by Dan Jenkins
Dreamer was vice-president of the NFL Players Association, and what he wanted more than anything in the world, what he had always wanted, even more than another vintage Mercedes, was a strike.
He wanted football players to become auto workers, coal miners, teachers, machinists, garbage collectors, public- utility employees, and elevator operators.
For the fourth time in his career, Dreamer was trying to encourage all of the players on all of the teams in the National Football League—about 1,300 guys—to walk off the job. Quit. Not play football. And stay on a picket line for as long as it would take to force the twenty-eight owners to pay us more money and give us more freedom of movement, to put it in simple terms.
I had never been in favor of a strike. I had debated the issue at other times with Dreamer and Puddin Patterson. In my judgment, a strike had no chance to succeed, and never would, for an excellent reason that I now put to Dreamer in the form of a question.
"How the fuck can you picket a yacht?"
"They got the tents but we got the dog acts, baby," Dreamer said. "We have the 'names.' You'd be a great spokesman for us, Clyde."
"You can't win, Dreamer. The owners have too much of that born-rich money behind them. They're members of the Lucky Sperm Club. You guys strike and they'll cancel the season, start over next year with new players."
"They need the 'names.'"
"You know how long it takes to make a 'name'? One headline."
"Sixty-five percent of the guys are ready to go out now. The rest will follow if we can get more people like you involved."
"How much have you got in the bank, Dreamer? Even if you sell all your cars, you can't live the rest of your life on it. A football team is just another toy to an owner. In the spring, they sail regattas around their off-shore drilling rigs. You strike and you're history. The Players Association will be the Window Cleaners Association. The dope dealers will be all right, but they're still the minority."
Dreamer said, "You don't understand about rich dudes. They hate to lose money worse than anybody. If we go out, they blow fifteen million apiece on their TV contract."
"Pocket change. A franchise is worth seventy, eighty million now."
"The common man's on our side, Clyde."
"The common man doesn't know shit about us or them. The common man thinks Vince Lombardi's still alive. All the common man cares about is something to bet on besides ice dancing. How do you bet on that—which one has the tits?"
"Clyde, you could double your salary if you were a free agent. Thought about that?"
"Not now, I couldn't," I said, glancing at the cast on my leg.
"The thing we're trying to do, man, is get us a salary scale that's determined by the players, not the jive-ass owners."
"I know what you're trying to do," I said. "I read in the paper where you said our demands are 'etched in stone.' That's a great way to bargain."
"You talk tough in the papers. That's what newspapers are for."
The free-agent issue had been a nagging one in pro football for years. Pro football was the only professional team sport that didn't have free agents. It worked like this: if you played out your contract with the team you belonged to—because they drafted you out of college—you couldn't go to another club unless that club "compensated" the club you were with. That was the kicker. Let's say I had wanted to leave the Giants and play for the L.A. Rams because the Rams offered me a higher salary. Fine, Burt Danby would say. If the Rams pay the Giants ten million dollars, they can have you. But the Rams wouldn't do that, so I would be stuck with the Giants. Collusion was what the players called it.
The owners argued that if it weren't for compensation, the best athletes would choose to play only in the glamour cities, places like New York, L.A., San Francisco. Nobody would want to play in Cleveland, Buffalo, St. Louis, K.C., Detroit. The owners were dead right about that in my case.
Dreamer now said, "If we don't strike, we're never gonna get the free-market value for our services."
I couldn't hold back a laugh. "Dreamer, what would your old daddy do if he heard you use a phrase like 'free-market value'? I thought we played the damn game because we loved it."
In that singular remark, I had hit upon the main reason I was opposed to a strike. Granted, the owners were richer than doctors, but they needed some deductions. We were paid better than sheetrockers. The average salary around the league was $130,000 last year, and that was for only working half a year playing a game. And guys like Dreamer and I probably made more money than the chairman of the board at Chrysler.
