CHAPTER 7

Down on the field after a day or so, the players, who had been so many ciphers, one indistinguishable from another, began to take on identifying characteristics. Some were obvious. One was struck by the odd disparity of the football players’ physiques—more than in any other team sport—from the lean, near-emaciated stringiness of the defensive backs and flankers to the bulwarked heft of the linemen, many with pronounced bellies, who were set close to the ground, like cabbages. The range would be from such a player as Del Shofner, the Giant flanker, lanky, sallow, with ulcers, who has been described as looking like a saxophone player after a hard one-night stand—from Shofner to Brown, the three-hundred-pounder of the Lions, the bulge of his thighs so enormous that to get one leg past the other produced a waddle of such distinction that the players seeing him in the locker room or emerging from the shower jawed at him about it, and imitated his walk.

Down on the practice field I would see Brown and the other big men endlessly circling the field after practice—distant figures against the trees, trying to remove a pound or two, so that their bulk could be moved with more agility.

The running styles were as different as the physical characteristics. Dick Compton, a small Texan scatback, ran with sharp exhalations when he had the ball, ah-ah-ah, like piston strokes—a habit he had picked up in high school which he felt gave power to his run. He could be heard across the width of a field. “The Gasper,” some of the players called him, and he was also nicknamed “Roadrunner”—after the quick-running desert bird of his home state. Jake Greer also had a distinctive run—moving his spindly body in leaps like a high jumper moving for the crossbar, high, bouncy steps, and then he stretched out fast, and when he got to the defending back he feinted with his small high-boned head, sometimes with a tiny bit of toothpick working in it. Then he’d fly on past or off at an angle, his hands splayed out wide, looking back for the ball homing in to intercept his line of flight, and then he’d miss it—good moves but bad hands in those early training sessions, they said—and the shouts would go up, “Squeeze that thing, baby,” “Hands, man, hands.” Greer would circle back, stricken, staring into his big hands as if they had betrayed him as he bent down to pick up the ball. His face would remain long and melancholy, and when his signal came up again, Scooter McLean would shout: “Look like you want it, Al, come on, baby.”

He had come up from the Southwestern Athletic Conference, which has small colleges—Prairie View, Grambling, Mississippi Vocational—but very good teams: the year Greer graduated from his college, Jackson State, six of his teammates went on into the professional leagues. Greer had almost impossible competition at Detroit—Terry Barr and Pat Studstill at the flanker back position, and Gail Cogdill at the weak-side end. The only reason that Greer was there at all, and kept around, was that Barr’s knee had been badly injured the year before and was of uncertain strength.

The coaches were readily identifiable on the field—all of them with clipboards except George Wilson, and golfing hats, whistles dangling from cords, and they wore big rubber-ribbed shoes that seemed outsized on all of them except Les Bingaman, whose heft was proportionally matched. He was lighter that year. He had come to camp on a diet which had lost him seventy pounds. One year he came to camp weighing more than the training-room scale allowed for; he was weighed on a thousand-pound-capacity machine in the Ypsilanti feed-and-grain store, and he weighed eight ounces short of 350 pounds. That summer he was known as the “two biggest men in northern Michigan.” He had played middle guard for Detroit, a position which became obsolete when the emphasis moved to passes and a more mobile attack. Buddy Parker, who was the Lion coach then, said that Bingaman was so good that he never had to position a linebacker behind him. He had extraordinary speed for such a large man. Parker used to say that he was one of the team’s fastest men for eight, perhaps even nine yards. The player next to him in the line properly symbolized the great defenses that Detroit had always been noted for: he was a guard called Thurman McGraw, who was so strong that on one occasion, shoeing a horse on a Colorado ranch, he lifted the right hind leg too high, and over the horse went. That was a story Bingaman told. Everyone called Bingaman “Bingo,” and down on the field he had a strange cry, like a bird’s, to exhort his linemen, calling, “Here we go,” which came out, “Hibby-go, hibby-go, hibby-go”—repeated endlessly.

