CHAPTER 14

One afternoon I was driving back with Don Doll and Aldo Forte from the coaches’ hideaway bar after a turn at liars’ poker. The two coaches were commenting on a magazine story which speculated that there were very few superstars in the National Football League. The Green Bay Packers had a plethora of them, perhaps as many as five, but many of the teams, of their complements of nearly forty players each, according to the article, had not one player of great stature. Both coaches were inclined to agree, though when I asked them about the superstars on the Lions, pridefully and with dispatch they eclipsed the number of Packers with their own list. Well, there was Joe Schmidt, of course, and Roger Brown, Terry Barr, Alex Karras (if one could assume his being active), John Gordy, certainly, and Gail Cogdill and Night Train Lane, and possibly a few more could be added, Wayne Walker and Yale Lary, for example, though certainly those first seven would have to lead off such a list.

“The championship’s in the bag,” I said.

There are weaknesses, they said, pointing out that a pro team has twenty-two positions; a strong bench and specialists are essential. They did not discuss the soft spots; they preferred to talk about their superstars, going over their list with relish. The last two, Cogdill and Lane, were the easiest to talk about, they said, because their skills were so markedly evident. Cogdill was an astonishing athlete, fast, with extraordinary coordination, the natural athlete of the club, for whom everything was almost too easy. He was an attack by himself. You could always rate a player by imagining how much trouble he’d be playing against you; the thought of Cogdill with a good quarterback to throw to him running out of an opposing formation and floating around in the secondary was enough to bring on the fits.

“And Night Train?”

“I tell you I wouldn’t like to play against him,” Aldo said. “He’s the roughest cornerback in the league. He’s got pipes for legs, all bone, with just strings of muscle holding him together, but when he comes up, there’s no fooling around: he’s a ferocious tackler.” He shook his head thinking back on some of the tackles. He recalled Y. A. Tittle, the New York Giant quarterback, describing being hit by Night Train (it happened on a freezing afternoon in 1962)—so hard that the Giant plays simply popped out of his head. He got off the ground and reeled back to his huddle, and his teammates all leaned in toward him to pick up the next call, the faint puffs of steam at the cages of their helmets, and hearing only their own heavy breathing, and then Tittle saying, “Christ, I don’t… I can’t think of any plays.”

They hurried him back to the bench. Dr. Sweeney, the team physician, stood in front of him and said, “What’s your name?”

“Y. A. Tittle.”

He knew all those things—his name, the doctor’s name, the day, that the Giants were playing the Lions, but the Giant plays and formations had gone. He had some old high-school plays he could offer, and a few San Francisco formations (he had played with the 49ers before coming to New York), but nothing else, until the halftime intermission when the plays suddenly flared back into his consciousness and he was all right.

Don Doll suddenly said to me: “Tomorrow, why don’t you take a try at Night Train’s position, cornerback, the toughest there is—see how much tougher it is than playing the offense.” He grinned at Forte, who coached the offensive line. There was always rivalry between the two units.

Forte shook his head and grunted. “We can’t lose our quarterback,” he said. “The big Pontiac scrimmage coming up next week.”

“Is there a scrimmage tomorrow?” I asked, haltingly.

“The offense will be running plays against the defense,” Doll said. “We’ll slip a red shirt on you, and send you in for a couple of plays.”

“Well,” I said. “I guess so.”

Doll suggested I talk with Night Train that evening and pick up a few pointers. I saw Night Train in the dining room when we came in together, and I got my tray and sat with him, asking him if he had some time to confer that evening.

“Certain,” he said.

We met in his room before evening classes. The Dinah Washington records were turning on the record machine when I got there. Train turned the volume down but not off. The records turned, and slapped down on their predecessors, the arm would grope and set, and the voice of Train’s wife would come on, just barely audible. At the camp, conversations always seemed to be carried on over a background of transistors or record machines.

“It must be fine to have that voice around,” I said.

Train grinned and said it was. Set up on his dresser were big glossy photo prints of her, some showing her flanked by two youngsters from a previous marriage. Night Train was her eighth husband. All of her photographs were autographed and inscribed in a flowing script. One was signed “Mommy,” and the inscription read: “I keep my eye on all trains.”

Train was easy if occasionally puzzling to listen to—his voice high and friendly; if something serious was on his mind the tone became gentle and curiously poignant. He had an odd habit of lengthening one-syllable words into three—“but” into “but-ter-ah”—he used involved rather than simple words, and he was likely to slap suffixes on the ends of words, such as “captainship,” so that his sentences were rich, and a certain strain was necessary to get the gist of them absolutely straight. He motioned me to a chair, and he sat relaxing on the bed. He had on his siren suit; I noticed a small monogram on the handkerchief pocket.

