![]() The whole thing, from taking off his helmet to beginning to seize, took 15 seconds. First he vomited, over and over, and then the seizures began. He flopped down on the grass and told Higgins, "It feels like someone's squishing down on my head." Higgins ran to Benbow and said, "Coach, something's wrong with Bailey." By the time they reached him, Foley was lying near the 25-yard line. Only a few plays later, Foley jogged off the field, mumbled something about cramps and took off his helmet. He must have gotten hit, but then you look at it and he runs. "I'm sitting here over and over trying to figure out exactly what could have happened, and that kickoff return is the one thing. Benbow runs it back twice more, going frame by frame on the tackle. He runs hard and straight - nothing in his manner suggests even the slightest interest in elusiveness - until he's hit at the waist and brought down 25 yards downfield. Foley catches it on a bounce and is almost immediately at full speed. It's a short kick, to the right side of Fortuna's return team. Cardinal Newman scored the final touchdown of a lopsided win, and as the teams line up for the kickoff, he says, "OK, so Bailey's going to return this kick. "To this point, he's doing all the right things." He's right: The game, and Bailey's role in it, is stunningly ordinary.Ī few plays later, Benbow stops the film again. "See?" Benbow asks, playing it one more time. Bailey chases a play across the field from the far hash to the sideline and pulls up as the runner heads out of bounds. Benbow stops the film on one play early in the fourth quarter. There are plays when Bailey gets hit and plays when he does the hitting, but he never drifts on the outskirts of the huddle or needs help getting off the field. Benbow starts the game, and it plays uneventfully before us. He's been coaching long enough to see the signs: A kid wanders or looks lost in the huddle or stands off to the side trying to collect his bearings. There were no signs of confusion on the 3 1/2-hour drive from Fortuna to Santa Rosa, he says, nothing alarming during warm-ups, no fuzzy interactions during the game. There are team photos on the wall and a sticker that reads "Hit or Be Hit" attached to the lectern at the front of the room.īefore he cues up the game, he runs through his interactions with Bailey from that day. (His daughter, Haley, will be a freshman there in the fall.) It's the last day of finals graduation is tomorrow, and he is repeatedly interrupted by students asking him to sign their yearbooks. government in cargo shorts, a T-shirt and either a John Deere cap or a Harvard visor. "He wasn't much for assignment football, but he could destroy plays."īenbow, 48, is a beefy, affable guy who teaches U.S. "I just put him out there to blow things up," Benbow says. "Best word is fearless." Benbow tried Bailey all over the field before settling on weakside end, where he was all-county as a junior the year before. "God, he was a tough-ass kid," says his teammate and best friend, Ethan Higgins. 20, a 5-foot-11, 180-pound defensive end and part-time running back with a reputation for throwing his body around like it didn't belong to him. The objective, as always, is to follow one player, senior Bailey Foley, No. We are sitting in his classroom at Fortuna High School, 270 miles north of San Francisco, watching a game that took place at Cardinal Newman High School in Santa Rosa, the first game of Mike Benbow's 10th season as Fortuna's head coach. "Now, what I want you to look out for here is. He'll tell you what the alignment is, what play is called, how it turned out. He can stop the film before every play and describe it. 25, 2017: the knot in his stomach, the helplessness, the grim knowledge of how many lives would change before it's over. He pulls down the screen at the front of his classroom and cues up the kickoff, hopeful he might see something he missed the first 50 or 60 or 100 times. He's a detective, unable to shake the cold case that haunts him. ![]() But he takes the laser pointer and sits down, preparing to attack it with forensic intensity, one more time. He knows it's an unhealthy number, a troubling number, maybe even a shocking one. The coach doesn't want to think about how many times he's watched the game. A version of this story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Aug.
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