It was easy to spot George Wilson. He was usually in the middle of the field, almost always alone, wearing slick-pressed purple knee-length shorts, and socks drawn halfway up his calves. Occasionally, he talked to a reporter, or the coaches collected around him. The procedures all seemed to have been set, the timetables established, so that he only seemed to keep half an eye on what was taking place. He would walk with his head down, seeming to inspect the ground before he moved a shoe onto it, and then after the deliberation a foot would move forward, and he would plod slowly in an aimless turn among his players as if unaware of their presence. He had strategy in mind, I always assumed, some master design that was going to dismay the opposition in the next game. Occasionally, he would look up at an end flaring for a pass and he’d call out something, but more likely he would turn away from what he’d seen and the ruminating would begin again. It could have been something else: he could have had his bank balance on his mind, or the girl his son was taking out in the family coupé, or the crabgrass problem on his lawn.

He had been with most of his associates since his Chicago Bear days, and it was apparent that he rarely interfered with them: each knew what he was supposed to do. Their day began with a meeting at 9:15, just after breakfast. Wilson presided and scheduled what was to be done during the day. Just before lunch, they had a short fifteen-minute meeting to discuss the morning’s practice and to check the various rookies’ showings. A few minutes after 2:00, they met again to prepare the afternoon practice session. At 5:15 another meeting was held to discuss the afternoon’s session and to plan the next day’s program. The last meeting of the day was at 7:10, when the staff decided what would be presented at the 8:00 players’ meeting. So they had five official meetings called during the day, and an evening meeting with the players, and after the 5:15 meeting they were down in a bar on the Pontiac pike relaxing and playing liars’ poker. After the evening meeting they started a pinochle game up in the second-floor rooms in the dormitory. That often lasted until midnight. They were always together, a strong sense of camaraderie knitting the group, and their operation was a cooperative one, Wilson in charge, but the authority being delegated. The assistants managed the evening meetings; Wilson made the introductory remarks and then prowled around in the back of the classrooms. It was not the standard practice around the league. Some of the head coaches involved themselves with every detail. They said of Pop Ivy, the Cardinal coach, that he handed out the players’ equipment in the morning for practice and at the end of the day ran the projection machine at the team meetings.

Wilson’s nickname was “Pine Tree” after a song which he was supposed to give a great rendition, though I never heard him sing it. Almost everyone called him George, though the rookies, of course, referred to him as “the Coach.”

The team nicknames were colorful, many of them, and they made it easier to identify the players, since many of them were based on physical characteristics. When Daryl Sanders, a tall, shy rookie with a white streak in his hair about an inch wide, arrived in camp the players spent a day wondering how this phenomenon could be worked into a nickname. There were the dull possibilities, “Whitey” and so forth, but then Wayne Walker came tearing down the dormitory corridor, very excited, and he had come up with “Skunk,” which stuck for a while, poor Sanders.

Roger Brown, the great three-hundred-pound tackle, was nicknamed “Rhinofoot” and sometimes they called him “Haystack.” The suspended guard Alex Karras was often called “the Hog,” a name that had been suddenly arrived at on a bus when a teammate turned on Karras in a storm of ribbing and referred to him as a Cincinnati dancing pig. John Gordy, the All-Pro offensive guard, was called “the Bear” for being heavily thatched with body hair, though for his prenom he was often called “the Bathroom,” especially by Joe Schmidt. Schmidt would stick his head in the door and say, “Where’s the Bathroom at?” I would answer, “The last time I saw the Bathroom he was playing pinochle.”

Schmidt would say, “Well, tell the Bathroom, if you see him, to get his ass on down to the Monk’s room.”

“Sure,” I’d say.

“The Monk” was Pat Studstill, so called because of the capuchin monkey resemblance, with black, close-cropped hair that stood up stiff and brush-heavy above a small, pinched face that might have belonged to a Sicilian ascetic. He kept it in repose, poker-faced, tight-lipped, and then it would erupt in motion as he’d suddenly belt out the first line of a bossa nova: “Fly me to the moon,” yelling the phrase in the high mountain twang, drawing out on the word “moon,” holding it for quite a peg, and then he’d snap it off short. It was the only line of the song he remembered, or chose to sing, and after a while he’d let loose with it again, particularly if he was in the dormitory showers, where the tile walls gave resonance and tone to his voice.

