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Added date: 09/23/2010
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Take picture of what you think interesting to investigate as a private eye
Smash buildings to create as much damage as possible.
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CarGo's injury called 'fatty mass with tentacles'
DENVER -- Head athletic trainer Keith Dugger described the giant cell tumor removed from the left index finger of outfielder Carlos Gonzalez on Tuesday as a "fatty mass with tentacles."
Still feeling the effects of anesthesia when he saw the images, Gonzalez thought of food -- and not the appetizing kind.View Full Game Coverage
DENVER -- Head athletic trainer Keith Dugger described the giant cell tumor removed from the left index finger of outfielder Carlos Gonzalez on Tuesday as a "fatty mass with tentacles."
Still feeling the effects of anesthesia when he saw the images, Gonzalez thought of food -- and not the appetizing kind.View Full Game Coverage
"It was something really creepy," Gonzalez said. "It might be a Cheeto, because I eat too many Cheetos."
Later he compared it to a shrimp. Whatever it was -- and a pathology report expected by the end of the week could provide a final answer -- it's gone, and it's possible that Gonzalez could return in five weeks, if not sooner. He hopes to begin baseball activity shortly after sutures are removed in two weeks.
"I'm glad it's gone and it's not in my finger anymore," Gonzalez said on Wednesday night after returning to Denver, his arm in a sling but a smile on his face. "I've got to take it day by day, little steps, and just try to get back on the field when I'm ready."
Recurring swelling in the finger, which came and went mysteriously, forced Gonzalez out of the lineup on three occasions. It was a key reason why Gonzalez, who has started the last two All-Star Games, was batting .255 with eight home runs and 31 RBIs in 52 games before being placed on the 15-day disabled list last week.
Dr. Thomas Graham, a hand specialist in Cleveland, performed the surgery to remove the mass.
"We're calling it a giant cell tumor -- it sounds scarier than it is," Dugger said. "Besides a cyst, it's probably the most common thing in a finger.
"But it had some branches off this little fatty mass that just didn't look right. We're not quite sure what it is. The one that comes off a little nerve, we're calling it a neuroma [a tumor, usually benign], and the other looks like possibly a blood vessel, a thrombosis that just kind of hardened up."
Dugger said that it's possible Gonzalez could sooner than five weeks, since the recovery time for such surgeries varies depending on how Gonzalez's finger feels when he begins hitting and throwing.
Gonzalez was encouraged.
"I was really happy they took all that stuff out of my finger," he said. "Hopefully, I can feel better when I start making contact again, and not be afraid to just let the swing go."
The decision to delay the surgery -- even though the swelling had been a problem for more than a month -- was simply because if the injury turned out to be minor, the surgery would have created more problems than the mass itself.
"It wasn't like when you get jammed, he has a bruise, and it hurts for three days," Dugger said. "Sometimes it would disappear completely, and he'd feel good.
"Normal swelling, in your hands and in your feet, doesn't go away within an hour."
If all goes well with the pathology report and the ensuing rehab, Dugger said, it's possible this issue will be behind Gonzalez.
"The doctor was real excited about possibly eliminating any other onset of this," he said. "But it was a larger piece than we thought. It's kind of like a fatty tissue with tentacles on it."
Dugger, who has been with the Rockies throughout the life of the franchise, could only shake his head at the number of strange injuries that have occurred this season. Michael Cuddyer fractured his left shoulder socket while diving for a ball -- an injury more common in football or extreme sports -- and pitcher Brett Anderson broke his left index finger when he hit a pitch off the end of his bat -- an injury circumstance Dugger had never seen.
"I don't feel sorry for us or the organization," Dugger said. "We just seem to have these ... I don't know how you can explain it, kind of freak-type incidents.
"These are not our normal injuries. My counterparts and peers, we talk all the time. They're like, 'What is going on out there?'"
Thomas Harding is a reporter for MLB.com. Read his blog, Hardball in the Rockies, and follow him on Twitter @harding_at_mlb. Cody Ulm is an associate reporter for MLB.com.

subset: commoncrawl


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Researching the web, I've found numerous image viewing sites, but non with voting options.


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When David Sills V was eight, he attended a summer football camp at the University of Delaware, a few minutes from his family's home, in the town of Bear. Sills was a precocious kid, a peewee quarterback who actually threw the ball instead of scrambling on instinct. He seemed to see patterns and systems at work amid the chaos of swarming defenders in front of him. His father asked him how it was going as they drove home after the camp's first day.
"Dad, they treated me like an eight-year-old," the kid groaned.
"You are an eight-year-old."
"Yeah, but they didn't really teach me any QB stuff. It was more like recess."
