Digging out the story behind the little numbers

Buried in every newspaper are little morsels of information rendered in a minuscule font called agate. These tiny numerical nuggets only hint at the larger story.

What explains the stock price's sudden plunge? How exactly was the no-hitter broken up in the ninth inning? What did the foot of snow dumped on the New England city portend? The stock table, the box score and the weather report are like highway signposts pointing toward roads most people won't take.

A few weeks ago, one such set of numbers caught the eye of Peter Schneider of McLean. Peter scans the high school football game summaries in search of "guys who perform way above their peer level." It's a relic of his days as a high school player in the 1950s in Oklahoma, back when he entertained football dreams he knew were unlikely to come true.

"With all of my football gear on, I weighed about 140 pounds," said Peter, a retired government consultant. "That wouldn't have mattered so much except that I was also slow."

Peter was intrigued by a bare-bones report in The Washington Post about the Oct. 9 varsity game between Oakton's Flint Hill School and Sidwell Friends of the District. There, in the fine print, he saw that in the first half a Flint Hill player named "Mends" carried the football one time. Mends made the most of that single touch, running for 98 yards and scoring a touchdown.

Up until that game, it had not been a good year for Flint Hill -- or for Mends. Consult the agate, and you will discover that the school lost its first four games by a combined score of 144 to 28. Mends had three carries in three games, for a total rushing record of minus 13 yards. And yet there was that Sidwell Friends game and that blistering touchdown run.

"Why only one carry?" Paul wondered.

That question took me to Flint Hill one rainy afternoon last week in search of Mends. The rest of the team was on the practice field, their cleats digging into the soggy earth. I waited for Mends with Michael Wright, the Flint Hill head coach.

"It was a quarterback sneak the whole way," he said. The previous week, his team had been in a similar bind. Backed up against their goal line, they gave up a safety. Coach Wright was determined not to let that happen again. He put in Mends, a lightning-quick 16-year-old sophomore who plays offense and defense and is in his first year at Flint Hill. "We were just trying to get our backs off the wall, so to speak," Coach Wright said. "It turned into something bigger than that."

Sidwell blitzed. Mends wriggled through a hole on the left side. The crowd cheered. Six points went up.

Eddie Mends -- who wears No. 1 -- trotted out of the locker room. I asked him when he knew he was headed to the end zone.

"Right when I broke loose, I figured I beat the safety deep," he said. "When I hit the 40, I knew I was pretty much gone. I knew nobody was gonna catch me."

And then? What had made him a mini-Moonlight Graham, the "Field of Dreams" ballplayer who notched a single big league game but never batted? "I guess I didn't drink enough [water] the day before," Eddie said. "My body started to cramp up. . . . I didn't want to take any chances in the game. . . . I just told my coach, 'I want to take it easy.' "

Flint Hill won, 28-14.

Not bad for a kid who didn't see a football till he was 8, when he moved to the United States from Ghana. His father, Isaac Ebo Mends, played professional soccer there and coaches in the West African country. Eddie settled in Leesburg with brothers Calvin and Raymond (now a wide receiver at Shepherd University in West Virginia), and their mother, Jennifer Ofosu-Appiah, a nurse.

"He loves football too much; there's nothing I can do about it," joked his mother when I called her. She said she doesn't really understand the American game.

Said Schneider: "I've always sort of fantasized that one of these days, I'll find one of these kids and contact my home university [Oklahoma State] and say: 'Here's this fabulous athlete here in Fairfax County. Why not look at him?' And he'll turn out to be a big star."

As for Eddie Mends, he hopes to play in college and -- who knows? -- maybe the pros. But if that doesn't work out, he said, he might like to be an accountant, another line of work in which tiny numbers can tell stories to anyone willing to ask.