CHAPTER 2

My arrival at Cranbrook brought me closer to active participation with a professional football team than I had been in four years of intermittent trying. It had been relatively easy to arrange to play in the baseball game that resulted in Out of My League. But it had been difficult with football—possibly, I supposed, because I could not approach the owners with quite the confidence I was able to muster when I asked to pitch. I had played a lot of baseball, but my football experience was limited. The school I went to in New York was English in character, and in the autumn, we played soccer rather than football. The “football song,” which we sang lustily in school assembly, went as follows:

The author, number 0, prepares for a scrimmage in the Lions’ locker room. (Walter Iooss Jr.)

We do not mind

The winter’s wind,

Nor weep o’er summer’s bier,

Nor care a jot

If cold or hot

So long as football’s here.

The other schools took us for sissies because we played soccer, and on the weekend some of us went out and played furious daylong games of tackle against them, and came home bruised and exhausted. I played end. I did not much like the clutter in the center of the line, or the physical contact, not being properly built for it, being very lean and thin, along the lines of a stick.

At prep school I kept at it for a while, playing end, but with neither the devotion nor skill to make the varsity, or even the junior varsity. At college I did other things, and the last tackle game I played in was the annual Harvard Lampoon–Harvard Crimson football game, in which thirty or forty people from each publication played to a side; two footballs were used, and big paper cups of beer were propped strategically around the field so a slug or two could be consumed on the fly.

My credentials as a football player may not have been of the first order. But I kept assuring myself that the purpose of my participation in professional football was not to represent the skilled performer but the average weekend athlete.

My first try was grandiose. I took a trip out to Los Angeles, to see if I could insert myself into the mid-January Pro Bowl game—the postseason spectacle which pits the best players of the Western and Eastern Conferences against each other. Red Hickey, who was the coach for the Western Conference All-Stars that year, had been described by an acquaintance of his as a most understanding coach. I was told he would surely accept my participation—it would amuse him.

With a letter of introduction I went to call on Red Hickey in his suite up in a midtown Los Angeles hotel.

“Sure,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

I told him—somewhat haltingly, finding the proposal increasingly odd as I went on—that I wanted to train briefly with his team as a quarterback, never causing him any trouble, just staying on the periphery of things, and learning just enough to get by, and then trotting into the game itself in the Coliseum and calling three or four plays, just one series, I said, nothing much at all; then I’d be able to write about my experience and enlighten those who had wondered as a sort of daydream what would happen to them if they actually became bona fide quarterbacks playing in a pro game.

“Did I hear right?” Hickey asked. “You—with no experience—want to train and then play—in the Pro Bowl game?” He was incredulous.

“That’s right,” I said. “I wouldn’t get in your way…”

“That’s the damnedest thing I ever heard,” he said. “Who put you up to this?”

“Well, I write for this magazine…” I began. “Sports Illustrated.”

“They ought to know better.” He stared briefly at me. “You’re nuts, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“You mean it’s impossible?” I asked. “I can’t play?”

“Not a holy chance,” he said. He looked nervous.

“I’ve come all the way out here,” I said, somewhat frantically. “From New York.”

“A drink. You want a drink or something?” he said.

It was about three in the afternoon.

“Do you think I ought to try Buck Shaw?” Buck Shaw was the coach of the Eastern Conference team.

“Yes, yes,” Hickey said. “That’s the thing to do. You try Buck Shaw. Just the thing.”

The interview ended. Hickey was very kind. He gave me a bench ticket for the game and I went to the practices and I met a number of his players, and sat around with them.

Whenever Hickey saw me in the hotel lobby, he’d nod his head, and once he called out, “There you are—my last-string quarterback…”

I said, “Yes, sir.” I told him that I was ready to jump into uniform any time he changed his mind.

“Oh yes, oh yes,” he said, and he drifted away. I really made him very nervous.

I never tried Buck Shaw. He was called the Gray Fox, a severe-looking man with a temper, I was told by the players, and he wouldn’t go for the idea. It was too bad about him—the players said—that neither he nor Hickey would let me do it. The players thought it was a fine idea.

I kept at it. That spring I wrote to the New York Giants. I was a native New Yorker and a supporter of their club. I outlined what I hoped to do—train with them as a rookie quarterback—and after a while the front office wrote back to say that they would take my project under advisement with the coaches and see what could be done. They said that they might be interested. That gave me hope, and I began planning to set aside the end of July and August for a stay at Fairfield, Connecticut, where the Giants train. Occasionally, I called up the public-relations man at their office and he said, “Yes, there was interest—quite true,” and he said that he’d let me know.

