The Harris-Stowe Hornets improved to 9-1 with a lopsided victory at Arkansas-Pine Bluff, but the game was marred by knee injuries to their only two quarterbacks.
One game remained, against the Alabama Crimson Tide, ranked number one throughout college football, and Harris-Stowe did not have an available quarterback on its roster.
Someone at Harris-Stowe, a historically black college in St. Louis, told an assistant coach that Rock played quarterback as a child. Consequently, the day after the game in Arkansas, the assistant asked Rock to join him for a tryout on a field near the Mississippi River.
Rock was fifty-five years old. He hadn't thrown a football in years and was thus skeptical about his chance to make the team. But his first pass hit the coach chest high as he sprinted across the field thirty yards away, and Rock's confidence soared. Each pass he threw found its target with a surprising and impressive zip.
Just like that, Rock was named the Hornets' new quarterback.
He was celebrated across the campus, and delighted by the opportunity. It was the sort of thing he had daydreamed about most of his life.
At some point though, Rock remembered he was a fragile, aging man, about to face three-hundred-pound twenty-year-olds whose top speed were much, much faster than his. Obviously a single hit might put him out of the game. He couldn't possibly expect to play for long, and might very well be severely injured.
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