Guess who's demanding to have a kid's high school passing record

wiped from the books?

The kid who set it.

Hang on to your Barcalounger for a second. You're about to get

all your cynicism about sports stuck right in your ear.

Go back two weeks. In the last high school game of his life, Nate

Haasis, a 17-year-old quarterback at Southeast High in

Springfield, Ill., is losing to Cahokia High 36-20 with 22

seconds left. It's a lousy Saturday because he's also going to

fall 29 yards short of the Central State Eight conference career

passing record. Cahokia has the ball. Southeast is out of

timeouts. Fans are packing up.

Except now Southeast coach Neal Taylor is meeting with Cahokia

coach Antwyne Golliday at midfield. When play resumes, the ball

is snapped and the Southeast defenders have their hands inside

their jerseys, allowing Cahokia to cover the 28 yards to the end

zone like 11 guys on a morning jog.

Cahokia kicks off out-of-bounds. Eight seconds left. Nate and his

offense take the field. The coaches are screaming at Nate, "This

is for you! This is for you!"

What's for me? Nate wonders. Then he sees that no Cahokia players

are within 20 yards of the line of scrimmage. "That's when I knew

something was up," Nate admits.

He throws a five-yard pass to his receiver, Jacque Robinson, who

is so alone he must think his deodorant has failed. He runs

directly to the spot where Taylor is standing on the sideline

yelling, "Run to here!" It's a 37-yard gain. Nate has the record.

Game's over.

It was a setup, a fix, a last-second favor from one coach to

another to get a good kid a big record. High tens all around.

But it poked up under Nate's pillow that night, soured his cereal

the next morning, whispered in his ear during class that Monday.

"I kept thinking of the guy who had the record before me," Nate

says. "I mean, his teammates fought for every yard he got. And

then I get mine this way? It just seemed wrong."

Coincidentally, the next day he got the grim news from an Ivy

League school that it was no longer interested in recruiting him.

(Later in the week the same thing would happen with the only

other Ivy League school he had a chance with.) Nate was having

one helluva bad week.

On Tuesday night Nate decided to do something crazy. He wrote the

conference president and asked him to remove the record from the

books.

"[Out of] respect [for] my teammates, and past and present

football players of the Central State Eight," Nate wrote, "it is

my hope that this pass is omitted from any conference records."

Somewhere, a guy in a suit read that letter and fainted.

In Cedar Falls, Iowa, Griff Jurgens, the player who had set the

record for Chatham (Ill.) Glenwood High in 1998, then lost it and

now may get it back, was blown away. "If you see him," says

Jurgens, "will you tell him I have the utmost respect for him?"

Better, Nate again has respect for himself. "Right away I felt

better," he says. "I never cared about the record, anyway. I just

wanted to win games." His father, Lou, an engineer, says, "We're

sure proud of him."

So, apparently, are plenty of people across America. Nate is

suddenly a national symbol for doing the right thing. In a

bling-bling world it's bigger than MAN BITES DOG. It's CONSCIENCE

BITES MAN. And when it's a kid righting adults' wrongs, it's an

icy Gatorade bath for the soul.

Hey, you think ethics might suddenly be contagious? You think the

New York Giants' Michael Strahan will return the record-setting

sack he got with Brett Favre's Oscar-worthy dive? Will

Connecticut basketball's Nykesha Sales protest the uncontested

layup that was gift-wrapped so she could set her school scoring

record? Will Colorado coach Bill McCartney give back the

fifth-down win over Missouri in 1990 that led to his national

title? Uh--no, no and hell, no.

Meanwhile, Southeast alumni and fans and the media in Springfield

are clamoring for the aching head of Taylor, even though he had

led the team to its best record ever (8-3) and the playoffs in

2002. It's gotten so nasty that Taylor has had to take time off

from his job as an eighth-grade language arts and phys ed

teacher.

"Eight seconds of my life, man, and I'm still paying for it,"

says Taylor, whose e-mail box has been jammed ever since. "People

are saying we met behind the building at halftime and arranged

this secret deal. Insane stuff. I was just trying to get Nate's

name in the record books. I was trying to do something good, but

no good came from it."

Taylor's fate is in the hands of the Springfield school district,

but it's almost certain that Nate's record will be Wite-Outed

this week--his total will be rolled back to 4,969 yards--because

the kid who set it doesn't want it.

And if it bugs you that a kid this honest and this principled

doesn't have a single Division I offer yet, relax. The sooner he

gives up football, the quicker we can get him to the place where

we really need him--Washington, D.C.

B/W PHOTO: JEFFERY A. SALTER

"It is my hope," wrote young Nate Haasis, "that this pass is

omitted from any conference records."

If you have a comment for Rick Reilly, send it to

reilly@siletters.com.