EPILOGUE

Detroit had a bad season my year. The team finished fourth in its division—behind Chicago, Green Bay, and Baltimore. Injuries hurt their chances. Eleven of the first-line players were knocked out of the lineup by injuries, most of them on the defensive team. Joe Schmidt and Carl Brettschneider of the linebackers were crippled, and so were Yale Lary and Night Train Lane. Gary Lowe ruptured his Achilles tendon. In one game the defensive secondary was so depleted that Wilson sent in Gail Cogdill at safety, hoping that the superb athlete could adapt himself to a position he had never played before. Cogdill was so startled to be sent in on the defense that he ran onto the field without his helmet, which was not unusual, but on retrieving it, coming out for the second time, he kept calling in his madcap fashion, “What do I do, what do I do, what am I supposed to do?” The rival quarterback, chancing that such a display of ignorance was not a ruse, called for a play that probed at Cogdill’s position, a long pass, and it succeeded.

I suffered from afar that season. Once, that autumn, sitting in a waterside café in Bellagio, on Italy’s Lake Como, I came across the weekend scores in a Paris Herald which turned up down there, and when I read that the Lions had lost a game, I rose in anguish out of my chair, absolutely stiff with grief, my knee catching the edge of the table as I came up, and toppling it over in a fine cascade of Perrier bottles. The following year—though I vaguely hoped the passage of time might ease the frenzy of autumn Sundays—I found that my emotional concern had not been tempered at all. The team had another difficult season, finishing fourth again in the conference, and Sundays were hardly bearable. The Lions themselves were aware of my commitment, and it amused them. They put it to the test from time to time. I tried to see the Detroit games in person when it was possible—at least when they came east to play. One autumn I dropped into their locker room at Franklin Field, Philadelphia—traveling down from New York to watch them play the Eagles in a preseason exhibition game—and when I walked in, already worried about the game, holding up a hand, calling out, “Hello, hello, hello,” glad to see everyone, George Wilson, the coach, spotted me and said, “Get that man into uniform, quick.” Any citizen with his wits about him would have replied that he was sitting up in Section 24 with an attractive girl, with a crowd down from New York for the game, and beer was going to be sipped from paper cups while the players pushed and heaved in the heat (the temperature was in the high nineties). But I offered a pleased, vacuous grin, willing to do anything they told me to do, and they did outfit me, what’s more—Friday Macklem scrabbling around in the big team trunks and coming up with a uniform of sorts. He didn’t have my zero jersey, but he had a spare one with the number 30, which was George Wilson’s number when he played with the Bears. Wilson ran alongside me as we trotted onto the filed and he warned me not to dishonor it. I sat nervously on the bench during the game, knowing that if they ran up the score, the temptation might rise—the commissioner notwithstanding—to run me in as quarterback for one or two plays (Wilson kept asking me if I had my plays straight), and my sense of allegiance being what it was, I would have trotted in, absolutely, mumbling perhaps, but shuffling out toward them, seeing the helmets turn to watch me come, and I would have done what I could. As it was, they put me at the quarterbacks’ table, with the phones to the coaches on the rim of the stadium, and they would tell me whom they wanted to talk to, and I would motion at the player and he’d come to the table. The game was close, and it was exhilarating to be with the team again, but I thought the girl and the rest of them must be wondering what had become of me. I showered at halftime and returned to my seat in the stands.

“Where have you been?” my friends asked.

“I’ve been down there on the bench—suited up,” I said, just right, the voice absolutely perfect. “You didn’t see me?”

“G’wan,” they said.

“Whatya mean?” I cried out. “I was number thirty.”

“Ah g’wan,” they said.

“Whatya mean ‘g’wan.’ I was down there.” I was furious. “You didn’t see me on the phones?”

The people in neighboring seats were craned in toward me, listening, with quizzical looks, as if they thought perhaps the heat had fetched me. I said in a low voice, “Well, never mind.” Then, with play under way on the field below, I stirred myself and began calling support for the Lions.

“’S been in the bar,” I heard one of my friends say to the girl. “Absolutely blotto.”

