CHAPTER 29

The locker room under Tiger Stadium was a spacious square room with rows of individual dressing alcoves around the walls—a wooden seat set in back of each with a Lion helmet waiting on it, a pair of football shoes underneath, and, above, the rest of the football gear hung up on hangers. Terry Barr and I shared a cubicle. It had the Detroit pitcher Don Mossi’s name on a card tacked above it. A three-legged stool stood out in front. I sat on it while Barr changed. There was not room in the cubicle for the two of us. My jersey with the zero had been laundered since the Pontiac scrimmage. Friday and his assistants had put out the uniforms at mid-morning. The big steamer trunks stood in the center of the room, the lids thrown back. Friday circled them, officious, with a big medieval prison warder’s ring of keys dangling from his belt, and also a cat’s cradle of extra shoelaces and chin straps, swaying as he busied himself around the locker room. The paraphernalia in his charge was varied and voluminous: once, in colder weather, I had seen a dozen or so portable hand warmers being prepared, their wicks flickering like devotional candles as they stood in rows on the floor beside the trunks.

Friday was calling for the players’ valuables. Into a set of compartments in a steamer trunk went watches, wallets, rings, key chains, and also their bridgework, wrapped in tissue paper. A substantial pile of teeth came to Friday on game day. The players dressed slowly. There was plenty of time before we were due on the field for the pregame warm-up. Harley Sewell was ready first, as he always was, and he came by with his cleats crashing on the cement floor, his teeth working on a new Chiclets tablet which clicked sharply as he began to break it down to the right consistency. The locker room was quiet, hardly a word spoken, so that one heard the venetian-blind slap of shoulder pads being set in place, and then, increasingly, the sound of cleats against the cement floor as the football shoes were pulled on, and the players walked around keeping loose and in motion to calm their nerves. That was when the behemoth size of football players was most apparent—when they wandered gloomily around the confines of a locker room, their shoulders widened by the pads, and their height stilted up an inch or so by the cleated shoes. The contours of the helmet gave them another inch, so that a player who was six feet three or four, and hardly worth a glance by the fans waiting in the alleys outside the locker room, would come clanking by in gear at six feet five or six, and the fans would gawk and say to themselves, “Holy cow, well, that’s something.”

An hour before game time we went out for the pregame warm-up. We walked down the alley from the locker room to the back of the dugout, trotting up the wooden steps into the sunlight and onto the field. A small ragged cheer went up from the early spectators scattered through the stands. The Browns were at the far end of the field, just finishing their calisthenics. Their uniforms were brown and orange. I could not resist the assessment one remembered from schoolboy days—a long worried look to see how large the opposition was. That was always the ritual, to pile out of the school bus and inspect the team at the other end of the field. Someone would say, “Look at those guys, they’re enormous, look at that one over there,” and we would stare gloomily at some giant who afterward turned out to be ponderous and of not much use. The Lions, as we walked out, were curious—their heads all craned in the Browns’ direction—but for quick assessments of skills rather than size. “There’s the Big Stud,” someone said at my elbow, Gibbons I think it was, and he gestured at a player going out on a pass pattern. I recognized Jimmy Brown’s soft slipping motion, his feet never picked up high, almost as if gliding through the grass on skates, as he cut and gathered in the pass. He was hypnotic to watch in motion. The Brown player nearest us as he backed to the midfield stripe to practice field goals was Lou Groza, “the Toe,” they called him, and we watched him, broad and heavyset, take two delicate steps and swing his foot against the ball with a thunk that reverberated in the overhangs of the stadium. “Nobody else can get a sound like that out of a kick,” said Gibbons. “Hear that sound blindfolded and you’d know it hadda be Groza putting his foot to the ball.”

Behind us Terry Barr called for a circle, and we turned away from the opposition and started the jumping jacks, calling out the cadences, the deep gruff shouts from our own people reassuring.

When we got back to the locker room a half hour remained to game time. The players slouched in the backs of their cubicles, or on the stools out front. Some lay on their backs on the floor reading the game programs, or staring up at the long fluorescent tubes that ran the length of the ceiling. Wayne Walker and John Gordy pummeled each other’s shoulder pads into position with big jarring whacks. That was traditional between them. On one of the teams, Green Bay, the same ritual took place between Dan Currie and Ray Nitschke, except that in their case, after the blows to the shoulder pads, they would give each other cuffing open-palm slaps to the face, hard enough to twist the head abruptly. They would glare at each other, and then take the hate, which they had generated like clicking on a switch, out onto the field.

