CHAPTER 26

It was a happy group that met for the evening classes the next day—a few hangovers perhaps, but there was a new sense of solidarity and purpose. The show and the celebration in the veterans’ hall had much to do with that. Perhaps one or two more players would be cut, but the rookies were confident, and felt they belonged. The veterans felt themselves getting into shape, and the enemies now, rather than rookies trying for their jobs, were the Cleveland Browns.

A number of announcements began the session. General Manager Anderson appeared, and he put a crimp in the good spirits by announcing that he did not believe the team was going to be awarded Ford cars to drive during the season. That had been the practice, of course, in the past, he said, but the year before, the Ford Motor Company had struggled until March, three months after the season’s close, to get their last car back, some three hundred unpaid parking tickets had come into their office, and insurance claims of over ten thousand dollars were under litigation. The insurance company had indicated they would refuse to insure the cars again, and the Ford people were not “brimming over with enthusiasm”—as Anderson put it—to continue the project.

Well, that was Detroit for you, the players said afterward, a dog town. Now take New York. That was a great football town. There wouldn’t be any such nonsense there. They talked about pregame ceremonies in Yankee Stadium a few years before when one of the Giants had been honored—gift after gift from New York supporters wheeled out across the grass: golf clubs, a red convertible (driven out by a Miss Rheingold), a Hammond organ, hundreds of dollars’ worth of fishing equipment, a television console, a camping outfit with a barbecue stand, other smart accessory gifts, and then a motor yacht on a trailer whose tires left deep twin ruts in the turf. The Lions stood watching from the sidelines, like country cousins, more than one of them remembering Jim Martin “night” in Detroit when his car had been wheeled out for him, a gift from the fans, the only gift, and when he got in it to drive it off he found a payment book attached to the steering column with a ribbon, half the payments still due. The gas tank was a quarter full. Being a man sensitive to the correctness of things, he left the team the next year to play in the American Football League—the niggardliness of Detroit management certainly a contributing factor. He had returned to the Lions, but he was always vocal when representatives of management complained about the team. He snorted when Bud Erickson got up, greeted with a chorus of oo-ahs, the players imitating his speech habits, to complain that the team was inviting too many guests for meals. The evening before, the entire allotment of steaks had been consumed before the coaches, returning late from their liars’ poker in their bar down the Pontiac pike, had a chance at them. The chef boiled some eggs for them and there was some iced tea.

Wilson then spoke, and he was in good humor about the steaks. He said, “I’m not a steak man. I’m a pork chop man. The only time I ever got mad was when Layden Miller ate eleven pork chops and Joe Stydahar had nine and I didn’t get any. That’s the only time I’ve been real mad… ever!” He grinned at his men. “Of course, we got this Cleveland game coming up, and maybe I could turn up real mad again if you guys don’t sit on them good.”

Roger Brown then had a film to show he had shot during the Playoff Bowl in Miami the year before. Detroit had played Cleveland, beating them badly. As Brown threaded the film into the projector they remembered him on the practice field with his camera, and the comic routines they worked up for him. Brown had temporary enthusiasms with such gadgets as movie cameras. Two years before, he had a Harley-Davidson motorcycle which was his pride and on which he took Les Bingaman riding around the school grounds. The two of them amounted to over six hundred pounds loaded on that machine, and people who saw them would turn and stare after them for a long while, as if a circus act had materialized and gone by. He had a saxophone that year too, and he practiced assiduously. There were complaints, and if Brown was sympathetic he took the saxophone off and played it out in the pine woods by the lake, the moans of the scales drifting out from the dark line of trees like the high cries of a mournful bird. For the Miami trip he had his new movie camera, and the film he showed the evening class was nearly a parody of the early efforts of the enthusiastic amateur.

His film opened with a long shot of the airplane wing through the window.

“That’s the wing there,” Brown said. He was seated next to the projection machine, prepared to give a commentary. The camera dwelt lovingly on the wing. Some clouds rolled by underneath. We were given a view of the other wing. The sun was shining on it and the image was pale and underfocused.

“That’s the other wing of our jet,” said Brown.

The camera panned down below the wing, and for a time the screen showed white, with just a flicker or so to indicate that the film was still running through the projector.

“Clouds,” said Brown. “There was some ground down there, but it was quite clouded up.”

Then we got another shot of the wing, and the classroom began to get a little out of hand.

