Gary Gulman

Like maybe he was a waste after all.

The man costume had fooled him for a while, but he was still the same person he'd always been.

He started to dread practices and games.

I would throw up before every game.

On the sideline, I would throw up because I was overcome by nerves and anxiety.

I started to feel really lousy about myself, and my grades suffered, and I just knew that I was starting to disappoint these guys.

And they never said anything, to their credit.

They never said, wow, we really had high hopes for you.

It just, it sounds crazy.

I still have nightmares about it.

His plan back then was, make it through the season, one game a week, never play again.

And in the middle of this, a college football coach came into our locker room and introduced himself to me at my locker.

And that was sort of a, what the hell is going on here?

Introduced himself to you?

And said what?

He said, you had a great game, which I hadn't, and I am an assistant at Dartmouth College, and we'd love for you to take a visit to Dartmouth.

Okay, here's the thing that Gary didn't know or understand at the time.

As disheartened as he was, his coaches did not think he was having a bad season.

Sure, they weren't sending him out for passes, but the main reason for that, John Jetson told me on the phone, wasn't the fumble that Gary had made, like Gary obsessed over.

It was that the quarterback couldn't throw reliable passes.