CHAPTER 16

Always after practice, the crowds moved across the sidelines and grouped around the players as they started across the wide fields for the gym. Some of them wanted autographs; others simply walked along with the players for the enjoyment of proximity. The kids were the most insistent about the autographs. Even when Morrall, and other players who might have stayed down after practice, finally quit, there was always a crowd of young autograph seekers waiting before the pines by the tennis courts. I had refused to sign anything at the beginning, but it was too difficult to explain why my autograph was not one they’d be especially keen to have. So I signed what they offered—their books, scraps of paper, and once the cast on a small girl’s arm. The scraps of paper were used for trading. I’d heard someone calling: “I’ll give you a Morrall for a Terry Barr.” Sometimes a familiar hand, overly grubby, with a Band-Aid on the thumb, would appear among the books and pencils with a notebook sheet identical to one presented a moment or so before. And then, after I’d signed it, the hand would withdraw and I’d hear just within earshot: “I’ll give you two of these… for one Morrall.”

“Never heard of this guy.”

“He’s a rookie. That tall guy.”

“Listen, I can’t even read this guy’s name. What is it?” They were bent over the paper.

“Pumpernickel.”

I didn’t write my name very distinctly.

“He could make it with Detroit,” the first youngster said. “He could make it big with them.”

“Well, I’ll give you one Plum for three of your guy’s.”

So the same notebook paper would appear, held under a bandaged thumb, and I’d sign it, pretending I hadn’t overheard anything.

I was very conscious of the crowds at first, almost despairing to have to perform in front of them, and I never got used to it. What I hoped they would decide about me was that I was a specialist, that whatever gawkiness or gaucheness of performance I displayed could be dismissed on the assumption that my specialty was drop-kicking, or throwing the ball enormous lengths, or punting, that perhaps I was being groomed to replace Yale Lary.

On the sidelines, both for the morning and afternoon practices, there were always a couple of hundred people watching. If nothing much was going on, they sat up on the knolls under the big elms, and they had thermos bottles standing in the grass beside them, with iced tea probably, and brown paper bags with sandwich lunches. Like English crowds at a county cricket match they came to spend the summer day, and they could lie flat out and feel the sun flicker against their eyelids down through the elm leaves. When the teams scrimmaged, or ran through their offensive patterns, they came down and stood along the sidelines. The majority were men—in Bermuda shorts, some wearing straw beach hats, others in bathing suits, and quite a few smoking pipes, toning down from cigarettes, I suppose, which many people were trying to do that summer, and it was odd to go out on a pass pattern and run into a cloud of pipe tobacco, a whiff of it offering up a sudden association of English manor libraries.

The other players were naturally unconcerned by the crowds. Often, though, there were girls along the sidelines, chatting easily, and the players would notice the prettier ones. Occasionally, during a scrimmage, a player would tell the quarterback that something really interesting had turned up on the sidelines, maybe worth a closer look.

Morrall, if he was quarterbacking—Plum was more likely to tend to business—would squint at the spectators where the player indicated, and he’d say: “Sewell, if I’m looking at what you’re looking at, that looks like a bunch of dawgs—that is, if you want my opinion.”

“I’ve been over there,” Harley Sewell said. He was an offensive lineman from Texas.

Morrall would duck his head in the huddle and if it was feasible he would call a play which took the ball laterally across the field—a pitchout, perhaps, and the play would eat up ground toward the girls, the ball carrier sprinting for the sidelines, with his running guards in front of him, running low, and behind them the linemen coming too, so that twenty-two men were converging on them at a fair clip.

The spectators would look at the rush wide-eyed, and scatter back—cameras and handbags would be dropped, and the girls would draw back, fluttering, with their hands up, as if alligators were rearing up at them from a pond.

With the play done, the players would stand near the sidelines and gawk at the girls over their face bars, shifting around, and shuffling. The coaches’ whistles would blow them back to action after a while, and when they got back to the huddle a précis would be offered:

“Sewell, you got the taste of a groundhog. That was horrible.”

“What? Horrible? The one on the right, the one without the hat, she weren’t no dawg. Dawg? My ass!”

“Well, you take her, Sewell. You got you’self one big leash and lead that hound dawg from heah.”

Another lineman puffed up and joined the huddle.

“Morrall, for Chrissake, move the ball for the opposite side. Let’s clear out.” He looked at Sewell, his nose wrinkled.