“My God, what’s that?” someone said.

“That’s the wing of our jet,” said Brown carefully. He was proud of his film and sensitive to the joking which was beginning about it.

“What’s that?” someone called.

The screen was suddenly ink-dark with an occasional flash of light, and the sense of movement. We were all squinting to make something of it.

“Coffee,” said Brown. “Those are interior shots that didn’t quite come out. The stewards on the plane are serving coffee.”

“Those close-ups of the coffee, Rog?” someone asked.

“Look,” said Brown suddenly. “You guys want to see this film, or not?” He stood up in front of the projector and faced the classroom. His face, shining in the light from the machine, was miserable. The film worked silently and busily on his shirtfront. An airplane wing appeared again, miniaturized on his chest.

“Sit down, Rog,” they called out. “It’s crazy, man.”

“Be a little respectful,” Brown said. He sat down; the beam shot forward again to the screen.

We had some more views taken in flight, and then a long ground shot of the Miami Air Terminal, long enough for us to imagine that we were watching color slides, not a motion picture, and that soon we’d hear the lecturer squeeze the cricket, pick-pock, so the assistant would push the next slide into view.

“You trying out a tripod or something?” someone asked.

“You really feel it, Rog, for that terminal.”

Brown, sitting next to the projector, remained quiet and tense, because he knew what was still to come, and sure enough the next shot was the airliner itself, sitting on the ground with some baggage being taken out of its belly. A whoop of laughter went up.

Finally, after some shots of the hotel where the team stayed, some views appeared of the hotel swimming pool, with the players sitting around, and then some shots of the practice field with the players mugging around for Brown’s camera, Alex Karras in particular, leapfrogging over his teammates and leering at the camera so that Brown had hardly been able to hold on to it for laughing, and the picture on the screen dipped and swayed.

When the film ended the players applauded Brown, who grumbled as he put it away in its can, and they shook their heads, remembering the pleasure of their Miami trip. It had been almost like a vacation. Practices were kept to a minimum; the players had time to lie around on the beaches. They went out on the town at night; there were no curfews or bed checks.

Paul Brown, the Cleveland coach, had kept his team working as if it were mid-season. He applied his restrictions, which were stringent: curfews, no smoking, no cuts of classes or practices. He meant to show that spartan dedication would triumph. On one occasion, both teams met at a banquet given in Miami Beach, at one of the big hotels on the waterfront. The Lions had beer at their plates, and the air above them was thick with cigarette smoke. To witnesses, it seemed as if a plate-glass partition divided the Lions from the Cleveland area of the banquet room, where the Browns drank water and there was no smoking. Later, one of the Lions told me what he remembered about looking out of the fog bank of smoke at the Browns: “Over there in that clear area, I could make out those guys in their blazers, made you feel like a bum,” he said. “But you could see from the guys’ faces looking at us, like pleading, how much they wanted to sit with us and cadge a drink, maybe a smoke.”

Brown was a stickler on smoking. He had traded a very good defensive end, Bill Quinlan, to the Green Bay Packers, primarily because he seemed unable to abide by the rules, on smoking in particular. Quinlan, loafing around the training room, had spotted a half-smoked cigarette resting on the lip of an ashtray, and he had sidled over and taken a quick hand-cupped drag on it.

“Quinlan!”

He had turned, the smoke escaping in a quick puff as he started back from the cigarette as if burned, and Brown, staring at him from the door, shouted: “What are you doing, Quinlan? Trying to ruin my organization?”

Quinlan was sent to Green Bay not long after.

When Roger Brown’s film was done, Wilson got up again and began talking about Cleveland. He kept mentioning Paul Brown’s name (though Brown had been replaced that year by a new coach, Blanton Collier) as if what was on the line in the upcoming game was the efficacy of one type of coaching as opposed to another—the hard martinetcy of Brown against Wilson’s relaxed operation. His psychology had worked in Miami the winter before; he tried it again: he was letting the team know that his system was once again on trial.

Wilson was admired for his oratory. Yale Lary had told me that he thought George Wilson could stir up a team better than anyone he had heard—and he had heard some fine rousers. The coach of his Texas high-school team was in the habit of playing a soothing record as the players trooped into class, or to the locker room; then when they were all seated he would rip the phonograph arm across the record with a fearful amplified screech of the needle against the grooves, and he would rant at them while their nerves jangled.