Carl Brettschneider was called “the Badger,” presumably for his belligerent attitude on the field. He had a big pale face that never seemed to darken under the hot summer sun; he was a lively prankster, and good company off the field. But in play he was unpredictable, with a killer reputation, and occasionally he had been removed from a game altogether. On one occasion he was removed for kicking the Philadelphia player, Dan Burroughs, in the belly. “He punted him, for Chrissake,” I was told. “Damn wonder Burroughs didn’t sail up into the sky, spiraling.”

Other names were derived from personal habits. Bud Erickson, from public relations, was known as “Uh-Uh” by the players, because of his halting speech, and when they talked about general manager Edwin Anderson the players often made a strange, belching sound, imitating his sonorous manner of speaking. Don Doll, who coached the defensive backs, had been in camp just long enough for the team to discover that he neither smoked, drank, nor swore and he got himself tagged with the nickname “Coop”—for Gary Cooper. “I heard the Coop say ‘Heck!’ today,” said Wayne Walker. “No! No!” said the players, throwing up their hands in horror.

Night Train Lane, of course, owned the most famous nickname in camp, given him in his Los Angeles Rams days for a phonograph record he liked to play.

Jim Martin, a utility player, the field-goal specialist and reserve center, was “Marine”; he was a veteran not only of that service, a Bronze Star winner, but of considerable tenure on the Lions—voted the most valuable player on the 1959 championship team, elected to play in the Pro Bowl that year, which is rare for a utility man. He was an absolutely dedicated player, always pep-talking down on the field, and he was one of the team leaders—almost a billboard caricature of his nickname, with his blond crew cut, his broad tough features, an erect carriage, and a puffed-out chest. In the shower, with the cold water sluicing down, he drummed his chest with his fists and made howler-monkey sounds. On his biceps was a large Marine Corps tattoo with the anchors and the Marine motto, “Death Before Dishonor.” I was told that at a cocktail party one of the teachers at Cranbrook had given, to which a few of the Lions had been invited—a hot evening, out on the lawn—one of the wives had come up to Martin and said, “Now. Who are you?” He had told her, and she said, “Look at that,” touching the blue design on his biceps. “My, my. ‘Death Before Dishonor.’” She took a quick sip of her fruit punch and pressed down on the biceps. “Just suppose, Mr. Martin,” she said, “I asked you to dishonor me,” cocking her head at him. He looked at her, and he was very polite, but he said, “Death, ma’am, before that!” and she couldn’t tell whether he was serious or not. So she threw the fruit punch at him. The glass was empty, and the only thing that came out of it was a strawberry, which sailed over his shoulder.

Two players owned titular nicknames. Wayne Walker was called “the King”—but that was a tribute to his sartorial elegance more than an indication of rank. Hoots would go up along the corridor when he came sashaying past the doors in a powder-blue outfit tailored to his big frame, grinning, ready for a night on the town. Joe Schmidt had the other titular name. “The Old Man” he was called—in deference to his position as the team leader. Officially, the Lions had four captains, two from the offense—Terry Barr, the flanker, and Jim Gibbons, the strong-side end—and two from the defense—Night Train Lane, who in his strange argot referred to his position as the “captainship,” and then Joe Schmidt. No team in the league had as many captains, and when the four of them marched out abreast to meet the opposing captain in the pre-game meeting at midfield they seemed to belong to another part of the ceremonies—a close-order drill team perhaps, in football outfits, striding out to do some intricate maneuvers before the flag-raising ceremony.

Schmidt’s was not the flamboyant cock-of-the-walk leadership that typified Bobby Layne’s years with the Lions. But the same competitiveness glowed in him. On the practice field he stayed down with the quarterbacks when the rest of the players were moving up for the gym, and for minutes at a time, off by himself, he practiced the crab-scuttling movements of the linebacker—lateral, and up and down the field, the quick starting and turning that the linebackers must be able to do to keep on top of the offensive maneuvers. Defeat or sloppiness of performance affected him profoundly. In 1952, when he was the captain of a run-of-the-mill Pitt team, his coach, Red Dawson, prevailed on him to give the pep talk before the Notre Dame game and left the dressing room to give him free scope to say anything he wanted. Schmidt told his teammates in so many words: “You guys whip Notre Dame, or, so help me, I’ll whip you.” His team went out to upset Notre Dame 22–19, and afterward one of the Pitt players said, “We were more scared of Joe Schmidt than the Irish.”