Sewell was pained. “Where’s you’ appreciation? I don’t take no ’count of the one under the hat—that one on the left. Why, I got something of a start myself looking under that hat. But the one on the right, she wasn’t so horrible.”

The others jawed at him, and kidded, until the coaches’ whistles would interrupt. Scooter McLean would call in his high, pained voice: “Come along, come along—no picnic, no picnic!”

The biggest crowds turned up on the day of the team photographs a couple of days before the intra-squad game in Pontiac. Friday Macklem handed out the Honolulu-blue jerseys that morning, with the big silver official numbers that appeared in the game programs and were familiar to everyone who followed football in Detroit—Joe Schmidt 56, Night Train Lane 81, Terry Barr 41, Gail Cogdill 89, and so forth. Friday had two numbers available for me when I came to him for my jersey—a zero which had been worn by Johnny Olszewski—“Johnny O” everyone had called him during his playing years, and a 30, which was Hopalong Cassady’s number.

Friday made up my mind for me. “The zero,” he said. “It has more distinction.” He told me that at Washington there was this player called Steve Bagarus. He wanted a double zero on his jersey so the crowd, when they saw him coming off the bench, could call out, “Oh-oh, look out, here comes Oh-oh.”

I took the paraphernalia back to my locker and put it on—the jersey, the silver pants with the blue stripe down the side, the blue-and-white socks, and the silver helmet which Friday had resurfaced with a new blue decal of a leaping lion.

Down on the playing field, the usual throng of onlookers was swollen by a crowd of reporters, photographers, TV cameramen, and radio men. Dozens were carrying portable recording equipment around, the stick microphones ready in their hands. I avoided them. Often they stared—I could see their lips move, “Zero? Zero?”—and I would turn away as they inspected press release handouts for some inkling as to my identity.

The team and individual photographs were taken by an odd character named James F. Laughead—“Loghead” to all the players—a familiar transient throughout the professional football camps and also the colleges. He is the Karsh of Ottawa of football circles. He wore a floppy sourdough hat, a red leather vest over a Hawaiian shirt that some observers said hadn’t been off his body in a decade, and faded blue overalls that were overlarge so that from certain angles the photographer appeared to be standing in a sack. His cameras were set low—on a two- or three-inch structure he calls his “ground pad”—so that the player in his photograph seems poised against the sky in the grandiose flying-leap poses familiar to anyone who has looked into a sports magazine or a football program. He called all the players “Mister.” When he wanted a player like Yale Lary to run and leap in front of his camera, he would shout: “Show me something, Mister Lary—get up there in the air where the birds fly, Mister Lary.” He would illustrate with short chunky steps, and then crouch down to his camera. “Dig-dig-dig-dig,” he would shout. Lary, with the ball, would run up to a prescribed spot and sail up into a pose he would never find himself in on the playing field though it looked excellent in the photographs. “Once more, Mister Lary,” Laughead called. “Fly for me this time. Fly-fly-fly-fly!”

“Photograph Day” brought out many of the team’s most fervent supporters—the superfans, the players called them—whose infatuation was such that they attached themselves to football teams like remoras to a large fish, sustaining themselves by their close relationship to the organization.

They could range from the very wealthy (Jerry Wolman, who bought the Philadelphia Eagles—it was often said—so he could shag footballs on the sidelines with his players) to those men one saw turn up day after day at the practices, who later, when the season started, would stand in their long overcoats outside the locker-room corridors stamping their feet in the cold, waiting for the players, calling out to one they may even have met, “Hey, great game, Joe baby,” and crowding forward to aim an affectionate blow at his shoulder blades.

The first of the breed I heard much about when I was at training camp was Sam Smart, a businessman from Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was a fervent supporter not only of the Lions, but of anyone involved with football. Kyle Rote, the ex-Giant, once told me: “He was the sort of man who never met a stranger. He was all over the place. He followed every football player there ever was.”

