CHAPTER 1

I decided finally to pack the football. It was a slightly used Spalding ball, an expensive one, with the information printed on it that it was “triple-lined and lock-stitched.” Its sponsoring signature was that of Norman Van Brocklin, the ex–Philadelphia Eagle quarterback. It seemed a little deflated. I pressed it down hard against the shirts and was able to get the canvas suitcase cover zipped up around it. It was the bulkiest item in the suitcase, and the bulge of it was noticeable. I had two sweat suits in there, a pair of football shoes, some socks, a book on football formations written by a high-school coach, a sports coat and some trousers, and a few other things.

I was not sure what I was going to need at the training camp. The Detroit Lion officials had not sent me the sort of list one remembered from boys’ camp—that one should bring a pillowcase, a mattress cover, a flashlight, a laundry bag, etc. I assumed I could buy what I was lacking at the nearest town. I carried the suitcase down to the street and went out to Kennedy airport to catch an airplane to Detroit. From there I would go by car an hour north to Cranbrook, a boys’ private school near Bloomfield Hills, whose athletic facilities were being used by the Detroit Lions for their preseason training. I was going there as the Lions’ “last-string quarterback”—as my friends referred to it—to join the team as an amateur to undergo firsthand the life of the professional and, hopefully, to describe the experience in a book.

I had written one such book—a recounting of my turbulent experiences pitching in Yankee Stadium in a postseason major-league All-Star game. Out of My League the book was called, and it described what happened to someone with the temerity to climb the field-box railings to try the sport oneself, just to see how one got along and what happened. The notion behind the book was to play out the fantasies, the daydreams that so many people have—seeing themselves on the center court at Wimbledon, or sinking long putts in the U.S. Open, or ripping through the Green Bay secondary. I had been able to arrange with the baseball game’s promoters to play. Ernest Hemingway had thought it an odd if interesting experiment and he described the difficulties of my participation as “the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty.” Other friends were more critical. “Why do you want to embarrass yourself like that?” they asked. “It’s terrible. Either you’re the most frustrated athlete there ever was, or you’re nuts.”

“Well, the idea is also to get a firsthand knowledge of the professional athlete,” I said. “By being one of them, in a sense—being a teammate.”

“Sure,” they said. “Some teammate. Well, all right, what are you going to do next?”

“The Detroit Lions are allowing me to go through training with them,” I was able to say after I had worked it out with them. “They’re going to let me play in a few games.”

My friends were skeptical. “Sure, sure,” they said.

During the earlier part of that July month I had been practicing strenuously with the Spalding ball. On New York City weekdays, with friends working in their offices, it was difficult finding someone with whom to throw; but I would take the ball out to Central Park, trotting along the paths in a sweat suit, bringing the knees up high, then launching into an occasional sprint, with the arm held out straight to ward off an imaginary tackler, and then in the open stretches, out in the meadows where two elderly men were helping some children fly a box kite, I would rear back and throw the ball. It would arch through the air, bounce down the field, and rock abruptly to a stop in the grass. I would fetch it. Then I would throw it again. Without someone to throw to, it was a melancholy practice—to throw a ball in a park meadow and then walk to it, and throw it again—and I did it in a sort of dull, bored way so that if anyone caught me at it, if one of the elderly men looked away from his box kite, it would appear that I had nothing better to do while awaiting the arrival of friends, obviously delayed in traffic, for a touch football game. Sometimes, I punted the ball. Once I kicked it off the side of my foot into the infield of a baseball game, and the black-shirted players began shouting, “Arriba! Arriba!” and waving their arms as if what had dropped down among them was a large buzzard. July was not the seasonal month to be carrying a football around in Central Park, and I didn’t go out too often. I threw the ball around in my apartment, which is a sort of studio, long enough to allow a throw into an armchair from twenty or twenty-five feet away—keeping at it when I had the chance, if only to get used to the feel of the ball.