No one except Clay Helton himself knows how he spent the few hours between the most brutal game of his life and the moment he showed up at the apartment he shared with friends later that night.
Helton, then a backup quarterback at Houston, had been pummeled and sacked so hard by Texas A&M it was a wonder there weren’t dents left in the sod at Robertson Stadium. By the end of the game, the crowd ran him off the field with a cascade of boos.
His friends mostly let him be. They know he iced down afterward.