He began by talking about the changes that he had seen since his start in the professional leagues, what he called his “commencemanship.”

“Ballplayers are not made up of that old vigor,” he said. “These days when Sunday rolls aroun’, there’s like to be too much kibitzing going on, which ought to be left in the bedroom, or somewhere, so that you don’ find it lyin’ aroun’ on the day of the game.”

“Kibitzing…?” I asked.

“Not being serious enough. Not being able to get up for a game—that’s what I mean. We’re only here for a little while, so this bereaves me. Sacrifice ought to be made. I know what happens when you don’ make it: the last eleven years I look to play on a championship team, and six years, think on that, I play with Chicago where we have this kibitzing and win maybe two games a year. There’s not so much time left now. Every year it’s a challenge to see if I have the ninety percent I had the year befo’. Maybe not. I don’ look forward to it. To finding out. It seem like it come too fast—that old express train.”

I asked Train if he would start at the beginning—if he would go back to his “commencemanship.”

Train settled himself comfortably.

“I was an adopted kid,” he began, “and I had a lot of harsh days. I grew up in Austin, Texas—that was the basis for my playing then, football, and a little basketball, but I was always getting the gigglings ’cause I weighed 135 pounds. What broadened me out was the services. That was a break. After thirteen weeks of that apprenticeship training I felt like a man. After, they get me into the Army Language School in Monterey to study intelligence. They give me a sort of runaround there, and a break too, because they send me across the Bay into Special Services at Fort Ord.”

Train shifted on his bed. “We become to enjoy each other,” he said. “We play badminton there,” he went on, “a lot of badminton, and every Wednesday we set up the boxing ring. Weight began to shift onto my bones, not a whole lot, but some. We get along jus’ fine with each other. At that time I was playing offensive end for the Fort Ord team—we busted some good records, and played in three bowls. On the weekends we go to see the 49ers play in the Kazoo” (Kezar Stadium), “where I fall in love with football. Settin’ there one day I see a player from the old New York Yankees miss a whole mess of tackles. So I went back and I jot me down a little letter to Buck Shaw, the 49er coach. I was in business administration then at Fort Ord, and the colonel’s secretary helped me to draft it up. All I done was to tell Shaw that I had a good pair of hands, and why not? Nothing lost, nothing gained. Well, Shaw—who is called the Gray Fox—he jotted me back a letter, but I never did activate on it.

“After,” Train went on, “I won a football scholarship to a college, but just as I was packing my bags and getting set to go, why this college drop football. So I played basketball for North American. Played against Kirby Shoes. It was not much to my liking, so one day I was out riding around Los Angeles, and I stopped in to see Joe Stydahar, the Ram coach. Gabby Sims, out of Dallas, who had played on the Fort Ord team, was with the Rams, so I thought it’d be all right to drop in at the office. I said, ‘If you please I want to see the head coach.’ So they sent me in. Stydahar was built solid, a big Polack-looking fellow. Jumbo Joe. A terrific fellow. Red Hickey, his end coach, kept looking at me and saying, ‘How much you weigh?’ I was at 185 then, light for the pros, so they ask me about the other players on the Fort Ord team, Bernice Carter, John LaGordia, John Hoch, Hellwig, and all of them. So the next day I came in with a scrapbook which I open up to show them about Bernice Carter, John LaGordia, John Hoch, Hellwig, and-er-ah… Well, Hoch, he is the only one to make the ball club.”

“And you,” I said.

“Joe Stydahar says, ‘Lane, how ’bout $4,500?’ I say to him, ‘Joe, before I sign and waste your time, do I get a fair shake at my position?’ He says, ‘Yes, if you can beat out Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch and Tom Fears.’ Well, that was something. Crazy Legs is going to be in the Hall of Fame, and Fears, he wasn’t the slightest slouch neither.” Train grinned suddenly. “When the camp start that summer, I was sick. I’d faint on the field, and then hittin’ the dummies I faint again, jus’ faint, and Jumbo Joe, he’d say, ‘Take that body over theah.’ So they’d drag me ovah by the heels and lay me down. I wasn’t getting much sleep at night neither. It was hard for me to learn the system, to run the patterns, and the terminology. Someone’d yell at me, ‘Twenty-seven fake toss,’ and man, I didn’t know where to go. So after the lights go out at eleven, I’d have a little push-button flashlight, and I’d beam it on those playbooks so as to understand the things in there. Tom Fears, he was helpful. He had a phonograph in his room. One night, when I come along to get his advice, he had Buddy Morrow’s ‘Night Train’ playing. Someone said, ‘Here he come, Night Train.’”