My behavior began to worry me. I began to wonder if my absorption was absolute and if my commitment would be to hang around the training camp and the practice fields like the superfans I remembered from camp—the Gershes and the Sam Smarts—and I thought once or twice of Jungle Jamey in his autographed car traveling with the teams.

When I went to Times Square on Sunday night to look for the scores in the early morning editions, I would throw the paper skyward if the Lions had won, and whoop, and the people idling around the newsstand would look at me, half grinning, waiting for me to tell them what had brought on such a rage of contentedness, that I’d won a jackpot or something; I knew that I could not satisfy their expectation by saying, “Well, the Lions won.” So I would hurry away.

In New York I found a kindred spirit with whom to talk about the problem of being hooked to a football team. He was Mike Manuche, a restaurant owner, and a supporter of the New York Giants. Some years ago he acquired the status of a talisman. He turned up at a Giant practice on a Thursday afternoon, then the following Thursday, and the Thursday after, and someone noted that on the following weekends the Giants won their game. The winning steaks were equated to his appearances at practice, and the Giants, who like so many athletes are a superstitious lot, began to expect Manuche to turn up on Thursdays to ensure victory the following Sunday.

Manuche performed his role rigorously: he was on hand every Thursday, often he went to team meetings, and traveled with the team. As time passed and the winning streaks went on through the championship years he evolved a carefully worked-out system of custom and procedure that he adhered to in order to keep them going: he wore certain clothes (on one occasion, a battered though lucky pair of underpants got thrown out by his mother-in-law and were retrieved from a garbage pail just as a disposal truck was coming up his Scarsdale street), he ate certain foods, and on the day of the game the complexities were staggering. He would leave his house at such and such a minute, follow the same route to the stadium, park the car at the same lot, then, entering through the same gate, he’d go up the same ramp, to his seat—the same seat, of course—showing his ticket stub to the same usher, then getting into his seat in just such a way, backing into it, and at 1:50, fifteen minutes before the start of the game, he would go to the men’s room, picking the same stall, willing the team’s success as he stood there, and then he had to take the same number of steps back to his seat, often having to hop or mark time to keep them exact, and a hot dog had to be bought at just such and such a time. With all these things to remember, and a host more, it was astonishing Manuche could ever concentrate on the game itself.

The importance of ritual was applied not only by Manuche but by many of the Giant players as well. Before the game, Y. A. Tittle, perhaps the most superstitious of the Giants, and two or three of the others would go to a special food shop to consume one or two meatball sandwiches apiece, not because anyone enjoyed them particularly but for their good-luck value, which was sufficient to keep the players returning week after week until, as the successful seasons continued, the trip to the eatery took on the ritual and solemnity of a pilgrimage.

With the fall of the Giants’ fortunes in the mid-sixties, Manuche was hardly of easy mind. I called him up on the phone after one season and asked him about it. Apparently, as the losses continued, with the Giants ending at the bottom of their division, he had tried to establish new patterns of behavior. “We tried all sorts of things—new routes to the stadium, different cars…” he told me sorrowfully. “We thought we had something when we won the St. Louis game—but it was no good, of course. It was a terrible time. I tried all the clothes I had. I had my wife checking all of hers out—to see if there wasn’t a Giant win in some combination she had. There was a time, back a year or so, when I was afraid not to show up for those Thursday practices. Then last season, when the troubles started, after all those Thursdays, years of them, I tried a Wednesday, just to see if it would help. It didn’t. Nothing worked.”

“How about those meatball sandwiches?” I asked.

“Well, when the defeats started,” Manuche said, “they thought that perhaps the meatballs were not being cooked properly. They had the counterman cook the meatballs just a little longer, then a little less, but nothing helped, and finally we gave up the place entirely. Crazy, it all was,” Manuche said. “I mean you’d think there was a screw loose somewhere, the way we behaved.”

I said that considering my own behavior, his was perfectly natural.

“You have the trouble too? If you get hooked, you’re lost—eat some awful meatball sandwich, fifty or sixty of them, if you thought it’d do the team any good.”

Was there any cure for this state of commitment? I asked Manuche.

