From the beginning I had trouble getting into the helmet. The procedure was to stick the thumbs in the helmet’s ear holes and stretch the helmet out as it came down over the head, a matter of lateral pull, easy enough if you practiced isometrics, but I never had the strength to get my ears quite clear, so they were bent double inside the helmet once it was on. I would work a finger up inside to get the ears upright again, a painful procedure and noisy, the sounds sharp in the confines of the hard shell of the helmet as I twisted and murmured, until it was done, the ears ringing softly, quiet then in the helmet, secure as being in a turret. Then I would look out beyond the bars of the nose guard—the “cage” the players call it—to see what was going on outside, my eyes still watering slightly. It was more difficult to get the helmet off. The first helmet Friday Macklem gave me was too small—a helmet was supposed to fit snugly to afford the best protection—and when I tried it on in front of my locker I yelled as it came over my ears. Wayne Walker, the big linebacker, happened to be chatting with me at the time. He was one of the few players who knew of my amateur status. He had read my baseball book and remembered my name.

“How’s she feel?”

“Feels fine. Snug,” I replied. “Once you get the thing on.”

I tried to take it off. I got my thumbs in the ear holes and tried to budge the helmet loose.

“I’m stuck in here,” I said simply.

Walked began to grin. He looked down the locker-room aisle for other players who would have enjoyed the dilemma. Mercifully, none were on hand.

“Damn!” I said. “I can’t budge this thing.”

“You’ll get used to it,” said Walker.

“Geezus!” I was really straining to get it off.

“You’re truly married to pro football,” said Walker. “After a while you’ll never know that you got it on.”

The helmet came away finally, leaving my ears inflamed and raw, the side of my head furrowed. “Enough to make me quit the game,” I said.

No contact work was planned the first day. I put on the blue shorts, a T-shirt, white socks, and the football shoes Friday had given me, which were worn and comfortable. I followed the other players out the back of the gym down to the practice field—down through a small pine grove, past the school tennis courts, on which, even at that early hour, a pretty girl in shorts was banging a ball up against a backstop. She stopped briefly to watch our group go by through the pines.

The practice fields were vast, four or five football fields separated by rows of tall, widely spaced trees. Off in the distance were a pair of baseball backstops, for softball perhaps, since no base paths marred the long expanse of green. A few distant sprinklers were working, throwing up long enormous curves of water as they turned.

We were early. A number of players were lying around on the grass. Most of them were rookies, but there were some veterans, who were the ones talking easily. It was peaceful, the earth still cool from the night dew. There was gossip about players, always the name linked with a height and a weight (“This guy, Logan Fox, oh he’ll go six feet five, run maybe two thirty-four, well against Boston College this time, he…”), and often his speed (“… does the hundred in nine oh three”), and they talked about coaches, and how tough they were, and with calisthenics coming up in a half hour or so, the rookies wondered what the Detroit exercises would be. At Chicago, one of them said, running through the grillwork of ropes, which was one of the standard exercises they had in all the camps, was easy because big Doug Atkins would step on the ropes going through and press them down to within an inch or so of the ground. They stayed down there too. No spring left in them after that guy stepped on them. That’s what he had heard.

“What’s he weigh?” someone wanted to know.

“Atkins? ’Bout two seven oh. He’s six eight. Big as six barns.”

The footballs arrived. One of the centers brought them down in a blue sack and spilled them out on the grass. Some of the players got up and began tossing them back and forth, limbering up. I noticed that the big linemen could hardly throw the ball: their arms seemed stiff, hinged like thick poles to the bulge of muscles along the backs of their shoulders. They threw the ball in an overhand lob motion—like tossing a grenade. They didn’t catch the ball particularly well, either, which made my spirits rise. The ball would drop and bounce. But their hands were enormous. They picked up the ball with one hand and it seemed to fit in the palm.

