CHAPTER 21

Friday was waiting by my locker. He handed me my game jersey of tear-away silk material, in the deep Honolulu blue of Detroit, with my number in silver, the zero, on both the back and front, and on the sleeves.

“You feel all right?” he asked.

“Oh sure,” I said. I sat down on the bench and took off my street shoes, setting them carefully in the locker. The plan was to dress at the training camp in the early evening and ride in game uniform to Pontiac, a half-hour ride by bus, rather than change in the stadium there.

“You better jump to it,” Friday said. “Most everyone’s dressed.”

Sam Williams, the first-string defensive end came by, and looked down my aisle of lockers. “Nerves, kid?” he asked. “How are the nerves?”

“Well, I’ve got them, Sam,” I said. “I feel them in the stomach.”

He was in his sixth year of professional football, and I asked him if nerves still affected him.

“Sure,” he said. “In the feet and hands… heavy feet, heavy hands so’s I can barely move around.”

“Heavy feet!” I said. “Think of that. My nerves seem to stick to the stomach.” I took a breath, a deep one, to relieve the tension, and went back to dressing, putting on the paraphernalia of the uniform slowly, item after item, overfastidious to get them set right—the tape, the supporter, the wraparound girdle, the thigh pads, the arm pads, the shoulder pads, the sweatshirt. Williams’s locker was in the next aisle, and when I was ready I went around and he pulled the blue jersey down over my shoulder pads, which was difficult to do alone, and then cuffed the pads into place.

“That’s a good number you’re wearing,” Williams said. “Johnny Olszewski’s—Johnny O’s.”

“It indicates my talent,” I said.

I went back to my locker. My football shoes were up on top, next to the big silver helmet with the blue Lion decal, and when I took the shoes down they seemed astonishingly heavy to the hand.

I spotted Friday coming by again.

“Hey, Friday, what’s happened to my shoes?”

He came over. He looked busy. “What’s the trouble?” he asked briskly. “Boy, you’d better hop to it. You’re going to miss the bus.”

“Well,” I said, “these shoes seem, well, sort of heavy, that’s what they seem.”

“Your shoes seem heavy?” said Friday, quite loudly, so I moved toward him and I said softly, so as not to be overheard in the locker room, “Well, look here, Friday, heft them for yourself.”

He did so, and looked surprised. “There’s nothing wrong with these shoes.”

“Somebody’s put something in them,” I said stubbornly.

Friday called out loudly, “Hey, the rookie thinks somebody’s weighted his shoes. What’d anyone want to do that for?” he asked. I looked carefully at the corners of his mouth for a turn that would suggest that a joke was being played. Sam Williams came around the lockers, and so did Joe Schmidt.

“Feet seem heavy?” Williams asked.

“Hell no, Sam,” I said. “It’s the shoes themselves. Someone’s stuck some weights in them.”

“Who’d want to do that?” asked Schmidt. He leaned over and hefted the shoes. “They seem all right to me.”

I took them back and hefted them myself, but I was beginning to lose my sense of proportion, so that they no longer seemed as heavy as they had.

A number of players were standing around by then, dressed for the bus ride, holding their helmets by the chin straps.

“Try them on,” Schmidt suggested.

I slipped the shoes on, laced them up, and clomped around the locker-room floor in front of my bench.

“What do you think?” Friday asked.

“Well, I don’t know,” I said frankly. “I mean I can walk and all, but they still seem all-fired heavy.”

“That’s not surprising,” said Sam Williams. “Look, you got a big night coming up, quarterbacking your first game, and you got a real example of heavy feet, that’s all. Perfectly natural. Nothing to be blamed for.”

He had a big grin on his face, but I began to wonder if it wasn’t one of sympathy. Around the circle of faces there wasn’t a glimmer, even on Night Train Lane’s, whose manner was so easy he was always laughing, to suggest that they weren’t all being perfectly serious.

“Aw, come on now,” I said. “I haven’t got heavy feet, for Chrissake!” I watched them, particularly Night Train’s eyes, waiting for the laughter to dissolve them and give them away. They all remained solemn. At the edge of the circle players just arriving, who couldn’t see past the big phalanx of shoulder pads, wanted to know what was going on.