Whenever discussion of coaching psychology came up, I always thought of my grandfather, who, as a close student of football, was particularly interested in the oracular powers of the head coach. He collected stories about coaches’ perorations. He liked the description of Knute Rockne’s harangues being “champagne from a battered oilcan.” He was fond of telling the story of Michigan’s Hurry Up Yost working himself into such a frenzy with his own pep talk that on one occasion he concluded by charging out at the head of the squad through the wrong door of the locker room and tumbling into the field-house swimming pool.

“There was a meet going on in there at the time,” said my grandfather, who, though he had not been a witness, enjoyed speculating on the scene, “and there was no end of commotion. Yost was wearing a large capelike overcoat and it hung out in the water like a great bat, his feet beating underneath. To the swimmers it must have seemed that someone had scaled a large Aubusson rug on the pool.”

“That is an exaggeration,” my grandmother had said.

My grandfather’s primary interest was in the fortunes of Harvard, his alma mater; his special hero was Percy Haughton, who coached the team through its early years. “Now the present fellow you’ve got there, Dick Harlow,” I remember him telling me when I was very young and impressionable, “well, he’s certainly no slouch. But his hobby is oology, that is he’s a collector of eggs, and his approach to the game is what you might expect: delicate, technical, and deft. His predecessor,” my grandfather said, “the great Percy Haughton, now he was a different and splendid sort. A dramatic turn was one of his specialties, and on one occasion, pepping up his team just before the Yale game, he strangled a bulldog and tossed it aside to illustrate what he wanted done.”

“A bulldog!” I said, my eyes popping.

“That is a legend about Percy Haughton,” my grandmother said, “and not necessarily the truth. You should not tell the boy such things.”

“Nonsense,” my grandfather said. “Of course he did. There weren’t any softies around in his day.”

I believed my grandfather, of course, seeing the terrible wrench in my mind’s eye, and the bulldog sail off into a corner as limp as an empty glove. But then, in a year or so, when I thought about it, the bulldog began to gain somewhat in bulk and stature, so that when the coach called for him (“Charlie, bring me over that bulldog”) what was brought through the circle of players was a substantial animal, bowlegged, mean-looking, and rheumy and cynical of eye.

“The opposition,” Percy Haughton said, “is soft—a bunch of softies. He reached for the bulldog. “I want you to go out there on that field and throttle them.” He hoisted the bulldog up and began applying pressure in the neighborhood of the collar. The bulldog got his teeth into Haughton’s sleeve and ripped off the cuff. The coach’s wristwatch strap was severed and the watch dropped to the floor.

“Not much neck to these things,” Haughton said. His breathing was strained. The bulldog began working on the other sleeve. “Give me a hand here, fellows,” the coach said. A tackle or two, and a guard, would get up and separate the coach from the bulldog, the three of them hauling and the coach straining back, the bulldog in between, and the coach’s sleeve separating at the shoulder seams finally and remaining in the bulldog’s possession. They set the bulldog off in a corner with a leash on him.

“Well, that’s something,” the coach said, shaking his wrist. “Whew! Charlie, that damn thing’d pass as a mastiff.”

While George Wilson’s oratory—of a much simpler variety, and not supported by such artifacts as bulldogs—was admired by all the players, he too had been caught out on a few occasions.

“You remember George’s great boner,” Wayne Walker had said one night, swinging back in his chair, “the time when he gives us the big halftime speech—was it in Chicago?—when we’re a couple of touchdowns down, and he’s telling us, just ripping at us, that we can come back, we’re a great team, we got the stuff, and he’s getting all worked up, red and heavy around the neck, and finally he says, ‘Now go out there and give it to ’em!’ We jump up, and as we start crowding out the door he shouts after us, ‘Remember, guys, a good team never comes back!’ Well, man, that let the plug out.”

John Gordy, who was sitting in the room, said, “One time George is on television, one of those question-and-answer shows, sitting there looking uncomfortable, and the guy says, ‘Mr. Wilson, one of our listeners wants to know the difference between the fullback draw and the halfback draw.’