When the quarterbacks and halfbacks started throwing the ball, it was another matter—the footballs traveling on a line and with distance. I went and stood alongside Earl Morrall, the second-line quarterback. He had a close-cropped haircut and a friendly face, and he kept up a lively chatter. He was one of the two quarterbacks the Lions had, his reputation that of being a superb “reliever” for Milt Plum, who was the first-line quarterback. Plum stood opposite—fifteen yards downfield, tall, his dark hair neatly groomed above a face that shone with a pale, curiously high-polished skin that did not seem to weather. Next to him, John Gonzaga, an offensive guard, was grizzled by comparison. He was a veteran to whom I had introduced myself that morning. He had the locker next to mine. Even at that distance, alongside Plum, I could see his arm tattoo, which was a large quizzical-looking cartoon-character duck on his biceps, and underneath in dark blue letters against his skin the question WHO ME?

When I played baseball in my stint in Yankee Stadium I had difficulty getting anyone to warm up with. Not recognizing me, the players took me for a batboy, I had assumed, and they wouldn’t throw the ball to me though I stood in beside them, waiting, tapping my glove speculatively. So I found a batboy and warmed up with him. The football players had no such compunction. They saw me in the team practice togs, and assumed I was one of them. Plum threw me the ball immediately—the nose slightly down as it came, and its spiral perfect so that it seemed to slip through the air and was at my hands and almost through my fingers to my chest before I had time to react. And yet his motion, directly overhead, was as nonchalant as if he had been waving at someone across the street.

There was no mistaking a professional quarterback’s throw—one had the sense, seeing it come, of a projectile rather than a football. I found it nearly impossible to imitate with my own throws. The grips varied, and there was no standard hold that could produce those perfect hard spirals. Otto Graham, the great Cleveland quarterback, threw the ball with his thumb on the laces. Plum held the ball much further toward the end than Morrall. Both of them at different stages of the training showed me their grips, and the arc of the arm in the throw, but they agreed one had to work out one’s own style. The object was to get the ball to the receiver; there were great quarterbacks who rarely threw the classic pass: Bobby Layne’s passes invariably wobbled, and Frankie Albert, the 49er quarterback, had been known to throw the ball end over end to his receiver. Still, it was galling not to be able to do it correctly. Sometimes the ball would leap off the fingertips—I had done it right—and the receiver would nod his head. But the next time something would go wrong, and sometimes the players watching would call “quack-quack-quack!” to bring attention to its fluttery flight.

I made my first mistake as a rookie after Plum threw me the ball—not two minutes having gone by of my physical participation. I caught the ball and looked for Gonzaga, next to Plum, to throw to; someone had called his name, and he had turned away. So I threw the ball back to Plum. I pegged it pretty hard. Plum looked startled, but he caught it. Morrall, alongside me, looked over and said: “Up here we don’t throw to a quarterback like that. Throw it to the other guy. He’ll shovel it to the quarterback. Or if you do throw it to the quarterback, toss it underhand.”

He said it perfectly kindly. I had learned my first lesson. The precaution was against anything happening to the quarterback, even a jammed finger from catching a ball. His person was inviolate—a coddled piece of equipment that was not subjected as much to the physical wear of the training. If a quarterback was brought down in a scrimmage, the coaches would call, “Go easy, go easy…” When Clark Shaughnessy was installing his new T formation at Stanford, he was so nervous he might lose Frankie Albert through injury that involuntarily he would blow his whistle just before the start of a play in the practice scrimmages.

While the limbering up was going on, and about fifteen minutes before the coaches’ whistles blew for the calisthenics, the kicking teams began to practice—Wayne Walker and Jim Martin alternating at field-goal attempts, starting at the twenty-five-yard line and moving the ball back from the goalposts five yards at a time until they were trying fifty- and fifty-five-yard kicks from their own territory.

Over by the sidelines Yale Lary and Pat Studstill practiced their punting. I went over and watched. I never tired of it—standing downfield from them and watching the ball arch up to the height of the tall rows of elms and sycamores bordering the football fields. The kicker’s foot seemed to impart a liveliness to the ball so that it bore up to a height where the properties of the ball itself seemed to change—it seemed a toy against the sky, a feather-light object about the size of a baseball hanging almost motionless, far up, at the apex of its trajectory. I would be sixty or so yards downfield to retrieve, waiting with Tommy Watkins, who did the punt returns in the games, and he would say, “OK, you take it,” and I would look up, almost straight up, and the football would begin to reestablish its properties—growing abruptly larger in its vertical drop as I tottered around under it, and then with the faint whew-whew-whew of its laces turning it would be on me, as large and heavy as a dead goose knocked from the sky, so that as I hauled it in to my chest I would let out an involuntary grunt.

