CHAPTER 23

After the scrimmage, the disappointment stuck, and it was hard to ease. It was quiet in the bus going back; everyone was tired, thinking back on the game. We were a long time blocked in traffic outside Pontiac, but no one complained. It was dark inside. Up ahead, a police car had its revolving beacon going, which illuminated the interior of the bus with quick periodic washes of deep rose. I was sitting alone. George Wilson came down the aisle. He sat down, and looked, and began talking easily. I was feeling low, and he knew it.

“God, George,” I said. “I couldn’t get unstuck. Those first three plays, I didn’t even get to complete them. It was like getting into a car and having the motor drop out on the pavement before you even turn the ignition key.”

“It’s not easy, is it?” he remarked. “You have to be a certain type of person to do it well.” He began talking about the character of the football players. He picked Bobby Layne, the Detroit quarterback, whose teams would take anything from him because he performed and was tough, the personification of the football player. At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact. Wilson told me that his teammate Jumbo Joe Stydahar once shouted at a losing team when he was a coach: “No wonder you guys get kicked around. Every one of you’s still got his teeth.” Joe himself had none. He was an enormous man, a compulsive eater, and when the Los Angeles Rams tried to pick him up on their shoulders after he coached them to the ’51 championship they dropped him. That was what it was all about: hitting. Wilson himself would be remembered for perhaps the most vicious block in football history, clearing out two Washington Redskins, Chug Justice and Jimmy Johnston, to uncork his fellow Chicago Bear Osmanski for a touchdown on the second play of the championship game that ended in a 73–0 rout. Wilson was a member of one of the greatest teams ever assembled—George Halas’s Monsters of the Midway, the Chicago Bears of the early forties: with Wilson were Norm Standlee from Stanford, Sid Luckman, the quarterback from Columbia, Bill Osmanski of Holy Cross, George McAfee of Duke, Ray Nolting of Cincinnati, and Scooter McLean, who was, of course, still with him, as was Aldo Forte. In the line at center was Clyde “Bulldog” Turner, who came to the attention of the pros through a publicity photograph supplied by his Texas college, which showed him carrying four-hundred-pound cows around on his shoulders. According to a story Red Grange used to tell, Turner fell out of a four-story window once, for some reason—it was never explained—with a big, heavy thump, and when a policeman rushed up, shouting, “What’s going on around here?” Turner, who was brushing himself off, replied, “Damned if I know, just got here myself.” Hampton Pool of Stanford was also on that team, and so were Joe Stydahar, Ken Kavanaugh of LSU, Danny Fortman of Colgate, Ed Kolman of Temple, and then Ed Sprinkle, an extremely rough player who was known as “the Iceman.” These players made Chicago a power for over a decade, right up to the war. The year after their 73–0 rout of Washington they beat the New York Giants 37–9 two weeks after Pearl Harbor, with a few more than 13,000 people in the stands, and the winnings to the victorious team only $430 apiece.

Sid Luckman had always said that the one play of all these years that would stay in his mind was Wilson’s block. In the car after the game Wilson’s wife had innocently asked who it was that had wiped out the two Redskins in the brutal move—her tone implying that one of her husband’s teammates was near inhuman.

“Well, I… ah, I did that,” Wilson told her.

I could hear him laughing in the darkness as he remembered. “Well, now,” he said. “I may be wrong. Perhaps you like physical contact. After all, you boxed Archie Moore and did some rough things in this series you’re doing.”

I said, “Well, I have these tear ducts which react quickly to being hit. It’s an unconscious reflex. There’s nothing I can do about it. I suspect it embarrasses my opponents—to see that tear-streaked puss opposite them; I’m told that it’s called a sympathetic response—it means in fact that I don’t like to be hit. It doesn’t mean I run away.…”

“Of course not,” said Wilson. “But the love of physical contact happens to be a quality that’s suited for football, and you can tell it early. When kids, out in the park, choose up sides for tackle rather than touch, the guys that want to be ends and go out for the passes, or even quarterback, because they think subconsciously they can get rid of the ball before being hit, those guys don’t end up as football players. They become great tennis players, or skiers, or high jumpers. It doesn’t mean they lack courage or competitiveness. But the guys who put up their hands to be tackles and guards, or fullbacks who run not for daylight but for trouble—those are the ones who one day will make it as football players.

