CHAPTER 12

For the veterans the evenings were easier. Many of them had cars and went into town, or to their homes around Detroit, particularly if the evening classes were canceled or curtailed, though all of the players, married or not, were supposed to be back in camp by eleven. At eleven there was a chance of a bed check by one of the coaches. He would come around with a clipboard and if a player was missing from his room or the dormitory floor he was presumed absent and subject to fines or punitive action—such as extra wind sprints on the practice field the next day.

At Detroit the bed checks were rare. The coaches treated the men as professionals, unlike some of the other training camps where there was a more procrustean attitude. John Gonzaga, who played briefly for the Dallas Cowboys, said that Tom Landry, their head coach, pulled a main switch himself at 10:30 to darken the training-camp dormitories there, and that the players would bring out big deer-hunting lamps, the bright beams crisscrossing up and down the dormitory corridors. Gonzaga did a crossword puzzle each night, and when he was with Dallas he fashioned a flashlight holder for the headboard of his bed so he could see to do it.

At Cranbrook, there always being the threat of a bed check, most of the players, if they went out after the evening classes, were back in before the eleven-o’clock deadline. But others stayed out, taking the risk, and at two or three in the morning they’d coast their cars into the parking lot, with the motors low or off, and walk slowly across the school grounds, keeping to the shadows of the buildings, with an eye out for a coach, and when they got in the dormitory they’d shake their roommate awake and ask if a check had been made.

“No, for Chrissake,” the roommate would murmur.

I went out with them a few times. They’d come around to my room and they’d ask if I wanted to come into town. They had begun to accept me as one of them. I’d bounce up off the bed and get ready. One favorite place was a big dance hall in Dearborn, about a half hour down the main pike, called the Gay Haven. The sound in the place was concussive—big rock ’n’ roll bands—and out in front of the bandstand the place packed, and here and there girls in mohair sweaters, despite the heat, sitting at small tables waiting for dance partners. They would get up without looking to see who had offered them a dance, walking quickly to the dance floor, which was raised, with three or four steps to get up to it, and they’d run up the stairs to get themselves going in the steps of the monkey and the mess around and the others, the variations of the twist—not a word out of them, but it was enough to jog up and down opposite and watch them move their bodies. Some of them were terrific dancers.

One could tell from the condition of the dormitory washroom after the evening class how many players were skipping out for a long night. Sometimes, if communal plans were afoot, it took on the aspect of a college weekend coming up—the place lively with players grooming, and heavy with the scents of cologne. But as the practices became more severe and the evening classes longer, with the training moving into full schedule, the night exodus was cut down considerably. It was too risky, with as much competition as there was at each position, and the possibility of a bed check, to go out on the town and try to get by with four or five hours’ sleep before undergoing the rigors of training under that hot August sun.

Usually, after the evening classes, the veterans started up with their card games—pinochle, and bridge, and gin rummy. Often, the music would begin, mildly cacophonous since it would drift out into the corridor from different rooms, and meld—LeBeau and Maher on their guitars, and perhaps Night Train Lane, dressed in his siren suit—lying on his belly listening to his wife Dinah Washington’s records plopping down, one after the other, on his record machine on the floor next to his bed.

Then, too, some of the players would collect in someone’s room—very often John Gonzaga’s, who would lie in bed working on his crossword puzzle book—and the storytelling would begin. Six or seven or more would collect in those small rooms, those who couldn’t find a chair or a place on the beds sitting on the floor with their backs up against the wall so their legs stuck out straight into the room.

Often I was reminded of the fine, droning stories that one heard in the Army—lying on the top of one’s bed in the barracks on the summer weekends with the faint scent of wood and tar being worked out of the tar-paper roof by the afternoon sun, and down the line one of the regular Army soldiers telling about a trip somewhere, to Baton Rouge, or about a night brawl in some neon-lit bar, or about the arguments in the cheap motel rooms, the glass empty, with the low beds flush on the floor like mattresses—joyless sagas long and sonorous like the sound of summer bees, and yet transfixing. The outside world hardly touched the military: they lashed out at it on the weekends or on furloughs, darting out at it, taking what they wanted, and then they came back inside, skipping through the camp gate, to the security of the barracks, where they talked about their ventures, retelling the stories a little differently each time, until they were just right, set pieces to be installed in their repertoire of misanthropy. The experiences were cruel and heartless, invariably angry and obscene, and there was always scorn and, if one was lucky, humor—and from the best of the storytellers one could hardly get enough: “Jake, tell about the time at Mother’s Bar in Shreveport,” and everybody would cork up, and Jake would clear his throat and begin.

