CHAPTER 8

What I learned in the classroom and down on the training field I practiced when I had the opportunity. Walking in the school grounds, or down by the lake where there were no witnesses, I would practice the seven quick steps back from the center on a pass play. In my room I would hold my hands open, with the heels of the palms together, up against the bottom of an open bureau drawer the way they were supposed to rest against the center’s backside, and I would practice calling the count. As soon as I was up in the morning, I got the Spalding out of the clothing alcove and I practiced the handoffs in my room, calling the count, then spinning, and sticking my arm out at an imaginary fullback ripping by.

Once the door swung open, and Bertha, one of the Cranbrook cleaning women, came in with a dusting mop and caught me at it.

“Don’t let me be disturbing you,” she said. “You keep right on with what you’re doing.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. “Practicing on the sly,” I said.

She began sliding her mop around. She wrote verse for the local paper—invariably about flowers. I had tried to persuade her to jot something down about her job, about the clutter she turned up in the Cranbrook rooms—a comparison, perhaps, between schoolboy clutter and what she cleaned out of a professional football player’s room. I said the readers would be interested.

“Here, practicing a simple spin handoff to Nick Pietrosante, I have not turned fast enough to get the ball to him. He has had to reach for it, most likely in vain. In a game, the procedure for the quarterback in this event is to try to follow the fullback into the line.” (Walter Iooss Jr.)

She had said, “What’s the difference between two messes?” She reflected. There was some, of course: cleaning up after football players was usually cigarette butts, cigars, and half-eaten fruit. The schoolboys didn’t loll around in bed, she said, and throw peach pits. But then the boys had pets, and that was worse than peach pits.

“Bertha,” I asked, “a football player ever bring a pet to camp with him?”

She drew back in alarm. “I don’t look forward to the day they do,” she said. “Imagine what they might take it into their heads to care and feed.”

“That’d be a good subject,” I said, thinking of her poetry.

“Come on,” she said, squinting her eyes. But she was fond of the Detroit players and as she dusted she talked about them with enthusiasm. The one who drove her almost crazy was Gil Mains, the big tackle whose knee had been destroyed. “He’s gone now, but he was… oh my!” Her face glowed with remembrance. “I’m a nervous type,” she said. “So what does he do when I come in for work in the morning but stand in the corridor and shout that if I got home from the bars earlier I’d do my job better.” She shook her head. “Why, I never had a drink in my life, not so much as a drop, and he’s shouting, ‘Bertha—the Booze Hound—open the windows—the fumes!—she’s coming,’ carrying on so you could hear him fifty miles away. You can imagine what the authorities up in the school office must have thought. Oh, he was everything that was the devil, and then he’d come and hoist me up near to the ceiling in his arms, you know, and carry on, and I’d go just crazy mad at him. I never knew what he was going to be up to. Threw a firecracker at my heels once, scared me half to heaven.

“I know,” she said, prompting me. “I should write a poem—a sonnet, or something,” she said, giggling, “about Mr. Mains.”

“You should,” I said.

She finished dusting. “Look.” She fished in her cleaning apron. “I have a new one.” She took out a clipping.

The daffodils are butter yellow, I read. The wind sweeps… etc.

“That’s very nice,” I said.

When she left, I went back to my practicing. I needed it. I was worked into the quarterbacking rotation with Plum and Morrall only rarely. Down on the training field, I worked the plays on the sidelines or behind the goalposts with Friday Macklem’s and the trainer Millard Kelly’s assistants when they weren’t busy—four or five boys, the oldest working their summers at a pittance to build up pocket money for their school or college year. We had some spirited sessions, the puzzled spectators occasionally turning to look since I was indistinguishable from the bona fide Lions on the field—being in the same practice clothes—and it was difficult to understand why I was working with a group of boys who ran gravely in the patterns of the plays I was learning. “Injured, that guy is,” I overheard someone say. “Damn shame, isn’t it?”

The youngest of my sideline squad was Artie Morante, going on ten years old. The son of the superintendent of the girls’ division of the Cranbrook School, he had been coming to practice for two years. July, at the end of the month, was the best time, when he would walk up through the school grounds and across the girls’ hockey fields, and, hearing the voices on the fields that had been empty, he would come up through the border of trees and see the blocking sleds there on the school varsity field, and the tackling dummy hanging from a steel-bar gibbet like a pirate in chains, and everywhere the footballs moving through the air, or rocking and bouncing on the grass, the players jogging after them, everything at an easy pace, and one or two would spot him and call, “Hey, Artie baby. Look who’s here. How much you weigh this year, Artie?”

