CHAPTER 20

The closer the Pontiac scrimmage, the more the Lions became interested, day by day, in my reactions—how my amateur’s eyes were taking in what they knew so well.

“Whatja think today?” they’d ask, dropping by the locker after practice. I would sort out a few observations and tell them, though it was difficult. Even with a couple of weeks behind me, the experience was so new that I was left each day with a jumble of impressions. Wayne Walker said he wasn’t surprised. General observations were difficult for someone just starting out. He had an idea, thinking back on his first days as a professional, that for the dozen or so first plays one’s concentration is such that the light seems to dim.

“You’ll notice in the scrimmage. Everything gets dark,” he told me, “like seeing everything from a dark tunnel.”

“You mean the peripheral vision goes?” I had asked mournfully. “That’s about the only physical attribute that… well, that I might possess.”

The night before the game I dropped in on Milt Plum and Earl Morrall, hoping for some last-minute instruction.

“Wayne Walker tells me everything’s going to go black,” I said.

They grinned and looked at each other. “Well, he’s blunt enough about it,” Morrall said.

“He didn’t mean I was going to get hit.” I explained what he had said about the field of vision seeming to diminish. The two quarterbacks said that was new to them, but they both spoke of the advantages of peripheral vision—“a type of split vision,” Morrall described it. “Tomorrow night,” he said to me, “let’s say you run the pass play ninety-three. Once you’re back in the pocket here’s what you should see: you see your short receiver, the number three man, and you see how he is going, then you pick up the long man to see if the defensive safety’s got him covered, then back to the three man, and you go to him”—Morrall slapped his fist into his palm—“unless the linebackers are in his zone, in which case you throw out into the right flat to your swing man, the safety valve. Then you have the man going down from the eight hole ten yards to the left and buttonhooking, so that actually you have four possible receivers in an arc of 180 degrees, and since you’ve only got two, maybe three, seconds to pick one of those people out you can see how helpful a wide angle of vision can be.”

“The angle seems to widen with experience,” Plum said. “When you start out and don’t know quite where to look, it’s as thin as a flashlight beam, which is what Wayne is saying.”

“Pass patterns are set up to help you see your receivers fast,” said Morrall. “Your primary receivers are usually on a direct line of sight from you. For example, tomorrow night”—every time he said “tomorrow” I could feel my stomach tighten—“if your short man is covered, all you got to do is raise your eyes, like clicking the sight up on a rifle, and there’s the long man on the same line of angle.”

The two quarterbacks began talking about the other mandatory attributes of their position.

Morrall said, “If you could put a quarterback together with all the skills he ought to have, you’d give him, first, speed—speed going back those seven yards into the pocket, which a quarterback like Van Brocklin had, which gave him time to see the action and the pass patterns develop. Then you’d give him the ability to fake well, which Y. A. Tittle and Eddie LeBaron have: good dramatics and action, good enough to make the defense lean the wrong way. And then, of course, an arm, a good arm, and strong.”

“I’d put that first,” Plum said. “The coaches look for someone who can throw the ball fifty yards, and almost on a line. In college, there’s not much emphasis on pass defense. It takes too long to develop a good one. With your receivers getting ten yards clear of the defense, you can loft the ball without danger. But any pass which gets up in the air in this league will have four defenders crowding around waiting for it to come down—like an infield pop in baseball.”

They could see from my fidgeting that I was uncomfortable as they put together their composite super-quarterback. Down on the training field both of them had seen my passing efforts, which over the length of twenty yards began to develop the high trajectory of a howitzer shell.

“Look,” said Morrall. “You don’t need to worry tomorrow if you call running plays and get the ball to the running backs. Make those people pick up the yardage for you.”

“How about experience?” I asked. “That must be an important attribute.”

“Big,” said Morrall. “The rookie has to rely on his game plan—what the coaches have told him to do. That’s the only weapon, outside his own natural ability, that he’s got. As the game goes on, he can’t feel or sense what’s going on—that, for example, a defensive back has inched up too far, or is moving about in such a way that he’s susceptible to such and such a play working on him. That’s what the veteran can do—he seems to have the field fixed in his mind like a chart—and that makes him infinitely more valuable than the rookie, even if his throwing arm’s about to come unscrewed and fall off.”

“What are you going to call for your first play?” Plum asked.

