CHAPTER 5

The next morning, just after breakfast, I walked over to the gymnasium to get outfitted. Practice was called for ten o’clock. Friday was there, in the locker room, and he took me in hand. I had my own equipment with me—the shoes from the army-navy store, the sweat suit, the socks, the rest of it—in case any of it could be used—and Friday took a look and said, “Well, you can take that stuff and dump it somewhere. You come with me.”

We went down a corridor to the basketball court, passing under a framed life-sized color photograph of Pete Dawkins, the Army halfback, who went on as a Rhodes scholar to play rugby in Oxford—Cranbrook’s most illustrious graduate, the color in the photograph fading and the surface badly scratched, his face patched with color like a circus clown’s.

Friday had the equipment laid out in separate piles on the gymnasium floor—shoulder pads, knee pads, thigh pads, belts, helmets, shoelaces, and so forth, and we went from one pile to another, Friday as officious as Mole in The Wind in the Willows, putting together an outfit. There were over a dozen separate items. “Now these shoulder pads,” Friday said, “used to belong to Doak Walker. Here, you slip them on this way.”

“I see,” I said. I strung myself into them.

“Lift up your arms, like you’re throwing the ball.”

The pads, smaller and lighter than a lineman’s, seemed to restrict movement somewhat, in fact extensively, but Friday seemed satisfied. “Of course,” he said, “I’ve not got anything here that’s going to be of much use to you, since what you need is a suit of armor. I haven’t got none of those around.”

“Of course not,” I said.

He handed me an elasticized padded garment he referred to as a “wraparound girdle”—“to protect the hips.” I looked at it speculatively, not sure how to get into it.

“Don’t mind being confused about the equipment,” Friday said. “Let me tell you, a few years back, some rich Detroit bozo sent his son here to try out with the Lions. He arranged it somehow. The poor fellow wasn’t worth much, missed it in every profession he tried, ten or a dozen of them since getting out of school, so his father thought he’d try him at football, for Chrissake, starting him out at the top, one might say, getting him in here with the pros. Well, this poor fat fellow—he’d’ve weighed three hundred pound, easy—didn’t know from nothing, couldn’t catch the ball, hardly throw it, and as for his weight, he didn’t know how to use it: they pushed him around like he was on rollers.

“When the first scrimmage came up, this fellow put on the same sort wraparound girdle you got there, but he thought this back part here which covers the base of the spine”—Friday pointed out a reinforced section of the equipment—“was supposed to cover his john, for Chrissakes, so he got the thing on backwards, for Chrissakes, and the guy must have been in agony down there on the field, moving around like a sort of spastic ape.”

I was grateful for Friday’s story. I was confused by the girdle, and I might easily have put it on the way the young three-hundred-pounder tried it, which he probably sensed.

“What happened to him, Friday?” I asked.

“He got shoved around something fierce. Of course, the team dropped him. A big, confused fellow. Hated football and couldn’t take it. I suppose he went home and said, ‘Well, Dad, I didn’t make it, y’know, failed again,’ and I suppose his father looked at him hard and then crossed ‘football’ off some crazy master list he kept of professions he wanted his son to try.”

We finished the outfitting, and Friday led me back up to the locker room, my arms weighed down with paraphernalia so I could barely see over the top, on which was the hard silver helmet with the decal of the blue lion.