Forgotten Season (Excerpt)

The Baylor Bears and the Legend of “Brain Hand”

Something happens to even good teams in the midst of a losing season. You begin to play as though you think you’re going to lose. Even if you start a game off leading and playing well, losing becomes a habit; when you become accustomed to it, you always seem to find a way to lose. Even teams who were champions the season before can catch this affliction.

It had been that way with the teams I had played on at Rice in 1986 and 1987; even when we outplayed an opponent and kept the game close, we would almost always find a way to lose the game in the end. I got so tired of being on losing teams with this habit and expectation of losing that it was one of the reasons I transferred to Arkansas. And that, in turn, became one of the cruel ironies in my star-crossed college football career. Never in my remotest dreams did I ever think this disorder would infect a team at Arkansas.

But in 1990, I learned I was wrong.

The only memory that stands out from that week of forgettable practices preparing for an unmemorable road trip to Waco — the stadium with the worst visitor locker room in the conference — occurred during one of our team meetings. Among the other unnecessary, unfruitful, and at times counterproductive things Jack Crowe had instituted that were changes from the way Ken Hatfield had conducted business were the full team meetings held during the week. In addition to the new curfew rules that had not existed under Hatfield, these new team meetings were perhaps the most hated invention of the new regime. Crowe decided to have one at the beginning of practice each week, and he appointed a different assistant coach each week to lead them. For the Baylor week, our defensive line coach — a man who had no love of kickers or punters and for whom the feeling was mutual from our end of things — would lead the big team prep meeting.

I had already had a brief run in with him earlier in the season as I was coming off the field after a long punt return by Texas during our game against the Longhorns in Austin. As happened a lot that year, they broke a long return, and I (the punter) had to help out on the tackle, right next to their sideline. When I tried to get up, I felt someone try to shove me back down. I jumped up and stood face to face with some 6’ 7” back-up tight end or something. A freaky-looking dude who was acting very brave on his own sideline with his entire team and coaching staff behind him.

Our facemasks touched for a second. I gave it a fleeting thought; I could kick him in the crotch and drop his ass, but I’d be swarmed by burnt orange jerseys within seconds. Plus, I’d been in a huge, bench-clearing brawl in high school after a similar cheap shot from some punk during our annual rivalry game with the other high school in our town at the end of the season. That had not gone well. I got ejected from that game and had to apologize to my head coach the next day. My father — a former player himself — never mentioned it; he probably liked it. But my mother who was an English teacher at my school was less than thrilled.

This all flashed before my eyes before I thought better of it, and turned away from the freak to run off the field. (Texas would go on the win the Southwest Conference championship that year, and go in to the Cotton Bowl ranked 3rd in the nation, with an outside chance to win the National Championship, only to get absolutely blown out by Miami, 46–3. I took a lot of satisfaction at the result, and I noticed I never saw the freaky back up tight end on the field that day. Maybe he just didn’t want any of those boys from the U.)

But I digress.

As I got to our sideline, the D-line coach ran over to me like he was my position coach, as if he was going to chew me out or something. He had this dumbass look on his face that made me want to slap him. We were down at that point 42–17 and the game was out of reach. I was in no mood to speak with anyone. What the hell did he want? He got to about three feet from me, and I yelled, “What are you looking at?”

I stood there ready for whatever he was going to do. Nothing came out of his mouth, although his face looked like he was trying to process what I had just said. He froze. He locked up. He never said a word. I walked past him back to where the rest of the kickers hung out, away from everybody else.

“What’s up with that? I thought he was going to do something,” our place kicker Todd Wright asked me, smiling. “I have no idea.” I answered.

We intensely disliked this guy even during the best of times, which were few that year. He didn’t acknowledge the existence of kickers unless he wanted to blame them for his and the defense’s failures; that was a convenient and often invoked excuse from some of the defensive coaches for our porous defense all season long. They liked to blame punters for “putting the defense in a bad situation” on the field, or our placekicker for missing a field goal and “costing us momentum,” whatever the hell that meant. (I never knew how you could cost the defense momentum.)

These guys ignored the fact that most of the time we had kicked off and tackled the returner inside the 20 or punted the opponent down to the three-yard line deep in their own territory, only to see the defense give up a 97-yard touchdown drive. That had happened more than once. In fact, it seemed to happen more often than not to a defense that gave up an average of 33 points and 402 yards per game in 1990. (In comparison, the 1989 team had allowed just 18 points per game and 335 yards of total offense.)

But back to those team meetings. The coaches running the meeting each week would pick out the best players on the opposing team that they thought we needed to focus on in order to have the best chance to win. In those days before Powerpoint became a thing, coaches still used blackboards. We watched as the defensive line coach who’d nearly accosted me near the end of the Texas game wrote out the names of Baylor’s best players. When he came to one of their best defensive players, linebacker Brian Hand, he wrote in all-caps in huge letters, “BRAIN HAND.”

Wright, who was sitting next to me on the front row, turned and looked at me with a grin beginning to form on his face. I gave him a warning look, but the coach was so intense talking about “BRAIN HAND” that we couldn’t suppress our smiles. Luckily, nobody appeared to catch us laughing at our coach’s lack of spelling skills. But everyone in the room had to also know what had just happened. To their ever-lasting credit, however, nobody in the room said a word, and we just let him continue with his intense briefing about how tough the Baylor Bears were.

Nobody raised their hand and said, “Uh…coach. Uh… you spelled Brian wrong…” He never noticed his mistake. And he just kept rolling. This made everything funnier than it would’ve been had someone corrected him. The more worked up he got, the more we started laughing. He thought we were getting fired up over his pep talk, so he fed off it and got louder and crazier. And so we laughed even louder, which made him turn it up another notch. And so on and so forth.

Little did he know it wasn’t his pep talk; we were laughing, shaking our heads, and high-fiving now about BRAIN HAND. Like so many other things that season, you couldn’t make this shit up.

The whole scene was a perfect metaphor for a season that was rapidly going down the toilet.

Glen Hines is the author of three books that make up the Anthology Trilogy — Document, Cloudbreak, and Crossroads — available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.