“What did you put up your hand for?” he asked.

“Well, end,” I said. “I always thought that was because I was tall and spindly, and better suited for that position.…”

“Sure,” said Wilson. “You probably were.”

I said half jokingly, “Do you suppose I can pick up a liking for physical contact before the Cleveland game?”

Wilson laughed. “One interesting thing,” he said, “is that you begin to lose your zest for it after a while. Take Bobby Layne. In his great years, when he was knocked over because someone missed a block, he’d shove a friendly elbow into the guy’s ribs and tell him to forget it, that he could take it. The fellow’d think, ‘What a guy!’ and the next time he’d do better—out of sheer respect for a quarterback who could take it. He’d block a bull elephant for Layne, or run through a brick wall for him. But then after a while it wasn’t so easy to take, and Layne began to say, ‘You son of a bitch, you missed your block.’ The players said Layne began to flinch. It wasn’t that—he just lost his liking for it. So he chewed them out. That was all right if he was infallible, but no quarterback is, or ever could be, and his players began to lose respect for him—and when that was gone, his capability diminished at the same time.

“And when that really happens,” Wilson said, looking out the window, “you’re done, and you have to go on to something else.”

He began talking about coaching then, about its complexities—almost with regret, as if the pleasures of the game with its fundamental simplicity of physical contact were unavailable to him watching from the sidelines—as if it were a frustration and a nuisance to find self-expression in the actions of others. No matter, he said. It was a tough and absorbing job.

And did the coaches change, I asked, under the rigors of it? As Bobby Layne did as a quarterback?

He nodded. “After a while the coach can’t take the losses out on himself. So he turns on his players. He forgets that his players are men. And also he forgets that once he was a player. Why, Joe Stydahar, my old teammate on the Bears, when he was the Rams’ coach, once crept around a hotel lobby, sneaking around behind the palms—which was hard for him, being as big as he was—and he jotted down a big number of fines for his players coming in late after losing a night game. I heard about that and called him up—I knew he wouldn’t mind—to recall to him that he’d been a player once, and, what’s more, a ‘rounder’—which was what we called a guy who didn’t care too much for the rules and regulations.”

“The players say that of Vince Lombardi of the Packers,” I said. “That he was once a player’s coach, and that the pressure in Green Bay changed him into a martinet… removed him from his players.”

“It’s not easy,” Wilson said.

The bus was clear of the Pontiac traffic jam, and we were moving along swiftly through the dark.

Wilson compared his job as a head coach at moments of stress with that of a baseball manager, Casey Stengel, not in scorn, but to make a point—the Met manager coming slowly up out of the dugout to see to his pitcher, hunched forward but moving for the mound as if hauling a small garden roller behind him, getting his short stumpy stride arranged so as not to step on the foul line, all the time his mind turning on what to do, three or four minutes available to decide whether to bring in another pitcher, which was a decision often made easy for him by reference to the “book” of percentages. The football coach in a similar situation of stress had to marshal a host of minutiae within seconds, and, applying knowledge or intuition, make a decision which if it went wrong, since only fourteen games were played a season, could cost him his job. Often something would happen—a fumble, a penalty, or an injury—to remove the reins and make the coach as much of a bystander as the fellow ripping tickets in half at the gate, or the hot-dog vendor in the aisles. Yet the disaster on the field was his doing and responsibility.

All of this made my own disaster seem far less important, which Wilson had calculated, I’m sure, and it was easy to sense why his men had such respect for him—a “player’s coach” was how they referred to him.

I was grateful to him, and I felt better as the bus turned off the turnpike and headed down the dark country roads for the school.

