It was hot when I landed in Detroit. Many of those on hand to meet incoming planes were wearing shorts and dark sunglasses, some sporting cowboy hats with the Ford insignia. They meandered through the terminal, which was new and spacious, past glass cases which displayed machine parts revolving on small velvet-covered stands. Down on the lower level I rented a car, a red convertible, and I set out north along the main pike, called Telegraph Road, following directions for Bloomfield Hills. It is hard to go wrong. The country is flat, with the cranes standing in the fields amid the housing developments going up, and the bisecting roads are named for the number of miles out from the city limits—Seven-Mile Road, Eight-Mile Road, Fifteen-Mile Road—until about an hour out, when the country road names begin to appear on the turnpike signs, and the country itself begins to roll under big shade trees. I turned off for Bloomfield Hills, and the macadam road ran down through thick, tall woods, with an occasional glimpse of pond through the foliage.

I drove into the school parking lot, and carried my suitcase up through the school grounds toward a building which was indicated by an occasional directional arrow as the administration building. It was quiet and peaceful walking the brick-lined paths. The school buildings were ivy-covered, and everywhere sprinklers ticked back and forth on the lawns and flower beds.

In the administration building there was no sign of anyone around. I could hear a typewriter going somewhere, down a cloister, so I took my bag and followed along to the school office. Someone was typing in a cubicle there, and when I knocked and went in a woman spun around from her machine, blinking violently to dislodge a pair of pince-nez spectacles, which came off finally, and fell, suspended by a velvet ribbon around her neck.

She looked at me sharply.

“You are from… what country?” she asked.

I set my bag down. On the table beside her stood a row of badges of the type pinned on at conventions. One of them, turned slightly, had a name at the top which I could see and under it, in block letters, GHANA. Another card read IRAQ, and a third IVORY COAST.

“Yes?” she kept at me.

“Well, I’m from New York,” I said hopelessly, turning my palms over.

She looked at me quizzically, and she said, “You are with the convention… with the bishops?”

“The bishops?”

She colored slightly. “Oh dear,” she said. “I am in error. We have sixty Episcopalian bishops and other church people coming in for a convention… from all over the world. You are with…?”

“… the football people,” I said.

“Yes,” she said primly, recovering quickly. “The football people are in Page Hall.” She gave me directions to the Lion public-relations office, where she thought someone might be able to take me in hand, squinting forward as she spoke, reaching finally for her pince-nez to give me a closer look through them.

I thanked her, took up my bag, and hurried from her scrutiny, finding Page Hall after a short walk through the school grounds, and then the public-relations office. Bud Erickson, the assistant general manager of the Lions, was in—personable, slow-talking, his hair cropped like an oarsman’s, which gave him the appearance of being not long out of college—and with him was Friday Macklem, the team’s equipment manager. He was older, thin, sand-blond, with amused eyes, and he wore pants as baggy as a comedian’s. He had been the “man Friday” to his predecessor with the Lions, which is what they called him then, and the nickname had stuck. As he introduced us Erickson referred to him as the “guy who was the… ah… team humorist, in charge not only of equipment and uniforms and… ah… helmets, but also team morale.”

“Naturally,” Friday said. His manner was caustic. “Your morale may give me some trouble,” he went on, grinning suddenly. “Bud’s been telling me about you. I heard you’re a writer turned footballer. You’re going to play for us—making some sort of big comeback.”

“That’s right,” I said.

He shook his head. “Well, I’ve been with Detroit for twenty-seven years, dishing out uniforms all those years, and I know if I’d ever been tempted into one, I wouldn’t be around to tell of it, for sure.”

“Did you get your insurance?” Erickson wanted to know. We had talked about that over the phone the week before.

“I got some sort of protection,” I said. “It wasn’t easy. The company tried to get Lloyd’s of London to do it, but they backed off, not quite sure what it was all about.”

“What sort of policy is it?” Erickson asked.

“It’s a twenty-five-thousand coverage against death, dismemberment, or loss of sight,” I said. “It cost me seventy-five dollars and the policy’s only good for thirty days—which shows you what the insurance people think of my chances for the weeks ahead.”

“Seems those people were trying to tell you something,” said Friday.

The two of them laughed.

“Don’t give me away to the players,” I said. “I’d like to be thought of as just another rookie, an odd one maybe, but no special favors or anything because I’m a writer. The point is to write about it firsthand.”

Erickson asked if I’d had an easy trip out from New York.

“Until I got here,” I said. “Up in the school office they took me for an Episcopalian bishop. Not too auspicious a start.”

“Let’s hope that’s the worst thing that happens to you,” said Friday.

After a while Erickson got my assigned room number out, and Friday said that he’d go along and show me the way. We went down the dormitory corridors, which were long and dark, with clocks up on the wall at the end, and bulletin boards, and past the rows of numbered doors, most of them ajar. We could glance in and see the small cubicle-sized rooms, each with its narrow bed with a kelly-green spread that looked as rough as cowhide, the cheap teak bureau, round wooden pegs on the drawers, the mirror on top, and then the varnished desk, which would have a round hole to set an ink bottle in, and alongside, on the floor, the big green metal wastepaper basket. The dormitory smell was familiar—faintly antiseptic, perhaps of laundry bags full of bed linen, or of damp linoleum, which lined the corridor floors and squeaked underfoot. The rooms all seemed empty. Quite a few veterans had arrived—Friday said—but they’d be off playing golf probably, the coaches for sure, and as for the rookies, they were all in, about fifteen of them, most of them bunked down up on the second floor.

My room was 122, on the ground floor. I hoisted my bag up on the bed, which was hard, with enough spring to bounce the bag back up. Friday cranked open the latticed window and the afternoon breeze began to come in past the tendrils of ivy. Some mourning doves were humming in the eaves. It was pleasant enough.

“At least you got a single room,” Friday said. “Most everyone’s in doubles. This being a boys’ school, and everything sort of undersized, you get a three-hundred-pounder for a roommate and he’s not far from overflowing a room.”

It was true about everything being undersized. The hydraulic door jacks up in the corners of the doors had thick guards of wadding attached so the ballplayers wouldn’t crack their heads. They had to bend down to reach the doorknobs. The chairs were small and creaked under their weight. The washroom sinks were two or three inches lower than usual; the mirrors were also set lower, so that the sight of a row of players hunched over those sinks, almost bent double to peer at their beards while they shaved, made them appear even more gargantuan than they were.

Friday said he’d come by at dinnertime, which was six-thirty, a few hours away, and take me along to the dining hall. He closed the door after him. I turned to my suitcase and unpacked it. I took out the football. At the end of the bed I set up the pillow, dropped back to the closed door, and whipped the ball into it. But the distance was too short to be of any value for practicing—just barely six feet.

I unpacked the rest of the bag. At the bottom were the football shoes I had bought in an army-navy store in Times Square. I took off my street shoes, and after kneading the football shoes back and forth in my hands I tugged them on. They were stiff when I bought them, and wearing them in Central Park had raised a number of painful blisters. I kept wearing them to soften the leather, and also to harden my feet. When I stood up and walked around, the round cleats left marks in the brown linoleum floor, so I flopped back on the rough bedspread.

I was going to look into the high-school coach’s book on basic formations. But I was tired after the trip, and I fell asleep.