Detroit, though, was his favorite team. Smart traveled to every game and he spent as much time as he could with the team itself—during training camp, down on the practice field, and on occasion taking as many as would go to dinner with him at a fancy restaurant, where often his emotions would get the better of him: he would collect the waiters and busboys and organize them into a squad of cheerleaders. “All right, now!” he’d cry out to the startled patrons. “I’m Sam Smart from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and we’re all going to roar for the Lions!” He was absolutely irrepressible, his enthusiasm such, and his nature so infectious, that he would get the people doing what he wanted, roaring like lions, and carrying on, people who’d never clapped an eye on him, or thought very much about the Lions, for that matter. One of the players told me that on a plane trip to a game on the coast he so roiled up the passengers with roars and cheers “for the Lions” that the pilots had to come back and plead for order. He was rarely silent. He had a strange war cry he often shouted—which the Lions remembered him for—“L-I-A-H-O,” it was, bellowed in airplanes, bus stations, or down on the practice field, an amalgam of the initials of the phrase “Let it all hang out!” a spirited appeal that was used so often he finally shortened it to the initials.

Occasionally he would telephone. He was too ill to come to training camp that summer. There was a public booth in the dormitory corridor which the rookies would answer, then shout for the player wanted. Once, when I answered it, a cheerful voice came across hundreds of miles. “Hey, anybody ’round? This is Sam Smart from Chattanooga, Tennessee” (he always included the appendage of his hometown). “Let me speak to a player, will you?” he’d say. “Anyone’ll do.” I found someone for him, a veteran groaning as he stretched up off his bed to pad down the corridor for the phone. But the players would always talk to him—whatever else they were doing.

The most impassioned of the superfans came and offered to be water boys and locker-room assistants—not the most edifying or pleasant of jobs, but it kept them close to the team. The Philadelphia Eagles had an ex-millionaire for their water boy, Frank Keegan, nearly seventy years old, whose run was sprightly on the way out to the players on the field with his tray of paper cups. He had been on the job since the mid-forties, paying his way to each Eagle game, where his equipment awaited him in front of the bench.

In Cleveland, they had a successful radio producer, John Wellman, working for their equipment manager, and in addition they had a local cigar-store operator, a very successful one, named Abraham Abraham, who was a sort of general handyman. Abraham’s specific duty during the game was to try to retrieve the football on field-goal and extra-point attempts. A familiar figure behind the end zone, he dressed in a garish orange suit which he thought lucky and wore to games for nearly twenty years. He stared into the sky for the ball, his arms stretched out stiff as if calling for divine assistance, but the ball invariably eluded him, sailing by him and engulfed by mobs of spectators. He was something of a showman, and in his later years he gave up trying to extricate the ball for the Cleveland management and took to capering around the periphery of the melee calling penalties on the spectators struggling for the ball—throwing his handkerchief down and signaling the infraction with appropriate arm signals to the crowds. Most of them, as might be expected, were personal fouls.

Proximity was the thing, no matter how demanding the superfan’s position. Scooter McLean, who was once with the Bears, and who kept up on activities there, told me of one opportunist called Motyka, a window washer who worked a five-foot-wide squeegee across the plate-glass windows out at O’Hare Airport. For some years he had suffered his Sundays at Wrigley Field in a miserable seat under the scoreboard, so poor a location that he finally wrote a plaintive letter to George Halas, the Bear owner-coach. To what must have been his surprise he received a letter back from Halas offering him a better, if somewhat ambulatory, view of the game—cavorting up and down the sidelines outfitted in a bear costume as the team mascot. “He grabbed at it,” said McLean. For years, thus costumed, in the vicinity of the fifty-yard line, Motyka watched the Bear games through the eye apertures of a reinforced bear head, his suit, heavily furred, stifling hot in the early part of the season and exuding the odor of melting glue. In the winter, the snowballs thudded up against him; he was a favorite target from the stands, but he paid little heed, since he considered his move from under the scoreboard into the bear suit the greatest thing that had ever happened to him—giving him a fine view of the game, and furthermore a certain rapport with the team. “He used to whack them on the butt with his paw when they came off the field,” McLean said.

“Quite a sacrifice,” I said. “I suppose he had a locker with the bear suit hanging up in it. Or perhaps he brought it to the game in a special sort of duffel bag.”

“Perhaps he wore it to the game,” McLean said. “Standing in the bus with the thing on. I don’t know.”

He shook his head. “But you want to know the craziest of them all—the real champ of the camp followers is Jungle Jamey.” He looked at me. “You heard of him?”

I said I hadn’t.

McLean was the first who described Jungle Jamey (John Baccellei was his real name), though the other players often talked about him. Almost all of them had come in contact with him at some stage. He was an eccentric Californian who was a familiar figure in the NFL training camps, as familiar as Laughead, the photographer. His allegiance was not to any particular team, but to sports figures in general. He got around in an old car covered with hundreds of sports stars’ autographs. When the training camps opened up, Jungle Jamey “adopted” a team.

