Life Its Ownself

by Dan Jenkins

  Rita was practically the same thing as on the air, he said.

  ABC was going to cancel two shows for certain, Car Wrecks and Jerome. Rita's Limo Stop was going to get one of the slots and Celebrity Car Wrecks the other.

  The network's whole schedule was being juggled.

  Just Up The Street was shifting from Friday night to Thursday night. Buffed Up, the comedy-adventure series about a group of daredevils from Redondo Beach, was taking over the eight-o'clock spot on Sunday night.

  The network hoped to blow everybody away on Saturday night with a powerhouse lineup. ABC intended to throw Kindergarten Disco into the hammock between Don't You Love It? and Cruds! That would give the network three big winners in a row.

  Rita would fall into the nine-o'clock Sunday-night slot. It looked like a rating-getter. Buffed Up would be the lead-in, and Return of the Humans had been rock-solid at nine- thirty for more than two years.

  Jack Sullivan smiled at Barbara Jane and said, "I didn't want to tell you this before. We couldn't afford to let up. Looks like you and I are in for some steady employment."

  Barb said, "I'd feel a lot better about it if they'd put us behind Cruds! on Saturday. We'd be a mortal lock."

  She rattled the ice in her empty glass at the bartender.

  Shake said to Barbara Jane, "Let me see if I understand this. You're an actress?"

  "Uh-huh," she said.

  Shake turned to me. "Billy C., I don't know what we're gonna do with Barbara Jane Bookman."

  I said, "She always had a missing gene. I knew it when she quit the Pi Phis."

  The three of us laughed together. Barbara Jane leaned over and gave Shake a kiss; then she leaned over and gave me a kiss.

  And the more we exchanged looks, the more we laughed—as we had so many times in the past about so many things that other people hadn't understood.

  Jack Sullivan was observing us with a faint, puzzled grin.

  Barb finally said to the director, "Jack, you'll have to excuse us old boys from Texas if we think all this shit is pretty funny."

  Part Two

  GOING DIXIE

  TEN

  As a place to visit, Green Bay, Wisconsin, had never meant much more to me than a night in a motel room, three hours of football on an Arctic grassland, and a chartered jet making a getaway in a blizzard.

  Therefore, in any discussion of Green Bay, I had always been at a disadvantage when sportswriters I knew had compared it to having a villa in Sorrento or taking a cruise around the Greek islands.

  But I no sooner hobbled inside the terminal of the Green Bay airport when I was given reason to wonder if this trip— my first announcing job for CBS—might have something more interesting in store for me.

  Kathy Montgomery met my plane.

  My leather overnight bag was swinging from my shoulder and a crutch was under each of my arms when she stopped me in the airport lobby.

  "Hi," she said. "Welcome to Leningrad."

  She introduced herself as a member of the CBS crew and said she was going to be my "stage manager."

  She took the bag from me. Easier on the hobble.

  "I'm not supposed to meet people at airports," she said, "but, golly, Billy Clyde Puckett! How could I turn that down?"

  In the beginning, I said I would be talking about events that happened a year ago. The drinking man's memory becomes all the more clouded in a year's time, so I wouldn't want to exaggerate my first impression of Kathy that day.

  She was just your average, friendly, likable young girl of twenty-four who happened to be outrageously fucking gorgeous.

  As Kathy Montgomery drove me to the motel where the CBS crew was staying, I learned some things about my stage manager.

  She was a graduate of Berkeley, but she was ingrained with the sanity of a South Dakota childhood. She had grown up in Sioux Falls. She had been with CBS for three years, having gone to work for the network as a secretary just out of college "to get in the door." She had just been promoted to stage manager from "broadcast associate," which used to be called "production assistant," or "PA," or, more to the point, "go-fer." Stage manager was another step toward becoming a producer or director of "live" events, news or sports. That was her goal in life, to work "behind the camera."

  "When it's live, I'm spun," she said.

  I took that to mean she was enthusiastic about live telecasts.

