North Dallas Forty (9 page)

“Emmett likes you,” Hunter said. “So do the kids, and so do I! I’d like you to give some serious consideration to settling down and becoming a permanent member of our family.”

“You want me to marry Emmett?”

“No,” he laughed. “I’m afraid Joanne has him hooked.” Conrad liked Emmett’s girl and was proud of him for finding her.

“She’s a great gal,” Conrad continued. “You know her, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“She’s just what Emmett needs to settle him down,” he said thoughtfully. “Then maybe I can quit sending him all over the country to those stupid league meetings and keep him here to help me run the club.”

I shifted my weight on the metal bench and lifted my right leg to let the water pound on the chronically sore hamstring.

“You ought to think about getting married again,” Hunter said, absently reaching down and running a finger along the zipperlike scar on the inside of my right knee.

“I don’t know, Con,” I stalled, not wanting to pursue the subject.

“Nobody blames you.”

We both fell silent, drowned in the roar of the room.

“She was a Catholic, wasn’t she?” Conrad said.

“Yes, but that’s not ...” I protested.

“It’s hard to believe she could have so little respect for the sacred vows.” Hunter frowned. “You were married in the Church?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t just her fault. This isn’t an easy life, you know,” I said, aware he didn’t know at all.

“That’s no excuse. If she was a Catholic, she knew the vows were eternal. It was all pretty messy.”

Conrad’s eyes wandered to the white puckered line running from my right calf over my ankle to my instep. “How’s the ankle?”

“Great,” I lied. “Better than before. It’s amazing, but I feel better now than I did my rookie year.”

“Maybe so.” His reply was slow, his eyes traveling carefully across my naked body. “But you really ought to give some thought to what I say. I’m not promising anything, but there’s always room for the right kind of boy.”

I moved again, sliding my leg back under the swirling water, away from his inquisitive gaze.

“Well.” He stepped away from the whirlpool and stretched. “I guess I’d better get out and do my exergenie.” He slapped his stomach with both hands, turned, and walked back into the locker room, heading for the practice field beyond.

The air rushing from my lungs made a whooshing sound as I relaxed my posture and sighed with relief. After all my years in Dallas, Hunter still had no idea who, or what, I was.

Conrad Hunter came to almost every practice session, running laps, lifting weights, and doing exergenie during the first part of workout. Then, standing on the sidelines, surrounded by assistant coaches and lesser club officials, he watched pass drills and scrimmage. Discussing the team and individual players, he pointed out mistakes and broken plays, often yelling encouragement or criticism to players and coaches alike. Conrad Hunter and his brother Emmett owned 90 percent of the club stock. B.A. and Clinton Foote split the other 10 percent.

A deeply religious man, Hunter spent a part of every day at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, two blocks from the practice field, discussing with Monsignor Twill everything from salvation to the acquisition of a good white running back. Twill was an affable, heavyset priest in his late fifties whose only previous connection with football had been attending undergraduate school at Notre Dame. The Monsignor traveled with the team to every game and was often called upon by Hunter to “say a few nondenominational words of inspiration” before particularly important contests.

During our lean years, it was rumored Father Twill was having difficulty explaining the nuances of multiple-formation offense to God.

I looked beneath the foaming water at the legs Hunter just scrutinized. The thin white scars were barely visible. Beside the long knee scar, commemorating extensive ligament damage, were three smaller incisions arranged strategically around the kneecap to facilitate removal of pieces of articular cartilage that unaccountably kept breaking loose from beneath the kneecap. It was quite a shock to be running full speed and have a quarter-sized chip of cartilage lock in the joint. Fortunately, it had happened only twice in games and both times I was able to grind them free before anyone noticed.

The scar across my ankle marked a compound fracture and dislocation suffered in a freak collision with a New York free safety and a Yankee Stadium goalpost. Neither the safety nor the post got a mark on them.

A roll of fat around my waist floated fallow in the water. Professional athletes don’t need healthy bodies, they do it all with their minds. That is why experience is such an important commodity. The body wears out quickly, but with training and chemicals the mind is conditioned not to notice.