Off the field he was calm, almost shy. His face was large and wide, with pale eyes, he had thin yellow-blond hair, and in street clothes, dressed to go to Detroit, he wore very narrow collars clasped in front with a tiepin, perhaps a sartorial trick to make his neck seem longer. He had a size 18 neck, so the Detroit Lion fact sheet said, but its length was inconsiderable: his head seemed set immediately on his shoulders, like a stone Aztec head on a wall. Schmidt himself joked about it. He said he had been six feet three inches when he came to the Lions, with a fine neck, not swanlike, but evident enough, and during his playing years of diving and bulling his way through blockers his head had been driven down a few inches into his body, like a cartoon character bopped with a sledgehammer. He was getting down to an even six feet. He felt that he perhaps had further to go—that a few more years of active play would see his head hammered down so that his neck disappeared completely, then his chin would go, tucked away in the clavicular cavity, eventually his mouth (after a Green Bay game), and they’d have to feed him in some complicated way, and then his nose would disappear, and finally, when just his eyes peeked out of his body, like a man going under in quicksand, he would announce his retirement and apply for the players’ pension fund.

There were always rough jokes made about players with short necks. “Look at that guy,” someone would say. “He’s got to unbutton his shirt to blow his nose.”

Almost all of Schmidt’s weight was in his torso. His legs were surprisingly spindly. He told me that when he was at Pitt, the coach had this notion that all good football players were thick-calved. At the beginning of spring training he lined up all the candidates according to position and walked down behind them and assigned them to teams depending on how big and powerful the backs of their legs were. It was embarrassing for Schmidt, who ended up on the third team. He was the captain that year too, which embarrassed the coach, who was quickly disabused of this theory. Schmidt said impassively, “Well, you have to let those guys work things out for themselves.”

As its true leader Schmidt was the Lions’ “Main Man”—that was the current term for it when I was there. The league itself had its “Main Men.” At that time there were three at the most—Schmidt, Jimmy Brown, and John Unitas. I remember standing with Unitas at a dance following a Pro Bowl game one year. He had not played because of a knee injury sustained during the season, but he was in Los Angeles for the game. A player would come around, an absolute star in his own right, perhaps even the “Main Man” on his own team, and he would see Unitas leaning against the wall, looking on, and he would say, “Hey, Main Man, how’s it?” or something as innocuous, just to pay court, to drift by and acknowledge who the number one man was, this despite a humility and politeness on his own part that leads Unitas to refer to everyone, short of a teenager, as “sir.” The terms changed—the Big Guy, the Leader, the Big Stud, the Old Man, the Boss Man—whatever the title, it was one of tribute.

There were some players, of course, who had been known not to show deference to the Main Man. When Joe Don Looney, the odd and troubled star who had caused such consternation to a number of coaching staffs throughout the league, came to Detroit and began cutting practice, the Detroit coaches, who were unable to impress him, sent Joe Schmidt around to talk to him. Schmidt found him sitting cross-legged on the bed in his room, a big Indian blanket pulled up over him, and his high-fidelity equipment turned up full volume.

Schmidt turned the music down, Looney watching him from the hood of his blanket, his eyes flickering.

“Joe Don,” began Schmidt easily. “A football player has certain responsibilities. Practice is one of them. You’d have no kind of team if the players didn’t report for practice. You can see that. I haven’t missed, or been late for, a practice in thirteen years.…”

“Thirteen years!” exclaimed Looney.

Schmidt supposed that he was beginning to make an impression.

“Man, you need a break,” Looney went on. “You’d better take an afternoon off. Take my word for it.”

