Jack Trice Iowa State Football

Jack Trice was twenty-one. That’s the age when you still think pain has a purpose. When you believe hard work fixes everything. He believed that, anyway. He was polite, serious, built like a brick wall with a scholarship and a playbook. Ames, Iowa, didn’t know what to make of him, so they put him in a helmet and told him to hit people.

He studied animal husbandry, which is a nice way of saying he was trying to understand the world by understanding cows. He was good at that. He was good at everything. Coaches loved him because he didn’t talk much and did exactly what he was told. That kind of reliability makes people nervous.

The night before Iowa State played Minnesota, he sat alone in a Minneapolis hotel and wrote himself a note. “The honor of my race, family, and self is at stake,” he wrote. “Everyone is expecting me to do big things. I will.” Then he wrote down a few football reminders — fight low, stay alert, watch for the cross-buck. It read like a letter from a soldier who already knows he’s not coming back.

Game day was gray and cold, the kind of day that smells like dirt and bruises. He broke his collarbone in the first quarter but kept playing because that’s what you do when you’re twenty-one and everyone’s watching. In the third quarter, he went down in a tangle of legs and spikes and never really got up. They carried him off. He told them he was fine. Everyone says that before they die.