CHAPTER 24

Five men were cut the day after the scrimmage. There was a meeting that night, addressed briefly by George Wilson. He was wearing a blue business suit and a tie. He had an engagement afterward, I guess, though his severe attire was appropriate to the occasion. He said he was pleased with the Pontiac scrimmage. He said that now it was time to think about the Cleveland Browns. Only a week to go to prepare. He seemed distracted. He said we would have a rookie show, and would Joe Schmidt and Terry Barr, as co-captains, see to it that the rookies scraped one together. After his remarks, we saw him wander outside and stand by the fountain in the shadows. Aldo Forte took over, his dead cigar in one hand, chalk in the other. The diagramming began, the players hunched over their playbooks. Then Nussbaumer, “the Hawk,” began stepping around the rear of the classroom, very softly, and he would move forward quickly to lean over a player, who would jump at that sudden touch, and he would whisper to him to come outside, and bring his playbook with him. Wilson was out there in the darkness. The two would sit on the balustrade that ran around the edge of the fountain, and out there, beyond earshot, Wilson would say that he was sorry, that the position the player was trying for was filled, and that there wasn’t a spot open.

That was how it was done in the Detroit organization—one of the ways, at any rate, tapping the unfortunate in class when he had his playbook, the organization symbol, so it could be taken from him right then. It was done as unobtrusively as possible, but after a nudge or two from seat to seat we were all aware what was going on, watching the fountain out through the windows. No one paid attention to Forte—all of us, veterans included, conscious of the Hawk moving around in the rear of the classroom, waiting for Wilson to finish with his man at the fountain before moving quickly among the seats to send him out the next one. Dennis Gaubatz, who had played well in the Pontiac scrimmage, gave such a start when the Hawk touched him on the shoulder that his playbook and pencil went flying, and we all turned and stared at him in awe. He went out with the Hawk, but he returned in a minute or so, pale, and shaking his head. He told us later that the Hawk had simply wanted to tell him that he was to be responsible for bringing the blue sack of footballs down to the practice field for the workouts. Jerry Archer had been responsible for that, but he was being let go.

It struck me as a heartless procedure, but perhaps there was no way to let a man go easily. The coaches hated it, because it was hard to do cleanly. There were procedures elsewhere which were hard to believe. A couple of years back at Buffalo, in the American Football League, when the coach cut a player, he let him know by having the equipment manager clear out his locker. When the player arrived in the gym to dress for afternoon practice, horsing around with the others, he would sit down on the bench to work his shoelaces loose, and suddenly find his locker empty, not ever believing it at first, staring up at the locker number, and then into the lockers on either side, the hope beginning to fade, his teammates, now no longer teammates, but acquaintances, looking away from him, embarrassed, staring down at their socks.

Outside my room, just after the meeting, I saw John Lomakoski, the big 250-pound offensive tackle, who had been cut—the only veteran—come down the corridor already on his way out, carrying a toilet kit and his suitcase, a handsome leather one. I would have ducked into my room if I’d had time, so as not to embarrass him. He put down his suitcase and said, “Hello.” It was a warm night, and the sweat stood along his forehead in glistening lines. He had ordered a taxi. He wasn’t sure where he was going to go—the bus station perhaps, or a nearby railroad station—he’d ask the driver—but the main thing to do was to clear out. I don’t think he lived far away, in fact, somewhere in the state, but listening to him I had the impression he wanted to be many miles from Cranbrook before turning to the leather suitcase, and opening it. He said he was sorry we had not had a chance to talk more.

That evening, in their rooms, the players were reminiscing about “Squeaky Shoes,” or “the Turk.” Tommy Watkins said that at Cleveland, when Paul Brown was the coach he would wait until the players were all in at night and then he’d send a coach to get the fellow out of his room and bring him down to the office, where he was officially let go. In the evenings of those days when a cut was due, the rookies would collect in one room, and to keep their spirits up they’d put on twist records and practice dance steps—the volume up high, and the feet pounding—until Paul Brown from the floor below complained that there was so much noise he couldn’t keep his mind clear to decide who to let go. Eventually, the door would open anyway, and Brown’s emissary would point at the unfortunates through the crash of music and the players turning in the dance patterns, and after they’d left the music would be turned down, because for that night at least there would be no further worry, and they knew the dance steps quite well by then.

