CHAPTER 27

A few days after the Pontiac scrimmage, Edwin Anderson, the team’s general manager, asked me to have lunch with him. I was glad for the chance. I wanted to clear my participation in the Cleveland game. The players had been talking about my playing. They promised me a twenty-point lead, which would ensure that Wilson could let me in without danger of the team losing. We met at the Steakhouse, which is Detroit’s equivalent of New York’s “21” Club. He met me at the door—a large, impressive-looking man with a squashed-down head, a massive straight jaw, and bushy white eyebrows. His eyebrows were particularly distinctive, and the rookie who played Anderson in a brief role in one of the rookie-night skits had only to come onstage with two thick wads of cotton stuck above each eye for the audience to know who he was.

He came forward, and we shook hands, and I thanked him for inviting me. He was wearing large gold cuff links, a gold bee on his tie clip, a gold watch, and a ring which was large and gold with red stones in it. On the way to the table Anderson did a lot of waving and shaking of hands with acquaintances. When we had got settled we ordered from a menu that crackled stiffly, with a velvet string in the back to hold it together, and it opened up as large as a newspaper. The details of opulence were especially noticeable to me after the relatively spartan existence at the training camp.

Anderson talked for a while about himself. He had devoted himself to the Lions since 1958, when he combined the job with running the Goebels Brewing Company. Then he decided that operating the breweries with one hand and the Lions with the other didn’t allow enough attention for either, so he resigned from the breweries to devote his energies to football. His most important function as general manager was to initiate trades beneficial to the team.

He began talking about the art of trades. He thought I’d be interested to know how Milt Plum had come to Detroit. Certainly, I said. Well, at Cleveland, when Plum announced publicly that he thought a team could do better if the quarterback called the signals himself rather than receiving them from the bench, Anderson knew that Paul Brown wouldn’t stand for such a breach of authority, and that Plum would be on the trading block. So he called up Brown and offered a straight trade—the Detroit quarterback Ninowski for Plum. Sure, said Brown. Anderson knew that Brown would be riled up enough to lose his sense of values. Anderson went and told his coaches, who wouldn’t believe it. When Brown told his coaches, they had such a fit that Brown finally called Anderson back and said that things would have to be improved at his end. He wanted Bill Glass, the defensive end, and somebody else, just as a sweetener. OK? Well, that seemed all right, Anderson told him, and for the sweetener he offered up Detroit’s running back, Hopalong Cassady.

“He can’t make my team,” Paul Brown said.

“He’s an Ohio boy,” said Anderson. “You can sell season tickets on him down there in Cleveland.”

Brown thought about it for a while, and then he let Plum go, and raked in the three-player Detroit package. Anderson’s coaches wanted Tommy Watkins, and after four additional days of talking it was arranged.

“That poor fellow Cassady,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” said Anderson. He raised a hand and a waiter in a resplendent jacket like a hunting coat came and took our order.

“I was thinking that he had a pretty rough career. He got the club rush and they put graham crackers in his bed, and the Coventry deal and Layne hauled him around by the scruff of the neck.”

Anderson looked at me oddly. “Graham crackers?” he asked.

I began to explain. “Well, he got into trouble…”

Anderson seemed impatient that I was telling him something about his own team. He probably knew it anyway. “This business is cold,” he said abruptly. “And it’s cruel. There’s no room in it for sentimentality. I wanted Buddy Parker to trade Doak Walker, Cloyce Box, and Bob Hoernschemeyer. He wouldn’t. He was a sentimental cuss. Finally, all these three retired and we didn’t get a thing. You can’t afford to be a sentimentalist. I thought Doak Walker was the greatest credit the game of football could have. The guy never smoked, he never drank, he never even drank a goddamn Coke or milk or anything that might cut down his wind. When he retired, they gave him a gold football, and they retired his shirt… and then the next summer he turned up at training camp. He wanted to try it again. It was a terrible thing. Buddy Parker had to argue him out of it. It was too late anyway. For helping the club, he should have been traded when he was still a player of value.”

“Firing,” I said. “I suppose you have to fire managers.”

“Buddy Parker’s predecessor,” said Anderson. “Of course, Parker walked out on his own. But Bo McMillin, it took me three and a half hours to fire him. He was a great friend of mine and he kept saying, ‘You can’t do this to me.’”

The food arrived. Anderson tucked a napkin under his chin. He began speaking of the cordial relations he had with the other general managers around the league—they all knew each other on a first-name, backslapping basis, invited each other to their country clubs, and each was aware of the other’s football problems. Anderson’s manner as he described these relationships was expansive, as if the manipulation involved in running a ball club and trading players was matter-of-fact—conducted, one had the impression, from a leather armchair leaned far back, with a leg, a highly polished shoe on the end of it, up on the corner of a massive desk, a telephone at his ear, and good friends at the other end—golfing companions, good sorts, of course, and talking business with them was just a question of knowing what you had and what they wanted. Of course, he wanted to make it clear that his friends were not limited to football circles. “Civically,” he said, “I’ve got the goddamnedest record of anyone in Detroit, you ask anyone—Red Cross, school drives, community funds, that sort of thing…”

I asked what he felt the relationship should be between the general manager and the players.

