Game Over 
Coming of Age in the Locker Room
What the players say about their life in the game.
A coach likes to have a lot of those old trained pigs who’ll grin and jump right in the slop for him. —UT Coach Darrell Royal
Ah, yes, Daddy D! Don’t they, now? You summarize so beautifully even your enemies despair of better saying it. You capsule those grim, sappy communal teachings I most took to heart in my burnt West Texas village about five lives ago. In one burst of cracker barrel candor you bring back the former cotton-mouthed guilts, agonies, and humiliations of the practice field; you fill my head with ancient losses: fumbles, blocked punts, imperfect tackles, fourth and nineteen. Forgive me, Daddy D. Royal, for I have sinned . . .
Our Midland High School coaches, wearing their rumpled good luck clothes and otherwise as faithful to rituals as witches, stomped the sidelines and ranted as if exorcising luck’s bad demons; at half-time they implored, threatened, cursed, kicked ass, sometimes cried. After losing games, as we wearily shed purple-and-gold jerseys, we avoided eye contact and shrank from view. In the showers we berated ourselves, offering contrite confessions of malpractices that might have done credit to felons hoping for the grace of a lenient court’s mercy. My fault, gang, goddammit . . .
Our defeated coaches tramped the steamy sullen dressing room like wandering gypsies, puffing cigarettes and muttering grief as if their collective dogs had died: Dammit, my ole trained pigs just wouldn’t jump in the slop tonight. It became near to unbearable to watch those intense, salaried Boy-Men who had goaded, cheered, pushed, punched, cajoled, and otherwise instructed us in the fine arts of Bash-and-Cracking, while preaching that some vague dark dishonor awaited those unwilling to Pay The Price. In defeat, we reacted with the shamed guilt of True Believers caught at heresy. Erring backsliders, we awaited our punishments.
No matter that one may have played near to one’s top potential, or had lost by a single point or by luck’s ill-whim; no, the sense of unworthiness—of failure, of ineptness, of having somehow dropped the soap—washed us in great melancholy waves. In permitting defeat one had somehow betrayed one’s team, one’s town, one’s self: had lost one’s youthful, uncertain gonads. “You’re not even in the backfield,” a high school temptress slurs her interior-lineman boyfriend during a lover’s spat, and shortly after his team has newly known dishonor in Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. She sensed, yes, where young Texas boys might be most effectively kicked. Now her lover knew, for certain, that never would he dash for the winning touchdown with the Thalia wind in his hair . . .
After a double tough loss to Abilene, as we sat in stricken silence listening to the noisy celebrations of our conquerors in their adjoining dressing room, our coach said: “One more good block, boys—hell, just one more good hard tackle—and that could be us livin’ it up in there. Did you play your best? Or did you dog it? Can you look in the mirror and say you gave it all? Do you feel like men?” Forty sweaty young heads dropped to stare at four-hundred sweaty young toes, each certain in the indictment applied directly to him. It didn’t help when our First Baptist pastor prayed from the locker room in a way seeming to apologize to God for our football transgressions; where had his prayers been when we faced third-and-long?
During the post-game meal one gloomy Friday night in San Angelo, after we’d been thoroughly battered by the defending State Champion, fullback Bobby Drake grumbled: “Shit, even steak don’t taste good when you lose.” I guess one of our coaches heard him: Monday’s pre-practice pep talk ran to the theory that even steak don’t taste good when you lose, thence progressing to affirm that steak tasted absolutely wonderful in victory’s aftermath. I wondered—but knew better than to ask—how steak might taste after a tie.
Do not think that Midland High School’s Bulldogs constantly dealt in dishonor. No, we won as often as not in the early 1940’s. But at night, now—though past my forty-fifth birthday—when my sleepless spooked old ranging mind unaccountably strays back to West Texas football fields long replaced by housing developments or shopping centers, it is not the good times I recall: not our whomping of Fort Worth Poly, not the 18-13 upset of Pampa, not the 32-6 pasting we laid on Austin High of El Paso. No, I remember what might have been . . ..
