Maverick Brevard was Lizzie’s first real boyfriend.
The Brevards were a family that lived and breathed football. Wyatt, the father, grew up in Baton Rouge in an exceptionally large Cajun family. He’d always planned on playing for LSU (Geaux Tigers!) but was wooed away by a damned good recruiter for the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) who basically promised him the moon, including a free ride financially and no redshirt year: he would start at wide receiver as a true freshman. And the guy absolutely delivered on his promises. In return, Wyatt played his heart out for Michigan and Coach Bump Elliott. During his years there the team had one winning season, his freshman year, when they lost only a single game and were the Big 10 champions. The next three seasons—which he never liked talking (or even thinking) about—would have destroyed a lesser man’s love of the game in general and University of Michigan football in particular, but Wyatt remained a Wolverine fan forever. His greatest disappointment, at least prior to his realization that his two oldest sons showed some talent but probably not enough to play pro ball, was that he was never mentioned as a possible Heisman Trophy candidate. He’d chosen to play the wrong position.
“Should have been a quarterback,” he’d say to his three boys, Maverick, Ranger, and Colton. Still, he was plenty good enough at wide receiver to be drafted by the New Orleans Saints, much to the delight of the hometown fans, who still remembered the good hands and fleetness of foot he’d possessed in high school. He spent his steady and successful career there, making the Pro Bowl once, but was cursed again with being on a team that was mediocre at best. He was happy that he’d chosen to retire in 1979, because the next season many of the Saints’ frustrated and angry fans started calling the team the “Aints” and coming to the games wearing brown paper bags on their heads so that nobody could recognize them for the fools they were, throwing away good money to watch a consistently losing team. Right after Wyatt retired and was casting about for how to fill his life post-football, Bo Schembechler, then the head coach of the Wolverines, asked him to come back to Ann Arbor to coach the receivers.
Maverick’s mother, Pammie, grew up in suburban Detroit. She was tiny, blond, and cute, and reveled in being all three. She’d been captain of the U of M cheerleading squad (which is how she and Wyatt met), president of the Tri-Delts, and still wore her hair in a ponytail. Under the right conditions and after a glass or two of wine, she was reliably bouncy. Dispensing with the dot, she put a heart over the lowercase i in her name. She loved her sons to distraction. Her cheerleading background came in handy at their football games. And she’d never missed one.
Maverick, like his father before him, was a wide receiver; his brother Ranger, ten months younger but also a junior (the vagaries of birthdays: Ranger was a young junior, Maverick an old one), backed up the quarterback but was projected to be a starter his senior year. Their younger brother, Colton, quarterbacked his Pee-Wee football team. Maverick was a good football player but not an excellent one. Ranger was excellent but not great. The family’s football hopes and dreams resided in Colt, who at thirteen was starting to get noticed by college football scouts. In fact, Colt went on to win the Heisman twice, joining Archie Griffin as the only two players to achieve that distinction. He had a superb NFL career with the Kansas City Chiefs and would eventually be inducted into the Football Hall of Fame.
Before she started dating Maverick, Lizzie had never given much thought to football. Oh, she went to the occasional high school game, because that’s what everyone (except Andrea) did on Friday nights. At the beginning, though, when Maverick and Lizzie couldn’t bear to be out of sight of one another, she spent her afternoons watching the team practice. Evenings, she helped Maverick memorize the playbook. He diagrammed various pass routes and defensive alignments, went through the rosters, and described to Lizzie the strengths and weaknesses of each player on the opposing team. He told her stories about the great coaches: Vince Lombardi, Bill Walsh, Don Shula, Tom Landry (Lizzie would hear that name again—and again—from George); and the great tragedies: Ernie Davis, the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy, dead of leukemia at twenty-four before he could ever play a down as a pro; Darryl Stingley and Mike Utley, whose football careers were cut short by spinal cord injuries.
Maverick lent Lizzie all of his favorite football books to read, which included not only George Plimpton’s Paper Lion and Don DeLillo’s End Zone but also Mr. Quarterback and Mr. Half?back, two children’s books by William Campbell Gault that Wyatt had read as a boy growing up in Louisiana and passed on to his sons. Under Maverick’s tutelage she rooted wholeheartedly for the holy triumvirate: the Pioneers (High School), the Wolverines (U of M), and the Lions, Detroit’s pro football team, which had never won a Super Bowl.