“Well, George leans forward, much too far so that his face suddenly fills the screen, and then he leans back and you can see him tap his fingers on the table like he was going to say something profound, y’know, and he says, ‘You see in the fullback draw the fullback draws, and in the halfback draw the halfback… well, er… draws.’ Period. That’s all he says, and the announcer says, ‘Yes, and now we have a question from a viewer in Marquette.…’”

Wilson’s speech about Cleveland was clever that night, though—with his simple description of Cleveland coaching methods, and the suggestion that, if the Browns won the game, it would mean that the easygoing regimen and the reliance on self-, rather than group, discipline which typified the Lions would be at fault. The implication was that life would not be easy if the Lions lost. It was not a game which was at stake, but a whole way of life, he seemed to be telling us.

When he finished, he looked at us for a while, and we listened to the plush sounds of the fountains playing outside and all of that was made to seem very desirable suddenly.

Then, a game film of the Browns in action was shown. Each play was run over three or four times, Bingaman sitting by the machine in the darkness and hitting the reverse button. In reverse the players would soar up off the ground from the welter of blockers and tacklers and dodge back in a strained backward lope to the sudden pristine order of the teams poised just before the quarterback’s snap. On the screen, all twenty-two players were seen at once, a wide-angle view, so that each player would watch his opposition. I could hear John Gordy begin to murmur in the darkness, complaining about the big tackle he would be playing opposite.

“Look at that big whore,” he said. He pronounced it “hoo-er.”

“What’s that?” I whispered.

“Look at him. He’s got fifty or sixty pounds on me. I got to play him head-on in the pass plays. He’s the biggest horror” (which he pronounced “whore-er”) “in the world—a large door with a suit on it.”

I could hear Gordy tap his pencil against his teeth. “Tractor foot,” I heard him say.

“Can you figure him?” I asked.

Gordy said in the darkness, “If I was him, playing against me, I’d bust out laughing. That’s like to be just what he’s doing, sitting there with two chairs under him to handle all that goddamn bulk, and watching our film and laughing to beat the band.…”

We went back to the dormitory rooms after the game films. The player on Cleveland they talked about that night was Jim Brown, the great fullback. Joe Schmidt, shaking his head, said, “He’s going to be three kinds of rat poison. How to stop him? Carry a gun.”

Many of the descriptions of Jim Brown were platitudes, and they were trotted out about other great players too. But when the reference was to Brown, the players spoke as if the words, however commonplace, were worthy of particular attention for their aptness. A player would say, “Tackling Brown, you try to hold on and pray for help to come.” It was a cliché about him and it should have been tossed off and forgotten, but instead what he was saying was so accurate that the scene would play in the defenseman’s head, and he would add somberly: “And the help’s gotta come fast, or that boy, oh my, he’s gone…”

Brettschneider had the imaginative idea that defending against Brown one got the notion from his speed and drive that he was running downhill, that somehow the field had tilted to his advantage—there was that sense about him of heavy tonnage in an avalanche. Brettschneider put his hands apart as if the situation were hopeless. He remembered tackling Brown in the Playoff Bowl in Miami the year before. It was near the end of the game, with just a few plays to go, and the Browns got the ball. He remembered cursing as he trotted out to his linebacker’s position, and then he began some heartfelt praying that Jim Brown wouldn’t be sent around him—it was hot, he was exhausted, the game was safely won, the season gone, and the long months of layoff and lazying around just a moment or so away, and he jiggled around at his position, thinking all this as the Browns broke their huddle. Watching the big fullback settle in his stance for the quarterback’s call, Brettschneider had the sudden presentiment not only that Brown was coming his way, but that his legs were going to be snapped in the violence of the play. He could barely get himself going when the ball was hiked. Watching his keys, the blockers form, he knew that the ball had been shoveled to Brown on an end sweep toward him, and moving desperately he got by the blockers and to him, and hauled him down, the first time he could remember ever doing it alone, and when he started to get up he discovered the force of the impact and Brown’s momentum had knocked the face bar off his helmet and it was lying on his chest.