"Do me a favor, Dream Street," I said as he left. "Before you call a strike, give me the name of your broker."
Everyone had been right about television. That same day, an NBC executive called on the phone and offered me a lucrative contract to sit in a broadcast booth and babble.
Then the CBS executive came to see me in person.
Richard Marks was his name, and I decided he had been the head of CBS Sports for at least thirty minutes. He took a seat by my bed and began cleaning the lenses of his tinted glasses with a pocket spray and a Kleenex.
Richard Marks was a fit-looking thirty-five. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a regimental tie with a collar pin. He had an alarmingly short haircut, and his nails had been done. His face was boyish but humorless. It was a good guess he ran in marathons and had conquered wok cuisine.
He explained how it would be a major coup for him, being new in the job, if he could "bring Billy Clyde Puckett aboard." I would be his first notable acquisition.
Like the three men who had preceded him as the president of CBS Sports, all of whom had come and gone within the year, stepping over corporate bodies to loftier jobs, Richard Marks had been unearthed from the Business Affairs division of the network. This meant he was a lawyer.
But now he knew everything about television production, live or tape, and he had a "vision" of what CBS Sports should be.
"We have to become more dimensional," Richard Marks was saying as I admired his nails and envisioned a pedicure. "We have to redefine our goals as broadcast journalists. The best announce teams have what I like to call an 'interplay,' n'est-ce pas? Do you like Summerall and Madden?"
I uttered an approving sound.
"I take a little credit for putting their act together," he said. "The idea was to marry Pat's infectious believability with John's scatalogical humor and informative expertise."
"Informative expertise is the best kind," I said.
Richard Marks said I had "potential" as an announcer because I was "natural." I was also "current." He considered it to be an inducement that I would work with Larry Hoage on NFL games.
"Excellent traffic director," Richard Marks said of Larry Hoage.
Larry Hoage was possibly the worst play-by-play announcer in the annals of television. He was a man who had successfully defended his Fluff Dry Award against all comers for a decade. More to the point, Larry Hoage had a way of making an off-tackle run for no-gain sound like a mid-air collision of 747's. But I didn't say any of this to the person who might want to pay me good money to go to several American cities and get drunk. What I said was:
"Larry Hoage has a familiar voice."
"Yes, he does," said Richard Marks, offering me a fruit- flavored Cert. "Ideally, I would like for Larry to get fewer names wrong when he's calling a game, but he has a high recognition quotient, and you can't overlook this in television."
Richard Marks then outlined the future of CBS Sports for me.
"I want to enhance audience sympathy for the athletes as people," he said. "There are many instances during telecasts when we need to spend more time humanizing sports. You can help us do that. I plan to see to it that my network becomes the one that enriches the viewer. I want us to be frothy, keenly focused on issues; comedic at times, yes, but never pessimistic. Wary but not cynical. Aggressive but never inaccurate or chaotic. I see us as the network with texture, depth, spark, clear concepts, spontaneity
, and above all, perhaps, the network with the inner conviction that a professional football game is very much a part of the human narrative."
I said, "Most of my friends seem to like announcers who just give you the score and the clock and otherwise shut the fuck up."
"That, too," Richard Marks said.
He asked if I was represented by IMG.
"Who?"
"Mark McCormack."
"No."
"The Hook?"
"Who?"
"Ed Hookstratten."
"No."
"Mike Trope?"
"No."
"Don't tell me you're with ICM! I didn't know they handled athletes."
"I'm not."
"Ron Konecky, of course. I'll give him a call and we'll bang the dents out of the fenders."
"Who's Ron Konecky?"
"Who's your agent?"
"I don't have an agent."
"How can you not have an agent? Everybody has an agent or a business manager. You don't have an agent?"
Richard Marks didn't seem to know whether to be flabbergasted or accuse me of an out-and-out lie.
"All I do is play football," I said. "My wife has an agent in L.A. Actually, he's a lawyer. She's never seen him, but he does her stuff. Barry somebody."