“And it stuck,” I said, gratuitously.

“Correct,” said Night Train. “All that training camp,” he continued, “I was catching the devils from Red Hickey. He shout, ‘You can get your bags packed, Lane, if you miss another pass.’ I did miss another, natural’, but they don’ let me go. He an’ Joe must’ve seen something—maybe that I never appeared lazy to them. One night we had a big intra-squad scrimmage, like the Pontiac scrimmage you’ll be in, a ‘rookie scrimmage’ they call it, and there’s a big mess of folks there to watch, and the newspaper people, course. ‘Play defensive end,’ said Red Hickey—me, weighing 185 soaking wet! So I went out there and dug in. Stydahar shouted, ‘Don’t tackle the quarterback!’ On the first play he come right by me—Bob Waterfield, who was a great pilot—and my fingers got all gibbely wanting to fetch him in. But I let him go—like I been told. They had a draw play next, and on the third play, by my being so light and shifty, the tackle got fooled up and I pushed him into the quarterback, ol’ Waterfield, who fell over. Red Hickey got angry, ’cause the quarterback fell over, and I got angry too, throwing my helmet, and so Hickey banish me out as a defensive halfback. I didn’ know about that ’tall. I didn’ know how to ‘set’—so I fuss around there and I got settled finally, and in it pretty natural. Later in the game, I came up fast on a fullback end around and I was hit by the flanker back, who I didn’t see, and he knocked me over so I somersault and land on my feet right there with Deacon Dan Towler, the fullback, in my arms. Well, Jumbo Joe Stydahar, he come rushing out of nowhere and he says, ‘That’s the type of ballplayer I want.’ I get in on the play so much that night that my eyes and jaw get swollen and sore, so that the nex’ mornin’ when my roommate, Willie Davis, rustled the newspapers at me and is calling out, ‘Say, Star, wake up, hey, Star, read ’bout the star,’ I say to him, ‘Oh you read it, Willie Davis, I’m too sore to read it.’”

“That was when you knew you were set with the Rams?” I asked.

“Well, we had the Los Angeles–Washington charity game one night, and I got me a spotlight there for the introductions before the game, running through the darkness with that big cone of light, and me in it, and all the noise from that crowd, the biggest crowd they had in the Coliseum in a time. Then was when I knew I belong. Then they turn out all the lights, and this man, he says, ‘Now light your matches’—and my! The whole place blaze with thousan’ tiny little lights, blazing quick so you see the blades of grass at your feet, and a big shout from everyone it look so pretty, and then they go out, so it look sad, and everybody quiet, and finally just one or two little lights are left, and they seem so far away, like we were in a valley very dark and quiet, with a light across in the hills.”

He said this rather slowly, thinking about what he had seen. I told him he had a fine eye for detail.

He brightened. He told me that he had been thinking of “jotting” himself down a “little book,” and that he had been considering taking a Palmer correspondence course in what he referred to as “authorship.”

“Train,” I said, “talking of other professions, I thought I’d take a crack at your position tomorrow.”

“Goodness,” he said, grinning.

“I mean I’d like to play it, not run against it,” I said, thinking he might have misunderstood.

He nodded.

“Perhaps you could help me on the field—a tip or two down there tomorrow so’s I know what I ought to do, even if I can’t.”

“Certain’,” Night Train said seriously. “Now playing my position, course the big thing is not to get beat deep. You must keep your angles correct and keep talking so the others know where you are and what’s going on—so’s you don’t bring the defense down.”

I asked, “How do you prepare for a game? How would you get ready for the ends or flankers like Terry Barr or Cogdill?”

“I sit in the motion pictures of the games and watch careful so I pick up the keys. A receiver likes a certain pattern and after I watch for a while I’m able to decipher him, and I’m able to tell what he like to do. All of the, even the best men, have moves they prefer, an’ while you wouldn’t call it a habit, still you got a little percentage working for you. Now I go a little further. I think to myself, how would I play the play if I was the receiver. Now I’m working on him, I’m setting him up. He think he setting me up, but no, I’m setting him up.”