The football players’ world was more sophisticated and not as insular as the military’s. Their stories did not have the venom and the suspicion of the outside that one remembered from the Army chronicles. But there were similarities: their view of the outside, a trip to a foreign country, Mexico, say, was usually essentially provincial and chauvinistic—the drama that of struggling with unknown and suspicious foods, and customs, and languages, leading up to a tortured and bizarre nighttime frenzy of corrupt guides, bars, fights, tiny girls perched on stilt heels with black hair stiff with lacquer, perverts, jails, police courts, monumental hangovers, and then finally the security of their car, moving them on to the next adventure. The stories were long and rich—and like the great Army stories they had been told often enough, or thought about, so that they slipped into the form of the epic and one never tired of them. They began properly: the car trip, the town they started from, coming across the border, and where the car broke down in the mountains, and why, and how they got it going again, and coming down into the desert town with the long dusty main street with the bars on either side in the bright sunlight, and inside where the strippers worked in relays for twenty-four hours, a girl picking away at a button on her white glove for ten minutes—that was the pace of the strip tease—and how they started on the cool cerveza that had a red rooster on the label. Then one of them felt that the drummer nodding over his drums should quicken the tempo for the girl so she could get those gloves off, and start working at the zipper along the side of her dress, and he went over to the drummer to see what could be done, and behind that bar the big men in the white shirts took their arms off the counter and stood up.

The players knew that I had lived abroad, and sometimes they would say, “Tell us about the Riviera, the chicks there…” but I demurred. I could not sort out an epic about it. There were generalizations to be made, I would stir and think about the Carleton Hotel, and the terrace bar with the producers standing about with their starlets, and the tables with the beach parasols up through the middle, and the girl with the black panther crossing the Croisette, and the quiet of the quais at night, and the little stony beach with the dark sea sifting at it, and the distant high bulk of the carriers of the U.S. Sixth Fleet like apartment houses moored on the sea. But I could produce neither an attitude about these images nor a straightforward narrative. One should arrive in an old Peugeot at film festival time, with the steam coming out of the radiator, and coast into a garage where a Frenchman with a striped shirt, a horrible garlic breath coming out past a thick down-drooped cigarette, and a beret down over one ear, comes to the window of the car and says: “I am Jacques—your guide if you pleez.” That was the way the story should have started, and the players would have arranged themselves comfortably for something like that. I would have too, if someone else could have told it.

Not all the stories were about traveling away from home. Sooner or later, the conversation would move around to football—reminiscences of past games and training camps, gossip about coaches and ex-players and other teams, and what were good football towns, and the places in them to eat, and often they told stories about each other.

One evening before classes I looked in a room down the hall and saw the legs sticking out from where the players had their backs up against the wall, and the chairs occupied, and the beds, and I knew they were sitting in there conversing, whiling away a half hour or so before it was time to head for class. Everyone had his blue loose-leaf notebook with him. I dropped in a corner to listen. They were telling stories about their teammate Night Train Lane. Dick LeBeau, who apparently collected Night Train stories—a self-appointed archivist—was describing Night Train as a theorist and tactician. He was saying that often Train had come close to taking over the classroom from Don Shula, who the previous year had been the Detroit defensive backfield coach before moving to Baltimore as the Colt head coach.

“Of course,” LeBeau was saying, “Shula was a great theorist himself, and he liked to work on the blackboard. He’d say: ‘All right, here’s what we’re going to do,’ and he’d start diagramming. You’d hear this creaking in a chair behind you, and it’d be Train itching there, and maybe he’d slide out of that chair and into one closer to the board, until he was right up there in the front row finally, mumbling and shaking his head, and he’d say co’ah, which meant coach, I guess, and pretty soon he couldn’t take it no longer and he’d be standing up there with Shula, the chalk going at the board, talking away to beat the band.”