The players themselves were also concerned about my well-being. When the bus had pulled up at the gym, and we had showered and changed, a group of them took me along that night—a long tearing night through the Dearborn dance halls, all of them shouting, “Fawty-fowah, fawty-tew,” from time to time, mimicking my accent, and slapping me on the back and making me feel as though I had really done something more than play the fool in Pontiac, until I began to say, “No, no… it was nothing at all, really.”

Perhaps most concerned about my welfare following the game was Harley Sewell. He had been eleven years in the National Football League. He had pale, thinning hair, a rolling gait like a sailor’s; he was small in stature for a lineman (his weight was in the record books as 230, though he looked much lighter), but when he put his mind to something he was insistent, and his determination was obviously a major part of his equipment. He was always the first player in the locker room, the first dressed, and on the field he always ran from one place to another, never to impress anyone, but because that was his way—to drive himself at a furious tempo. One of the jokes in camp was to speak of Sewell as “dragging his feet” or “holding things up,” and often they shouted at him: “Hey, Harley, can’t you never get it up?” and he would keep at what he was doing, not letting on he’d heard. Off the field his manner remained the same. A Texan, born in a place called St. Jo, he kept after me to come down to his part of the world in the off-season and try my hand at riding broncos. He was absolutely determined about it.

He’d say, “Now when you coming down to ride them broncos?”

“Well, Harley, I don’t know…”

“I’d sure like for you to have that experience.”

“Well, Harley…”

“No trouble ’tall to set it up for you.”

“Harley…”

“Now when you think you can come on down?”

“Sometime in the off-season,” I’d say.

He was insistent, for sure. John Gordy told me that in his rookie year Harley liked to hear him sing, and kept after him about it. “All right now, rook, I’ll play,” he’d say, picking up his guitar. “You sing.”

“God, Harley…”

“Sing.”

“I can’t sing.”

“Sing, rook.”

So Gordy did. There was nothing else to do.

After my scrimmage and our return to the dormitory, Sewell came looking for me. I would be downcast after my sorry performance and in need of company. For some reason he thought I would like a pizza pie, so he drove off and got one somewhere, which he put in the backseat of his car. Only two or three players were in the dormitory when he got there, chatting in one of the rooms about the scrimmage, and Harley appeared in the door, holding the big pizza in front of him. “Where’s the rook at?” he asked.

They told him they thought I was off at the Gay Haven twist palace with the others. He waited around for a while, and they had some of the pizza, though Harley kept a big piece of it in case I turned up. He left finally.

I didn’t get in until six in the morning. I had spent two hours in the Dearborn police station, a gleaming emporium where the police sergeants sit up behind a bright-colored Formica-surfaced desk, to retrieve my car, which I had parked too close to a side crossing. In Dearborn, parking violators, no matter how minor the offense, have their cars towed away. I was not aware of this practice, and when I came out of the Gay Haven, a little dizzy in the head from the smoke and exercise, and walked up a quiet street to find the car gone, I sat on the curb, head in hands, and tried to remember where I’d parked it. A taxi cruised by, and the driver, thinking he had a fare, stopped, and after we’d talked a while about the missing car he drove me to the police station nearly ten miles away. Out in back of the station was a big macadam-surfaced parking lot with the yellow tow trucks and the offending cars parked in rows. Mine, they told me, was among them, and I paid up, furious, with no sense of guilt, and then sat in an absolutely immaculate waiting room, as if in a hospital, until the paperwork on the case was done; when they took me out to the car, I drove off with rattling speed through the parking lot to show the contempt I felt.

The sun was up when I reached Cranbrook. It was going to be a hot day. I knew the heat would begin to build up in my room, but the bed looked inviting. I hadn’t been asleep for more than what seemed a minute when I heard a voice sing out, “Up you get there, rook. No time for lying around.”

I looked and it was Harley, standing in the door. I had a sudden premonition that he had some broncos ready for me, waiting, outside on the lawn. “Wha’? Wha’?” I said. I sat up in bed. His two children were with him, staring around from behind him.

