Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  Even so, his sadness at the plight of Mrs. Crandall was not feigned. In America, the black high school athletes on whom the success of a university football team depended were apt to be from broken homes, from disadvantaged backgrounds, and even though Taggart saw so much of this, it always grieved him. There ought to be a better system, but until it was devised, he would continue to use this one to his advantage.

  ‘Does your nephew have good grades?’ he asked.

  ‘He does, but they give him the grades.’

  ‘Mr. Carter, suppose your nephew decides to join us, do you know what he gets first of all?’

  ‘I’d like to know.’

  ‘A tutor. A full-time, well-paid tutor whose sole job it will be to teach your nephew how to cope with his university studies. Because, Mr. Carter, when your boy leaves us, we want him to have an honest education … lawyer … business executive … whatever he wants to be, he can be.’

  ‘What he wants, Mr. Taggart, is a damned good contract with a top professional team.’

  Coach Taggart coughed. ‘Have you followed the results of the last three drafts? Our men stand way at the top, year after year. And do you know why, Mr. Carter? Because at Jefferson we teach them football. We teach them to hit.’

  Abruptly he turned to Artemius and said, peremptorily, ‘Stand up, young man.’ From his chair he said, ‘You look even stronger than they told me.’ Then he rose, walked over to the boy, and stared him right in the eye. ‘If you have character as well as strength, you might be able to play for Jefferson. But let me warn you about this. When you get to Jefferson, you find yourself among a hundred and ten young men just as tough as you are, and, son, to make our team you have to put out. I’d like you to see your future teammates.’

  He promised that during the season the Western United jet would come back to pick Artemius and his uncle up for a visit to Jefferson. Then, abruptly, he resumed his discussion with the uncle.

  ‘Mr. Carter, I’m aware that certain other coaches, whom I will not mention, have offered you jobs in their towns. Now, obviously, my good friends here from Western United can equal their offers any day in the week, but I see you as a man who’s made his own way. You have a nice house here, clean, well organized. You don’t need help from us, and I’m not going to insult you by proposing that you change your residence just to please us. Now, you can have a job with the Western United plant out in the industrial park, but only if you want it. What I propose is something quite different. I would like these two good gentlemen to find your sister a job at their plant near Lubbock. She’d have to move—take the children with her—but we’d help with the expenses. The thing of it is, you’d not only be assuring Artemius of the best education he can possibly get, but you’d be taking care of his four brothers and sisters, and, Mr. Carter, frankly I think you’re the kind of man to whom that would be important.’

  It was. The University of Jefferson, in order to entice a great high school halfback to enroll, found the uncle a well-paying job, moved the mother and her four children to a rent-paid house near Lubbock, found her a job, gave her son a full scholarship, six suits of clothes, a Pontiac hardtop, eight hundred dollars a year spending money, ten tickets to each football game, which he could sell for one hundred and twenty dollars a week, plus a full-time tutor to teach him to read and write. In total, such a scholarship would provide $6,800 a year, for four years.

  Crandall was worth it, a sensational back and one of the easiest men to coach Honest John Taggart had ever unearthed. He had an instinctive feel for open space, which all the great halfbacks had, but he was unusual in that he could sense where the line would open up while it was still a solid mass, and he would plunge for that spot, satisfied that something would give. When it did, he was off for eighteen or twenty yards, and if things broke wide open, he’d score.

  He was also a likable person, modest, not talkative, but never surly. He loved the game of football so much that he would gladly have played for nothing, and he sometimes said so. He was gratified, in the late spring of his junior year, to find that the university publicity department had selected him as the man to push for all-American honors in his senior year.

  This meant a host of color photographs, many interviews, the construction of human-interest stories, and even the making of a color film which would be distributed to television stations. One of the coaches calculated that Jefferson had spent at least $11,000 on the brochure extolling Artemius Crandall, but he judged the money well spent if Crandall landed an all-American designation. It would help in recruiting next year.

  The only negative aspect of Crandall’s stay at Jefferson was reported by his tutor: ‘Coach Taggart, he doesn’t even know the multiplication table. I know you count on me to get him through his classes, but algebra and calculus! They’re simply impossible. He can’t even subtract, let alone fractions.’

  So a plan was devised whereby Artemius took a smattering of unrelated courses in the easiest possible subjects, plus four apparently difficult courses in which the professors were what was known as ‘slaves to the athletic department’ in that they gave any boy on scholarship a passing grade, and to those who needed it an A or a B to offset low grades in some other class.

  At the beginning of Crandall’s senior year, in a major American university, he had an education at about the fifth-grade level of a good public school. Even counting the gratuitous marks given him by ‘the slaves,’ he had credits which would place him at the second semester of his freshman year, because his scattered courses added up to no reasonable program, and he had no major. There was not the slightest chance that he would graduate with his class or ever.

  But he was an adornment to the university, a young man positively loved by the alumni, by the sportswriters and by the television audience. For he was essentially a bright young man, with solid instincts inculcated by his mother and her sharp-minded brother. He could have been educated, for he obviously could learn, but from the seventh grade on, there had been no necessity for him to study, because, as in so many American schools, any boy who could play football or basketball was so precious a commodity that it was best if he not be bothered with books.

