CHAPTER 6

I had come to Cranbrook hoping vaguely to maintain anonymity and be thought of as a rookie, and treated as one. I knew my pretense would break down, but to start I had a mild fiction prepared for those who asked where I’d played ball. I was to say that I had played for some years in an obscure east Canadian semipro league for a team called the Newfoundland Newfs. The team had always finished in the league cellar, but I’d had ten years of experience with the Newfs. It had been suggested that if I made a horrible mistake at Cranbrook—that if I fell down, or ran the wrong way, or threw a pass end over end rather than in a spiral, or kicked the ball over my head—I was to cry out loudly, “Well, that’s the way we used to do it with the Newfoundland Newfs!”

I never had the temerity to pretend I was something that I wasn’t. The team caught on quickly enough: Wayne Walker had read my baseball book, and I suppose he talked about it to the others. The Harvard song set a few to wondering, I suppose. My manner of speaking caught their ear—an eastern seaboard cosmopolitan accent that they thought was “British.” They delighted in imitating my quarterback signal calling. After practice I’d hear them yelling the numbers in the shower: “… fawty-foah, fawty-tew.” The swear words I used also caught their ear. I never learned to master obscenities, to use them with ease and without self-consciousness. The swearing around my house was limited to such bland expressions as “My Lord,” “Shoot,” and an occasional “Ye gods and little fishes” from my mother; at school, and later in the Army, I never caught on enough to do it with proficiency. I can throw out an obscenity if pressed, but it sounds wrong, just as anything that is not done out of habit often seems awkward. Besides, good swearing is used as a form of punctuation, not necessarily as a response to pain or insult, and is utilized by experts to lend a sentence a certain zest, like a sprinkling of paprika. Someone at training camp would come up with an innocuous request—“Like to go down to town and have a beer and pizza?”—and in the course of the asking he could slip in six or seven obscenities, and if there were some polysyllabic words in his sentence he could slide a few functional words in between the syllables. Sometimes, particularly when the training season drew to a close, the players would tone down on the swearing to keep the habit from slopping over into their home life or out in public. Substitute words were found to help the easing off. The word “bent” was used for a while.

Someone would shout: “Get bent, you son of a bitch.”

Throughout the incampment I remained faithful to my feeble supply. I would run downfield for a pass, and if it slipped off my fingers I would say, “Shoot!”

The players looked over. One of them said, “Man, dropping that ball really tore that guy—he feels it.”

I knew there would be some kidding about that. So, at the dinner table later that evening, a player would lean across at his teammate and say loud enough so I could hear: “Whatja say when the tornado blew the roof off the toolshed?”

“Shoot!”

“And you look in the house and there’s your wife with the milkman.”

“Why I say ‘Shoot’ just like that. ‘Shoot!’”

“And your dog, Spot, he comes tear-assin’ off the porch and sinks his teeth into your leg. Whatja say then?”

“Shoot! Spot, whatja do that for? Shoot.”

They would look at me, grinning, and I would say, “If it wasn’t for those bishops sitting down there, I’d give you an earful.”

“Holy mackerel,” one of them said.

I use that expression too. Friday made me feel better. He told me that Bo McMillin, the former Detroit coach, and formerly of Centre College’s famous Praying Colonels, had only one phrase he used in moments of stress: “Oh my side and body!” he would shout.

The author shares a laugh with his teammates at Lion training camp at Cranbrook Academy. (Walter Iooss Jr.)

But it was down on the practice field most particularly that my activities did not support the fiction of being a practicing quarterback. I usually carried a little notebook with me—to jot down what I saw. When I was called on to run a play I’d toss the notebook down and trot in among the players, and then look for it when I’d done with the play. Sometimes, tired of scribbling, if I wasn’t wearing my helmet I’d drop the notebook in it and leave it lying on the grass with the others so that I was sure where it was. But most of the time I carried the notebook. Terry Barr, one of the team captains, saw me writing in it the first day he came down to practice, and he said his jaw dropped. He had an idea I was a rookie with a short memory.

He told me later that at lunch that day he had turned to one of the regulars and said, “Well, that’s a great bunch of rookies. Just beautiful. You seen the guy with the notebook?”

“No.”

“They got a rookie down there who carries a notebook around. He scribbles in it. If you ask me why, I’d have to say because the guy can’t remember things. What else could it be?” He shook his head. “Where the hell do you suppose they dredge up these rookies from.”

“You sure the guy’s a rookie?”

“He’s got the right gear on. And the coaches seem interested in him. I see Don Doll call on him to run a pass pattern. Flanker back position, he wants him to try. Well this guy jumps when he hears Doll’s voice, and he runs around like a shot rabbit trying to find a place to put his notebook. He puts it in his helmet, which is lying there, but then they want him to wear his helmet—they’ve got a defense unit working—so he throws the notebook out, and a pencil, and he strains that helmet on. Lord, I’ve never seen anybody struggle with a helmet like that… it’s like to kill him.”

“Did he catch the pass?”

“Christ, I don’t know. Out of the corner of my eye it looks to me like the guy runs like the forward end of a giraffe. But I couldn’t resist it. I sidled over to take a look at that notebook, lying open there in the grass, and I look down and I read in this big nervous handwriting: ‘Jake Greer chews toothpicks while running pass patterns.’”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“What it says, I guess. You think it’s code?”

“Don’t ask me.”

Whatever doubts the players had about me were dispelled the first day George Wilson sent me in to a play as a quarterback. The first day of practice he had asked what position I had figured on playing.

“Well, quarterback,” I said. “I guess that’s the essence of the game, isn’t it?”

