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You can’t just drop a story like that and not elaborate.

Jeez I went to go make dinner and didn’t expect this to blow up. Thanks for the upvotes.

I wasn’t actually there when they made the bet so I don’t really know what started it. What I heard from my buddy was that the quarterback on the football team, who was kind of a dick, was making fun of the goth kid for wearing lipstick or something, saying he wasn’t man enough, and the goth kid snapped back that he could shoot down one of the quarterback’s passes. To which the quarterback was like yeah right, and the goth kid said he could do it from outside the stadium.

For context, I went to a suburban public school, with maybe like 1500 students. We had a pretty decent football team, and with it came a pretty good-sized football stadium. Not like state-of-the-art massive, but not SMALL either.

So when this kid says he can shoot down a moving football from OUTSIDE the stadium, of course the quarterback’s like “how much you wanna bet?” and by the time I heard about it, there was already a couple hundred in the betting pool against this guy. Because it sounded crazy. To give you a picture of this kid, he wore lipstick and eyeliner and skulked around scowling at everyone and barely said a word even when a teacher called on him. The rumor was that he had a few screws loose, so by the time I found out about the pool, it seemed like he was probably talking crazy, like maybe he actually believed he could make this insane trick shot but that was because he wasn’t all right in the head.

So I bet fifty bucks. I wanted to get the hell outta Texas when I graduated, so I was looking for any opportunity to make an extra buck. It seemed like there were pretty solid odds I’d get a return on my investment, though I felt a little bad taking advantage of some kid’s crazy. Real stupid in retrospect, but we’ll get to that.

The actual incident went down on President’s Day, when school was closed. Somebody convinced the assistant football coach to let us into the stadium—probably because he was also in on the bet. I have no idea how many people were in the whole pool, but like 10-15 of us were at the stadium that day. Somebody had a camcorder and was gonna put the video up on Youtube later. Somehow, I ended up in the group that went with the goth kid to watch him set up, and make sure he was legit. As if any of us knew anything about shooting at a football.

A lot of our families were hunters so it wasn’t that weird to have your own deer hunting rifle or paintball gun or whatever. But this guy pulls up with a fucking sniper rifle. Like full on military shit, with a silencer and everything. And the way he starts putting it together, all quick and efficient, like he’s definitely used this thing before. He had like tactical gear too, specialized gloves and ear protection and everything. That’s about when I started thinking maybe we fucked up.

The football stadium backed up against some forest, and there was this big old tree where the goth kid posted up, lying on his belly on a tree branch with the rifle pointed toward the middle of the field. Which again, spooky stuff in retrospect, but we were a bunch of dumb teenagers thinking we were about to win a bunch of money. The goth kid gave us a thumbs up when he was in position and then one of the guys who had a walkie-talkie radioed the group inside the stadium to tell the QB to throw the ball. We’re all silent, basically holding our breath, and then there’s this massive BANG. All of us on the ground are covering our ears and ducking, and the goth kid just like, lowers himself down from the tree, tells us “Job’s done,” and starts packing up the sniper rifle.

I had thought maybe he’d need more than one attempt so I remember being confused how fast it was all over. But we heard the guys in the stadium all yelling into their walkie-talkie, like “he fucking did it, get in here, you gotta see this, holy shit.” So we make our way back into the stadium, but kinda slowly because teenage Jason Bourne over here needs to finish putting away his gun, and after seeing him shoot like that we all kinda silently agreed we didn’t want to let him get behind us. So after he slings his gun case over his shoulder we all kinda fan out behind him and basically herd him back toward the stadium like a bunch of awkward sheepdogs, giving each other nervous glances the whole time because no one wanted to be the first to admit we might be in danger.

When we get into the stadium, there’s this standoff going on around the 25-yard line. The QB, the assistant coach, the guy with the camcorder who was still filming, and the other guys who had just watched the football get sniped, are all clustered around this kid I’d never seen before who’s got this pompadour hairstyle and is dressed all in black and I think wearing a dog collar? The QB is holding what’s left of the football, with a look on his face like the world might as well be ending. The ball was totally shredded. There was a big hole through the middle and it was barely hanging together at the seams. When I saw the video later it looked like it basically exploded when the bullet hit it.

Pompadour is holding up this lump of metal that has to be the bullet, and when he sees the sniper kid he breaks out into this big smug grin and starts monologuing at us like a Bond villain about how he knew sniper kid could do it and we all had until Friday to pay up. Sniper kid had been terrifyingly expressionless this entire time, but when he sees this guy holding the bullet and waving at him, his whole face lights up. It would have been almost sweet if it wasn’t so creepy. Pretty sure that was the only time any of us ever saw him smile.

I found out later that Pompadour was actually this super-genius and the reason I didn’t recognize him was because he was taking almost all of his classes at the local university even though he was only 16. And he was the only person in the entire pool who didn’t bet against the sniper kid, so when all was said and done he won like $3000 off all of us combined. Then I also found out that the goth sniper kid was the state target shooting champ from the time he was like 10. So it was actually really fucking stupid of us all to bet against him in any kind of shooting competition, but it’s not like he was about to tell us that.

And the two of them were dating. I found that out when they started kissing each other on the mouth right there on the 25-yard line while flipping us the bird.

So that’s the story about how I got hustled out of fifty bucks by two gay goth dudes.

Somehow everyone started calling it The Exploding Football Incident which, yeah, buries the lede a little bit.

After posting this I googled their names to see what they were up to, and they both have Wikipedia pages now, wtf.