Tossing and Turning
The Quick Lane Bowl takes place in Detroit in the week following Christmas whenever there isn’t a surging pandemic. It was founded in 1997 as the Motor City Bowl and played at the Pontiac Silverdome until moving to Ford Field in 2002, where the Detroit Lions play real NFL teams. The name changed to the Little Caesars Bowl in 2009 before finally becoming the Quick Lane Bowl in 2014, but we still call it the Motor City Bowl. It features teams from the Big Ten and ACC, or sometimes the MAC. It is objectively the least desirable bowl game to be invited to.
I love it dearly.
Since it moved to Ford Field, my high school friends Jimbo and Stein have gone with me to every game, except for one when there was a terrible snowstorm. Since the game usually features two random teams with fanbases not particularly keen to travel to Detroit around Christmas, we usually find a way to score free tickets or are given some outside the stadium. I couldn’t tell you the teams that were in the game moments after it ended, but it was an excuse to hang out with old friends, to go to a football game, to have a tradition.
In 2018, we got an email from the Quick Lane Bowl about signing up for the contest that they hold at the end of the first quarter. I entered and didn’t think about it again until a few days later when they contacted me and said I was going to be on the field throwing footballs through a giant tire to win a truck.
***
This is the part where I regale you with stories from my football career. Don’t worry, it’s short.
I quit seventh grade football after the first day. We ran sprints for the entire practice in what I now see was an attempt to weed out people just like me. It wasn’t fun and I wasn’t into the whole coach-as-drill-sergeant routine. I came to regret my decision to quit pretty much immediately but was also too embarrassed to go back. I sat out the year.
So in eighth grade, I was determined to play. I was one of the fastest kids in the grade, had already reached a towering 5’9” and had pretty good hands. I thought I could be a receiver. I was right, earning a starting spot at flanker and kick returner.
On the second play of my first game, we ran a reverse to me—the first time I would touch a football in a game. The handoff was clean and as I held the ball in my arms, I felt a rush of adrenaline. I was finally playing football. I looked up field and was instantaneously slammed into the ground by three defenders for a loss.
I landed on the wrist that was carrying the football.
It was clear just from looking at it that something was wrong, since the black and blue swelling of a broken wrist looks pretty much exactly how you would expect it to. But, as a true football player, I didn’t tell the coaches anything was wrong.
Later in the game I made a diving catch on a ball for a first down, but our quarterback ran past the line of scrimmage so it never really happened. Somehow at the end of the game I was put in at running back, a position I had never actually practiced. I took a couple more hits, until the pain in my wrist became unbearable.
That was the end of my football career.
***
In 2016, I was coming off the high of finishing my creative writing master’s with a completed novel manuscript. I was preparing to send it out to agents and was working every connection I’d ever had to get eyes on it. I felt so close to real success. And my novel was not going to just change my life. It was going to change the world–make us reconsider everything that we thought we knew. What I didn’t know is this was the start of what I refer to as my disaster years.
By the end of 2018, I had crashed and burned. Over the previous two years, my girlfriend left me, I had become depressed, then I’d decided the best thing to do was to try to buy my way out of it and I spent my way through my savings. I left an impressive trail of ruined friendships. It also turned out the biggest problem with my novel was that it wasn’t very good, and I racked up the rejections to prove it. I lost my job. I stopped getting haircuts and ended up with a man bun, hoping people would be too distracted by my hair situation to ask how I was really doing. I lost myself.
I was 32.
***
The Quick Lane Bowl Quick Toss is simple. You get twelve chances over forty-five seconds to throw a football through a giant tire target fifteen yards away. If you make seven of them, you win a brand new Ford F-150. I would have sold the truck right away and ended up with somewhere around $30,000 after taxes, a sum of money I had never had at any time in my life. This was my chance, a lifeline at a moment when I needed it most. Things were going to be okay, I could feel it. All I had to do was throw with Zach Wilson-level accuracy. It seemed shockingly easy.
The email came to me on Christmas Eve telling me I was going to compete. I had two days to prepare.
I borrowed Stein’s football and practiced hitting the basketball hoop pole in my parents’ driveway. The high temperature that day was thirty-six degrees, and I threw the football until my shoulder ached. But I got relatively good, hitting well above the fifty-eight percent I needed. I dragged a trash can out to the backyard and placed it at what I thought was the height I would be picking up the footballs from and worked on being able to grab and release the ball quickly. The one thing I didn’t want to do was leave any footballs un-thrown, which meant I had 3.25 seconds to grab, grip, and throw each football. I had my parents come outside and time me. Most of the time, I could do it. My toes ached from throwing for hours in the snow.
