CHAPTER 9

The morning of the first contact work—with everyone in full gear except for those with gimpy legs or ankles—George Wilson motioned me over after the calisthenics.

“We’re scrimmaging today,” he said. “Your ankles taped?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, we’re going to get you blooded today,” he said.

“… today?” I asked.

“Don’t forget to wear your helmet,” he said. “Scooter will tell you what play to call.” He turned away. “Don’t forget about that helmet,” he said over his shoulder.

I said, “I think I’ll slip into it right now.”

When the scrimmaging began a little after eleven, I did in fact get into my helmet as I waited on the sidelines with the others—wanting to be done with the effort of putting it on—grimacing as it came down over my ears and flapped them down against the side of my head. I worked them upright with my fingers. Inside, it was quiet, but the first sounds of the scrimmage out in front of me on the field were sharp and concussive—the odd whack of football gear when the lines came together sounded like someone shaking a sack of venetian blinds. The spectators on the sidelines gave a gasp at the violence of the contact seen from as close as they were. Inside the helmet I felt my own jaw drop slightly and my eyes widen.

Taping the ankles was an essential part of pre-practice procedure. Waiting his turn is Night Train Lane, wearing a jumpsuit of his own design. (Walter Iooss Jr.)

“Listen to that crowd,” said Roger Brown, standing alongside. “That play shook ’em. Look at them back away.”

I turned to see that some girls who had been lolling at the sidelines as if seated around a picnic blanket were getting up, reaching down for their handbags.

After ten plays or so had been run, all basic running plays—the quarterbacks, Morrall and Plum, in rotation and giving handoffs to the backs driving into the line—George Wilson began motioning to the sidelines, waving his arms.

“Who’s he looking for?” said one of the regulars.

I stepped out where I could be seen more easily, and Wilson increased his waving.

“Watch this,” I murmured, and began running out toward them.

Then something happened that I remembered for a long time. Behind me, on the sidelines, the regulars, after a quick word among themselves, came hurrying after me of their own volition, wanting to see that I got the best protection. I was unaware as I came running toward the huddling rookies that I was leading ten regulars behind. There were quickly about twenty men in the huddle, and some pushing and murmuring as the rookies were replaced: “… Right, rook, out you go,” and I could hear George Wilson calling out, “What’s going on there?”

Everything got sorted out finally, and in the huddle I called the signal that Scooter McLean, standing off to one side with his clipboard, had whispered to me to run: “Twenty-six near oh pinch, on two, break!” I called—a play in which I was supposed to spin and give the ball to the two back, who then slanted off for the number six hole.

As I walked up to the line behind Whitlow, the center, I was suddenly conscious of Raymond Berry’s description of the “pit.” The big broad backs of the linemen, hunkered down in their position, seemed sprung from the earth itself. Across the line the linebackers, close up to their edge of the pit, were shouting “Jumbo! Jumbo! Jumbo!” It was a jarring cry to hear—the code cry that I knew indicated that a red dog had been called, and I was going to be rushed.

The defensive code words varied. When Jim Ninowski, a former Lion quarterback, was traded from Detroit to Cleveland, the defensive signals, which Ninowski knew, of course, had to be changed when the two teams met. It was decided to change them from colors to girls’ names—one of them Ninowski’s young wife’s name, Judy, I think it was—and he would call his play in the huddle and come up behind his center to hear the linebackers across the line all hollering “Judy! Judy! Judy!” The Lions hoped that might shake him somewhat. I had only the vaguest idea what those code words meant, and could not have used the information to advantage anyway, since I knew no checkoff plays.

I cleared my throat and began the signals. The count began with the three meaningless numbers. I had to be careful not to begin with the same number as the designated play. That indicated the play was checked off, and that an audible was being called. “Sixteen,” I called. “Seventeen, ninety-nine!” Then I started the cadence, “Hut-one, hut-two!” shrilled above the chorus of “Jumbo’s” across the line, and at “two” the snap back came. I began to turn without a proper grip on the ball, moving too nervously, and I fumbled the ball, gaping at it, mouth ajar, as it fell and bounced twice, once away from me, then back, and rocked back and forth gaily at my feet. I flung myself on it, my subconscious shrilling “Fetus! Fetus!” as I tried to draw myself in like a frightened chinch bug, remembering Raymond Berry’s advice on being trapped in the pit by the big linemen, and I heard the sharp strange whack of gear, the grunts, and then a quick sudden weight whooshed the air out of me.

A step too slow on the handoff, the author fumbles just before taking a hit. (Walter Iooss Jr.)