“A surprise call,” I said. “Something that’ll really jar those people. I think about it a lot—some odd play, one out of the past perhaps. Columbia had a play at the turn of the century in which a guy named Harold Weekes was used in what they called a ‘hurdle’ play. It was his specialty, poor fellow. He’d get the ball some five yards behind his front line, which was all pinched in tight, and he’d get off to a running start, and using the back of his center—a fellow with the name of ‘Bessy’ Bruce—he’d go off like a diver from a springboard, y’know, trying to launch himself into space. His ends would come around and push him if he was in danger of toppling back. It was like trying to scale a mountain sometimes if the opposition bunched up on him.”

“Oh yes,” said Plum.

“In 1902, in the Princeton game,” I went on, “the Princeton people came up with a defense against Weekes: they got a guy named Dana Kafer and they hurdled him the same time Weekes was coming over; they met, and both were carried away.”

The quarterbacks looked at me.

“Well, I’ll tell you it’s true,” I said. “I read it in a book. I’ve done my homework.”

Morrall grinned. Plum was solemn.

We sat around and talked some more—Plum, as always, helpful but distant. The thought often crossed my mind that he looked askance at my participation, though it may have been his manner, which was prim, almost stiff, the demeanor of a company executive. He didn’t strike one as a football player; it was always surprising to see him appear on the field as carefully groomed as he was, his hair dark, with a careful part, and then incongruous up around his ears the high bulk of the shoulder pads, and then to see his fingers gripped around a football. His voice wasn’t a footballer’s: it was clear and boyish, with a nervous, acid timbre to it, which made it seem in a higher register than it actually was. Some said that his voice rose under strain, and that he couldn’t inspire confidence with it. It wasn’t a player who told me that. The players, at least the first-string players, only talked about each other’s skills to praise them, unless they were joshing. Otherwise they kept quiet.

Someone told me that about Plum’s voice and I remembered the dictum that the French instructors quoted at the military academy at St. Cyr. “Learn to pitch your voice low,” they told the young cadets. “An order given in the soprano register, Mister, is not calculated to drive troops to impossible glories.”

“That’s it,” the critic said. “That’s it exactly.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Someone say that about Plum?”

He was a newspaperman. “Sure,” he said. He was writing a story about Detroit’s two-quarterback system.

“You ask around if they’d rather have a big, sincere voice, like a bullfrog’s, in the backfield,” I said. “Or Plum’s arm.”

“I’m not taking anything away from the guy’s arm,” the newspaperman said.

“Well, you ask around,” I said.

“Man, don’t get so touchy.” He was grinning. “I’m not knocking the guy.”

“Well, just ask around.” It was amazing how protective one got about the Lions.

Earl Morrall was more easygoing, less the technician. His qualities of leadership were those of the squad leader. He was easier to joke with. There had been a lot of joshing about his big toe, which he had lost to a power lawn mower. Since then his passing had improved, and the players had suggested that he get the toe mounted like a rabbit’s foot to carry around as a watch charm. They kept an eye on his passing in practice; they quacked happily in derision when his passes fluttered, and reminded him that he still had nine toes left to experiment with; Plum’s fluttery passes, which were few assuredly, drew no comment from them. Their admiration for him was high, but he wasn’t anyone to kid around with. He was essentially serious.

In a sense Plum reminded me of Hemingway’s description of Marcial Lalanda; the bullfighter was described as taking no pleasure in his skill, and deriving no emotion or elation from it—a sad and unemotional performer, although he was technically skillful and completely intelligent. That seemed to me Plum’s attitude toward his profession, at least from a distance, whereas Morrall’s seemed more gypsylike, emotional, impassioned, yet often haphazard, a trait which marked his play as well—it often seemed scrambled and styleless, the play breaking down all around him, so that in the din from the stands Morrall scampered about like a chicken under pursuit; and yet he would somehow extricate himself—finding his way back to the line of scrimmage, or getting off a successful pass from his shoe tops while being flipped down on his back. He was a very exciting quarterback to watch, though it was difficult to sit comfortably and feel confidence in his attack, which seemed improvised out of turmoil.

“What else?” I asked. “Give me some more advice.”