“Someone fainted?” I heard a voice ask.

“You’ll get over them,” someone else called out, “soon as you get on the field.”

Friday suddenly said, “I’ll tell you something about those shoes. The cleats are worn thin. Hand ’em over and I’ll get one of the boys to screw in a new set for you.”

I sat down on the bench and took the shoes off, hefting them once more, and shaking my head. Friday disappeared with them.

“Friday’s probably going to work a nail or two up through the soles, for Chrissakes,” I said.

Someone said, “D’ja ever see such a case of nerves?”

The players began drifting away—those who were dressed heading for the buses out in the parking lot, their cleats crashing against the locker-room floor. Someone came by as I waited and said I was wanted—and quick—for the quarterback meeting.

Earl Morrall and Milt Plum were waiting with Scooter McLean. Over the faucets of the whirlpool baths a message on a paper towel had been stuck up which read RESERVED FOR PLIMPTON.

“Look at that thing,” I said involuntarily.

The notice was signed with a device—a dagger dripping blood. It was from Brettschneider, the last in a series of messages which I had been receiving at staggered hours that day; I found the first stuck in the mirror of my room when I awoke. It read: George—you are going to get your butt knocked off [s] The Badger and his friends. The next announced: We have made arrangements for you to order anything you want for the pre-game meal [s] The Badger and his friends. Another message had appeared in the mirror just before I left for the gym—this one informing me that I had only two hours to go, signed with the bloody dagger and the signature of the Badger and his “gang,” not “friends” this time, but “gang.”

Scooter McLean was sitting up on a rubbing table; in front of him on wood-slatted chairs sat the two quarterbacks, tilting back as the Scooter ran down the play list, deciding with them what plays would be used that night against the defensive unit.

McLean looked at me when I came in. “OK,” he said. “You’re going to run the first five plays of the night.”

“The first five plays!” I said. “You sure?” I swallowed hard. “The first five plays.” Time seemed to be going too quickly, and the temptation was to try to slow things down.

McLean looked at his play list.

“Start off with the three left twenty-six near oh pinch,” he said.

That was a play I had tried a few times in the scrimmages—clumsily and with little effect—a running play, in which the quarterback receives the ball from center, turns, takes a couple of steps straight back and hands the ball to the number two back coming across laterally from right to left, who then cuts sharply into the number six hole between left tackle and end.

“God, Scooter,” I said. “I’m not so hot on that play. Can’t I… start with ninety-three, the pass play that I hit Pietrosante with, cutting across ten yards downfield? It’s my best play and it’ll rile them, starting with a pass play—shake them up.”

Scooter shook his head. “This is the first-line defense you’re playing against. You’re not going to rile them up with any ninety-three pass play. Stick on the ground. Let the blockers and the running backs do the work for you. Sure, you can do that twenty-six near oh pinch.” He hopped off the rubbing table and demonstrated—the spin, the two steps back, and the handoff to the two back cutting across. “Simple,” he said.

“It’s a good choice,” said Morrall from his chair. “You got more chance moving on the ground because once you get the handoff to the running back he’ll be responsible for picking up the yardage.”

“OK,” I said weakly. “If I can get the ball to him.”

Scooter went back to his clipboard. “Then the twenty-six roll,” he said.

“Look,” I said. “I’m not so hot on the twenty-six roll. Why can’t I try the ninety-three next? My two best plays are the forty-eight flip” (this was a long lateral from the quarterback out to the number four back running parallel to the line and then cutting for the eight hole, at left end) “and the ninety-three pass. I think about those plays, and I have a certain amount of confidence about them. Scooter, I have a terrible time with those handoff plays like the twenty-six roll.”

“OK,” said Scooter. “Run the ninety-three next. That’s two plays. Then how about the forty-two?”

“OK, that’s the third play,” I said. The 42 was supposed to be simple, the quarterback spinning as soon as the ball slapped into his palm, a full spin, and then shoving the ball into the stomach of the four back churning straight past into the two hole just left of the center—but still it was a play that filled me with gloom. The times I had tried it in practice, the fullback, with that jackrabbit speed at which a professional backfield moves, would be past me and into the line before I could complete my spin and hand the ball to him. The procedure then, having missed him, the ball held out to his rump going by, was to haul the ball back in and follow him into the line, which I would do, grimacing, eyes squinted almost shut, waiting for the impact, which was invariably very quick.