Failure was so galling to Schmidt that his reaction to it was thought by some to have damaged the overall team effort. Bob Scholtz, the big center, told me that the team character, in a certain sense, had been formed by what happened in a game in Green Bay in 1962. With a minute and forty-six seconds left, the Lions were leading 7–6. The victory, which seemed so close, would ultimately have given the Lions the league championship that year. They had possession of the ball on their own forty-nine-yard line; it was third down with eight yards to go. Before the series of plays which got the Lions to the forty-nine, Joe Schmidt had come off the field with the defensive team and, as he passed Milt Plum, going in to quarterback the offense, he called to him to run out the clock as much as he could with running plays. Even if he had to kick the ball over to Green Bay, the defense was very strong and would be able to contain the Packers’ final rush. His point was that Plum could rely on the defense and therefore did not have to take chances with passes and possibly lose the ball in his own territory. Plum, who had his own ideas, began the series back on his own twenty-two. Mixed in with his running plays he threw three passes, two of which were complete, one on a third-down play which got them a first down on the thirty-four, and the second, also on third down, which got them a first down on the forty-seven. The third pass was thrown out-of-bounds; Plum, while being judicious, was inviting trouble by throwing the ball at all, of course, but possession was surely worth the risk at that stage. Green Bay had only to score a field goal for a win, and only had to reach the vicinity of the Detroit forty-yard line to make a try for it.

With the ball on the forty-nine, and the minute and forty-six seconds to go, possession was still very much on Plum’s mind. He could have used the third down for a running play, which would have kept the clock running, and then, presuming the play had not fetched the first down, Yale Lary, the best punter in the league, would have kicked the ball on fourth down deep to the Packers. Green Bay would have had a little more than a minute and the one time-out they had remaining to move up to field-goal range. The onus would have been on Schmidt and the defense. No one knows what would have happened because Plum decided to pass once more to try to get another first down. Herb Adderley, the Green Bay left cornerback, intercepted and the Detroit players moving in their offensive patterns suddenly heard the cry go up from the Packers, “Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!” to indicate their players should start blocking every Lion jersey in sight. Adderley slipped down the sidelines in front of the Packer bench, all of them jumping insanely as if on pogo sticks, their heavy-weather capes billowing like wings, and was wrestled down on the Detroit twenty-two-yard line. The Packers ran a few plays to keep the clock moving, and with thirty-six seconds to go Paul Hornung kicked the field goal that won the game.

It took Joe Schmidt a long time to get over it, and perhaps he never did. For many games thereafter, when Plum and Schmidt passed each other on the field as the defensive unit came off and the offensive players were taking over, Schmidt would say disdainfully: “Pass, Milt, three times, and then punt.”

I said, “That doesn’t seem… ah… to represent the qualities one would expect in a captain. I mean Plum’s confidence wouldn’t exactly stand up…”

“The quality that makes Schmidt a leader,” Bob Scholtz said, “is his absolute honesty. Everybody knows that. Johnny Unitas is the same. The guy never said anything, ever, he didn’t believe in. Schmidt took that for a dumb-ass call in that Packer game, and there’s no way in his book it can be rubbed out. His reaction may have hurt the team, sure, in some subtle way. The balance between offense and defense has never been right here at Detroit. A team is as skittish as a herd of animals—like gazelles—and a wrong word or decision can rile them up so they never can really be set straight again. That’s what a coach is supposed to do. Maybe Wilson won’t be able to do it, set everything right, to get that exact harmony where you don’t have to worry about anything but winning. So they’ll bring in somebody else to see what he can do.”

“How about Bobby Layne?” I asked.

“Well, there’s a case,” someone else said. “You think Schmidt may have been rough.”

He went on to say that Layne was a different team leader from Schmidt—with brass rather than dignity, and cocky rather than forthright. He didn’t get along particularly well with Buddy Parker, who was head coach at that time, but they accepted each other. Layne’s methods, which were hardhanded often, worked with most of the players, because he was admired by the veterans and held in awe by the rookies, though the cussings-out he was likely to give embittered some of them, so that they’d sulk and their performances would dip accordingly.