“Well,” said Morrall. “You’ve got to remember the things not to do, so that you don’t tip the play. Not to wet your fingers, or look to see how your tight end is being defensed. We used to hear that Jim Ninowski—who went to Cleveland in that deal for Milt—had the habit of tipping off his plays: the linebackers could tell what he was going to do by the way he shifted his eyes at the line of scrimmage. Our coaches put the cameras on him to see if they could pick out what it was he was doing. They never found out. It may have been a false rumor to worry us. Still, the defense is always looking for little things that’ll help them. A good lineman can tell from seeing how much pressure the man down opposite him has on his fingertips whether he’s going to charge or pull. If he’s got his weight forward on his fingers, they’ll show pale, and that means he’s going to charge.”

“What are you really going to call?” Plum asked. “What’s on your ready list?”

“Two pass plays,” I said, “the ninety-three you were talking about, and a short slant pass to Jim Gibbons. Then I’ve got a pitchout to Pietrosante, and also two handoff plays into the line. There are one or two others I know, but I’ll stick to those five.”

“Audibles?”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

Plum kept at me. “What are you going to do if the defense is stacked against your play?”

“Run right at it,” I said. “Test it. There’s nothing else I can do. Besides,” I said truthfully, “if the defense was stacked against a certain play, I’m not sure I could tell.”

There were four main secondary defenses quarterbacks were likely to see as they came out of the huddle up to the line—a 4-3, a 6-1, a 4-2, and what was called an “over defense.” When Aldo Forte diagrammed a play on the blackboard such as the 3 left 48 flip (the three back lined up to the left, with the four back receiving the flip pass from the quarterback and heading for the eight hole at his right end), he would say that it would work OK against a 4-3, be an excellent play against a 6-1, but against the 4-2, and the over defense, he preferred a checkoff. So in the case of the latter two, Plum and Morrall would make mental notes, if the situation arose, to call “forty-eight” as the first number in the sequence of three, which checked off the original play, and they knew the players, poised at the line, would be alert for the second number to tell them what they were now supposed to do.

I said, “I don’t see how you can keep all this clear in your mind. First of all, you’ve got to keep the field position in mind—what down it is, and so forth. You’ve got to remember over seventy-five different offensive plays. True, the coaches, relying on their scouts and the game films, give you fifteen or twenty for the ready list—plays which ought to do well against the club you’re playing. But the defense can throw four or five formations against those plays, which means almost one hundred possible situations you have to diagnose to see if you should go ahead with your choice of play. Then, after you call the checkoff, they can jump the defenses around on you, and you may be forced to call another. And the clock is running all this time, just a few seconds available for you to decide what to do, and on top of that, your nose is bleeding, and as you stand up behind your center you have the feeling that your shoelace is untied. And then, for God’s sake, you’ve got to give the signal and execute—as Casey Stengel says. It’s damn breathtaking!”

“You’re right,” Plum said. “It’s got to be almost second nature. There’s too much to consider consciously. You don’t have a quarterback out there who’s saying to himself, ‘Now let’s see: the forty-two is the four back into the two hole.’ There’s no time for that. The quarterback’s mind’s got to be on the subtleties, not the basics.”

“I should think you could lose your mind out there,” I said. “I mean the stuffing could just leak out under all the pressure, and you’d have this quarterback cackling and carrying on.…”

Morrall said, “You find you do lose your mind out there sometimes—even if you’ve been at the game a long time. It’s not only the quarterbacks. Joe Schmidt will tell you.”

They described it. Apparently, Joe Schmidt once was sent into a preseason exhibition game in the terrible late summer heat of Texas with only a few seconds to go. Detroit was leading. The Philadelphia Eagles had the ball in Detroit territory, but all their time-outs had expired. Schmidt ordered a rush on Van Brocklin, the Eagle quarterback, and dropped him as he was trying to get off a long, last pass. The second hand on the clock swept around and the onlookers stood up to begin filing out of the park. Whereupon Joe Schmidt called: “Time out!”

The referee looked at him blankly for a second or so. His eyebrows then arched up, and he blew his whistle to stop the clock with five seconds to go. The players all stared at Schmidt. Some of them had started off the field, expecting to hear the final gun before they reached the sidelines. Schmidt himself couldn’t think then, or ever, why he had shouted for a time-out. He said, “Maybe I just wanted a drink out of one of those little paper cups. The heat was horrible out there.” The time-out gave Van Brocklin another chance to throw the football, which he did with success—connecting for a touchdown.