I went to bed on Christmas night envisioning the moment on the field of winning the truck. Should I run into the end zone and celebrate? Maybe I could even spike a ball. That would be awesome.
***
There’s an Eminem song where he raps about having one shot and not missing your chance. You know it. When you grow up in Metro Detroit, the song is like a less problematic version of the Pledge of Allegiance, where you don’t actively think about the words, but they’re just fully entrenched into your being.
I woke up on December 26, 2018, a date that would change my life, and grabbed my carefully selected clothing I set out from the night before. My sweatpants that were made to look like jeans. A loose t-shirt. A winter hat to keep my hair tucked in out of my face (I was also afraid of being mocked for having a man bun by the football fans). Then I went out to practice throwing some more.
Midway through the first quarter, I took Jimbo and Stein down to the field with me. I was struck by the immensity of the stadium, how it kept rising up from the field. And then I saw the giant tire looming in the tunnel. We took some photos and tried to joke around a little, but nerves began creeping in. I remember taking deep breaths on the sidelines and wiping the sweat from my palms. This would change my life, rewrite my football legacy, and become a family story for the generations.
I stepped onto the field that legends like Joey Harrington and Jon Kitna had once called home. The crowd roared as they announced my name. I was feeling great. I knew it was my moment to shine. I did the ‘louder’ motion with my arms. And you know what? The crowd got louder. The last two years were about to suddenly disappear. At the 15 yard line, the rack of footballs was actually closer to me than the distance I had been practicing. I looked up on the jumbotron, and there I was.
I genuinely don’t know how it started, with a ‘go’ or a whistle. I was focused on the target and my game plan. Then the muscle memory of my practicing took over.
I grabbed the first football and had a good grip. I stepped and let the ball go, a nice spiral with plenty of distance. I only glanced out of my peripheral vision at the path of the ball, as I was already going for the next one.
It doinked off the bottom of the tire.
Undeterred from my game plan, I kept focused on grabbing the next football and throwing it as quickly as I could.
And then an amazing thing started to happen.
The crowd of 27,228 started to boo.
***
Maggie’s Wigs 4 Kids of Michigan accepts clean, dry, uncolored hair donations starting at seven inches in length. My hair, slightly over 12 inches long, took significantly longer to cut off than my time on the Ford Field turf. Two days after the Quick Toss, a stylist pulled my hair into approximately ten ponytails. He carefully cut off each one, put in a Ziplock, and mailed off to be turned into a wig. When he was done, I ran my hand over my head, reacquainting myself with the once-familiar feeling of it massaging my palm, the same way it did in my childhood when I would buzz my hair every summer for baseball season.
I was low on almost every throw. In all my practicing, I had been throwing the ball to where a receiver would catch it. The giant tire was significantly higher, around where Jared Goff would overthrow a ball—a good 8-10 feet in the air. In my haste to try to get through every ball, I didn’t adjust to the height of the tire. When I finally made one, there was a pity cheer. I might have made one or two more as well. I genuinely don’t know. I have the footage on my phone, taken by my parents, Jimbo and Stein, and friends who I didn’t even know were at the game but texted me the video. But I can’t bring myself to look at it.
After my last toss, I looked up at the clock. I had six seconds left. I was whisked away and given a gift bag. I watched the rest of the game with a sinking feeling coursing through my chest. I hoped no one would recognize me, afraid I might cry. I had failed. I knew there would be no more magic trucks to the rescue.
I started therapy.
***
On December 26, 2019, Jimbo, Stein and I were back at Ford Field to watch Pittsburgh take on Eastern Michigan, which I know because I just googled it. I had a mix of emotions returning, as one of the things I loved doing every year would always be tainted in some way.
At the end of the first quarter a man went out to do the Quick Lane Quick Toss and I found myself rooting against him, afraid he would succeed where I had failed. I was relieved when he did worse than I did. But I felt guilty as I watched him take the long walk off the field, where you want to be anywhere but in front of tens of thousands of people. I thought back to the moment it was me a year before, and all that had happened since. It turns out, the contest wasn’t my last chance. Therapy had done wonders and I wished I had gone much earlier. But I was, after all, still the kid who had played through a broken wrist. After I didn’t win the truck that year, I started to rebuild myself, piece by piece, like my grandparents did on the assembly line. I fell in love, began writing again, went back to school, and moved in with my girlfriend. I even naively found myself hopeful about the coming year. I wished I could go down to the field, put an arm around him and tell him it was okay, and that he could still find whatever it was he needed. And that it wasn’t a truck.
Scott Bolohan is a potential award-winning writer. He roots for the Detroit Lions draft pick.