The next summer, Sills attended a sleepaway camp in Pennsylvania, where he was named the best quarterback in his age group. The summer after that, his father dug out an old USA Today clipping about a "quarterback guru" in Pasadena, whose clients would "even drive seventy or eighty miles" for private training sessions. Half a dozen of them were at the time preparing to start for Division I colleges. The guru's name was Steve Clarkson.
"I just went over to David and said, 'Hey, we've never been to California—you want to call this guy up and see if he'll take a look at you?' " Sills recalled, mentioning that he'd dangled the possibility of a Disneyland side trip. "And I'll bet you I called Steve for six weeks before I actually got him on the phone. I introduced myself, said, 'I've got this young kid who's ten years old, and I was wondering if you could take a look at him.' And he was like, 'You're from where, and your kid's how old?' "
Sills IV was recounting this on Memorial Day weekend, in Santa Barbara, at an annual retreat hosted by Clarkson for his most promising students, some of whom he planned to brand as Trendsetters. Six years had passed since their initial meeting, an evaluation for which Clarkson charged the Sillses three thousand dollars, and a little more than two years had passed since the head coach at the University of Southern California, Lane Kiffin, sent traditionalist parents and sportswriters into spasms of outrage by promising young David a full scholarship. Sills was then in seventh grade. Kiffin extended his unprecedented offer solely on the basis of a video highlight reel and Clarkson's recommendation.
The Hankins family, of Manhattan, Kansas, had also flown in for this year's retreat, as had the Speights, of Richmond, Virginia, and the Caplises, from Denver. There were roughly three dozen boys in all, ranging from eight to eighteen. A few wore T-shirts with a quote attributed to Clarkson printed on the back:
The quarterback is like an artist. The artist controls what goes where on the canvas. The quarterback controls what goes where on the gridiron. His focus is on his receivers down field, and the on-rushers become a swirl of colors beneath the main vision.
The quote, according to the shirt, was from the San Francisco Chronicle and dated to 1981, when Clarkson, an African-American, was a junior at San Jose State and an Academic All-American playing QB for head coach Jack Elway, John's dad.
Clarkson, now fifty and barrel-chested, could pass for an ex-linebacker. "When I played sports, it was very seasonal," he told me, while standing outside a broadcasting booth, above the grandstands at a football field overlooking the harbor. "You played four months, and then you'd go on to the next sport. Now these kids do it ten to twelve months out of the year." He sounded more like a bystander to the changing winds than like a pioneer—"the Béla Károlyi of quarterback coaches," as one writer put it—who charges up to a thousand dollars an hour for private lessons. The referrals on his résumé include the Steelers' Ben Roethlisberger, the Raiders' Matt Leinart, and one of this year's leading Heisman Trophy contenders, U.S.C.'s Matt Barkley. "So you take a nine-year-old," Clarkson went on. "A nine-year-old is really twelve years old by my standards, because, where we used to go four months on and eight off, he's been, you know, four, four, four. Essentially, every year, kids are doing this now. They're that much farther along."
In previous years, Clarkson had invited clients like the teen-aged sons of Joe Montana, Wayne Gretzky, Snoop Dogg, and Will Smith to participate in his retreat. Tre Polamalu, a fifteen-year-old cousin of Troy, the All-Pro Pittsburgh Steelers safety, was among this year's group, though not the star attraction. That distinction belonged to Sills, who was about to turn sixteen, and just finishing his freshman year of high school. He arrived wearing neon-yellow sneakers to match the blond highlights in his hair, which was styled in a fauxhawk. A few of the younger boys pointed and whispered. "Sills is the game changer," Clarkson said. "He's like a rock star."
Inside the broadcasting booth, the quarterback prodigies and wannabes were receiving new shirts with Clarkson's trademarked "Dreammaker" logo. "M., do you like those?" Clarkson shouted at a lanky boy with a white glove on his left hand.
"Yes, sir!"
The boy, another freshman, was named M. C. Poe. He was from Nashville. A year ago, he left his mother behind in Tennessee and moved in with Clarkson, Clarkson's wife, Lisa, and their two young sons, in Pasadena, so that he could receive more concentrated tutoring.
The nine-year-olds are twelve, and the really driven twelve-year-olds are "gray-shirting," or voluntarily repeating a year of middle school. What's strange about this is not the seeming contradiction—arrested precocity is every parent's fantasy—but the fact that it took so long to infiltrate football, a game so increasingly complex, and with a vocabulary so specialized, that to listen in on even a Pop Warner League film session can make a casual fan begin to doubt his basic literacy. Talk of mere "X"s and "O"s obscures the need to remember your "Z"s and your "F"s, to distinguish among Mikes, Sams, and Wills—the middle, strong-side, and weak-side linebackers. If reading defense is like speaking a foreign language, why not start earlier, when the brain is more elastic?
