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NEWTON On the last play of the last home game of the 2008 season for the Newton-Conover junior varsity football team, the backup nose guard made a tackle.
One tackle. That's all.
The tackle was the first one the Newton-Conover nose guard, whose name is Justin Weisner, had ever made in a real game. But it made no difference in the outcome. Newton-Conover won by 26 points.
So why were so many fans screaming as the clock ran to zero? Why were so many people crying? Why were Weisner's teammates slapping him on the back and lifting him off the ground with bear hugs?
To know that, you have to understand that Justin has Down syndrome. And you need to know that, after serving as the water boy and ball boy for Newton-Conover's varsity in 2007, the 17-year-old junior was determined to try football himself in 2008.
“I like being a water boy, too,” Justin says. “But I wanted to play.”
His mother didn't want him to. Newton-Conover's head coach didn't want him to.
But Justin Weisner wanted to.
And so this is a Thanksgiving story about the power of want-to.
In 1990, Tara Walker got pregnant. At the time, she had two daughters and a lot on her mind. She and her then-husband broke up in the third month of the pregnancy. She was suddenly a single mom, working for $7.50 an hour. She didn't have any sort of prenatal testing while pregnant with her third child.
Justin was born on April2, 1991. Within hours of his birth, a doctor approached his mother.
Tara, we think your son has Down syndrome, the doctor said.
“I busted out crying,” Tara Walker recalls. “You have two normal, healthy children, and you don't think of anything else. I was real upset. I cried for the whole first day. And then I went to sleep that night, woke up the next day and said, ‘OK, let's get on with it.'”
They got on with it. Tara learned about Down syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome. One of about every 800 babies is born with Down syndrome, which causes mental and physical limitations.
In Justin's case, he reads at about a third-grade level. His mother has mainstreamed him in public schools, although some of his high school classes are only with other exceptional children. He also struggles with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder).
Sports has always been an outlet for Justin. He has played basketball and softball for Special Olympics teams.
“I love football,” he says. “When I was a little boy, I started to like football.”
Justin would watch Newton-Conover games on Fridays and Panthers games on Sundays. He would tell anyone who asked that – when he grew up – he would play for both of them.
‘Strong as an ox'
While in middle school, Justin was befriended by Matt Wilson, quarterback of the Newton-Conover football team and son of coach Nick Bazzle. Wilson was doing an internship at the middle school, working with exceptional children.
“I guess why Justin fell in love with football had something to do with me,” says Wilson, now a senior at Appalachian State. “We would wear our jerseys on Fridays. And he'd tell me every time I wore mine: ‘I'm going to have one of those jerseys one day. I'm going to play.'”
Newton (population 13,000) sits 45 miles northwest of Charlotte in Catawba County. Its downtown is dominated by white church steeples. Newton-Conover High routinely draws several thousand for Friday night football games.
When Justin got to high school, he became Newton-Conover's water boy and ball boy. The players treated him nicely. They always let him “run through the sign,” as he calls it – leading the football team's charge through a paper banner made by the cheerleaders before each game.
But Justin wasn't playing. And that's what he really wanted to do.
His mom, who remarried when Justin was 4, was concerned.
“As his parent, I didn't want him to play, because I didn't want him to get hurt,” Tara Walker says. “But I didn't want to stop him from his dream.”
She bought him a replica of a Newton-Conover uniform for Christmas, including shoulder pads. She hoped that would be enough.
Justin loved it. But it wasn't enough.
Coach Bazzle knew Justin wanted to play, too. And while he was fond of Justin, he didn't want him to play, either.
“I was concerned about his safety,” Bazzle says. “What if he got cheap-shotted sometime? And he had never played before. There was no way he'd know what he was getting into. Plus, how would my kids react to him?
“I kept trying to convince him I just needed him as our water boy only – that he was the best water boy we had. And he wanted nothing to do with that.”
Surely, though, there would be some medical reason to keep Justin from playing. Maybe the doctor could be the bad guy – not the mother Justin loved, not the coach he adored. Justin's mother took him to Dr. Ben Goodman, who had been his family physician for his entire life. She explained the situation and sort of hoped he'd say “No.”
Goodman and another doctor ran all sorts of tests. Then Goodman wrote a letter to everyone concerned. It gave Justin medical clearance for football and compared his situation to that of “Radio,” a mentally challenged man from Anderson, S.C., whose association with a high school football team became the basis for a Sports Illustrated story and a movie.
Goodman noted that Justin was 5-foot-5 and 217 pounds.
“Look at Justin carefully,” the doctor wrote. “He is not a frail, frightened young man; he is as strong as an ox, with massive shoulders and a heart at least as big as his shoulders.”
OK, everyone said after they saw that letter – and after Justin's mother and 19-year-old sister Jenny agreed that at least one of them would come to every practice and game to make sure he stayed focused.
Let Justin play.
‘I knocked him down'
On the first day of practice in July, in the middle of conditioning drills, Justin flopped down on his back. He was sick of running.
I don't want to play football after all, he said.
His mother came and stood over him. “A lot of people went to a lot of trouble to get you on this team,” she remembers saying. “Let's give it one week and if you still feel the same way, we'll talk.”
Justin stuck around, doing double duty as a JV player on Thursday nights and a water boy for the varsity on Fridays (Newton-Conover's varsity is 12-1 and still alive in the 2A playoffs).
His teammates got used to him.
“I thought it was kind of weird at first,” says Rob Lutz, one of those teammates. “But it only took until about the second week until everyone started acting like he was part of the team.”
Justin still didn't like to run. When the team did sprints, he would often plop down on the ground, complaining about a mysterious problem with his cleats.
But he learned what to do well enough that he played a couple of snaps in games where Newton-Conover built a big lead. No one took it easy on him, and he never came close to making a tackle until that last game.
On the video of the play, you can see that Justin is actually double-teamed. He fends off the blocks, moves to his left and runs into the ball carrier. Then about five of his teammates fall on top of the pile.
Justin describes the play simply: “I found him. I got hold of him. I knocked him down.”
After the game, Justin got to call his friend Matt Wilson at college and tell him about the tackle. Partly because of Justin, Matt has decided to become a teacher.
He will teach exceptional children just like Justin.
Justin asked his mom a question about the tackle a few days later.
Will my tackle get my name in the newspaper? Justin asked.
Oh, honey, I don't think so, his mother said. They just can't put the name of everyone who made one tackle in the newspaper.
Scott Fowler: 704-358-5140; sfowler@charlotteobserver.com.
