Sidelines
Chang answers the bell
TIMMY Chang answered every question yesterday.
His finger? I don't know. Do I look like a doctor? No, I mean he literally answered a lot of questions.
You should have seen the media crush that came out for Timmy's return. There were about 20 of us at yesterday's Hawaii football practice. Five TV cameras. Tape recorders everywhere, microphones galore. It was a horde, a swarm. It was like Madonna at the Oscars.
Chang -- practicing yesterday for the first time since Aug. 15 -- has the most famous pinkie this side of Dr. Evil.
That's how it is when you're the quarterback, the hometown high school All-American whose career has been clouded by injury and still unfilled promise. Bad luck struck again two weeks ago, a broken finger marring his fresh start. Now the season opener was closing in, and so were all the old questions, and everyone needed to know if Chang would practice, if Chang could play.
Only in a career like Chang's could something so small seem so big. But big it was. So very, very big.
"If he didn't practice today," Jones said, "he wouldn't play at all Saturday."
Yes, but it went deeper than that, and Chang knew it. He needed to be back yesterday. He had to come back.
Or, to put it a different way, after all that has happened, how would you have reacted if he hadn't?
If the news came that he needed more time, that he wasn't ready, that he couldn't go yet again?
Fairly or unfairly, how would his teammates have felt about that? His coaches?
Himself.
Chang needed to come back yesterday, if for no other reason than to prove to himself that he was ready to play again. And he did. And he looked good. But he has a lot of proving to do:
"This whole time I've been out, they've been, you know, people wanting me to come out, and play through it," he said. He knows it. He feels it. "And I told them," he said, "you know, 'When my day comes, I'll be right there beside you guys.' "
That day was yesterday.
He needed to make a stand, to show them all, to start again rebuilding the bonds, the trust, the invaluable chemistry that these injuries keep interrupting.
He needed to get them back.
"The guys need to see me out there," he said. "And behind the huddle, and throwing the ball downfield.
"So it's real important," to finally be back. To take that tiny, giant step.
Now is the start to Timmy Chang's would-be storied career. Yesterday. Today. Now, not his freshman year, when he wasn't ready yet, when he got his brain bruised and his passes stolen and his bell rung. Not last year, when he struggled with injury and expectations. When he lost his team and his coach and finally his job. When he was told he could come back when he felt ready, and then he said he felt ready. But he couldn't come back.
And he had his heart broken by the game he loved for the very first time.
What if you knew then what you know now? Now Chang knows.
He's still soft-spoken and big-hearted, still a sweet kid, still nice. He still refers to his custom-made playing brace as his "pinkie pillow."
But he's learned a lot in the last couple of years. Learned it the hard way, the pink scar on his right wrist is proof of that. He knows so much now. He knows how important coming back from this injury is, to this team and his career. He knows realities of college football that aren't always fun and games.
Jones was asked how Chang's finger felt in his first practice back. "I didn't even ask him," Jones said. "Just get in there and throw it."
But remember that while Jones at first expected Chang to miss this first game against Eastern Illinois, it was Chang who always insisted he would play. He's a different player now. He's learned well what his coach wants. Now he says things like, "If it was the other hand, I should tape it, let's do it, whatever, let's go," and, "Just pop a couple aspirins in there and call it a morning."
They need to see this from him. They need to see him out there. He knows that now. Yesterday, he delivered. He answered a lot of questions, but most important, he answered the bell.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com