But I never heard anything, and as the summer wore on I began to worry. I called again.

“We brought it up at a meeting with the coaches,” the publicity man said, “and while everybody thought the idea was just great, and there was a lot of enthusiasm voiced, I want you to understand, they turned down the project flat.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, how about all that enthusiasm?”

“The fact is,” said the publicity man, “we got four quarterbacks, and the idea of a fifth hanging around—who’d have to take his turn, after all—that’d be too much for a coach to bear, I mean a guy’d be tempting a coronary carrying five quarterbacks on his team.”

“I agree,” I said truthfully. “Look,” I continued, “I haven’t got my heart set on being a quarterback really, I mean I’d settle for flanker back, why not? Where maybe I wouldn’t cause as much confusion. Or tight end,” I suggested. I was not sure what a “tight end” was, but I threw it in anyway.

“Look,” said the publicity man, beginning to get an edge to his voice, “I did the best I could for you. You got to realize professional football is a serious business.”

Having been refused by the Giants, I tried the other New York team—the Titans of the American Football League, then in their second year of operations. The team had not done well, either at the gate or in the league standings. Knowledgeable friends warned me that if my performance at their training camp had any flair, if I completed two or three passes, the coaches would not be likely to let me go. “Right off,” I was told, “you throw some passes straight into the ground just so they won’t get any ideas. You wouldn’t want to hang around too long with those people.”

I went to call on Harry Wismer, the wealthy sportscaster who formed the Titans and eventually went broke trying to keep them going. He ended up spending, by his own count, a million and a quarter dollars before he and the team went bust and the franchise was picked up by an entrepreneur, Sonny Werblin, who formed the New York Jets, who have done better. Wismer had troubles from the beginning, but still he was hearty enough in greeting me, and he showed me around his office, which was hung with framed photographs of himself shaking hands with mayors, athletes, and borough presidents, thin faces all smiling, but flat and two-dimensional in the photoflashes, like cardboard cutouts. He motioned me to a chair. He had on a bright-colored blazer, nearly orange it seemed to me, though there was a heavy thunderstorm going on outside and the afternoon light in his office was diffused and dim. He listened patiently to what I had in mind. As usual, the project seemed absurd as I explained it, particularly with the thunder, from time to time, accompanying it, and the heavy sluice of rain against the windowpanes. But he seemed enthusiastic enough when I had done. “Why not?” he said. “After all, what’s a team without a last-string quarterback?

“You ever played much quarterback, kid?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Well, you’re going to have the best in the business out there at the camp showing you how, and of course that’s…” The thunder came just as he was saying “Baugh,” but his voice was resonant enough so that it carried through—“Baugh!”

“Yes,” I called out. “Sammy Baugh. It’s going to be a tremendous privilege.”

“‘Privilege’ is the word,” he said. “Greatest quarterback who ever lived.”

“I’m very fortunate,” I said.

“Well, now,” he said. The thunder murmured away. He slapped his desk with the flat of his hand and smiled broadly. It was the signal for me to leave. He told me he would check everything out with Baugh the next day—I wasn’t to worry about a thing; all would be arranged. “We’re glad to have you aboard,” he said. He gave me a ballpoint pen with NEW YORK TITANS printed on it. I said good-bye and took the elevator down. I didn’t have a raincoat with me, so I stood waiting in the doorway, watching the traffic move slowly up Park Avenue. The gutters were awash with rainwater. The temperature had dropped as the storm moved out, and it was cool and exhilarating after the heat. The project, after so long, seemed arranged, and the excitement was pleasant to savor. Behind me I heard the elevator doors sigh open. I turned, and saw Harry Wismer, coming along briskly, in a raincoat, working at the fastenings of an umbrella. As he came opposite, I said, “Hello, Mr. Wismer.” I lifted a hand and smiled. He looked at me with no sign of recognition, and stepped outside. I guess he had other matters on his mind. He was an odd man: he used to say “Congratulations” to many people he met, on the grounds that they had probably done something they could be proud of.

I never saw or heard from him again, but I did get to know his secretary quite well over the phone. Her name was Rosemary. I would call up to see how progress was coming and I would say, “May I speak to Mr. Wismer, please?”

“Hello,” she would say, recognizing my voice. She would apologize and say that Mr. Wismer was off somewhere, but he had me very much in mind and was going to mention the project to Sammy Baugh at the first opportunity and get the thing arranged. “He’ll call you as soon as he comes in,” Rosemary would say.

“Fine,” I would say.

