Credit: Mark J. Rebilas, USA TODAY Sports
At approximately 8 p.m. Thursday, in a banquet hall at the Hampton Inn & Suites Highland outside San Bernardino, Calif., the reverberating din of a party fizzled to silence.
Three hundred sets of eyes and ears honed in on a microphone set up to amplify the voice on the other end of a telephone line, a voice that was simultaneously near to their hearts and indescribably far away.
The speaker, Kenny Clark Sr., had dialed in from 250 miles away, a proud father addressing his son in the buildup to the biggest moment of a 20-year-old's life.