The scholarship offer and Sills's "commitment" to U.S.C. are nonbinding—per N.C.A.A. rules, he won't be eligible to sign a letter of intent until the winter of his senior year, in 2015—and therefore easy to dismiss as a ploy orchestrated by Clarkson and Kiffin to draw attention to their respective programs. Nonetheless, other colleges have followed suit. In July, the football program at the University of Washington was reported to have extended an offer to Tate Martell, another Clarkson protégé, who was about to begin eighth grade.
Intensive football training before puberty is not what your neighborhood neurologist has lately been recommending. Developing brains are elastic in more ways than one, and especially susceptible to the long-term effects of bouncing around inside a skull. The presence in Santa Barbara of a representative from Xenith, an upstart helmet manufacturer dedicated to reducing concussions, served as a reminder that amateur football is suddenly vulnerable, and not only because of creeping professionalism. A number of parents at Clarkson's retreat told me that they'd observed the beginnings of a California lacrosse boom. They attributed this to a shift from football among more cautious families who nevertheless allowed for a little aggression in their sons' athletics.
Several of the parents wouldn't have been out of place at an art opening or at a farm-to-table restaurant. Clarkson sounded almost like a dance instructor as he led the boys back and forth across the field in a variety of warmup drills, shouting cues in a rhythmic cadence: "Don't sit in quicksand, fellows. Let's go: Stride, point the nose. . . . Three-step catch and throw. . . . Five-step hard hitch. . . . Seven-step hard hitch, soft hitch. . . . In and out. Glide, glide, glide." Maybe all the ambition was mutually offsetting, but I've sensed more competitive hostility among the patrons of Brooklyn karaoke bars than among Clarkson's campers. They weren't competing with one another for precious roster spots, after all, but basking in the shared dream of stardom.
Clarkson and a couple of assistants used the broadcasting booth as a classroom, for deconstructing film. One session was dedicated to extolling the general virtues of the "three-step drop," meaning three quick steps back from the line of scrimmage before setting one's feet and, ideally, throwing: a blitz-thwarting technique that rewards decisiveness. "If you guys can develop your three-step game like this, you'll get everything else you want later on in life," one assistant said.
Another assistant, identified as Coach Frog, diagrammed plays. "If we feel a window on the back side, one on one, and we like our matchup, we can go on ahead and take that slant," he said, to nodding assents all around. "Back side, right? We can tag it, we can go snap, which is a nine-yard hitch. We can go fade, we can go slant." That was the back side, at any rate. "Front side, we have this stick concept," he continued. "We're going to start outside in. Pre-snap, is our vertical right? Then we go, basically, arrow to stick—if the flat defender flies out, we're throwing to stick. Flat defender backs up? We're throwing the arrow. If the corner's pressed with no safety high, we're taking the vertical."
I've reproduced that bit verbatim from a recording. My written notes from class are much sparer, and reflect the rare moments when plain English was used. "Simple tip," I wrote, and underlined it. "Yell 'Set!,' watch for the corner who starts to back up, and throw to that guy" (meaning the wide receiver who would otherwise be covered by the skittish defender—a cornerback). I also wrote, "You look like you're struggling. You look like me in biology." The speaker in that instance was Clarkson, who likes to invoke his struggles to earn a C-plus in high-school biology as a lesson in the importance of responding to pressure.
Clarkson grew up on the outskirts of East Los Angeles. His parents split up when he was still in elementary school, and he lived with his mother, who worked as a waitress and beautician. He always saw himself as the class cutup and figured on skating by in the biology course that he has since elevated to a teachable moment. The teacher was black. "I was like, 'Come on, sister. Give me a break,' " he recalls. Instead, she made him stand in front of the room for three days as he failed to answer simple questions from homework assignments that he hadn't completed. "Finally, she pulled me aside and said, 'Why do you think I'm doing this?' " he told me. "I'm like, 'I don't know—you hate football players?' She goes, 'We're black, right? You have to be three times as good, so if I let you off the hook you'll never get to where you want to be.' "
In the late nineteen-seventies, at Los Angeles's Woodrow Wilson High School, a black quarterback wasn't out of the question. Clarkson called his own plays and led the Wilson Mules to a city title, attracting the attention of Jack Elway, at San Jose State, who favored a progressive, passing-oriented approach that would come to be known as the West Coast Offense. "The things that we were doing then are what the Patriots do today," Clarkson said, and recalled the thrill of seeing a photograph of himself rolling out and being chased by the future Chicago Bears linebacker Mike Singletary after San Jose State upset an undefeated Baylor team, in Texas. They also beat Stanford, where Clarkson's coach's son John played, in two out of three games, a source of pride that would come to smart.