A few of the players began circulating, reaching into a cubicle wordlessly to shake a fellow player’s hand and wish him luck. “Give ’em hell,” they said to me. In the next cubicle was the Roadrunner. I looked in and said, “Good luck, Roadrunner.” “I’m not nervous,” he said. “I’m just scared to death.” Some of the players seemed completely shaken by what faced them, even the veterans. John Gordy sat on his stool, one leg jiggling uncontrollably, his helmet between his legs like a pail into which he could be ill. He looked up when I passed by, and his hand floated up to shield a toothless, sickly grin. With the bridgework wrapped in tissue paper and put away in Friday’s valuables boxes, the features of many of the players had changed just infinitesimally: cheeks seemed slightly more sunken, a mouth would have a pucker, and with a smile the vacant gaps of gum would show abruptly and surprisingly.

Milt Plum stood up and began throwing the ball—short, stiff passes half the length of the locker room, in the quiet the laces whistling before the loud slap of the ball into the receiver’s hands.

I went back in front of my cubicle and sat back down on the floor. We had about ten minutes to go. Then George Wilson began to talk to us. It was not really a speech. He walked among us as lost in thought as he often seemed on the practice field, and occasionally he would speak, softly and abstractedly, almost as if musing the shopworn maxims to himself: “Just get the idea we can go out there and go all the way,” he said. He walked around behind the team trunks. I was lying on my back. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him say, “Keep your lanes on all teams.” That was in reference to the defensive specialist teams—the kickoff, punt, and field-goal teams. He came into view again. “Be careful of foolish penalties,” he said. “Walk away from a punch.” Plum had stopped throwing the ball. It was absolutely quiet, except for the humming of the air conditioners and the dripping of water in the shower room. We had just minutes to go. Down at the end of the room Wilson was saying, “If something goes wrong at the beginning, don’t let it bother you. Keep up the momentum.” He came by our end again. “Don’t let up. Give it sixty minutes.” He had a clipboard in his hand. “OK,” he said. “Here are the two teams. On defense…” He read off the names rapidly. A thick growling cheer went up. “Now, the offense…” Another cheer went up when he finished the list. An official put his head in the door and said it was time. “OK,” said Wilson. The players were all on their feet. I had the sense of a parachute drill, seeing everyone standing up in the heavy gear and beginning to shuffle for the locker-room door. I heard Wilson calling behind us: “Don’t fool around. We want this ball game. Go out and play sixty minutes.”

We were delayed in the tunnel behind the dugout. The entire team was introduced to the crowd—which took time—each running up the dugout steps and out to the midfield stripe as his name and college were called out over the loudspeaker system. My name was not called. When they had all gone out, I walked out to the bench with Friday and his assistants. Friday sensed my discomfiture. The stands were almost filled. The capacity was over fifty thousand, and on that bright afternoon, with so many there to get their first look of the season at the Lions, I imagined them nudging each other and pointing. I walked with my head down. “Limp a little,” Friday said.

“You think Wilson’s going to let me in?” I asked. “This is awfully serious stuff.”

“He’s his own boss,” Friday said.

The game began, all of us standing on the sidelines to watch the kickoff, and Detroit scored almost immediately. The Roadrunner caught a pass, the first touchdown he had ever scored in the pro leagues, and he came off the field with his face shining with excitement. He said, “Hot dawg,” and he rolled his eyes up. Everyone crowded around. He had gathered in his pass about the fifth play of the game, before anyone had had a chance to settle down.

I did not find it easy to follow the game from the bench. The players, milling in the ruck of a play, were difficult to spot against the multicolored background of the stands opposite, and the intricate patterns of their maneuvers were not apparent. Even the coaches, standing up on the sidelines, often seemed confused if the angle of their vision was difficult, and they’d call out, “What the hell was that play?”

Much of the direction of the team was carried on by the coaches up in the rim of the stadium in the spotters’ booth. Aldo Forte and Scooter McLean were usually up there, and Don Doll for the defense, and they were connected by phone to the little lightweight collapsible table in front of the bench where they could get on the line to Wilson, or the quarterbacks.

