CHAPTER 3
Friday came by at six-thirty and woke me up. I swung my legs off the bed and stood up, the football shoes indenting the linoleum floor.
“I fell asleep in them,” I said lamely, sitting down to change into my street shoes.
We walked across the terrace of Page Hall to the dining hall. The system there was self-service, a buffet steam table in the kitchen which we passed by with plastic trays, loading on the food, and then we walked on out to the dining hall, which was vaulted and high-ceilinged, designed like an English manor hall, with an aisle down the middle, and long tables on either side. The baronial effect was heightened by the rows of Episcopal bishops sitting at the far end of the hall. Many of them were in clerical outfits, and the roar of conversation rose from that end. An area of empty chairs and tables in the center of the hall separated them from the Lions, who were sitting up at the kitchen end, just a few of them, in T-shirts, with sloping, powerful shoulders bent over their plastic trays, most of them sitting alone.
“Rookies,” said Friday. “They all sit on the right of the aisle. Veterans on the left. Segregation. Coaches can sit anywhere.”
A big man in a gray business suit motioned us to join him.
“That’s Gil Mains,” said Friday. “He used to play a great tackle for us, until he got hurt against San Francisco. He’s an insurance man now, working the area, I guess—that’s why he dropped by—brought in over a million dollars’ worth of policies last year.”
We sat down with him. I was between them, and after we had been introduced and had chatted a while Mains leaned across and asked, “Friday, what about the rookies this year?”
“Well,” said Friday, eyes shining, so one sensed a set piece of monologue coming up, “I want to tell you this is the greatest crop of rookies we’ve ever seen—they’ve sent down nothing but all-Americans.”
“That’s great,” said Mains. “How many of them are going to stick with the team?”
“None of them, of course,” said Friday. “But this is still the greatest crop of rookies ever sent along—every one an all-American, and I just don’t know how our scouts continue to do it year after year.
“Hey!” said Friday, motioning at me. “You know what this guy’s going to be doing in the next weeks, up in Pontiac for the first big scrimmage and on August tenth against the Cleveland Browns?”
“No, what?” Mains looked at me.
“Well, he’s going to be down there on the field. Doing what do you think?”
“Head linesman,” said Mains.
“Guess again.”
“I don’t know… maybe he’s some kind of promoter or master of ceremonies?”
“Come off it!”
“What the hell,” said Mains, exasperated. “Maybe he leads the bands between the halves. You mean he’s actually on the field?”
“Right,” said Friday.
“He’s a referee.”
“No,” said Friday. “He’s a quarterback, our quarterback, the new one, just fresh off the campus. Talk about what a great job our scouts have done—Nussbaumer and the rest of them…” He was delighted. He whacked his fork against the plastic tray.
Mains stared at me.
“It’s true in a way,” I said, explaining it to him. “Don’t let on to the others,” I said. “I’m here from a semipro team known as the Newfoundland Newfs, if anyone’s curious. Don’t give me away.”
Friday said, “Show him that limb of yours, Gil. Show him what sort of thing can happen.”
Mains reached down and rolled up his pant leg, turning in his chair awkwardly, his leg stiff, to show me.
“Take a look at this,” he said.
Two long half-moon scars ran down either side of his knee, which no longer had the outlines of a kneecap, but seemed as shapeless and large in his leg as if two or three handfuls of socks had been sewn in there.
“Holy smoke,” I said.
He took out a pencil and showed me on a napkin what had happened—the cartilage removed, which is not too serious, but on both sides of the knee the ligaments had been torn away (he had been blocked on the blind side during a kickoff play in San Francisco), and, since ligaments will not grow or mend, complicated grafts had to be done. He will never walk normally. It was not easy to look at his knee, much less the napkin design of what had happened to its interior.
“Maybe Gil is trying to tell you something,” said Friday.
“I’ll say,” I said.
“It was the cleats that caught,” Mains said.
“Perhaps I should wear sneakers,” I said. “I can ride into town and pick some up.”
“That’d be welshing on it,” said Friday. “You come down to the gym tomorrow, and we’ll get you outfitted.”
Mains talked about his injuries. He had an unfortunate empathy with San Francisco: he had never been hurt in the slightest playing against any of the other clubs in the league; in games against the 49ers, he had fractured his jaw, an arm, a right leg, and finally his left knee had been torn on the kickoff play which put him out of football for good.
“It’s hard to be out of it,” he said. “I always look in on the Lions when I get the chance.”
