I have a million answers and yet no answer. I want to tell him it's about men and boys, toughness and weakness, fathers and sons, the invincibility of youth and the vulnerability of age.
It's about the importance of football in places like Napa, Calif. And, sometimes, what that culture does to men like him who love it too much. The answer I give Steve Hendrickson is abbreviated and ineloquent, but he nods along politely and tells me the story of the voice recorder. He has many stories of being unmade by the game that made him, sad stories he tells with unflinching, painful honesty, and it's the story of the recorder that gets me the most.
He bought the voice recorder as a means of hot-wiring his failing memory. His thinking went like this: He would tell the recorder everything he did, from conversations with his two children to walks with his dog, and wake up every morning to review what took place the day before.
The experiment lasted one day. He woke up the next morning and never found where he left it the night before. He laughs, but the story lands hard. I try not to let him see the sadness I feel. His mind is like a strainer; larger decisions, like buying and using the recorder, tend to stick, while the smaller ones, like where he left it, pass through, lost. The first time I heard Hendrickson's name, I was a senior in high school and he was a freshman playing varsity football across town.
There's a photo from his senior year, Steve and three friends posing in their letterman jackets. He's the one with two league-championship football patches sewn into his block-N jacket, the one who looks most comfortable, the alpha, with his left hand slung over the shoulder of the buddy next to him. The others seem less sure of themselves, perhaps happy just to share the same lens. Now Hendrickson is 46 but looks much older. His hair is the color of old concrete as it strings out from under a well-worn Chargers cap.
