Waking the Wildcat

The weights crash back down on the rack. I leap to my feet, yelling and clapping. My arms are jelly and my light grey workout shirt is now dark grey and soaked with my sweat. I’m a medium sized average Joe slammed together in a mash pit of a weight room with giants. We clap in unison. We yell in Unison. It’s the football offseason and we are Wildcats. If you have never yelled so loud you felt light headed and nearly passed out, I would say you have never quite yelled with enough enthusiasm for something. I loved being a Wildcat. Coach Jayden McCullugh, now head coach of the Plano Wildcat Football Team, was one of the assistant coaches in the late nineties. He silences the weight room and points to me.

            

“I need to point out something to all of you right now,” Coach says in a raspy voice. He enjoyed yelling a lot too for various reasons, and I’m sure it had an effect on his vocal chords from time to time. “Nobody in this room works harder than Travis Hightower right there. If you guys all did the same nobody could ever stand in your way.”

            

I’m bragging a teeny bit. It was one of the biggest compliments anyone had ever paid me, and the whole team agreed with applause. There was more, but I can’t remember the exact words. It was something about how I wasn’t the strongest or the fastest, but demonstrated the most heart. I wasn’t a very talented athlete at all, and Coach was putting it mildly. There was an occasion I had a chance in eighth grade to catch the game winning touchdown as a tight end, but the ball went right through my brick hands and careened neatly off my shiny white helmet.

            

If you thought this was a sports blog, I’m sorry to deceive you. I’m deviating from my normal topics to talk about something personal—finding the drive to push past our limits in everything we do. I dreamed of being the hero linebacker for sure. I would have loved to have played every down and made the newspapers, played college ball. I won more awards than I can count at science and engineering fairs and symposiums, but I never won a Grand Prize, and I never got to compete at the International level. But in those days it did not matter. I gave my all for the sake of how it made me feel. I was a Wildcat.

            

Somewhere along the way I lost that drive. My inner fire to achieve fizzled as I met more failure and disappointment. I was a proud Texas Aggie and member of the Corps of Cadets, but I never became one of its leaders like I once imagined. I once dreamed of screaming through the sky upside down at Mach 2, and instead I watched it happen like a video game on a two dimensional screen while flying in long lumbering left turns. The more life fell short of what I hoped for, the more my resolved crumbled like tragic stack of Bonfire logs. I do not use that simile lightly. The Bonfire collapse of 1999 was a central event in time I can point to where the resolve that once made me a Wildcat was completely extinct.

            

It may have been depression. It may have been a number of things, but when the Air Force, marriage, and life in general did not feel right or complete I no longer charged ahead with a full voice. I was not the leader the Air Force needed, and I still may not quite be what the civilian job market is looking for. Now that I have a chance at a new path in life, I suddenly remember what it was like to have the determination and resolve to push past my limits no matter how challenging or incomplete my situation may seem. If you have been struggling, if you have been feeling defeated, yell loud and push yourself hard.

Today the Wildcat within me awakens, but it can awaken within all of us. When we push past our limits and give everything we have to each moment, we reveal to others around us that which makes us special and unique. We create an environment within ourselves in which no dream goes unfulfilled, and like Coach said, nobody has the power to stand in our way.