Clarkson graduated in 1983, a year now remembered for its strong quarterback class. John Elway and two more future Hall of Famers, Dan Marino and Jim Kelly, were drafted that summer, along with ten other QBs. Clarkson was not. Outside California, black quarterbacks were still a rarity, and Clarkson bristled at the implicit assumption among N.F.L. scouts that he was just an athlete, not a field general. "I went to a lot of workouts where guys said, 'Well, can you play safety?' " he said. "I'm like, 'I haven't played safety in my life.' " He dogged it in the forty-yard dash, on purpose. "I was capable of running, probably, a high 4.5, but I ended up running something like a 4.85, so they knew I wasn't going to be fast enough to play outside the ball," he said. The Denver Broncos finally offered him nine thousand dollars to sign on as a free agent. Then they traded with the Baltimore Colts for Elway, the No. 1 pick. Clarkson wound up in Saskatchewan, playing in the Canadian Football League, much the way another Los Angeles native, Warren Moon, who would become the first black Hall of Fame quarterback, had been forced to do. Frustrated after two seasons with little sign of progress, Clarkson gave up and went home to Southern California, where he got a job managing a Black Angus steak house. "What I wanted to do was leave the game while I still liked the game," he said.
His return to football prominence was something of an accident. In 1986, Clarkson's Aunt Rosa noticed an ad in a local paper: someone was looking for a football coach. The man who placed the ad lived in Malibu and had a teen-aged son, a gymnast and volleyball player, primarily, who was looking to become a quarterback. Clarkson saw the kid doing cartwheels and backflips in the end zone and figured he had potential. They began meeting regularly for film study, with Clarkson emphasizing a martial-arts-like mental discipline that he calls "extreme consciousness." In the fall of 1987, Clarkson announced to the Los Angeles Times, "I think he will develop into the best quarterback in the history of high school football."
The pupil's name was Perry Klein, and he went on to play for the Atlanta Falcons. He also sparked a controversy in high school when, in 1988, before his senior year, he transferred to Carson, an inner-city school with a stronger football program, and then returned to Malibu in time for volleyball season. Mr. Transfer, sportswriters called him, and fingered Clarkson as a malign influence. Clarkson, who had been volunteering as the Malibu team's offensive coördinator, made the jump to Carson, too. He got a reputation as a rogue street agent, whose loyalties ran counter to the militaristic football culture that prizes brotherhood over individual striving. Two years later, a second Clarkson pupil, John Walsh, transferred into Carson before his senior year. The school got spooked by negative publicity and banished Clarkson from the sidelines. "The principal runs this operation, not the coaches," an administrator said. Yet Walsh broke the state passing record (once held by Klein), and was later drafted by the Cincinnati Bengals.
A precedent had been set, in which nostalgists publicly decried the exploitation of youth while Clarkson's phone rang with new inquiries from motivated families. Pushing against the conventions of high-school football was a good way to get your name in the newspaper, and what would otherwise have been a word-of-mouth side business became, for Clarkson, a living. Neither defensive nor oblivious, he disarmed would-be critics with good-natured humble-bragging ("I guess I'm the guy who started this whole madness"), although success of the sort that inspires vanity license plates (DRM8KER, QB CLUB) was slow in coming. That required the Internet, which elevated the fetishized pursuit of college scholarships, even among those who don't need them, into a spectator sport of its own.
"How I grow is getting these guys into different schools," Clarkson told me. "I figured out a long time ago, like, if I have a kid that goes to Notre Dame and he gets written up in South Bend, I get written up in South Bend. I didn't have to jump on a plane. Because when they want to talk about Jimmy Clausen they call me."
Clausen, who is now a backup for the Carolina Panthers, was Clarkson's first middle-school student—notable, like Sills, as much for the fact of his early apprenticeship with Clarkson as for his eventual success, which has been mixed. He began training with Clarkson at thirteen, after repeating sixth grade, and was featured in Sports Illustrated four years later as "The Kid with the Golden Arm." Serious fans may remember him best for having arrived forty-five minutes late to his own press conference, in a white stretch Hummer, to announce his college selection. He'd flown to Indiana from California for the official declaration, which he made at the College Football Hall of Fame.
"These kids are only kids for so long," Frank Noland, a gold-mining entrepreneur from Reno, Nevada, said, inverting the common skeptic's critique. He was explaining why he planned to hold back his thirteen-year-old son, Connor, "a straight-A student," having long ago missed the opportunity to postpone, like a good Park Slope parent, the start of kindergarten. Noland, an enormous and gregarious man, had played a couple of years of semi-pro football, as an offensive tackle, in Arkansas, and now wished that he'd been given the same opportunity. "If you have the year, why not use it?" he said. In Connor's case, the bonus year might give him twenty-four more sessions with Clarkson—at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. (Conditions that are bad for global currencies are good for the mining business.) "What we're thinking about doing is maybe bringing him over here and letting him play in the Throwback League," Noland added, referring to a new venture of Clarkson's, a spring counterpart to Pop Warner. "Being in Reno, it's a real short flight to San Diego or to Los Angeles. You're there in an hour and a half."