I found myself watching George Wilson. His absorption in the game was complete. He strode up and down the sidelines, his head turned to the field, so that he tripped over telephone and television cables, and swore, and then caromed into his players. He followed opposite the play, so that occasionally he was far down toward the goal line, leaning forward to shout and flap his arms at his players, and often at the referees. Occasionally, he joined his coaches, and their heads would bend over the play charts. Once in a while Wilson picked up the phone to his staff spotting the plays from the top of the stadium. But most of the time I was possessed by the idea that the action on the field was beyond his control, that the triumphs and tribulations of his men rolled on impervious to his presence. What he shouted out to them through cupped hands was not arcane instruction, but exactly what the spectators up in the stadium were shouting—“Hold ’em, gang!” or “Block that kick!” or “Watch the bomb!”—exhortations which not only were commonplace but in the din drifting down from the stands doubtless went unheard.

When Detroit scored a touchdown he made a stiff uppercut of satisfaction, the force of it wheeling his body completely around. “A bitch. A goddamn bitch!” he called to Bingaman. He leaned forward and shouted happily at the offensive team as it came toward the bench, pounding his palm with his fist. When adversity came, he was hardly able to control himself: the temptation must have been overwhelming to tip out onto the field and try to take matters into his own hands. What he did was lean over the sidelines as if an invisible fence were there, and bray. I began to understand why Paul Brown called each play and sent it in to his quarterback: it was not only to keep a grip on the proceedings but so that he had a sense of expectation with each play rather than surprise. It was not easy for a coach to get through a game. Green Bay had a coach, Red Cochran, whose absorption was so complete and frenzied that the head coach, Lombardi, relegated him to the spotters’ booth, where he tore up clipboards and play charts when things were going badly, rather than chancing his behavior down on the sidelines.

In varying degrees all the players were caught up in the game. I sat on the bench next to Jim Martin. He kept up a constant roar. Behind me I could hear the swish-swish of the skirts and the rustling pompons of the cheerleaders. They weren’t more than ten or fifteen feet behind the team bench. I turned around to catch a look at them. They were facing the field, a long string of them. Under orders never to be in repose, the girls kept up a slow prance in place, the pompons whisking steadily. The one immediately behind me looked at me gravely. I had a glimpse of her eyes, a mouth that shone smooth with pale lipstick, a serene, bored face above the leggy, tart motion, endlessly in place, of her cheerleader prance, and then Martin cuffed me hard on the shoulder pads.

“Keep your mind on the game,” he said. I began to grin at him, thinking he wasn’t serious, but he was furious. “What do you mean looking behind you like that? What’s going on that concerns you is in front of you.” His voice shook, he was so angry. “Concentrate,” he said. “Concentrate all the time on that game out there.”

When the next time-out was called, and things were quiet on the field, Martin told me that coaches would get their cheerleaders up close behind a rival bench—anything to take the edge off the opposition’s concentration—and have them whisper things, telephone numbers, so that the players would start thinking about where they could find a pencil stub. George Halas of the Bears once put a brass band immediately behind a rival bench, and before it was moved under complaint the players wore their helmets against the noise, which was full tilt, and to protect their ears from the trombone slides that slid between them as they sat on the bench.

The time-out ended. Martin leaned forward and began yelling again. Lucien Reeberg came off the field toward us. He was limping badly. “Jesus!” he said.

“Wipe it off!” Martin shouted at him.

“Jesus,” Reeberg said. “I’m getting hit bad—I don’ understand how.”

“Try to figure it.…”

“I don’ know. I’m being hit from the side.…”

“Well, figure it out,” Martin shouted. “You gotta head on those fat shoulders.”

Reeberg shook his head.

“Figure it, baby,” Martin said more sympathetically. “If they’re double-teaming you, go low. What is it?”

Reeberg looked at him mournfully. “I’m near kilt,” he said. “Jesus.” He went looking for the trainer, moving his bulk gingerly.

Martin snorted. He kept opening and shutting his hands. It was very hard for him to sit on the bench. When the players came off the field, he was up to shout at them, and to the platoon going out he railed, “Work! Work! Work!”

John Gonzaga came off the field and sat down on the other side. He was wobbling on his feet as he came. Martin saw him, and shouted for Doc Thompson. There was a thickening welt above his eye. The doctor stared at it. “Tough day at the office,” Gonzaga said calmly. His voice was very soft. When Thompson had finished ministering to him, Gonzaga said, “I didn’t know from nothing out there. When I got hit, I reached out and followed Gibbons into the huddle like he was a Seeing Eye dog, just stumbling along after him, following that blue jersey. Then in the huddle my head cleared. It’s crazy how you keep going no matter what.”

“You moving them?” It was Martin leaning across.

“Someone’s being moved out there,” Gonzaga said, grinning enigmatically.

