CHAPTER 18

It had been my intention to play all the positions—to get, as I put it to myself, a more “rounded” perspective of the game. Before leaving for Detroit, I told a friend of mine what I had in mind, and he said: “What a rotten idea. You’re just going to get smashed around. There’s no suspense in that. Who’s interested? It’s applied misery. There is something wrong with you.”

“No,” I said. “I may get knocked around, but I’ll be privileged—it’s a privileged position. At least for an observer. You’d be absolutely right if I were trying to be a football star.”

“Well, I think that’s what you’ve got in mind. I repeat: I think there’s something wrong. You’d better look up somebody and get yourself straightened out.”

“I’m an observer,” I said stubbornly.

“You got some sneaking idea you can make it,” he said. “Don’t try to kid me.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?” I said hotly. “After all, I’m going to be trying my best.”

Despite him, when I got to Cranbrook I kept to my intentions, though with a certain prudence. I tried Cogdill’s position a few times. Nussbaumer, the end coach, let me try, and described the patterns to run. Raymond Berry had said it was the safest position, but as I moved into the defensive secondary, my eyes darted everywhere for a clotheslining linebacker, and I ran, according to the Hawk, in a crouched run like a burglar coming up through the rose gardens in the twilight. The ball was not thrown in my direction.

I asked John Gonzaga if the professionals ever craved to play positions other than their own.

He told me that Leo Nomellini, who was a great tackle from the University of Minnesota and played with the San Francisco 49ers, used to run the ball as a fullback every once in a while. Frankie Albert, the 49er quarterback, knew that Nomellini’s idol was the big star fullback Bronko Nagurski. So in the huddle, if things were going all right, he’d call the thirty-one wedge, and he’d say, “Nomo, you run it.” Nomellini only got a yard or so, ever, and he always got the stuffing popped out of him.

The easiest positions for me to try were on the special teams—the kickoff and the kickoff return units. No one minded my substitution. The players called them the suicide squads, and there was always a certain amount of moaning on the practice field at the end of the day when George Wilson would call for these special units to drill. Usually the rookies, being expendable, and yet full of élan and willing to rip down the field full-tilt for the ball carrier, were selected for them. The open-field blocking, with players moving at that clip, was brutal, and the coaches always watched nervously, Doc Thompson on one knee right at the sidelines.

I found that there was a curious, terrifying exhilaration about being on these teams, especially on the kickoff unit, lining up with the others, hearing the whistle blow, and then committing oneself to a full-out rush downfield, yelling, in it something of the exhilaration of running down a beach for the water at a speed one no longer controls toward a humped and chill line of high surf.

My own trouble was that the concept, going downfield, was not only to defend one’s lane, but also to maintain a constant position relative to the men on either side, so that the downfield rush was straight, like a ruler sweeping crumbs off a table. The defense would move downfield at absolutely top speed, shouting, and a fold would develop at my position on the line since I was unable to keep up, and when the time came to curve my lane in to contain the play like the sweep of a seining net, I was panting heavily, and the business, which was bringing down the runner, would be done with, the downed ball carrier and his tacklers beginning to pick themselves up as I ran up, puffing.

Don Doll would say, “George, never be last,” shaking his head. “Get on down there next time, and unload on that ball carrier.”

On one occasion, going downfield, I was picked up bodily by Roy Williams, a big rookie defensive tackle, and held aloft. He did it as a joke, instead of throwing a block, and he lifted me up in the air over his head, a great humiliation, weighing as I did over two hundred pounds in football gear, and as I revolved over his head I called down, “For Chrissake, Williams, let me down!”

I wanted to try the running back positions, to take a handoff and see how far I could get into the line. But, whenever I practiced with the backs, I found myself absorbed by the quarterbacking, and I watched Plum and Morrall with fierce concentration. I knew so little about quarterbacking that taking on additional assignments, and learning new patterns and procedures, seemed excessive, though often, on the sidelines, with my notebook, or in the dining room, I talked with the backfield personnel to have some concept of their positions.