Train was getting excited as he talked. As he explained who was and who wasn’t being “set up” he came half off his bed and jabbed a long finger at me for emphasis. “Now heah is how it work.”

He settled back and folded his hands. His voice sank, and became almost conspiratorial: “I set the fellow up by baiting him just a li’l bit,” he said, “giving him just a bit too much to the outside on the red coverage maybe, until this fellow goes back to his quarterback and he tells him in the huddle, ‘Lawd Almighty, I can beat Night Train to the outside, beat him like a drum,’ and he plead with the quarterback to throw him the ball out there, he practically get down on his knees asking for the ball. The quarterback may have been around a time, and maybe he smell a rat, especially when the talk is about Night Train’s zone, but then he figure maybe there’s no harm in trying a pass out there. So he says OK. He calls the play. I watch my man as he lines up. He’s trying to look the same as he always does, but he don’t—there’s something about him, something I can read, trotting out and standing there at the flanker, maybe by the way he curl his fingers, maybe a bit too casual, maybe something you can’t even see, but just feel. Joe Schmidt calls the blue coverage, which is what I hope he does, and where before I don’ move, I’m there, and that boy, who runs out there looking to make the touchdown easy, why he’s like to be in bad trouble. Maybe a Night Train interception. Let’s say it is. So when he goes back to the bench, he’s in worse trouble. That quarterback looks at him kinda hard, and he says to everybody, kind of scornful, ‘Well, thank you, gentl’m’n, but from heah on we stick to the game plan.’”

Night Train grinned. It was an example he obviously savored giving.

I asked how much difference there was in the style of the flankers and ends Night Train defended against.

“Oh, my,” he said. “Some are easy. They come at you and pussyfoot around in the zone, and when they make their move you can tell. Wherever those boys go I can pick them up in a few steps. Others can give you the fits—Jimmy Orr, Lenny Moore, Johnny Morris over there with Chicago, Boyd Dowler, Casey with the 49ers, those big long-legged fellows. They have good combinations, and they don’ let on when they goin’ to turn on the big step. They get me into trouble. They’re goin’ to beat me, a good fake is got to beat me, but the thing is not to give up. You got to have a sense of recovery—to get back on the fellow to cut down the time he’s a free receiver.”

“Dick LeBeau was telling me he likes to defend against the guys with the long strides,” I said. “Because they have to shorten their steps to cut and fake, and he can read them better.”

“Well, that’s Dickie-bird for you. He’s complex. He confirms and thinks on it about reading the receivers.”

“What do you look at when they’re coming out for you?” I asked.

I look at the belt buckle, at the waistline, which is always fixed no matter how much sashaying and fakin’ is goin’ on with the feet and the hands. Very seldom do I catch a look at the head or the eyes, ’cause even the half-good ones can pull you out of your boots with a fake if you do. I try to come at an angle where I can see both the quarterback and the receiver, trying to keep the outside, particularly when I have inside help. The big thing is to try to be in position when the quarterback throws the ball, and to do that you try to work the angle with the receiver so’s you can keep half an eye on the quarterback to see where he let the ball go. The exception is when your linebackers are red dogging. Then you can’t look at the quarterback. He’s goin’ to get rid of the ball too fast, with the linebackers grabbeling at him, so you move way up on the receiver and keep your eye fixed on him. If you don’, he can make a move on you, and bring the defense down.”

“It’s complex,” I said. “What’s the main thing I must keep in mind tomorrow?”

“The big thing is a sense of recovery,” Train said. “They’re going to beat you tomorrow no matter who you is—a good fake has got to beat the defense, like I say. But you got to recover. You can’t give up, ever.”

“And an interception?” I asked. “What is the procedure?”

Night Train looked at me, surprised. The possibility apparently had not occurred to him.

“I might as well think positively about this thing,” I said.

“Well-er-ah—well, I’d just run,” he said. “Run for the touchdown.”

“I shouldn’t look around for interference to form, or anything?”

“I’d go into high gear and hightail it outta there,” Night Train said. “I’d incline to drift down the sidelines and keep away from those big fellows hanging around the line of scrimmage.”

“Train,” I said, “if you’re anywhere near me on this interception, I’ll lateral it to you first thing.”

“You’re playing,” Night Train said, grinning. “I’ll be on the sidelines, watching.”

“I’ll get it to you. It’ll be like a beanbag game,” I said. “If you refuse it, it’s going to that grandmother standing next to you, the one with the baby carriage.”

Night Train rocked back and forth on the bed. “Oh my,” he said. “I’ll remember tomorrow.”