“Then what?” asked Scooter.

“I’d like to try the slant pass into the Badger’s territory at left linebacker. That’d give me great pleasure to complete that one—he’s been giving me such a time with the messages.” I motioned toward the whirlpool bath. “Besides, I’ve been working on it after practice with the tight ends, particularly Jim Gibbons. Then I suppose I could end with the forty-eight flip.”

Scooter agreed to the list, and he marked the plays down on his clipboard.

Joe Schmidt came in to have something done to the tape on his ankle. He saw us grouped around Scooter, and he called out, grinning, “Hey, Scooter, be sure to let him try the Fake II.”

For a week Schmidt had been tempting me to try the Fake II for the Pontiac scrimmage. It was a play in which the quarterback took the ball from his center, dropped back a few yards, pumping his arm to fake the linebackers into moving back, or laterally, to protect against a pass, and then suddenly taking the ball into the line himself—a quarterback draw play, it was, and it meant the quarterback was accepting the horror that came when the linebackers recovered from the fake and picked him up as he came through. There weren’t many quarterbacks around who called the play.

Schmidt did a little pantomime there in the training room of a nervous quarterback working the Fake II, poised behind his center, then dancing back in his stocking feet, pumping his arm hard, then running hard in place, head down, emulating the dash for the line, then looking up and screaming as the imaginary linebackers converged, followed by a concussive sound he made by exploding his palms together, and he gave the expiring, anguished cry of a broken quarterback.

“Oh yes,” he called out. “You got to get him to try that one.”

It was a funny imitation, and we stood laughing at it—except for the Scooter, who said testily, “They’re going to make you yo-yos on defense look silly tonight, mind you!” He would take no such kidding from the defense people, simply as a matter of principle, having spent his years, from the first, running against defenses, and afterward, as a coach, attacking them with personnel he trained endlessly, trying to imbue them with his skills and perhaps his antipathy, which was such that when a member of the defense, even from his own team, twitted him, it raised his temper.

Everybody knew this—and admired it—though it did not keep Schmidt and the others from joshing him, knowing just how far they could go. The Scooter turned his back and inspected his clipboard, his quarterbacks grouped around him.

He had no further use for me, so I hurried off to the equipment manager’s room to retrieve my football shoes. Friday’s assistant was still screwing cleats into them.

“Friday!” I said. “These cleats look awfully long to me. Those aren’t mud cleats you’re sticking in there?”

Friday came over. “What’d I want to stick mud cleats in there for?” he said. “The day’s fine outside. Going to be a lovely night. What do you want mud cleats for?”

“I don’t want mud cleats, damn it, Friday, but those things being screwed in there are long enough to bring up… well, oil, and as for the shoes themselves, Friday, they got to have weights in them.”

Friday began hefting them again, but then suddenly he grinned and broke—with a thin wheeze that left him struggling for breath. “OK, OK,” he said. “Look at this.” He tugged at the inside sole of the shoe, straining against the glue that had hardened fast, and he skinned out a thin, shaped metal strip. It weighed at least a pound.

“What do you think of that?” he asked. “They were put in this morning.”

“Look at those things,” I said.

Friday explained that players who wanted to strengthen their leg muscles often wore them in their shoes in the early part of training. You could tell when they came in from running with them—“sort of like gimpy hens.”

“Great,” I said. “You mean to say they would have let me play the game tonight wearing those damn things?”

“Probably not,” said Friday. “They’d all like to see you do well, but it’s hard for them not to kid around. Besides,” he said, “you could have gotten around all right wearing those shoes, and they would have had a good laugh afterward, and if you didn’t do well you would have had a good excuse. Now, you haven’t got an excuse.”

“Well, I’ve still got these mud cleats—look at the length of them—to fall back on for an excuse,” I said.