One of the Lions remembered him in the Dallas Cowboys’ first training camp in Portland in 1960—the ancient car pulling up and Jungle Jamey stepping out, bearded, wearing a white hunter’s hat with a snakeskin band, a ragged pair of short pants, and a pair of shower slippers on his feet. He carried a live rabbit tucked under one arm, and with the other he brandished a hunk of meat he claimed was bear. He was on hand to “help” the team get going, he announced loudly—an offer that dismayed the coaches. The players enjoyed him, though—a valued hedge against the drudgery of training camp. On the practice field he shagged footballs, trotting clumsily, his sandals flapping, his patter of comments odd and arresting, a crowd of children scampering after him—an endearing thing about him; there always seemed to be children around him, worshipful, attracted by his strange outfit, his pets, and his pied-piper disposition. At night he’d get into the dormitory and sit around with the players telling his stories, which were long and funny for a while, and he’d show off voluminous scrapbooks, most of them attesting to his boast that he was the world’s greatest gate-crasher—certainly of sports events. One year he crashed the Rose Bowl game by walking through an entrance gate leading two goats. No one stopped him. John Gordy told me that one spring he spotted Jungle Jamey’s old car leading a line of racing cars participating in the Indianapolis 500 onto the track, not for long, before the officials shunted it off to the side, though for a fine moment or so it was the leader. Jamey had such stories to tell into the evening, up to the curfew, and then he’d close up his scrapbooks and find a place to sleep. In Portland, with the Cowboys, he slept under a grand piano in the common room.

It was never long before Jungle Jamey’s welcome wore thin. General managers were usually his undoing. Their sense of control over the camp, and the nicety of how things should be, was unhinged by Jamey, his ragged outfit, the pet rabbit hopping about, the children everywhere, and the autographed car standing out in the lot. To get Jamey to move on was not easy. When Tex Schramm, the Cowboy general manager, tried it, quietly pointing out that there was no place in the organization for him, Jungle Jamey later stood up in the training-camp dining room to offer a startling accusation. “How about you, Schramm?” he shouted. “You’re no athlete. What are you doing here if you’re no athlete? I’ll tell you what—you’re a freeloader, that’s what.”

From the Dallas team he went to the Giants and moved in with Dick Lynch and Cliff Livingston as a personal valet. Lynch, then a bachelor, who owned a mid-Manhattan apartment, has described Jungle Jamey as having minimal duties as a valet—he washed the dishes, took clothes to the laundry, and answered the telephone (“the residence of Lynch” was his greeting). Both Lynch and Livingston, who was rooming with him that season, were devoted to Jungle Jamey. He was an amusing companion, and when they went to a cocktail party they dressed Jungle Jamey in one of Lynch’s suits—his own were somewhat too “loud,” as Lynch put it—and took him along. Later, Lynch became engaged to a girl of practical mind who insisted that Jungle Jamey had to go. Livingston had to go too, but she was adamant about Jungle Jamey. She didn’t envision him as part of their married life. When Lynch dutifully reported to Jungle Jamey that his days as a valet were numbered, he received a long lecture on the perils and miseries of married life. The girl, Roz, the present Mrs. Lynch, prevailed, and Jungle Jamey left New York wearing one of Lynch’s suits, with more packed away in a Macy’s shopping bag. He called up from time to time after that—collect—but Lynch said he was always glad to hear from him.

“I’ll tell you,” said McLean, “I half expect Jungle Jamey’s car to roll out from behind those trees.”

A veteran sitting beyond him leaned over and said, “There’re some odd characters who follow football. I mean to say…” The three of us were sitting under a tree up on a knoll watching Laughead taking pictures. “Dig-dig-dig-dig, Mister Watkins!” Laughead was calling. “Like a bird-bird-bird-bird, please!” “Listen to that,” the player said. He shook his head. “You ever hear of Roughhouse Page?” he asked, looking at me sharply.

“No,” I said.

“Maybe you might have heard of him. He’s a great legend over there with the Dallas Cowboys.”