Around us, our end of the dining room was beginning to fill. A crowd of veterans came in. I recognized some of them from their pictures in the Lion fact book. Their conversation was lively. Their attention seemed concentrated on the rookies across the aisle. A finger would come up and point, as if what was in view were heads of beef. The rookies were conscious of the scrutiny; they ate sullenly, bent over their food. Suddenly, one of the veterans motioned across the aisle. “On your feet, rookie!” he was calling. “Sing!”
“What’s this?” I asked Friday.
“Watch,” he said. “They’re calling on the rookies to sing their school songs.”
A rookie, his face pale, his jaw working on a vestige of food, climbed laboriously onto his chair. He put his hand over his heart and sang in a low, embarrassed monotone.
Here are the Razorbacks, pride of old Arkansas,
Never in duty lax, ready to fight.
We have the winning team, see how our colors gleam,
Always they’ll be… ah… supreme, the red and white.
No applause greeted his rendition. He climbed down from the chair, and dug a spoon, which he had clutched in his left hand while he sang, into his deep-dish apple pie.
Friday explained that the hazing—the singing of school songs mostly—was a tradition fomented originally by Bobby Layne, the Lion quarterback and team leader through the fifties. The dining room at mealtime was his special province. The rookies would rip through their meals to get out of the dining hall before he came in to eat. If he was already at the table, latecomers coming in with their trays from the buffet would peer in the swinging doors and they’d try to gauge where Layne was in his meal—whether he was just starting in, in which case they could sit down and bolt their meal, or whether he was done, and about to push back his chair, pat his belly, and look around for some fun. In that case, the rookie would slide his meal—steak, potatoes, bread, and a slice of pie, all of it—into a paper bag and go out and eat in the woods. They ate in the woods because often Layne after supper would come down the corridors and rout the rookies out for a concert on the quadrangle lawn in front of Page Hall. “We’re going out to chirp,” he would call loudly.
Rookies had to perform various stunts and chores. Wayne Walker, a big linebacker sitting opposite, overhearing us talk about Layne, leaned across and told us that in his rookie year during training camp Layne stopped him late at night in the corridor—Walker was padding down to the washroom in his pajamas to brush his teeth—and ordered him to provide him with a pizza pie. “I want a pizza pie, boy, and I want it hot and I want it fast,” he said, jabbing his finger at Walker’s chest for emphasis. Walker had arrived in camp the day before, and had hardly settled himself in. He had no idea where the nearest town was, or how to get there, or whether there was a pizza palace in it. But he did what he was supposed to.
“You’d turn up buffalo steaks for that guy,” he said.
From their table a group of veterans were shouting across. “Friday! Friday!”
He looked up from his ice cream.
“That a rookie sitting beside you?”
Friday looked at me. “A rookie?” Friday called back. “I’ll say. You mean you guys don’t recognize your own top draft choice?”
“On your chair, rook,” they were calling.
“Get up there,” Friday whispered back.
“Christ, Friday,” I whispered to him under my breath. “I don’t know my college song. I haven’t thought about it for years.”
“Just squawk something. Nobody’ll know the difference.”
“Sing anything!” Mains said, looking at me with a big grin.
I climbed up on my chair. It was very high and precarious balanced there; I could see the bishops clustered down at the far end of the hall, one or two with their heads craned around. I put my hand over my heart and sang:
’Til that last white line is past.
er… We’ll fight for the name of Harvard
’Til… that last white line is past…
fading it away at the end, since all of it had gone wrong, and I climbed down off the chair and looked into my plastic tray.
“That’s the shortest damn college… not much body to that song,” said Friday.
“They took me by surprise,” I said.
No one seemed much put out. Everybody went on eating, though perhaps one or two heads came up at the name of the college, an institution with little identification with professional football. Nobody put down their forks to listen. It was apparent that the singing was secondary to the indignity to which the rookie was put; he was being embarrassed so that he would keep the rigorous caste system firmly in mind. After my inept performance, Lucien Reeberg, a big three-hundred-pound black rookie from the Bronx, was ordered up on his chair, and without any self-consciousness he boomed out the song of his alma mater—which was Hampton Institute—with great gusto, a high, tenor voice coming out of all that bulk with no hesitations as he coursed through a song full of “thee’s” and “thou’s” and “hail, sweet mother,” etc.—but when he sat down, quite pleased, it was to the quiet clicking of cutlery against the plastic trays, no approbation at all, except from the bishops down at the far end of the hall, one or two of whom half stood and turned to hear.