If the talk wasn’t about Jim Brown, Paul Brown became the topic, even though he had retired from the coaching profession. Plum was the authority on him. He said that Brown was the most suspicious man he ever hoped to meet. When airplanes flew over the practice field he would look up, hands on hips, and the players knew that he suspected scouts were taking aerial pictures of the practice. When helicopters flew over, he was sure of it, and the practice was stopped. To discourage ground-level surveillance the practice field had a seven-foot-high canvas fence set around it, and from time to time Brown would walk its perimeter to check for peepholes that might have been drilled in the dark of the night. On one occasion a telephone truck drove up and stopped on the other side of the fence, a crane rose up with a cherry-picker lift on the end of it, and repairmen started work on the telephone-pole transformer. Brown saw them working up in the lift, which in fact gave them a fine view of the field over the fence, and he cried out: “Stop, stop everything!” The coaches blew their whistles shrilly, and the players stood up from what they were doing and watched. Brown walked stiffly over to the fence and looked up at the repairmen. “Don’t try to kid me,” he shouted at them, cupping his hands. “I know what you’re up to—from Baltimore, aren’t you? Well, don’t try to kid me, you’ll never find out anything from this practice. Why don’t you give up and go home?”

The repairmen looked down at him, too puzzled to say anything, and one of them spun his forefinger near his head, and then pointed at Brown.

But it was curious, Plum said, that what seemed such an obvious paranoia did appear to have, on another occasion, some justification. Brown had stopped a practice because he thought he saw the glint of binoculars from the top story of a building five or six blocks away; an assistant was sent to check, and to everyone’s surprise, except perhaps Brown’s, it was discovered that the room had been rented just for the daytime, ten dollars a day, and that the landlady had only seen the boarder coming and going at practice time. It was quite likely that the “boarder” was indeed a scout.

I asked, “How much can be discovered that’ll help in the game?”

“Enough,” Plum said. “Anything about the opposition that you can add to your game plan helps.”

But then, shaking his head, Plum went on to say that Brown’s suspicions, however justified, were carried to extraordinary extremes. In the locker rooms at halftime Brown would search the corners and run his hands across the walls for microphones, suspecting that the room was bugged, and even his search did not allay his fears. Talking to the team, drawn in close around him, he would diagram a play on the blackboard, but rub it out quickly with an eraser, its name never mentioned aloud. He would say, leaning in toward his players conspiratorially, “Now in the second half we’re going to throw…” and holding up ten fingers three times, he’d mouth “thirty passes.”

Jim Martin, who was listening, said appropriately: “He was certainly a man who made you uneasy.”

Plum went on to describe him—an extraordinarily competitive man, but an aloof figure, possibly because he had not been a player himself, nor had he coached professional teams before taking over at Cleveland: he had jumped straight from coaching the great service teams at the Great Lakes Training Station, where the environment was military and disciplined, to the professional teams. He seemed almost uncomfortable with his players. He had an office on the first floor of the training-camp dormitories but Plum never remembered him up on the second floor where the players were. Once, he came up to the top step of the stairwell and called a player out of a card game to fine him for abusive language. The player had been trying to fill an inside straight and, when he was dealt an unsatisfactory card, the blue language drifted out into the summer evening and through Brown’s office window.

The sense of remove from his players, his concept of them as pawns, was especially evident in Brown’s famous practice of sending in the offensive plays to his quarterback, shuttling them in with a relay of his running guards. The guard would whisper the play to the quarterback, who would then repeat it in the huddle.

“He was insistent about that,” Plum said. “Even in practice. I remember once he came out to practice with this terrible case of laryngitis. It was cold and damp. They drove him out to the sidelines in a heated car with the windows rolled up. You could see him bundled up in there in scarves. Before every play, he’d crank the window down and he’d croak the play to the assistant coach or the running guard, who’d come out and tell me. Mind, this was just a practice session.”

“In those years you played for him,” I asked, “didn’t you ever call a play on your own in a game?” I recalled from reading that Otto Graham occasionally called his own plays as Cleveland quarterback, though with the compulsion that they had better succeed or Brown would have some stiff things to say. I remembered that George Ratterman, a substitute quarterback for Graham, was once sent in late in a game that the Browns had tucked away, and when Brown’s play arrived at the huddle, he said jokingly, “I don’t like that one, Joe Skibinski. Go back and ask Brown for another.”

Skibinski dutifully trotted away from the huddle on his way back to Brown, and was only hauled back by Ratterman with some difficulty. As Ratterman put it, “The next signal from Brown would have been a ticket to my hometown, which is Fort Thomas, Kentucky.”

“Ratterman would have been right. He’d have been out on the next train,” Plum said. “I only called my own signals twice. That’s all. In fact, when I started out, it wasn’t so bad. It didn’t bother me and I didn’t mind. I didn’t know anything and having that responsibility—the whole process of play calling—lifted from me, well, that made things that much easier. But then as I got to learn more what it was all about, and began to understand what I was seeing in front of me as a quarterback, then after a while, which was natural, I began second-guessing—wondering how a play I might have called would have compared with what Paul Brown had ordered—particularly if I got piled up with Brown’s play. Then, after another season or so, it became frustrating, and that was when I knew I didn’t want to play for him anymore.”

