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With a pair of binoculars and a seat in the press box at Kyle Field, I got to see more than almost anyone else in attendance on Saturday afternoon.
I saw Jack W. Jernigan's grandson run onto the field, only to be escorted off unwillingly by a policeman.
I saw Jernigan's fellow band members frantically try to administer CPR to restar his silent heart.
I saw the ambulance drivers try to shock Jernigan's heart back into a working state, and I saw the looks of panic and concern in Jernigan's friends, as he was lifted into the ambulance that would rush him to St. Joseph Hospital in Bryan.
An opinion I heard both voiced and printed throughout the rest of the weekend following the halftime incident was "Well, at least if he had died, he would have fallen on Kyle Field in front of 50,000 people who loved him just for being an Ag."
As I watched the drama unfold fromthe press box, I was very near to breaking into tears, as I thought about my own grandfather, who had died while working in the sun on a similar day, and of my father, with his notoriously-high blood pressure, watching from close by.
But when I heard that opinion voiced over and over, it just made me sick.
They loved him becuase he was an Aggie? When Jernigan dropped to the turf, he was no Aggie, he didn't even need a name, he was only a man. A man fighting for his life right there in front of us, while we stood or sat in a daze.
That should have been enough, right there. A fellow man was ill, near-death and needed help.
The help came as quickly as possible, and when they finaly had Mr. Jernigan on the stretcher, there was applause, and much to my disdain, a few isolated whoops.
Being an Aggie may be a great thing (and that's only from a certain point of view, namely that of an Aggie), but being a human being is infinitely more important.
Who knows how Jernigan wanted to die, or even if he had though about it?
True he was old enough to have a heart attack, but a 59-year-old man is hardly near the end of his life.
Right now, as I write this and you read it, Jernigan is fighting for his life at St. Joseph's in Bryan.
To his doctors and nurses, he is not an Aggie, but a man struggling to regain consciousness and his life.
To his family, many of whom have come in from out of town in the last few days, he is not an Aggie, but a husband, a father and a grandfather, who they are, at the moment, unable to help.
And to me, as he was from the moment he went down, he is just a man, but a man fighting for his life, and therefore a very, very important man.