When Hopalong Cassady arrived as a rookie halfback with a considerable reputation from Ohio State, he tried to buck Layne, apparently to assert his independence, and he suffered for it. In one of the early scrimmages he made an excuse for a play Layne had bawled him out for, and Layne grabbed him and took him up to Parker, like a teacher hauling a miscreant before the headmaster, and shouted that he didn’t want to see the fellow around, ever, not ever again, not on the field or anywhere, and Parker listened without a word. The Lions didn’t let Cassady go (he was a high-priced rookie), but what must have astonished him was Parker’s silence. It indicated who the field general of the Lions was, if not the supreme commander.

For reasons of his own, Cassady refused to be intimidated. Not long after, he announced loudly on the practice field, after being cut down in a running play, that the blocking was nothing but crap, and that his blockers at Ohio State had been superior. He called it out obviously as a challenge. The players getting up off the ground hunched their pads into place on their shoulders, and they stared at him. On his way to the huddle Layne signaled across the scrimmage line to the defensive team—a nod of the head to the defensive captain, some such signal—and in his own huddle he called Cassady’s number to handle the ball, and by some prearranged sign he indicated to the rest of the team that the “club rush” was to be executed. The club rush was a punitive tactic in which the offensive linemen by design allowed the defense to storm through unopposed, and the blockers stepped aside so that the ball carrier was unprotected, and it was simply a question of which lineman, ripping at full speed, got to him first, and how many piled on afterward. The coaches turned away when the club rush was called, and they looked off at the line of trees, or at the spectators, hoping that the internal strife was not too evident, and that what the spectators thought they were seeing, eyes slightly popped and mouths ajar at the violence, was just another blown play, with one or two of the players missing their assignments. Particularly they hoped that the victim of the club rush had survived, and when they turned back there was very nearly the temptation to peek out between their fingers, grimacing, as if an expensive vase had been dropped and they hardly dared to look.

“That’s pretty damn callous,” I said. “My sympathies are with Cassady. God Almighty!”

“That wasn’t the end of it either,” my informant told me. “They reckoned he squawked too much—a parrot—so they put crackers, graham crackers, and such things in his bed at night. They led him a right lively time.”

“Just damn childish,” I said.

The veteran nodded. “It’d seem so, for sure. But you had to remember that Layne broke the rookies like a broncobuster, and while maybe you didn’t like how he did it, he put a team together, and they’d do anything for him. Ask Joe Schmidt or John Gordy. They were scared of the guy. Others liked him. Whichever it was, they played a great game for him. They’d do anything for him. He was about the most popular man in Detroit, I’ll tell you. There was the time when the police got him on a charge of drunken driving. It was pretty serious. He could have been forced to sit out part of the season. There was a big uproar from the fans. They’d have lynched the arresting officer if he’d stuck to his story. So he admitted that he might have mistaken Layne’s Texas drawl for the drunken stammering he’d picked him up for. Layne got off, and that year a sign sat around the dormitory: ‘I’m not drunk. I’m just from Texas.’ He was like he came out of a movie,” the player said. “You ever see him play?”

“With the Pittsburgh Steelers, his last year.”

“Well, you remember. When he played, no one ever watched anyone else on the field but him. He had that cocky walk when he came out of the huddle, almost a duck walk because of that pot he had. And then you could see his face. He didn’t wear a face bar, yet the guy had all his teeth. Then he wore a shrunken old-fashioned helmet that looked like he swiped it off the head of Red Grange, one of those old-timers. It sat up high on his head, and you could… well, recognize him. You didn’t have to look at the guy’s number and reach for your program to find out who he was. He had a face for you to look at. Then he had these thin little shoulder pads, not much more than a piece of cardboard they were, and he didn’t bother about any of the other pads, so that when he was out there he looked like a human being. Next to him, all those guys with shoulder pads pushing up to their ears, and the bulge of pads around the calves and the thighs, and the twin bars of the helmets so that you can’t even see that there’s a human being in there, they look like a bunch of space cadets.

“And then the man’s confidence. He was the best quarterback there ever was with two minutes to go, which is when you have to cut the mustard. When that was the situation, he could move the ball with a team of Girl Scouts. Players used to say something about Layne which is the best description of him, and accurate.”

“What was that?”

“That he never lost a game, really—that time just ran out on him a few times. That’s not a bad man to have around as a leader.”

“No question about that,” I said.