Game Over 
Coming of Age in the Locker Room
What the players say about their life in the game.
(Page 2 of 6)
Still, it is those authors who have stuck their helmets in at the college or professional level—Gary Shaw at The University of Texas in the early 1960s, Pete Gent and Lance Rentzel for the Dallas Cowboys—who get closest to the battered football bone and psyche. It is they who make you understand just what a mean damn business is football, and how Texans may be peculiarly susceptible to its root poisons.
Though feeling semi-guilty about the decision, I don’t intend to dwell long on Semi-Tough, that marvelous gut-bustin’ spoof by Dan Jenkins, the Sports Illustrated writer out of Fort Worth. As I intend at least a semi-serious examination of football and its fruits, I find it difficult to make use of Semi-Tough: it’s simply so damned funny it ill-serves my poses and preachments. But make no mistake: the saga of Billy Clyde Puckett not only deserves its enormous success as pure entertainment, it provides many broad insights as caricature. If you would inspect the light side of Texas craziness and observe our hang-ups and excesses multiplied times nine—whether patriotic, racial, sexual, regional, or financial—then don’t ignore Semi-Tough. Indeed, should you read the other football books here cited, then maybe reading Dan Jenkins is required; otherwise, you might go to bed thinking the evils of Texas football outrank the sins of pestilence, Watergate, or war.
Yet, it is less a reliable sociological study than the roman a clef by ex-Cowboy Pete Gent, North Dallas Forty, or the angry personal memoir of Shaw—Meat On The Hoof—or the strangely muddled, ambivalent recollections of the troubled Rentzel in When All The Laughter Died In Sorrow. Rentzel, alone among the six authors, was an active player at the time of his writing; he therefore may have been less a free agent of the total truth.
I don’t know if Giles Tippette, author of Saturday’s Children—a study of Rice University’s 1971 season—played the game beyond high school. Tippette often seems more instinctively protective of the game than not, more patient with its excesses, perhaps a little more on the side of the team or the coaches than of the individual. Even if inadvertently, however, Saturday’s Children affirms many of the institutionalized brutalities offered in evidence by ex-jocks Gent, Shaw, and Rentzel. Say of Tippette that he has a good feel for the game’s tortures and troubles, as well as for its stirring excitements. I suspect that he shares with me a love-hate relationship toward football, the demon struggling with the angel each time we witness a kickoff.
The sixth and most unabashedly Gee-Whiz offering is Spirit, by Carlton Stowers, who treats the 1972 Brownwood High season. Though we see many glimpses of Coach Gordon Wood (remarkably, seven times a coach of Texas schoolboy champions at multiple schools) and while Stowers provides interesting looks at football-crazed Texas towns as well as those untiring Superfans inhabiting them, he is next-to-silent when we yearn to know something of the heads, hearts, and inner-tickings of youthful Brownwood Lions while they fall from near perennial Class AAA schoolboy champions to an atypical, frustrating 6-4 season. In missing such important meat and basic potatoes, Mr. Stowers thus leaves the definitive Texas high school football book to the future.
A pity. For it’s in the high schools, after working up through ambitious secondary “feeder” systems, that the boys of Texas begin to sense something of the demanding football life ahead. Gary Shaw, a product of Denton High School, relates crying himself to sleep as a football freshman who felt, at fourteen, a failure for life. Shaw’s high school coaches later benched him during mid-week practice sessions and convinced him, though his teammates had elected him co-captain, that he might be unworthy of starting at linebacker. Naturally, when the coaches suddenly “relented” and started him in the next game he played like a wildman: “And it was only after the season that I realized they had manipulated me to get a better performance.” Shaw’s eyes opened when he discovered opposition scouting reports, speaking so highly of his talents that their offenses had been completely geared toward avoiding him. Schoolboy Shaw remembers vomiting before each game, nervous muscle spasms, playing with hobbling injuries, fearing his best efforts would somehow leave him disgraced, and coaches “who made no comment one way or the other” even after heroic performances in which he had astoundingly made twenty or twenty-five tackles.
