[HM] The Story of Tommy Debuse

Tommy Debuse, Jesus, what an athlete. Every high school has a small collection of athletes that could play at the next level, and maybe one that stood above the rest and could be imagined playing at the highest level, but we were lucky to witness Tommy Desuse. It was fun to dream athletic dreams when we were young, and fun to dream of our peers that had real potential. We all came from the same roots.

There isn’t a single get together with friends from high school where his name doesn’t come up at least once. Usually in the context of sports, or general fitness, his name will come up. I can’t think of anything pertaining to physicality without thinking of Tommy Desuse. When Tommy first came into our world, it didn’t take long for us to tag any and every nickname to him – chief, boss, captain, el jefe, tank, the beast, tree trunks – but we couldn’t give him them all, so we kept it simple and stuck with what was the first thing anyone noticed about Tommy when he stepped onto the football field, he would be Tommy “Big Legs”. His legs weren’t big as in fat, they were pure muscle, six foot and two hundred and forty-five pounds of pure muscle was Tommy, and extremely proportional except for his legs. Apart from his legs, the rest of his body looked the exact build of someone smaller that had just been enlarged. Not with more muscle or fat or anything, just bigger bones. His thighs burst out of any pants he wore, he always had to wear stretchy fabrics, and had no separation of the inner thighs above the knee; his inner thighs rubbing together as he walked. Thighs the size of tree trunks and calves that were nearly the same size. His legs looked like they lived a life of their own. Went home to their own families and worked their own jobs. These legs could stop a freight train and that’s not hyperbole, it’s told he had stopped a freight train, not at full speed, but it was coming to a stop but was about to take out a family of deer. Someone spotted Tommy lie on his back, plant himself on the train track, and stop the train with his legs. I have no reason to not believe that story.

Tommy had curly brown hair, blue eyes, and some freckles. He was dense, really filled in his clothes, but was of the softest character in our grade. He looked like he weighed less than he did, due to his low body fat. He looked like he weighed maybe around two hundred and twenty pounds, but the scale would sometimes show him over two-fifty, like he was storing lead somewhere in his body. His true weight was known and felt by anyone that physically interacted with him, or god forbid opposed him in football. 

We were all excited for football in freshman year, everyone came out, except Tommy. Tommy didn’t show up until the second week of practice, when the coach saw him in the cafeteria and asked him to come out. It only took one practice for the coaches to disallow any contact by Big Legs to anyone else, and he was moved to the senior team immediately. After his first game strapping up for our Belle Bay Broncos, every single team asked to verify his birth certificate, which routine was eventually quashed after his first season and everyone knew who he was. His face told the truth - he looked as young as any of us. We ogled at Tommy’s size and ability in the one practice we had with him, even though he barely knew how to put on his equipment - he had never played organized sports before. Tommy had the sort of strength that we couldn’t fully comprehend in high school. We thought we knew what strength training was, and believed it could turn us into any athlete we wanted to be, but something primal and instinctive inside us whispered that there was no matching Tommy. It took two grown men to squeeze the quadruple XL helmet onto his head. The prime physique of youth, like the statue of David, with big ass legs - a god amongst boys. Could someone have lifted weights and gained his size over the course of childhood? We had all started going to the gym around highschool, maybe he just had a head start. But it didn’t look like he had worked for his body, and nor did he carry himself like he had worked for it. We never saw him at the gym, and while we weren’t sure what his routine was at home, it seemed as if he didn’t work out at all. He just worked on his grandparents farm, is what he would tell us every time we asked about his routine. He must have been lifting some god damn hay bails and tilling the fields himself. He would bench press two plates like nothing in gym class, squat three plates, do twenty pullups when we could hardly do five, did dips when we could hardly do any. Pushups were nothing to him; it looked more like he was pushing down the earth than pushing himself up. Tommy was really just born with it. You want to believe that anything is possible, and you’re all on equal ground with others, plenty of years to develop, but Tommy would show that sure as shit no one was on his ground, especially on the football field. It only made a bit of sense when someone said they saw his father at the grocery store one county over. A six foot five man that looked about three hundred pounds sporting a mullet and a cutoff t-shirt, and a similar build to Tommy, is what someone told. But this man was never seen with Tommy, so how could they know it was his dad, we asked. He looked exactly like Tommy, they insisted. 

