Al just kneeled there with a stunned expression. He wiped the snot off his nose; otherwise, he didn’t dare move or say a word. When it became apparent that the excitement was over, the group of kids who had just been egging on Al quietly began to disperse, afraid Tony would turn on one of them.

“This guy’s just a punk,” Tony said to Danny. “Let’s go home.”

With that, Tony turned and marched out of the school yard with Danny trailing behind, feeling vindicated and protected.

But Danny decided then and there that he was never going to let anyone push him around again. Even if it took hard work, he was determined start a workout program and bulk up, and that’s just what he did. He dusted off his dad’s barbells and bench, and worked out every day. Pretty soon he started to see ripples in his biceps. The squats and leg raises gave him lower-body strength, and he would spend half an hour every day doing sprints to build up his speed.

So by the time Danny was a sophomore at Geauga High, he was the starting halfback, and Tony, by then a senior, was the quarterback. In football-loving Cuyahoga County, the Turner brothers were local celebrities in that magical year of 1978, the year they went all-state but lost in the finals. The Geauga Arrows had never gone so far, and never would again.

The Turner family moved to their ranch-style home in 1967, in the part of Chesterland that was not as bad as Streetsboro (which was literally on the other side of the railroad tracks), but not as nice as Clover Hill, the development that was built in the early ‘60s. The kids whose fathers worked in the office at AE’s Jayomar plant, or at one of the other big manufacturers, or were local professionals, tended to live in Clover Hill. The kids whose fathers worked in one of the factories or at one of the stores on the main drag, Mayfield Road, lived near the Turners in the area commonly called the Junction.

Most of their neighbors kept up their houses and the lawns were usually tidy, but every once in a while you could find a house with a junker in the front yard, weeds pushing up through the rotted steel. Steve Turner had two healthy teenage boys who kept his yard in great shape, for which each earned ten dollars a cut. It was his way of teaching them responsibility and giving them some spending money. When it was time to cut the lawn, Tony always had to bug his brother to do his part, but a few smacks upside the head would usually do the trick.