The Champion Lays Down His Lance and Takes Up the Whip Instead

I am bid again by them that pay my hire to sit before the great glowing tapestry and set down what I see of the games, and so I have sat, and so I have seen, and so, God be good, I set it down, though I understand near none of it and never expected to by this age of my watching.

This day's marvel came not from the field of combat itself but from a parchment they call ESPN, which I take to be a sort of town crier that never sleeps and never once draws breath, for it speaks all hours and to all corners of the realm at once. And what this tireless crier told was this: that a great champion of the catching-games, a man named DeAndre Hopkins, famed these many seasons for snatching the leather sphere from the very air as if it were a hawk plucking a lark mid-flight, has now laid down his own lance. He does not retire to a cottage to keep bees, as any sensible champion of my acquaintance would. No. He goes instead to a forge-hall they call Georgia Tech, there to teach striplings the very art he once practiced, as an assistant master of the wide-catching men.

I confess I wept a little at my writing-table when I set this down, for I know this shape of story in my bones, though I have never in my life seen a leather sphere thrown at a man's face at great speed. It is the shape of the old huntsman who cannot draw the bow so true as once he did, and so he takes the young squires out to the butts instead and teaches them where to stand, how to breathe, how to keep the elbow steady, so that his art does not die with his arm. It is the shape of the miller's man who, grown too stiff in the shoulder to heave the sacks, teaches the new boy how to read the wind in the sails so the whole mill does not grind to ruin. A man who has done a great thing his whole life, handing the doing of it to those who come after — that I understand plainly, whatever they call the game itself, and I confess it moved me more than the game ever has.

Now. What is this "Georgia Tech," you will ask me, and I will tell you true I do not rightly know, save that the crier-parchment names it a place of learning, and that "Tech" is a word I have decided, on my own authority and without consulting any man wiser than myself, must mean a hall of gearwrights and alchemists — a forge where they make the clever moving things of this age, the carts without oxen and the great tapestries that show a man's face forty feet high. I picture it thus: high stone halls hung with cog-wheels instead of tapestries, and young men in leather jerkins running drills in a yard between two furnaces, while somewhere off in a tower a wizard in spectacles adjusts a brass instrument that hums. Into this place walks the champion Hopkins, catcher of spheres, to teach the catching art amid all this grinding and sparking, and nobody there thinks it strange, which tells me this Tech-forge is a stranger place even than I have imagined, for they let a hawk teach among the gearwrights and call it fitting.

I will say, too, that I do not fully grasp what manner of "coach" this is, and here is where I must be honest with you as I always try to be: in my village a coach is a covered cart drawn by four horses, and a coachman sits up top with a whip and shouts at the horses to mind the ruts, and I had for one confused half-hour genuinely believed our champion Hopkins had given up catching spheres to drive a cart of young men about the fair-grounds, cracking his whip and calling "hup, hup" while striplings inside rattled about on the benches. I have since corrected myself upon closer study of the crier-parchment. He does not drive a cart. He is instead what I would call, in my own tongue, an under-steward of the wide-catching guild — a journeyman-master, one rung below the head master of the whole yard, set specifically over those who catch, as a reeve is set over the plowmen while the lord himself minds the whole manor. This I understand very well indeed, having spent my whole life beneath just such an under-steward myself, and I will say this for the wide-catching men of Georgia Tech: they could do far worse than to be minded by a champion who has himself caught more spheres than I have counted turnips in a good harvest, which, I assure you, is an uncommonly large number of turnips.

What manner of drills they run I cannot say with the fullness I would like, for the crier-parchment did not show me the yard itself, only the naming of the man and the naming of the hall. But I picture it of an evening, when the furnace-light goes long and orange across the practice ground, and the old champion stands with his arms crossed watching some raw, gangly boy drop the sphere three times running into the dust, and I picture him not shouting, not cursing the boy for a fool, but walking over slow and saying some quiet thing about the hands, the eyes, the turning of the hip, the very thing that made him a champion himself and that no crier-parchment will ever fully capture no matter how many hours it speaks. That is the part of this tale that wants no translating into oxen and forges and guilds. A man who was the best in the realm at a thing, choosing to spend his after-years making some other man good at it too, asking nothing grander than that the art outlive him — that is not strange to me at all, whatever they call the field it happens on, and I have set it down as true and as plain as I know how, which is the whole of my office and my worth.

I confess also that I spent some good long while of the crier-parchment's telling wondering after the boy — for there must be a boy, there is always a boy, some raw young catcher standing in that forge-yard right now not knowing yet what a rare thing has walked in to teach him — and I hope he has the sense God gave a goose to listen close, for such champions do not walk into any man's yard twice in a life.

The light is going long and orange over my own field now as well, and I am called back to it, for the barley will not mind itself while I sit marveling at forges of gear and glass, and a reeve's temper is a shorter thing than a champion's patience. I go to it gladly, as I hope that boy at Georgia Tech goes gladly to his drills come morning.

By my troth and with mud yet on my hands — Hodge o' the Field