the garage gospel: Yes, But He'll Never Be Great
And the other point is I started to fall forward even before I started to hear him reply, standing there: Yes, But He’ll Never Be Great.
Context
The verdict that is the scene's whole wound: to the client's carrying "that lad of yours is good," the father's father replies, "Yes, But He'll Never Be Great." The judgment lands at the exact instant the body is ruined — the boy insists he "started to fall forward even before" hearing it — so that hearing his athletic ceiling pronounced and destroying his knees forever become one event. It is the body pronounced not-great at the moment it stops being able to be great, the anthology's darkest fusion of the ranking-verdict machinery with bodily catastrophe: a father who never watched, watching once, to say the son will never be enough.