Then next up was a tall, spindly fellow who was sitting alone, down at the end of his table toward the wall. He got up on his chair slowly and you could see he was in trouble. His features constricted swiftly in concentration, then relaxed, and he peered moodily down the hall at the bishops. Occasionally, his hand would drift up toward his heart, but it would drop away, and we knew the words had not come. Then a tremendous smile would burst onto his face, and die away instantly, and he would lift his melancholy face and peer into the shadows of the vaulted ceiling. We heard him say, “Oh my,” and then after shifting his feet he said, “Shee-it,” and maneuvered himself out of the chair and sat down. But there was no complaint from the veterans at his lapse of memory. He had paid his obligation to the system simply by getting up. Friday whispered that his name was Jake Greer. He came from a small southwestern college.
Friday told me that Bobby Layne had been much tougher in his day on rookies who had difficulty remembering or performing their songs. “Hum it, man,” he would have said scornfully to Greer. “Everybody quiet now. We’re going to hear the rookie hum his school anthem.”
Or he would have said: “Well, if you don’t know the school song, let’s have your school yell… a yell, please.”
“You mean…” the rookie would say, “what the cheerleaders…?”
“Right.”
The rookie would shift uneasily in his chair.
“Rah!” he would shout tentatively. “Rah. Rah. Rah… Rah. Rah,” his eyes fixed in a mournful face, his arms jerking oddly, as if strings from the vaulted ceiling were being manipulated by an unseen puppeteer.
“Hold on,” Layne would call. “What was that?”
“That was the locomotive cheer… sir.”
“What?”
“That’s what they call it… the loco…”
“How many rah’s in that yell?”
The rookie would look at the ceiling.
“It speeds up toward the end of the cheer, but I reckon there must be, altogether, maybe fifty of them.”
“Fifty!”
“Just about, I reckon.”
“What other cheers do you have?”
“Well, we had one”—the rookie was very embarrassed—“we had one that goes:
They ain’t no flies on us,
There may be one or two on you,
But there ain’t no flies on us.
“We heard some great yells,” Friday recalled. “Thanks to Layne. I remember one that come out of Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana. He got some poor guy up on his chair, shouting it.
When you’se up, you’se up.
When you’se down, you’se down.
When you’se up ’gainst Roosevelt
You’se is upside down.
Hey Ray Roosevelt!
When Layne left the Lions, traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers, his hazing methods were continued, though less rigorously. When Alex Karras came onto the club, after his own rookie year, during which he barely spoke a word, he became the unofficial hazing master. But he used the dining room less as a hazing ground than as a stage to display his own theatrical tendencies. He banged the water glass for silence so he could deliver his own speeches, skits, or monologues; even a request for chocolate syrup for his ice cream, which could have been fulfilled by raising a finger to a passing waitress, was given a performance. He would rap his water glass loudly and signal out the dining-room matron. “Mrs. Page!” he would shout. “Mrs. Page, having consumed a salad, your salad, with a little shrimp in it, is it too much for me to ask, as a red-blooded American, a voter, with a wife back home, a dog lying by the hearth, a parakeet in a wire cage, is it too much for me to ask for a beaker of chocolate syrup to pour on my ice cream? Mrs. Page, give me chocolate syrup or give me death!”
“He’s a great loss,” Friday was saying. “It’s hard to think of the dining room here at Cranbrook without him in it—doing some crazy act.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “Right, Wayno?”
Wayne Walker, sitting opposite, said, “No one like him.”
The desultory singing went on until all the rookies had performed, nearly fifteen of them, rising one after the other, to sing their songs with their hands over their hearts. All of them remembered. Only Jake Greer had been unable to come up with his song.
Afterward, Greer was standing out on the terrace outside the dining hall, just after supper, a toothpick working in his mouth with just the tip of it showing, and as I came up he turned away to look out over the school grounds; I grinned at him. “You had a little trouble there with your song,” I said, meaning to commiserate with him.
He looked back at me, stricken, and he got himself set, and began to sing, having recalled his school song apparently, and taking me for a veteran. He had a very high, gentle voice, and as for the song, it too had a “thee” in it, and a “sweet mother,” etc., but he did not get much of it done, because I leaned toward him, after my surprise, and said, “Oh no, not on my account!”
He stopped. “She just warn’t coming to me back in there,” he said in a rush. “She was at the do’, just scratching to get in, but she warn’t comin’ in”—his head shaking in exasperation—“and I know my school song—my!—why we sing it every time the team wins, down there on the field, and that season y’know, we only lose once.”
It was very much on his mind, so I said, “Well, I didn’t do no good neither,” letting the language go in some subconscious deference to his concern. “I messed up.”
“You sanged?” he said, surprised. “My.” His toothpick began to work. “She was sure at the do’,” he said, reminiscing again about his own troubles. “But she warn’t comin’ in”—his head shaking again, the toothpick whisking busily.