His family owned a deli one county over, where he grew up; a family with which he no longer stayed due to some sort of situation with his father. I remember seeing him win some medals in regional track and field events in middle school, but nothing major. His grandparents have a farm in our city and Tommy would come to school from this farm every day on his bike, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him. Biking to school did not turn any of us into an athlete like Tommy Debuse, unfortunately. We don’t know much more about Tommy’s roots, as he was always distant about personal things and didn’t open up much, and we didn’t want to invade his space. It was of utmost importance that we kept Tommy comfortable, and not make him want to quit the football team, or leave our school. Reason being is that Tommy had single-handedly taken our single A school to the AAA city finals at running back when he was in grade 9. We couldn’t ruin this for our school.

It was not just Tommy’s size that made him special, that really paled in comparison to his playing abilities. Big Legs was explosive as hell, he could bounce side to side like a small Spanish tennis player, like a child playing tag, could get to full speed like a bobsledder, and at full speed looked like an Olympic sprinter. Forget it, six points for big legs. The score lines of our school's games was  laughable. 

Our school is a small school, less than 1,000 students which puts us in the A category for scholastic athletics. But after winning our first four games by an average of 50 points, and multiple injuries to underdeveloped opponents, teams that had had historically better programs, we were bumped to AA. My friends and I got to watch this every Friday under the lights in our first fall of high school. And in AA things did not change, and more people from town began to come out to see the rising Broncos. The way Big Legs moved was art. The beauty of a player that moves in ways that can’t be taught, bordering the abilities of grown men at the highest level, it was magical to think of what time would make of Tommy Big Legs Desuse. After obliterating the AA schools that contained less than 1,500 students, our Broncos were moved to the AAA playoffs against schools of less than 2,000 students. Some big dogs, competition that our school hadn’t seen in many decades. Dusty plaques in glass cabinets were the only evidence of days when our school had competed in AAA. The town was excited. They installed new bleachers and put down new grass for our school's field, with money made from the large crowds, all because of Big Legs.

Game after game the ball was handed to Big Legs and he would run over anyone in his way until three people at minimum brought him down. Sometimes our quarterback would throw it to him for fun, or other players here and there. This more or less continued through the AAA playoffs, winning every game by three touchdowns minimum until they claimed the first AAA city title for the Belle Bay Broncos. They made it look so easy that our coach campaigned to play the AAAA city champions, and they took him up on it. We wouldn’t be granted the AAAA title, but it would be a spectacle at the least. So we thought, but it was not. The score was 58-24 for our Broncos. There was no team in our city that could stop Big Legs. Our town had a parade for the historic champs, they were giants, all while Tommy took it in in his reserved manner. The quiet kid that showed up to class, said “yes ma’am” and “yes sir”, ate his packed lunch, went to football practice, and biked back to where he came from. Me and my friends couldn’t wait to suit up with Tommy once we got to grade 11.

The next year, ours and Tommy’s sophomore year, our school moved into AAAA and included opponents from across the state. People were talking about Big Legs statewide, and recruits would be turning up to games. But things again did not change. Big Legs was now only stronger and more knowledgeable of the game, with a team built singly around him, all state competition was wiped. The first state title for the small Belle Bay Broncos. 

