Game Over 
Coming of Age in the Locker Room
What the players say about their life in the game.
(Page 6 of 6)
“DeCrosta rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘It’s nookie,’ he pronounced. ‘Take him out and get him laid. Those kids get used to getting it regular off their steady girl friend and then they get up here and can’t take it. He just needs to get laid.’
“ ‘Come by my office,’ Conover told Roberts. ‘I’ve got the names and phone numbers of some girls who are supposed to be real cooperative.’
“Roberts looked incredulous. ‘Are you serious?’
“ ‘Of course we’re serious,’ Conover said. ‘What did you think? Best remedy for homesickness.’
“Roberts still looked shocked. ‘I can’t do that!’
“ ‘Why not?’
“ ‘Why not! My—my god, I’ve got a doctorate in theology! I can’t just get some kid a—a—’
“Conover got up from the table. ‘Well, C.A.,’ he said, ‘you’ll never make a coach. A coach will do anything to win . . .’”
(Bulletin: Apparently, peculiar notions of the sexual role reach the highest football level. In the week before last year’s Super Bowl game, Miami Dolphin Coach Don Shula—a decent fellow generally not as given to conventional bugaboos or caveman beliefs as your average coach—ordered his grown, largely married charges to engage in no sex past Tuesday before the Sunday game!)
If I were required to indicate today that element of American life which is most characteristic of our nationality, my finger would unerringly point to our athletic escutcheon.
-General Douglas MacArthur
I don’t suppose you can grow up in small-town Texas—or you couldn’t 30, 40 years ago—without catching football fever. I was hooked from the moment the Baird Bears defeated our hometown Putnam Panthers, 12 to 6, in 1934 or 1935. What I most remember was the grumbling of Putnam grownups to the effect that Baird always cheated, always bought off the referees, always played dirty. I knew then that football involved community honor.
My early heroes were selected from the sport pages of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Sammy Baugh, Bulldog Turner, Davey O’Brien, John Kimbrough, Jack Crain, I.B. Hale, Ollie Cordell, Bullet Billy Patterson. I kept scrapbooks, memorized scores; for years I could recite the starting lineup of the 1939 National Champions out of College Station, Texas. In my better dreams I emulated those noble old giants of power and speed. We played football almost from the cradle: on vacant lots with tin cans serving as the ball, at recess and lunch time on the school ground, in the backyard with makeshift balls of rolled cotton socks. In fourth grade I became part of an organized team, with a coach and a schedule and pick-up uniforms: an ill-fitting helmet, a worn pair of shoes, a faded Big Brother jersey. By the time I was twenty, I had played for eleven consecutive seasons.
High school was where it mattered most. A poor boy might advance himself socially and romantically if fleet, strong, or brave enough. The ultimate dream was to win the state championship and then be named to the North-South All-Star game. We won not even a district title; no All-Star selectors beckoned. Somehow, it always came up fourth and nineteen . . .
After Midland’s season ended with our annual rowdy embarrassment at the hands of Odessa, I sat by the radio while my contemporary betters—Bobby Lane and Doak Walter of Highland Park, Kyle Rote of San Antonio Jefferson, Milton Rathbone of San Angelo, Froggy Williams of Waco, George Walmsley of Goose Creek, Hayden Fry and Bryon Townsend of Odessa, Lindy Berry of Wichita Falls, unknown huskies from Port Arthur or Paris or Amarillo—went about settling the state championship. As a young adult, I was a West Texas sports writer recording in purple prose the feats of regional knights. It seemed important at the time. Never having lived outside the football culture, hanging around with coaches and incurable fans, I didn’t question whether the game might be Pure or Good.
When my friend Mac McCutcheon ran for the Odessa School Board on a football-deemphasis program twenty years ago, I thought him crazy. And so, by a convincing margin, did the voters. Bankers, lawyers, politicians, and doctors attended the games in large lots as did roughnecks, truck drivers, and ribbon-clerks. Many dressed in the local colors for each game; the more manic rang cowbells. Over coffee in the courthouse or in the Club Cafe, one heard more in season of football than of politics, deer hunting, sex, or even the oil business. There were people in Odessa who believe that Coach Cooper Robins should be Governor, though Midland fans preferred Coach Thurman (Tugboat) Jones.