He went on to describe how in Northfield, Minnesota, where the Dallas Cowboys had their training camp in 1962, a cab had drawn up in front of the dormitory and a man in his early forties had stepped out carrying a suitcase. He wore a straw boater, an Ivy League–cut khaki suit, with a tattersall vest, somewhat scuffed white buck shoes, and, what was most noticeable, a black eye—so large and colorful that the players standing out on the dormitory stoop thought he had made himself up with a piece of burnt cork for a costume party.

He announced: “I’m Roughhouse Page! Star halfback. Where’s my room?”

The Cowboy players looked at each other. The team had recently been organized in the league—one never knew where talent lay—and they hopped off the stoop and gave him a hand with his bag. They found him a room, and sure enough, when he opened his bag, there, lying on top of bright new athletic gear, was a contract made out to Rufus Page for thirteen thousand dollars and signed by Clint Murchison, who was one of the Cowboy owners.

The coaches came down and stared at the contract. One of them said: “What credentials do you have—other than this?” pointing to the document. They had an idea Murchison was laying a joke on them. He was known to do such things. None of them had been told anything about a player named Page.

“The name’s Roughhouse Page,” the man said. He put his straw boater up on the shelf in the closet. “I played freshman football at Princeton—if that’s what you want to know—and that’s the extent of it. They never appreciated me at Princeton. I was a great light under a bushel basket.”

“Oh,” said the coaches, looking at one another. Well, how had he come by the black eye?

He replied that he had fallen into conversation with a stranger in a Chicago bar, and this fellow had asked him—after the usual pleasantries—what his profession was. Page had replied easily that he played halfback for the Dallas Cowboys. The other fellow expressed doubt. Page’s signed contract was back in the suitcase in the hotel; he had to convince his drinking companion verbally. It had not worked, and the other fellow was so incensed at Page’s insistence that he was an active halfback that a brawl had ensued in which Page had been hit in the eye with a glass peanut dish.

“Oh yes,” the coaches said. And where had Rufus Page been signed to a contract? they wanted to know.

“Roughhouse. It’s Roughhouse Page,” the man said. Well, that had transpired in a New York bar just a couple of days before. He was a family friend of the Murchisons and the two of them, he and Clint, had got to talking…

“Yes, of course,” the coaches said.

They did not quite know what to do with Page. He seemed very intense. They kept him around a few days. Laughead, the photographer, arrived while he was there, and they took some pictures of him swinging from the crossbar of the goalposts in a Cowboy uniform.

Finally, it was determined that Murchison should get back some of his own. The Cowboys found out where the owner was—he was vacationing on Spanish Cay, a small island in the Bahamas—and Roughhouse Page was dispatched there by plane with orders to find out “more specifically” how Murchison felt he could fit into the Cowboy attack. The last part of the trip required a small chartered seaplane, which taxied in to shore, and Murchison, looking out the bay window of his villa, was surprised to see Page step off, carrying his suitcase, the straw boater jaunty on his head; he was carrying his suitcase under one arm, and wearing a Dallas Cowboy sweatshirt with the team name across the front.

Page was indeed, as he had said, a Murchison family friend, an acquaintance of personable eccentricity who had been a New York broker. Murchison went out to greet him with a faintly wan smile. His guest stayed on at Spanish Cay. He stayed for a week. Murchison was not sure what to do with him. Eventually, he put Page aboard his yacht and had him ferried to Nassau, a hundred miles away. He had some excuse to offer—that it was a part of the Bahamas that Roughhouse should see. Quite likely there was football talent there which Roughhouse could scout for the Cowboys. They had these big rangy policemen in Nassau.

Murchison himself happened to put into Nassau a month or so later, Page quite forgotten, and, sitting in a café called Bluebeard’s, he was startled to see Roughhouse Page ride through the place on a bicycle. He was still wearing the Cowboy shirt. “Hi, Clint,” he called out, raising a hand from the handlebar in greeting, and rode out of the café through the back door. His balance riding between the café tables was terrific—according to Murchison—who said the sight was one he could never quite forget. Subsequently, when he dropped into the Cowboy training camp, or joined them on a road trip, he would ask when he first arrived: “I don’t suppose… ah… Roughhouse isn’t around, is he?”

“So you never heard of that character,” the Lion player said to me. “I thought maybe you might have heard of that cat.”

I squinted at him through the sun, wondering if he had a comparison in mind—sitting as I was next to him in my blue jersey with the big zero.

“No, no,” I said quickly. “No, I’ve never heard of anyone like him… truly.”

“I tell you,” he said, “in the crowds that follow football there are some beauties.”