Have you ever been hit in the head really hard? I have.
I was knocked unconscious in front of a crowd of thousands. But I'm not bitter or embarrassed about it.
In fact, it's the most entertaining story in my arsenal, which means a lot from a guy who has fallen off his own roof, acted in a Pizza Pit commercial and been officially banned from the UW-Milwaukee dormitories.
I was 17, and my Parker Viking football team was playing the Beloit Memorial Purple Knights in their homecoming game.
The Knights' roster featured current UW-Madison defensive end and then-blue chip recruit Darius Jones.
By the second half, Darius had rolled on us for three touchdowns and seemed to be making every other tackle.
Our defensive guys knew the best way to tackle him was to fling themselves kamikaze-style at his legs and hope he didn't step on their groins on the way down. Sometimes even the ol' fling-and-pray didn't keep him out of the end zone.
The only thing worse than tackling him was blocking him. That, as the left offensive tackle, was my job on about half the snaps.
I executed my duty admirably and without incident until late in the third quarter.
On a second down, our coach called a halfback run up the middle. I ran out to block Darius, but before I got to him, I fell.
My head, on its way down, met Darius' knee, in full-sprint, hydraulic-pump-mode, on its way up. Everything went dark.
Incredibly, after a moments-long catnap on the field, I got up without anyone noticing I had been unconscious.
My helmet had come halfway off-a fact to which I was oblivious. Also, I heard a tornado alert signal nobody else knew about and I couldn't focus both my eyes at the same time, so I just shut one of them.
I wandered back to the huddle and awaited instruction from the quarterback on the next play.
When the quarterback barked out the play, much to my horror, I didn't recognize it at all. I looked up, hoping to inquire about this strange new play they'd learned without me, and realized I'd never seen the quarterback before. Surveying the rest of the 11-man congregation, I saw 10 more people I was about 70 percent sure I'd never met.
Also, even though I was still seeing sunspots out of my half-functioning right eye, I noticed that my supposed teammates' jerseys were purple. A quick glance reassured me that mine was not purple.
They looked at me suspiciously, like I had come, in full uniform with my helmet on top of my head and one of my eyes shut, to steal their play.
I waved sheepishly and walked back to my huddle, much to the relief of my quarterback, who was starting to get worked up over my sudden and inexplicable disappearance.
I never mentioned my head injury-induced reconnaissance mission to anyone during the game. I didn't want to be replaced. Oddly enough, we won.
The next morning, I tried to drive to Janesville's Monterey Stadium-a place I'd been hundreds of times.
I drove around town for about an hour looking for it. The whole time, I was thinking, \when I remember how to get to the stadium, this is going to make a great story.""
Dan can be reached at dlhinkel@wisc.edu.
