Thanks, Dad, thank you. I’ll remember that.”
The tone and mood in the car immediately shifted and lightened up.
Bruce wondered if this was why his Dad didn’t want him to play football this year. He thought, “Maybe it’s because he saw how badly I suffered from my former teammates and friends.”
He thought more about it and continued to think about what kind of lemonade he could make. He remembered the silent vow he made to his grandfather, the vow he made during Khrushchev’s UN visit. After all, the seeds were planted years before by his Grandpa Joseph and now they were ready to grow. He wondered, “Is this accident really a blessing in disguise? Without football and my girlfriend I won’t be distracted.”
During the remainder of his hospital stay he obsessed about his new mission. All he thought about was finding a way to stop Nikita Khrushchev. “Man, how am I, a sixteen-year-old kid, going to beat the Soviets at their own game?”
His mission became clearer every day. After three days he left the hospital. “Man, I still don’t have a clue about how to get it done.”
“First things first,” he thought. “I have to face my father when I get home. I’m not looking forward to that confrontation.”
Bruce only saw roadblocks and obstacles ahead. He couldn’t see an end in sight or any way around all those obstacles. “I’ve got to be tough. This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky dream. I know this mission is achievable. It has to happen. It is necessary. No one can stop me, not even my angry father.”
Bruce felt he had to make choices that were right for him, so, with