Nick Pietrosante was the Lion first-string fullback. He had been a great star at Notre Dame, his picture often on national magazines, and if Detroit had a glamour player it was he—with dark, somewhat Valentino-like good looks which one often saw on television in the shaving-soap or hair-lotion commercials in which he starred. On a team which had a sputtering running attack and in a league dominated by such superstar fullbacks as Jim Taylor of Green Bay and Jim Brown of Cleveland, Pietrosante was a controversial figure often booed by Detroit fans who hoped for long-ranging thrusts by their running backs. Pietrosante’s great value was as a blocker, and he was very good on quick openers and trap plays into the middle of the line, which are not much to see from the stands—being apparently a moving hillock of players—but which result in steady three-, four-, and five-yard gains that are invaluable if not spectacular. The sweeps and pitchouts which give running room were not Pietrosante’s forte. He constantly nagged Plum to call the short trap plays in which he relied on what he considered his chief attribute: anticipation—to get off on the “hut” of “hut-one” or “-two” and pop through a hole wedged open just momentarily.

“It used to be the force and speed with which you hit a hole,” he told me one evening in his room. “Power and speed was everything, and all the talk was about big backs who could do the hundred-yard dash in nine point something seconds. But it’s vastly overrated. Jim Taylor doesn’t get through the line with great speed. He anticipates, and of course he’s sharp and quick, and he knows wonderfully what to do with his blockers. There is always a key moment in a run, which is when the blocker commits himself, at which point the back must make his move to take advantage of however the blocker has moved his man. Skill is involved, and instinct, and anticipation—and Taylor and all the good ones have got it.”

“What do you think about as the quarterback calls the signals?” I asked. “Do you close your eyes when you run for the middle of the line and it’s… ah… piled up against you?”

“When we line up, first I keep reminding myself not to point the play,” Pietrosante answered. “Either with my feet, or my eyes. If I flash a glance where I’m going, and make a habit of it, the linebackers will pick it up, and adjust their defense. What I think about mainly is the count, and the hole I’m supposed to head for. I never think about the ball. That’s the quarterback’s responsibility. You must remember that in Pontiac if you call any of my plays—to get that ball to me. I’m not going to hold up and wait for it. All that’s on my mind is the count, getting off on it, and the hole to head for.”

He ignored the question about his eyes, whether he closed them. I did not pursue it.

“The pleasure is something, I mean to tell you,” he was saying, “to get through that hole, to get past those first big four. Of course, the size of the front four linemen is increasing, and they move faster, and they’re smarter. That sweetens the pleasure, if you please.” He grinned. If you get past them, it usually means that you’re past the linebackers as well—unless they’ve sucked back to look for a draw play—so you’re moving to pick up a few yards. It wasn’t like that in college—where the linebackers and deep backs are all up close and you have twenty-two men in a relatively small area. It’s hard to run in such a congestion. That’s one of the facts of life in college, where there just isn’t the talent to mount a pro attack, which is spread out wide to split and disperse the defense, and consequently needs experts and technicians to make it work.”

“How about those front four?” I asked. “What was it like to run against Big Daddy Lipscomb?”

“He talked a lot at his position,” Pietrosante said, “telling everybody in that confident, oily voice of his just what he was going to do—that someone was going to get flattened, he was going to squeeze the juice out of someone ‘personal.’ He was capable of it. He was a great showboat character.”

“What about running against Alex Karras?” I asked.

“He’s a type of guy you’d never think is ready,” Pietrosante said. “But with the ball in the air, he is: he has everything, the Johnny Unitas of his position—instinct, size, ability, the moves of a ballet dancer, dainty…” That was the word Pietrosante used, and, seeing that I was surprised, he said: “Well, one of the nicknames for him is ‘Tippy-Toes’—hard to believe, I mean the fellow standing still looks like he’s sunk in the ground. But then he takes one step and you can spot that he’s all springs and coils inside.”

“And Roger Brown? How about him?”

A slow grin worked across Pietrosante’s face. “Why should I tell you anything about him?” he asked. “You’re going to be finding out about Roger firsthand come the game night in Pontiac. He’s not going to be sitting on the bench.”

“Well, that’s a thought,” I said.

“He’s down the hall,” said Pietrosante. “Perhaps you might drop in and make some sort of arrangement—at least make your peace with him.”

“Well, that’s a thought,” I said again.