But he never did call, so every other day or so I would put in a call for him. After a while, when Rosemary answered the phone, I began to say, “Well, once again, this is the Great Arm calling…”

She would laugh pleasantly at the other end and tell me that Harry was out to lunch, or out at the training camp, or with the banks, or somewhere, and I would say that I was just checking in to get an estimate on when the Arm was going to be unleashed.…

“I’m sure everything will work out,” she would say.

One day I telephoned and announced myself as usual: “The Great Arm calling…”

“I beg your pardon.”

“The Great Arm,” I said. “The Grrr… eat Arm! The answer to Baugh’s headache…”

After a pause, the voice said, somewhat tentatively, “This is the New York Titans.”

“Rosemary?”

“No, this is Miss Huron.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I gave the new girl my name and asked if Mr. Wismer had any information for me.

The girl said carefully, “Of what specific nature is the information which you desire?”

“I’m supposed to be the last-string quarterback,” I said. “I’m calling to find out when I’m supposed to report.”

“One moment, please.”

I could hear a murmur of voices in the background, and I heard someone say, “What’s that… last-string quarterback?”

The girl’s voice came on again: “We do not seem to be aware… Would you kindly spell your name, please?”

“Well… never mind,” I said. I hung up. I decided I would wait for them to call me. They never did.

For a time that winter, I thought I was going to play for the Baltimore Colts. I had been introduced to Carroll Rosenbloom, the Colt owner, at a skating party the Robert F. Kennedys gave one evening at a lighted outdoor rink in Chevy Chase near Washington. A furious hockey game was going on at the time—despite a cold misty rain—a small beach ball being used as a puck, and the contending teams, about twenty to a side, including Ethel Kennedy, seven months pregnant, were equipped with brooms. I was off the ice momentarily. I have bad ankles for skating, which collapse painfully, my ankle bones just off the ice except when I am simply gliding, when I am able to keep the blades upright. I was sitting on the bench with my skates off, kneading my feet and working my toes comfortably. We had already had a relay race, carrying balloons for batons, and I had done the length of the ice and fallen, socking up against the boards, after handing the balloon on to a girl with a black babushka hat. She set sail back up the ice, moving well against her opponent, the balloon in attendance, swaying and skipping behind her, but then halfway down the rink the string slipped through her mittens and the balloon, helium filled, the size of a pumpkin, rose slowly up into the mist. The girl braked and stood, her head thrown back, watching the balloon rise; she reached up an arm with a long mitten at the end of it, and she made an utterly poignant hop, perhaps an inch or so off the ice, as if the force of her determination would soar her up to retrieve the balloon—forty feet or so in the air by then, caught in a slow wind current, and moving laterally toward the frozen tennis courts. The girls at the party were very serious competitors. Occasionally, one would skate off the rink, from the hockey, breathing with difficulty, and sit down hard on the bench and rest her forehead against her broomstick. We would talk until she got her breath back, and then she’d tug her scarf tight, and glide out on the ice toward the beach ball, with the crowd around it, flailing at it, and she would hold her broomstick in front of her warily.

Suddenly, play stopped. Someone was down on the ice, a crowd collecting around him—Ed Guthman it was, the attorney general’s press secretary—and it developed he had broken his collarbone in a bad fall. It was sure to be Guthman, curiously prone to disasters of this nature: he has a short, flat, triangular nose, nearly a parody of a prizefighter’s, which was pushed in years ago when he took off his catcher’s mask to shout out something to his pitcher, who it happened had just completed the follow-through of a pitch that caught Guthman just as he removed his mask, pop, right on his nose. He was always being hit with objects, or falling off things, or into things, and when his skates went out from under him, and he gyrated slightly before his shoulder hit the ice, he had time to think “Again” before the bone snapped and he felt the pain. After a while he was helped to his feet, and he was propelled slowly off the ice. His face was pulled tight with pain. Beside him skated the attorney general. “All right!” he called out, as they approached the bench. “Let’s hear it for Ed.” We stood and applauded, with the muffled sounds of wet-soaked mittens, and the press secretary was helped past the bench into the clubhouse.

On the rink, the hockey game started up again in the rain. I began putting on my skates. Through a big plate-glass window I could see Guthman sitting in the clubhouse waiting for transportation to the hospital—holding his arm to his chest, sitting bolt upright and still to ease the pain. Rosenbloom arrived then, late for the party, hurrying into the clubhouse. A friend sitting next to me on the bench pointed him out through the window. “That’s Rosenbloom of the Colts,” he said. “Maybe he’s a good bet for your football project.” We watched him pick up his skates at the rental counter and glance uneasily at Guthman. He came outside and sat with us on the bench. We were introduced. He smiled at me briefly, then squinted out at the rink. “What the hell,” he said. “That’s not curling going on out there, is it? What are all those brooms for?”