"Barry Sloan?"
"Could be. All I know is, some guy told her that in Hollywood, she'd better have her own Jew or they'd play racquetball with her liver."
"I'll give Barry Sloan a call."
"Why?"
"Why? You and I can't talk money, Billy Clyde. Things aren't done that way."
"Make me an offer. I'll probably accept it. What's the big deal?"
Richard Marks took a pocket calculator from his coat. He began pecking on it.
"Hmmm," he said. "Twelve games left in the regular season... playoff possibilities... these darn lashups are getting more and more expensive. Looks like our budget can stand to make you a... one-year deal for... well, let's round it off...a hundred thousand."
I cleared my throat. I wasn't balking. I honestly had to clear my throat.
So Richard Marks said, "Heck, I know you've talked to NBC. Make it one-fifty and we'll wrap it up."
NBC had only offered me $75,000. Richard Marks had already doubled it because I cleared my throat. It made me wonder what a violent coughing spell would have done.
"NBC mentioned something about expenses," I said.
"Look," he said, "I hate this bargaining business. Of course you'll get expenses at CBS. We fly first class. Let's say two hundred thousand for the regular season, we'll negotiate the playoffs later—okay?"
I took the job with CBS. I would begin work the first week in October. A regional game. Me and Larry Hoage.
Some people might have thought that being paid $200,000 for going to twelve football games was sinful. Ordinarily, I would have agreed. But later on, when I thought about the fact that I would have to spend three hours at each of those games with Larry Hoage, and no telling how many dinners the night before, I decided I had sold out too cheaply.
Before he departed that day, Richard Marks said, "I don't think you need voice lessons. You still have your Texas accent. Good! It will create an aura of sincerity on the air when you're discussing the socioeconomic backgrounds and behavior characteristics of your fellow athletes."
Barbara Jane was delighted with the news that I had taken the color job with CBS.
"You'll like the grownup world," she said on the phone from California. "What did you think of the new head of CBS Sports? It's fantastic he came to see you personally. They usually send a drone."
"He's just another TV guy, as far as I can tell," I said. "Throw a Ping-Pong ball in a boxcar and you've got a Richard Marks."
FOUR
T.J. Lambert said he would fold me up like a taco if I didn't stop in Fort Worth on my way out to the Coast to join Barbara Jane.
He demanded I be on hand for TCU's home opener against the feared Rice Owls. Rice was the only school in the Southwest Conference with a worse football record than TCU over the previous twenty years.
A week had gone by and I was out of the hospital.
The cast on my right leg reached from mid-thigh to the ankle and made my leg look like a parenthesis, but I could get a pant leg over it. I was on crutches, but I could hop around without them if I could grab on to things. And I could drive a car.
I rented a Lincoln from Budget at the D/FW airport and pointed it west on a freeway. The skyline of Fort Worth sprang up and loomed ahead of me, taller and fatter than ever, and I marveled at how my old hometown was beginning to resemble Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, all of those cities that were striving to become a bigger Dallas.
Certain cities would always have their own look, their own feel. New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., part of L.A., Chicago below the skyscrapers, even a Jacksonville, Florida. But all other cities in my mind were starting to look alike, think alike, live alike.
Take the snow out of Minneapolis and you had Phoenix. Take the cactus out of Phoenix and you had Denver. Take the crab cakes out of Baltimore and you had Kansas City. Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta were the worst examples of progress. They were already Freeway Heaven, cities intent on linking high-rise suburbs to new shopping villages to new country clubs with condos. Cities where people in the future were only going to communicate by word processor or over strawberry Margaritas at Happy Hour.
Now it was slowly happening to Fort Worth, once the world headquarters for white socks, Western music, and Tex-Mex food, an honest town where a man wasn't considered drunk unless he was lying down in a livestock pen and couldn't speak his native language.