Dave Lloyd, a 250-pound defenseman, had got through the line and pounced on me to make sure I wasn’t going to get up and run. A whistle blew and I clambered up past him, seeing him grin inside his helmet, to discover that the quick sense of surprise that I had survived was replaced by a pullulation of fury that I had not done better. I shouted lustily at my clumsiness, hopping mad, near to throwing the ball into the ground, and eager to form a huddle to call another play and try again. The players were all standing up, some with their helmets off, many with big grins, and I heard someone calling, “Hey, man, hey, man,” and someone else, John Gordy, I think, because he said it all the time, called out, “Beautiful—hey, real beautiful”—sensing, then, that an initiation had been performed, a blooding ceremony, as George Wilson had wished. Lloyd said, “Welcome to pro ball”—something in his tone which made the comment not only in reference to the quick horror of what had happened when I fumbled, but in appreciation that I had gone through something that made me, if tenuously, one of them; they stood for a while on the field watching me savor it.

But the trouble was that the confidence that came with being blooded did not last long. After ten minutes, kneeling on the sidelines quaking with eagerness to be called again, one would feel it begin to seep away, and the afternoon would pass, and what confidence was left would edge away, skirting the discomfiture and insecurity that waited, as palpable as cat burglars, to move in.

I said to Joe Schmidt on the sidelines just after my play, still in the throes of my excitement and talking about it too much: “I got the feel of it out there. I suppose it could have finished me… I mean the humiliation… but I got the reverse—confidence.”

He nodded.

“It was really something,” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

“The best thing was how the regulars all jumped in.”

He was grinning. “The defense would’ve killed you if you’d hung on to the ball. You can’t throw the ball away like that. You’ve got to give us defense people a chance to get to you.”

The other two first-string linebackers, Walker and Brettschneider, were standing with Schmidt. They nodded and grinned. They always seemed to stand together, as if their skill at defense as the three linebackers was such a corporate undertaking that it bound them together even off the field. The scrimmage began again. Their attention shifted to it immediately. They were watching the rookies substituting at their positions. “That’s crud,” one of them said, gauging his replacement. “Look at that!” he said scornfully. Their attention was completely taken up by it. He pointed at some maneuver the rookie had made which was too subtle for me to catch.

I asked, “Will you straighten him out—whatever it is he did wrong?”

“You must be kidding,” Brettschneider said. “They’re after our jobs, boy.”

“But they’re your teammates—common cause,” I said tentatively. I was startled.

“Crap,” one of them said.

Wayne Walker pointed at the rookie who had taken over at his position. “Look at Clark’s stance,” he said. “It’s wrong for a linebacker. He’s got his arms hanging down as he waits. When the lineman busts through to him he’s got to bring those hands up to stave him off, which loses him a half second or so of motion. He should wait with those hands up—all set to fend…”

“But you won’t tell him?” I asked.

“Hell no,” said Schmidt. “He’ll learn quick enough. He’ll get hit on his ass and he’ll learn.”

“That’s the damnedest thing,” I said.

Schmidt looked across. He could sense my disillusionment, particularly after the display of the regulars coming into the scrimmage to help me. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “When I came up in 1953 the team was hot off the 1952 championship. But it was a team getting on, long in the tooth, and Buddy Parker traded some of the regulars to put in rookies and first-year men. When he traded Flanagan, the middle linebacker, a lot of the regulars broke down and cried, I want to tell you, and when I took over his position they took it out on me as if I was responsible. They wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I went through six league games as a regular and no one talked to me. I played the game, dressed, and then I went home to my apartment and looked at the wall.

“Veterans don’t love rookies,” he went on. “It’s as simple as that. You always read in the paper that some young rookie coming up says he couldn’t’ve done it if it hadn’t been for some ol’ pappy-guy veteran who took him aside and said, ‘No, son, up here we do it this way,’ and then showing him. Well, that’s crap, you’d better believe it. A regular, particularly an old-timer, will do almost anything to hold on to his position short of murder. They say that Big Daddy Lipscomb used to get into these horrible fights, close to kill these guys during the training season when he was with Los Angeles, really beat up on them, and everybody’d say, ‘Boy, Big Daddy’s got a mean temper this year.’ Then the coaches look around and find that cooler than hell he’d been beating up on the guys trying for his position so that finally there wasn’t anybody at his position but Big Daddy.”

“I was thinking how the offense—the regulars—came in to help me,” I said.

Brettschneider, who had been listening and nodding, said, “You’re not quite what we’d think of being a ‘threat’! But you start completing some passes and hanging on to the ball, and doing something sensational, and you’ll see if you get anything but the back of their hand from Plum or Morrall. You threaten them for their jobs and you’d be like to get a time bomb in your soup. You’ve got to be a son of a bitch to play this game right.”

“Well, not completely,” I said, considering it.

