CHAPTER 19

George Wilson addressed us one evening at the start of the eight p.m. class. “Next Saturday night,” he said, “that’s only four days away—we’ve got the big intra-squad game coming up in Pontiac. That’s about half an hour down the main road. We’ll dress in game uniforms here and drive down there by bus. They’ve got a fine stadium, good lights, and there’ll be a big crowd there. They make quite a ceremony of it—a Queen of the Day on hand, fireworks, bands, and all of it. Before the game there’ll be some contests—punting, sprints, field-goal kicking, passing accuracy—there’ll be a number of them, cash prizes, and those of you who want to enter, sign up with the Hawk.”

One of the players wanted to know how the scoring for the intra-squad game worked.

Wilson explained that for the offensive unit, the scoring was regular. The defensive unit would get one point for stopping the offense from making a first down in a series; it would get two points for a fumble recovery, an interception, or a blocked field goal.

“The game’s the big chance for you rookies,” he said. “We want to see how you do. We’re going to take a look at the third-string quarterback”—my heart jumped—“to see what sort of reserve strength we got.” He looked to where I was sitting.

“Whitlow,” he said to the big center. “How’s the kid coming along receiving the snap from center?”

“Well,” said Whitlow. “He’s… ah… coming along.”

“Whitlow,” he said, “you’d better stay down after practice a little longer and work with him on his plays. And you too, ends—Gibbons and Cogdill—and Pietrosante and Lewis. Right?”

The big men nodded.

Terry Barr leaned across from his seat. “Learn everything you can,” he said. “One of those crazy rookie linemen is going to try to make his reputation off you.” He nodded gravely. “If one of them snaps you in two—I mean, literally—the club’s not going to think about letting him go. He’ll fill Tiger Stadium with people in to see the killer.”

“I’ve got four days to beat those rookies to it,” I said. “To develop some crippling ache or other.”

As if reading my mind, Wilson said, “Now you guys, don’t go and get yourself hurt before the game. We want to see what you can do—and if you’re sitting on the bench with a muscle pull, you’re not worth anything to us. You can think about packing your suitcase.”

A prime topic with the Lions—not of conversation but of concern—was the question of physical condition. George Wilson mentioned it almost every evening at the team meetings. “Don’t drink nil,” he said. “Don’t let food run you out of the league. Don’t go swimming too much. If you think a muscle is going to pull, take it easy and pull up, particularly you receivers and halfbacks.”

The training room at one end of the gym was the most popular of the hangouts. Millard Kelly was the trainer in charge—“Mallard” or “the Duck” the players called him—with two assistants who did such chores as taping the players’ ankles and running the various machines which stood around the training room: the two big tanks of the whirlpool baths, then a large black box in a corner with four or five dials called a Paerst muscle stimulator, which had pad attachments to put on the arm or leg which made the muscles jump involuntarily; also there was a large dental-like piece of equipment called a “modality machine” which produced—I was told—100,000 ultrasonic waves per second, or it may have been a million, which probed down to stimulate deep-lying muscles. Almost all the machines were designed in one way or another—through the rush of water or by electrical impulse—to increase blood circulation and thus speed healing in an afflicted area. The training room and its procedures and machines had come far since the days of John Heisman—after whom the trophy which is the highest award in collegiate football is named—who felt that soap and hot water were debilitating, and in his coaching days urged his teams to refrain from their use.

The training room began to fill at eight-thirty in the morning, just after breakfast. The rookies were the first to arrive, hopping up one after the other on one of the two rubbing tables to get their ankles taped. The veterans, by reason of their status, had an extra fifteen or twenty minutes in which to loll around in their rooms.

After practice, the place crowded up again. There were two galvanized pails with iced lemonade; the players after a hot day stood around them as if at a trough, spooning up the drink with ladles or with little paper cups which gave them a swallow or two, and then they’d scoop among the ice cubes again. The atmosphere was very lively in the training room—a place for talk, where the players congregated rather than in the dark aisles between the lockers or back in the small dormitory rooms, so that at times it sounded like a coffeehouse. Sometimes, Bruce Maher, sitting up on the edge of the whirlpool bath with one leg in the swirling water, would strum his guitar and sing. Other players sat in rows on the rubbing tables and joked back and forth. There was a lot of coming and going. In an alcove just off the training room some exercise barbells were often in use, and when I glanced in there I usually saw players straining at the wall doing isometrics.

