The championship tent

A small-town high school in Texas so frequently won state championships that its leaders felt compelled to construct a permanent, yet easily storable tent in which students, alumni, and townspeople could gather to celebrate.
Rock was on hand shortly after the school won its classification's 2014 football championship. He stood downhill from the gym and watched as several men and boys dragged out an inflated, olive drab bundle of canvas and rubbery plastic roughly the size of an average mobile home. Rock and another hundred people saw the workers push it down the hill toward them. It bounced like a beachball perhaps a hundred yards before it shuddered to a stop on level ground near Rock. The men and boys walked or jogged down the hill to the large contraption and began to unsnap and untie its bindings.
With one final tug a large tent unfolded, filled with everything anyone would need for a celebration. It contained dozens of long wooden picnic tables, seating for several hundred, and pantries and walk-in refrigerators and freezers stuffed with food and beverages in a huge kitchen that included enough stoves and burners to cook for anyone who came.

Gambling service

Rock struggled with all the data involved as he tried to establish point spreads and bracket predictions for the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. He wandered from his back bedroom to the bathroom, where he lost his balance and fell forehead first across the rim of his bathtub.
He noticed blood as it splashed across the tile, but his mind was still on his betting service. Even as he looked in the mirror to see rivers of red rolling down his face, Rock thought in terms of percentages and accuracy. It occurred to him that his predictions had been correct eight-six percent of the time. In fact, his mind—a moment before he recaptured it—repeated "eighty-six percent" again and again.

Something's wrong

Something was severely wrong, but Rock couldn't figure it out. Apparently he had broken a rule, or rules, perhaps even a law or laws. He didn't know.
Up from an afternoon nap, he sorted through his mail and wondered what to do with his property tax bills and a check from the paper which he mistook for a bill. Or was it a fine? Rock sat on his couch and ate three Hershey's Kisses.

Car trouble

This wasn't good. Rock's 1994 Toyota Camry was parked in a lot across from the Hot Springs Convention Center. It ordinarily looked bad, with numerous small dents and scratches and faded maroon paint and an interior marred with stains from a thousand spills and litter from a hundred sources.
But from across the lot as Rock approached from a basketball game he had just covered for the paper, he could see that someone or something had peeled up the side edges of the hood so that it had a concave appearance. As he neared he noticed the engine was exposed, and though Rock was no mechanic, he did know enough to know that a lot of wires were missing.

Countdown

Rock was in bed. Dawn was near, and he faced the need to count down from several thousand. It was not clear to him what was at stake, but it seemed urgent that he get to zero in his count.
For a while it was very difficult, but as he neared zero, the effort became easier. Perhaps it was that he had moved to the maroon chair in his living room. It also helped when he changed into dry shorts. Comfort alone assisted him greatly.

Icy marathon

Unexpected snow and ice fell late, and the subsequent road conditions wiped out any chance of a quick finish to the Little Rock Marathon. Rock watched the race go through the entire day into the night, and it was still going near daybreak the next morning.
He was assigned to cover it for the paper and was troubled by his failure to keep the course of the weather straight. He couldn't remember when the ice started or what the temperature was at any point and was also unsure why the race began on Tuesday morning.
"Do you have any idea why this started when it did?" he asked his boss Jeff Krupsaw. "Why is it running through Levy?"
Rock was at an intersection where runners were making a ninety degree turn off of a slight down hill stretch. He watched them go one by one past a police car parked at the bottom of the hill. Two overweight cops, wearing dark blue jackets and white motorcycle helmets looked miserable and watched contemptuously as runners slid past them.

Nearly perfect

Rock was back in college, standing on an outside deck at the student union, bullshitting with his buddies when a friend arrived. He was a blonde-headed, tall and skinny nerdish freshman known for his sometimes comical naivete.
"Where have you been?" Rock said.
"I just got in from golfing."
"Oh yeah. How'd you do?"
"Not very well. Man, I played for almost three hours without a one?"
"Without a one? What does that mean?"
"You know, I didn't hit a hole in one."
"So you're telling me you're disappointed that you didn't hit a hole in one?" Rock said.
Everyone went quiet for a second or two, followed by a cacophony of loud eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old voices filled with shop worn phrases of skepticism like "bullshit," and "fuck, get out of here."

Jim Brown

Someone painted a rectangle the size of a ping pong table on the edge of a basketball court. A line was painted across the middle where the net would've been, and Rock was about to play an important game against Jim Brown in front of a large audience. Brown is considered by many to have been the greatest football player ever. He is 79, but, at 6-2, 235, still appeared to Rock as menacing as he was in the 1960s when he bulldozed his way to thousand-yard seasons year after year as a fullback for the Cleveland Browns.
Rock served first and took a 3-0 lead. A split second after he served for the the fourth time, the paddle slipped from his hand and fell to floor, but Rock kept his eye on the ball and clearly saw it land an inch or two over the line before it spun back to his side of the court.
"I lead four zero," Rock said.
"No way," Brown said. "It hit your side first."
"No it didn't. It landed at least a couple of inches on your side."
Brown looked angry. He seethed as he whispered, "It...never...crossed...the line."
"OK, your point," Rock said. "I'm serving 3-1."
Brown won the next point and then smashed his first three serves so hard and fast that Rock had little chance to react. He whiffed on all of them.
After the match ended, Rock and a friend looked at Brown's side of the boundary and were unsurprised to see piles of dirt on each side, deposited from the ruts Brown had dug up as he slammed shots past Rock.
"I don't know how I scored those three points," Rock said.

Kickoff confusion

It was time for the Arkansas Class 7A high school state football championship game between the Russellville Cyclones and the University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff Golden Lions at Golden Lion Stadium in Pine Bluff.
The start, however, was delayed by a fierce rules debate.
Game officials had agreed to use rules from the late 1800s, but apparently no one told Russellville Coach Jeff Holt until the teams lined up for the opening kickoff. Using the old rules, the kicker and return men were placed on the back perimeter of opposite end zones. Holt and many others were immediately confused.
"Wait a minute," Holt said. "My guy has to kickoff from the back of the end zone? That would mean my whole team has to line up out of bounds."
Arkansas-Pine Bluff's coach was equally puzzled: "So you're telling me my kick returners have to field the ball out of bounds?" he said. "What the fuck sense does that make?"
Rock got involved at about six a.m. when the argument between several African-American referees and Arkansas-Pine Bluff administrators, and Holt and the Pine Bluff coach, spilled into his front bedroom.

The word

Rock needed a single, specific word to restart his rewrite of A Different Closet, the incomplete product of his first significant attempt to write a novel.
He tried to estimate how many days it had been since he last made progress. It might have been before Christmas, but regardless of how long it had been, Rock was stymied and frustrated and thought for a moment that he had essentially given up over the need for one word.
Perhaps he should call Erin. She was a bit of a wordsmith and occasionally did well at this sort of thing; or maybe Kayce Hall from the Hash House Harriers. She seemed interested the last time Rock spoke to her about it.
And then there was the matter of driving to Nashville to visit his mother. Yes, of course. That's why he was up. Rock at last realized it was 8 a.m., not 8 p.m., and walked through his filthy kitchen for a drink of milk.