Watkins himself seemed to do it with the ease of a shortstop handling an easy pop fly. But as I watched the ball sail down to him from those elm-high heights I would shake my head, thinking that however easy it was for him to catch the ball, the feat was tempered by the thought of the big linemen coming down and reaching for him. “In a game…” I said.

Watkins once told me: “You think of the ball first, and then what’s coming for you down the field. Reverse the order, and you’ve got yourself a fumble, sure’n shooting.”

Occasionally, I would stand upfield next to Yale Lary and watch him swing his leg into the ball and sail it up on those long flights. There was nothing about his kicking leg to distinguish it. Lary was wiry, built like a European soccer player, though perhaps a bit heavier—180 pounds. He was very fast, and played defensive safety in addition to his kicking. Size seemed to have little to do with kicking ability. Bobby Green, the Cardinal kicker, Lary’s closest rival the previous year, weighed only 150 pounds. Lary’s skill had come naturally. In junior high school when he was about eleven he outkicked everyone—the ability was always there, and it was a question of tuning it up: like speed or like the quarterback’s arm, he said; it’s natural, and it can be improved, if only to a certain degree. He practiced in the street outside his house. The streetlights would go on, and he would punt the ball up through the cover of darkness, gone, and then forty or fifty yards down the street it would suddenly reenter the streetlights’ glow, startlingly white, and bounce erratically on the macadam and rock to a rest. He would stroll down the street, stepping off the yards to check his progress, to retrieve the ball and kick it back up into the night sky toward his front gate.

He wore out footballs, practicing; the bladder would protrude and be stuffed back in and a patch put on, but it would pop finally. For a long time, he remembered, he owned a yellow ball the color of a lemon which had the staying power of a cement block. It lasted a couple of seasons. The nose of the football disintegrated first, since a perfectly kicked ball has about the same trajectory as a howitzer shell—that is to say a long climb to the apogee and then a steep vertical drop in which the nose is pointed straight down, indeed is pointed slightly back toward the kicker so that the ball when it lands will cartwheel rapidly downfield and add to the kick’s length. Lary averaged forty-six or forty-seven yards a kick during a season (the lengths of the kick measured from the line of scrimmage, of course), which is usually the best in the league. Sammy Baugh of the Redskins had the annual record, fifty-one yards, but as a tailback he did some quick-kicking, which catches the defenses in tight against the line and allows the ball to roll unencumbered. He had a number of these the year he won his record kicking championship. Lary’s longest kick was a seventy-four-yarder against Cleveland in 1953. Desperation may have added a dozen yards or so on that punt—the snap from center was a poor one which bounced well in front of him, and he had to rush to field it: he was only just able to fly the ball up over the fingertips of the incoming linemen.

It was always frustrating to watch the ball soar into the air from Lary’s foot, and then try to do it oneself—which suddenly imbued the ball with a lead center, replacing the life that was in it; it was like punting a large dead bird in comparison. I envied the kicker’s skill. It seemed so simple. Milt Plum once told me about a Bunyanesque character who had turned up at a Cleveland practice when he was with that team. He was very young, spindly, with a happy-go-lucky high-school face working hard at a stick of gum, and afterward no one was sure whether he’d been sent by a scout or had just stepped out from the spectators lining the practice field. The calisthenics had not yet started. The players were spread across the field tossing footballs back and forth, and the field-goal units were practicing. A football rolled near this fellow. He picked it up and looked at it speculatively, twisted it slightly to get the laces right, a look of schoolboy concentration caught at his face, and he stepped forward and kicked a long, high spiral which came down, the football’s nose over in the perpendicular drop of the perfect kick, seventy yards away. A ball coming off the kicker’s foot correctly makes a sharp though thumping, gourdlike sound that, reverberating, seems to hang in the air. Hearing that, the players standing nearby could turn in time to see the ball soar up, for a cataleptic instant a part of height and air, before its nose turned over and its trajectory became vertical.

“Jesus,” someone said.

Another ball was tossed to him, which he turned over, inspecting it as if it were an object he had not seen before; he worked his gum furiously, and then with simple ease he lofted up another punt, quite similar to his first—the same hollow thonk of sound, the ball poised against the sky before the nose went down and it dropped straight. The coaches came and stood around.

