Ziggie Zigler: The Alabama Einstein:

 Chapter One

That Friday night incoming ‘Bama freshman Ethan Ziegler, known only as Ziggie to the few who noticed him—sat alone at the Waffle House, a twenty-four-hour student dive a few blocks from the stadium. Orientation Week had passed by in a blur; It was no to the Bohemian Rhapsody Choir, Club Tennis, the Greeks yawned, even the Robotics Club shrugged. Ziggie found a home at the Waffle House, where the waitresses had already clocked him in as a regular and the coffee, a short stack with plenty of butter soon appeared. The Waffle House was the quintessential sanctuary for the invisible.

Ziggie had perfected the laptop hunch, lips almost to the screen; without a 911, a dog or girl; Ziggie had the makings of a doomed geek. But inside the quintessential hapless loser lived a superhero. Fingers to the keyboard, Ethan Zigler was empowered, a data savant, a master of the universe, he wasn’t lonely. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Ethan Zigler was Mark Zuckerberg at Kirkland House. Ethan owned Jagger’s wild preening rooster in Jumpin’ Jack Flash. He was the Star Wars master. The Jedi sword was his inheritance.

Ziggie walked the ‘Bama campus with the armor of the elite warrior. When he leaned into his laptop, he wasn’t a shy, pathetic freshman on Orientation Week. He was staring into a maxed out three-layer Mac Studio rig. The road to Tuscaloosa had started years earlier, at Temple Beth-El in Shaker Heights when his parents Beth and Rubin Zigler, Beth a pediatrician at Cleveland Clinic and Rubin, a senior scientist at NASA Glenn Research Center gifted him his first Mac. It had been more than a Bar Mitzvah present; it represented their belief and love for the boy they understood was special.

It was never clear if Beth and Rubin grasped what the Mac Studio bundle the sales team at the local Apple Store in Woodmere assembled really meant. Bar Mitzvah boy Ziggie was the proud owner of a stack of three Mac Studios, M4 Ultras, 192 GB Ram each, 8 TB SSDs striped for speed, dual Pro Display XDRs, external RAID array for data hoarding, all packed into a custom aluminum chassis he’d reinforced himself. It was the equivalent of a nuclear reactor at a campfire.

Six years later at the Waffle House, Ziggie was dreaming about the next day’s Bama-Ole Miss game. He was consumed with the 100,000 fans screaming and singing every town’s fight song, Sweet Caroline. He typed code and stared at his empty cup. He waved to the waitress, and she brought another short stack, butter, maple syrup and a large coffee. She set it down with a wink. “You’re gonna need the energy, hon. Game’s tomorrow.” Ziggie nodded, but his eyes never left the screen. He was thinking about the game but not the way the crowd would.