He was very mournful. He didn’t think so—“hooked” was the word he kept repeating.

The Lions were able to get me to do anything for them. The year after my participation they prevailed upon me to represent them at the National Football League draft at New York’s Summit Hotel. Nothing much to it, they told me—sit at a phone and give the Detroit office the names of the players drafted by the other teams, and announce the Lions’ choice (which they would phone me from Detroit) when their turn came up. It might take some time, they said, and perhaps I should plan to keep that weekend free (the draft was scheduled to start on a Saturday morning). Would I do it? they wanted to know. Absolutely! I shouted into the phone. I had a full weekend planned, but I would cancel it. A tremendous honor. I only wanted assurances that I could not in my official capacity damage the Detroit organization. Would it be possible for me to draft a 132-pound fullback from Ypsilanti High School?

No, they said coldly, that would be impossible.

Bud Erickson met me at a midtown hotel at seven-thirty a.m., a half hour before the drafting session was scheduled to start in the Summit Hotel.

“I’m terribly grateful to be asked to do this,” I said.

“It’s going to be a long haul,” he said. “Twenty rounds, fourteen picks for each round. You’ll be in there for quite a spell.”

“How do they know who I am? Do I have any accreditation?”

Erickson reached in his coat pocket. He handed me a souvenir key chain attached to a blue disc with the Detroit lion rampant showing on one side.

“You can use this,” he said, “for identification.”

“It’s a key chain,” I said.

“Don’t put any keys on it,” Erickson said. “Just wave it around and it’ll do.”

The importance of my duties seemed somewhat diminished.

Erickson talked over Detroit news. There had been two deaths which had been almost unbearable to accept—Scooter McLean, the little wiry backfield coach, who had died suddenly of cancer, and then Lucien Reeberg, the big rookie, who had died of uremic poisoning, which came on a month or so after the season’s close. He had had a chronic kidney condition which he had kept from the doctors, supposing that it might affect his future with the team. He had made the squad that first season, a reserve at both the offensive and defensive guard positions, which he played with a clumsy élan that was at once the despair and delight of the coaches. I remembered seeing him for the first time as a bona fide member of the team in Baltimore, the only time the team came east that season.

The day before I had been to a game in Cambridge. Princeton was playing there that weekend. The rain was very heavy. Three Harvard graduates died in the stands that afternoon—a headline story in the metropolitan papers the next day. One of them succumbed two or three rows away from where I was sitting; they laid him down carefully in the aisle, and I remember that down in front on the field a cheerleader, quite unaware, kept bellowing cheerfully through his megaphone: “Everybody up! Everybody up for the kickoff!” I drove to the airport after the game and took a flight to Baltimore. Reeberg was the first Lion player I saw when I came into the hotel lobby. He was very nattily dressed. He was wearing a thin-brimmed black hat, like one of Roger Brown’s, with an Alpine brush at the side. He was very suave.

I went up to him and said, “Lucien, it’s great you made the team.”

He barely made a sign of recognition, trying to suggest with his aplomb that making the team was just a matter of course.

“It’s terrific, Lucien,” I said.

I thought he was going to try to yawn. But it did not work. His Alpine brush began to quiver. He broke down. “Whataya think?” he asked breathlessly. “D’ja believe it? Well, I’ll tell you something true, that I can’t!” He could hardly contain himself. “You like the blazer?” he said. He pointed at the lion on the breast pocket. “Look at this,” he said. He said he wanted to buy me a cup of coffee and tell me about the game he’d played the week before, but some other players came by and I never got a chance to talk to him again.

“He was all enthusiasm,” I said to Erickson. “What a mockery.”

He shrugged his shoulders and paid for the breakfast.

In the Summit Hotel the league had set aside two large adjoining conference rooms. One of them was set up with a bar, a buffet table, and two television sets, which were tuned to different channels so that a burble of sound rose from them, with an occasional scream or sob from a soap opera, and it sounded as though things were very lively in there.