Clarkson started the Throwback Football League last winter, inspired in part by basketball's Amateur Athletic Union, or A.A.U.: a travelling circuit for private clubs at the élite level. "When I'm teaching my kids in the spring, sometimes it can get monotonous," he said. "You're working on these schemes, and all the different techniques, but it's six to eight months before you can put it into play." The weekend of the retreat coincided with the championship games in the new league's inaugural season, which was confined to ten teams throughout California, though Clarkson told me that he had plans to expand into football hotbeds like Texas and Ohio, and beyond. As schools and municipalities become more skittish about assuming the insurance risks associated with football, he predicted, private clubs will pick up the slack. And whereas Pop Warner sets weight limits on its participants, and has recently begun restricting the amount of contact allowed at practices, the Throwback Football League is open to all comers in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades—"the best of the best," as Clarkson put it. "It's kind of the next step. The name refers to the way professionals played back in the day."
Back in the day, the passing game was nowhere near as sophisticated as it has become, and a guy like Clarkson couldn't get a fair shake. The nostalgia of the Throwback league, in which the teams all wear replicas of old N.F.L. uniforms (the 1970 Rams, the 1980 Chargers, the 49ers of 1984, and so on), is aimed primarily at fathers, like Noland, who may be inclined to see an overreaction to the concussion controversy that has left youth football in a seemingly precarious position.
At one of the T.F.L. games, I sat next to a man in the bleachers who was dressed in a sports coat and designer jeans. "It's pretty," he said, gesturing at the backdrop of sailboats in the harbor. "Just image-wise, the shirts, the colors, all of that stuff—it has a kind of energy." His name was Eric Owen Moss, and he was an architect in Culver City. (His work has been profiled in these pages; Philip Johnson once referred to him as the "master jeweller of junk.") His son Miller had just turned ten, he told me. That made Miller the same age David Sills had been when Clarkson answered his father's phone call. But Miller had been working with Clarkson since he was seven.
Moss drew a distinction between what he called the "Peyton Manning model," in which boys are groomed for the N.F.L. almost from birth, and "the Bill Bradley model," for gifted polymaths. "A year or so ago, they asked everybody in the yearbook, 'What do you want to be?' " he told me. "And Miller said he wanted to be Secretary of State." Miller also attended a writing camp, had a personal scripting tutor, and played on a "mostly black" travelling basketball team, according to his father. "I really think a lot of this is an accident," Moss said. "Whatever you put in front of him he kind of likes." Among Miller's early interests were math and chess, which translated to the kind of intuitive football sense that Clarkson was keen to identify. "Tactically, Miller associated both," Moss said, referring to chess and football. "He used to draw these plays on the laptop."
When I introduced myself to Miller, he said, of Clarkson, "I think he tried to see how smart I was," and mentioned that they'd been reading different defensive formations since their first sessions together. Miller is four feet ten, with curly blond hair and the easygoing affect of someone as yet untroubled by burdensome expectations. He showed me his gold Nike cleats with custom embroidery on the heels that read "Miller Time." "Steve gave me the nickname," he said. "So I use it pretty much as a trademark, kind of."
Down on the field, a middle-school kid named Robbie leapfrogged a defender, causing a murmur in the stands, and Eric Moss mentioned that Robbie was another disciple of Clarkson's. "I would be completely disingenuous if I didn't say I really enjoy this stuff," he added. "I'm embarrassed a little bit. It's contagious in a way that even parents who should know better don't always."
Eric Moss wasn't the only unlikely parent I met among the trendsetters. Sixteen years ago, when Harrison and Molly Lebowitz's son Jared was just learning to walk, they started Vermont's first commercial vineyard and grape winery, Snow Farm, on an island in Lake Champlain. "We're at the forty-fifth parallel," Harrison explained. "It's the same growing season as Burgundy, France." The Lebowitzes were committed agriculturalists and preservationists, and Harrison, a former Vermont assistant attorney general, writes novels, musicals, and screenplays in his spare time. Their son grew to become a committed football player. "Jared's a bundle of oxymorons," Harrison said, and nodded his head in the direction of a boy who towered over both of his parents. "A tall Jewish quarterback from Vermont who wants to play Division I football." Vermont arguably has the worst high-school football in the country. Big-time college recruiters are no more likely than wine snobs to include South Burlington on their travel itineraries.
A couple of years ago, during winter break, the Lebowitzes consented, as a birthday present, to fly Jared out for a clinic with Clarkson. "So we left ski season in Vermont for what turned out to be three rainy days in Southern California," Harrison said. "At the end of the trip, Jared says, 'Those were the best three days of my life.' What are we supposed to do?" Clarkson was impressed, too: "The Lebowitz kid has, like, a thirty-eight-inch vertical!" They considered shipping Jared off to Gilman, an élite private school in Baltimore that plays a national football schedule, against perennial powerhouses like New Jersey's Don Bosco Prep and Ohio's Archbishop Moeller. "But there's still four months of winter," Harrison noted. Football favors a more tropical growing season. Many of the most heavily recruited athletes at so-called skill positions come from Florida, California, and Texas, where year-round training is possible.
