was Hoosiers, rewritten for the Deep South. We’d only managed to win South State in baseball, but at the track meet on that day we racked up our third state title.
Though I was still three weeks shy of turning fifteen, I ran in both the mile and two-mile relays (we won firsts), and I took third place in the high jump. But my older brother was the star of the team. Adam had filled that role in every sport for St. Mark’s since his sophomore year, when he began playing quarterback for the varsity football team. That year Adam McEwan led the Crusaders to a South State title, beginning his meteoric rise to statewide legend status. There’s nothing unusual in that, of course. Every couple of years, a kid from some little Mississippi town gets canonized as the Next Big Thing, the next Hot College Prospect who’s “maybe good enough to go pro.” My brother happened to be that kid. The thing was, most people who canonized him had no idea how unique he really was.
Adam wasn’t like the other small-town demigods—phenomenal at one sport, or two, or even three. He was gifted at everything he put his hand to. I once saw him (having touched a bow and arrow only once, as a boy at day camp) try a compound bow at a demonstration being given by a hunting expert at a local gun show. After an hour of informal advice, Adam outshot every hunter present and even matched the instructor on distance shots.
But Adam’s embarrassment of riches did not end with sports. As a junior, with no background in music, Adam walked onto the stage during the St. Mark’s production of My Fair Lady and sang “On the Street Where You Live” in a tenor voice so tender yet powerful that it literally stopped the show. To add insult to injury, Adam was as beloved by his English teachers as by those who taught calculus and physics. His SAT scores came in fifty points higher than anyone else’s in the senior class, cementing a National Merit Scholarship, and by the afternoon of that track meet in 1987, he’d been accepted to five Ivy League universities. Our father wanted him to attend Sewanee, his own alma mater, but in a rare rebellion, Adam told me he planned to insist on Brown University.
I loved him for that, for breaking free from our father’s life template. Mississippians with Adam’s gifts rarely leave Mississippi, much less the South. When you’re from Mississippi, Vanderbilt is considered a northern school. My brother not only decided to attend an Ivy League school in the far north, but the least structured institution of them all. Oh, I loved him for that.
Yet even so, it was tough to have a brother like Adam.
The three years between us might have provided a protective cushion with a normally gifted older brother, but there was simply no escaping Adam’s shadow. The glare of the spotlight he walked in whited out everything around him. And while I stood six feet tall as a ninth grader, and was no slouch in the classroom, I couldn’t possibly stand tall enough to escape the penumbra around my brother. Yet as I watched him stride like Apollo through our earthly realm, what amazed me most was his humility. Despite being subjected to near continuous adulation, Adam did not “get the big head.” He kept himself apart from all cliques, treated everyone as an equal, and he almost never got angry. Adam seemed, by any measure of human frailty, too good to be true. And while someone so universally admired almost inevitably generates resentment or outright enmity in some people, Adam seemed the exception. Even teams he embarrassed on the hotly contested fields of Mississippi embraced him as a kind of hero, someone they would later boast they had played against.
By the end of his senior year—at least the athletic year, of which that track meet marked the coda—Adam wasn’t the only high school boy feeling immortal. As soon as the coaches handed out our trophies, we broke out in spectacular fashion. After holding ourselves in check for most of the year—limiting ourselves to a few beers on weekends—we switched to Jack Daniel’s or vodka for the ride home, and some guys even broke out the weed. By ten p.m. in Bienville, every member of every St. Mark’s boys’ athletic team was wasted.
We started in one big group, a convoy of cars and trucks that hit