“Seventy-one.”

During the practice he would stick around Friday Macklem and help him if he could. He’d fill the pliable plastic water bottles, carry them out when the time-outs were called, and watch the players tilt their heads and press a stream of the warm salted water through the thin spouts against the roof of the mouth, and then spit it out on the grass. For him, it was terrific being a part of what was going on, carrying the bottles and the knotted towels that had ice in them and which the players would drape around the backs of their necks. When the field-goal units practiced, he would get under the goalposts and chase after the balls kicked beyond the end zones. The proper attitude was not even to notice the kids standing among the spectators. He was delighted when I would motion to the others of my small squad and we would head off behind the goalposts to practice my plays. “Let’s try the twenty-three roll,” he would pipe, so I would call it in the huddle, bending far down to get the signal to him, and he would play the two back and churn into the number three hole with the ball clutched to his chest.

The best part for all of us was after practice when the quarterbacks stayed late. When they had finished practicing pass patterns with their ends and flankers, they would throw to anyone who would run out in the patterns. A crowd of kids would stand on the sidelines, ten or twelve of them, waiting. The wait was long. At first, the centers would stay to snap the ball back for a while, and when they had gone the quarterbacks would slap the ball with the palms of their hands to signal the receivers to start downfield, and then drop back those exact seven yards, stop with that half-dance step to set themselves, and whip the ball on a line to their targets. By and by, the receivers—Barr, Cogdill, Gibbons, Studstill, and the rest of them—would drift away toward the gym. The quarterbacks could never seem to get enough practice throwing the ball. Sometimes, they would even throw each other passes, which also gave them the exercise of running downfield and sprinting for the ball. Don Doll, who occasionally stayed to help me with the plays, said, “Watch. A quarterback’ll never catch another quarterback’s pass.” We watched Morrall throw a long spiral to Plum. Sure enough, Plum didn’t catch it. He had an excuse. “Came right out of those trees,” he called. “Lost it against those trees, Earl.”

“Absolutely instinctive,” said Doll. “Of course, they’re careful about their fingers, careful not to jam them, so they haven’t what you’d call confident hands.”

We watched Morrall drop a Plum pass. He swore cheerfully. “Right on target, Milt,” he called up the field. “Too much juice on it for me.”

I said to Doll, “My hands haven’t been all that confident either. I’m glad to know the reason.”

“Quarterbacks are often freaks,” Doll said, “like baseball pitchers. Over at Cleveland, Frank Ryan, who’s the quarterback there, used to say that his coordination was so bad that when he picked up a dart and looked for the board the people standing around would start running.”

“Thanks for all the excuses,” I said.

Often I did some practicing with Bob Whitlow, the center, receiving the snap, and I’d throw a few. If the ball was near Cogdill or Barr, or any of the others, it would be gathered in. It was like throwing into a net.

The last to leave was always Earl Morrall. He stayed to give the kids their chance, and he would motion to Artie Morante to take up position on the imaginary line of scrimmage at the flanker position. “Go on out on the divide, Artie baby… great hands, baby,” he would encourage him, and then he’d slap the ball between his hands to signal the hike, then loft it like a balloon. Artie would chug down under it and haul it in like a man catching a suitcase tossed out a window, and he would hold it clutched to his chest, an object about a quarter his size, and keep on going downfield apace, savoring his success before turning and trotting back.

Morrall never seemed to tire of throwing passes, whoever the receiver. He was pressing Plum hard for the starting position. The players said he was “throwing the hell out of the ball.” They joshed him because earlier that spring he had lost part of his big toe to a power lawn mower (he had joked that he needed to lose a couple of pounds, but it was a tough way to do it), and the odd thing was that his passing seemed to have improved as a result—perhaps because he set up to pass in a slightly different stance in deference to the injury. The trajectory of the ball seemed to flatten, and a built-in wobble which had always distinguished the flight of the ball disappeared. He thought perhaps it was because he was releasing the ball quicker or later, it didn’t matter which since he wasn’t going to dissect his form to find out: he just wanted to keep throwing the ball, to groove his newfound skill.

