After those first 19 were claimed, there were years and years of gridlock. One guy was dumb enough to keep his football on him. He had too many at a bar in Illinois, ran his mouth a little too much, got his ass beat, lost the ball. There were a couple stories like that. But by and large, that stage of the game was mostly about digging up forgotten Detmer balls. The ones that were sitting in attics and old boxes for 15,000 years and forgotten about.
That must have been a nightmare.
At first it was really fun. It was a lot of really challenging detective work. At first I had all my research stored on my computer, but I got hacked by another team and lost a ton of it. So I did it the old-fashioned way. After a while I'd probably filled two dozen notepads full of notes. Phone numbers, coordinates, notes on where I thought the balls might be, intel on how tough they'd be to break into, all that.
But yeah, after a point it was damn near impossible. I mean, I knew from day one I was gonna run into dead ends, but it was so hard to know where to start. It was like being an archaeologist, except there was no rhyme or reason or pattern for what I was trying to find. I couldn't narrow down my search in any way, so I was just going around cities, taping flyers to lampposts and stuff, like "have you seen this Koy Detmer ball?" And after a while, I realized, hell, I'm a smart guy, but I'm not like this genius detective or anything. So that was the next stage of the game. I started trying to thieve balls from the other players.
Did you ever steal any?
Yep. Ginny and Manuel had teamed up and had a little stash of four Detmers. I staked them out for a while and found their place in Vermont. One day, both of them hit the road, so I busted in and took them. You know where I found them? You want to guess?
Um.
.
.
Above the kitchen cabinet. Like, sitting on top of the cabinet. Nobody looks up there.
Oh, whoa. God, we've lived here for 300 years and I've never looked up there.
Shit, that's really good! Well, there's an idea for next time. You just come up with that?
I used to work for the DEA, back when ... you know, back when.
Well if they'd hid 'em there, I might've never found it. They hid in what I call a "bullshit cabinet." My theory is, every home, no matter how big or small, has one drawer nobody uses. It's usually the bottom drawer of a two-drawer nightstand. Thing about furniture is, it's gotta be waist-high or so, right? Furniture makers don't want that space to go to waste, so they're like, "oh, here's a little cabinet or drawer or whatever you're never gonna use." They had a cabinet in their grill out back, which is kind of the ultimate bullshit cabinet. Sure enough, ball was in there.