“What were the two plays?” I asked.

“In Yankee Stadium—’60 I think it was. We got beat bad, and near the end, about two or three minutes to go, the fans came pouring out on the field—fighting, a lot of them, damnedest sight, and Brown took us off.”

I had seen that game myself, from high in the upper tiers, and it seemed comic at first: the scurrying of overcoated men (it was a bitter, gray day), among them, I recall, a gawky figure of some elegance, with a chesterfield coat, carrying a tightly rolled umbrella, loping out among the players, but then suddenly he shifted the umbrella so he was carrying it like a club. Across the field one saw the stiff-levered swings of brawling men, then someone down, clumsy in the folds of his overcoat, his legs flailing, and then another, and there was absolutely no reason for it at all. It was not an attack on the players. They stood, huge in their uniforms, stately, near-Olympian figures in that confusion, quite immune, and gazing dumbly at what was going on. Plum described the lunatic stare he saw in the eyes of those tearing by, and the sounds they made, near keening in their eagerness to find someone to hit.

When Brown removed his team from the field, they trotted off with dispatch, those from the bench with their field capes billowing as they hurried past, a few of them lingering in the openings of the locker-room corridors in the dugouts to watch the strange turmoil out on the field. A voice, majestic, and quite implacable, as if announcing the next Sunday’s event at the stadium, came over the public-address system, to inform the crowd calmly that if the field was not cleared the game would be forfeited to Cleveland. It was easy to hear the announcement. The huge crowd, after a first great roar at what seemed the carnival attraction of spectators careering out onto the field of play, now watched quietly, almost sullenly, in a mood near introspection, as if aware that what had galvanized the spectators over the box-seat railings ticked quietly in themselves. My man with the umbrella was down. The lining of his coat, half open, was bright scarlet—silk perhaps. The participants in the brawl seemed shabby, though, in that gray light—squat men, quick as beetles, but parodying the grace we had been watching in the game.

The police appeared—a small nervous knot which disintegrated as each trotted onto the field, and then, as quickly as they had appeared, the brawlers stopped, almost in mid-stroke, and each for himself they fled for the rails, the police after them. The crowd warmed to this immediately—flight from authority was explicable—and we stood and yelled cheerfully, applauding each elusive maneuver. It was impossible to clear the field completely, and when the players returned, the spectators trotted along beside them, more coming across the sidelines. For the moment the brawling had stopped, though everywhere there was evidence of the scuffling—hats rocking in the stiff cold breeze, the loops of a scarf convoluting clumsily across the ground, and then incongruous, and quite visible from the tier where I was sitting, an empty saddle shoe lying near the midfield stripe, where it was picked up and used in an improvised touch football game, the shoe flipped from spectator to spectator until a wild toss ended it up in the stands, where it disappeared, flying up rows at a time until I lost it from view under the overhang.

Down near the Giant goal line, the two teams finally lined up, the spectators crowded around, and Plum called two running plays into the line to run out the clock as quickly as he could. The gun went off, and the two teams ran for the locker rooms together, in a big bunch. Those were the two plays he called on his own. Paul Brown never came back onto the field to witness them.

“Something wild?” I asked. “The Statue of Liberty… triple reverse… after all that time following his orders, why…?”

“The crowd,” Plum said. “Nobody wanted to fool around. The crowd stood in the huddle with us—maybe forty or fifty in that huddle, I guess the biggest offensive huddle there’s ever been. Then they lined up with us, down in the three-point stance, maybe twenty in the backfield, and then a long line up front. But then,” Plum grinned, “the defense—the Giants—they had maybe a hundred guys on their team. So I just lay down with the ball a couple of times.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “After all that time.”

“It’s poor writing when they talk of the crowd as ‘the Beast’?” asked Plum.

“Almost surely,” I said.

“All the papers seemed to have it on their minds the next day. They would have been right that time. The crowd was standing right in with us. You get used to a crowd yelling—that’s as much of the game as your helmet—but to hear it breathing, that’s something else. I’d been somewhere else, I’m telling you, if there was a choice.…”