CHAPTER 4

The evening class, the first of the training season, was scheduled for eight o’clock. I met the coaches a half hour before. Friday took me up to their dormitory common room on the second floor—a small room with a big refrigerator in one corner, some armchairs, and a card table with some open decks lying on it. George Wilson said, “Welcome to the Lions.” He was a wide-shouldered, dark-haired, deeply tanned man with a voice of curious resonance—which the players said reminded them of someone speaking up through a long iron pipe. He and the other coaches had been playing golf. All of them wore golfing hats with crossed club-sticks insignia on the front. Wilson introduced me to them, as they stood there waiting, some with diagram charts under their arms, to go down for the evening class: Scooter McLean, the backfield coach, who spoke with the accents of South Boston, a slight, wiry man with a gentle, worried face who had been a mercurial runner for the Chicago Bears in Wilson’s time, and had a spell, an unsuccessful one, as the Green Bay Packer head coach; then Aldo Forte, the big pleasant-faced line coach who had also played for the Bears; and Don Doll, a soft-spoken man with fading, close-cropped hair, a newcomer to the Lions that year, a former defensive backfield star for them just a few years before, who had come to take over that department from Don Shula, an enormously popular assistant coach who had gone to the Baltimore Colts as their head coach; Bob Nussbaumer, who coached the offensive ends and flankers, and was nicknamed “the Hawk” for a bird-of-prey profile and a manner which was imperious and quick. Finally there was Les Bingaman, who coached the big interior defensive linemen; he was huge himself in shapeless purple trousers, his shoulders rounded and enormous, supporting a chubby small boy’s face with blue eyes in it, and slicked with sandy-colored hair. I shook hands with all of them.

Wilson said, “Well, I hope you have an interesting time with us. We’ll try to help you as best we can.”

But almost immediately there was a problem. I went down across the quadrangle for the first class. Wilson saw me standing at the classroom door, which faced outside onto a courtyard with a fountain in the middle, and he came over and said, “Hold on now. You can’t go in there. That’s closed to the press.”

I looked at him blankly.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Well, I wanted to do this,” I said. “Stick with the rookies throughout, the classes, the scrimmages, all of it… just as if I were one of them.”

I spoke very rapidly. Once more, it seemed I was going to be barred. But Wilson then saw exactly what I wanted to do—I think the first time he’d really put his mind to it. I could sense him turning it over—how much my activities might be a diversion to his objectives. The coaches crowded around him, at the door.

“All right,” he said abruptly. “But you get too much on anyone’s nerves, and you go home.”

I said that I understood. I went to the back of the classroom and sat down. Not many of the players had noticed the confusion at the door. The playbooks were being handed out and they were looking into them.

A roll call was read. At the end of it Aldo Forte asked if anyone’s name had been left off. I said nothing, and I saw George Wilson standing at the side of the classroom grinning. He picked up two playbooks and brought them over.

“If you’re going to do this right,” he said, “you’d better have these.”

The two books were heavy, stiff-covered loose-leaf notebooks—one for the offensive team, the other for the defensive. Each had index tabs listing such categories as screens, goal line, double wings, and, in the back, blank pages for diagramming plays. The plays were drawn on the blackboard or thrown up on a screen by a projector for the players to copy down—the theory being that the assignments on a given play could be more formidably ingrained by having the player draw them into his own textbook.

I read in them a bit, keeping half an ear on Aldo Forte and Scooter McLean, who had lists to go through and announcements to make. The book for the offense was arranged by topics in the order of importance. Its first page led off with the heading “Two Minutes,” and a first paragraph which read: “Probably the most important part of a ball game is two minutes to go in either half. It is not only imperative for the team captain to know when time is out, and whether the clock starts with the snap or with the Referee’s whistle, but for each individual also. Time-outs must be saved for these periods. A team that can handle itself through this period without confusion and frustration will be the champion.”

A list of important points to remember about those two minutes followed—such as “After the fourth time-out, clock starts with Referee’s whistle.”

