Chasing Space Read online

  The summer after freshman year, I stayed in Richmond to take my first physics course. I was doing research for Dr. Myers and I worked out every chance I had, hoping perhaps that every pound of muscle would help Richmond win more games. I was determined that this season would be different, that we would gel more as a team and, with some luck, turn things around.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong about that fall. Among the standout players that year was a huge offensive tackle from Marietta, Georgia. He was six foot six and nearly three hundred pounds, and the coaches were talking him up as a rising star. There were rumors he was taking steroids, perhaps lots of them, but nobody was paying much attention, probably because he was playing well. But four weeks into practice and only two weeks before the Spiders’ first game of the season, he drove to the home of his girlfriend in Chester, Virginia, about twenty minutes from the University of Richmond campus. It was about four in the morning, and he was furious that she wanted to break off the relationship. Using a key she had given him, he let himself into the house she shared with her mother and brother, waking them up and launching into an argument in the hallway. According to police interviews with the girlfriend’s younger brother, who had been in the house as well, my teammate raised a rifle and began shooting them, point-blank, killing his girlfriend and her mother before turning the gun on himself. The brother was also shot, but the doctors managed to save him.

  The tragedy stunned the quiet university community and the city of Richmond, leaving the Spiders distraught. Rumors were widespread that a dependence on steroids had warped the player’s mental state far worse than anyone had imagined. I never saw steroids and was never exposed to them during my time on campus. Our coaches never pressured us to consider them. Still, questions remained. Why hadn’t the team seen the signs? How much had he been using and for how long? There would be no answers. The stage was set for what would be another challenging year on the field for the Spiders.

  We won more games that season, an improvement but still not enough to boost our reputation on campus. The tragedy of our teammate had taken its toll. We ended the season with a 3–8 record. We were still losers.

  The Ground Shifts

  The Spiders’ performance on the field changed dramatically during my junior year. It was as if the ground shifted; we started to win. The mind-set of the team was transformed from one of disappointment to one of constant improvement and optimism. The starting lineup from my first two years had graduated. Coach Shealy finally had the team he had set out to build when he arrived at Richmond. His approach was to look first for character in an athlete, and then help him develop into a champion. After years spent looking for the “right stuff,” he felt he might finally have it in this team.

  Often on the night before a game, Coach Shealy would come into my hotel room and sit at the foot of the bed. “Leland, close your eyes,” he’d say. “You’re lined up on the thirty-yard line. You’re running a post corner into the end zone. You’re accelerating past the defender. You’re now looking at the ball. The ball is coming into your hands. You tune out the crowd. You’re now in the end zone. You caught the ball. We’ve won the game.”

  Sleeping with that visual helped get me ready. Once I got on the field I had already done it. Visualizing a pattern, a defensive coverage, or move was a really important part of the headwork to prepare for the game. This type of practice would serve me well years later when I operated the fifty-eight-foot robotic arm on space shuttle Atlantis. I practiced my maneuvers over and over on the ground through simulation and thought about it so deeply that when it came time to perform the actual installation of the Columbus research lab onto the International Space Station, I had mentally already completed the task.

  • • •

  I was starting every game now, and quarterback Bob Bleier threw every pass I caught and I caught every pass he threw. We were a force. To hear Bob describe that year, “We were a nice duo. We complemented each other. We made each other famous.” Halfway through the season I was neck and neck with a receiver named Jerry Rice in the number of catches per game. We were 8–4 and went to the playoffs.

  By my senior year, the Spiders were the number-one-ranked team in the nation in Division 1-AA after seven games, averaging thirty-one points a game. I caught sixty-five passes, eight for touchdowns, and totaled 956 yards. It was an exciting time—we were winners and the school loved it. Dr. Clough, my organic chemistry professor, told me years later of going to a home game back then with his two young children. The three of them were cheering and yelling my name, whooping every time I caught a pass. Somebody tapped Dr. Clough on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me,” a woman sitting on the bleacher behind him said. “Is that your son?” It was a fun moment for Dr. Clough. “No, but I wish he were,” he said. Many years later, both Dr. Clough and Dr. Myers would drive down to Cape Canaveral to witness the launch of space shuttle Atlantis and cheer me on as I experienced my first moments in space.

  I was playing better and better, getting lots of attention in the papers and, eventually, from some NFL scouts. In my last season at Richmond, the team was 8–3 with a playoff bid. I went on to become an NCAA 1-AA Academic All-American and Richmond’s career leader in receptions and receiving yards. I had caught a pass in each of the thirty-nine games in which I played.

