or even like:
but usually looks something like:
But that is not how we see it as Spades Marathon. We see it thusly:
Not a lot is really known about Chuck Cecil. Some speculate he grew up in an orphanage in the wilds of Southern Alaska near the Canadian border, or perhaps it was near the Alaskan border. It is not definitively known, but has been gathered from this statement he made after a play-off game victory:
"Sister Anne-of-the-Woods back at Virgin Fields of the Blessed Miracle would have been happy with the hit I made on Aikman. I just want to let everybody in Whitehorse know, because they're in Whitehorse now after that storm back in '81, that I thought of ol' John Tucker when I made that hit." Cecil laughed after that and ran off to join his team in celebration.
What is known about Chuck Cecil is that he could hit, and at some point, a then little-known coach on the sandlots of Arizona happened to see a scrawny undersized kid make a hit he'll never forget. Mike Ditka had this to say,
"I had left an interview with Long Flats High School just outside of Phoenix and was walking by this sandlot and saw a semi-pro football game going on between a factory team and a trucking line. Most of the guys were scarred lumps of muscle who'd been working the night shift since the Christmas before their friends graduated high school or had been driving from their daddy's knee way back, there was blood on the sand everywhere. Rocks littered the field like mines, and in the middle of it all was this kid who just didn't belong. He was everywhere, fast, instinctive and as hard as any of them, but without that look in the eyes. You know, that thousand yard, too many bad cups of coffee stare you see sometimes on the highway or the docks. His eyes had a look of joy and there was a play, a pitchout to this short, squat but quick trucker, I think they called him Bo, anyway, suddenly this kid jumps over a double team. Jumps it, and with his bare head leading, just crunches into the guy. It was skull on skull and the back just crumpled. The ball skidded on the Phoenix grit and Cecil, this kid, without pausing, picked it up, stiff-armed a trucker flying at him so that the guy fell like a shot duck, and sprinted otherwise untouched into the end zone. It was the most amazing thing I ever saw on a football field. I asked a guy who this was, he said he didn't rightly know. Kid had come off the Plains one day looking for a job, said he'd do anything and ran a pressing machine and sometimes filled in for the janitor. Everybody liked him, they called him "Tooth" because he'd ripped out one of his back molars on a dare first week on the job over at the Greasy Can, the local bar. I called a friend, the tight ends coach at Arizona and then convinced the kid he had a future. Never forgot him."
Ditka would of course rise to a position where he was able to have his own line of playing cards, and did honor to that sandlot legend of Phoenix, Arizona by way of the wilds of deepest North, by making him the ten of spades.
Chuck Cecil, was the perfect choice to be the ten of spades: a silent assassin biding its time until the Kings and Queens have run about the board, usually making its appearance late to slay an opponent, as it has done many times throughout Spades Marathon. No card is more desired - after all, the Ace is only death, the Cecil is Pain.
Chuck Cecil is now married to a writer in Nashville, Tennessee and attends charity golf outings. But occasionally friends still see the old Chuck come out.
"Yeah, Tooth still comes out to play," old friend and one time workmate, Steve "Stev-o" Forks says, "we were walking through some backwoods once and heard dogs fighting. Tooth loves dogs. There were some assholes running a dog-fighting ring there and Tooth walks in there and rips these guys apart, and frees the dogs. Well they [the dogs] come tearing out at us, I'm serious, I climbed a tree yelling at Tooth 'why you gotta be so crazy,' 'you and your damned conscious!' But he just knelt down, holding out his hands, like for communion? And started speaking some crazy gobbly-gook I never heard before and the dogs just calmed. They started licking his hands and followed him after he slowly stood up. He never stopped speaking that stuff and it was so soft I almost felt sleepy. He looked up at me, and kind of smiled, 'come on down Stev-O, their time of being caged is over. Like mine was, thanks to Sister Anne.'
"One of them dogs is a seeing-eye dog now and two others are in this orphanage he helps out, the dogs help the new kids adapt. I asked him what he spoke and he said it was a branch of Inuit or something like that. He said the real language is from Siberia. That's the weird thing about Tooth, you think he's just one of the guys, but he's smart. He named one of the orphanage dogs Stev-O and starts laughing every time he brings that dog up, he's saying that's the one that chased me up a tree! The seeing-eye dog he named Sister Anne. He doesn't forget his roots. Any of them."
Chuck Cecil: the ten of spades. There is not higher praise for football player or playing card.
