CHAPTER 30
I went back to Cranbrook early. I decided to leave camp the next day. In two weeks the Lions had a big exhibition game with the New York Giants at Cleveland, part of a doubleheader, but the commissioner’s edict was sure to continue. I packed that night and made reservations to leave Detroit at noon the next day. I put the football back in the suitcase, and the high-school coaching manuals on basic principles of team play, which I had not opened. There were some sweatshirts with DETROIT LIONS across the front which George Wilson had given me, and I took those, thinking how when I got back to New York the shirts would look out in the winter pickup touch football games in Central Park.
When I had packed my suitcase, I went down the dormitory corridor to look in on some of the players to say good-bye. It was quiet that night. A few of the players were already asleep. But one or two of the rooms were lively, the players still working off the excitement of the day. I joined them. Hearing that I was leaving the next day, there was some murmuring that I should stay. They knew how much I wanted to get in a league game, and they began plotting how I could be secretly inserted in the Giant game in Cleveland. “We’ll just sit on ol’ Milt Plum a bit, just hem him in on the sidelines,” someone said. “And another group doing the same to Earl Morrall, and by the time they’re loose, and Wilson’s onto it, you can reel off a good quick series.”
I knew that if such a thing was done some of them would get into trouble. The temptation was strong, and as we conspired in that small dormitory room the consideration of writing about such a subterfuge was almost irresistible. But it would not have sat well. I never forgot that in Pontiac, just before the scrimmage was to begin, John Gordy had shouted as the huddle broke, “Let’s everyone lie down, and let him go through, let him get his touchdown.” I had shouted, “No, it’s got to be straight—no fake, straight.” Gordy, with the others, not only played it straight, but he shot out of his offensive guard position with such vehemence that he bowled me over. He told me afterward that my being in there at all had upset him. Keyed up as he was by the vigor of his profession, he felt it wasn’t natural to have an amateur like me involved. That was fooling around. There was no combining the two attitudes—it had to be one or the other.
The talk shifted to the afternoon’s game. They began talking about Reeberg’s play. “He had a fair afternoon with the guy opposite,” someone said. “But anybody good—like Katcavage on the Giants—why the Kat’d rape him.”
Just at that moment, quite abruptly, so that a sentence a player was speaking trailed off, the doorway filled, and we looked up and saw the coaches standing there—Wilson in front, Doll on one side, and the Hawk on the other, with a clipboard.
“Bed check,” said Wilson.
He had the familiar glum look on his dark face that came when he was forced to do something, usually in the name of discipline, which he felt beneath his dignity.
“Anybody missing in here?” asked the Hawk. He looked at his clipboard. “Where’s Whitlow? He bunks in here, doesn’t he?”
“He’s down taking a shower,” someone said without much conviction.
The Hawk made some sort of mark on the clipboard. “That shower’s pretty full up tonight, from what I’ve been told. There’s maybe ten, twenty men must be down in there according to my records.” He looked down at his clipboard. “That had to be a mighty dusty bus ride coming back from Detroit. We’re going to be awful low on soap.”
“Where’s Morrall at?” the Hawk asked. “That him singing down in the shower?” He cocked a hand to his ear derisively. We all stared sullenly at nothing in particular.
“It’s long after eleven,” Wilson said. “Can’t you men stick to the goddamn rules? You think the coaches like to make Holy Rollers out of you? You think it gives us some sort of goddamn pleasure?”
He turned away abruptly. We heard their footsteps go down the hall, and the murmur rise from the next room where they had stopped to check.
After a while, John Gonzaga said: “This is the time when you want to pack and go back to your wife. At least you don’t get some guy turning up with a clipboard and peering into your bedroom to see if you’re there.”
“What are Holy Rollers?” I asked.
“That’s what they call the guys doing the grass sprints,” someone said. “You hang around long enough tomorrow and you’ll see. The sprints are a type of punishment. It’s better than a fine. But not much. A guy will miss a bed check, maybe three or four guys, like tonight, and the coaches’ll put them to it the next day. It doesn’t sound hard. You have to sprint for twenty yards, then on hands and knees for ten, then down and roll for ten more, then up again and sprint for twenty—keeping this up in succession down the length of the field and back until maybe you’ve done two hundred yards. It’s sort of funny at the start, everybody leapfrogging and grinning, and the spectators all laughing and pointing. But you have to do the drill at top speed, and the rolling in particular gets you dizzy and sick feeling. There’re not many who can do a hundred yards of it without puking. Then it’s not so funny anymore.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
Someone said, “George Wilson doesn’t call it but once or twice in the training season. But the guy before him, Buddy Parker, he used to have the Holy Rollers performing like it was a weekly benefit. This one time he put the entire squad to it. I’ve forgotten what for—it must have been bad. Bobby Layne was the team leader then, and he was madder than a tick. He had this gut that poked out, a regular pot, which made it tough on him in the rolling—but he was the leader and the toughest, and while he was rolling himself along, and leaping up and down in those sprints, he was shouting and swearing at the others to keep up with him and finish it out or he’d see to it that they never drew another breath. He pulled them all through, just like he did in the games on Sunday. Then what does Layne do but line up the Holy Roller like a platoon and he’s going to march them up towards the gym, singing some damn song, just to show Buddy Parker that he hadn’t broken their spirit.”
“It’s like some sort of bad movie,” I interjected.