Perhaps the most famous story about the inconstancy of players under stress concerns a rookie quarterback on the Chicago Bears—either Sid Luckman or Bernie Masterson; the story is told about both of them, which suggests it may be apocryphal—who was sent into an exhibition game against Cleveland with orders from George Halas, the coach, to “run over guard,” “try an end run,” and then “punt.” Whichever quarterback it was had considerable success with the first two plays, running the ball out of his own territory deep down to the Browns’ twenty-five-yard line and a first down. Whereupon, in the third play, Luckman (or Masterson) stepped back into kick formation, just as he had been directed, and punted the ball from thirty yards or so out—which sailed the ball out of the high-school stadium where the exhibition was being played. The veterans in the huddle, according to one account, said “Hmmm” when the rookie called for a punt, and Musso, who was the captain at the time, is supposed to have said that the purpose of the training season was to let the rookies “learn for themselves” what it was all about. That was why nothing had been said in the huddle.

“All sorts of things can happen to the quarterback out there,” Morrall said. He described how a quarterback, distracted, would sometimes stray off center as he walked up for the line of scrimmage from the huddle, concentrating on the alignment of the defensive backs, perhaps considering the advisability of calling a checkoff play, and he would step up not behind the center, but behind a guard, whose eyes would widen inside his helmet to feel the unfamiliar pressure of a hand in under his backside, and more often than not he would bolt across the line and cause an offside penalty. On one occasion Jug Girard, the Cardinal quarterback, stepped up behind a guard by error, but his count was so quick that the play was under way before the guard could demur, and the center in beside him popped the ball back though he didn’t feel the usual pressure of the quarterback’s hand, swinging his arm, and the ball shot straight up in the air as the two lines came together, as if squeezed up like a peach pit by the pressure.

“That’s the damnedest thing I ever heard,” I said. “I didn’t think I’d have to worry about getting in behind the wrong man. You’ve shaken me,” I told them. “I think I’ll go to bed.”

Morrall said, “Let me give you some advice if you’re going to bed. Clark Shaughnessy, who invented the T formation, used to advise his quarterbacks to lie in bed the night before and play the entire game—to imagine situation after situation and supply the solution. It’s a good exercise if you have the right sort of imagination—I mean if you imagined yourself dropped every time you wouldn’t be in the best frame of mind the next day.”

“Put me in a good frame of mind,” I said. “Tell me about a quarterback’s triumphs.”

Plum looked at Morrall. “Tell him about the Baltimore game. Describe the last quarter.”

Morrall leaned back in his chair. “This was a couple of years ago down in Baltimore. We were behind eight to three with not much time to go. I threw a pass to Cassady. He got it all right and ran bam! into a goalpost, which bounced him back out about four yards, and then he went in the end zone again, rubber-legged, like a guy with the shakes. I ran up to him with my hand out to grab his—it was a great effort of Cassady’s—and he wandered right past me, just dazed. He didn’t know where he was or what he’d done. It sort of took the pleasure out of it for him. They told him about scoring the touchdown. He was sitting on the bench, and when his head cleared, he’d say, ‘Tell me again, tell me how I caught it.’”

“Poor Cassady,” I said. “He never had much of a time playing for the Lions.”

“Well, after that,” Morrall went on, “Jim Martin kicked his field goal and that put us ahead thirteen to eight with just enough time left for Johnny Unitas, their quarterback, to put together a drive and score if he did it quick. There’s no one around who can do it like Unitas, and, sure enough, we couldn’t hold him. It took him eight plays or so, and the last one was about the best catch I ever saw—Lenny Moore, with those spats of his, making with this crazy big leap and sliding away from Night Train, who had him covered, into the end zone on his belly, his arms out, and he got that ball with what must have been the tips of his fingernails, clawing it to him, and they had the touchdown, which put them ahead fifteen to thirteen. You should have heard the noise that the Baltimore crowd made. Night Train told me later that his heart plumb stopped ticking over when he saw that catch pulled in, and what got it going again was being stepped on and pummeled around by the Baltimore crowd trying to get to Lenny Moore to carry him off on their shoulders. The noise was fantastic—that whole place had gone wild, and they were all over the field. You could hardly blame them—they thought they had the game. Ten seconds to go, that was all, and they were really raising the roof. Of course, those ten seconds gave us a chance—not much, it didn’t seem—but we needed only a field goal to win. So while they were trying to clear the field, the whole place this crazy bedlam, we were figuring what to do, over by the sidelines shouting at each other in that mad noise—how to get the ball into Colt territory for the field goal. We had all our time-outs left, and I was going to call one as soon as we got the ball. They kicked off finally—the police cleared about ten thousand of those fans to the sidelines—and Bruce Maher got the ball up to about our thirty-five. Then we got what looked to be a big break. Steve Junker, who was an end with us then, was just getting to his feet after the play, when he was hit from behind. One of the Colts was too excited, or he lost his head, or something, and that should be a fifteen-yard penalty for us, which puts the ball on the fifty-yard line with time for a play, perhaps two, to move it down further for the field-goal try. But what happens? One of our players standing near Steve Junker sees this Colt player hit him. So he steps over and whacks the Colt with an elbow, really lets him have it. The referee, who’s just about to blow a penalty on Baltimore, sees this because it happens about two feet away from his nose, and he blows so hard the whistle floops out of his mouth, and we have two penalties, offsetting each other, which leaves the ball still on the thirty-five-yard line where Maher took it in the first place.”