“Time to be up,” Harley said.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Eight,” he said.

“God, Harley, I only just got in. I only had two hours’ sleep.”

“Time’s a-wasting,” he said. “We’ll go for a drive.”

“Harley, I’ve been in a police station…”

He disappeared with his children, but they were back after a minute or so with coffee and rolls from the dining room. “These’ll fix you up,” Harley said.

I groaned and got up to dress.

“It’s best to keep your mind occupied,” Harley said.

“My God, Harley, I was asleep.”

“You would’ve waked up wrong,” Harley said.

We went riding through the country in his station wagon. His children sat quietly in the backseat, flanking a lawn mower that Harley had borrowed and had been meaning to return. When I closed my eyes I could feel sleep rock toward me, so I kept the window down to let the warm air, thick with summer, hit, and I tried to keep my mind on what Harley was saying. He was talking about the tough people he had played against, the enormous defensive tackles and ends he had tried to clear out for the offensive backs, and the humiliations he had been forced to suffer. He was trying to make me feel better about my own humiliations the night before. He talked about Big Daddy Lipscomb. Harley said that he had played against him a number of times and that while he was one of the best, and he’d been humiliated by him for sure, he was not as good as Leroy Smith of the Green Bay Packers, who was faster and trickier and much harder on a good day than Big Daddy on an average day. Occasionally, Big Daddy would put his mind to it, and then he was invincible. He talked a lot on the field, announcing to everybody what he was going to do and whom he was going to rack up. Harley’s worst day against him was in the 1962 Pro Bowl game when he just couldn’t handle him, so he came out and someone else went in to try, and couldn’t, then Forrest Gregg tried and couldn’t, so finally they double-teamed on him, two men driving at him, and that helped but not much. He had arrived in the National Football League strong and massive, pupil to Art Donovan of Baltimore, where Lipscomb first played, who taught him just about everything he knew, which was instruction from a powerfully knowledgeable source.

I asked Harley why Baltimore had traded such a valuable property even if he did have a bad day or so, to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Well, they’d had problems with him, Harley told me: he was not an easy man, being prideful and quick-tempered, and on one occasion, the year before he was traded, one of the Colts gave a party to which Big Daddy was not invited, and he prowled around until the idea that he was being snubbed got the better of him. He turned up at the party and threw the host through a window. There was a big ruckus, of course, particularly since the host, who was a very fleet scatback, cut a tendon in his ankle going through; after that, they didn’t think they could keep Big Daddy around. Harley talked about him as if he were still around. The great tackle had died of an overdose of drugs. I asked Harley about his death, but either he didn’t hear me or didn’t want to answer. We drove in silence for a while.

“The vision I have of him,” I said dreamily, “is him sitting in a dentist’s chair.”

“What’s that?” asked Harley sharply.

“I’ve read somewhere he couldn’t stand pain,” I explained. “He wouldn’t get in a dentist’s chair unless he had his wife with him, sitting on his lap, to calm him down at the slightest twinge. I never can think of him without seeing that dentist trying to get his job done with those two people sitting in his chair, and having to work around the girl to get at Big Daddy wearing one of those little bibs.”

“I don’t see Big Daddy like that ’tall,” said Harley. “Regretfully, I see him down across the line from me, maybe that shirt out and hanging down behind him like a tail, and then trying to move that boy—like running up agin a barn. He wore these funny special shoes—high on his ankle and made of soft leather—because he had corns, maybe. He had a habit, moving for you, of cracking his palm over the ear hole of your helmet, so it sounded like the side of your face was caving in.” Harley shook his head, as if his ears were still singing.