I never tried playing any of the big interior lineman positions, such as Brown’s—either on defense or offense. Down on the field I tried their drills. I tried the blocking sleds, and also tackling the big leather dummy that hung above a sawdust pit from chains and pulleys attached to a steel support like a playground structure. The team stood in line and sprinted off one by one, and the structure would creak and the pulleys shriek as the dummy was hit. The trick was to use the shoulders rather than the arms, and to keep on driving through the pit and let the bag slide off the shoulders and back. If you wrapped your arms around the tackling dummy, and hung on and tried to wrestle it down, as I did the first time, the bag turned over and one sagged ignominiously to the sawdust pit, the bag on top, somewhat the way one is turned by a rubber sea horse in a swimming pool. Aldo Forte would yell, “Keep your head up, keep to your feet, drive, drive, drive—when your head is down, you fall down, head up, up, up!”

The blocking sleds, off in a far corner of the field, had curved padded supports to contain the simultaneous rush of seven linemen, their shoulders to the pads, their legs driving, and the sled, with Bingaman standing on it, would sweep across the grass. It seemed simple enough to try, like pushing a car, except that I found it difficult to spring off the three-point stance with the astonishing drive and timing of the regular linemen. Bingaman would announce the hike number, and then call the quarterback’s cadence. “Hut-one hut-two hut-three,” and the line would push off at the “hut” of whatever the hike number was, getting that fraction of a second’s advantage, and the sled would spring away without my getting a shoulder to it—and I would lunge forward after it, almost toppling forward, like trying to catch an animal running low to the ground, until my shoulder would fetch up against the pads. Sometimes on the blocking sleds the players would gag around, and at the hike number I would be the only one to drive forward at the sled, the others holding up on some secret signal, and without the others to help, and with Bingaman’s weight, it was like jarring a shoulder into a wall. The players all stood up, grinning, and Forte yelled, “Keep to your feet, drive, drive, drive, head up, up, up.”

I never tried the “nutcracker drills,” in which an offensive lineman and a defensive lineman are pitted against each other. One could watch these drills, the linemen bucking at each other, hearing the crack of gear, and the infinitely melancholy gasps of violent effort, and one learned enough about prudence. Fights often broke out, I was told, during contact work of this sort. It was hard to keep one’s equanimity banging into someone else, and being banged into—and finally the tempers could not be contained, and the flailing would begin. The year before, Karras and Gordy had a fight which required four or five men on each player’s back to separate them. Yet the two were roommates. The violence never lasted for more than a few minutes. Wilson occasionally talked about fighting. There was a pair of boxing gloves in Friday’s training room, which he said were to be used if an argument was to be settled. There’d be none of it on the field. The gloves collected dust. The eruptions of temper died as quickly as they came.

One’s impressions that the positions in the interior line required solely heft were faulty. Guile was as much a part of the tackles’ equipment as the feints and fakes were of the flanker backs’ and ends’. Both Roger Brown and Alex Karras thought all the time about removing weight, not to the point where they were weakened, but just enough to be able to couple their weight with speed so that their attack was both massive and agile. I found this out talking to Brown. I followed Pietrosante’s advice and dropped in on him. He delighted in talking about his position, but it was always the technical aspects he talked about rather than the physical demands—so he seemed to deprecate his enormous bulk, half out of a little armchair, as he talked in favor of the other factors which made a play successful against the offense.

His “keys” for example—which he talked about at length—were essential: “keys” meant hints he could pick up from the actions of the players opposite to help him diagnose the play. He keys (the word is both noun and verb) on the guard in front of him, then the center just to his left, then the off guard, and finally the backs within view—seeing their moves almost simultaneously with the snap of the ball; as he moves to the attack he must decide from what he has seen what the opposition is up to. It is not simple. If the guard in front of him pulls left, toward the center, an end run toward the opposite side might be indicated, but then again the offense may be trying to fool him: the guard can take a step or two to the left and then return, and if Brown has committed himself to defending against an end run, and acted accordingly, the offense may have succeeded in removing him from the play’s actual line of direction. Offensive moves are planned to make the defense commit itself, particularly the enormous interior linemen, and then take advantage of that commitment, and the offense can do this, if a guard’s feint is successful, without ever having to lay a block to those cat-quick three-hundred-pound defensemen. Thus, for the defense, if only to save embarrassment, reading the keys is an essential adjunct to strength and speed, and success at it comes with experience. For example, when the guard opposite pulls left, Brown has additional keys he knows to look for: the blur of moving backfield men will tell him something, and if from the corner of his eye he spots the center falling back to block to hold down the pursuit, then a power play to the opposite side is almost surely indicated. Reading this key fast Brown bolts left for the center himself, hightailing along the line of scrimmage for the spot players call the “cutoff,” where the halfback with the ball will run out of playing field and must cut downfield, often to find Brown reaching for him as he does.

