Why would the parents of a Charlotte 49ers QB drive to a game they couldn’t see? Love
Let’s say your son is the starting quarterback for the Charlotte 49ers and that you pride yourself on showing up for all of his games.
But then comes COVID-19. That means no fans are allowed at the 49ers’ 2020 opener, which came at Appalachian State on Saturday.
If you go to the game, you won’t have a ticket. You won’t see your son face-to-face, and probably you won’t see him as a speck in the distance, either. It would be much easier to watch it on TV. What do you do?
If you’re Dan and Beth Reynolds, you drive up to Boone regardless, because you want to be physically near your son. You love him. And it just feels better to be close by, if you can be, when one of your five kids does something that’s important to them.
You park as close to App State’s football stadium as you can — in this case a couple of hundred yards away, although the stadium is invisible through the trees and the security guard only let you park there after you absolutely, positively agreed not to get out of the RV.
Then you start trying to figure out a way to witness a play — even just one single play — in person.
I asked the Reynolds family last week if I could tag along with them on this unconventional road trip to go see a football game we probably wouldn’t see at all.
“Plenty of room!” roared Dan Reynolds, a former Marine who served in Operation Desert Storm and is also the father of Chris Reynolds, Charlotte’s quarterback.
I met Chris Reynolds’ parents — Dan and his wife Beth — at their home in Mocksville at 7:45 a.m. Saturday. We made the 90-minute trip to Boone in their RV.
And the trip was a blast, even though the 49ers lost, 35-20, in a driving rainstorm and Chris Reynolds threw two interceptions on a day better suited to snorkeling than football. His parents also had to watch almost — but not quite — the whole game on TV. They never got close enough to tell their son hello. But they still felt like it was a worthy trip.
“You want to be there for all the moments — the great moments, the scary moments, the sad or somber moments,” Beth Reynolds said as she sat inside the RV. “You want to be there all the time. Just watching it from here, it makes me feel like we’re close by.”
‘It’s killing my Dad’
The Reynolds family is close. They’ve lived in Mocksville, about 60 miles northeast of Charlotte, since 2010. Chris is the third of the five Reynolds children, all of whom are athletic.
Beth and Dan Reynolds have gone to dozens of gymnastics meets, soccer matches and baseball games over the years. In all the years Chris has played football, his father has only missed one of his games.
But when Gov. Roy Cooper didn’t lift coronavirus restrictions as fast as football fans hoped, it meant that college teams around the state were playing without fans Saturday (which was still better than most N.C. high school teams, who don’t get to play games at all until February).
Said Chris Reynolds a few days before the game of the prospect of his parents not being able to see the Charlotte-App State game in person: “It’s killing my dad. He’s calling me every other day seeing what’s going on. He hasn’t missed a (football) game of mine since I was born, other than the death of my grandfather. So it’s really killing him right now — and I know it is the rest of my family.”
The Reynoldses have watched Chris play football, baseball and basketball for roughly 15 years, always making sure at least one parent was there for everything. They’ve done the same for their other kids, too — they are fortunate that Dan’s job as the owner of a commercial painting company allows him a lot of flexibility with both time and finances.
How many of their children’s games have they seen?
“Hundreds,” Dan said.
“Oh, I think it’s a thousand,” Beth said.
After seeing all those, I asked the Reynoldses about their favorite sports memory of Chris. For his Mom, it was the 34-yard touchdown pass he threw as a Charlotte 49er in the final 18 seconds to pull out a 39-38 win over North Texas last year.
For his father, it came in a loss.
When “Christopher,” as his parents call him, was in fifth grade, he was pitching in a little league baseball game with the bases loaded.
A kid he knew — one that had barely gotten a hit all season — was up to bat against him.
Chris threw a fastball, and the kid swung with all his might and crushed it for a grand-slam home run. In the dugout, Dan Reynolds was helping coach the game. He shook his head in disgust.
But his son felt a different emotion. He walked off the pitcher’s mound and stationed himself between third base and home plate. When the batter came by on his home-run trot, Chris Reynolds raised his hand — and gave him a high-five.
In the heat of the moment, Dan Reynolds told his son he shouldn’t have done that. He should be more upset for giving up the home run, the father thought.
“Honestly, I was wrong,” the father said now.
Dan Reynolds would coach his son for many more years. A decade later, he’s never forgotten that high-five, and the lesson a son taught a father.
‘I can yell really loud’
It was fun to see Saturday where Chris Reynolds — originally a Charlotte walk-on who was hardly recruited at all — gets his resolve. His parents talked themselves into a parking lot before the game and hoped it was close enough that the 49ers sideline might notice.
“I can yell really loud,” Beth Reynolds said. “So if something happens, they might be able to hear me.”
Said Dan Reynolds: “If this is the closest we can get … then I’ll deal with it. ... But I’m not saying I’m not going to try and sneak down to the stadium come game time.”
Just in case, they hooked up the RV’s satellite TV to make sure their backup plan was in place.
App State had banned tailgating on campus for this game and said there were to be no fans of any sort in the stadium. Reynolds had written letters to everyone he could think of, to no avail. Other parents of college football players took the fight to social media with the hashtag #ParentsInTheStands. No dice.
But not long before kickoff, App State announced that the parents of its junior and senior football players could actually come watch the game after all. Given the weather, the short notice and the fact the game was on ESPN2, it appeared that fewer than 50 actually did.
This did give the Reynolds parents an idea, though. They were parents of a college junior playing in the game, albeit from the other team. Maybe they could get in after all?
The security guards who had been circling the RV regularly for two hours had gone somewhere else by then. The Reynolds parents walked the 200 yards to the stadium and talked to everyone guarding a gate.
No, all the officials said. Sorry, but you can’t go in.
A last-second reprieve
Finally, it seemed like time to turn back to head to the RV for kickoff. There would be no in-person viewing, not even of a single play.
But then Beth Reynolds walked a little further and found a spot you could see the field from a hill, through the trees. She spoke to a kind security guard — all the App State campus police we encountered on this trip were kind — and asked if they could just watch the Charlotte players walk into Kidd Brewer Stadium, known as “The Rock” in Boone.
That turned into watching the coin toss, which turned into standing at attention for the national anthem, which turned into watching App State kick off.
The security guard wanted us to go away by then, but the Reynoldses were persistent. Could they watch just one offensive series? The security guard nodded. Just one.
So Chris Reynolds trotted out onto the field, in front of a stadium devoid of any fans except for about 50 from App State. He didn’t know his parents were watching him outside the stadium, with a restricted view of the field, just over a hill and between two trees.
Reynolds threw an incomplete pass (he ended up 11-for-30, for 140 yards and two interceptions). Then he ran the ball twice for six yards. Charlotte had to punt.
There was nothing memorable at all about the three plays the Reynolds parents saw with their own eyes before the security guard gently shooed us away to view the rest of it in the RV.
But as I watched those parents watch their son, I thought about all the parents and grandparents, guardians, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends who watch their sons and daughters play sports. In all sorts of weather. In sickness and in health. To celebrate and to console.
For some reason — maybe it’s because the Reynolds family is originally from New Jersey — I thought of something Bruce Springsteen wrote in his autobiography “Born to Run” about the loyalty of one of his band members, Danny Federici.
“After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love,” Springsteen wrote.
I’m not sure anyone quite performed a miracle Saturday.
Chris Reynolds didn’t play well. It rained all day. His parents only saw three plays live.
But it felt an awful lot like love.
