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   Gwaine Mathews sat alone on a folding chair in a cold, concrete coach’s room deep inside the Fargodome. A towel was wrapped around his waist. His clean-shaven head was in his hands.

   Mathews’ football team from Arkansas-Monticello had just been defeated 59-7 by North Dakota State, the second thrashing the Boll Weevils received in less than a week. And it might have been the furthest thing from his mind. Instead, Mathews’ thoughts were 1,500 miles south, in the hurricane-ravaged city of New Orleans.

   Mathews grew up and graduated high school in the city.

   His 58-year-old father, Ronnie, still lives there, in an area where water is reportedly 8 feet deep. Mathews also has three aunts and two uncles in New Orleans, and they live in some of the hardest-hit areas of the city that are under 11 feet of water.

   The son has not heard from his father, aunts or uncles in four days. All the son can do is hope, pray and worry.

   “Me and my dad talk before every game. We didn’t talk before this one,” Mathews said.

   Mathews is not alone in his anguish. A Boll Weevils freshman cornerback named Jared Peters is from New Orleans, too, and has learned his house is under water. Junior halfback Matt Fryfogle and junior cornerback Reynaldo Veal both attended Gulf Coast Community College near Biloxi, Miss.

   “We don’t even know if Gulf Coast Community College is still there,” Mathews said.

   The coach estimated there are a half-dozen Boll Weevil players who can only wonder and wait for news about relatives and loved ones. Mathews tries to be the rock, the adult on which these young men can lean, but he is only human, too. He is torn between doing the job he was hired to do and being the son who wonders if his father has escaped Hurricane Katrina and the water and the violence and the disease.

   “Listen to me, my brother, this has been a tough week. I kid you not about that,” Mathews said. “Usually on game days you’re supposed to be thinking about the game. Today I spent two hours talking to relatives on the phone about what’s going on with my dad. But this is a two-fold deal. I have 56 kids in that locker room who are depending on me to do the right thing.”

   But what exactly is the right thing in this horrific situation? It’s a question Mathews begins to answer, but he stops and puts his head back in his hands. The pause is more than 30 seconds.

   “I have seniors on this team that deserve 110 percent of my attention right now,” Mathews continues, finally. “We’re trying to build this program from ground up. By no means do I want to put this football team in front of the issue down in New Orleans, but at the same time I have a job to do. If I thought going down there would accomplish something, I would.”

   Instead, like so many others who have a stake in this disaster and all of us who don’t, Mathews has to watch the looting and lawlessness take over New Orleans via the cable news networks. Three or four hours before Thursday’s game were devoted to the television, the coach said, trying to catch a glimpse of something familiar. There have been phone calls to policeman friends in the never-ending search for some information, any information.

   “Now to me, 8 feet of water, that doesn’t seem life-threatening. But then again, you don’t know the circumstances that went with that 8 feet of water. What freak things could’ve happened?” Mathews said. “You just don’t know. You just don’t know if they got out in time.”

   The head goes back in the hands.

   The last question had to be asked, and it had to be asked with an apology because it probably seemed so silly to Mathews.

   But does a football game, the time spent on the sideline trying to coach those players you’ve sworn to devote everything to, in any way take the mind away from what’s happening in New Orleans?

   “I live for the game of football. I played high school football, I played college football in a scholarship situation so it paid for my education. I’ve coached high school football and I’m a college football coach. Football is a big part of my life,” Mathews said. “Today I talked to my mom, and nine times out of 10 she’s a football mom and we talk about the game and we talk about football. But today when I talked to her – I talked with her twice just today – football never came up. Not once. I’ll leave it at that.”

   The football game had to be played Thursday and it did not go well for Mathews and the Arkansas-Monticello Boll Weevils. Now we can pray that everything else does.

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