The larger room, decorated with a deep red wall-to-wall carpet, was devoted to the business at hand—half the room assigned for television equipment and interviews, and the other set up with fourteen small tables, one for each team in the league (the name designated on a placard), and arranged in two long rows of seven each. A speaker’s table with its podium from which the draft selections would be announced was at the head of the room. Each table was decorated with a small, fat football-player plastic doll with a painted brown football tucked under one arm, the appropriate team name painted on its jersey. Each had an oversized helmeted head, fixed by a spring, so at the slightest touch it bounced and turned for a painfully long period. One sees such dolls bobbing on the back-window shelves of automobiles. When a draft choice was announced, and the representatives reached for their phones to call the home offices, their dolls, set off by the vibration, would bounce and bob in a little lunatic show of approbation, their faces fixed with the thin half-moons of kindergarten portraiture. I don’t know why one of us—in the latter stages of the session particularly—did not reach out to crumble his doll. Perhaps it was in the air, because toward the end someone came by and they were packed carefully away in a valise.

When I arrived the room was beginning to fill: team officials with briefcases sat down at their assigned tables and spread out colored charts and a clutch of sharpened pencils; NFL officials appeared, Commissioner Rozelle among them, who seemed to know everyone—big hellos, and handshakes—and then the big wide-shouldered men who were from the scouting pools, ex-players most of them, who sat at tables at the rear of the room, shucking off their coats first thing to their short-sleeved shirts so the heft of their bare arms was displayed. There were others—and I was among them—who seemed slightly bewildered among these people: superfans, for sure, I decided, who had given up their weekends, as I had, to help their teams. I introduced myself to some of them: “… from Detroit,” I said, “the Lions,” nervously fingering my key chain. It was hard to say with conviction.

I went to my table with the Detroit placard on it and sat down. The chair was bright leather, the color of a new pocketbook, and air-cushioned, so it whistled slightly as I settled into it. I picked up the phone and called the Detroit office. The football doll bobbed in front of me. The brassy, friendly voice of George Wilson came on the wire.

“I’m ready,” I said. “The Giants have first draft choice and they should be selecting very shortly.”

“Good,” he said. “Bill Ford will be on the phone for us at this end. Call him when the news comes through.”

The year before I went to Detroit, William Ford had bought control of the Lions for six million dollars. He would appear on the sidelines to watch the scrimmaging, perched on a shooting stick, his small blond daughters flanking him. As the ball moved on the field, he would pick up his stick, trail it up and down the sidelines after him, set it again, and sit, staring out at his players. He took particular interest in my own eccentric flailings in the Detroit backfield—he was not aware of my privileged position—and I was told later he often described me to his wife over the dinner table. “There’s this one fellow,” he’d say, shaking his head, “who just isn’t going to make it. They keep him on, though; I can’t understand it.”

I knew what Ford was going to say as soon as I got on the phone to him from the Summit Hotel. “Well, hello, Bill,” he was going to say. “Hello, is that Bill Ford?” and I would laugh, if somewhat hollowly, and say, “Sure, certainly it is.”

He calls me Bill Ford because once, when traveling with the team, I made the mistake of using his name to make a reservation in a small fashionable Beverly Hills restaurant named La Scala, and was caught at it. The team had come into Los Angeles earlier that day, and in the evening a few of us began to telephone around, trying for a good place to eat. La Scala was not accepting reservations, they told me over the phone.

“This is Mr. Ford,” I said suddenly. “Mr. William Ford in town with the Detroit Lions for the Rams game.”

I could hear the clatter of silverware in the background and the hum of conversation. The Ford name helped matters. Someone came on the phone and I was informed that a table had “become clear.” We were welcome to appear any time we wanted: it would be held for us. “Yes, indeed, Mr. Ford,” they said.

“Right,” I said. “We’ll be along presently.”

We turned up at La Scala, not much later, a group of us, Nick Pietrosante, John Gordy, and Bill Quinlan, a veteran defensive end who had joined the club the year after I left, all of us striding up, hungry, under the little marquee, into the restaurant, and as soon as we were in there I knew something had gone wrong. The owner was waiting for us, eyeing us sharply.

“The Ford table?” I asked.

“Which of you gentlemen is Mr. Ford?”