John Simon, the big rookie defensive end from Miami, came off. He had tackled Jimmy Brown, and he said it was like wrestling with the front end of a truck. He shrugged his shoulders.

“The mother went down, didn’t he?” Martin shouted at him.

“Sure,” Simon said, “sure.” He was not sure how to react.

Just then Detroit lost the ball on a fumble, and Wilson was shouting, “Defense! Defense! Get on out there!”

“There’s no mother better’n you are, Simon!” Martin yelled after him. “Half ass,” he mumbled to himself.

It was exhausting sitting next to Martin. I went and found a place at the other end of the bench. But then Jim Gibbons came off the field and he said, very apologetically, that the end of the bench, that particular seat, was lucky for him, or at least it had been so far that afternoon. One heard of superstitions of that sort. Eddie Khayat of the Philadelphia Eagles had a fixation that the ladles in the water bucket should never be crossed. He was forever looming over the water bucket, snatching it away from the water boy, to get the ladles straightened out. Such things were important. So I slid off the bench and crouched in the grass beside Gibbons.

“We’re not going so good for you,” Gibbons said.

Groza of Cleveland had kicked a field goal and the score was 7–3. The team was still three touchdowns away from my being allowed to play.

“I’m not sure I’m sad or happy,” I said.

But then, just before the half ended, Detroit scored again, which made the chances seem less remote. As the gun went off, and the players rose from the bench, and we began trotting for the dugout entrance at the end of the field, I could feel the nerves begin to collect.

Anderson, the general manager, was waiting just inside the door of the locker room. He motioned me over.

“Listen,” he said. “What’s the arrangement that’s been made?”

I said, “If Detroit is twenty points ahead or so, and the game is out of reach of the other people, then it’ll be OK to go in. It doesn’t seem very likely at the moment.”

“Well, it’s off,” Anderson said.

“What do you mean?”

“Like I said. It’s off,” Anderson repeated. “I called up the commissioner, Rozelle, and he didn’t go for it. It’s OK to have you suited up and all, but you can’t go in. I already told Wilson.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Who? Wilson? He didn’t say anything.”

“Well, that’s a hell of a thing,” I said. “What am I all dressed up for if not to play?”

Anderson shrugged. “I called the commissioner. I had to. There might have been hell to pay.”

I went back to my cubicle. Barr was sitting in front of it. “What’s up?” he asked.

“Anderson won’t let me play. He called the commissioner.”

“What about Wilson?”

“He knows.”

“If things are right,” Barr said, “he’ll do what he feels like.”

“Maybe,” I said hopefully.

Quite abruptly, with the news from Anderson, I felt an outsider. Everything remained familiar, but I was no longer a part of it. Opposite, Don Doll was in front of a blackboard, the defensive backs with him. He was chalking up diagrams. With his brown-rimmed spectacles, and his conservative gabardine suit, he could have been a college section instructor working at an equation, except that he wore his hat indoors, a brown felt hat with a red band. Just down from me Bingaman stood amidst his big linemen. “Watch the angle of pursuit,” I heard him say. “Joe,” he said to Schmidt, “you’re calling good plays.” Lucien Reeberg stood at the edge of the group. He had taken his football pants down. An enormous mottled bruise covered one thigh. He looked at it nervously. “Lord,” he said. Sam Williams said, “Take a towel and wipe it off, rookie.” Reeberg looked at him hopelessly. He looked as if he were going to break down and cry.

But all of this—the drama, the discussions, the locker-room bustle, the excitement that permeated even the studious attitudes of the players grouped around the blackboards—seemed far removed, and the temptation, as petulant as a schoolboy’s, was to get out of uniform and return to camp.

But I told myself that there was a chance. Wilson was a man of his own convictions. Some of the players, who had heard about Anderson’s edict, came by and said so. “We’ll get the points, get way ahead, and you’ll see,” they said.

I went out to the bench without much hope. The second half progressed quickly, with Detroit doing well, its defense, as it always had been, strong and containing Cleveland, and the offense erratic but continuing to press. Then, with one minute to go in the game and Cleveland flailing around on its own ten-yard line, the Detroit team recovered a fumble from the Brown quarterback. The Lions were ahead by a good margin at the time, two touchdowns, the game won, and it would have been a propitious moment for me to go in. I was watching Wilson from my position on the bench, when suddenly he turned and looked directly at me. I could tell immediately that his mind was being tugged slightly. A grin began working at his mouth, and he looked quickly at the scoreboard clock.