That first pass was the signal for the boys on the sidelines to line up, one behind the other, some of them moving pop-eyed and tentative, watching the big quarterback, waiting for him to give a signal of acquiescence. “Get on up there, Slim,” Morrall would call out. “Try a flare,” he’d say, explaining with an arc of his hand where the receiver was to go.

The boys followed his direction with great determination and the awe of being thrown to by a professional quarterback. It was a mixed bag of receivers. I was among them, rearing above them, but taking my turn for the practice, and the fun of it. One of them, one of Friday’s assistants, wore heavy glasses which sometimes slipped off when he made his cut and looked back for the ball. The glasses would fly off, and in mid-flight his hands would fly up to protect his head; he would stumble along, cringing, as if the football were a swarm of bees. Another of the boys left a loafer behind where he cut, simply stepping out of his shoe and leaving it behind in the grass as he moved in bizarre, determined flight for the ball.

Once I saw a full-grown man, wearing a seersucker jacket and a straw hat with a colored band around it, sidle for the line of youngsters, and he got in it for a while, then dropped out; then he made up his mind and stepped in again, and though he wore an embarrassed smile he stuck to it, and wearing both coat and hat he cut downfield for his pass and got it. He went over the grass with quick bouncing strides, but his hat stayed on, and his grin changed afterward from embarrassment to accomplishment. He looked at the ball as he ran back toward Morrall, chuckling at his audacity, and then he flipped it back and headed for the sidelines, still shaking his head.

One afternoon, a tall boy wearing black chino trousers joined the line of receivers. He was very fast, and the first passes he caught were short buttonhooks and flares; he was sure-handed with them, and tossed the ball back toward Morrall with an underhand shovel motion that was nonchalant and professional. He seemed to want no part of the easy, joking camaraderie that existed around Morrall in those post-practice sessions. When a receiver’s loafer would drop off, or the boy losing his glasses would cringe down to escape the ball he suddenly couldn’t see, I could hear him mutter under his breath, “Come ahn, come ahn!” as he took his place on the line. Morrall didn’t offer him his usual words of encouragement. He seemed to pitch the ball hard to shame him perhaps, to knock his attitude off a peg or so, but the boy held on to the passes, and he would turn and deliver the little underhand flip to sail the ball back up toward Morrall. He was about seventeen, I guess. He must have been a star on his school team.

When his turn came up again, he said, “Hey, throw me a long one.”

Morrall dropped back his seven yards and bounced up on his toes twice, waiting a while to get his receiver far downfield, and, meaning to make him stretch, he finally threw the ball about sixty or seventy yards, a long arching spiral like a perfect low punt. We watched the boy in the chino trousers running like a sprinter for it, his arms pumping, and then we saw the arms come up, the ball settle into his palms, and he kept on going, his legs still pumping high, and whisked through a hedgerow at the end of the field, like a ferret into a bush, and was gone with a twenty-two-dollar official Duke ball, only slightly scuffed.

Everybody was embarrassed. There was no hope of catching him. He had a hundred yards’ start on us before anyone had recovered from the astonishment of seeing him keep going, and no one of us could have matched his speed. Friday’s assistant blinked behind his glasses. He would have to explain why the blue sacks contained one less football. But most of the concern was over Morrall—what he would say. The kids stared at him wondering—as if the boy in the black chinos was a responsibility of theirs. Would it be thought an act of betrayal—an affront to his kindness in staying down to throw passes to them? They watched him stoop for a blade of grass and chew it solemnly—gazing off at the distant hedges where his receiver had disappeared. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Helluva catch,” he said. “That guy was moving so fast he was having his troubles slowing down.” He shook his head in appreciation. “A pair of hands, I want to say. Come on, Artie baby. Where’s my boy?” He picked up another football and slapped it hard. “A flare, Artie baby, on three. Let’s see some action.” He began to bark the signals. “Hut-one… hut-two… hut-three,” and when Artie began to run downfield the others formed their line eagerly. The theft was dismissed from mind, and it was almost possible to hear a sigh of relief go up.

Finally, Morrall would say, “That’s it, everyone. Do six laps and go home.” It was greeted with a groan.

“They’d stay until the moon came up—and they’d play by its light,” Morrall told me as we walked across the field for the gymnasium. He looked back over his shoulder. “And I’m not so far from wanting to stay down myself. There are not so many better ways of fooling around.”