There are some odd places that appeal to ballplayers. The Chicago Bears had a big tackle named Fred Davis who had an intense feeling about the ambiance of the locker room. He was always the last one out, not because he was a slow dresser, but because he enjoyed hanging around the place. It gave him a sense of security; he had probably spent his easiest and happiest days there amid those familiar props—the long worn wooden benches, and the metal lockers with the light metal doors that clanged and had perforations through which the toes of white wool socks could be pulled so they hung properly inside and dried; the liniment odor, and the faint chlorine smell, and the rubbing alcohol, and the sweat, and the piles of towels, and the dripping from the loose taps in the showers—all of it was balm to Davis, and when the Chicago equipment manager, who understood it, locked up for the night long after practice, he would call, “Hey, Davis!” and sometimes it would be quiet, but more often a call would come from the locker rows: “Hold on, I’ll be along.” And then he’d come out. “They hid my damn shoelaces on me,” he would say.

The training room was obviously a more congenial place than an empty locker room. And yet for all its conviviality, the training room, with its odor of disinfectants, and the sight of the porcelain cabinets with the rows of bandages and syringes, and the squat bottles in rows on the shelves, always made me feel uncomfortable and apprehensive. I felt about the training room as I did about any doctor’s office—and I stayed away as much as I could. I got my ankles taped and grabbeled the salt and vitamin tablets from their boxes by the door (which was required), and then later, after practice, I came back for the lemonade.

The others were not as sensitive as I was, though it was apparent that the players reacted to the concept of injury by trying to ignore it completely. When a player was hurt in a scrimmage, the others seemed to turn their backs pointedly, and they moved away as if an injury were communicable, like mumps. Sometimes, if the injury did not appear serious, and the player was just having difficulty getting to his feet, they would call to him, “Forget it—it’s nothing—get up!” almost nagging him, as if the pain were a state of mind and could be dismissed by will. If the player remained in trouble, with Kelly running out to him, or Doc Thompson, they would turn away as if nothing had happened, snubbing him.

Injury is the most nightmarish aspect of football because its threat is impossible to handle—its nature unpredictable, even quixotic. In 1960, fourteen major injuries had occurred in an insignificant preseason exhibition in Texas against the Chicago Bears. Detroit’s chances for the season were destroyed. The game had not been noticeably hard fought. By comparison, in one of the roughest games that the Lions played back in the forties, there had only been one injury: Lloyd Cardwell injured himself, and quite badly, getting himself a drink between the halves. He leaned over to press a plunger on the water fountain, jammed two vertebrae, and was carried away on a stretcher.

So much—even a championship—depends on the health of a team, and often on the condition of one star player. When I was with Detroit, Terry Barr was having trouble with his knee following a ligament operation. There were two long new scars alongside his kneecap. It was difficult for him to move on the knee with full efficiency. He told me once: “I look at it—my knee—every night, and I damn near cry.” His concern was matched by that of a whole complex of people—fellow players, coaches, owners, fans, and then reporters, who wrote columns about what was going on under Terry Barr’s kneecap—all of them wondering if the intricate surgical patchwork job, the areas involved being the size of tiny transistor tubes, could withstand the extreme stress.

Sometimes an injury is kept from the press. One year Alex Karras had a groin injury which cut down his agility in lateral moves, and the quick side bounds that so often got his opposite number off balance so he could proceed past him into the enemy backfield at the angry bustling speed that was almost comic to watch, like a speeded-up film clip of a running washerwoman, but which was one of the most destructive rushes in football. The injury was kept secret so that the Green Bay Packers, their opponents the following weekend, would not take advantage of Karras’s comparative immobility. Karras was strong enough so that despite being restricted he was able to put up a competent rush straight forward. But the offensive guard opposite, a rookie who had been told he was in for an awful afternoon, had much less trouble than he expected. He made the mistake of saying so in print. A reporter asked him a week or so before the two clubs were scheduled to play again how he expected to fare against Karras. “Well,” the Green Bay rookie said, “I didn’t have too much trouble with him in the last game. He’s overrated. He hasn’t got that many moves—at least none that I can’t handle.”

The substance of the rookie’s comments appeared in a Michigan paper, which was passed on to Karras. The Lions knew that he would be interested. The groin injury had cleared up. He was in perfect condition. His teammates watched him stare at the clipping, and they shook their heads and thought about the rookie when Karras said, “Hee-hee-hee,” cracking his knuckles; they noted that his skits and monologues, which he performed in the dining room, began, in somewhat tight-lipped fashion, to include the rookie’s name.