Even in straight-ahead blocking, which to an onlooker seems a simple test of strength, there are infinite subtleties. If Brown, in the first few seconds of contact with the guard opposite, feels the exhilaration of outbulling him, pushing him back, he must worry immediately that perhaps he’s being led on, being suckered out of position for a takeoff or a trap play, and accordingly he must contain his rush. Equivalently, on a pass play, with the quarterback in his sights, Brown must hold his final commitment until he is sure that the quarterback is no longer in position to initiate a draw play; he must wait a half second as he controls the blockers with his hands until the quarterback is out of the “roll zone,” and is himself committed, and then Brown goes for him.

That provides the highest satisfaction—to break down the protection and reach the quarterback, to loom over him, seeing the last quick frantic turns of the passer’s helmet before it ducks in resignation, and the quarterback’s body begins to jackknife over the ball tucked in the belly for protection as Brown enfolds and drops him. Brown does not feel he has had a good game unless he has been able to do this once or twice during the afternoon.

“Well, what sort of pleasure is it?” I asked him. The Dinah Washington records were going and Night Train Lane was lying on his belly on the next bed, watching them turn.

Brown shrugged.

“Well, what about rage?” I asked.

He blinked behind his spectacles. It was strange to think that his vision was poor. I remembered him one night trying to slap a big moth that was hammering around the overhead light. He shouted, “Fly still,” flailing at the moth with a big towel so wildly that he drove Night Train out of the room.

“No,” he said. “I don’t go around growling. But the feeling’s there. You know what I feel, Train,” he said to Lane. “I think back on all the guys I know who have been injured, and I say to myself those guys across the line are trying to do it to me. Well, they aren’t going to do it,” he said.

Night Train nodded. “You got… er… a great communion to get to the Hall of Fame,” he said.

Brown stared briefly at him, and continued: “It’s not hatred. You feel deep you want to win. It feels good to get to the quarterback, but you never want to disjoint him. Mind, you want to let him know you’re there. For sure. So I get plenty worked up. Home with the wife and then on the field, I’m two different people—like Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll. On the field—” he began laughing—“I don’t know that I’d like to meet myself on the field… I mean I can think of other folks around that I’d prefer meeting.”

He turned his palms up. He had a large ring with an embossed RB set in diamonds, and it flashed with the movement of his hands.

Night Train looked at me and began giggling. “Jawge, you set to find if Roger’s goin’ to disjoin you? I mean in Pontiac you are goin’ to have expectation in this whole question—he’s goin’ be at you shufflin’ and breathin’ right hard.”

“Perhaps the time has come for me to make some sort of donation to his favorite charity,” I said.

Brown was grinning from his chair. His jaw was very wide, his teeth strong and set apart from each other so the gaps between them showed. He seemed benign enough; he leaned out of his chair to fetch a black porkpie hat, which he set on his head. It seemed small and rode high.

“Smart?”

“What about after a game?” I asked.

“I lie in a hot tub,” he said, “with the water up to my chin, and just ease. My wife stands around and pours in the Epsom salts and tells me what happened and what she would have done if she was the quarterback. She’s a big fan, and she can talk longer about a game I been in than I can.”

I asked him how much he thought he was going to miss Alex Karras at the other tackle. He shook his head and said that while he admired what he had seen of Floyd Peters, the tackle that Detroit had traded for to fill Karras’s spot, he expected to spend his autumns with two men always working on him, the offensive guard and tackle, and also the fullback in reserve, and even the offensive center dropping back to pick up his rush if his penetration was to the inside. With Karras playing next to him—with his great ability—the offense couldn’t afford to concentrate its blocking power against one man in such a manner.

Brown was not particularly effusive about the pleasures of football. Night Train Lane, on the bed, tried to get him to say something more profound (Train himself got so excited talking about his love of football that he was unintelligible, or at least more than usual), but Brown was insistent: it was the pleasure of winning that pleased him most, and having played a good game, which meant getting to the quarterback and dumping him at least once. And it was the little things too—getting through a game without too many bruises, and lying for hours in that hot tub with the salts in it.