  As the 1985 football season came to a close, I got an unexpected call telling me I had been selected to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship. I would be the only student that the University of Richmond would submit that year. Seriously? This can’t be happening, I thought to myself. Rhodes Scholars—thirty-two of them from the United States in any given year—get a free ride to Oxford University to attend grad school in the area of their choosing. Three years before, I was nearly expelled for violating the school’s honor code. Now, I had been nominated for what was perhaps the world’s most prestigious academic award. My success in the classroom and on the gridiron had drawn interest from outside the university. I had never heard of the Rhodes Scholars program, but the more I learned about it, the more I thought it would be something good for me to pursue. If the opportunity came, great. If not, there were other exciting possibilities, like professional football.

  As luck would have it, the timing couldn’t have been worse. The famously torturous Rhodes Scholarship selection process took place over the long Thanksgiving weekend, right as the Spiders were contending for a spot in the playoffs. NFL recruiters were calling to say they would be showing up in the next few weeks to check me out. And first semester finals were only a few weeks out.

  Becoming a Rhodes Scholar requires surviving an application process that takes nearly as much resilience as vying for a spot in the Astronaut Corps—thankfully it’s over more quickly. Rhodes Scholar candidates are nominated by their university, recommended by a minimum of five professors, advisors, or coaches, and asked to write a one-thousand-word essay with very high stakes. They then must get approval from their state committee, interview locally, shine at a cocktail party, interview on the state level, shine at yet another cocktail reception, and then interview at the regional level. If you survive all that, you move to the next level. I was one of 1,143 applicants from around the country that year, but I was eliminated somewhere between the first cocktail party and the second interview.

  • • •

  I remember walking by the student commons during lunchtime on my way to the chem lab. It was January of my senior year, and I was feeling the pressure of all the work I had to complete in my last semester. There was a television attached to the wall as you entered the commons from the dining hall and the news was carrying a story about the space shuttle Challenger launch. I was vaguely aware there was a launch scheduled that day, because the media had been chattering about NASA sending a teacher—Christa McAuliffe—into space for the first time.

  And then it happened—tragedy. Seventy-three seconds into the flight, Challenger exploded 48,000 feet over the Florida coast in view of millions around the world. I s
aw the clip—over and over again, as the station replayed it constantly. Everyone was stunned. As I watched the tragedy unfold, I said to myself that, as a scientist, I would help prevent disasters like that from happening again. The vow didn’t make much sense as my future still seemed earthbound.

  I Get a Call

  I was sitting in my room in Thomas Hall when the phone rang around eleven at night. It was April 30, a Wednesday, and I had just taken my last final at the University of Richmond. There were still a few weeks until graduation and people were pouring out of their rooms into the halls, looking for a spontaneous party or just to blow off steam. Earlier that day, Joe Bushofsky, a scout for the Detroit Lions, had phoned to ask me whether I’d be home that night, and I’d told him I would be. So did the scout for the Denver Broncos. Who goes out on a night the National Football League team might call?

  The NFL Scouting Combine is the yearly scouting event held every February where players get a chance to show their skills to impress and raise their stock for draft day. I had not been invited, but Joe knew my stats, and knew that during my four years the team had gone from 0–10 to 8–3. Joe had flown down to Richmond a few weeks earlier and meticulously timed me in the 40-yard dash and ran me through a battery of agility drills. The Broncos had sent their scout too, as had the Dallas Cowboys. I hadn’t heard back from the Cowboys, but the Broncos had indicated they were more interested in me as a free agent than a draft pick.

  I picked up the receiver.

  “Leland Melvin?” It was Joe. “You have been drafted in the eleventh round of the NFL college draft. Do you want to play for the Detroit Lions?”

  I had made it to the NFL.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. And I hung up the phone.

  I’m even-keeled. No super highs or lows. Instead of jumping up and down over this news, I immediately began to get ready for it. Even though I initially hadn’t pictured myself playing professional football, I did see myself succeeding. My parents’ culture of expectation, supplemented by my coaches’ and professors’ patient tutelage, continued to nourish and shape me as I prepared for my next challenge.

  The next day, the news of my draft had spread across the University of Richmond campus. Local TV news carried the story, as did the Richmond Times-Dispatch. School administrators and professors whom I’d never met beamed with pride during news interviews. My teammates seemed ecstatic, and that was probably the best part of the whole thing.

  My parents were elated for me, though they maintained the same composed demeanor they had throughout my childhood, a quality I had always admired. I’m sure my mother was warming up her prayer book in hopes of keeping me from getting even more badly injured in the NFL than I might have in NCAA football.

  Four days later I was on a plane to Michigan for the Lions’ minicamp. The week of intensive training gives the coaches a chance to assess the new players and decide who’s coming in and who’s not. It’s nerve-racking, especially for a guy from the eleventh round, but things don’t easily faze me. On the last day of practice, on the last play of the day, I caught a pass in the end zone—right in front of head coach Darryl Rogers. I finished on a high note, suddenly more confident that I would avoid being cut and find a place on the team. Brimming with self-assurance, I caught a plane back to Richmond to graduate from college.