I laced up the shoes and hurried out to the parking lot where the bus was waiting. The first bus, with the rookies in it, had gone. I was the last into the veterans’ bus, and we started for Pontiac as soon as the door had sighed shut behind me. It was a strange busload—all of us in uniform, the offense in blue jerseys, as I was, and the defensive players in white with blue numbers, the big shoulder pads filling the seats out into the aisle when the players sat two abreast, and swaying almost across to the seat opposite when the bus rocked around a corner.

It was relatively quiet, conversation low, the players staring out the windows, their minds on what they would be doing in an hour or so. In the rookie bus, one of them told me later, they rode in absolute silence for the half-hour ride to Pontiac. Occasionally, in our bus, someone would call out, “Get it up, get it up! Offense!” and a few players would stamp on the bus floor with their cleated shoes—the tension beginning to rise; once in a while the crack of palm against palm would sound, and that tight call, “Get it up!” would come again, sometimes delivered for the offense’s benefit, sometimes for the defense.

Earl Morrall, in his seat across the aisle, recalled that the year before, the Pontiac game had been played in a torrential downpour—the worst conditions he could remember for a game, worse than the ten-degree temperatures that swept in off Lake Erie in Cleveland—the players ankle-deep in warm summer rain. Then near the end of the game the rain came down unbelievably hard and lightning hit one of the light standards and popped the row of lights far up, smoke rose from each distant bulb and sparks trailed down, like a country-club fireworks display, and then the other light standards flickered and failed. In one of the lightning flashes Morrall saw Night Train bolting for cover, stretching out in a crazy stride like a man being pursued across tide-covered mudflats, almost obscured by the spray kicked up in his haste.

Across from Morrall, I sat alone trying to clear my mind and get my plays straight, visualizing what I had to do with each—the 26 near oh pinch, the 93 pass play, the 42 (which made me wince, thinking about it), the 9 slant out to embarrass the Badger, and finally the 48 flip play. I was tempted to scribble the numbers down on my wrist with a ballpoint pen, which some quarterbacks do, particularly checkoff plays, so that when they arrive at the line of scrimmage and find the defense set up against the play called in the huddle they can glance down—they have very little time—and spot the play scrawled in blue ink on their wrist.

Jim Gibbons, the tight end, came down the aisle and sat with me for a while. We went over the plays together, keeping our voices down so the defensive players would not overhear. In front of us Paul Ward, a big 250-pound defensive lineman, knew what we were whispering about, and he turned and leered over the back of his seat. He was a big, blond, friendly ex-Marine who had a degree in physical education, and he was writing a postgraduate thesis on isometric exercises, which he practiced, straining against immovable objects. At the training camp I would come around a corner and find him in a doorway pressing out against the sides with his palms, his face flushed with effort. He was always trying to get me to do the exercises, which I did, to humor him, grunting in doorways, and he would say, “Great, great! But you must do it every chance you get—look for places to stand up and practice it.”

“Hey!” he said over his seat. “Which of the two plays you know are you going to run against us?”

Gibbons said, “Two? This guy knows the whole book—secret sessions after practice—plays you haven’t even heard of, and you’ll be seeing them from flat on your kisser—you better believe it—now that he’s got the weight out of his shoes.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Ward.

Schmidt, sitting a few seats away, who had overheard, said, “I’ll tell you the play that’s going to bust the whole game wide open—it’s the Fake II, that’s the play,” and down the aisle we heard the Badger, Brettschneider, say, “The Fake II! Well, that’ll sure’n hell bust the third-string quarterback wide open,” and the guffawing began. Someone asked if anyone could think of a better play to offer the rookie than the Fake II, and behind me somewhere I heard John Gordy say, “Yes, a club.”

The joking did not last long. We were in the outskirts of Pontiac—the traffic heavy, much of it moving toward the stadium. It was dusk outside, and the blue antiglare tint in the windows darkened the bus. The driver kept the inside lights off. Gibbons, beside me, chatted for a while, and then he too was silent. The bus turned, and we maneuvered slowly through streams of pedestrians, ticket holders, who would look up, annoyed at the bus in their midst, expecting to see a fan club from Ypsilanti, perhaps, with colored plastic hats, and saw instead the Lions themselves, the big shoulder pads flush up against the windows—gaping then, and pointing.