  She would be up in the broadcast booth during the game with Larry Hoage and me. Her job was to keep us coordinated with the producer, give us cues, hand us promo cards, alert us to improvisations—and see that we didn't run out of coffee. She had been assigned to our "announce team" for the rest of the football season.

  "Like it or not, you got me," she bubbled. "I'm your trusty sidekick."

  I didn't do the old line about what's not to like, but I'd be less than candid if I said it hadn't entered my mind.

  This was a gray, misty Saturday in Green Bay. A bite was already in the wind although the date was only Oct. 9. The work clothes on the sidewalks would soon be blooming into mackinaws.

  "When did you get to town?" I asked Kathy.

  "A month ago yesterday."

  By the time we reached the motel, I had found out from Kathy that my appointments for the afternoon and evening were plentiful.

  Wade Hogg, the Green Bay coach, was expecting me to drop by his office. Ray Hogan, the Washington coach, was expecting me to drop by his motel room. It was customary for the TV color man to visit with both head coaches before a game. The color man needed to know what surprises, if any, to anticipate. The Redskins were headquartered at our motel. That would make it easy for me to knock off the all-important insert with Dreamer Tatum.

  Kathy said, "I spoke to Dreamer Tatum. He's real happy you're going to be here."

  "He's a friend."

  "Dreamer's the guy who whaled on your knee, right?"

  "He didn't mean to."

  "That's how it was for us in college. At Cal, you're supposed to hate Stanford. But everybody I knew liked Stanford. Everybody I knew at Stanford liked Cal. I think the hate's more for the Old Blues and the Down-on-the-Farms. Stanford has a neat band. "White Punks on Dope" is one of their fight songs. Ever heard it?"

  "It missed the charts, I guess."

  It was Kathy's information that Larry Hoage would be arriving in the early evening on somebody's corporate jet— one of those Tennecos, Nabiscos, or Fritos. Some rich guy was making sure the celebrity announcer reached his broadcast assignment from a speaking engagement.

  "You know Larry Hoage?" Kathy asked.

  "I've only loved him from afar."

  "He'll complain about his room. That's always first."

  A dinner reservation had been made in the motel's "gourmet" restaurant for me, Larry Hoage, Mike Rash, the telecast director, and Teddy Cole, the telecast producer. Rash and Cole were bright young guys, really good at their jobs, Kathy said.

  "What about you?" I said to the stage manager, who could have retired the Miss South Dakota Trophy if she had ever entered the contest.

  Kathy was an exquisitely built 5-8, a golden-haired beauty with mischievous, sea-blue eyes and what you call your radiant complexion.

  "Dinner's just for the big guys," she said.

  "Used to be. If you're gonna be my trusty sidekick, dinner's part of the deal."

  "Really?"

  "I've always had a weakness for the Nordic combined."

  Body. Eyes. Hair.

  "The what?"

  "Nothing. You're coming to dinner."

  "Great! I brought a clean pair of sneaks."

  Inviting Kathy Montgomery to come along to dinner was a harmless enough thing to do, I thought. There was no point in letting our professional relationship begin on an awkward social footing.

  Contrary to what Shake Tiller would say about it in the months to come, I'm certain I would have extended the same invitation to my stage manager if she had been a sawed-off little bilingual, erudite beefo-dyke from an Eastern girls' s
chool instead of the winner of the Nordic combined.

  Here again, I knew how to deal with the unfounded accusations of those who questioned my moral fiber.

  A man simply told the truth.

  Or lied.

  Before America had been brain-washed by television, a professional football coach had never been called brilliant. A coach was wily, crafty, shrewd, inventive, determined, cagey, respected, innovative, sometimes even lovable, but never brilliant. He wasn't called a brilliant organizer, administrator, delegator, thinker, or teacher because he didn't know anything about self-promotion. He kicked a player in the butt and told him to win games.

  Every coach in the National Football League is brilliant now. He's perceived as brilliant for many reasons. One, he speaks a foreign language: "Zone, gap, flex, crease." Two, he has a loyal staff. Three, he has an energetic organization. Four, his owner stands behind him. Five, his computerized scouting system has revolutionized the game. Six, the whole community's on his side. Seven, he has an unselfish family. Eight, he's earned the respect of every player on his team. Nine, he never panics during a game. And ten, he has a vague past in which he learned some kind of secret from either Paul Brown, Vince Lombardi, or Bear Bryant.