My jaw went slack. As I stared at him, mesmerized, my hands grappled blindly under the bench for my helmet. Then abruptly he turned away. I never asked him why afterward. I think he saw the stunned surprise, the look of a man suddenly faced with the abyss—and that perhaps it was sympathy as much as anything which made him turn and concentrate once again on the game. He did not call back Plum. The quarterback ran out and called two running plays, and the game was over.

“He almost did it,” I said to Gibbons as the gun went off. “Wilson had it in his mind. Jesus, maybe if I hadn’t fouled it up so bad in Pontiac.”

“There’s always next week,” said Gibbons helpfully. “You haven’t been cut yet.”

I was beginning to get over my disappointment. My heart still thumped with the exhilaration of the last minute of the game. Back in the locker room, the excitement of winning, of getting the season off to a good start, was contagious, and I joined it—whooping it up a little, and whacking people on the back.

“Why weren’t you in there?” Sam Williams asked. “Feet too heavy again?”

“Hell no,” I said. “The Browns weren’t tough enough. You always had the game in hand. No need to send in the special reserves like me.”

Lucien Reeberg was nearly overcome with excitement. He gave me a big cuff on the shoulders. “You did terrific!” he shouted.

“I didn’t get in,” I said.

He didn’t hear me. He shouted at another rookie: “You did terrific!”

“How did you get on, Lucien?” I asked.

“I liked it!” he bellowed at me. “It was all right. Two or three plays, I could see that I could play ball up here—measure up. I got to the quarterback once—d’ja see that?—and he fumbled.” He snapped his fingers. “Nothing to it. I got kicked in the side later, so that made a difference. But I’m three sixteen now. Ten more pounds to go and I’ll be down to two ninety-six, and when I’m there I’ll be faster and meaner, oh my, real mean.” He tried to look mean, but his pleasant round face failed to accept it. “I was very happy,” he rushed on. “I went out there very curious. Joe Schmidt talked me through the game. Who to watch and what. ‘Watch sucker play,’ he yells at me. ‘Watch takeoff—don’t go with him.’ I do what he tells me. It works great—just beautiful.” He spotted Schmidt across the locker room. “Joe baby!” he called out. “You are beautiful.”

Schmidt, bending over and lacing up his street shoes, buffed shining black, gave him a long disdainful look.

I asked, “Nothing surprised you out there, Lucien?”

Reeberg, lowering his voice, perhaps surprised at Schmidt’s coolness, said, “Well, you know something? The language. The players yell things at the referees, it’s something. I thought we was going to be penalized—I mean, man, that language out there is like blue.”

The Lions did not joke with me about my not appearing in the game. They could tell it was a disappointment. Some of us went down to Alex Karras’s bar to celebrate the victory. Karras was in his place. He was in shirtsleeves behind the long bar. The Lions were not supposed to go to the Lindell A.C.—it was declared off-limits—but the rule was broken defiantly. He came out from behind the bar. A table was cleared and he sat down and talked with us. The bar was crowded, but it seemed pleasant. Karras did not talk about the game. The jukebox was turned on, and he began a comic twist dance routine. Someone at the table said that he had been in the stands that afternoon. He had kept himself under control for the first quarter—very blasé, leaning back and puffing at a cigar. But not long after, the cigar had gone out and he was leaning so far forward that his head was practically hanging in the row in front. In the second quarter, at some pivotal play, a yell erupted from him, and he began exhorting the Lions, half out of his seat, his arms flailing—causing a stir around him in the stands from people nudging their neighbors to point him out: “There’s Karras—there’s the reason we’re not going to be copping the title this season.”

In the last quarter he broke down completely and began crying. He took off his big horn-rimmed spectacles to mop them with a handkerchief, and they fell under his seat. He let them lie there as if the fuzzy dim world of his myopia was preferable to what he would see with them on. They were picked up for him, and the people he was with gathered around and led him away, up the aisle and out onto the ramps behind, one of them holding his spectacles.

Having heard about Karras at the ballpark, I did not mention my disappointment to anyone while we were there in his bar. I wanted to complain, just for the satisfaction of it, to ease the chagrin, but I thought better of it. Karras seemed recovered—good-natured enough, and happy to see his ex-teammates; there was yelling and carrying-on with him, and his hand would fly up to contain his high giggle. Often he would break away and dance strenuously to his jukebox. But it was hard to watch him without thinking of him being led from the stadium, with the people looking at him curiously, and someone behind carrying his spectacles.