As our junior year approached, my chance to play with Tommy, players began to relocate from around the city, future college players, into our catchment to play for Belle Bay. This made us better, but unfortunately for my friends filtered out some that wanted to play with Big Legs. But luckily I gained a spot. More lucky was that we were flown nationwide on occasion to play the top teams in other states, such as New York, New Jersey, Florida, California, and Texas. Playing on ESPN, Tommy on the cover of Sports Illustrated, what the fuck? Getting days off of school while seeing places we’d never seen. All to showcase Big Legs to the world. Some of the games were actually close, Big Legs had to play some defense, while the rest of us tried to play our best football while mostly outmatched, but we still never lost. Many of us supplementary players would spend much of our down time working on celebrations, or dances. As Tommy would be making his way down field, we would find the cameras and start dancing and making gestures into them, knowing Tommy was most likely on his way to a first down or touchdown and did not need our support. Oh my was it a time. Media would swarm our games looking for a chance to speak with Tommy. Girls we had never met and that we had no business speaking to would send every player on the team letters. Back in Belle Bay Tommy’s grandparents had had enough of recruits loitering outside their property; a pile of packages containing college offers and bribes appearing on their front lawn. Any time of day you could drive by and there were a couple of cars lined up trying to come inside and have a word with the young man, talk to him about the top class programs and facilities at Alabama, Ohio, Miami, etc. Among all this attention, Tommy continued on in his reserved ways. It hadn’t changed him at all. Whenever we asked Tommy about his future, he said he wasn’t sure that he wanted to play in college. He said to us once while we were winding down after a game in a hotel room watching Ghostbusters, one of Tommy’s favourite movies, in a rare moment that he had opened up to us, he said  that he didn’t ask for any of this, nor did he really work for it. To him, all of his abilities and successes felt normal, they were just a product of traits he had in the same way others have traits that make them unique; for some perhaps making them more social, artistic, humourous. He said that he wished he could be more like the normal guys on the team. It was then that I realized how all this attention had been weighing on Tommy, but he stuck it out, and we captured the AAAA state title. Back-to-back state champs. Were we the best team in the nation? Possibly. The best high school team ever? It was all possible.

The next season, there were talks of moving our games to a more competitive western state, such as California or Texas. But, as the summer neared a close and training camp started approaching, things felt different, and when training camp finally rolled around, our gut feeling was clarified. Tommy would not be joining the Broncos for his senior year. He wanted some time and space from the game. This wasn’t necessarily a surprise to someone that considered Tommy’s preliminary level of passion and attachment to the game in any of his past three seasons. He had been asked to play in the first place, after all. But for the people that had expectations and longed to be a part of further success for the Broncos, the news was striking, and for the money making media and hopeful collegiate suitors dying to have a generational talent like Tommy welcomed into their program, even more so. But, Tommy Desuse was an aligning of stars in a galaxy of their own.

So, we all collected ourselves, took some deep breaths, and stuck to it. We had a chip on our shoulders and no one believed we should remain in AAAA, and that we should return to A where we came from. There would certainly be no travel games, but we would have a chance to start our season and compete in the AAAA division without Tommy. We still had a talented team, on account of the players that had relocated to play with Tommy, and it felt like some of Tommy’s moves and abilities had rubbed off on us, if not at least some confidence. We worked hard and played our assess off to defend our legacy and prove to everyone that we could compete without Tommy. We had to change, of course. We became a different team that now utilized assets that were little used when we had Tommy and not respected by our opponents, which worked to catch our opponents by surprise. We finished the season a respectable 8-4, and as playoffs neared, many of us respectfully asked Tommy if he could join us for playoffs, but he respectfully declined, but said he would be there with us on the sidelines. We lost the first playoff game of our senior year, as Tommy stood with his legs bulging on the sideline. Everyone knew that the story would be different if Tommy was on the field, but he looked happy to be watching, happy to have some space from it all, and we were all happy for him after all he had done for us. But I wish we could have had more success in our final  season, without Tommy. Not for us, but for Tommy. To take some of the light off of him, give him some more space, because everyone knew that a multi-generational talent was standing on the sideline in streetclothes, with big ass legs.