If the attitudes the veteran held about the rookie were scorn and suspicion, the reaction of the rookie in consideration of the veteran was invariably awe. When the veterans—Schmidt and the rest of them—trotted in to scrimmage, the rookies stood on the sidelines watching silently, engrossed, and one could sense them soaking up information for their own use. Even playing against a veteran, they found it difficult to reduce an idol or a player of great reputation to corporeal status. John Gordy, one of the offensive guards, told me that in his first league game, which was against the Colts, the coaches sent him in at the beginning of the second half to try to stop the Colt tackle, Art Donovan, who had spent much of the early part of the afternoon in the Detroit backfield. “They found me in the corner of the locker room,” Gordy said. “Aldo Forte kept yelling, ‘Gordy! Gordy!’ and I kept answering, but in such a small voice that the fellow on the next stool couldn’t’ve heard me.

“I’d seen Donovan in the game films, and I knew all about him, and it just seemed crazy that I was going in there. I went out for that second half and tried—you could say that. Once, Donovan felt that I was holding him, and he told me right then that if I tried anything like that again why he was going to remove my head from my body. You know what I said? I said, ‘Yes, sir!’

“That was the sort of respect you had for the great ones,” Gordy said. “And you felt it even if you were in the field hitting hard. That same rookie year I was going to play opposite Jesse Richardson in a game. The coaches told me that he’d been playing that position since the third grade. He’ll play it straight, the coaches told me. So don’t bug him. Play it straight yourself, they told me. He knows the position so well he’ll take advantage of any funny stuff you try. You get him riled up with funny stuff and he’ll kill you. That’s what they say. So I go in there, and this guy holds me, and gouges me, and I get kicked around, and I say what is this, what is going on? Why there was a moment in the game when he knocked my helmet up in the air and he grabbed it and hit me with it. We could see it afterward in the game films—the helmet pop off, and this guy reaching for it, and belting me by the strap. The rest of the guys watching the film broke up laughing. I mean you could see this guy was really having himself a time. So I said to Forte: ‘Aldo, that guy Richardson really been playing since the third grade?’ So Aldo tells me that Richardson had been moved to the other side of the line. I was playing against a rookie. They forgot to tell me.”

The only rookie down on the practice field who seemed unabashed was Lucien Reeberg, the big three-hundred-pound Negro who had bellowed out his song in the dining-room hazing without any self-consciousness. He was the only rookie who said very much—a cheery high voice urging everyone on—a pepper talk that one felt was probably a veteran’s prerogative. He attracted attention. He got on the veterans’ nerves. I wondered if he wasn’t cocky enough to get a club rush lowered on him—remembering how Bobby Layne had done it to Hopalong Cassady to indicate a rookie’s proper station. The second or third day of practice, with some light contact work going on, Reeberg hit the man opposite him, Larry Vargo, a tight end in his second year with the Lions, harder than called for. Vargo said, “Watch yourself, fat man. You thinking you’re Sonny Liston?”

Reeberg looked at him. Both men had small tight grins.

“I’ll whup you like Cassius Clay, if you want it,” Reeberg said. “I don’t get beat, man.”

I was grinning too, assuming they were fooling around, mimicking the two heavyweights. I sidled over.

“You’re going to get it, fat man,” said Vargo. He began moving around Reeberg, watching him. The other veterans began moving around. “You ever see so much ass on a fat man?” I heard one of them say. They were going to make sure that Vargo, one of them, a veteran, wasn’t humiliated. I was aware that the grin was still on my face, stuck on there foolishly. Someone brushed by me. Reeberg said, “I don’t get beat… by nobody.” He looked at the circle of veterans.

“Fat lip for a fat man,” someone else said.

Millard Kelly, the trainer, ripped in between them, leaning against Reeberg’s arms. “Crazy? Crazy?” he called at them.

“He says I pushed him too hard,” Reeberg said, his voice high and querulous like a child arguing in a playground argument; it was difficult to tell if his voice was natural, or if he was taunting Vargo.

“Settle it here,” Kelly said, straining up against him, “and you’ll be on the next train out, the both of you.”

The tempers began to cool. The veterans stared at Reeberg, but they stopped milling around him. Curiously, the reaction began to settle most strongly in Kelly. His mouth opened and shut like a piece of silent machinery. He was almost quivering with rage, or perhaps at the thought of his temerity in stepping in between the two big players.

“Crazy! Crazy!” he kept hissing between his teeth. “Bunch of goddamn adolescents—the bunch of you, like fooling with pistol triggers.”

When the practice was over, Reeberg tried to patch it up with Vargo. He walked along beside him on the way to the gym, trying to explain in his high voice that he was trying his best and didn’t mean to do no wrong. Vargo was embarrassed to have a rookie hanging around him. He knew the veterans walking along behind were grinning. He said, “OK, OK,” and he began to trot quite hard for the gym, his speed picking up. But Reeberg kept right up with him, his voice still going, and his weight bouncing as he ran. The players behind shook their heads and laughed.