It was pleasant sitting with Brown and Train. It was easy talking. They found some soft drinks, and some Nabisco crackers. We listened for a while to the Dinah Washington records. The two of them were especially curious about my view of the team. I told them how impressed I was with its apparent solidity—that it was knit strongly, at least to my eyes. Of course, I had no idea what happened when things went badly.

“Well,” said Train, “people stand whispering in rooms. You can always tell. Look in the locker room of a team that’s slumping and just lost another game, and oh my: the owners set around in one corner, whispering, the coaches in another, and the players all huddled, with the talk low down.” He turned on the bed. “There’s no misery like that.”

I wondered, talking about the strength of a team, if racial questions were ever a problem. Brown was as reluctant to talk about the racial problems in professional football as I was to ask him about them. He said that once in North Carolina, during the exhibition season, a black girl had refused him a date because he was too light. “So you get it both ways,” he said.

Night Train said from the bed: “Yo’ don’ think maybe yo’ three hunnert pounds had somethin’ to do with this girl bein’ bawky?”

“She didn’t say nothing about the poundage,” Brown said, “only the color of the poundage.”

Nor did the white players talk much about racial problems. Dismissing the subject, they often said that in professional football it was performance that counted, that was all, that football was a business in which a player was rated by his ability to help the team. The concept of the team and team play was essential. Nothing else made any difference. All players knew that. If their prejudices got in the way, that was the end of them. You could be prejudiced against a rookie trying for your position—that was a clash of one man’s ability against another’s—but prejudices in respect to race or color were violations of an unspoken code. The Lions were quick to rise to any slight that involved a black teammate—there had been some difficulty registering in a hotel on one occasion during an exhibition swing through the South and the team had formed a bloc to force the management to back down.

Still, the situation was paradoxical—which was why, I suppose, the subject so rarely was mentioned despite the civil rights headlines in the daily papers. While the relationships among the players seemed easy enough in the communal living of the training camp—except in the rigors of competition—the players felt about the world outside with prejudices intact. The Southerners on the team, who made up almost a third of the players, continued to have their firm and expected views on school and social integration. In the off-season, the social communication between black and white, however close the rapport seemed in training camp, was almost nonexistent.

Even in the strict business of football, despite what was said, if one probed it was easy enough to find the taint of prejudice. One of the coaches told me that as a matter of principle he would never want to have more than six black players on a team: cliques formed if you had that many—that was his idea—and the whole all-important concept of the team went awry.

Once, when I was traveling on the West Coast with the team, I dropped into a bar after the game with some of the Lions, and in the bar was the opposing quarterback. The Lions, who had won the game, had handled him roughly, though he grinned at them when we came through the door. He was drinking champagne out of a mug. He had consumed a lot by the time our group arrived. He began criticizing the black on his own team, and then he extended his criticism to the rest of the league. His idea was that the black backed away from contact, that he hadn’t the nerves for the game. The people along the bar began shouting at him.

“Look at this,” he said, weaving. “Listen! Take the linebackers. The search-and-destroy guys are the linebackers. How many black linebackers you got in the NFL? Maybe one or two. They haven’t got it, I tell ya. They flinch. It’s the same with the running backs. My guys do, they flinch, I tell ya, and I’d rather hand off to a gimpy fullback who’s white druther than my guy, the guy they make me hand off to, who’s got mush for guts. You know why I got to hand the ball to a colored back? Because the NAACP says so, that’s why, and they’re calling the tune these days, not the coaches.”

Around the bar he was listened to with some embarrassment. Someone said, “That’s balls, fellow, real balls.” I asked John Gordy about it on the drive back to the hotel. He is a Southerner, from Nashville, Tennessee.

“He got beat bad in the game,” Gordy said, “and he’s drowning it with champagne—what d’ya think of that?—and he hasn’t got himself a good fullback or halfbacks. You give him Jim Brown for a fullback and Lenny Moore and you wouldn’t hear that stuff from him, and maybe he wouldn’t put such a run on the grape.”

“But the prejudices would remain—bigotry in that fellow’s case?”

“That quarterback has a good head. He’s under pressure. He’s losing, and he’s not as sensible as he could be.”

“Well, all right, call them prejudices,” I said. “These would remain.”

“Sure,” Gordy said. “Why not? You come to the leagues with your prejudices already set for you—from your home, your school—and not much happens to change them. What is increased is understanding. After all, you’re living together, playing together, and you learn it’s easy enough. Perhaps that undermines the prejudice. But not too much. We get along.”