Laurance, whom no one calls Larry, is short, red-haired, and talks almost as fast as I can throw a football, making me wonder sometimesif anybody has ever radar-gunned the words coming out of his mouth. I had interviewed a bunch of agents when it was time to do that. Well, EmmaJean Tucker had done most of the interviewing. Most had other star clients, including Laurance. But he didn’t have any other high-profile quarterbacks. That sealed the deal for EJ, and for me.
Laurance now pulls down the mic from where it had been set for Gideon.
“As I look around this room, I’m aware most of the people in it know Silas Tucker a lot better than I do,” he says, “and will probably have a lot to say about that as the night wears on. So I’ll try to be brief, probably for the first time in my career.”
From the middle of the room, Roof Crockett is making loud kissing noises.
Now Laurance Most is the one doing his best to ignore him, and ignore Lynyrd, as Laurance reaches into his pocket and comes out with a key fob that I can see has the Porsche logo on it.
“Just in case you can’t order an Uber for the ride back to campus later,” Laurance says, holding up the fob for everybody in the room to see, “this is the key to your never-been-driven Porsche 993 Turbo S, currently being guarded out front—appropriately enough, I might add—by what appears to be your entire offensive line.”
He walks over, hands me the key to the Porsche, and says, “Who loves you, baby?”
I grin at him. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” I say. “But a Bobcat front loader would have done the trick.”
He leads me then, along with a lot of the party, out to where the car, an even brighter red than Laurance’s hair, is parked. And the car is a beauty, no doubt, shining as if under a spotlight. Even though I hadn’t been kidding, not even a little, about how a Bobcat would have suited me just fine.
There are a few more speeches once we’re back inside. My coach at UNC, Edd Rogers, says a few words. So does my old coach fromCross Rivers High, Emmett Norman, who describes me as the player every coach dreams about, the one who walks on the field and changes everything.
Even my grandmother, EJ, steps up to the mic.
“I have just one wish for my baby boy,” she says. But when she smiles over at me, I can see the devil in her blue eyes. “That maybe he’ll start picking up after himself now that he’s gonna be richer than sin.”
That gets her maybe the biggest laugh of the night so far.
Finally, it’s Vince Tarplay’s turn. A sophomore at Cross Rivers when I was a freshman, three-sport star same as I’d been, Vince played his college football as a Vanderbilt running back, then on to the Chicago Bears his rookie year until he’d ruptured his Achilles and got cut when the season was over. He’d also been my catcher in baseball for two seasons.
“I was the one behind the plate the day one of those college scouts clocked the fastest damn pitch any pitcher had ever thrown,” Vince tells the crowd. “Somehow, me and my left hand lived to tell about it.”
On the screen Laurance Most had set up on the stage, there it is: the footage shot the day I fired the fastest pitch ever thrown. The Cross Rivers AV department that my father had started at our school made the video, then superimposed the numbers from the gun, flashing:
109! 109! 109!
“Right there is the day the legend was born,” Vince says. “See, sometimes there can be an accurate record of mythic greatness.”
He turns and looks at me and mouths,Love you, dawg.
I mouth the same words back at him.
Now Gideon is stepping back to the mic.
“It’s time to hear from the man and the legend himself,” he says. “And someone to whom I’ll always be grateful for turning me into a second-round draft choice with the Panthers. You know what they say, right? A great quarterback and a great wide receiver are supposed to go hand in hand. I just had to keep explaining to Silas that didn’t meanoffthe field, too.”
One more laugh for Giddyup Garland and then he doesn’t even need a microphone as he shouts out, “Give it up for Silas Tucker!”
One more Carolina crowd goes wild for me. I let the cheers ride for a little bit, can’t help myself.
There are so damn many people in this room that I care about, and ones who seem to care about me just as much. I talk to them now about how much my dad, who never saw me play a lick of college ball, would have loved a night like this. And about the career I hope to have with the Steelers, thanks to my grandmother.
“She was the one who always told me to dream as big as my dad had done,” I say.
Then I talk a little bit about my teammates, at Cross Rivers and Chapel Hill, and how I wished I could take all of them with me to Pittsburgh.
“What time do we need to be at the airport?” my three-hundred-pound right tackle at Carolina, Norbert (Mack Truck) McCall, shouts from the back of the room, now inside after helping guard the Porsche.
“Not sure that jet would be quite big enough for you, Mack,” I call back to him.
Then I thank everybody for coming and for helping make all my big dreams come true.
