One Shot at Forever by Chris Ballard Page A

he found Sweet in the gym, playing basketball with his students after hours, and the two men had engaged in a heated shouting match. In each case, Britton had stepped in, calmed the waters, and defended his friend. But communist? That was a new one.
    The agitated parent proceeded with a litany of reasons why he believed this to be the case, including Sweet’s reading selections, his politics, and the fact that, plain for all to see, the man was a hippie who’d be better off taking his act to California.
    It wasn’t the first time someone had suggested Sweet leave town. To many Maconites, Sweet seemed more foreign than ever by the spring of 1970. Rather than the town having an effect on him, the opposite appeared to have occurred. Not only did Sweet look like a peacenik, but instead of settling down he’d become even more of a vagabond. For a while he lived in an apartment on Front Street, then in a house with Jack Burns down the road in Radford. Now, of course, he lived in that house in Decatur with a bunch of basketball players, some of whom, the women down at the Country Manor restaurant whispered, were colored . At times it seemed Sweet just lived out of his car. To invite him over for dinner was often to find Sweet, a few days later, still camped out on your couch. Not that anyone ever minded, for he was excellent company and a conscientious guest. Steve Shartzer remembers a couple of mornings when he awoke to find Sweet on the family’s couch, bleary-eyed after a night of carousing with Burns, Britton, and Bob Shartzer. Unfailingly, though, Sweet was always up by 7 A.M ., groggy but dressed and ready. By eight he was at school and teaching, lest he break one of Britton’s cardinal rules: Have your fun but always, always stand tall the next morning.
    Then there was that strange business with the slippers. One morning, Roy Roush, the vice president of the school board, was walking in the post-dawn hours near his house on the eastern edge of Macon when he’d seen the most peculiar thing. There, silhouetted against the morning light, was a man in shorts and canvas slippers, tearing down the street. As the figure got closer, Roush recognized the mop of brown hair and realized it was Sweet, pumping his arms and sprinting around town for what appeared to be no good reason. “Hello there, Roy!” Sweet called out, and then he was gone.
    This being 1970, the idea of running for fun hadn’t yet entered the national consciousness. Runner’s World had only recently graduated from being a pamphlet printed out of the Kansas home of a man named Bob Anderson, and it would be a year before a University of Oregon track coach would oversee the release of a shoe called Nike. Sweet was already hooked, though. He loved how running cleared his mind and energized him—“better than a pill,” he told people. He began while living in Champaign in 1962, starting each morning by clocking four miles around town. Macon was not Champaign, though, and concerned neighbors sometimes stopped and asked if he needed help—why else would he be tearing off at such a pace? Other times, pickup trucks swerved as if to hit him, the drivers cackling as they zoomed by.
    Indeed, little about the man made sense to the people of Macon. Still, while there were plenty of words one could use to describe Sweet, “communist” was not one of them. So when the parent made his accusation, Britton pushed back. Addressing the parents, administrators, and board members, he reminded them how much the students loved Sweet. The man was just a bit progressive, that was all.
    Later, however, Britton cornered Sweet to tell him what had happened. “L.C.,” he said, “you know that one of these times I really am going to have to fire you, right?”
    Sweet nodded, then thanked his friend for having his back. He was aware of how McClard and the school board viewed him, but if anything he found it amusing.