North Charleston

I am writing at a table in the lobby of the Wingate Hotel, with about twenty minutes until we leave for shootaround at Charleston Southern's gym. Highlights from last night's Super Bowl are on the flat screen TV above the fake fireplace and a styrofoam cup of black coffee sits by my right hand. After an early breakfast and film session, all of us were faced with a rarity: several hours of downtime. After a relaxing couple of hours watching How I Met Your Mother (stewing for a large portion of the time about how I should be working on my thesis), I went for a run around Charleston Southern's campus (the hotel is essentially on campus, so it did not exactly take great feats of strength to run there). There is not a whole lot to it, to tell you the truth. It is flat, kind of spread out, dotted with buildings of a gold color that matches the sandy grass fields surrounding them, with the exception of the university's athletic fields, which are a manicured deep green.

I kind of liked it. The campus. There was something very appealing about it, its smallness, its intimacy. Strange because, measuring by the standards of college campuses across America, there is nothing there. As I ran past the soccer field and its makeshift mesh fencing, I thought that I might like to be a part of a campus like that. Not necessarily that one, but a small, overachieving university that does not look like much on the outside, but has substance beyond appearances.

The mood is different today. No longer defeated, despairing, and hopeless. As Coach told me one Sunday morning after a recent loss to Liberty, "the sun comes back up in the morning." I feel renewed. Maybe it was the run and the hot shower. Maybe it is the caffeine in this cup of coffee (a pretty decent one at that, considering it is in a styrofoam cup). Maybe it is just that, since the sun rises again, we have no choice but to eventually do likewise. Maybe it is that, as long as we have that fire within, we will find it in us to fight again, the embers glowing and igniting again when reason is found to do so. The Patriots, losers of the Super Bowl, eventually will. Probably not today. Probably not tomorrow. But eventually they will shake off what, for some of their players, is the greatest disappointment they have ever dealt with, and live to fight again.

Smokestacks in the Smoke

We are en route from Myrtle Beach to Charleston, South Carolina. Leaving a loss at Coastal Carolina University heading for Charleston Southern University, and hopefully a win. As our charter bus drove through Georgetown, South Carolina, we approached a large power plant. The metal sheeting of the building probably shined at one time, had since dulled under layers of coal dust particulates and the weathering of years of exposure. The buildings of this compound themselves seemed hollow as we passed on the right. Thin, slatted walls slapped around stairs and machinery. Slits revealed the inner workings of the beast below the smokestacks, coughing out a thin cloudstream. Two workers in hard hats and lime vests idled in the large doorways at the base entrances clogged with small bulldozers. Bright orange and blue signs adorned these doorways and numerous other strategic locations around the compound. Like a wasted minetown. Failing and floundering for breath, but giving the impression that it was a place you wanted to be.

We passed and came to a bridge over a river. To the right, another shinier power plant pumped smoke into the atmosphere with virility. The new metal gleamed the sun back to passerby. It lays riverside. I thought about the side of things that we don't see, how there is often a dark underbelly to all things seemingly good. Like power and electricity, even energy itself. To say nothing of money and labor.

Then I thought about the mood on the team bus today. About the hollow, empty feeling prevalent this morning. The silence that pervades everything. Everything that can be said has. There is only to try again tomorrow. Coming straight from church, the players wear matching custom-made sweatsuits, some of the coaches dress clothes. For some, the feeling inside does not match the external appearance. The general feeling seems to be that this is the social equivalent of putting a brightly colored sign on the dust coated wall of a dingy plant.