“What does he say?” someone asked.

“Well, that’s it,” said LeBeau. “You don’t know what he’s saying. He has these theories he goes on about, but it’s like stepping into another world to listen to them. He’s all the time talking about ‘angles’—angles between him and the pass receivers, and also between him and his defensive teammates, Gary Lowe, and Mather, and me, and the rest of the secondary. I remember a couple of years ago in the first five games of the season they began hitting passes on Train deep, and it made him pretty sour. He’d stay long after practice, and you’d see him there in the evening, a loner, practicing his footwork down there on the field, talking to himself—cussing, I thought, because they were getting to him—and then afterwards, for the rest of the season, they don’t catch a cold on Train. So I went up to him and I said: ‘Train, you made a hell of a comeback.’

“‘Dickie-bird,’ he says. ‘I figure out what happens.’

“‘What’s that, Train?’ I ask. ‘You find a false step in your moves?’

“‘It ain’t me,’ he says, grieved-like. My, he looks at me like I struck him. ‘It’s Gary Lowe,’ he says. ‘He’s been comin’ in at a bad angle on me.’”

The players whooped and rocked back and forth. They never could get enough Night Train stories.

“Maher,” one of them said. “Tell the time Train fessed up and allowed he was wrong.”

The others had heard it before, so Bruce Maher, who played cornerback on the defense with Train, looked at me as he told it: “Well, this one time George Wilson sent me in at left safety to play for Gary Lowe. Train’s up in front of me, and when I get set to my position he looks over his shoulder at me and calls out a lot of things but of course I don’t understand a word of it. He calls me ‘Bru’!’ So I hear ‘Bru’!’ and then a whole mess of jabber. On the very first play Train gambles and it goes wrong. He goes for the quarterback. They get a pass out to a man in his zone, and he’s off. I lit out for him, but he’s going across the goal line as I get to him, and when I give a big last jump at him I get nothing but the breath knocked out of me and a long slide into the end zone. So I get up, and who should I see running down the field toward me but Train. When he gets to me he says, ‘Don’ worry, Bru’! That was my man’—the only words I understood from him all that year. But as he says this what he’s doing is jabbing his finger at me like he was lecturing. Up in the stands the people—oh, sixty thousand of them—can’t hear what he’s saying, so to them it looks like I was the one who let the man score—after all, I was the closest to him when he crossed the line—and here’s the great Night Train coming on down to tell me what I did wrong. So I say, ‘Clear out, you fink!’ and he says, ‘But Bru’, don’ you worry none. That was my man!’—his finger jabbing at my chest. I tell him to quit poking at me, but by that time it’s too late. My stock had dropped to nothing in that place, and running back to the bench I could hear them beginning to let loose with the boos. Train was trotting right along behind me, and I was pretty sure he was still pointing. ‘Bru’… don’ you worry.’ I could hear him saying that.” Maher shook his head, and began to laugh.

“That’s beautiful,” someone said.

“Is the jabber absolutely unintelligible?” I asked, fascinated. “What does he say in the defensive huddle?”

“One time,” LeBeau said, “he came into the huddle and he said, clear as a bell, very formal, ‘Good evening, gen’l’men,’ don’t ask me why, and when he got back out to his position he said it again, like he had it on his mind to say. When the offense comes out of its huddle and takes up a formation, often Train calls out, ‘What sort of setup we got heah?’ reflecting on it, like he had something spread out on a newspaper to look at. Then his mind begins to go to work, and that’s when you can get into trouble if you listen. One time he calls across to me: ‘Dickie-bird, on this play fuss with a zone defense over theah and over heah I’ll play a man-to-man.’ I yell at him he’s crazy, plumb crazy, and he calls back: ‘Mix ’em up, Dickie-bird, confuse ’em!’”

Gary Lowe, leaning up against the door with his playbook, broke in, speaking in a rush of clipped sentences: “Shula? He used to make these horrible faces at what Train’d do. He’d say, ‘That crap’d never better backfire.’ Of course it did—like what happened to Bru’. But then damn if it don’t work. In the Playoff Bowl? Against Cleveland last year? He calls at me, ‘Gary!’—he says it Gow-ay—‘you covah fo’ me,’ and he sprints in and red dogs the passer. Now what sort of crap is that for a cornerman? I stand there and my jaw drops. He gets to him too, knocks the ball loose, and their quarterback, that kid Ryan? When he gets up he looks at Train like he seen a ghost.”