The Lamesa Golden Tornadoes are giving us a mean, close game. Such was not meant to happen, and substitutes bring reports form the bench of increasing ire and disgust. Running a deep pass pattern I am suddenly and magically in the clear near Lamesa’s goal line. The ball is coming in over my right shoulder, spinning and accurate and lovely; I hear again the grunting pounding desperations of the defensive back, and rejoice in having the knotty little bastard beat. I place my hands in welcome for the certain grab but a single step from touchdown glory, feel the good sharp sting of the ball and—Jesus, I’ve dropped it! Just flat dropped it. I cannot say how, or why, though that old brain movie has reeled in my head since shortly after the matching tragedy at Hiroshima. The day ends in a tie as unsatisfactory as a sister’s kiss; I learn that tie-game steak tastes remarkably like bitters and sawdust.
Reel Two. We closely tail Big Spring. The Steers are punting from inside their ten. Time is short. As our offense has been unusually inept, we agree that we must block the punt to salvage victory. Word comes from the bench that the Bulldog blocking it need not practice on Monday and may reap bonuses of free hamburgers or milk shakes. Royce Higgs and I desperately shoot through, clawing and cursing. Thawhunk: together we get large, stinging, thrilling pieces of the ball. Blood pounds and surges in the ears as, dazed, we chase the erratic ball into Big Spring’s end zone. Higgs flops on it . . . and it squirts away. I hurdle him to flop on it—and, inexplicably, as if greased, it squirts away a second time, to maddeningly . . trickle . . out . . of . . play. We get only a two-point safety, where victory required a touchdown.
In many reveries of bed and bar have I seen that insane old scene: the Big Spring players hugging each other, dancing and whooping their great relief, while Higgs and I—spent and unbelieving and cursed by luck—sprawl on the ground to kick and sob our frustrations like spoiled rich kids. And though it’s pluperfectly crazy, making no sense and affirming no worthy values, there are moments—if one could but buy a return ticket on the Time Machine—when I might surrender a bit of my remaining time, talent, or treasure for one more shot at the bounding elusive football. It might not improve history much, but it would rid me of a nightmare.
Finally, Reel Three. In the summer before I would become a husky senior, less than two weeks away from opening football drills, I quietly joined the Army out of many private compulsions. My coaches were astounded: they thought they’d hyped me with promises of how, should I be willing to Pay the Price, I might win a coveted college scholarship. When word circulated that I’d soon be off to basic training, it was made clear—by coaches, teammates, and formerly friendly members of the downtown Bulldog Booster Club—that I had awarded the worse possible betrayal to my team and to my town. A generously ignorant lad of seventeen, I skulked away my final civilian days in avoiding the normal social contacts.
Five months later, when I eagerly visited the old school as a brand new PFC, my former coaches hardly seemed to remember my name: where were those old mentors, who, for all their ass-chewings, had sometimes kidded me, predicted my good future, spoke of all-for-one-and-one-for-all? “We might have won nine games,” one of them said, “if you and Burt Stringer hadn’t lost your minds and joined the goddamn Army. You left us without any depth. And three of our losses were by less than a touchdown.” No more than a dozen times a year do I wonder, these 28 seasons later, what might have been had I stayed behind to attempt that one vital block or saving tackle.
Ah, yes, Daddy Darrell! Yes, indeedy! In the dark nights of the soul’s winter discontent it is those times they failed to “grin and jump right in the slop” that spoil the pointless guilty reveries of your average former old trained pig. Hold up your heads, ye coaches of yesteryear: you did your jobs well.
“You can take your wars and your starvation and your fires and your floods, but there’s no heartbreak in life like losing the big game in high school.”
From Semi-Tough, by Dan Jenkins
I have lately read or re-read a half-dozen football books, each of them preening some Texas connection at the high school, college, or professional level. These works vary in their truth quotients, though each returns certain strong whiffs of deja vu; I suppose that’s because the basic football drives, goals, rituals, myths, and tortures are universal—no matter whether one plays in the Pop Warner kiddie league or for potential Super Bowl champions.
My Library