At Chicago George Halas used to reach out and touch a man on his shoulder, and the players seeing him coming, if they were worried about being cut, would tend to sidle away. One day he reached out to touch a quick little scatback, a 170-pounder with speed and fine hands, who saw the hand coming for his shoulder at the last second, and dodging it he dropped to the ground with a groan and began to do a series of quick push-ups. “Look,” he said, glancing up at Halas, “I’m strong too. I can do these forever.” Halas was supposed to have been so touched by the player’s desperation that he turned away as if it hadn’t been his intention to tap him at all. He kept the player for an extra week, and then came up swiftly behind him in the locker room when the player was skinning himself out of a sweatshirt and got him on the shoulder before there could be any chance of avoidance.

The reactions of the players cut from the roster were likely to be more consistent than the methods of dismissal—often tearful, then sullen, for the most part, as they thought back on all the wasted effort; then there would be a slow shift to the problems of the future, the wondering what would come next, and after a few phone calls they would make a quick departure, to get the place behind them, as Lomakoski had.

There were exceptions, of course. Some years back, after two Lion rookies had been told they were cut, they went up to their room and got mean on a bottle of rye, and came lazying out looking for trouble. They found a Cranbrook mathematics teacher in the lavatory, brushing his teeth. He wore a green silk kimono bathrobe embroidered with a red dragon. He heard them come in behind him, and he turned, smiling at them pleasantly, his mouth full of toothpaste.

“Hi, fellows,” he said. “Nice practice today?”

The two stared at him, rocking slightly.

“Who’s that clown?” one of them asked, pointing at him.

After studying him, the other said, “He’s a chink. A mad chink. Look at that foam on his mouth.”

The mathematics teacher turned back to the sink.

What happened then was unclear—as I was told about it—except that the mathematics teacher was “terrorized,” and he had a packed trunk (he was about to leave the school for a late summer vacation) hoisted out of his quarters and thrown down a stairwell. The Detroit management did its best to patch things up, but the Cranbrook School said that football players were no longer welcome. The Lions would not be invited back the following year. The school stuck to it for a while, and the Lions trained for two summers on the facilities of Ypsilanti State College—spartan surroundings compared to the sylvan aspects of Cranbrook—until the school relented and had them back.

I walked around to the rookie quarters. In their common room a gin-rummy game was going on among those who had escaped the cut—full of hilarity and no one’s mind on his cards. Nick Ryder, the rookie fullback from Miami, wore a big grin as he looked at his cards, and so did Jake Greer, who, when he saw me come in, turned and piped out in a thin, high cry: “Ma’, Squeaky Shoes she didn’ get you none neither,” and he gave off a little whoop, tilting far back in his chair so his foot flew up past the table, but then embarrassed by his temerity he quieted down and looked solemnly into his handful of cards. Lucien Reeberg, who’d also survived, was there too, and Don King, the one they called “Honeymoon” because he had been married recently, and so was Ernie Clark, whom Milt Plum for some reason had been ribbing since he’d arrived, calling out, when he saw him, “Well, we’ve nothing to fear, Ernie’s here.” Clark could barely shuffle the cards. Reeberg tried to pretend nothing important had happened, lifting a hand in stiff acknowledgment when I came in, but his actions were exaggerated. He emitted a piercing giggle, and when he riffled the cards they sprayed out over the table, which got them all hollering with laughter—Greer rocked his chair around on one leg—as if they were all high on hashish. Roger Brown sat with them, the only one interested in the card game, indulging the excitement of the others, and occasionally he would say, “Hey, has no one come here to play?”—a look of pain on his big face that got the rest of them going again, whooping and pointing at him, not far from idiocy in their relief at still being able to consider him a teammate. They quieted down only when one of the rookies who had been cut came through the common room, or stood by waiting for the telephone, which was in a booth just off the corridor, the group at the table avoiding him as if his humiliation were infectious.

Gene Frantz was cut, the tall ski ranger whose locker was opposite mine—the one the veterans referred to as “the Mop,” and more often “the Rug,” for a bowl haircut he wore, a Hamlet cut that left a fringe of hair down over his ears, and nearly to his eyes. Around the school grounds he wore white tennis shorts to set off his tanned legs—which, along with his haircut, earned him the quick enmity of the veterans. In the dining hall he was made to sing more than the others, it seemed to me, a soft Mormon hymn (he was a graduate of Brigham Young) which was lengthy and sung with patience. The veterans would look up at him on his chair in his white tennis outfit, as if standing for the anthem on the center court at Wimbledon, and they would say: “How the shit’d he catch anything with that rug in his face?” At Brigham Young he had been the top pass interceptor in the nation, nine of them caught the year before, and Detroit had signed him as their seventeenth draft choice. He was never confident about making the team, and was more prepared for being cut than some of the others were. Pass defense in the professional league was so highly developed that what had succeeded for him in college—intuition, the flair for committing himself, and the luck, and the inaccuracy of the passers—was secondary to knowledge that came with experience. “I’m just beginning to learn,” he told me once in front of his locker. “Whether I can make it is a question of learning fast enough.”