The Lions told me that the afternoon of the game had been high comedy for them—all of them coming off the bench and standing on the sidelines grinning when Karras ran on with the defensive team. They stood up to watch what he was doing to the rookie, and when the game films were shown the following week they rocked their chairs back and forth, guffawing, as if a Mack Sennett comedy were on the screen. “There’s no word for it,” Pietrosante told me. “That poor kid, he was raped, keel-hauled, he was just destroyed. Finally, Lombardi took the rookie out, he had to, Karras having jumped over him, around him, under him, and then motherin’ around in that Green Bay backfield. And as the kid went off the field, his mouth hanging open, Alex said to him, hardly breathing, like it had been hardly no exercise at all, ‘Well, ass face, how you like those moves?’”

Pietrosante himself had an odd physical ailment. One evening after leaving the training room he told me.

“I’ll let you in on something,” he said. “I’ve got gout.”

“Come on,” I snorted.

“God’s truth,” he said. “I’ve got gout in my big toe. You ask Mallard or Doc Thompson.” I did, afterward, and it was true, unless they were joshing me.

Back in his room after supper one evening I asked Pietrosante about the causes of most injuries, and he picked out two particularly crippling maneuvers, both of which were legal, namely the “clothesline” and the “crackback.” The former is a defensive stiff-arm tactic used by the linebackers primarily, and the other, the “crackback,” is a blocking technique that the flankers and split ends use against the linebackers.

Nick Pietrosante told me he thought the crackback might eventually be outlawed. “It’s too dangerous,” he said. “What happens is that the split end or the flanker takes two or three steps across the line and then cuts [cracks back] in towards the middle, barreling towards the linebacker, who isn’t likely to see him since he’s facing the play. The block delivered is almost a clip, and it’s delivered to the side of the leg with speed. The flankers and ends aren’t big men, but they’re fast, and they launch themselves going full out at the linebacker’s knee, and if it’s a good blind shot, it’ll just cave him in and is like to finish him for good.”

“Doesn’t the linebacker get some warning from the cornermen and the safeties?” I asked. “They must see the flanker cutting in.”

“It’s hard to tell what the flanker may have in mind. He could be moving into the middle on a pass pattern. Of course, the cornermen do yell, damn near scream, if they think the flanker’s moving for a block. They yell, ‘Crackback! Crackback!’ and the linebackers, hearing that, half turn and their hands come down to fend off a block at their knees. If you want to test how linebackers feel about the crackback, drop into a linebacker’s room down the corridor, the Badger’s or Schmidt’s or the King’s, and call out, ‘Crackback!’ and he’ll leap and look alongside his leg like there was a sidewinder coiled there.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

“It wouldn’t be a safe thing to yell,” Pietrosante agreed. “Not unless you had a lot of running room, and maybe a Ferrari outside with the motor turning over…”

I asked Pietrosante about the “clothesline.” I’d seen it demonstrated down on the practice field. The maneuver is simple: the linebacker sticks out his arm, stiff and straight, usually when the receiver coming into his area is looking back over his shoulder at the quarterback, so that he runs into it, his feet churning ahead very briefly, his head motionless against the clotheslining arm, and then he hits very hard on his back with the sound of a bladder being whacked at the ground.

Pietrosante told me a story about clotheslining. In a 1959 game against the St. Louis Cardinals he caught a divide, which is a pass pattern, and began to move downfield. He’d gone a way when he ran into a Cardinal who had a clear shot at him, but instead of tackling, the Cardinal swung his arm stiff and clotheslined him, smacking him down and slicing him past the helmet bar so that three stitches were required to patch up his lip.

Pietrosante felt his mouth where he had been hit. “I never thought much about who did it,” he said. “I got hurt in the knee that game and I had other things to think about. Then later that year, Brettschneider was traded to us from the Cardinals, my roommate it turned out, and if it hadn’t slipped from my mind I could have asked him who did it. I didn’t bother. Well, 1961, two years after, and two years rooming with the guy, he finally brings himself one day to say, looking at his feet, “Uh… Nick,” and he tells me he’s the one responsible.

“Well, I was over it by then. Besides, if you think about it, the linebackers have an awful tough position to play: they’ve got to slow down the backs, anything to keep them from getting behind them, and the clothesline is a big weapon.”

“I’d be nervous running against them, knowing they have it to use,” I said.