Eventually, the Lebowitzes came up with a novel idea: marketing Snow Farm's ice wine, a Vidal Blanc with an apricot finish, as a niche product in the California market. Last year, Harrison rented an apartment in Pasadena, and began making business contacts, while Jared enrolled at St. Francis, a Catholic school nearby. Molly took comfort in a conversation she'd had with Peggy Fleming, the former Olympic figure skater, who was involved in the California wine business. "Are we crazy?" Molly asked, and Fleming told her a story about a plane crash in 1961 that wiped out much of the American figure-skating establishment—a tragedy, to be sure, but in the aftermath she'd begun training with the Italian master Carlo Fassi, and finding the right coach had made all the difference in her career. The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, uploaded a video to its YouTube account with the title "The QB from Vermont."
On the field, Clarkson divided the boys into four groups, by age and size, and I lingered most often by the youngest and smallest. Clarkson aimed to bring the complexity of the classroom diagrams to three-dimensional life, piecemeal, and for a start he isolated a defensive shell, involving only the secondary—the cornerbacks and safeties. No grunts obstructing vision (and more) at the line of scrimmage for these purposes, and no linebackers haunting the middle distance and creating the illusion of chaos. The goal was to teach the quarterbacks to begin reading defenses from the outside in, beginning with the shell, and to develop an instinct for converting those initial cues into viable passing options.
Clarkson stood behind the line of quarterbacks, facing his defensive volunteers, who were arranged in an arc of four, roughly five to ten yards out. At the sound of each "Hike!," he held up either two or four fingers—a signal to the cornerbacks, or the outermost components of the shell, either to hold their ground (two fingers, for "cover two") or to backpedal immediately alongside the safeties (four). The drill incorporated a pair of flanking receivers as well, with the left side running a slant route across the middle and the right side running flat, as they say, or wide to the sideline. The slant was best for beating cover two, and the flat for taking advantage of the open space created by a fully retreating shell. As presented, it was a simple if-then proposition: two fingers, throw left; four fingers, throw right. But the quarterbacks, unable to see the fingers, were forced to make the calculation based on the shifting defensive alignments in front of them. "I try to dummy it up as much as I possibly can," Clarkson said. "You can dummy it up and still make them smarter." It began to make sense to me, at least, and for perhaps the first time in my life I came to feel that I was reading a defense in real time instead of waiting for John Madden's Telestrator.
The junior QBs responded with mixed success. One sandy-haired boy with braces on his teeth threw to the flat on a two-finger cue, leaving his receiver hypothetically exposed to a punishing hit from the waiting cornerback. "Bam!" Clarkson shouted. "That guy date your girlfriend or something? That's the only reason I can think of to throw a ball like that." Miller Moss, I noticed, never failed to make the right decision, though he threw an errant pass at one point, prompting a more encouraging admonishment from Clarkson: "Great read. Now we just got to execute. We can make that correction."
As the weekend wore on, Clarkson added further complications to these scenarios, requesting that the boys pump-fake, spin, and roll out, and designating others to chase them for extra pressure. He applied subtle diversionary tactics, through small talk, to see if he could shake them from their extreme consciousness. "What's your favorite restaurant in Manhattan, Kansas?" he asked eleven-year-old Sam Hankins, who had a light buzz cut and wore a brace on his throwing elbow, from overexertion on the Midwestern javelin circuit. Hankins shrugged without making eye contact. Clarkson persisted: "If I come visit you and your family, where am I eating?"
"Noodles, probably."
Clarkson kept after him. "What am I going to get at Noodles?" he asked. "What's your favorite dish there?" Hankins suggested macaroni but looked unsure. "I'm going to go to Manhattan, Kansas, for their finest macaroni?" Clarkson asked, sounding incredulous, and soon an unsettled Hankins, having reached the front of the line, stumbled and forgot to complete the requisite spin move. Trying again, he rushed the routine and chucked the ball into the ground. "See, I got you thinking about that macaroni-and-cheese," Clarkson said. "It threw you off. Come on, remain a quarterback now."
The obvious risk in identifying future talent at such a young age is that so much of football comes to be determined by size and speed. A world of savvy isn't going to protect you from hormonal would-be Lawrence Taylors; you need some spring in your legs and a growth spurt for that. Eric Owen Moss is six feet one, which may bode well for Miller. David Sills IV, the rock star's father, who played on the freshman team at Virginia Military Institute, in the late nineteen-seventies, is only five feet ten. "I told David, 'I can help you with everything except making you tall,' " Sills IV said, with a slight drawl. " 'God's got to do that.' And thank goodness he did." David is now nearly six feet four, and stringy, with room to add twenty-five or thirty pounds. He looks increasingly like the quarterback archetype Clarkson projected he would be when they first met, back in 2006.