Morrall looked over at me. “Guess who the guy is—the guy who gives the elbow.”

I took a chance. “The Badger,” I said. “Brettschneider.”

Morrall looked at Plum and shook his head. “The Badger’s reputation,” he said. “What’s to be done?”

“Was it the Badger?” I asked.

“Of course it was the Badger. Who else?” said Morrall.

“Well, what happened then?”

Morrall’s mind was still on the Badger’s indiscretion. “Considering what was going on, it wasn’t surprising what the Badger did,” he said. “The whole thing out there was crazy.”

“Go on, tell him what happened,” Plum said.

“Well, like I said, the idea was to get the ball to their forty—a twenty-yard pass play would do it—so that Jim Martin could take a crack at the field goal. In the huddle I called—well, I had to shout it, the noise around was so crazy—three left green right eight right—which sends the strong-side end into the middle. Baltimore had a three-man line rushing, and the rest of them, eight men, were dropped back to defend against the pass they knew I had to throw. They had Lenny Moore in there, very deep, for his speed. They had every defensive back from their bench on the field, sacrificing the weight up in the line they didn’t need. They knew it was going to be a pass so they sent in speed. Except for the front three they had men in there averaging 180—and I don’t suppose you’d ever find a lighter pound-for-pound team on the defense in the NFL than what the Colts had out there. Coming out of the huddle to look at that defense wasn’t much fun, I’ll tell you. Eight men back there—like trying to drop a plug into a pond packed in solid with lily pads. No hope.

“But they were figuring, I think, for something much longer, and when the play started those eight men got spread thin and deep by the patterns. Gail Cogdill went deep and he took three Colts with him. Cassady went deep on the lookout and two men went with him. Webb, the fullback, moved out, and he took a linebacker. Gibbons, the strong end, went down about seventeen yards, a little deeper than he would ordinarily on that play, and he got a step on his man and was moving good when I got the pass to him. Cogdill threw an amazing block, and the Gibber carried it in for the touchdown. It was hard to believe. I think we all felt a little like Cassady when he was stunned running into the goalpost and didn’t know what he’d done. I kept looking around like mad thinking something had to go wrong. An official told me later that the gun ending the game went off when the Gibber was still running downfield—when he was crossing the twenty. Of course, none of us heard the gun. The Baltimore crowd was making all that noise. Then when the Gibber crossed the line—it went absolutely silent, just struck dumb, and you could hear this little sound, and it was our guys yelling. Damnedest thing. All this crazy yelling from the crowd and when the Gibber went across the line it stopped all at once, like they’d been gagged, like a cord went tight around all those throats—I thought I’d gone deaf—and then you could hear this little sound that our guys were making. The other thing that was crazy was that the whole stadium was empty in a couple of seconds, it seemed—that big crowd just melting away like it flowed down a big drain, and you looked around where they’d been so many people you could hardly move, and there were only our guys there, with these big grins, some of them still leaping up and down.”

“Well, that’s something,” I said truthfully. “It really is.”

Plum said, “You go through something like that and it makes up for an awful lot of bad times, and the knocks, and the hours of training, and running the plays over, and the defeats, and all, and the crap.”

“I’ll say,” I said. “The whole crowd just shut up absolutely tight?” I asked. I couldn’t get that out of my mind.

“It was like a tomb in that place,” said Morrall. “Just sudden-like—you could hear echoes if you shouted, I swear.”

“That must have been something,” I said again.

“That’s the best of it,” said Morrall, looking at Plum. “Just about the best.”

Plum said, “You pull off something like that, and there doesn’t need to be anything else, ever.”