  Nor did he need them. At the end of his senior football season he stood high in the competition for the Heisman Trophy, and went number eleven in the January draft for the National Football League.

  He was picked up by Kansas City, a team which sorely needed a running back, and both he and his future coaches felt certain that he would make it big in the pros.

  When he reported to training camp the following summer, his quiet competence impressed everyone, and several sportswriters from western papers ticketed him as ‘another Leroy Kelly.’ It was clear that he would make the cut, and by the end of the camp he was ready to take his place in the Chiefs’ backfield for the exhibition games.

  As the season started, he saw something of which he had not been aware before. Crandall looked over the roster of the Chiefs: forty-seven players on the active list, and only three of them over the age of thirty; one was a center, one a place kicker, one a reserve quarterback. And then it dawned on him that running backs, with their fragile knees, do not last into their thirties. He would have five or six good years, and then he would be finished.

  ‘What’m I gonna do then?’ he asked himself. ‘Hell, I don’t know nothin’.’ He wondered if he could get a coaching job, even in Texas.

  But the big games were about to begin. Kansas City was on the way back to its days of greatness. There was a thrill to any football season, exceeding all other things he knew, and this year was bound to be one of the best.

  That Artemius Crandall found joy in football there can be no doubt. It was exhilarating to crash into linebackers or to zigzag downfield for a long pass. He felt himself to be a lithe young animal, tougher and swifter than most, and he was competing against the best in his profession.

  His basic health was not threatened by the violence of the game; indeed, it was enhanced. He took care
of himself, taping his ankles before even the most casual practice. He watched his diet, got more than the average sleep, and while reckless on the field, challenging even the most mammoth tackles and linebackers, he was never so in his private life. He was aware that a knee could pop at any time, but when it did he would have it operated on immediately, for he had observed that men who postponed the knife damaged both their knees and their careers. In the off season he kept in condition by playing paddleball, a vigorous game he intended cultivating after his retirement.

  In high school and college he provided solid entertainment for spectators and was paid accordingly. By prevailing American standards he was a more significant product of Jefferson University than any of its future doctors, lawyers or professors, and if perchance he prospered in the professionals, he stood a good chance of becoming a true folk hero.

  On the debit side there was the likelihood that he would find himself at age thirty-three with no education, no job and no prospect of any. Then he would have to acknowledge that the system had treated him poorly. It had used him as a paid gladiator. The bright intelligence he had displayed as a boy had been intentionally dissipated.

  The Moderate Participant

  One dark and silent morning at 4 A.M. Jane Harker awakened in the bedroom of her split-level home near Culpeper, Virginia, and listened with a sense of shock to her sleeping husband’s labored breathing. In the darkness she felt him twitch and then stop breathing altogether for almost a minute. He ended this spell with a gasping rush of breath and a muffled moan, rolling to a new position and resuming his twitching.

  ‘My God!’ she muttered to herself. ‘He’s committing suicide.’ And she reviewed the life her husband had been leading.

  As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Tom Harker had played football and baseball and spent his summers as a hard-working counselor at a summer camp in New Hampshire. Several girls at Sweetbriar had been captivated by his manly behavior, and in the spring of 1955 one of them had invited him to a dance at the college. Unwisely, this girl had introduced him to Jane, and a vigorous courtship ensued.

  After Jane had graduated from Sweetbriar they married, in June of 1957, and then moved to New York, where Tom was employed in a real estate firm. He worked ridiculous hours, and at high pressure, which resulted in his promotion.

  Occasionally Jane would comment on the fact that he was growing quite thick about the waist, and she even suggested that he join an athletic club, but his reasoning was, ‘I’ve got a game plan. We’ll work like hell for a dozen years, then get us a farm down near Culpeper and live the good life.’ In the meantime he continued to put on weight as a result of long lunches, longer cocktail hours and even longer business dinners.

  Jane suggested that he take up golf, but he found this too demanding. ‘Look,’ he argued, ‘to play golf I’ve got to leave the office at eleven, drive out to the club, get into my clothes, spend three or four hours, get showered, and drive home. It’s too big an operation.’

  His game plan worked. After fourteen diligent years he attained enough rank in his firm to land the job as its representative in Washington and the south, and with his first increased paycheck he made the down payment on a farm near Culpeper. It was a lovely spread of ninety-five rolling acres, with a small stream leading to a lake frequented by ducks and geese.

  To reduce the mortgage, he worked harder than before, piling up commissions which impressed Jane. ‘I thought it would take us twenty years to pay for this place,’ she told Tom admiringly. ‘It’s even more fun than we imagined when you first told me your game plan.’

  It was an enviable life. They had delightful neighbors, some of whom owned horses, and they made friends with people who held responsible jobs and who viewed life with reasonable perspectives. Virginia was, in this period, undergoing a political revolution, with Republicans winning offices that had been held for more than a hundred years by Democrats, and the Harkers worked enthusiastically for the change.