Clarkson encourages quarterbacks to bring their own receivers, when possible, so that they'll have someone familiar to throw to. I noticed David Sills hanging out with an especially well-built African-American boy, with dreadlocks, whom I took to be a teammate from back home. "That's David's brother," Sills IV said. "Jahmere. I'm his legal guardian." Jahmere Irvin-Sills was a rising senior, and one of a number of athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds that the Sills family had helped attract to Delaware's Red Lion Christian Academy, instead of following Clarkson's recommendation, as the Lebowitzes had, and sending their son to California. Jahmere's background was more disadvantaged than most. "When he was in the eighth grade, he was living with his mother," Sills IV said. "Drug deal went bad. Somebody got shot while he was in the house. His mother and her girlfriend took off and got killed, execution style, in Philadelphia. They shipped him off to North Carolina to live with relatives for a year. He came back, and he was living with his grandfather and his little brother. The little brother died in a house fire. And then we took him to a combine. He won the combine, came home, and his grandfather died. So he really didn't have anywhere to go."
Sills IV is a real-estate and construction magnate in the Wilmington area, and he wasn't exaggerating when he told his natural-born son that he'd do everything he could to help him. He built Red Lion a stadium and a separate practice facility, known as the FLASH Training Center (for Faithful Leaders Always Serving Him), through which he subsidized the salaries of an expanded coaching staff. He also established the FOCAS Foundation (Financially Obedient Christians Assisting Students), to provide financial aid for kids like Jahmere. Red Lion's football ambitions grew to the point where the Delaware authorities were no longer comfortable letting them play against local teams and set them loose as an independent program, free to play anyone they wished in the other forty-nine states but not at home. Sills IV, as the president of the team's booster club, contributed amply to their travel budget. "Last game we played in Delaware, David was an eighth-grade quarterback"—an eighth grader starting for the high-school varsity, that is—"and we won, 51–0," he said. "You know, it doesn't help you improve." But Red Lion struggled financially even as its athletic program thrived, and last winter a new church acquired its six million dollars of debt. The incoming ministers were less amenable to the expansive priorities of the old regime. They wanted back into Delaware's good graces. "I said, 'You can't do that,' " Sills IV told me. "I said, 'You at least got to get these kids through, and work your way back to that.' They said no, so we all left and started a new school. We basically took the entire team."
The new school is called Eastern Christian, and it is across the state line, in Elkton, Maryland, a ten-minute drive from the Sills family home. It is an Internet school, run by an umbrella organization called the National Connections Academy. There are roughly fifty students, nearly all of them Honey Badgers, as the football team is named, after the viral Web video. Seventeen of them already have Division I scholarship offers. "And that's really what we care about, is getting these kids into college, because a lot of these kids wouldn't have the opportunity to go to college if it wasn't for football, and we all know that college education is huge," Sills IV said. Jahmere was on the verge of committing to Auburn, one of more than a dozen schools willing to pay his way. And all indications are that David Sills is taking his own premature college commitment seriously. "The S.C. coaches let him come to practice, and they let him in the film room with the quarterbacks, so he's learning the system," Sills IV told me. "They ask him questions just like he's on the team." (Lane Kiffin declined to discuss Sills or Clarkson with me, for fear of violating N.C.A.A. regulations.)
On Sunday morning, while the rest of the kids went over more film in the broadcast booth, Clarkson conducted a private lesson on the field with Sills, which provided the added benefit, he said, of showing the others that nobody's perfect: "Like, forget about what you read. He still has flaws he has to work on." In terms of posture, footwork, and general presentation, Sills had appeared to my untrained eye to stand out as the best of the lot—a cool customer. He seemed just as at ease hustling off the field to give interviews to the scouting services that prescribe a teen athlete's Internet experience as he did sidestepping down the field in giant strides and pivoting around cones with mincing precision. But his throws sometimes wobbled, and lacked the soaring weightlessness that you see on television.
As with the group drills, Clarkson isolated a specific challenge or problem, and zeroed in on it—in this case, Sills's left arm, or off arm, as they say. On the follow-through, it was hanging like deadweight in front of his torso, which indicated that he was short-changing himself of some natural power. "If we don't do anything else this year, that off arm has to come back," Clarkson said, and demonstrated in slow motion what he meant, with the left arm swinging across his body as though controlled from behind, by a pulley, and seeming to yank the right shoulder forward. He finished with his forearm parallel to the ground and by his side, as if he were jogging. "Elbow at ninety, tight through," Clarkson said. Sills nodded along and didn't say much. He was slow to catch on at first—muscle memory is hard to erase—and Clarkson soon interrupted the throwing routine for a lecture. "When I started this conversation, when you were a seventh grader, you got credit more for your mental acumen," he began. "When you were an eighth grader, it was just astonishing that you were playing on the varsity level. This past year, you were still a freshman. But at some point that starts to go the other way, because the more you do the more is expected of you." He added, "Your next step right now is you physically."
