Weather events

It was summertime, but no one seemed surprised by the patchy snow all over Rebsamen Park Golf Course.
Rock stood in several inches that had been swept from the number-six tee box, and noticed that one of the golfers in an approaching group was a young sportswriter from the Arkanasas Democrat-Gazette. He couldn't remember the man's name, but they spoke affably.
Later they were in the clubhouse, seated at a table in the grill, when a tremendous storm blew in. High winds blew rain horizontally past the large picture window. Rock looked straight up through a large skylight in the ceiling and saw distinct patterns in the dark gray overcast, each sharply outlined in random shapes, like counties on a state map. Then he saw patterns of small numbers, which looked as if they had faded into the storm from a bar code.
"What is that?" the sportswriter said.
"I don't know," Rock said. "I've never seen anything like it."

Golf

Rock and his brother John were swinging golf clubs at dusk in the five-acre, rolling lawn of a red brick apartment building in St. Louis. John lived there with his wife and five children.
For several minutes they took practice swings, until John teed up a ball and swung away with a fairway wood. He made poor contact. The ball traveled low, fading across the lawn toward a house about a hundred yards away. It stopped in hedges that ran around the base of the house.
"I've done that before," Rock said. "I'm sure you were sweating out whether it was going to break a window."
John laughed and said that was exactly his fear.

The football

Rock was at a campsite with several friends from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers, and they were tossing around his football. It rained heavily the night before, so there were puddles of water everywhere.
Rock threw a pass that sailed over Zach's head and bounced across a gravel road and parking area to the edge of a large puddle. Zach picked up a blue pillow from the road and threw it to Rock.
"Zach, I'm not going to play catch with a fucking pillow when I brought an eighty-dollar football," Rock said.
Zach laughed.
As Rock walked toward what he thought was the ball, it gradually became clear to him that it was nothing but a football-sized boulder. He looked around for a few minutes before concluding that the ball was lost. He considered that it might have been stolen.

Tulane basketball

A tiny, cute blonde student from the Tulane sports information office approached Rock and handed him a small slip of paper as he ate his complimentary pregame meal.
"Have you gotten one of these yet?" she said.
Rock looked up at her and smiled. He thought she was gorgeous. "I don't think so." On the paper was a handwritten surname, Mutusak, which Rock assumed referred to a guard on Arkansas State's basketball team. "What's it for?"
"We always hand out the name of every player, completely at random, to everyone here," she said. "Whoever has the name of the first player to score wins a dollar."
Rock stuck the slip in his pocket and walked into the parking lot to look for his car's steering wheel, which he had noticed missing just as he pulled to a stop a half an hour earlier. He could not find it anywhere, but noticed when he sat in the driver's seat that it was back in place.

Flying departure

Rock was in a lobby at the old Arkansas Democrat building just as Judy walked through to pass out paychecks. She gave Rock one for $1,920. He wasn't sure why, but it looked as if someone used a pencil to write it.
"That means they're about to fire you," photographer Rick McFranklin said.
Rock wasn't sure whether McFranklin was kidding, but assumed he was since he had never heard of a contract worker being fired. Regardless, after further examination Rock realized it had been written and signed in ink.
As he left the building, Rock ran across an enormous room on the ground floor, which looked like one from a 200-year-old government building in Washington, D.C. It had two marble staircases the width of the building's interior, and Rock leaped down them from top to bottom—a drop of at least ten feet—with no trouble whatsoever, like an athletic child, and heard people behind him express amazement.

Golden Bears

Out of the blue, Rock was the quarterback for the California Golden Bears late in what would almost certainly become a blowout victory over the UCLA Bruins.
California led 67-21, there were two minutes left, and Rock was with his team in the huddle. He called a 41, which he hoped meant the tailback would plunge into the line to the immediate left of the center, just as it had for his youth-league football team in Huntsville, Alabama, back in the fall of 1969. Apparently it did. After an awkward exchange, the overweight, baby-faced back rushed up the middle for a yard or two.
Rock looked at his teammates in the subsequent huddle and smiled. "Are you guys even getting hit? It seems as if those guys are playing like a bunch of little girls."
The players grinned sheepishly, almost as though they were embarrassed by their opponent's play.
Rock next called for a 42.
"You want me to go the right?" the back said.
"Yes," Rock said.
The play called for the back to run immediately to the right of center, but he instead ran parallel to the scrimmage line until a corner opened around UCLA's defense. He cut up field near the sideline and ran at least fifty yards for a touchdown. No one was close to him when he scored.
Rock and his teammates responded with a celebration that began near midfield, but spilled into the parking lot and eventually spread across the campus. They had abandoned the game with a minute and a half left to play.
Suddenly Rock was one of the analysts in a national television studio as this bizarre circumstance unfolded in Berkeley. Though none of them were sure what the ruling would be, one thought UCLA would be allowed to play the rest of the game unopposed, during which it perhaps could score the 53 points it needed for victory. Rock said he believed California would have to forfeit.

Darkest Africa

Rock had just a little more money than needed to buy a train ticket across the jungle of a tropical country in inner, central Africa. He counted it out for a woman at a ticket office, and had no more than a handful of change left when she gave him the ticket. He needed it to go see a speech by a famous leader, who remained unnamed but had a status somewhat similar to that of former South African president Nelson Mandela.

Bed shopping

This bed was so comfortable that it almost seemed magical. Rock stretched out on it in a large mall department story, maybe a Dilliard's, and immediately knew he wanted it. He said so and was sent to an area at the store's lowest level where he could pick it up, or from which he would have it delivered, but could never find the area. He searched so long that he forgot what he was looking for.

Marshall Matt

A handful of Mexican Americans disguised to appear as if they were from the old west were with Rock as they worked on a highly complex scheme to make sure Kansas marshal Matt Dillon and Dodge City, Kansas, were receiving adequate rainfall. Someone perhaps far in the past had miscalculated, and consequently rain was being diverted from the marshal and town ninety percent more often then it should have been.
Miss Kitty Russell took special interest in double checking everyone's math.

Birthday

It was Brass' seventy-fifth birthday, and Rock felt compelled to act somewhat like an idiot to display how highly he thought of him. Brass seemed embarrassed as Rock danced around his house.

The trial

Though Rock was selected to serve on the jury, there was no real trial. A woman accused of murder was introduced and that was it. No evidence was presented. Rock convinced the other eleven jurors to vote for acquittal, and the town was in an uproar. Apparently there was no doubt to most that the woman was guilty.