I looked back at John Gordy. He stared me down. He had heavy, sloping shoulders that make his suit coats ride up high, like an overgrown schoolboy’s. Beyond him, Pietrosante had worked himself into a corner of the vestibule, looking out bleakly, and as for Bill Quinlan, with his strong, pocked face, he was chewing belligerently at something, tobacco perhaps, and it was evident from his demeanor that he wasn’t going to step forward to pass himself off as the grandson of Henry Ford. He is known as “the Black Irishman from Massachusetts.”

“I’m Bill Ford,” I said weakly.

“Isn’t that interesting,” the owner said. “Someone wants to meet you.” He put his hand somewhat more firmly than was pleasant on my shoulder and guided me through the restaurant—people looking up as we passed since we were moving at a considerable clip—to a corner alcove, where, sure enough, William Ford was sitting with other officials from the Detroit club, Edwin Anderson, Russ Thomas, the personnel manager, and some others, all looking quite severe, and glancing at Ford so as to be able to equate their reactions with his.

The La Scala owner announced: “Mr. Ford, may I present Mr. Ford.”

Ford grinned wildly, the others taking up his reaction on cue, so it was all right, I suppose. But they never allowed me to forget the incident. “Hey, Bill,” they all called out when I saw them thereafter. His party had turned up, just by chance, without making a reservation. Naturally, they had been given the “Ford” table, and, curious, had remarked at the restaurant’s prescience. They were told someone had phoned for reservations; their eyebrows went up, and, fat cats, they waited to see who the impostors were.

Sure enough, when I got on the phone to announce the first draft choice, Mr. Ford said, “Hello, Bill, that you?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Nobody but Bill Ford. The Giants picked Tucker Frederickson.”

“OK, Bill,” he said. I could tell from the way he drawled it out softly that the big Auburn fullback had been high on their own list. Detroit was looking for a heavy, hard-running back.

The Giants’ choice was made at eight o’clock, their representative striding to the podium with the name, phoned in from Giant headquarters, written on a slip of paper. It was read off by Commissioner Rozelle. Detroit’s position was eleventh in the first round, and with each team allowed a half hour to make their choice it was long past noon, and ten players later, when our turn came and the phone rang on my desk with Detroit’s pick.

“Thomas Nowatzke,” Bill Ford said. “We’ve picked Nowatzke.” The connection was poor and the name arrived as a blur of sibilance.

“Once again,” I said loudly. “How do you spell that?”

They began snickering at the tables, and I had to cover an ear to get the swatch of consonants in his name straight. I took my slip up to the podium, and he was announced.

Not long after, Nowatzke himself came in with Bud Erickson. An interviewer took them into the television klieg lights, the machine facing them with its long black lens, the twin red lights beneath, and Nowatzke said into a stick microphone that he felt real good to be playing for the NFL, and for Detroit. I looked at him carefully—disappointed in him. If he had been a draft choice for another team I would have been impressed enough—a personable-looking athlete with the power indicated along the width and line of his shoulders—but a first draft choice for Detroit, I thought, my team, should have been a titanic figure, carrying away the door in his hand as he entered the room, just by accident, ripping it off the hinges, apologizing then, bobbing his head, not only to apologize, but to clear the ceiling, and when he got to the lights, the interviewer looking up at him nervously, he would take the stick microphone to say into it, “Well, gosh, folks,” and it would snap in his hands like a twig.