“Well, what happened then?” I asked.

“I never saw such kicking,” Plum said. “I don’t remember whether the guy had kicking shoes, maybe a pair of sneakers, whatever he had on when he walked out to practice. I don’t think there was one of the punts less than sixty yards.”

“Was he signed up?” I asked. “What became of him?”

“That one time was all I saw of him,” Plum said. “There must have been some technicality. He might have been in college, y’know, which made him ineligible. Our coaches must have kept an eye on him, praying he’d come to them when he got his degree. He may never have gotten one—he was a goofy sort of guy—and maybe the Army got him afterwards, or maybe kicking a football bored him finally. My, he could kick a football,” Plum said, shaking his head, thinking back to that summer afternoon.

At ten o’clock the coaches arrived, coming across the field in a group, most of them carrying clipboards. All of us—almost sixty men—gathered around while Nussbaumer, the Hawk, checked a roll call. He announced that anyone straggling down late through the pines from the gym would be fined. He then divided the group into five sections—the defensive linemen, the defensive backs, the offensive linemen, the flankers and ends, and the quarterbacks and backs. The centers stayed with the latter group—the quarterbacks and backs—and so did I.

First, the coaches sent off each section at a time up the length of the field twice and back to limber up—two hundred yards at a fast dogtrot that didn’t seem to bother anyone. I didn’t mind it. Many of the players carried on conversations as they ran—regulars who had just arrived the night before being filled in on camp talk.

The squad then circled Nussbaumer, who directed the calisthenics. The exercises were easier than I had thought they were going to be. They started with simple stretching exercises—hands on hips and swaying from side to side ten times, that was all, then touching the toes perhaps ten times, which was followed by a stretching exercise for the muscles of the calves. Everybody flopped to the ground then, on their backs, and the stretching exercises continued: hauling the knees up, first one, then the other, then both, to the chin. A bicycling leg exercise came next, followed by a tougher drill, which was to stiffen the leg and touch with one toe, then the other, the ground behind the head; one had to rear back on one’s shoulders to do so. That exercise was not easy, and neither was the next, which was to turn over on the stomach and, arching the back, rock up and down on the stomach, from head to foot, like the curve of a rocking-chair leg—an exercise that was supposed to strengthen the stomach muscles. The exercise was easy for the big men, who could rock on their ample stomachs like inflated beach-toy sea horses. But the receivers and defensive backs, the thinner men, would groan and carry on as they tried, complaining, the spectators already collecting along the sidelines gawking and pointing, until Nussbaumer would order a few push-ups. Then he’d leap up and lead everyone in quick jumping-jack exercises, everyone shouting the cadences because the exercise was the last of the morning, and it was a relief to be done with them.

The squad then headed for the “ropes”—a long grid of roped squares, raised about a foot off the ground—the exercise course that they had spoken earlier of Atkins having lowered—and we ran through it a number of times, the coaches urging us on. Here, the heavier men, Roger Brown and Lucien Reeberg, the three-hundred-pounders, had a more difficult time, having to hoist their bodies through the course in a series of quick little jumps. Their speed along the ground—that is, running flat out—was awesomely impressive, but the grid squares held them up and made them pick up their feet and hop, which they did cumbersomely and slowly.

The grid course was the last of the conditioning exercises—only about twenty minutes of them altogether—and the squad would then separate into its component parts: the offensive backs and quarterbacks stayed with Scooter McLean; the defensive backs moved to an adjacent field with Don Doll; the offensive linemen went down to the blocking machines with Aldo Forte; and the defensive linemen headed to an area where they immediately started contact work—what were called “nutcracker” workouts—and the distant thump of men colliding would drift up from their drills.

As the morning wore on, the various units would begin to gather together: the flankers and ends would trot over with the Hawk and join the quarterbacks and backs, and together they would run through play patterns. Then the offensive linemen would appear, which would complete the offensive unit. On the adjacent field the defensive people would be similarly forming, and when its components were together and it had drilled for a while as a unit, it would come across to join the offense, running in a big bunch, and the offense, seeing them come, would float down a few derisive moos and beef-cattle sounds in appreciation of their heft, and the entire squad would be together.