CHAPTER 17

The Lion player who was most conscious of crowds and who particularly enjoyed “Photograph Day” was Gail Cogdill, the split or weak-side end whom Don Doll had spoken of as the greatest athlete on the club. His affinity for crowds bordered on the psychopathic—an absorption so acute that one was aware, watching him, that with every move he made on the field he was pandering to the crowds shamelessly.

The majority of players during a game were scarcely conscious of the crowd, they told me, concerned as they were with the near-private struggle with the man opposite—the anonymity increased by the number of men involved. What the players referred to as “showboating” was difficult in a team sport which required twenty-two men moving in a relatively restricted area.

Cogdill was an exception. His position, split off from the compression at the line, set him apart from the pack, which was quite suitable to his nature, and so were the darting feints of his flickering moves through the opposing secondary. He was very often the last man back in the huddle, not because he had a longer way to come from running a deep pass pattern, but because by dawdling he had a little more time to keep himself from the anonymity of the huddle. When the offensive men came off the field, Cogdill would flop down on the sidelines to one side of the team bench, and there the trainer’s assistants, Collins and Stevenson, would work over his legs, kneading and stretching them. He suffered from cramps and muscle pulls, so he said, though there was a body of thought on the team which suspected that he was more conscious of being in plain sight of the crowd than he was aware of pain in his legs; up in the stands he could appreciate that people were saying, “My God, what’s happened to Cogdill?” When the offensive team went back on the field Cogdill would cease his cries of “Twist that leg, pull it!” to his masseurs, straining on him like Swedes, leap up smartly, and without the slightest suggestion of disability run onto the field, usually without his helmet—an oversight sure to get the fans looking at him again and wondering aloud, “My God, there’s Cogdill without his helmet!” Often he would nearly reach the huddle before realizing—his teammates shouting at him—and running back to the bench for his headgear. Perhaps it was calculated. No one begrudged him his habits; his skills were so extraordinary that nobody cared what motivated them.

At the end of a game, Cogdill was always the last player off the field, sometimes by as much as twenty or thirty minutes, dawdling as long as someone was still around to whack him on the back or ask him for an autograph.

I had asked the players from time to time what they enjoyed most about their profession. Some had said travel, others the money and the security, some the camaraderie of the club, others the excitement of the sport, and Danny Lewis, the fullback, had said simply that it was just the pleasure of hitting hard into the opposing line. Cogdill, when I asked him, had said that signing autographs was the best, down on the field after a game, especially when the kids came up and called him by his first name. It was what he had always dreamed of.

He had been raised in a small Wyoming town, Worland, with a population of about three thousand. He said that actually he came from a small community just on the edge of a forest that ran north clear to the Arctic Circle. Its population was fourteen. It wasn’t officially a town, so he said he came from Worland, which was the county seat. He was enthusiastic about the frontier aspect of his upbringing. There were some cowpokes in his family. “I’ve got Indian blood in me—one-quarter Cheyenne,” he told me. “I’ve got some madness in me. Can’t you tell by my eyes?” He looked at me hopefully. He had very light blue eyes. “I don’t know,” I said, inspecting them clinically. “I’ve never looked into a madman’s eyes, that I can recall.”

He seemed disappointed. He had a scar under one eye, a thin blue line where he had been “clotheslined”—the clubbing, stiff-armed defensive maneuver—the bony part of a linebacker’s wrist getting past his helmet’s cage from the stiff-arm and slicing him severely. Some of the eye black which protects players in a game against the glare of the sun had been sewn into the cut when it was stitched up so that the scar still showed. He was the youngest-looking of the Lions, with his scrubbed high-school face, and he said whatever came into his mind, his ingenuousness being such that when he began talking about himself the players would groan pointedly and leave the room, or someone would cross the dormitory corridor from a card game going on opposite and close the door against his chatter.

Though he had been four years with the Lions, some of the players still called him “Rookie.”

He shook his head. He told me: “I had always hoped that if I had a nickname it would be… well, ‘Cougar.’ I went to Washington State—the team there was the Cougars, and it was a name I liked. I would like to have taken it with me, I’ll tell you, but instead they called me ‘Rookie’ when I first came up in 1960 to the Lions and some of the older players still call me ‘Rookie.’ Nobody called me ‘Cougar.’

