I was holding a corn dog in one hand and a sweet tea I did not order in the other when a child in a compression shirt walked up to me at the fairgrounds Saturday and presented, with two hands like a samurai, a business card. Embossed. QR code. The words Class of 2034 — Pocket Presence Specialist printed under his name in a font I last saw on a wedding invitation.
His name is Brayden. He is ten. His arm-care regimen, per the back of the card, includes “weighted-ball protocols” and “sleeper stretches.” I asked him if he liked football and he told me he liked the process. I have been around football for fifty-one years and I have never once heard a child use the word process unprompted. I checked his eyes for a teleprompter.
His father was standing about ten feet back, filming. Of course he was filming. There is now a guy at every youth event in America standing ten feet back and filming, and he is always wearing the same gray quarter-zip, and he always has the same expression on his face, which is the expression of a man who has spent eight thousand dollars on a passing tutor and would like that to register on the tape.
Coach DiMaggio did not know my name until the second week of October. He called me Halloway for three years. He called Petey Corrigan “the fat one” until Petey graduated, and Petey loved him for it. Coach DiMaggio’s idea of player development was making us run until somebody threw up, and then making the rest of us run because somebody threw up. Nobody handed anybody a business card. The closest thing I had to a personal brand was a nickname I hated.
The skills contest itself has been, as the kids say, monetized. There is a banner. There is a sponsor — some protein-shake company I can’t pronounce — and there is a man with a headset doing live commentary on nine-year-olds throwing a Nerf football at a hula hoop. He used the phrase “elite-level mechanics for his age cohort.” His age cohort. The kid was wearing light-up sneakers.
I called Ray Kowalczyk on the drive home because Ray needs to hear these things or his blood pressure goes too low and the doctor gets nervous. Ray played one season of single-A ball in 1971 and tells the story like he was Reggie Jackson. Ray informed me, at considerable volume, that when he was ten his father gave him a glove and told him not to come home until it stopped raining. I do not believe this story. I have never believed this story. I love this story.
Here is what got me, though. Behind Brayden, in the regular line for the regular punt-pass-and-kick, was a kid in a t-shirt three sizes too big with mustard on the front of it. He was maybe eight. He kicked the ball more or less sideways and laughed about it. Then he ran to his mother and asked if he could have another funnel cake, which is the only correct thing to do at a state fair. Nobody filmed him. Nobody handed him a card. He is going to be fine. He is, in fact, the only one who is going to be fine.
I tried to imagine Petey Corrigan with a personal brand and I had to pull the truck over. Petey Corrigan’s brand was that he could fall asleep standing up during the national anthem. Petey Corrigan’s brand was that he ate an entire sleeve of saltines on the bus to Lima and did not share. We did not need a logo for Petey. Petey was the logo.
I’m not against kids working at something. Some of these little quarterbacks are going to be very good. A few of them already are. What I object to, gently, with the full force of fifty-one years of watching this game, is the idea that a child needs a business card before he needs a curfew. Brayden is going to be a sophomore in high school in five years and somebody is going to lay him out on a slant route and he is going to discover, in midair, that pocket presence is not actually a thing you can specialize in at age ten. I hope his dad gets it on tape.
Denise is bringing potato salad to the cookout tonight. She says she got the recipe from a podcast. I’m going to eat it anyway. It’s the dog days. You take what you can get.