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Wednesday, August 25, 1999 By Gene Collier
At the end of the sick, overheated, Charles Manson, Vietnam, Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town summer of 1969, Benny Davis was the embodiment of the male American high school ideal.
He was geared for his senior football season. He was 6-1 or better and 190 pounds of strapping anthracite muscle. He ran like a scalded dog. He was handsome and clean and had a girlfriend with a complexion like velvet. He was an A student, respectful of his elders and kind to his younger teammates. At 17, Benny Davis was man enough not to be a bully.
Bobby Davis was Benny's kid brother. Bobby was most of the things Benny was, except maybe for the big, strapping, athletic part. At 5-7 and 135 pounds, he was playing football, we figured, because he wanted to be like Benny, and, we also figured, who didn't, really? In two weeks, Bobby would be a sophomore. He was 14.
On Aug. 21, 1969, a Thursday, the sun burned a morning fog off the practice field by 9 o'clock and began bringing it to full boil. A brand new gung-ho coaching staff barked us through calisthenics and split us into groups for drills that would dump gallons of sweat and maybe some blood onto the glistening grass.
This regularly scheduled misery would make us an improved football team, we figured, and there was no collection of mostly unaccomplished hormone-jockeys anywhere in Pennsylvania with more room for improvement than the Panther Valley Panthers.
At 10:30, we were whistled together again, and a motley group of sophomores including Bobby Davis got issued dummies for a dummy scrimmage. In this bit of exhausted tedium, the varsity offense would huddle and call a play, then line up and knock the dummies and their hapless attached sophomores out of the way as Benny Davis galloped toward the far goal post.
After about 15 minutes, the dummies were discarded and we were into the portion of practice we feared most but pretended to love. It was called "going live." Of all the things you could be on a hot summer football field, an undersized sophomore going live was the worst. It was not just a line of scrimmage between Bobby Davis and the offense they were building around his brother this morning. It was a chasm of physiology. Across that line were mostly men. On his side, mostly boys.
At 10:58, two minutes before the end of practice, Bobby Davis walked out of a defensive huddle, and slumped to the ground. He got up, walked a couple of steps toward his position and fell again.
I remember the head coach, in his gleaming new Pontiac, burning rubber as he chased the ambulance. When the rest of us reached the locker room, an assistant coach stopped us and had us kneel. "Say a prayer," he said, "that Bobby Davis comes out from whatever he's under."
On Sunday, with Bobby Davis still in a coma, we left for Camp Hagen, some 60 miles from home, for a week of three-a-day practices.
On Monday, August 25, 30 years ago today, another assistant came into our cabin as we were about to walk to lunch. "Bobby Davis," he said, and then he paused a long time, "expired this morning." Expired?
We walked out onto the cabin's wooden porch and looked across the field. We could see Benny being counseled by some other coaches. He was crying.
So much for two other things we figured:
Benny Davis didn't cry.
Kid brothers didn't die.
Spontaneous hematoma, the coroner said, the result of a ruptured blood vessel in the brain. Not football related, they said. Bobby Davis had hung on for four days. Every August, I think about his last minutes of consciousness. Broiling in his own pungent sweat. Thirsty as hell. Fearful of being hurt. What a rotten way to go.
On the evening of Sept. 6, 1969, in the minutes before the season's first game, the head coach read a note to us from Mr. and Mrs. Bennett Davis, the parents of the starting tailback and of the late Robert Davis. The last line implored us to win that night for Bobby.
We lost 42-0. It wasn't Hollywood. It was reality. And we were so not ready.
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com
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