“Well,” he said, “a big family, and I work for them. I try to find them jobs. Jobs in insurance are the best. Gil Mains, who was a great tackle for us, has sold over a million dollars’ worth of insurance. He’s a good example. The days of the tramp athlete are over.”

Anderson thought about that and then he demurred slightly.

“Well, just about over. We have this tramp basketball squad.” He described how in the off-season some of the Lions put together a team and played where they were invited. “Maybe that wasn’t too many places,” Anderson said. Their brand of play was rough, their need for physical contact consuming, and in the town of Belleville, Michigan, the local papers after a game there criticized Alex Karras for a series of what it considered “deliberate backhand blows to the head”—as he remembered the paper stated—one of which left a local player “flat on the floor for five minutes.”

“Never know what Karras’s going to do,” Anderson said. “One time he spent the off-season filling jelly doughnuts in an Iowa bakery for $2.75 an hour.”

“What about signing players to contracts?” I asked. “That’s your responsibility, isn’t it?”

“They’re excellent negotiators, the average ballplayer, particularly the veteran,” Anderson said. “He comes in and sits down and the first thing he says is that while he appreciates that he’s at the peak of his career, never been faster, never been stronger, could move a concrete wall just by pressing on it, still he’s thinking of the future and maybe that he should quit and become a high-school coach. A high-school coach!” Anderson snorted. “He tells me that sixty-six high schools are after him, and twenty colleges, and there have been feelers from a few pro teams looking for assistant coaches. You’d think, listening to him, that his mailbox is choked with requests. Well, maybe. Then recently, of course, management has been having it rough because of these incredible sums of money the rookies are getting—quarter-of-a-million-dollar bonuses. The veterans resent it. I don’t blame them. Joe Schmidt came in at $5,800. Well, they were born too early, that’s all. You go back to George Wilson’s time, and he was playing for $100 a game, and quite often he was playing both ways, offense and defense.”

He downed an oyster and shook his head. In the old days a player wasn’t allowed to come to training camp unless he’d signed his contract. That was quite a lever for the owners—the player knowing he was falling behind by not being able to attend the classes or the practices or the scrimmages. But then Bert Bell, who was the commissioner then, said that legally the clubs couldn’t keep a player away while he negotiated his contract—that an option on his services was included in the previous year’s contract. So usually, with the training camp already under way, we have five or six unsigned players.”

“It’s you they come to see?” I asked. “To haggle.”

“I think I’ve only lost my temper once,” Anderson said. “That was when Earl Morrall came in to talk contract and wouldn’t say anything. He’d shake his head every once in a while, sitting opposite me there, just looking at me like he had been shot up with some terrible drug. But not a word came out of him, no explanation, no arguing, no nothing, so that I finally whooped with anger, I want to tell you, and damn near went off my rocker.”

“What happened then?” I asked.

“He saw that he had got to me,” Anderson said. “And then he began to laugh. I think he felt he had to put something over on me. There are all sorts.”

“How about Night Train Lane?”

“Well, of course, he’s famous around the club for having said: ‘Is I under the consumption that there ain’t no mo’ money heah?’” He looked down at his plate and laughed.

“Now John Gordy is a screamer. He comes in so angry you think maybe he’s going to wreck the place. You have to be calm and let the steam hiss out of him for a while. Then you get Bobby Layne, on the other hand, who in his year came in looking around for a pen to sign the contract with—hardly giving the terms a glance—and I don’t think he scarcely knew what sum of money he was signing for. To be sure, Layne was well-off, he was married to the wealthiest woman in town, so he wasn’t in there to spend a lot of time haggling. Then you get someone like Gail Cogdill. You might think that Cogdill, being a country boy, and perhaps younger than his years, and who loves football so much you’d think he’d play for nothing, well, you might assume that he’d be one of the easiest men on the roster to sign. Well, for him, I’ve practically got to set aside two or three days. First of all, he tells me that he’s been checking on the salaries of the other ends around the league. ‘Ditka,’ he tells me, ‘Ditka of the Bears, he gets…’ and then he’ll name, oh, an astronomic figure. So I say, ‘God, Gail, where’d you hear that figure?’ Gail says, ‘He told me so himself. At the Pro Bowl game.’ ‘He’s telling you that to impress you,’ I tell him. ‘No end in the history of the game has been paid anything like that.’ ‘Well, I don’t believe you,’ says Cogdill.

“So we call up the general manager over in Chicago. I get him on the phone and I tell him what Cogdill’s been telling me about Ditka’s salary. I hand the phone over to Cogdill and I can hear the manager laughing at the other end. He tells Cogdill what Ditka gets. Do you think Cogdill believes him? Of course not. He hangs up the phone with a grunt and he tells me he thinks complicity is involved. He says to me, ‘That fellow in Chicago is your cousin.’

