This is a story of three videos. You've seen the first one. Everyone's seen the first one. In a stretch of about 12 hours heading into Tuesday afternoon, more than 10 million people watched this Arkansas State fake punt against Miami, a miserable attempt if ever there was one, seeing how the pass was intercepted and the Arkansas State player who faked a heart attack -- you saw that, right? -- rose from the dead, only to be flattened by a Miami player.
The Arkansas State player, No. 18 in your program, is Booker T. Mays III. He plays receiver. He's a former walk-on who was awarded a scholarship on the final day of preseason camp in 2013, and was so emotional that day that he nearly burst into tears.
"But I had to keep it together," Mays told me Tuesday night. "The fellows were there."
So anyway, that's one video, the main video in this story. But there are two others.
One, this video of a goat fainting. It's adorable and it's silly, but it's the video Mays studied when he was told last week of his role on the fake punt -- a miserable attempt if ever there was one -- that Arkansas State tried Saturday in that 40-21 loss to Miami. Mays normally is a gunner on the punt team, running downfield on the outside and trying to make the tackle, but coaches changed the formation on the fake and told Mays he couldn't run down the field. He'd be ineligible. It would be a flag. So what to do, what to do ...
Coach Blake Anderson told Mays he would be the team's fainting goat.
"I was like, 'Fainting what?'" Mays said.
"Fainting goat," Anderson told him. "Look it up on YouTube."
So Mays did, and he found that video of the goat, keeling over like it had suffered a heart attack. And so Booker T. Mays practiced the fainting goat all last week -- "I got in five or six good reps," he said -- but by game time he wasn't sure which way to go.
"I also had the fainting cockroach," he told me.
I was like, the fainting what?
"Fainting cockroach," Mays told me. "You kind of curl up and go into the fetal position. But when we ran the play in the game, I went with the fainting goat. I sold out for the team, went all the way down, but Miami has soft grass and I have pads, so it's OK."
The third video in this story is from Booker T. Mays' senior year at Dollarway High in White Hall, Ark. See, Mays is more than the punch line to the joke that was that fake punt. He was and still is a receiver, fast and sure-handed, and this video from his senior year at Dollarway proves it.
But that first video you saw, the fake punt -- that's the big one. When I called Mays' father on Tuesday, Booker T. Mays Jr. knew why somebody from CBSSports.com was looking for him at Morehead Middle School in Dollarway, where he's the dean of students.
"It's about the fake punt, right?" he asked me.
Yes it is, I told him. Any idea how many people have seen that video?
"No I don't," he said.
Ten million.
"Ten million? Lord have mercy," he said.
Booker Mays Jr. says he's seen the video just once, but he's a busy man. In addition to dean of students of the town's middle school, he's also the JV football coach, an assistant on the varsity team, and a football referee in his spare time. Oh, and in the mornings he drives a school bus.
The 'T' doesn't stand for anything, by the way. That's what Booker Jr. told me. He says the 'T' is just a letter, nothing more. Just a placeholder. Another cute factoid in a story full of them. Like the fainting goat. And the dead cockroach. And the fact that Booker T. Mays is listed on the Arkansas State website as being 5-foot-1, a typo because he's really 5-11, but he never asked Arkansas State to correct it.
"People see me on the field, they know I'm not 5-1," he says. "So what does it matter?"
It doesn't, I guess. But it's a cute little factoid, another one, along with the way the punt video ended: With 6-3, 241-pound Miami linebacker Thurston Armbrister waiting for the fainting goat to get up, then plastering him back to the ground.
That's how it looks anyway, the coup de grace to the most miserable fake punt attempt you ever did see, but Booker T. Mays III swears the video is a liar.
"If you notice, it ends right when he hits me," Mays says, and he's right -- the video ends right as Armbrister blasts him toward the ground, but before Mays actually hits the dirt. "Most videos don't roll the whole film. I just lost my balance. I saw him coming, just enough to not get run all the way over. It looked like I got smooth run over, but I actually didn't. I promise."
