Cover story · Football
Nobody called.
Nick Mansour threw 35 touchdowns and no interceptions last fall and Fenton went undefeated for the first time most of us can remember. Then he spent the summer bagging groceries and practicing scales, waiting for a phone that didn't ring.
Editor's note: Hudson is a friend of the subject. He disclosed this to the adviser before reporting. — M. Pearce Jr., managing editor
On the second Tuesday in July, at approximately 4:15 in the afternoon, Nick Mansour was in aisle nine of the Meijer on Owen Road explaining to an older woman that the store had, in fact, stopped carrying the specific brand of applesauce she wanted, and that he was sorry about it, and that he did not have any influence over which applesauce the store carried.
She did not know who he was. That is not the point of the story. The point of the story is that six people who came through his line that same shift did, and every single one of them asked him some version of the same question.
"Where you going?"
"Like — for college," he said. "That's the question. It's always that question. And I don't have an answer, so I just say 'we'll see' and then they say 'you'll be fine' and then I scan their yogurt."
What everyone assumed happened this summer
Ask around the school and you get a fairly consistent picture of Nick Mansour's summer. He was at camps. He was on visits. He was getting looked at. Several people said "Michigan" without any apparent basis for saying it. One sophomore told me with total confidence that he had been to "like four camps at least."
Here is what actually happened this summer:
He worked at Meijer. He lifted at 6 a.m. four days a week, usually with Kobe Lookebill, who says Mansour is "still the weakest guy in there but he doesn't miss." He played piano — a lot of piano, according to Mr. Perkins, who has thoughts we will get to. He played jazz with Tommy Quinn and Max Herzog at two open mics in Flint and one thing at a coffee shop in Holly that Quinn describes as "eleven people, four of whom were our moms." He gained about seven pounds. He threw with Kevin Lack and Aaron Boulay on the practice field on Sundays, unsupervised, which is technically a gray area nobody wants to look into.
He did not go to a single camp.
Not because he didn't want to. Because nobody invited him, and the ones you can pay to attend happened during a stretch when he was working and when — his mother's words — "he had just been cleared and I was not putting him in a stadium full of strangers in June."
"I think people assume there's a machine. Like there's some office somewhere with my film in it. There isn't. There's me, and a laptop, and a link." Nick Mansour
The link
Mansour has a HUDL account. Everyone has a HUDL account. His has last season's cutups on it: the Linden game, the second Goodrich half, the Flushing game where he was 19-for-21 and Coach Shaffer reportedly said a word on the sideline that got him a look from an official.
Starting in the middle of August, Mansour began emailing that link to college coaches. He picked the schools himself off a spreadsheet his sister Ari built. He wrote the messages himself. He sent nine of them.
He has received zero replies.
"Nine isn't a lot," he said, when I brought it up. "I know it's not a lot. I'm not sitting here like, how dare they. They get a thousand of those. I'd delete mine too."
Then, a minute later, unprompted: "I do check, though. Like, more than I want to admit."
The teacher problem
A thing that has not gotten easier in a year: the adults at this school still do not entirely believe it.
Mr. Gilbert, who taught Mansour Algebra II as a sophomore, put it this way when I asked him if he had seen it coming: "See what coming? He sat in the third row and did the homework. I don't know what you want me to say. Kid's small."
Told that Mansour threw for thirty-five touchdowns, Mr. Gilbert said, "Against who?"
Mrs. Grady, who had him for English last year, went the other direction so hard I had to ask her to slow down. "I've read four hundred essays a year for nineteen years," she said. "That kid wrote one about a football game that I still think about. It wasn't about the football. That's what nobody understands about him. He wasn't hiding an athlete. He was always this exact person. The rest of you just got a way to see it."
Principal Bakker, asked for comment, said that Fenton High School is "incredibly proud of Nick and of all our student-athletes," and then asked me whether Nick was the one who did the piano thing at the spring assembly, which he was, two years in a row.
Mr. Perkins is not thrilled
The band room is the only place in this building where the football thing gets you nothing.
"I'm happy for him," Mr. Perkins said. He said it in a way that had a second half attached to it, and then he said the second half. "I am also watching a kid with a genuine instrument — a real one, not a school-assembly one — decide he doesn't have time for it. And he hasn't decided that. He'd tell you he hasn't decided that. But there are only so many hours and I can count."
He wants Mansour to prepare an audition program this fall. Mansour has not said no. Mansour has also not said yes, and Mr. Perkins has been teaching teenagers for twenty-six years and knows exactly what that means.
"He'll figure it out," Perkins said. "I just hope he figures it out on purpose instead of by running out of time."
The locker room
Ben Haijcar is going to start at free safety and take a package of snaps at quarterback, which is the same arrangement as last year, which means we have now all had a full year to stop finding it weird and have not managed it.
"You want me to say it's fine," Ben said. "It's fine. It's genuinely fine. He's better. I'm not going to be the guy who pretends he isn't." He stopped. "It's still my senior year, though. Like, that's the part. It's fine and it's also the only senior year I get."
Kevin Lack, asked how the offense feels going into the opener, said, "We're gonna be a problem," and then, when asked about Mansour specifically: "He's weird, man. Like he'll come up to me at practice and go, 'Kevin, on that concept, when the safety opens his hips, I need you to be nine yards not eleven,' and I'm like, my guy, I have a math test." A pause. "But he's right. He's always right. That's the annoying part."
Troy DeGayner, Mansour's cousin, was asked one question and gave a four-minute answer, most of which cannot be printed in a student newspaper. The printable portion: "If somebody touches him this year they're gonna have a bad night. Write that down. Write it exactly like that."
What Coach Shaffer notices
Paul Shaffer has been coaching offense at Fenton for a long time and does not talk like a person who is trying to get on television.
"Last August he didn't know how to get in and out of a huddle," Shaffer said. "That's not a knock. Why would he? Nobody's born knowing it. He'd call the play and then just kind of stand there and the huddle wouldn't break because he hadn't said 'ready, break,' and eleven kids are looking at him."
"Now he runs the sideline. He comes off, tells me what he saw, and half the time he's already got the answer before I do. That's a year. One year."
Asked what worries him, Shaffer took long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer.
"He's a hundred and eighty pounds and he's never had a bad month," he said. "He's had a bad quarter. He's never had a bad month. That's coming for everybody eventually and I'd rather it came while he's still here where we can help."
Coach Setzke was asked the same question and gave a shorter answer. "He's our quarterback. He gets us points. My concern is Clio."
The last thing
At the end of the interview in the band room, I asked him the question the six people in his checkout line asked him. Where's he going.
He laughed at me, which is fair.
"Somewhere," he said. "I'd like to play. That's the whole thing. I don't care about the level as much as people think I should. If a school lets me play quarterback I will be extremely hard to get rid of."
I asked whether he was worried nobody would.
He thought about it long enough that I got uncomfortable and started to move on, and then he answered anyway.
"Every day," he said. "But like — the games are still gonna happen. They're gonna play Clio on Friday whether anybody's watching or not. So I might as well be good at it."
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