  But the main reason he's brilliant is because television says so.

  Meanwhile, there are things about the brilliant coaches that puzzle me. If they're so brilliant, why do they all use the same offense and defense? Why do they all say, "We like to establish our running game, then throw"? Why do they then say, "You win with defense"? And why can't they answer a simple question about what happened in a game until they've seen the films?

  Players always know what happened in a game. If it's a game you lost, it's because some dumbass missed a block or dropped a pass. If it's a game you won, it was because the quarterback ignored the brilliant coach's "game plan" and threw a pass on a busted play and a leaper went up and outwrestled somebody for the ball.

  If the Pittsburgh Steelers of the Seventies had stuck with Chuck Noll's game plans, they would have lost three of their four Super Bowls. They'd still be running Franco Harris on trap plays. But Terry Bradshaw, the quarterback, happened to notice that he needed to get some points. So he chunked the ball a mile into the twilight, and Lynn Swann jumped 10 feet off the ground and caught it, and this made Chuck Noll brilliant.

  Shoat Cooper had been brilliant when Hose Manning would throw the ball away and Shake Tiller would go catch it.

  Shoat could explain it to the sportswriters with brilliance. He would say, "Our reference was Red all the way. They showed us Blue but they jumped into Yellow. Naturally, we had to switch from Odd to Even. Against a Concealed Zone, you have to go underneath. We knew the Crease was there."

  Shoat often talked like this to the players, but when his terminology overdosed the alphabet, we would only pretend to listen.

  Nobody on our team would have understood the play if Hose Manning or Dump McKinney had come into the huddle and said, "Brown left, eighty-nine flex, overload K, Y-sideline, Z-trap motion on two."

  We would have had to call time-out until the laughter stopped.

  That was the kind of thing they said in the Dallas huddle, which was why the Cowboys, despite their enviable record all these years, had never beaten a team that was physically worth a shit.

  What Hose or Dump was more likely to have said in our huddle was "Their right corner looks a little stoned to me. I'm gonna throw it over the fucker's head. Y'all try to block somebody."

  Much of this was going through my mind as I now sat in the presence of Wade Hogg, Green Bay's brilliant new coach.

  The contrast between the offices of Wade Hogg and T. J. Lambert would have gone a long way toward reinforcing Uncle Kenneth's argument about the college game being more fun. In Wade Hogg's office, I felt at first like applying for a personal loan, but then it became a problem to maintain a dignified posture as I studied the signs on his walls.

  Wade Hogg's most prominent sign was framed and hung on the wall over his Portabubble. The sign said:

  FORCE + WORK - CONFUSION = SUCCESS!

  Given enough time and thought, I decided Green Bay's defensive unit could probably understand the wisdom of that, but I would have defied anyone other than Wade Hogg to explain the sign that said:

  W = 1/2 MVT. + 1/2 INSP.

  "Simple," said Wade Hogg. "Winning equals one-half motivation plus one-half inspiration."

  I studied the sign another moment as the coach said:

  "One of the things I've introduced to the Packers—it's new in the league, by the way—is the correct use of energy. We're pretty sold on it around here. What we tell our people is this: the energy of an object will grow as its speed increases. We want our energy to grow! If you're a football team and your energy doesn't grow, you've got a kinetic problem. What we believe is that work transformed into energy exerts force. There's no question about that. And a growing force is a football team to contend with!"

  I wished Wade Hogg luck and said I hoped he didn't run into too many teams that stressed blocking and tackling.

  "Oh, I think fundamentals will always be a part of the game," he said. "Where we've taken the lead is in the way we've learned how to transfer our kinetic energy from a gravitational to an elastic object. How's the knee coming along?"

  "Okay," I said.

  "Those damn gravitational injuries," he said, shaking his head. "Wouldn't have happened if you'd been in our elastic program."