Sills began to get the hang of it, and his throws increased in zip (Jahmere's hands appeared to be hurting), but in the process he seemed now to be neglecting his lower body. "You better start learning to keep that front foot flat, front knee bent," Clarkson said. "If you get hit, you got a better chance of surviving that knee injury." Clarkson asked Sills IV, who had been filming the lesson on his Droid, to cue up the most recent throw and freeze the frame on David's locked knee. "It feels like a tragedy waiting to happen," Clarkson said.
They continued in this vein for the better part of an hour, during which Sills must have thrown a hundred passes. Jahmere eventually begged off, and Clarkson took over catching duties, occasionally barking new instructions: "Now give me a side step. . . . Give me a crossover and a step up. . . . Come on, fix it. Chin over your toes. Remember, thumb across your mouth."
The rest of the boys trickled down onto the field and began their warmups, and before long they separated into their respective groups. Clarkson brought Sills over to the youngest bunch for what he called "a little mentor treat," and asked them all to take a knee. "You guys know who this is?" Clarkson asked.
"David Sills!"
"What do you know about David Sills?"
"He got a college scholarship to U.S.C."
"How old are you?"
They shouted out numbers in a chorus: "Nine!" "Ten!" "Twelve!" "Thirteen!"
"Lucky winner right there: thirteen," Clarkson said, pointing at Connor Noland, the gold miner's son. "At your age is when he got a scholarship—first of its kind." Clarkson told the group that he was going to have David coach the next drill, to give his own voice a break. He asked them to line up and started backing away.
The boys remained in a cluster around Sills, basking for a moment longer in his attention. "Wait, I have a question," one asked. "How old are you now?"
"Me? Fifteen."
"Fifteen—so, two years ago." The boy placed his hand on his hip and cocked his head to the side. "So did they just call you?"
"Well, they talked to my dad first."
"How do you get a scholarship at thirteen?"
"I don't know," Sills said, sounding a little bashful, and then glanced over at Clarkson, awaiting further instruction. ♦


text:
Today, Microsoft Corp. and Linux platform provider Xandros announced a messaging protocol license and collaboration agreement that will enhance the interoperability of Scalix email servers with various mobile and personal computer-based email applications that utilize Microsoft email protocols. This agreement expands on the ongoing Microsoft-Xandros collaboration.
Both companies' commitment to protocol licensing and technical cooperation will help to provide more email choices and value. By continuing their focus on mixed-source solutions, Xandros and Microsoft are demonstrating how protocol-level collaboration can benefit customers who rely on a mix of Windows®-based and Linux systems. By licensing the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync® protocol and the Outlook® Exchange Transport Protocol, Scalix Mail Servers can now synchronize data over wireless networks with Microsoft Exchange Server as well as various email clients that use these and other Microsoft protocols.
"The expansion of our agreement with Xandros is a strong example of how collaboration through intellectual property licensing can foster innovation that benefits the overall IT ecosystem," said Horacio Gutierrez, Vice President, Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft.
"Today's enterprise users 'on the go' employ a plethora of mobile messaging devices to access a mix of Linux and Windows-based messaging systems," said Andreas Typaldos, CEO of Xandros. "With the ubiquity of Windows Mobile® -based Smart phones, this agreement will enable us to provide the same range of Scalix connectivity choices for users of desktop, laptop, and handheld devices that they currently enjoy with Microsoft Exchange. With this new Scalix interoperability, Microsoft and Xandros enable companies to freely implement a broad range of proprietary and open systems and devices."
The agreement is focused on two areas of protocol licensing:
Exchange ActiveSync protocol. Xandros will be given the specification and documentation license necessary to develop a server-side implementation of the Exchange ActiveSync protocol. Such implementation would provide organizations with the ability to enable mobile, "over-the-air" access to e-mail messages, calendars, contacts, tasks lists, and other mailbox data.
Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol. Xandros will be given the specification and documentation license necessary to develop a server-side implementation of the Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol 2007. Such implementation will provide organization with better mediation options between client applications and the Scalix Mail Server.
For Xandros, the agreement is another milestone in its strategic vision to deliver a complete Linux stack, including desktops, servers, Windows-Linux cross-platform management tools and mission-critical applications, in order to provide single vendor support for diverse and growing enterprise IT infrastructures, and to make certain that its stack is interoperable and integrates within existing customer IT infrastructure ecosystems, for both platforms, applications, and messaging.
For Microsoft, the agreement is the latest in a series of efforts to encourage the development of interoperable solutions between Microsoft software and open source software.