Well, he hadn’t, and he and Ron Schieber, also cut, a speedster who had won the sprint races in Pontiac the night before, both had calls in to the Denver team in the American Football League. If it didn’t work there, they were self-sufficient enough, and unencumbered by wives or other responsibilities—athletes sufficiently tuned up and able to make it somewhere with any luck, in the other football league, or in Canada, or with any number of semipro teams if they wanted to continue—and Frantz, at least, would go back into the mountains when the snows came in the fall.

It was not the same for Frank Imperiale, also cut by Wilson out by the fountain. He was a big lineman who had arrived as a free agent, with some previous experience at Buffalo—he was the one who had told me about the locker-cleaning procedures there when they dismissed a player—but he had responsibilities, a wife to support, and children, and as such he had to succeed at the top, where there was good money, or give up football altogether and go into his father’s business, which, as I remember, was plumbing. He had called his wife in Long Island to tell her he had been cut. Also, he had a call in for the New York Jets, but he was not hopeful. He sat gloomily in the rookie common room, waiting for the phone to ring. I went over and we talked for a while. He had been looking forward to being the master of ceremonies for the rookie show, which had been talked about for a number of days, and definitely scheduled by Wilson that night. Imperiale had turned around at Wilson’s announcement in the classroom and made a sign with his fingers to indicate that the rookies—a group of us were sitting together—were going to “wow” them. Imperiale had had some “practical experience” in nightclubs, he had pointed out, and he had tried out a number of his jokes on some of us a few nights before, which we listened to hopefully, needing someone to run the show. His jokes were delivered without much confidence, his voice somewhat flat, and often we only knew that a joke was complete when he’d pause and then say suddenly: “And then there’s the one about the gorilla who comes into the bar?”—questioning us with his eyes, and we would nod hopefully, and he would launch into another. Still, he was the only rookie with “practical experience” in the nightclub world, and—as he kept telling us—he got “warmed up” with an audience in front of him. Then, just five minutes after Wilson’s announcement about the rookie show, the Hawk had rapped him on the shoulder and he had gone out to the fountain.

Now his expertise would be unavailable. He kept looking toward the phone booth just off the common room. He said, “You can use any of those jokes you want in—in the rookie show.”

I said I was sure the show could use them. I said that we would miss him, and I doubted we would have very much of a show anyway without his practical experience. His mind wasn’t on it. “The big thing is to take this in stride,” he said. “You have to be cut a few times to know how to handle it.”

The phone rang—barely audible over the hilarity of the gin-rummy table—and he went over and pushed himself into the booth. The call was for him, perhaps his wife again, and being a big man, 250 pounds, he had quite a struggle with the booth door before he could close himself in.

Jerry Archer, the fifth man cut that day, could not leave. Tight with anger, he moved from chair to chair in the common room. He talked to anyone who came near. “I came here as a linebacker,” he said. “What the hell.” He puffed on a cigarette inexpertly. I had never seen him smoke before. “Jesus!” he said. He had been in charge of carrying the blue bag full of footballs down to the field across the wooden bridge between the pines every morning—assigned to do that from the first day—and it gave him substance, having that responsibility, and confidence; you could see it from the way he carried the bag. He had a big, friendly, ruddy face, streaming with sweat always, and chipped front teeth with gold inlays showing when he smiled. I thought of him on the field tossing the blue bag down, and the footballs spilling out, and those long mornings and afternoons, sweat dripping off his chin just forward of the nose of the ball, before he centered it, which he did hundreds of times a day, and the shout at him, “Pop it back, Archer, pop it back!” He never did get that correct swing of the ball back into the quarterback’s palm, not being truly—as he said—a center, but a linebacker. “What did I come here for? I’m not a center. What the hell? Why didn’t they give me a crack at quarterback, for Chrissakes?”

I shifted uneasily in my chair.

“I’m awfully sorry,” I said.

I went back to my room after a while, cutting across the quadrangle. Behind me, I heard a crash of furniture, yells of laughter, and I wondered if Greer’s chair had gone over. Archer would probably stay around there a long time. Too long. There were many evenings at Cranbrook when I felt myself an interloper more than others, always being one, of course, but there was a sense of degree. That night, with the hilarity still drifting across the quadrangle grass from the rookie wing, and down my own corridor the phonographs going, and Maher and LeBeau working on their guitars, surely that was one of them.

The next day, Don Doll said, “Well, that was the night of the Squeaky Shoes.”

I said, “Yes, I heard them.”