“Even my wife doesn’t call me ‘Cougar,’ but at least she doesn’t call me ‘Rookie’! You know who else calls me ‘Rookie’? John Unitas, the Colt quarterback. He threw me a pass, a soft lob pass, in the Pro Bowl one year, 1963, no one around me, just like in the dreams except that the ball went right through my hands. So he says to me whenever I see him—at banquets on the circuit—he says, ‘Well, Rook, how are those hands of yours coming along?’ I couldn’t believe it at the time. I put my hands up, and the ball went right through my arms, like they were a hoop. It was very embarrassing. It’s then that you become very conscious of the crowd—when you do something wrong. You can feel them looking at you, and the sound is suddenly tremendous, like you’re standing in a tunnel with trains moving around. There’s nothing you can do. Maybe kick at the grass. I remember Pat Studstill missing a pass once, and he picked up the ball, which was lying there rocking, and he walked around with these little angry steps, everybody hooting at him, and then he kicked it, getting all that frustration and rage into that punt, and he caught the ball absolutely perfect—well, he’s a hell of a kicker anyway, as you know—and my! that ball went far up into the stands in a perfect spiral, up into the mezzanine, and it went through an exit opening on the fly—phloop, just like that, it went through there and disappeared.”

“It’s to keep from brooding about it,” I said.

“You can’t have anything on your mind but positive thoughts,” said Cogdill. “All week long I run patterns over in my mind. In each one I beat my man, every time. Sometimes I juke him right out of his shoes and he’s lying on the ground in his socks. The ball sails over him and my hands go up for it. Every time, you understand, I beat my man.” His pale eyes glinted. “Then the game comes and I’m set for it.”

“I think that’s called psychokinesis,” I said. “The power of mind over matter. That’s what Cassius Clay does. He runs the future over in his mind—what he’s going to do to his opponent in the ring—like a rehearsal. A good dice player has it—the power to will a number by seeing it in his mind.”

“What I dream of most of the time is the long one, the bomb,” Cogdill said. “Even during the game I dream about the long one. It was two years before I got thrown one. It came in a game against the Eagles, the last game of my second season. When the quarterback first releases it, it scares you, my God!—to look back and get that first glimpse of it beginning to come and to know that it’s got the length and the next time you look, which is straight up, moving like crazy, it’s going to be above you against the sky, beginning to settle, and you’ve got everyone beat… I mean there’s nothing to compare with it.…”

I asked about the physical attributes of the split ends and the flankers.

“Speed is important,” he said. “But it’s overrated: you’ve got to be able to handle it. You have to learn how to shift speeds, which is more effective than just being able to travel at a terrific clip like those guys they call the World’s Fastest Human who last in the league awhile and then disappear. Then you have to have strength. Part of your job is to hold against the big ends. Then you have to arm-fight your way through the secondary, mainly against the linebackers. So strength is important. Then you have to have great eye-hand coordination—that is, when to go up for the ball. Basketball is the best training for that. And then, of course, there’s the catch itself. The ability to catch is not something you’re born with. It’s self-taught. The fact is, I taught myself wrong. I catch the ball goofy. I don’t cradle it, like holding water in my palms, which is how any normal person catches it. My right hand is always on top, over the left, to clap down on the ball, no matter where the ball is. Sometimes it looks from the stands like I’m trying to make it difficult for myself. That’s kind of goofy, isn’t it—sort of nuts?”

“I guess so, sure,” I said.

“Then comes the best part. Running once you got it… twisting down the sidelines… it’s just inexpressible. I wish you could experience it just once,” he said, shaking his head. He could hardly sit still thinking about it.

“Do you wear anything on your fingers?” I asked, to get him settled.

“Sure,” he said. “Most all the receivers do. It’s pine stickum—some sort of tar. I keep a little supply of it on me during a game—maybe in the ear holes of my helmet, or stuck in my crotch. Pat Studstill carries his over one ankle, in his socks. The stuff is great for cold weather—which seems to shrink up the ball so the oil comes out and it’s hard to hold. On a cold day I always try to cradle the ball against my chest.”

I asked, “Why do ends and flankers who get beyond their man and catch the ball always seem to get pulled down. Isn’t it easier to run away from someone than to catch him?”

“You’re much slower carrying the ball,” Cogdill said. “Your running style has to compensate, ever so slightly. And usually the safety has an angle on you.