Lipscomb did have one flaw which Detroit was able to take advantage of, which was that he liked to pursue and tackle in the open field, preferably by the sidelines, where he could knock his man down in full view of the great crowds he reckoned had come to watch him do such things. Then he’d reach down and pick his victim up by the shoulder pads, set him on his feet, and whack his rear with a big hand. The ruse was to get Big Daddy to range off toward the sidelines looking to make such a play, and then run the ball through his vacated position. The play was called 47 crossbuck takeoff, and it required the guard opposite Big Daddy—Harley, say—to pull from his position, indicating that he was leading the interference in a move toward the end, sucking out Big Daddy with him, and then the four back—Pietrosante—would light out through the seven hole with the ball. Of course, if Big Daddy didn’t fall for it and stayed there in the seven hole, refusing to trail out after the guard, it suddenly became very unpleasant for Pietrosante. But he was a showboat sort, Big Daddy, and the chances were—at least at the beginning of his career—that he’d move off laterally after the guard, the long jersey shirt tail, which always came out toward the end of a game, trailing behind him.

“He had his bad days, I’ll tell you,” said Harley, looking over at me.

“Like mine?” I said, grinning at him.

“Sure,” he said, quite seriously. He thought awhile and then he said, “You know of the guys opposite you play each week there’s not an easy one in the bunch, that’s what it comes to, which makes my position a rough one to play. I worry, and I’m occupied with what I’m doing. I have to block someone on nearly every play, so I usually wind up on the ground—I should be there, except on pass protection, something like that—but I kind of like it anyway.” He knocked his hand against the steering wheel. “Whenever you move, you got to move quick and hard, the harder you’re going, the less likely it is you’re going to be hurt. It’s like two cars coming together—the faster comes out cleaner. Can’t have weak grillwork, of course, I mean there’s got to be substance and heft behind the speed.”

“Sure,” I said sleepily.

“When you move you have to keep your body and muscles tense, because if you’re jogging, you’re loose, and if you’re clobbered when you’re pussyfooting around loose you can get unjointed.”

“Yes,” I said. “Unjointed. I suppose the same principle holds true in bronco riding.”

Harley looked over. “You’re coming down to do that, y’know.”

“Is the man going’ ride, Pop?” asked one of the children from the backseat.

“Nothing but…” said Harley.

I looked back at the children, the handle of the lawn mower between them, and their eyes seemed to me grave and speculative.

Harley turned off the road and we drove up a short driveway to a house on a wooded ridge. Friends of his were waiting in a screened-in porch. He hadn’t mentioned we were going there, but it was like him not to. I was introduced around. Coffee was brought in. They’d heard about the game the night before and they were eager for details of my participation.

I sat down and took some coffee. I rather looked forward to telling them. “Well, it was a disaster,” I said. “Just plumb awful.”

Harley was out in the kitchen overseeing something or other, the cutting of coffee cake perhaps, and he came hurrying in. He said, “Well, hold on now, I don’t know about that.”

“Come on, Harley,” I said, grinning at him. “I lost near thirty yards in five plays… fell down without anyone laying a hand on me, then had the ball stolen by Roger Brown, then threw the ball ten feet over Jim Gibbons’s head—that’s pretty plumb awful.…”

Harley said, “You didn’t do too bad… considering…” He was very serious, really trying, consciously, to keep me from being upset and humiliated.

“Harley,” I said, “you’re a poor judge of disasters.”

The others on the porch kept after me for details, but Harley wouldn’t let me discuss the subject. “It don’t do any good dwelling on such things,” he said.

“Aw come on, Harley,” they said.

“No sir!” he said.

So we humored him and talked about other things, and eventually I managed to get just enough in about the game to satisfy them, though we waited until Harley was off the porch, out on the lawn with his children.

He drove me back to Cranbrook after a while. It had been a pleasant morning, and I told him so, standing in the driveway, hands on the car-door windowsill, though Harley, inside, behind the wheel, continued to look preoccupied. He was still worried about my state of mind. “The thing is not to fret on it,” he said. “Your luck wasn’t running too good. Just forget about it, and get yourself going again for the Cleveland game—put your mind on that bitch.…”

“That won’t be hard,” I said. “Listen, Harley, I really am grateful to you.”

“When you wake up, it’ll be all right.”

“Sure,” I said.