  Tom said, ‘My father would turn over in his grave if he knew that I was not only voting Republican but actually working for the party.’ Jane headed one of the women’s auxiliaries, and it was while working for the reelection of President Nixon in 1972 that she met a woman she liked immediately.

  It was LouAnn Buford, married to an investment broker named Jack Buford. Fortunately, the two husbands got along well and for about a year the Harkers and the Bufords were inseparable. They went on picnics together, they drove out to Glacier National Park to see the wild parts of America, and played bridge frequently.

  Jack Buford had attended Washington and Lee, where, like Tom Harker, he had played various sports. The two men threw a football now and then, coming in puffing to watch football or basketball on television. They knew the records of all the college and professional teams, for sports were important to them. One day Buford said, ‘It’s a shame we don’t live in a city. I’d enjoy handball or squash. Something to keep in shape.’

  Jane, hearing the conversation, asked, ‘Why not golf?’ and Buford gave the same reply her husband had, ‘Takes too much time. But I’ll tell you this, Jane. As soon as I get my branch office in Warrenton squared away, and the one in Charlottesville, I’m going to take it easy. Lots of horseback riding. And I’ll take up golf.’

  It perplexed Jane to see that she and LouAnn had stayed about the same weight they had been in college, whereas their two husbands had become quite paunchy, and she vaguely considered doing something about it. But these were the days when Tom Harker’s firm was experiencing the uncertainty that swept all American business in the early Watergate days, and Tom was required to fly to New York and Chicago for emergency meetings.

  He liked flying, liked the urgency of business confrontations. ‘For me it’s no trouble,’ he told the Bufords one night. ‘I jump into my Electra, drive easily to Dulles Airport and find myself anywhere in the United States within a few hours. I park the Electra at the airport and can be home again that night.’

  But an important trip to Kansas City was interrupted by an urgent phone call. It was from his wife, and she was sobbing. ‘You’ve got to come back right away. Jack Buford just dropped dead.’

  He was only forty-seven, close to the apex of his career, and he had died in a space of four minutes. After the funeral Dr. Westlake, the cardiologist, told the Harkers, ‘The trick is to postpone your first coronary till you’re past the age of fifty-two. If you get one in your thirties, it’s almost always fatal. If you get one in your forties, it’s usually fatal. But if you can delay till your late fifties, you have a damned good chance of survival. And in your late sixties or seventies, it’s much like a bad cold. Your chances for survival are excellent.’

  ‘Why?’ Jane asked. Suddenly she was vitally concerned with this problem.

  ‘Well,’ the doctor explained, ‘in your thirties a coronary is a tremendous shock on a young heart. It’s not prepared, It runs wild, and you’re dead. Same way in your forties, but to a lesser degree. But by the time you’re sixty, the heart is a beat-up old organ which has already suffered a lot of knocks. Some of its arteries have slowed down and it’s had to set up alternate feed lines. If you have a coronary then … Well, just like Ed Gonzales. He had one hell of a blast in November, but he was sixty-six and his heart had already established alternate lines, so he was up and about within three weeks.’

  ‘How do you establish those lines?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Exercise,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Is Tom too old to start exercising?’

  ‘Never too old, if you observe simple precautions.’

  Dr. Westlake explained what he meant by this—gradual approach, easy steps to hard tasks, never exhaust yourself—and Jane committed herself right then to seeing that her husband interrupted his frantic and hypertensive life with some sensible exercise.

  But she was unable to get her husband’s cooperation. Tom, who had been a really fine athlete in college, was now so preoccupied with other things which he de
emed more important, he refused to establish any sensible and regular program. Under his wife’s pressure he tried jogging, but that was a dreadful bore. He also tried some horseback riding, but without Jack Buford to accompany him, he did not keep it up.

  What he really liked to do was sit in his Electra and speed over Virginia roads, enjoying the scenery with his wife, or fly to distant cities and meet exciting new problems, or spend a leisurely Saturday and Sunday watching his favorite teams on television. The years 1972, 1973 and 1974 were especially rewarding, for then the miraculous Washington Redskins stormed back into contention, and even went to the play-offs, and there was a constant sense of excitement in the air. At meetings men would interrupt to ask, ‘Did you see what George Allen pulled in the second half against Philadelphia?’

  Tom Harker was a hard-nosed Billy Kilmer man, once and for all. He had no patience with the sentimentalists who argued that Sonny Jurgensen should be used as the regular quarterback.

  ‘Sure!’ he would exclaim, his voice betraying tension. ‘I can see using Sonny as a fireman. Bring him on in a crisis situation for a few throws. But a starting quarterback? Are you out of your mind?’

  And then, in the latter part of 1974, Jane began to notice that her husband was not sleeping soundly, that his breathing was troubled, that he had begun visibly to sag. And he was drinking more than usual.

  She watched him carefully, and even went so far as to consult Dr. Westlake confidentially. He said, ‘It’s a wife’s responsibility to see that her husband stays well.’

  ‘What can I do? Hide the bottle?’

  ‘Tom has no drinking problem!’ Westlake snorted. ‘If you ever saw a real drinking problem, you’d thank your stars for a husband like Tom. All he needs is less tension, more relaxation. And that’s not my responsibility. It’s yours.’