“You know what you have to have,” he went on abruptly. “You got to have speed, half-decent moves, the ability to shift speeds, quick reflexes so you can come back if a ball is underthrown, how to go up in the air after a ball, and then that important thing I was talking about—hand-eye coordination, how to catch a ball—and yet what makes it tough is that after you’ve learned what you can, and you get paid a lot of money for it, and you work for it, there is still no such thing as perfection, no matter how hard you struggle for it. Each time the situation changes when that ball comes through the air at you—so it’s not the same as the time before, and there’s no way you can prepare for it absolutely. There’s all sorts of things that can go wrong. Did you know that the air is different in each town? And that the ball acts different in it? That’s not so surprising. The water is slower here than in Tokyo. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said truthfully. “What does that mean—‘the water is slower…’?”

“You thought you knew everything, didn’t you? Well, now you know something new.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Why don’t you write it down in your notebook?”

So I did.

I asked, “So what does happen when things go wrong? What do you do when a play breaks down and Plum is scampering around?”

“Unless that happens, I very rarely break the pattern I’m supposed to run. But if I see Milt pump his arm in a certain way, or I look back and see that things are going badly and he’s out of the pocket running for his life, then I usually reverse the pattern I’ve just run—I go back the way I came. Milt knows that, and so almost instinctively he knows where to throw to find me.”

“But there are the bad days?”

“Sometimes you fall down, or you don’t feel right, like you’re running on a beach in heavy sand. But when you’re right nothing goes wrong. The trouble is that you can be going just right, beating your man, just like in the dreams you’ve had all week long, but you’ve got to remember you’ve got a quarterback calling signals who may not have you in his plans. He may not heave it to you.” He said reflectively: “It’s bad for an end not to get thrown to. It’s like Nick Pietrosante, a fullback, having to block all the time. He may be the best blocking back in the business, which maybe Nick is, but it drives him nuts. I used to feel strongly about it, more than I should have. I went to George Wilson, like a kid over spilt milk, and I said: ‘George, I want to get the ball thrown to me.’ I was down in the dumps. So Wilson says, grinning at me, ‘Gail, you know how the politicians work. Why don’t you take the quarterbacks out to dinner, a nice lobster dinner, and maybe you can get them to throw it to you a few times.’ It took me five years before I appreciated that my value as a decoy was important, and I even began to get a kick out of double-teaming and blocking—even trying to hold those monster defensive ends in the front four.”

He looked up. “How about that? You going to get into the line, the offensive line, to see what it’s like to face those big ends and tackles close up?” he asked. “You got to do that?”

I said, “Gail, if you can describe it very explicitly, maybe I won’t have to.”

“I’ll try,” he said, considering. “Well, playing Pittsburgh, my sophomore year, on an outside run I was in close and I was supposed to take care of Big Daddy Lipscomb, their monster tackle. When the play started, he stood up to look around and I happened to bump him right. He stumbled. I could hardly believe what I had done. He looked at me and he said: ‘Li’l man, you better find a different job.’ In all the games I played, looking into that man’s face was the most frightening. How’s that?”

“That’s all right,” I said. “That’s terrific. You’re giving me the feel of it. Won’t be any need to do it myself. How do you play those bullers? Doug Atkins of the Bears, those enormous people who rely on strength primarily?”

“You have to set up close,” Cogdill said, “as close as you can, so he doesn’t pick up the momentum on you, which he can get if you play back. Of course, against the big quick guys like Atkins, and Marchetti of the Colts, I can’t do much but be humiliated. I bounce off like a bird run into a windowpane.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “You’re getting me off the hook.”

“When I miss my block, and get bounced off, and the big guy’s past me, his head down and moving for the play like a bull, I shout, ‘Look out! Look out!’ so the quarterback knows that I’ve missed my block and a big guy’s coming for his blind side going like sixty. When you’ve thrown a ‘look-out block’ you don’t feel much like going back to the huddle. It’s hard to know what sort of a face to put on for the quarterback.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Tell me more about Marchetti and Atkins. I’m getting the feel of it.”

“Blocking Atkins, what I try to do is stick my nose in his belt—just hold him up a bit. What happens is that he jumps over you, either that or he picks you up and throws you away. Once he threw me into Ninowski, our quarterback then, and knocked him down with me like I was a medicine ball. Gino Marchetti, he uses his hands on the big fellows to get by them, but for me, he just runs over me, his cleat marks up my belly.…”

“Grand,” I said.

“Will that do?” Cogdill asked.

“You got me off the hook,” I said.

“It was all right?”

“Very descriptive,” I said.