Until the boy slid in mud to the bottom of a deep ditch near the fieldhouse, everything had gone well for Rock as he began work on a preseason story about Oak Grove High's football team. Oak Grove's coaches were glad to see him, and most of the players remembered him from the season before. One of those players was a typical overweight lineman, an African American underclassman who stumbled near the top of the fifteen-foot ditch into boulders, slick grime, and the two or three feet of water at its base. He lay motionless. "Do you think he's okay?" a coach said. "No, I don't believe so," Rock said as he began his slide toward the player. The boy appeared unconscious, perhaps dead, when Rock reached him. Rock lifted the boy's head from the water and shouted for help.
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