“Hockey,” we said.

“Oh,” he said. “Of course, if the Kennedys went in for curling, that’s the way they’d play it.” He leaned forward. The flailing was going on at the other end of the rink. “Is that Ethel out there in that carnage, for God’s sake?” He leaned back and nodded toward the clubhouse windows. “What happened to the guy sitting in the vestibule?”

“That’s Ed Guthman,” I said. “They think he’s snapped his collarbone.”

Rosenbloom said, “It takes a little time to get used to this. I mean I’ve just come from a little dinner in Georgetown—the usual thing, cocktails, pleasant light conversation, candlelight, a little brandy in the library, small room, you know, and paneled. And now…” he said with a vague gesture, “… well, this. And in the rain, what’s more.” He took off his shoes and put them neatly under the bench.

“Perhaps,” said my friend, “an appropriate moment to tell you that George, here, wants to play for the Colts.”

Rosenbloom looked at me sharply. “I’m going batty. You’re not serious,” he said.

I said I was, and as he worked his feet into his skates, loosening the laces, I explained once again what I wanted to do. He was attentive, despite his struggle with his skates, and when he had them on, the two of us up and moving gingerly over the duckboards toward the ice, he said, “I don’t see why it can’t be arranged… that is, if we survive this,” he said, gesturing toward the melee, where there was considerable yelling going on. “I don’t see much point in moving into that mess without a broom,” he said hopefully. I thought of offering him mine, but I think he would have declined it.

So for a while I became a strong Baltimore supporter. I studied up on their players, telling people I was going to play with them, and as the spring arrived I purchased a football and threw it around the apartment, into armchairs, and occasionally down on the street with a friend, and at night, coming home, I would break into a trot, bringing the knees up high, and at other times, relaxing. I would think about what was coming, the excitement beginning to collect, until I would have to go out to an art gallery or a movie to keep my mind off it.

But the Colt people, it turned out, were just as difficult to settle anything with as Harry Wismer and his Titans, and it was more expensive, besides, having to telephone Baltimore to find out no one knew anything. Rosenbloom always seemed to be away “traveling.” I wrote a few letters finally, and then one day a note from Rosenbloom came in the mail. He wrote we would have to defer the project for a year. Baltimore had a new coaching staff, headed by Don Shula, newly arrived from Detroit, and it was going to be important to keep things as simple as possible for them. Did I understand? Of course I did, I wrote back, wishing him luck for the coming season, and I stopped throwing footballs around my apartment and the broken-field running late at night in the streets. I could wait another year, I thought.

Not long after, though, I met one of the directors of the Detroit Lions. He said he’d put in a good word for me with the club officials, and he recommended that I write George Wilson, the head coach of the Lions, to see what he might say. He was encouraging. He said that there were two types of teams in the league—each reflecting the head coach’s disposition. Some were primarily no-nonsense, tight, stiff organizations, which would be averse to any such idea as mine, and others, relatively few, were disposed toward something that might catch their fancy—“loose” was the word.

The Lion team was still reflecting its fame in the past as a tough roughneck outfit; that was not to say that it was undisciplined, but that it was a player’s team, molded by such “rounders”—which was the old football term for the hell-raisers—as their quarterback Bobby Layne. Indeed, the year before, the deportment had reached the stage of public scandal: six Lions had been fined heavily by the commissioner’s office, some of them two thousand dollars, for gambling. They had placed their bets, actually, on a team not their own in a postseason game—the championship game between Green Bay and New York. The league rules forbade it, in any case, and the commissioner levied the fines. For placing a series of small bets during the season, Alex Karras, their great defensive tackle, had been suspended indefinitely. These offenses had nothing to do with Wilson’s tenets of coaching, my Detroit friend was hasty to point out. Paul Hornung, the Green Bay superstar, had been suspended along with Karras from a team guided by the hand of Vince Lombardi, who was tough and dictatorial.

I wrote George Wilson to see what would happen. It was much the same letter I’d sent the other clubs, telling them that I would just hang around the periphery of things and not bother anyone, just try to participate enough to get the feel of things in an atmosphere which was denied the general public, but which they wondered about.

To my surprise George Wilson wrote back and said he thought the idea was interesting. He invited me out to the training camp at the end of July for the three-week training session. He said that there would be an intra-squad game up in Pontiac in early August, a big night game that might be a possibility for my participation. Then, the first exhibition game was against the Cleveland Browns a week later. His letter was short. It ended with the hope that I was in good shape.

I looked at the letter for a time. That same day I began throwing the Spalding football around the room again, and I went out and bought the stiff-leather football shoes.