  I had tried to picture Wade Hogg as the prehistoric interior lineman he'd been when he played for the Detroit Lions. It was easier than picturing him as the head coach of the Packers, but it was my guess he wouldn't have the job much longer if he didn't stop reading that fucking book, whatever it was.

  Later, I was up in Ray Hogan's room at the motel with my head swimming in X's and O's.

  The Redskins' coach was more of the old, traditional taskmaster, the kind who drew diagrams as he talked—and talked in a language that only a football coach could decipher.

  "We don't care what they do tomorrow," said Ray Hogan, scribbling on sheets of motel stationery. "If they show us this, we're here. If they're here, we're right here. You can't do this to us. We'll do this. Let's say they're in a three. Hell, that gives us this! They go to a four, we do this. Or this. If they bring in the nickel, this is open. We'll take what they give us. I'm not worried about our offense. They'll play Redskin football."

  "Like they did against the Rams?" I didn't think it would hurt to give old Ray a jab.

  "Aw, that was just one of those given Sundays," he said. "All teams have 'em. Your people have 'em. We had this open all day. Never could hit it. We could have run here till Christmas. Put this guy out here, they have to do this. Look what that leaves? Hell, it's a landing strip! Of course, we kept trying to do this—and they wouldn't give us that."

  "Zebras tried to help you out."

  "They dropped a few, didn't they? Well, they get a lot of criticism, but they do a pretty good job overall."

  "You think all of them are honest?"

  "In the National Football League? Our game officials? Goodness, Billy Clyde, that's the craziest question I ever heard! Of course they're honest! They're wrong half the time but they're honest! It's those dang judgment calls! Did he or didn't he? Was he or wasn't he? All coaches die of a judgment call sooner or later."

  "Charlie Teasdale makes his share of them," I said.

  "Charlie will drop a flag for you. Old Quick Flag, we call him. He likes to drop one early, let you know who's boss out there. I've accused him of wanting to get on television too much."

  "What does he say?"

  "You can't talk to an official. You can talk to a Pope or a king or a president, but you can't talk to an official. Charlie's a real bad official, but he's not dishonest."

  Ray Hogan said you had to know how to use the officials to your advantage.

  "They almost never call the same penalty twice in a row. So if we get a holding call, we tell our
people to grab anything that moves on the next play. In other words, you hold after a hold, don't you? If we get a pass-interference call, we tell our people to undress the scoundrels on the next play! But this isn't anything new, Billy Clyde. Hell, I bet they taught you this in high school in Texas, didn't they?"

  Yes, they had.

  I pressed the other point one more time.

  "Coach, you don't think there's even a remote chance an official would do some business?"

  "Not a chance," said Ray Hogan. "For one thing, they're too stupid."

  I asked the Washington coach if there was anything I needed to know about his defense.

  "We'll be in this most of the time," he said, returning to his diagrams. "It's been good to us. We may show 'em this now and then, try to get 'em to come here. Right here's where we'd like to keep 'em. You're not going anywhere here. We'll come if they do this. We'll come if they do that. We love for 'em to try this! It's all up to Dreamer tomorrow. If Dreamer decides he wants to come to the dance, our defense will be all right. They'll play Redskin football."

  Was Dreamer Tatum coming to the dance?

  I asked Dreamer the blunt question as the two of us had a drink in the motel bar. We were waiting for Kathy and a camera crew so we could do the insert.

  Dreamer gave me a look when I put the question to him.

  "Between you and me, Clyde?"

  He could trust me, I assured him.

  "I'm Dixie," he said.

  I told Dreamer I had assumed as much when I saw the Rams-Redskins game on television.

  "You changed the future of pro football," Dreamer said. "Our conversation when you were in the hospital? I got to thinking about it later. You were right. We couldn't win a strike. I'm leading the Players Association in a new direction."

  The problems were the same, he said. The players didn't have collective bargaining, the owners had completely undermined the free-agency system. A football player was less able to get a fair-market value for his services than a steel-worker. A player's salary was still determined by the "whim" of the owner.