I turned the pages to find that next in line of importance was the category “Third Down Situation.” The text began: “The ability of a team to succeed on third down (either offensively or defensively) is the key to winning football.… The good clubs in the league today are the ones who excel on third down situations.”

The third category of importance ran under the heading “Severe Penalties and Their Avoidance.” First on the list was “Running into Kicker.” The text warned: “A foul is often called if you just touch the kicker. This penalty is unpardonable.” Also high on the list was “off-side or holding on 4th down kicks,” about which the text commenced coldly: “There is no excuse for this foul.”

Other than an index of “basic terminology” there was not much else in the offense book. The rest of the pages were blank for diagramming plays. A young football fan coming across one of these books by chance would be disappointed—finding a few admonitions that are impressed on every high-school player, and not much else. Obviously, the book increased in content and value as the players diagrammed their plays. I learned that three or four were taught at each evening class, so that by the time the training season was over almost a hundred plays would be drawn into the book. Naturally, the penalty for losing a playbook was high—with some clubs as much as a three-hundred-dollar fine. The players kept close tabs on them, and they were urged to browse through them at every opportunity to learn not only their own assignments on a given play, but also their teammates’, so that they had a more complete picture of a play’s operation. The books were as much an organizational symbol as the Lion decal that the regulars wore on their team blazers. When a player was cut from the squad, the coaches reached for his playbook.

The defensive book was more interesting. Besides the usual admonitions about penalties, and the importance of the third down, and playing superior football for the last two minutes of each half, the book included page after page of statistics, graphs, and charts, and a long section showing assignments for individual players against specific offensive plays. The young football fan might not have understood much of what was in it, but it would have suited his confidence that professional football is a complex and heady business. Furthermore, it seemed to be written with a zest missing in the offense book—perhaps indicative of Detroit’s great tradition of defense. The defense had always received the adulation of the Detroit fans—Les Bingaman in his day, then the defensive backs known as Chris’s Crew (headed by the linebacker Jack Christiansen) in the early fifties, and then Joe Schmidt up through the mid-sixties with the assistance of such as Roger Brown, Alex Karras, Night Train Lane, Yale Lary, and the others. When Tobin Rote passed the team brilliantly to a championship in 1957, it was still the defense which held the fans’ fancy: they swarmed on the field and carried off Joe Schmidt and the other mainstays of the defensive unit. Two or three of them went for Rote, but not enough, so that he sagged awkwardly off their shoulders.

I spent some time looking through the section on terminology, knowing that I’d hear some of the words down on the field and in the classroom as time went on—“Brown” (an offensive designation which means that the fullback blocks to the weak side), “Slotback” (any back who is set inside a spread end), “Crackback” (flanker back blocks back on the linebacker), “Slow” (off-side end blocks on passes)—all these terms used on the offense. As for the defensive terms, the two that caught my fancy were “port” and “star,” which are designations of defensive areas, left and right—the terms derived, obviously, if curiously, from the nautical port and starboard.

The main defenses were listed as red (which was man-to-man on the potential pass receivers), blue (which was a zone defense), a 4-2, a 4-3, and what was called a green 5-1. There were others, but these were the basic defenses—all of which entailed different responsibilities for the defensive personnel. For example, the instructions in the playbook for the left linebacker on blue coverage read as follows: “Delay the end—don’t permit inside release unless there is a close flare to your side. You are responsible for strong side turn zone. Get to your area fast, 10–12 yards deep. Look into quarterback’s eyes.”

The middle linebacker had the following responsibilities: “Strong side hook zone. Responsible for any close flare or ‘T’ flare—flow away—favor your weak side—be alert for strong side end crossing. With roll-out or run-pass, replace your strong side linebacker. If rushing the passer, ‘red-dogging,’ call ‘Jumbo!’ to your tackles to let them know you are gone, and they will drive and pinch the middle.”