“How about flanker or split end?” he said. “You’re not likely to get into too much trouble unless you catch the ball.”

Other players had agreed with him. On my trip to California to try to play in the Pro Bowl game, I had talked to Raymond Berry, the great Baltimore end, about survival, and he had said that I would survive a scrimmage if I played his position—out on the flank—and was sure to stay out of what he referred to as the “pit.” The “pit”—as he described it—was an area along the line of scrimmage, perhaps ten yards deep, where at the snap of the ball the Neanderthal struggle began between the big 270, -80, -90-pound linemen. The struggle went on within a relatively restricted area, which was possible to avoid. Berry himself, when he told me this, had wandered into the “pit” only three times in his career—coming back to catch poorly thrown buttonhook passes falling short—and he spoke of each instance as one might speak of a serious automobile accident, the particulars embalmed in his memory in absolute clarity: that it was that year, in this city, at such and such a game, during such and such a quarter, when so-and-so, the quarterback, threw the ball short, his arm jogged by a red-dogging linebacker, so that Berry had to run out of his pattern back toward the scrimmage line so many yards to catch it, and it was so-and-so, the big 290-pounder who reached an arm out of the ruck of the pit and got him. Being hit, of course, could not be avoided unless—and Berry smiled—you dropped the ball, or ran out-of-bounds if you did catch it, but downfield it wasn’t so bad: it was one thing to be hit by a safety man or a deep defensive back, who are relatively light, since the positions require speed and agility, and quite another to be caught by someone out of the pit who weighs nearly three hundred pounds.

“One thing to remember when you get hit,” Berry had told me in his soft Texas accent, “is to try to fall in the fetus position, curl up around the ball, and keep your limbs from being extended, because there’ll be other people coming up out of the pit to see you don’t move any, and one of them landing on an arm that’s outstretched, y’know, can snap it.”

“Right,” I said.

“But the big thing is just stay out of that area.”

“Sure,” I said truthfully.

So I told Wilson that Raymond Berry had indeed advised me to play flanker on end. I told him about Berry’s concept of the “pit.”

He laughed. “That’s good,” he said. “Well, what do you say? It’s up to you.”

“I still think quarterback. It’s the position everyone would want to read about.”

“You’ll be standing right at the edge of the pit—just teetering there,” said Wilson, grinning.

“I’ll back away quick enough,” I said. “And I’m not going to run into it. What’s that fine dictum of Van Brocklin—that a quarterback only runs out of sheer terror?”

Wilson did not give me much time to change my mind. On the fourth or fifth day of practice—the backfields running through play patterns without contact from the defense—Wilson suddenly called out: “OK, George. In you go. Let’s have the twenty-three roll. You’ve got it in your playbook. You know how it works.”

I dropped my notebook.

I did know what to do from the class the night before—that is, I knew how the play was supposed to run, but I had no idea where my hands were supposed to go, exactly—as I stood up behind the center to receive the ball. I had never stood in against a center, my hands groping under his backside, in the odd near-coupling stance of the T-formation quarterback.

If I had persisted with my story about the Newfoundland Newfs, I could have excused my ignorance by explaining that our attack there was single wing, that we had yet to adapt to the T formation—too “newfangled” our coach had thought it. I said no such thing, of course. I was very embarrassed. Even the most self-absorbed of the rookies would recognize that an impostor was in their midst—a quarterback who didn’t know how to accept the snap from center.

I took a few tentative steps toward Bob Whitlow, the center, waiting patiently over the ball. I suddenly blurted out: “Well, damn it, coach, I don’t know where to put my… I just don’t know…”

The coaches all crowded around to advise, and together we moved up on Whitlow, who was now peering nervously over his shoulder like a cow about to be milked.

It was demonstrated to me: The right hand, the top of it, rests up against the center’s backside as he bends over the ball—medically, against the perineum, the pelvic floor, just down from the base of the spine—with the hand lifted and applying enough pressure for the center to know where it is, exactly, so he can swing the ball there with power. The quarterback’s left hand is hinged with the right, the heels and thumbs together, the angle between the two kept sufficiently wide for the ball to slap flush against the right hand, the laces turned so they automatically land right under the fingertips, the ball set for throwing, as the left closes behind it for control. Some quarterbacks reverse the position of the hands, keeping the left hand on top. Otto Graham of the Browns was a notable example, accepting the snap from center that way, and he always assumed the habit was a carryover from his early baseball-playing days, catching the ball with the left hand and trapping it with the right.

At the signal, the center swings the ball back and up, generating as much power as he can, so that his rump bucks with the effort and the ball slams into the quarterback’s palm with a pop that can be heard across a practice field. At Notre Dame, I was told, the image that the coaches fixed in the centers’ minds was to try to make the quarterback’s hand bleed—“Make that boy bleed!” the coaches shouted at them, and there was a rumor that if you could, the coaches bought you a suit of clothes.

I tried receiving the snap a few times from Whitlow, everyone standing around and taking it easy. I had my left hand get in the way the first time, not sufficiently open, so that my fingers got jammed when Whitlow brought the ball up, and I yelped and skittered away, running in small aimless circles until the pain began to let loose. I kept the angle between my hands wide after that and after a while I got used to receiving the snap, practicing afterward as much as I could with anyone who would center me the ball.

But as for my anonymity—it ended that day with my stumbling approach toward the center. I could lope through the pass patterns without giving myself away. But not the quarterback position. The veterans looked over that night in the dining hall, and began joshing: “Well, damn it, coach… I just don’t know… I don’t know where…”

There wasn’t much I could say. It killed them.