Some people tell me all that’s changing in Texas; that in the urban schools, at least, football is no longer the be-all, do-all; that, maybe, a little more sanity resides. Perhaps. Only last year, however, my 15-year-old son was harassed by Midland coaches and semi-ostracized to the point he skipped twenty-odd days of school’s remaining six weeks. His crime had been to quit football. The campaign to break him was necessary, you see, in order to discourage other defections. Déjà vu, Son. Ain’t nothing new: history’s no more than a re-cycling.
So in my maturity I am through with football, right? Well, no. I have simply transferred allegiance to the NFL, particularly to the Washington Redskins. It is irrational and embarrassing, that extent to which I match my moods to Redskin fortunes. Crazy. Just plumb nuts-silly when you try to reckon it why. No Redskin is my special friend, I am not fond of Coach George Allen or his No. 1 Fan Mr. Nixon, I feel no geographic loyalty to Washington, and yet I roast or freeze through Redskin games while paying $12 for the discomfort. Like all good fans, I applaud or boo the Redskins according to fortune’s tides. When they lose it’s a gloomy Sunday; I don’t enjoy the games so much as suffer them.
Dammit, why does the game turn so many brains to peas and so many necks red? If it builds character, then so does street mugging. It foolishly and unrealistically teaches that second place is steeped in shame: we can’t all be Number One whether playing ball, writing books, or pulling teeth. Maybe we might be a more compassionate people if we didn’t dwell on victory at all costs, wouldn’t hatch Watergates, or odd neuroses.
From what we read in these six books, football players seem unaware of the world’s larger joys. They place protective fences around their emotions. Conditioned to live with their own pains and fears, they indifferently look away from the miseries of others. Their lives are such weird mixtures of special privilege and eating dirt, of alternately being hailed as heroes or dogs, that they are at once naive children and expert cynics. They appear to be rootless, sad men living only in the moment and spooked by the future.
Even knowing that football should have its mouth washed out with soap, I continue to miss deadlines, good weather and nature’s beauties, good talk, and good books—because right there on Channel Four the Oakland Raiders are kicking off to Kansas City. No matter that I’ve seen it all on other fields or screens ten thousand times. Only the names and numbers change, really, as old players or team champions fade out and new ones appear. Duane Thomas had it in perspective when he said, “If the Super Bowl’s the ultimate game, then how come they’re playing it again next year?”
Well, because it’s big business and traditional and may even fill some deep national need. Maybe it helps us continue to act out our fantasies where we might otherwise despair; perhaps cheering winning touchdowns preserves our illusions, helps us to believe that it’s never too late, that miracles are still possible: the middle-aged, who may have encountered career or other disappointments, somehow appear to exhibit the sharper football angers or celebrations. They seem less aware that it’s supposed to be a game.
Perhaps it’s simply that in a world where decisions arrive slowly and undiluted triumph is rare or hard to define, we revel in the clean, surgical suddenness of football’s immediate rewards and punishments. The old boy who doesn’t know what the future holds on his job or in his bed or even in the matter of simply breathing, may look at the football scoreboard and find satisfactions in knowing that late in the third quarter his side is ahead of somebody-or-other by two touchdowns. Or, perhaps, that’s too fanciful. Maybe we like it mean and tough so long as the other fellow’s suffering the bumps or risks. We are reputed as a violent nation, and Texas as one of the more violent states; many men before me have compared the game to war, citing its war-like terms: blitz, shock troops, aerial attack, sweep the flanks, in the trenches. And each game is something of a small war as teams fight for territorial acquisition—attempting to defend or gain ground—knowing their losses, retreats, casualties. Football coaches and drill sergeants tell you pretty much the same thing, send you after similar objectives.
One could worry that bone to death, of course, and not find the answer to those compelling reasons why, by the thousands, we find it easy to ignore the game’s sordid side: young men left to life-long wheel chairs or hobblings in the extreme visible cases, or invisible scars in the deeper inner tissues. The exploitations, deceptions, savagery, assumed retained guilts. The compulsion to choke it up—as, particularly, have Shaw, Gent, and Rentzel—perhaps not so much to share their frightening knowledge as to understand the madness themselves. Food for thought.
Ah, but I must run. The season’s kickoff is again imminent; I’m primed to whoop for the old burgundy-and-gold, live and die with strangers wearing numbers on their backs: let’s hear it for the Redskins, fans, and may the Dallas Cowboys and those Miami bastards drop the ball frequently and never pick it up.
My Library
