2024

The Buckeye Bar was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of 10 PM. A constant stream of game noise issued from the 4K HDTV screens, all tuned to ESPN.

Ryan sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the TV screen on the opposite wall. JIM HARBAUGH IS WATCHING YOU, the chyron said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Spiked Kombucha, the specialty of the café.

Without daring to glance at it, Ryan was listening to the ESPN broadcast. The news from Houston was disquieting in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying about it all night. The Washington offense was moving toward the Michigan end zone at terrifying speed. One did not have to look at the screen to see what it meant. It was not merely a question of losing his bet minus the points: for the first time in the whole evening, Michigan’s pending national championship victory itself was menaced.

A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about the game. In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at a gulp. As always, the Kombucha made him shudder and even retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. The various ingredients were themselves disgusting enough in their sickly way.  And what was worst of all was that the smell of the thing, which dwelt with him night and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the memory of that PI firm . . .

He never named it, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was possible he never visualized it. It were something that he was half-aware of, hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils. As the Kombucha rose in him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter since The Game, and his beard had regained its old Just For Men color — indeed, more than regained it. A waiter, again unbidden, brought the current issue of the Ozone Forum, with the page turned to last November’s Michigan-Ohio State game preview. Then, seeing that Ryan’s glass was empty, he brought the Kombucha bottle and filled it. There was no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The Ozone Forum always waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him. He never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they presented him with a dirty slip of paper which they said was the bill, but he had the impression that they always undercharged him. It would have made no difference if it had been the other way about. He had always plenty of money nowadays.

He examined the preview. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of rushing touchdowns. Maize and Blue to win in two snaps. Ryan looked up at the screen shot of Harbaugh. Michigan always scores, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no game preview since the beginning of the time had Ohio State ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. Michigan always wins.

The voice from the ESPN broadcast paused and added in a different and much graver tone: “The whole game could turn around on this play.  This is where Washington finally gets back into it.”

Ryans’s heart stirred. Instinct told him that it was bad news that was coming. All day, with little spurts of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in Houston had been in and out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Washington receivers swarming through the Michigan secondary, scoring touchdown after touchdown on that previously impenetrable defense. Why had it not been possible to blitz them in some way? The outline of the play call stood out vividly in his mind. He lined up a blitzing defensive back across from the slot receiver There was the proper spot.  But it was necessary to act quickly. If Washington could get control of the middle of the field, the Huskies could shift the entire momentum of the game. It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the conference, the destruction of the entire Michigan program! He drew a deep breath. An extraordinary medley of feeling — but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was undermost — struggled inside him.

Something changed in the broadcast that trickled from the HDTV. A cracked and jeering note, a maize note, came into it.

The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his glass was empty and came back with the Kombucha bottle.

He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was the Kombucha that sank him into stupor every night, and the Kombucha that revived him every morning. When he woke, seldom before 10 AM, with gummed-up eyelids and fiery mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the midday hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to SportsCenter. From 3 PM to closing-time he was a fixture in the Buckeye Bar. No one cared what he did any longer, no ESPN broadcast panel interviewed him remotely about next week’s game.

Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the NCAA’s Columbus Compliance Division and did a little work, or what was called work. He had been appointed to a sub-committee of a sub-committee which had sprouted from one of the innumerable committees dealing with minor difficulties that arose in the compilation of the Eleventh Edition of the NCAA’s Official Rules for the Regulation of Football Bowl Series Programs. They were engaged in producing something called an Interim Report, but what it was that they were reporting on he had never definitely found out. It was something to do with the question of whether remote scouting of future opponents via IPhone recordings from the stands should continue to be against the Rules. There were four others on the committee, all of them persons similar to himself. There were days when they assembled and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that there was not really anything to be done. But there were other days when they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never finished — when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels, threats, even, to appeal to higher authority. And then suddenly the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.

The ESPN broadcast was silent for a moment. Ryan raised his head again.

A sudden blast of crowd noise pierced the air. A sort of electric thrill ran through the cafe. Even the waiters had started and turned toward the screens.

The ESPN broadcast had let loose an enormous volume of noise. Already an excited voice was gabbling from the screens, but even as it started it was almost drowned by a roar of cheering from outside. The news had run round the streets like magic. He could hear just enough of what was issuing from the HDTV screens to realize that it had all happened, as he had foreseen; a sudden corner blitz from the blind side, an errant deep throw, an interception returned 80 yards almost to the Washington goal line– greatest victory in college football history — victory, victory, victory!

Under the table Ryan’s feet made convulsive movements. He had not stirred from his seat, but in his mind he was running, swiftly running, he was with the crowds outside, cheering himself deaf. He looked up again at the portrait of Jim Harbaugh. The colossus that bestrode college football! The rock against which the hordes of Columbus dashed themselves in vain! He thought how ten minutes ago — yes, only ten minutes — there had still been equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the news from the field would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was more than a PAC 12 team that had perished! Much had changed in him since that first afternoon in Ann Arbor, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never happened, until this moment.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Three long seasons it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was beaming from the SportsCenter broadcast. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two Kombucha-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Jim Harbaugh.