“Well, Parker was no mild-mannered bozo neither,” the veteran went on. “He looked at this singing and marching as indicating some form of disrespect. He blew his whistle and ordered Layne and his guys to do the sprints again. There was damn near a mutiny. But they went through it. Layne finished the course; hardly nobody else. He wanted his men to sing and march, but they weren’t so sure. And then Layne saw something.”
“What was that?”
“Well, he looked over and he saw Parker standing there, calm and collected, wearing a nice shirt, all clean, and a golfing hat, and a whistle on a white cord, and I mean Layne wasn’t a complete dummy. I mean it was no contest. All Parker had to do was lift that whistle a couple of inches up to his mouth to blow it, and rolling and sprinting for a hundred yards was no match for that. So Bobby Layne lost that one. He just trotted up towards the gym, and the others straggled along behind him.”
One of the veterans stirred and recalled that at Chicago when Hank Anderson, an awesome disciplinarian, was there, recalcitrants used to run what were called “fat-man” races, and Anderson had a little wooden paddle he eased onto the posteriors of linemen going by who he felt needed to be picked up in spirit.
“You see,” one of the veterans said to me, “you needn’t feel too bad about leaving camp tomorrow.”
I came in late to breakfast the next morning. A few players were there, and they said that the word was around that I was leaving. “The report is you’re chickening out on the grass sprints,” they said.
Wilson came up and said that the team and the coaches had planned a little ceremony in which I was to be presented with a gold football mounted on a wooden pedestal that read THE BEST ROOKIE IN DETROIT LION HISTORY. The trophy was not ready, so they would have to send it through the mail. John Gordy, standing nearby, said that the real reason I was leaving was because I didn’t have the nerve to accept such an award for the brand of football I had displayed at Cranbrook. “I haven’t got one damn trophy,” he said with a big grin, “and you’re getting one for the worst football I ever seen played.”
Wilson said he hoped if I had time that morning I’d come down to the practice. When I had the bags in the car, I started through the school grounds for the practice field. I had a half hour or so. It was hot and quiet, the lawn sprinklers ticking back and forth. I thought about the Holy Rollers. I went down past the tennis courts and the pine grove, walking gingerly to keep my street shoes clear of the hot powder dust.
When I stepped out from the sidelines the players all came and crowded around to say good-bye.
George Wilson said, “You want to try one last play. One more?”
“Sure,” I said. “Absolutely.”
The defense began shouting happily. Joe Schmidt said, “We get one last shot at him. One last shot. That’ll do it. One mighty Jumbo, men, that’ll do it fine.”
Scooter McLean blew his whistle. “OK,” he shouted. “Let’s get settled. Offense huddle up! George, go on in there and call your play.”
The teams separated. The helmets were tugged on. I went in among the offensive huddle, feeling slight in my street clothes. “I expect protection,” I said, grinning at them. Their helmets were turned toward me, so as always the faces were hooded and expressionless.
“Let’s turn them inside out with a pass play,” I said. “Green right, three right, ninety-three on three!”
I said it distinctly, and with the right rhythm, and they broke sharply with a crack of hands, and moved up to the line. I went up briskly behind Whitlow. I looked out at the defense. I stood in closer to the center. That had been one of my troubles in Pontiac—standing too far back and reaching for the ball. At “three” the ball came back cleanly, slapping hard into my palm, and I hurried back, sure-footed, seven yards, and turned to look downfield. Just in front I could see the haunches of the blockers around the rim of the protective pocket as they strained forward with their cleats churning up dust, but their bodies bent upright by the shock of the defensive tackles and ends working at them in a flail of arms; beyond them I saw Pietrosante cutting across, downfield about fifteen yards from me; he was looking over. I cut loose the pass, and it hit him just right, so that he could gather the ball in at a height at which the defending linebacker could not reach over to bat it down. With his legs pumping he moved the ball a few more yards downfield before he was brought down.
A great roar went up, not only from the offense, but also from the defensive people. The crowds along the sidelines stirred curiously, craning to see.
I heard the Hawk yelling: “Anything wrong with that? Any complaints about that?”
“Duck soup,” I called out. “Damn cinch. Child’s play.” I snapped my fingers.
“Give him the game ball,” said Wilson.
The helmets were off. Everyone was standing around grinning.
“Too bad about this trade with Baltimore—me for John Unitas,” I said. “I suppose Bill Ford and Anderson know what they’re doing.”
I shook hands with some of them. I said what a fine time I had enjoyed there at Cranbrook. Then I left them and walked up through the pine trees, the scent warm and strong in the noonday heat. On the tennis court two girls were playing desultory singles—awkward at it, using their game for gossip; but they were lovely to watch, both in startling white tennis outfits that set off their tanned bodies. I had a few minutes to spare. Their game consisted mostly of double faults. One of them called to the other: “I tell you Timmy’s car seats come off—I mean you sit there for a while on that hot leather and it comes off on your legs.” She served, a high arched shot like a lob. The other girl set herself, measuring her shot, and when she swung her racquet through she hit the ball with her thumb. The ball glanced off and she dropped the racquet to the court with a clatter. “You absolute fiend!” she said. She inspected her hand. The score went unannounced. One girl served, then the other, in some helter-skelter fashion, whoever held the ball it seemed. “God, at least,” said the girl with the bruised thumb, “Timmy plays a banjo. You know what?”