“How does he get away with it?” I asked. “Can’t the offense take advantage of this sort of thing? It sounds like what you might find in a touch football game.”

Jim Gibbons said, “He gambles, but then he recovers if it’s going wrong. That’s what separates him from most cornermen—his natural reflexes. You can’t learn to play like him because he gambles so much. There’s no one like him.”

It was getting close to eight o’clock. The players collected their playbooks, and we idled out to the quadrangle. The shadows were sharp across the lawns and walks, and the summer evening so quiet that we were silent ourselves, strolling for the evening classes through the vague murmur of the school’s fountains. One of the largest fountains was just outside the classroom door, its pool surrounded by a wide cement rim on which some of the players sat, their backs to the water, waiting for the Hawk to call them to class. The players seemed subdued then, with little of the chatter and fooling around, many of them affected by a curious self-absorption. Perhaps those lovely surroundings touched them, I thought, though afterward I found out that squad cuts took place during these evening sessions. Night Train was sitting on the rim, drumming his heels, and looking up and grinning as the players passed him. The mood did not affect him. “Hey!” he called out happily when our group approached.

Inside the classroom, George Wilson was in a foul temper. He waited at the blackboard until we had all filed in and settled, and then he wheeled on us and said, “I’m fed to the eyes,” sweeping a hard stare at us. We all stared back. Outside the fountains splashed loudly in the evening. It was not football Wilson had on his mind, it turned out, but a school regulation about parking cars which the players had been ignoring—a housekeeping problem that Wilson felt so beneath his dignity to bring up that having to do so turned him nearly apoplectic. “Cranbrook keeps getting on my tail about your cars,” he shouted at us. “They tell me their campus looks like a used-car lot. I’ve warned you about this before. You’re supposed to keep your cars in the parking lot. Is that so damn difficult?” He lowered his voice and leaned toward us. “Three cars are out behind the dormitory where they don’t belong. I’m fining the players responsible.” He looked at a list in his hand. “Whose is a Ford station wagon, whitewall tires, and a black top?”

Max Messner, a big linebacker, put up his hand.

“All right, Max,” Wilson said, “that’ll be a one-hundred-dollar fine.”

There was a quick involuntary hiss of reaction throughout the room and Lucien Reeberg, who didn’t own a car, gave a little whoop and flapped his fingers as if they had been singed.

“Cut the noise,” Wilson said. “Now whose is a Ford Falcon, two-tone black and white?”

Tom Watkins put up his hand.

“Tommy, that’ll be a one-hundred-dollar fine. Now the last one”—one could tell from Wilson’s haste how distasteful the matter was to him—“is a Chevrolet Corvair, bright maroon in color, with wire-spoked wheels. Whose is it?”

No one spoke up.

“I said it was maroon. Damn thing looks like a circus wagon,” Wilson said. “If that isn’t enough there’s a license plate number.” He looked down at his list. “It’s a Michigan plate, number M 6 9524.”

No one stirred.

Wilson said quietly, “I’ll read this information over again, and when I’ve done there’ll be a hundred dollars added to the fine for every minute we have to wait for an answer.”

He read the specifications off his list, and we all waited, some of us with our mouths half open in suspense. Then a chair creaked loudly, a voice was cleared in the silence, and Night Train put up his hand. He cleared his throat again, and then he said—in that high distinctive voice of his—“Jawge, was that Chevy you talkin’ about a two do’ah or a fo’ do’ah?”

A storm of laughter erupted. Wilson could not keep a straight face, though he tried. You could see his shoulders shaking, and that made everybody laugh harder. When he had composed himself, Wilson had a few announcements to make that were pertinent to football, and then he turned the session over to his subordinates. Later on, I turned in my chair and Wilson was standing in the back of the room. He still had a big grin on his face. The matter was not mentioned again. Messner, Watkins, and Lane all looked relieved, though perhaps the happiest of us was Dick LeBeau, the Night Train archivist, who had another item for his portfolio.