The players were on edge now—a few tight comments were leveled at the bus driver, who made a wrong turn and got us blocked in the crowds of ticket holders a few hundred yards from the stadium. He lifted his hands off the steering wheel finally with a hopeless shrug of his shoulders, and opened the door. We clambered down and trotted the short distance to the stadium, the crowd, hearing the sounds of the spikes on the macadam coming up on them, turning and dividing to let us by—always the stares, the mouths half open as if something was to be said, some verbal accord to be reached—though we ran between walls of silence, only an occasional call to someone recognized. Whoever was in the lead, Joe Schmidt I think it was, ran us up under the overhang of the outside of the stadium, then down a sloped incline of a corridor which led through to the football field. Someone, an official perhaps, misdirected him in the passageway—through a small side door, the long line of us trotting dutifully after him, into a small locker room, in the center of which a Marine color guard was standing, with its flags, and two Boy Scouts, with highly polished wooden guns, staring wide-eyed as the room began to bulge with football players. Schmidt couldn’t file us out again until the last in line had come in—like a tree boa in a birdhouse who has to get his length in with him before he can get out. The place got crowded full, some of us trotting in place, cleats crashing, waiting, no one saying anything, everyone too self-absorbed to remark on the fine lunacy of that room suddenly filling with football players, then emptying, for no apparent reason, and what the color guard and the Boy Scouts, waiting peaceably enough for their call, must have thought when the door opened and the influx of those big men began.

Schmidt finally got us out on the playing field. It was a lovely evening—a cool summer breeze coming across the wire fence at the open end of the field out of the remnants of a sunset splayed above a horizon of flat farmland. The fields close to the stadium were crowded with cars, with more arriving. The stands, which rose up twenty or thirty rows, rapidly filling, ran along the sidelines, and at each corner four steel towers stood into the hazeless sky, their arc lights on full and collecting clouds of moths, hardly visible until the dusk deepened and the light began to catch them, turning them white as they wheeled and hurtled into the glare as if windblown. A band shell for concerts stood at the closed end of the field; beyond it was a junkyard with a gigantic hydraulic press amid pillars of auto hulks, crushed absolutely flat as shingles and piled up, one on another.

I turned away to join the circle for calisthenics being led by Terry Barr, the captain of the Lion offensive unit—the jumping jacks, the stretching exercises, all of us bellowing out the cadences, the push-ups, the grass cool to the touch—all of us grateful to be active. The teams then split up and went to their respective ends of the field, the offensive unit at the junkyard end, those mournful stacks of flattened cars filling my vision every time I turned.

Wilson walked over. “How’s my starting quarterback?” he asked.

Instinctively, I reached for my helmet.

I had been in the habit of pulling it on when there was even the slightest chance of entering a scrimmage—rather than face the awkward possibility of being called suddenly by Wilson and either not having a helmet at all (players were supposed to keep their helmets at hand, but it was easy enough to leave them lying in the grass while you tossed a ball back and forth), or having difficulty getting into it—the strain, and getting the ears straightened out, all that procedure—while running out to take over the offensive huddle.

I said, “How much time before…”

“Oh, about ten minutes,” Wilson said. “There’ll be an award ceremony after the contests and then the game will start.”

I turned away from him, got my thumbs into the helmet ear holes, and ducking my head I got the helmet on, and when I’d got my ears straight I clicked the chin strap fast to a little punch-on snap which sounds sharply in the helmet—pop—and I wandered over to the bench and sat down.

One of the troubles with wearing the helmet was that it closed off the outside world, the noise of the crowd, the cheering as the contests went on—all of this just a murmur—leaving my mind to work away busily inside the amphitheater of the helmet. Voices, my own, spoke quite clearly—my lips moving in the security of the helmet—offering consolation, encouragement, and paternal advice of a particularly galling sort: “The thing to be is calm, son, and remember not to snatch back from the ball until you get it set in your palm”—this in reference to one of my common faults, which was darting back from the center before I had hold of the ball, too anxious to get back and develop the play; the ball would fall and bounce behind the center’s heels—Bob Whitlow, or Jim Martin, whoever the center was—his spikes furrowing the grass as he plowed forward, and I would stop in mid-flight back and dive forward to recover the ball, flailing for it like a man swimming frantic strokes underwater, hearing around me the cracking of shoulder pads and the thick heave of linemen like stress in an ice floe.