The reading, what little of it I could understand, made me feel somewhat uncomfortable—the knowledge that in a few days the linebackers would be jumping around behind their linemen trying to look into my eyes to see if I was going to tip my plays. I was not at ease about such phrases as “pinch the middle” and about the linebacker’s cry “Jumbo!”—to signify, apparently, that the red dog was on—the linebacker’s bulling rush toward the quarterback.

“How are you coming?” It was George Wilson hanging over the back of my chair.

“Just great,” I heard my voice saying to him. “I’m so damn appreciative.” I pointed at the phrase which instructed the linebackers to look into the quarterback’s eyes. “They won’t be learning anything from me,” I said. “They’ll be shut tight.”

Wilson grinned.

“We break the team into groups now,” Wilson said. “After the team announcements. You can stick with anyone you want—go with the defense if you’d like, down the hall, or stick here with the offense. I’d take a few plays down in your book, just like everyone else, and down on the field we’ll work out the plays you can do best. We’ve got a big scrimmage coming up in Pontiac, and you’ll want to be set for it.”

Thereafter, I stuck with the offense most of the time, which Nussbaumer, Forte, and McLean taught, though from time to time I went off to listen to the other components for a while—to Don Doll with the defensive backs, drawing his fastidious, absolutely precise diagrams on the board. Behind him was Night Train Lane, a fervid kibitzer, tilting forward on his chair legs to raise a hand and offer a comment: “Co’ah, co’ah… the way Ah see it, the angle come…” Down the hall a few doors was Les Bingaman, the chalk snapping off in his hand as he scribbled the quick big circles and arrows of his diagrams; the big linemen, with a haunch or two slid out of the schoolboy chairs, bent over their books, filling in the play. It was such an odd equation to make, and one I never adjusted to, between the classroom work, the scratch of chalk and pencils on those near-somnambulant summer evenings with the sound of the fountains outside, and the ticking of water sprinklers—between that and what the symbols on the blackboard actually stood for—that an arrow on a blackboard between two mild-looking circles depicting a halfback’s line of direction actually entailed, in effect, the twisting frantic rush of a back between the heft and surge of three-hundred-pound linemen.

At the first session for the offensive team Aldo Forte said he wanted to give a brief outline of how the offense play numbers and signals worked.

“The system we use is very simple,” Forte said. He drew seven circles on a line across the board. “There’s your front line,” he said. “The holes between the linemen are numbered from the left, starting out beyond left end, eight-six-four-two-one over the center, then three-five-seven and nine out along the right to beyond the right end. Your backs are numbered one, two, three and four.” He drew a circle for the T-formation quarterback (1) just behind the circle designating the team’s center, and then split diagonally behind the quarterback he drew two circles for the backs (2) and (4). “The number three back is the flanker,” he said. “The flanker is positioned either out at the eight hole on the left, or he’s flanked out at the nine hole on the right. The first number of the quarterback’s call in the huddle tells the three back where to go. ‘Three left’ means he positions left, ‘three right’ to the right. Got that?”

Forte’s procedure was to pepper his instruction with questions and to ask for assurances that the class understood him. “Right?” he would ask, looking from face to face, and then once assured he’d say, “Right,” and turn back to his blackboard.

“Now the next number that the quarterback calls in the huddle tells who’s going to get the ball from him and where he’s going to go with it. If he says ‘Twenty-three’”—he wrote down 23 on the board—“it means that the two back will take a handoff and run straight forward into the three hole just to the right of center—” he tapped the spot with his chalk—“a straight-ahead power play.” He drew an arrow to mark the direction of the three back. “There it is,” he said. “One of the oldest plays in football. Once again: the quarterback calls it in the huddle by saying ‘Three right’ (which positions the flanker), ‘twenty-three’ (who’s going to carry the ball and where), he gives the hike signal, ‘on two,’ let’s say, and then he calls ‘Break!’ and here in Detroit we have the players give a sharp clap of the hands—in unison—to bring everyone smartly up to the line.