Sweat rolled off my scalp onto my face, making my head itch. I reached up and scratched just above the hairline, my nails running roughly over the dry, scabby scalp. Several strands of my already thinning hair came away in my fingers. I reached back and scraped at the acne and boils that began to dot my shoulders about this time every season.

Standing up, I grabbed a towel from the stack next to the tub. My legs still ached. And the spot along my spine where the linebacker’s knee had smashed through the big muscle and knocked off the short ribs was acutely sore. I would need more codeine. I had my head in the sink, washing down the pill directly from the faucet, when Jo Bob Williams slapped me on the back. I almost choked to death. It was going to be a long day.

The meeting lasted over two hours.

Tuesday was reserved for reviewing the films of the previous Sunday’s game. The whir of the projector and the drone of B.A.’s voice were accompanied by the sound of forty stomachs churning in fear. It was bad enough to miscue in the heat and fury of a Sunday afternoon, but it was pure agony to sit alone in the dark on a cold steel folding chair while your mistake flickered forward, backward, in slow motion, and in stop action on a six-foot screen. Every misstep, stumble, and drop was carefully dissected and analyzed with a bovine detachment. B.A.’s dispassionate tones cut through the darkness to reduce the strongest men to cowards.

“Now, loook at this here.” B.A. reversed the film and men flew backward through the air to their feet, until our offensive team was realigned at scrimmage.

“Richardson, what were you thinking about here?” B.A. stopped the projector with the team one step into the play.

Thomas Richardson was at a running back spot. The recalcitrant black had been substituted for Andy Crawford on the previous play.

“I’m not sure,” Richardson answered.

“You’re not sure?” B.A.’s voice modulated slightly. “There’s no room for uncertainty in this business, boy.”

Nervous laughter rippled through the darkness.

“Yessir.”

B.A. ran the film. Richardson had failed to read a blitz and pick up a shooting outside linebacker. The head coach reran the play five times, without saying another word. The silence was excruciating.

I could relax through the first reel and a half, because I had remained on the bench until the fourth quarter.

It was B.A.’s philosophy to point out only mistakes, as we were “paid to make great plays.” He also felt the team “deserved to know who was letting them down” in the course of a game.

My leaping catch went officially unnoticed, although several murmurs of praise escaped my teammates. I was floating on & cloud of self-confidence, the reel almost ended, when B.A.’s voice knotted my stomach.

“Elliott. Look at this!”

We were lined up in a tight wing. I was split out about two yards from the right end. My job was to block the outside linebacker to allow Andy Crawford to skirt the end, cutting inside the lead guard’s block on the force man.

“You’re tryin’ to position him!” B.A. described my attempts to get upfield of the gigantic linebacker and make him come through me to get to Andy. I was standing almost upright. It was a dangerous technique.

“You see what happens when you think you’re better than the diagrams,” B.A. said coldly.

I let the linebacker get too close before I tried to block him, and he grabbed my shoulder pads. He held me off balance, shoving me in front of him, waiting. When Crawford tried to get by, the linebacker literally clubbed him to the ground with me. It was humiliating. The whole room rocked with laughter at the sight of the opponent using me as a baseball bat.

“I fail to see the humor.” B.A. phlegmatically stilled the room. “Stupidity like that can cost you guys the championship. If you don’t want the twenty-five thousand dollars, it’s no skin off my nose. My contract is longer than any of yours.”

He ran the play over five times. It began to take on the appearance of a Punch-and-Judy show.

The film ended and the lights came on.

“Okay.” B.A. was walking to the front of the room. “Everybody on the field in shorts and helmets. Exergenie and weights in ten minutes. Stallmon, you wait, I want to see you.”

Everyone headed for his locker except David Stallmon, a third-year safety, who waited in his chair for the room to clear.

Inside the locker room the equipment manager was cleaning out Stallmon’s locker. Several silent looks flashed between players. “Sandwich and a road map,” somebody said softly. When we came back inside from workout Stallmon would be gone.

“Ready ... Go! ... One ... two ... three ...”

