Sidelines
The sun shining
again for ChangIT is morning. The sun is shining, the shirts are off. It feels good. Practice is over. They are young and strong and the sun is shining and practice is over. It is the very best time of day.
Timmy Chang is dropping back, throwing. Free and easy. He is staying late, doing extra work, breaking a second sweat. It isn't punishment, no, far from it. This has nothing to do with the Hawaii quarterback's performance in his last two outings, in which he had four interceptions one game and went 9-for-27 the next.
He does this often, staying late, playing late, throwing passes in the morning sunshine. And often, it invigorates him, he seems to come off the field lifted, refreshed. Feeling, as Madonna once sang, shiny and new.
And so maybe, today, this joyful exercise does have something to do with those failings, a little, after all.
Timmy Chang is getting his smile back.
"I SULKED," HE SAID. "For like, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, I think that was enough days already."
Despite it all, he has found it. Timmy Chang has his smile again.
"It's getting close to game day," he said. "I'm focused on SMU. I gotta let everything else go already. Things that happened already happened. I can't take back a pass that I missed or things that I missed on the field. So I just gotta look forward to this week."
You can imagine how Chang felt. You could see his world crashing down upon him. "I played horrible," he said Saturday. It hit him harder than any defender could. It stayed with him, like a bad cold you can't shake.
"(Monday) was my first practice and throwing the ball (Monday) I felt a little uncomfortable," he said. "It's like I had those last two weeks of negatives in the back of my mind."
It's the kind of thing that can suffocate a young player if it gets out of control.
But Chang's coaches told him to relax. They told him to just play. They told him to have fun. They told him all the things you tell someone with a bad golf slice.
Yesterday, he was up and down. At times, he was great. At times, he was terrible. Shawn Withy-Allen, the hero at UTEP, had as good a practice as I have seen from him. That's what confidence will do for you.
"There's some throws that I made that disturb me, that I'm putting it low, I'm putting it in the ground," Chang said. "It's all correctable, but."
He keeps telling himself that. He has to, and it's true. Nobody stopped him. Nobody beat him. Nobody made him stumble and misfire. It was the classic June Jones credo come to life -- you can only stop yourself. That makes it easier on one level, but harder on another. The problem was internal. It was a lack of focus out there, Chang said. He knows what went wrong. He knows that now.
"Yeah, I know what the problem is. And I need to correct the problem. And I need to focus on those things that got me to where I was. And I, you know ... I gotta get back there," Chang said. "I gotta be the guy back there."
He has to get it back. He has to find himself again. He can't be lost like this. This can't keep going on.
"That's just something I can't let happen," he said. "If it was a better team, (one) that put points on the board, I think we'd be here 1-2. So I really can't afford those things for the team."
After four days of depression, Chang had had enough. This was football, and he'd been good at it all his life. "I know what's going on out here," he said. He knows, but had somehow forgotten. He knew he could remember again.
The coaches told him to relax. They told him to just play, they told him to have fun. They told him all the things you tell someone with a bad golf slice.
But the strangest thing happened. He knew this was it. He knew they were right. If only he could do this. He thinks it's that simple. He thinks that he can.
The morning sun was out, and then practice was over and Chang stayed. He dropped back, letting fly, free and easy, without a care in the world. The problems hadn't disappeared, but he had found his smile out there, throwing passes, working late. He'd let it all go, left it out there, and came off the field smiling, shiny and new. He was young, and a football player, and practice was over, and everything was possible once again.
Three days before the Southern Methodist game, Timmy Chang basked in the sunshine and shook off a cloud.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com