“It’s like when they speak of a quarterback ‘hearing footsteps,’” Pietrosante said. “When the quarterback thinks he hears someone coming up on his blind side, and he cringes, or throws hurriedly, his nerve’s gone… that’s usually the end of him. The linebackers, if they worry too much about crackbacks, they hear footsteps too. And it’s the same with the ends and backs with the clothesline. They’ve got the problem as soon as they come into the defensive secondary. As soon as they turn back to look over their shoulders for the quarterback, that’s when they begin worrying and wondering if there’s a clothesline hanging around somewhere. That’s why often a back or end doesn’t turn quickly enough for his pass—because instinctively he’s looking for the outstretched arm that’s going to deck him. He’s fair game until the ball’s in the air, which is why you hear the linebackers and the safeties shout ‘Ball! Ball! Ball!’ when the quarterback gets off his pass. Sometimes, the linebacker will say ‘Ball!’ anyway, before the passer’s got his arm cocked, and the flanker will turn his head over his shoulder to watch for the pass and bop! he’s got himself clotheslined.”

Just then, by chance, Joe Schmidt and Wayne Walker came by and looked in. Involuntarily I hopped to my feet. They looked at me curiously and Walker asked, “You standing up out of respect or fear?”

“A bit of both, maybe,” I said. “I’ve been learning something from Nick about your positions—some of the weapons.”

“He jumped up like he was bit,” said Schmidt.

“The fact is I always stand up when somebody comes into a room,” I said.

“Maybe he got so nervous he was running off to take a quick shower,” said Walker.

“Well, that’s where I’m going,” said Pietrosante. He looped a towel over one shoulder. “You entertain the rookie. Tell him about Jim Hill and Pellington and some of the other murdering linebackers and cornerbacks you call brothers.” He sauntered out down the hall.

The linebackers settled themselves. They talked a little about Jim Hill, the All-Pro cornerman from the St. Louis Cardinals, that he worked his area when receivers were running through it like a small but angry tornado with a whole mess of things in it—crowbars, eggbeaters, auto fenders—that whirled out and whacked anyone approaching the funnel. Very often, after a play you’d see a helmet rolling around near Hill, lifted off with a sidearm blow or a thrust off the flanker’s head as he came through the area. Hill relied more on defensive contact of this sort than he did on trying to match speed and agility against opposing receivers.

Schmidt said, “It’s a question of adapting a style to your potential. Some players have to be dirtier than others. Some teams are too. Green Bay plays the game the way it should be played. Lombardi’s a purist and with his teams you don’t have to worry too much about redneck tactics. The Packers learn a few plays—a simple offense, a comparatively simple defense, and they tune them both up to perfection.”

“Does it seem rougher now than it was?” I asked.

“Everything seemed wilder and tougher back then,” Schmidt said. “And when I came up there seemed to be more desire. A lot of it had to do with Bobby Layne, of course. Very often he was a more important man on the field than the coach. He’d go to the coach in the middle of a game and tell him to pull a guy because he wasn’t delivering. ‘Get that son of a bitch out of there, or I’ll throw him off the field myself,’ he’d shout. And he meant it too, and the coach knew it. Out the punk would come. Layne was really the team. He was the whole works. He used to have these goddamn champagne parties after the game. I remember Brettschneider turning up this one time wearing tennis shoes and a trench coat—nothing on underneath. Don’t ask me where he had been or what he had in mind.”

“How about the technical stuff?” I asked. “Has the linebackers’ job changed much?”

“It’s changed a lot,” Walker said. “Not too long ago, defensive backs were primarily concerned with the run. What were needed were big fast driving men who moved with the play and piled it up. Diagnosis was a matter of instinct and common sense. Now, with the prominence of the pass, it’s changed. Pass coverage makes it unbelievably complicated. The easiest defense, one-on-one—the defender sticking to one man and trying to cover him—that can’t be done: the receivers are too good. So what’s essential now is coordination between the defensemen. It’s no longer an individual effort. Basically, there are three separate teams: the middle linebacker and the two defensive tackles, that’s one, and then the two teams on opposite ends of the line—each with an end, an outside linebacker, and the cornerman. Each of these teams works not only within their group, but with the other teams—communication between them absolutely essential.”

“That’s the talking that Night Train insists on,” I said.

