Originally a hundred and eleven players, the team has been reduced to around forty, and still the practice continues. Rage quitter maybe crossword clue update#Every day the reporter gives an update on the gruesome situation and publishes a list of names-the quitters. Pushed beyond their endurance, other members of the team have simply fled, sneaking out of the ovenlike Quonset huts in the middle of the night in order to hitchhike away. Two days ago one of the players, Drake Goetze, a center from Paris, fell out with heatstroke and almost died of a heart attack. According to the newspaper, hardly a man among them is still whole.Ī syndicated columnist uses words like "bone-crushing" and "inhumane." He describes the players as "bloody" and "mangled" and compares them to soldiers on the Bataan Death March or to concentration-camp victims. The boys carry on with sprained knees, dislocated shoulders, broken noses, broken ribs. Denied water for hours at a time, the team continues to run and block and tackle no matter what. The players practice all day in a field of sand and clay drawn off in chalk lines, and they tackle one another atop jagged rocks and prickly pears. Nine days ago Bryant drove his new team deep into the desert, to a place called Junction, where the team has been housed in abandoned military barracks. The newspaper reported last week that the new head coach, Paul "Bear" Bryant, is determined to institute an extreme brand of spartan military discipline. Even so, he has heard rumors that things are about to change for A&M. But right now Kurt is beginning his last year of high school, and the Aggies are perennial losers. That same year the Aggies will win their first Southwest Conference championship in fifteen years. Kurt will be a sophomore at Texas A&M before rain falls on his home again. The only vegetation that remains consists of a few mesquite trees, honey locust, and oceans of short cactus. All of Texas is four years into a drought that has caused everything that was once green to turn brown, curl up, and blow away. The year is 1954 and the Blanco River is dry. The county seat moved to Johnson City years ago. The feedstore is only a mile or so away from the abandoned courthouse in Blanco. Working at the store means that he can become locked into pointless conversations he's at the mercy of any son of a bitch with six bits for a bag of Ripsnorter sweetfeed. He prefers the solitary existence of working cattle on his father's ranch, or the excitement of playing football on the weekends. The public life of a merchant doesn't appeal to him. Kurt doesn't much care for filling in at the feedstore. Late in the afternoon Kurt Schaffer rides on his roan gelding up to his uncle Pleasant's feedstore, only to find that the old man has already left for the hospital in Johnson City, to visit his sick wife.
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