But some time after Nowatzke’s departure my enthusiasm for all things Detroit began to flag. The hours stretched on endlessly. Each round in the draft moved slowly, each team using its allotted time to the limit to make sure through its network of representatives that its choice would sign his contract. It was apparent the session was going to last long into the next day. What had seemed a privilege was in effect a chore—being shackled to a small desk with its telephone and the fat football doll. The league did its best. Meals were sent in, but in the evening I thought of my canceled dinner, and, later, the theater I’d missed and after midnight I thought of the sashaying around town that the Lions had deprived me of, and I began to wonder if perhaps my allegiance had not been pushed too far. Football itself began to seem distasteful, epitomized by the ex-players from the scouting pools wandering about the room in their shirtsleeves. The long hours seemed to have no effect on them. The rest of us slouched wearily at our tables; all seemed scraggly; a sheen of beard appeared on some faces as the dawn came, and the sound of traffic began to drift up from the streets. One of the representatives gave a slight groan, and stretching out on the floor next to his table he slept with his phone on his chest. The scouts grinned and pointed at him. Every once in a while one of them would be called to a team table to advise the home office, Baltimore, say, at the table just in front of me; the scout would amble up, humming, with a stiff, loose-leaf notebook with colored tabs along the side, and when he sat down, the air cushion would whistle shrilly under him. He would talk to the coach on the other end of the phone as follows: “Hey, baby. Bailey Gimbel?” He’d refer to his book. “A real fine kid, this boy. Big! Oh, run to two-sixty, quick as a cat—oh, he’ll do the fifty in under six, for sure, in gear, and attitude, he’s got an attitude you don’t have to worry about, real beautiful attitude: hardnose.”

That was the gist of it—longer, of course, the patois rich, with the emphasis always on speed (“in gear” had nothing to do with a shift of speed, but with racing in football togs), “hands” came into it always (“he’s got a great pair of hands”), and always height and weight. In the early hours of Sunday morning, my attitude sour, with nothing to do, even the television sets dead in the next room, the place quiet, I found myself irreverent enough to be tempted to call the home office, to whisper sharply into the phone as follows: “Bill, this is… ah, Bill. The scout group here has been talking about a real good kid—not drafted yet…”

“What’s that? What?”

“He’s a tackle from Highland Cream Teachers.”

“What’s that again? The connection…”

“Courtney Caroline’s his name—everybody’s agog in here.”

“Everybody’s what?”

“Agog. Everybody’s agog. Bill, the kid’s big—a real fat kid, run up oh maybe five, six hundred pounds, as big as a mountain—and big on speed too, Bill, he can tackle you with those feet, great big cat-quick feet, and as for attitude, he’s got a real beautiful attitude: he doesn’t smoke.”

I never called such a thing in. I hadn’t the nerve to. But when the twelfth round came along, about six in the morning, a player’s name came up, San Francisco’s choice, which caught my fancy and gave me a small chance to indicate my newfound attitude of irreverence. When I picked up the phone to report, I said, “Bill, San Francisco just picked up a halfback from Fresno State named Dave Plump.”

“Yes, Plump,” said Ford. I heard him repeat the name to the others. They kept charts in the home office, crossing off names as I called in the other teams’ choices.

“I think we missed a bet there, a great bet,” I said. “You could have worked him into the Detroit backfield with Milt Plum.”

“What’s that?” asked Ford. “Speak up. The connection’s gone sour.”

“Plump!” I shouted into the phone. “You could have had Plump in there for Plum’s handoffs—Plum to Plump!”

I could hear him murmuring distantly at the other end of the line, but then I heard the rustling in nearby seats, the scouts looking over, and some of the others, so I said, “Never mind, Bill—just an idea,” and put up the receiver.

But in the twentieth round something happened which returned me irretrievably to the Detroit fold. About ten minutes before Detroit’s choice was due, Aldo Forte, the line coach, called in. He had taken over from Bill Ford, who had finally packed up and gone home. It was one o’clock Sunday afternoon. We had been going for twenty-nine hours. “You all set for our last choice?” Aldo said.

“Sure,” I said.

“We got a surprise choice coming up,” Aldo said. “Big surprise.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Well,” Aldo said, “we’ve decided to draft you!”

“Come on,” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

“Honest, Aldo,” I whispered shrilly into the phone. “You can’t do that. The commissioner’ll have a fit if he has to read off my name. He’ll start suspending people and slapping fines around. He hasn’t been to sleep for thirty hours or so, and he looks mean.”

“No matter,” said Aldo. “You learned five plays when you were training with us. That puts you ahead of someone else we might pick.”

“Honest, Aldo…”

“The big thing,” Aldo said, “is that we don’t lose you to the Kansas City Chiefs, or the Oilers, those guys in the other league.” He hung up the phone.