The Graduates

"I'd like my coaches here to have good memories of me. Hopefully, they'll remember me as a good athlete. As an intelligent person. I'm not sure they'll think of me as a responsible person. But I think I understand more now."

Ten years from now, Brownson said, he would remember those two national championships, and his contributions. He would especially remember the time in 1970 when Nebraska was down 20-10 to Kansas, and he brought the team back to win 41-20. Those heroics, which won him Big Eight Back of the Week honors, began with an 80-yard touchdown pass to Guy Ingles. Brownson remembered he got the pass away just as he was knocked off his feet and didn't see it, but the game movies showed it to be a perfectly thrown ball, the kind quarterbacks deliver in their dreams. Ingles had one step on the defender and never had to break stride.

Then a very funny thing happened, Brownson said. That spring the Nebraska football-highlights film, the one that makes the rounds of luncheons and banquets, came out, and included in it was Brownson's great pass. At the appropriate moment, as the play flickered on the screen, the announcer said, "Now, here it is: Jerry Tagge's perfect 80-yard touchdown pass to Guy Ingles."

Brownson said the irony had not been lost on him.

He was born in the south Nebraska town of Oxford (pop. 1,116), which is on the Republican River, where the bass fishing is good. There is nothing else Jeff Kinney can think to say about Oxford except that it has a big turkey feed every summer. His father, a brakeman for the Burlington Northern Railroad, raised the family upriver in McCook, a town distinct from Oxford in that it has 7,000 more people. There Jeff Kinney grew to be a star quarterback and a fine allround athlete. Devaney himself came to McCook to see him ("It was like entertaining the President," Kinney recalls), and Devaney gave him a scholarship to Nebraska, where Kinney starred again, this time as a halfback.

He married his high school sweetheart, whose name is Becky, as all high school sweethearts should be, and Becky gave him a son, Jeffrey Scott. And the Nebraska football fans gave him unremitting attention. In his senior year Kinney made All-America; he ended his career with the finest record for running the football in the history of the school (2,420 yards, 35 touchdowns) and was drafted in the first round by the Kansas City Chiefs. "Things have always fallen into place for me," said Jeff Kinney.

But with the encroachment of adulthood, Kinney found that a hero's work is never done, and that the ascent is never as direct or as painless as that brief resume would indicate. To be objective about it, one would have to say that between the joyful noise of hands clapping together, one would have to include the sleepless nights and the family budget; the realities of a classroom education and the harder realities outside. One summer he took a job with a section gang for the railroad, changing ties in the steaming rockbeds around McCook. The temperature reached 118°. He learned to appreciate the shade. Another time he worked as a policeman in Lincoln, riding a squad car at $3.50 an hour, and experienced the sensation of being called a pig. He said as a policeman he had a very hard time controlling his temper.

On the afternoon before the Nebraska class of '72 was to be graduated—graduating without him, he said, with a trace of indignation, because he had fallen behind due to the demands on a football hero's time—Kinney sat in the stark two-bedroom brick bungalow on Cleveland Avenue, the one he and Becky had rented (a bargain at $55 a month) two years before, and with the window-unit air conditioner buzzing at his back, he recalled that even the greatest triumphs were not without postscripts.

"A lot of us don't realize yet the full impact of that Oklahoma game," he said. "Maybe we never will." Surrounding him on the walls and furniture tops of the living room were the engraved plaques and trophies and pictures (one showing him with President Nixon) that certified his rank as a football star. Becky sat on the chair next to him. They had been packing for the move to Kansas City. Becky had quit her job as a dental assistant. Jeff said: "I know, personally, it was the biggest moment of my life, the Oklahoma game. Not everybody gets to play in a game like that. People around here idolize football players. They'll remember that game. They'll remember and be apt to help you later on, if you ever need help." Jeff Kinney had rushed for 171 yards and scored four touchdowns.

"The whole thing was wild, like being in a different world. The game itself was unbelievable—35-31. When the plane bringing us home landed in Lincoln, they couldn't get it anywhere close to the terminal because of all the people. Ten thousand of them, yelling and screaming."