Fort Worth was giving birth to clusters of those steel- and-glass towers of its own, needles rising among boxes of reflective glass, and its suburbs were starting to crawl with eateries overdosed in blond bentwood furniture and imitation Tiffany lampshades.
For some, a rowdy night out in Fort Worth was still a fistfight, a two-step, and a high school football game. But for most guys it was an inane conversation with a racy receptionist while a hot stock tip was passed across a platter of plastic nachos at Mommie's Trust Fund, the newest singles bar in town.
Prairie geography was responsible, I was convinced. Fort Worth was the same size and had the same lack of pretension of a Jacksonville, but it didn't have an Atlantic Ocean, a St. Johns River and an intracoastal canal to keep the land developers from shredding every outlying oak into mortgage paper.
Fort Worth seemed as determined as Atlanta to imitate Dallas. One day soon, if the planners had their way, everybody in Fort Worth could step gingerly into a restaurant specializing in fern salads and carrot boats.
Although I was surrounded by modern architectural wonders as I motored through downtown, one thing had yet to change. There weren't any people around. It wasn't a bomb scare, it was just Fort Worth. The rich folks were as cloistered as ever, and the people I did see were either bent over from age or had dents in their foreheads and prison haircuts.
I dropped off my bags at the Hyatt Regency and drove to the TCU campus for an audience with T. J.
"Your cast and them crutches is gonna help inspire my pissants," T.J. said. We were sitting in his office in the Daniel-Meyer Coliseum on a Friday in mid-September, the day before the Rice game.
T.J.'s office had a big window looking out on my old stadium. The office was almost entirely decorated in purple and white, TCU's fighting colors.
Each new head coach over the past two decades had added more purple decor to the coaching offices. He had then lost more football games than the coach he had replaced.
The carpet in the office was purple, T.J.'s desk was purple laminate, the walls were purple with white trim, and there were the mandatory messages on the walls that were intended to motivate the college athlete who could read.
One sign said:
MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN!
Another said:
ANGRY PEOPLE WIN FOOTBALL GAMES!
&nb
sp; My eyes lingered on the catchiest sign in his office. It said:
PRETTY COEDS DON'T SUCK LOSERS' COCKS!
"Has the chancellor seen that?" I asked T. J. innocently.
"He's a good old boy. Wants to win."
T.J. was probably right about the chancellor, Dr. Troy (Tex) Edgar, a man with an ever-present smile who wore purple, Western-cut suits and was more interested in raising funds for the university than anything else. Dr. Edgar could live with a T.J. Lambert who won football games. Like most chancellors, Dr. Edgar had no doubt been promised by his well-to-do alums that he could scare up more endowment in the end zone than he could at all of the Christian Fellowship dinners he attended.
One of the things T. J. had in mind for me while I was in town was an appearance in the TCU dressing room before the game. He wanted to introduce me to his players, whereupon I would say something to make their little hearts beat quicker.
"Tell 'em one of them bullshit Gipper things," he said.
"Like what?"
"Fuck, I don't know. Tell 'em how you went whistle to whistle against Rice one time when you had three broken ribs and a sore on your dick."
T.J. also instructed me to attend a reception for the coaching staff in the Lettermen's Lounge after the game. It was going to be a very nice function. I would see a lot of ex- teammates, probably, and several ex-TCU greats who had progressed from Honorable Mention to First Team All-America in the thirty years that had elapsed since they had worn the purple.
"Tonsillitis will be there, too. I want you to meet him," T.J. said.
"Who?"
"Tonsillitis Johnson."
"Is that his real name?"
T. J. looked at me sternly. "Tell you what, son. Tonsillitis Johnson can turn our whole program around if we can get him."
Tonsillitis Johnson was something to behold, if I could believe T.J. He was a once-in-a-lifetime running back from Boakum, Texas, a little town in the central part of the state. He was 6 feet 3, 235, and so fast, he made Herschel Walker and Earl Campbell look like paraplegics.