Pardon it, but that again sends my mind back to the old days in Midland: linebacker Barry Boone being kicked in the tailbone by an assistant coach shouting Git up, goddamn, you ain’t hurt when, indeed, poor Barry had been knocked cold in a thunderous scrimmage; Jimmy Edwards, our blue chip All-District center-linebacker, suffering official ridicule because a Sweetwater speedster had caught him from behind after Edwards had zipped a mere 60-odd yards with an intercepted pass; our coaches collectively screaming of how we were bums, cowards, and lazy fartknockers when Pampa’s Randall Clay returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown.
King, you’re flounding around out there like a goddamned old woman.
Coach, I got bad ribs. I think maybe somethin’s busted.
Your ass is gonna git busted if you don’t show me more.
I think they called it “Building Character.”
Sometimes when the pressures accumulated we gathered, safely out of official earshot, to stage verbal mutinies. Bob Drake was incensed, during a screening of the Lamesa game film for parents and other Bulldog Boosters, when our coach remarked: “Drake would have scored on that play with a little hustle.” His eyes glittering from anger and forbidden beers, Drake later offered his defense: “Hail, I was playin’ on a broke laig!” A slight exaggeration, yes; but the 138-pound Drake had, in fact, toted the ball many times when it pained him even to walk. Privately, we cursed and reviled our coaches almost as expertly as they did it to us in more public displays.
Only rarely does Carlton Stowers provide hints that in adversity Brownwood High’s young Lions may have occasionally had their craws full. After losing to Sweetwater they are told they are not in shape and on Monday will face particularly odious drills; a boy in the back of the bus grumbles, “Shit, we aren’t going to run those things ‘cause we aren’t in shape. It’s just going to be punishment drills.” After the kids get their reward of a tongue-lashing for having only beaten Vernon 21 to 0, a disenchanted player says: “Let’s get some beer and go out to the lake. I want to forget about football and district standings and all that crap for awhile.” A key starter, knowing that only combat wounds are tolerated, invents a story of having broken his hand in the game: “The truth was that earlier in the day he had argued with his girl friend and broke the hand when he slammed his fist into a locker.”
Not all football coaches are total ogres; it would be unfair to so indicate. Even those I liked, however—say, two of perhaps eight or nine—often disappointed with their narrow visions and victory obsessions. I resented, too, their presumptions that we belonged to them body and soul; that what we did off the field, in our private lives, qualified for official punishments or censure. Sometimes, frothing or screaming, they appeared to have gone mad. I feared them in such moments beyond their mere authority: they frightened me with visions of my own inadequacies and presumably bad judgments. It is not difficult, when you are fifteen or sixteen, to be convinced that your sum total equals a piece of shit.
Our coaches were hired to win, of course, and might soon be gone if they didn’t. Their futures and fortunes depended on the performances they could coax or bait or scare from us. Get two or more touchdowns behind and they grew frantic: “Dammit, we’re being humiliated! Crack somebody! They’re pushing your tails all over the field.” As Giles Tippette writes, “Football is a very hard game; it’s hard on everyone, coaches, players, secretaries, office staff, trainers, fans. A season of strain generally brings everybody down to their fundamental beings.” If Tippette is right, then perhaps football fans—and some football parents—deserve more censure than do coaches.
My parents not knowing or caring the difference between a touchdown and a quick-kick, I knew no home pressures. Certain teammates did. The more dedicated parents rarely missed our daily workouts or weekly Booster Club meetings. These sometimes embarrassed their sons with scornful exhortations form the sidelines, by buttering up our coaches presumably on their son’s behalf, or by berating them should Little Johnny be benched. After a home-field victory, I arranged a ride form the gym with a teammate whose family awaited. We cavorted to the car, happy that we’d passed another muster. “What’s the matter, Max”—his mother literally snarled—“ dammit, can’t you play football?” We were astonished. “If you don’t wanta pay the price, Max,” the father said, “why, just hang ‘em up and quit.” Max finally choked out that maybe, by God, he just would. His mother whirled, an angry Dragon Lady: “You try it, Buster, and I’ll slap your jaws!” We rode in silence, save for the hissing air-brake sounds she made in taking jerky puffs from her cigarette.
“The only thing worse than a football fan is two of ‘em.”
-Bubba Smith of Beaumont, moments after being booed in Baltimore’s one-point loss to Cleveland, in 1971
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