Both linebackers laughed. Walker said, “The big thing is knowing the guy’s with you—so that even if he does something separate you can compensate, and cover for him. We’ve been five years together. We’ve worked so long together that we hardly have to talk to each other. You’ve got to have the knowledge. It’s possible to come out of college and be a good linebacker, but three years later you look back and remember how bad you were. Every year, twenty men come out of college that are bigger, faster, meaner, and they move like great cats, but what you got over them is knowledge, developed knowledge—and that keeps you rather than them hanging on to the paycheck.”

I asked, “What is it you’re thinking about when you see their quarterback break his huddle and move up for the line?”

“I take a mild guess at what he’s told them—a calculated guess. After all, I know a lot about the quarterback himself—that’s part of the knowledge—about his mind, and then I know what he knows: the down, the position of the ball, the number of yards to go for the first down. By eliminating what he can’t do, or shouldn’t do, in a given circumstance I can narrow down the possible plays he can call. When the backfield gets itself lined up, the choice is narrowed down further: I know what he can’t run off that formation. So we’re getting to it. Then I key on the three men opposite. I don’t watch the ball or the quarterback. Just those three men. Perhaps they tip the play before the quarterback gets the snap. Even if they don’t, with the first few steps they take I can see the pattern, and this gives me the play for sure; even if my guess isn’t quite right, I can make the proper adjustments.”

“You don’t get fooled?”

“You don’t get fooled very often,” Walker said. “If you do, you’re finished up here. The only time you get fooled is when they pull something on you that you’ve never seen before. The A formation the Giants used one year. Or the shotgun formation that Red Hickey out in San Francisco sprung on us. Right, Joe?” He looked at Schmidt, who nodded. “That hurt us bad when it was first used. We all felt like rookies—we’d never seen anything like it.”

“Why isn’t it a good tactic to devise new formations or new… well, razzle-dazzle plays for each game?” I asked.

“It’s not as easy as that,” Walker said. “Even if you do, it’s likely the keys are still the same, and adjustments can be made quickly. The shotgun was an exception. And fortunate too, since if you could produce a new formation as effective as that one week after week the defense’d be run out of the parks. It’s tough enough as it is.”

While Walker was talking, I had my mind turned idly to what might work against him in Pontiac, considering what he had said.

“What about the… ah… pitchout?” I asked. “What do you do if that is… ah… run to your side?”

Walker caught it immediately. “You thirsting to send that out my way in Pontiac?” he said. “Gulp, holy cow…” He whacked the side of his head with his palm. “Don’t, pul-lease!”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m just curious.”

“If you call for a run out my way,” said Walker, “my function would be to delay the play, turn it inside so that the pursuit can catch up and take care of it—”

Schmidt stopped him. “That’s fine, professor. Now let’s talk about red dogging the quarterback. Let’s tell him how we do it. Wayne, tell him how I say ‘Jumbo’ in the huddle. Tell him how my voice throbs.”

“Well, Joe’s voice—”

“Tell him about my hands, Wayne. How are my hands, Wayne?”

“Like claws,” Walker said quickly.

“Now tell him about Brettschneider. Tell him how this little spot of spit turns up in the corner of the Badger’s mouth when he hears that word ‘Jumbo.’”

“Well, there’s this little—”

“Tell him about the big a-a-aagh sound that Roger Brown makes in the huddle—like he’s finished a big beer.”

“Roger—”

I interrupted. “Come on. Cut it out. Seriously. How do you get to the passer?”

When the two of them had quieted down, Walker explained. “Red dogging, blitzing—a lot of names for it—means committing the linebackers to a rush on the passer, means for me that I got to run over the halfback opposite who’s trying to block. There are two ways of getting by him. You can come at him and give him a juke—a fake—and dodge by him. Or, because he’s sure to be smaller, you can run right over him, jump over him.”

“Come on,” I said.

“If he’s set up right for it—that is, he’s crouched down trying to block low—then it’s a great move… You sail over him. It gives you a great feeling and it’s a great photograph too. I’ve got one of myself clearing Jon Arnett of the Rams.”

“When you come down,” said Schmidt, looking at me, the grin beginning again, “and you’re moving right lively, guess who’s there, just getting to throw the ball… oh, maybe just three feet away from you, your arms reaching for him? Three guesses.”

“I dunno. The official timekeeper?”

“Boom!” said Schmidt. “Pow!” He drove his fist into his hand.

“Zap,” said Walker. “Bwang!”

“Biff!” said Schmidt.

“Gentlemen,” I said. I rose from my chair. “There are holes, exploitable holes, in the defense. You have unwittingly talked too much.”

I tried staring at them somberly, but it didn’t work too well.