Fastening his helmet, the author steels himself to enter the action. (Walter Iooss Jr.)

“I must hang on to the ball,” I murmured.

“But”—the portentous voice came again—“you must not dally, son… On the handoffs you must get the ball to the halfbacks with dispatch.…”

When I played baseball in Yankee Stadium, my inner voice was Southern in inflection, until it finally broke into hysteria at my difficulties as a pitcher—a pleasant, comforting voice, originally, that said, “Gol-ding it” and “Chile’s play, this is.”

In Pontiac, the voice was not Southern; it might have been New England—severe, patronizing, that of a cleric, or a schoolteacher, perhaps, seated on a high stool, a blackboard behind him, and, out a small square window to one side, a barren field with some cornstalks in it and a scarecrow, and a low stone fence around—it was the sort of voice which fitted such surroundings. It said, “Son, no daydreaming—tend to your knitting.”

These instructions were accompanied by short, visual vignettes, subliminal, but which seemed to flash inside the helmet with the clarity of a television screen in a dark room—tumultuous scenes of big tackles and ends in what seemed a landslide, a cliff of them toppling toward me, like slow-moving objects in a dream, as I lay in some sort of depression, a pit perhaps, the pit that Raymond Berry had described, gaping up in resigned dismay. As the avalanche of linemen came down, they were calling out the red-dog cry “Jumbo! Jumbo! Jumbo!” almost loud enough to drown out the schoolmaster’s pawky voice whispering close at hand, “Son, do this, son, do that”—all of this a manifestation of insecurity so discomfiting that to cease being a captive audience to it I ripped off my helmet, despite my participation minutes away, and let the outside noise of the crowd, huge by now, wash over me.

A band was playing somewhere in the stands. The wind coming up off the parking fields was cool. The public-address system was announcing the contest winners. There had been footraces, a passing-accuracy contest, a longest-pass contest, and a punting competition for both accuracy and length. A pretty girl wearing a white evening dress and long white gloves was standing at midfield. She wore a diadem—the Queen of Something-or-Other—and she was handing out the awards, to Pat Studstill, the flanker back, as I watched, for the most accurate punt of the evening—it had gone sixty yards on the fly, a yard or so out from the corner flag to upset Yale Lary—and as he stepped forward I pounded my cleats against the ground and called out his name happily, concentrating on what was going on to keep my mind occupied. “Monk, oh you Monk!” His face wore a leer, alive with it, as he escorted the girl in the evening dress from the field to conclude the ceremonies, all of us along the bench hooting and braying at him.

George Wilson then called: “All right, teams A and B out there!” motioning to me, hard-faced—a door slammed shut on merriment—and the helmets went on.

The officials, in their vertical-striped black-and-white jerseys, were waiting on the thirty-yard line. The kickoff was to be dispensed with, and the scrimmage would start from there.

I came up off the bench slowly, working my fingers up into my helmet to get at my ears. As I crossed the sidelines I was conscious then not only of moving into the massive attention of the crowd, but seeing ahead out of the opening of my helmet the two teams waiting. Some of the defense were already kneeling at the line of scrimmage, their heads turned so that helmeted, silver, with the cages protruding, they were made to seem animal and impersonal—wildlife of some large species disturbed at a water hole—watching me come toward them. Close to, suddenly there was nothing familiar about them. With the arc lights high up on the standards, the interiors of their helmets were shadowed—perhaps with the shine of a cheekbone, the glint of an eye—no one recognizable, nor a word from them. I trotted by the ball. Its trade name “Duke” was face up. The referee was waiting, astride it, a whistle at the end of a black cord dangling from his neck. The offensive team in their blue jerseys, about ten yards back, on their own twenty-yard line, moved and collected in the huddle formation as I came up, and I slowed, and walked toward them, trying to be calm about it, almost lazying up to them to see what could be done.