  Graduation was a blur. I remember feeling the peacefulness that comes from success, combined with excitement about the future and playing in the National Football League. During my four years at the university, I had reached the lowest and highest points more than once. I never once thought of giving up, even in the face of ridicule for our team’s losing record and the suspicion of those Honor Council members who thought I had cheated on a test to get ahead. Instead, through the grace and wisdom of the good people in my life, I had developed a growth mind-set and truly believed anything was possible. Sitting in the Robins Center in my cap and gown, I never imagined that twenty-two years later I would stand on that very same stage and deliver the University of Richmond’s 178th commencement address—three months after I’d returned from my first mission to space.

  4

  A Short Life in the NFL

  The NFL Scouting Combine, the annual beauty pageant from which the NFL teams draft players, is an invitation-only event, held every February. It gives a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to those who are on the list—and puts guys like me who weren’t invited at an immediate disadvantage. Of the roughly 70,000 young men who play college football on any given year, only about 330 are chosen to attend.

  The combine includes tests like the 40-yard dash and bench press, and gives coaches the opportunity to interview prospective players. But making it into this pool does not guarantee that a player will play on an NFL roster. Like NASA looking for new astronaut candidates, coaches are looking for specific skills and abilities to round out their teams, and hugely talented players sometimes don’t make it if a team finds a player with a more compatible set of skills.

  The event’s organizers are often criticized for its reliance on the 40-yard dash and other speed drills, as well as bench press and other strength tests, because critics argue they weed out players with plenty of potential. The combine also measures arm and leg length and joint movement.

  David Epstein, an investigative reporter and author of The Sports Gene, a book on how teams select elite athletes, questions the usefulness of the combine. He argues that the combine can end up overlooking certain qualities that make a player great. “One of the many failings of the NFL combine that tests prospective draft picks in physical measures is that arm length is not taken into account in the measure of strength,” Epstein writes, for example. “Bench press is much easier for men with shorter arms, but longer arms are better for everything on the actual football field.”

  Nor, one might add, do those kinds of tests measure what some scouts call the intangibles. Those qualities, such as “high football IQ,” field awareness, and the willingness to do the little things that help teams win, are often more detectable in game situations, not drills. The combine’s shortcomings notwithstanding, the NFL always recommends that any player who dreams of playing professional football have a backup plan in case his hopes get dashed.

  As I’ve said earlier, I didn’t always dream about being in the NFL. Nor did I have that single-minded focus on playing football in college like most of the players I met. I had been a good football player at a young age, a bit on the small side but fast and able to catch pretty much anything. When I was a kid in the 1970s, soccer had not yet transformed the landscape of childhood sports, and wouldn’t for another decade. Boys played football or basketball, or both. Because my father had played football in college and later in the Air Force, it was preordained that I would play football too. Yet I had also been good at tennis—and would have much preferred to spend a Saturday afternoon on the court than a Friday night in the stadium. If one of my grammar school teachers had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I probably would have said a tennis star. But in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1982, football meant scholarships. Astronauts were not yet part of my imagination.

  • • •

  I arrived in Rochester, Michigan, for the Lions’ two-week training camp in July 1986. Being a rookie had its challenges off the field, but on the field we were all trying to impress, and during the first week, one player after another suffered injuries. League rules said you couldn’t get cut if you were injured, and so players would often exaggerate injuries just to live another day. I remember sitting in the hot tub in the evenings listening to players share stories of the hardcore painkillers they depended on and it dawned on me that this was a different world than Richmond. The veteran players feared being replaced by a rookie, and the Lions coaches would ignore players’ complaints of injuries and send them on the field just so they could cut them.

  Back in the 1980s, no one was talking about concussions. If you got knocked out, you simply got back up. “This is a man’s game,” they would tell you,
“you gotta man up.” I remember once when we had a game at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and it was raining and muddy. Greg Hasty, another tough Georgia boy, had an abscess in his leg. It was infected. At halftime the doctor cut that thing out with a scalpel and bandaged him up and he went back out on the field with the dirt and mud. I remember looking at his bandaged leg with the blood streaming down. You were expected to be a gladiator—and that was just college.

  In the NFL, coaches look for “the right stuff” in players, just like NASA does in astronauts. Performance on the field counts, along with a willingness to endure pain and injury to get the job done. Just like in the Astronaut Corps, the right stuff in pro football means never showing weakness. The idea is to make it look easy while displaying the level of skill that takes years to develop.

  The science behind the ability of elite athletes to push through pain, or perhaps not even feel the pain, has been studied for decades, and the research falls on every end of the spectrum. Certainly many people have had the experience of being injured in a fall or an accident but not feeling the pain until after the emergency was over. In The Sports Gene, Epstein compares “stress-induced analgesia”—the brain’s temporary blocking of pain in stressful situations—with what happens to athletes in competition, which is why it’s imperative to have referees there to stop the play. The brain temporarily blocks the pain to accomplish what the person needs to get done.