narrative storytelling. He has covered college football and the NFL, as well as college and professional basketball and the Summer Olympics, for Fox Sports and CBS Sports, and he currently writes for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. The article in which he first wrote about Zac Easter is included in Best American Sports Writing 2018. A past life found him working at The Des Moines Register in Iowa as well as several other metropolitan newspapers. Forgrave lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two sons.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Love, Zac: Small-Town Football and the Life and Death of an American Boy, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Reid Forgrave's website.It happened away from the ball, so the collision that ended Zac Easter's football career can't be seen on game tape. “He just smoked this guy who was twice the size of him,” his older brother recalled. “He got up and he was wobbling. He had no clue where he was walking. I was like, ‘Oh shit, this is not good.’ ” Two teammates pulled a player off the ground and dragged him toward Wilson. When she saw his jersey number, 44, her heart dropped into her stomach. Zac's feet were barely under him.The Page 99 Test works uncannily well for my book, Love, Zac. The book covers the tragedy of Zac Easter, a 24-year-old from small-town Iowa who died by suicide in 2015 and left behind many writings and explicit instructions to his family to spread his story. Zac believed - correctly, it turned out, according to doctors who posthumously examined his brain - that suffering numerous concussions while playing football from third grade through high school had caused him to have CTE, the degenerative brain disease often associated with athletes in contact sports. The moment captured on page 99 of Love, Zac, is the painful end of Zac's football career - the third concussion he suffered his senior year. After this, Zac's senior year of high school is enveloped in darkness, and his next several years are consumed by a tumultuous descent marked by memory issues, migraines, slurred speech, and what he called "brain tremors." This chapter ends with Zac's own words about the aftermath of that final football concussion: "All I know is that I have never been the same."
“Sue, he's not right,” one teammate said.
Zac didn’t say a word. He sat on the bench and put his head down. He started crying. He could still speak, he could still stick his tongue out, and he wasn’t vomiting. Even though his head was pounding, he didn’t seem in need of urgent medical attention.
Years later, I sat in my basement, watching and rewinding game tape from that night. I saw Zac all over the place, often jumping right into pileups on the field. But on that third-quarter drive, I could tell that number 44 was suddenly missing from Indianola's defense. Later in the game, at the bottom of the screen, Zac could be seen on the sidelines, arguing heatedly with someone: Wilson, the trainer. She was clutching his helmet. He wanted to go back in. Kluver came over. Zac had his hands on his hips. He was trying to talk her into letting him go back in.
No way, she said.
A nearly full moon was rising as the players walked off the field after their 24-9 loss. In the locker room, Zac’s blue eyes drifted into a haze. “A thousand-yard stare,” Nick Haworth called it. Nobody wanted to talk after a loss, especially to Ankeny. Haworth walked up to his friend. “I could tell Zac wasn’t there,” he recalled. “It was like a blank stare. I’m like, ‘Zac? Dude, what’s going on?’ And he said, ‘Nothing, man, I’m all good.’ It was almost like he didn’t want to say too much, because if he started throwing words together, he may get exposed. I got my shit packed up. We walked out of the locker room together, and I said, ‘Hey man, we’re going to go see Sue.’ ‘No, man. We don’t need to.’ ‘You’re fucking going with me, and we’re going to see Sue.’”
What The Page 99 Test does is showcase one of the main turning points in this book, the moment where Zac Easter changes from the fun-loving all-American boy-next-door into a troubled, lost young man who never seems to find his footing in a post-high school world. Zac's story is at the core of this book, and this page is a vital look at the moment when what he called "the old Zac" went away. What the test does not do, however, is reveal the true meaning of this tragic story. Read this one page, and you could think this is a football book. It is not. This is a book about sports, but not a "sports book." I think of this book as being about so much more than just sports: About parenting, about masculinity, about what fathers pass on to their sons, about our nation's addiction to football (and our species' addiction to violence), about what we value as a country. But all that big-picture academic-sounding stuff centers around Zac's story - which reaches one of its most emotional, vital turning points on page 99.
--Marshal Zeringue
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