“Now,” said Forte. “Sometimes the play the quarterback calls will include information for the linemen on their blocking assignments. Our off-tackle run to the right side, for example, is called as follows: ‘Three right, forty-seven, near oh pinch.’ Those last three words indicate to the offensive tackle and end that they double-team and block on the defensive end, which will clear the seven hole for the four back to get through.

“Now as for passing—all pass plays are indicated by the word ‘green.’ The quarterback says: ‘Three right (or left)’—for his flanker—then ‘green,’ and then he gives the action for his primary receiver: ‘nine turn,’ for example, which means that the right end goes through the nine hole, downfield, and turns… buttonhooks. Clear? Right.

“I’m giving this to you very sketchily,” Forte said. “Very sketchily. So you get the idea. Right? OK. Now. How does the quarterback call the signals up on the line? First of all, he starts his call with a sequence of three numbers, meaningless numbers—eighty-eight, twenty-one, sixty-six, they could be. This sequence doesn’t mean anything unless”—Forte pointed his chalk at us—“the quarterback doesn’t like the defensive alignment against the play he’s called in the huddle, and he decides to check it off, call an audible. To do this, he uses the same number of the play he called in the huddle to begin the sequence. That is, if he’s checking off a ‘twenty-three roll,’ for example, the first number he calls is ‘twenty-three.’ That checks off the play. He’s got to call it out clear so everyone knows… all the way out to the flanker. The next number he calls is the new play—‘forty-two,’ for example, which will take the ball to the other side of the center. He calls out one more number, which doesn’t indicate anything, just any old number, and then he begins the count. Here at Detroit we use a rhythm cadence: hut-one hut-two hut-three hut-four—very snappy—and if the hike signal is three, everybody shoves off on the hut just before three—‘bam!’”—Forte drove his fist into his palm—“giving us just that little extra rush and drive…”

With the different teams the signals varied. At Cleveland, when Paul Brown was there, the quarterback called, “Ready, set, let’s go, one, two, three…” The year after I was with Detroit, the Lions changed the count to what was called a “staggered” sequence—an innovation which became popular throughout the league. “Go” was the operative word. If the quarterback said “on four” in the huddle, the center would hike the ball the fourth time he heard the word “go.” The quarterback was not harnessed to a rhythm in his call. He could call “Go!” wait a few seconds, then “Go-go”—as if calling off the names of the discotheques that were springing up at the time—then wait until he felt just right before his fourth “Go!” and the clap of the ball back into his palm. The advantage of the staggered count was that the quarterback could get the ball when it was most advantageous to him. If one of the opposition jumped offside, he could rip off his “go’s” to get the ball and catch him for a penalty before he could hop back across the line. Equivalently, if he was faced with a shifting defense he could wait until it moved into a compromised position, then get to his last “go” and unleash the play at the most propitious moment. The disadvantage of the staggered count was that it denied the linemen and backs the split second of motion they could get on the opposition with the rhythm count when they knew exactly when the hike was coming and could pop off their stance at the hut of whatever the hike number was. With the staggered count the offense, with the exception of the quarterback, was as much in the dark as to when to shove off as the defense.

George Wilson came by again.

“How are you getting along?” he asked. “Getting the plays down?”

“It’s not easy,” I said. “I think I’ll steer clear of the audibles.”

He said, “It’ll all be clearer down on the field. You got anything to wear down there?”

“I have a sweatshirt,” I said. “And some socks and all.”

He said, “Friday’ll fix you up tomorrow morning. You get yourself over to the gym early and he’ll outfit you.”

Later, when the classes were over, I saw him motion to Friday and start talking to him, nodding over at me. I was beginning to feel a part of things.

But the most gratifying sense of being attached came when my name was installed on the roll call which was read at the beginning of each class. My name was inserted after that of the big fullback Nick Pietrosante.

“Yo,” he said when the coaches called his name, and then mine came.

“Here,” I said, just right, matter-of-factly, absolutely perfectly, as if it was nothing at all to be there.