Fragile bottles

Rock lent an old acquaintance a bottle of insulin. Hours later, as they stood in a rain-soaked alley between two buildings in downtown Little Rock, he asked him to return it.

The acquaintance complied by removing the tiny bottle from the right front pocket of his shorts and skipping it like a stone across the wet gravel. Rock caught it, and was surprised to see it was undamaged. "Shit, man, these things are really easy to break," he said. "Not to mention that they cost about eighty dollars."

A quarterback reborn

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.

Faldo's mistake

Greg Norman sat with Rock near the 17th green at Augusta National. They were part of a small gallery following Nick Faldo and Ricky Fowler at an exhibition of some sort.
They watched Faldo chip from five feet in front of the green, fifty feet from the pin, which was set eight feet from the back left edge. The ball rolled slowly past Norman and Rock, decelerating as it climbed toward the hole. With Faldo in casual pursuit, his chip missed by inches left and began to pick up speed as it rolled inevitably toward the fringe and the subsequent steep slope that would take it perhaps twenty yards off the green. But Faldo reached down and stopped the ball in its tracks a foot from the fringe. Incredibly, he simply stopped it with the palm of his left hand. A collective gasp rose up from the gallery. Rock was stunned.
"Did you see that?" Rock said.
"I did," Norman said. "And you know what, I can't believe it."
Fowler approached his ball, in the fringe in two, and three feet from where Rock sat. As Fowler walked by, Rock whispered to him. "Did you see what just happened?"
"I didn't see anything. What was it?"
Rock paused. In no more than a spit second it occurred to him that he was about to become part of the story, which as a sportswriter was far down the list of things he wanted. "You know what, never mind. It was probably nothing."
"OK, fine," Fowler said. His attention turned in an instant to the shot before him.
Norman tapped Pete on the shoulder and told him Fowler was not the one to talk to. "If you have any information to share, tell his caddie."
"What would you do?"
"Me, I'd leave it alone."

Rainwater

Rock rode his new Vespa south into Pocahontas, Arkansas, from his grandmother's southeastern Missouri farm. Though he had passed this way dozens of times, it seemed unfamiliar to him. He knew he missed a turn when he suddenly found himself on a narrow neighborhood street.
The Vespa would not cooperate. Rock couldn't get it to roll backward or turn significantly enough to reverse its direction. He abandoned it and walked back to where he thought he'd turned off the highway.
He reached a convenience-store parking lot. Of all things, there sat Randy Rainwater behind the wheel of a sports utility vehicle. Rainwater had been Rock's cohost on Drivetime Sports twenty-five years earlier.
"Rock, what are you doing in Pocahontas?"
"I'm just trying to get home, Randy. What are you doing here?"
"The same thing. Jump in."
As they drove to find Rock's motorbike, he suggested a question for the Drivetime sports quiz: Name the native Arkansans in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Rock dreams

It was at least an hour before daybreak. Rock had just returned from the bathroom to his front bedroom bed where he would continue his attempt to arrange a permanent connection between his present state and his afterlife.
A few minutes earlier, before he awoke to use the bathroom, Rock had investigated routes used by others. He saw for instance how God had simply spoken the words "number one," and then watched them ascend into eternity along a perfectly vertical path.
Before Rock made such an attempt, or even determined what message to send, he felt it was essential that he find his glasses, dress in fresh socks and shorts, and find the most comfortable spot on the bed.

Willie and Crutch

Rock and his first cousin Crutch Aikman chipped and putted on the No. 9 green at Fort Roots Golf Course, practicing for a round they were about to play with Rock's friend from the paper Randall Hunhauf.
Crutch had a story that he couldn't remember whether he'd told Rock. Months earlier, back in April, he had played as a marker at the LPGA Championship in Clarksville, Arkansas.
Rock was surprised to learn about it, and impressed. "Wow, who'd they put you with?"
"Willie Oates," Crutch said.
Willie Oates had been known for at least two generations in Arkansas as the Hat Lady. She was a long-time Little Rock socialite, famous for her outlandish hats, who once served in the Arkansas state legislature.
"Really? I didn't know Willie was still alive."
"Yeah, she's still alive and still a pretty good golfer."
"Well, tell me how you played," Rock said.
"You know, I only played nine holes. I had a fifty."
"No kidding. That's pretty good, Crutch. I mean, heck, those tees for that tournament were at what, at least sixty-five hundred yards, right?"
"Somewhere around that," Crutch said. "And the course was setup pretty hard."
"Oh, man, I know. I saw it on TV."
Rock noticed Hunhauf approach from the parking lot, his clubs behind him on a pull-cart. Rock introduced him to Crutch. "And listen to this; Crutch was a marker for Willie Oates at the LPGA in Clarksville. He scored a fifty for nine holes."
Hunhauf was clearly impressed.

The Dead Peckers

Rock pulled into the Rebsamen Park Golf Course parking lot and saw that Tim Coop had arrived just ahead of him. He parked beside Coop's car and got out to pull his clubs from the trunk.
"Here comes Dave," Coop said.
Rock turned to see Dave Hollisman park his old Volkswagen Bug behind him and walk over with his clubs.
"How's that car running?" Rock said.
Dave's Bug had grown to his friends into a significant part of his persona. It, like he, was an admirable mess. The car's original sky-blue paint job had oxidized to dust, and rust extended up from its threshold in veins that, after forty years of progress, reached at least halfway up the side panels. Anyone inside, once they'd dug through an assortment of garbage typically dominated by beer cans and fast-food bags, could see whatever was under the car through rusty holes in the floor board.
"It's not running very well," Dave said. "The engine is just about shot."
"So are you going to get a new car."
"No way. I'm gonna put a new engine in this one."
As they spoke, Rock noticed a group of elderly men walk out of the clubhouse toward the course. He immediately identified them as the Dead Peckers, a group he had written about twenty-five years earlier for the now-defunct Arkansas Gazette. They told him at the time that they'd chosen their name after several of them overheard a girl say to another, "Come on, hurry up. We don't want to get stuck behind these dead peckers."
It was apparent to Rock that his two friends and he now faced a similar need for haste.