Twenty faces flushed red in isometric strain (nineteen to be exact; I was faking) as the team worked through the exergenie stations. The procedure was ten seconds of push or pull against an immovable force, to exhaust specific muscles, then ten more seconds of isotonic motion as a muscle builder. There were fifteen different stations, each with exercises designed to exhaust and strengthen specific muscle groups. It was a prepractice conditioner that many of the NFL teams used. Working in two-man teams, one man supplying the resistance, the other doing the exercise, the drill was designed to condition, as well as loosen, the body for practice.

“ ... eight ... nine ... ten ... release!”

Maxwell released the rope at the other end of my exergenie, and I, slowly faking intense effort, went through the specified range of motion. Neither Maxwell nor I did the exercises correctly. The two of us were partners, each allowing the other to loaf through the stations.

Before instituting the exergenie. B.A. had used another conditioning program involving weights and a complex of vitamin and body-building pills. He had discontinued it when two players developed kidney stones and a third began to pass blood in his urine.

“Next stations. Ready ... go! One ... two ... three ...”

Slowly, we moved through the complete drill. Maxwell and I held our breath to flush our faces and simulate extreme effort. When the drill ended, we were completely rested.

After exergenie, we had ten minutes of calisthenics, and then covered punts. Everyone would get in some running. It was a short Tuesday practice, lasting over an hour and was designed to start loosening the kinks from Sunday. B.A. finished with pass skeleton for receivers and backs and defensive secondary, while all the linemen worked on the blocking sled. I truly enjoyed pass skeleton and totally exhausted myself running routes.

“Red right. Freeze. Wing down and in. On two.” Maxwell nodded at me as we broke the huddle.

The ever-present butterflies tired me slightly as I jogged to a fifteen-yard split on the right and tried not to look at the spot where the ball and I would soon meet. My stomach churned as everything but Maxwell’s voice and the cornerback’s face faded from my mind.

“Four, three, set,” Maxwell called an imaginary defensive line alignment.

I remained upright, preferring the advantage of better vision to the slightly faster start of a three-point stance. I was boiling with excitement.

“Hut one ... hut two.”

I drove off the line, looking right into the back’s eyes, moving slightly to the outside, trying to make him protect his position. He did, sliding two or three steps toward the sideline.

Three, four, five strides. I kept easing to the outside. He kept backing up and out.

I planted my right foot hard and, without any fake, slanted inside at a forty-five degree angle. The outside linebacker, dropping to his coverage zone, flashed underneath me. Four more steps and I would be to the middle linebacker. I looked back for the ball. Maxwell had already released it. It thumped into my chest, a full step before I reached the middle linebacker, his hand waving uselessly in the air. Goddam, I loved to catch a football.

“Okay.” Maxwell’s eyes gleamed. “Let’s get six and go on home. Red right. Freeze. Wing zig out. On one.”

The butterflies were bouncing off the roof of my mouth by the time I had taken my split and Maxwell had set us. There is something to be said for the thrill of constant pressure. Fear can be an incredible high.

“Hut one.”

I kept my head down as I drove off the line, conscious of nothing but the sound of air rushing through the earholes in my headgear. One ... two ... three strides, again I moved slightly outside. This time the back moved straight back, protecting his inside, giving up the sideline.

Two more strides and I made a slight fake to telegraph my inside move. The back picked it up, eased slightly inside, and bunched himself to begin his drive for the ball.

I planted my right foot hard and angled across the middle. On my third stride I swiveled my head and looked back for the ball. Maxwell raised it high over his head and made a pump fake at me. I planted my left foot hard and drove back to the sideline, passing underneath the back, who had bitten and was charging to stop the down and in.

I dug hard for three strides toward the outside before looking back for the ball. It was in the air, floating softly toward me. Reaching out, I took it on my fingertips, held it to my side with one hand and trotted casually into the end zone. It took control to keep from jumping gleefully up and down. I had been doing this kind of thing every day for years and was still not used to it.

Back in the training room, a mood of well-being washed over me. It was a combination of the thrill of competition and a full grain of codeine. I would feel like shit when the codeine wore off, and I remembered that I was still second string. I milled around the medicine cabinet, trying to get some more pills, but the drawer was locked. Eddie Rand was filling the tub he had just disinfected.