“So then he brings out a folder of statistics—very complex indeed; after all, he’s had the whole off-season to work on it—with charts and graphs and columns of figures which show, oh, I don’t know what all—touchdowns scored, yardage gained, percentage of passes caught, key blocks thrown, key decoys, by God, in which a certain credit is taken for someone else’s pass reception, on and on, and then his statistics are matched up against the other ends around the league. Well, on paper, of course, the Lions would only have to field one man—Cogdill—and they’d wrap up the championship.”

I said, “I would think that sometimes the statistics would work against him. I mean perhaps he hasn’t caught as many passes one year as he did the year before.”

“Well, you point that out to him,” Anderson said, “and he’ll look in his folder and he’ll tell you he wasn’t thrown to as many times. Or if his own statistics don’t bear him out, he’ll find a generality to fall back on. For example, if you say he scored fewer touchdowns, he’ll talk about the general decrepitude of the team and the lack of good downfield blocking. Surely, he says, he can’t be blamed for that.”

I asked, “What is the actual sum of money that… ah… that all the haggling is over?”

“Perhaps, after a while, five hundred dollars. Pride is involved, you see, and other intangibles—the principle.”

“You can’t just give Cogdill the five hundred dollars and be done with it?”

“The dialogue is important,” Anderson said. “We have to keep our end up.”

“I have a question,” I said, “which may require some dialogue.”

“Sure,” he said. “What?”

“I’d like to get in the game against Cleveland,” I said. “If the team gets ahead by twenty points, make it thirty if you like, and no damage can be done to the final outcome by my participation, what do you say to my getting in, just for a while? The team’s all stormed up about it. They’re likely to score a point a minute to get me in there. I don’t quite know why. The idea’s caught their fancy.”

Anderson looked at me. He said, “Why, what do you want to do that for? Didn’t you have enough in Pontiac?”

“Well, I was just getting the feel of it in Pontiac.”

“The feel of it. My God, they murdered you in Pontiac.”

“Well, that’s so,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Anderson said. “I don’t know if that’s possible.” He was looking worried. He had been skeptical from the beginning. George Wilson had accepted my participating without telling him, and when Anderson heard I was going to scrimmage with the team, he had said, “Oh no, he can’t do that!” Some persuasion had been necessary. A lawyer had been called in to draft a document which absolved the Detroit club of any responsibility if I was maimed or killed. I had signed it, and the paper had been carried away in Anderson’s briefcase to be locked up in the club’s safe.

“Well, I’ll have to think about that,” he said.

We drove back from the lunch place to the Lion offices on Michigan Avenue, just up from the stadium. Mounted above the building was a neon lion with a tail that went up and down.

“Very snappy,” I said.

“This is the headquarters during the season,” Anderson said. “Classes are held in here in the morning and afternoon, and practices, of course, down in the stadium. The procedure for the player during the regular season is quite different from what it is out at the training camp. He behaves like any commuter—leaves the house in the morning, the paper under his arm, his wife and kids seeing him off from the porch, and then he’s back for dinner.”

He showed me through the building—a modern one-story establishment with Formica floors that squeaked underfoot. It was very well-appointed. There was an exercise room for the players, and classrooms with one wall that slid up at the touch of a button to reveal a motion-picture screen. Anderson punched the button to show me.

“That’s terrific,” I said.

The classroom chairs were painted blue and highly polished, with kidney-shaped armrests for taking notes. The coaches had rooms. A big mounted pike was hung on Bingaman’s wall. Anderson showed me the coaches’ conference room. It had a blackboard at one end for diagramming plays, and a long table with chairs set around it. I noticed a scrap of paper on the table—an old gin-rummy score when I looked at it closely.

“This is where the club’s season is charted,” Anderson was saying expansively.

We walked back to his own offices, passing a blown-up photograph of a heavy-ruffed lion—Majesty, a plate underneath identified him—who once lived in the Detroit Zoological Society. Anderson’s offices were spacious. An old half-deflated football sat in a glass case. Some cheerleaders’ signs were stacked in a corner. They read GO, GO, GO.

“The Lions are going to use cheerleaders this year—for the first time,” Anderson said. Their jerseys, marked with a big C, were piled in a corner. “That’s some mistake, isn’t it?” he remarked. “What could those people have been thinking, to mark them with a C?”

“Cats,” I suggested. “As in ‘big cat’? Or maybe ‘cubs.’ Or maybe you got the Baltimore Colts’ uniforms and they got yours.”

“Why not?” he said vaguely.

“I hope you can do something about the game, Mr. Anderson,” I said. I had my mind on it. “The whole idea is to play against another team—people you don’t know, and who don’t know you.”

“You think they were easy on you in Pontiac?” he asked. He was staring at the cheerleaders’ uniforms.

“No,” I admitted.

“Well, I’ll try,” he said. He could see how concerned I was. “I may have to speak to the commissioner.”

“That would be fine,” I said.