A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  8

  When I was a senior at Fenwick High School, the year was as unmemorable, in any objective sense of that word, as my first three years at Fenwick. My acts of heroism, winning a championship, saving a life, were as unmemorable as any two events could possibly be—save perhaps as comedy.

  However, as I have learned through the years, frequently to my dismay, what matters is not that which actually happened, but what people think and say has happened.

  Thus, in the New York Times profile it is stated, authoritatively and without qualification, that in high school “O’Malley was a triple-threat quarterback who led his team to a city championship. Only a family tradition of military service prevented him from a possible all-American college career.”

  I have always firmly believed that if it is in the New York Times, it has to be not only true but officially true.

  I worry that someday I will begin to believe this part of the legend.

  I also worry that my teammates, who are not New York Times readers, will stumble on an old issue of the Magazine and find the profile.

  Presumably they will laugh. Possibly, I tremble at the thought, they too will have come to believe that the myth is fact.

  During summer practice, which began the day after the bombing of Nagasaki, I tried to reach an amicable settlement with Fenwick’s football coach.

  “With war over, Coach, you don’t need me on the team anymore, do you?”

  “Who will hold the kickoffs?” The congressman no longer mattered. Now Angelo loved the joke too.

  “Some clumsy freshman?”

  “Who will advise me on plays?” He laughed heartily and slammed me on the back with his formidable paw.

  I was, as I have insisted, quite worthless on the field, but I did know all the plays, even calls that Angelo rarely used and forgot himself. Occasionally he would jokingly ask me what strategy I would use on a series of downs if I were coach.

  “Pass on the first down, they won’t expect it. You usually play conservative.”

  He would laugh and tell the quarterback to keep the ball on the ground.

  Once, when we were way ahead of poor St. Ignatius, he followed my advice, purely for laughs, and scored an unnecessary but spectacular touchdown on a seventy-five-yard play. He looked at me quizzically as I trotted out on the field to hold the subsequent kickoff. “Too bad there isn’t a body to go along with that brain.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  After that our occasional consultations were what Mom would have called “half-fun, full-earnest.” He acted as though I were a good-luck charm, a role I was perfectly willing to accept. Not for me, or anyone else on the team as far as that goes, to suggest that I knew more about the strategy of Catholic League football, pretty elementary in those days, than the coach did.

  They didn’t laugh on Monday mornings when they had to pay off on my parlay-card bets. Mind you, I didn’t gamble. I told myself that betting on college football games wasn’t gambling because I always won.

  I read all the pages of all the papers, you see, including the sports pages. I digested them like my Wheaties in the morning (Mom had given up on oatmeal and cream of wheat by then). I knew who was going to win.

  Good think, no play. A strategist at a time when there was not a market for strategy.

  We didn’t think we were quite good enough to be champs and we probably weren’t. But we were better than champs, we were magic. We could do no wrong. We laughed our way toward the playoffs.

  We laughed, that is, until our game with Mount Carmel, always a power, and always a threat to Fenwick. If they beat us, the magic would be over and we would not make the play-offs. We were the better team, we told ourselves nervously, even if they outweighed us by ten pounds per man. But we were worried about the South Siders’ hex on us.

  The week before the game, the hex seemed to be working. We were swept by an epidemic of the flu. Our second-string quarterback was so sick he had to be brought from the practice field to Oak Park Hospital and put in an oxygen tent.

  There were only two men between me and something more than holding kickoffs.

  I considered feigning a fever, but decided that was hardly necessary. My classmate who was the starting quarterback was healthy and strong. And the sophomore who was his backup was one of the few players who wasn’t smitten by the bug.

  It was a raw, gray Sunday with occasional snow flurries in the air, just before Thanksgiving, and Hansen Park Stadium, beyond the Milwaukee railroad tracks above North Avenue (flying into O’Hare, you can still see them) was jammed with people despite the wind and the snow flurries.

  The game suited the day—what they call today “basic football,” Woody Hayes’s “three yards and a cloud of dust,” except the field was frozen and there was no dust.

  The kind of game, I muttered to myself, that Carmel might just win. But we led 14–12 going into the fourth quarter—three kickoffs for me to hold, amid loud cheers from my family in the stands.

  On our first possession in the fourth quarter, the Carmel linemen finally broke through our weary guards and center and smeared the quarterback on our fourteen-yard line. In the current parlance they rang his bell and then recovered the fumble. He was carried off the field on a stretcher. “Concussion,” said the doctor called down from the stands.

  Eight plays later Carmel scored on a sneak from the two, and after their conversion we were down 19–14.

  One player, I thought, between me and glory; and I wanted no glory, thank you very much.

  Our sophomore backup was sensational. He brought the team down the field quickly in a skillfully executed series of end sweeps with himself as the ball carrier. On a day like that with both teams tired, one more touchdown would keep us ahead.

  He fumbled on Carmel’s twenty-yard line and they recovered. The poor kid staggered to his feet, looked around once as though he were trying to figure out where he was, and collapsed.

  “This young man has a fever,” the doctor announced in astonishment. “His temperature is over a hundred and one at least.”

  As if to confirm the diagnosis, our poor soph vomited all over Angelo’s shoes.

  “Where’s Chucky?” the coach demanded.

  “Leaving the stadium,” I said, not altogether facetiously.

  “Grab him,” he thundered as I tried to slip away to the locker room.

  Carmel began to march back up the field inexorably. There were no field clocks in those days, so you had to depend on the timekeeper’s watch and his reports during time-outs or between plays. Maybe five minutes were left in the game. With any luck, Carmel would keep the ball for the rest of the game. We’d lose, but I’d save my life.

  All the Carmel linemen now looked at least eleven feet tall.

  We held on fourth and one at our own forty and took over.

  “I’m not going to tell you what to call, Chucky,” the coach sighed. “It probably wouldn’t do any good, but for the love of God, don’t call your own number.”

  With commendable lack of enthusiasm, he waved me in.

  “Never fear,” I shouted back at him.

  There was laughter from the Fenwick side of the field and an audible gasp from the Carmel fans. Did they really grow quarterbacks that small on the West Side?

  Then the Fenwick crowd, led I was later told not by the regular cheerleaders (Fenwick males; Trinity females came much, much later) but by Peg and Rosie, burst into a thunderous ovation. “Chucky, Chucky, Chucky!” they chanted savagely. Like mourners at an African funeral.

  If you are going to lose, why not make it high comedy. Or maybe they thought that the funny little redhead, everyone’s favorite mascot, might work a miracle. Wasn’t I, by the coach’s own admission, the team’s good-luck charm?

  We had three minutes left, three whole minutes.

  Almost without thinking about it I called the plays in the huddle and snapped out the signals in a voice that sounded unconscionably squeaky.

  Maybe I should note h
ere that we were playing the old Notre Dame box. Only the Bears and Stanford and a few other teams were using the T. Notre Dame itself was about to abandon the box in favor of Angelo Bertelli in the T.

  I sent Vince Antonelli, the wingback, around end. Something that he hadn’t done all season.

  Fifteen yards and a first down.

  I called him again, this time for a quick sideline pass to Joe Raftery, our end (no wide receivers in those days). Ten more yards and another first down. Two minutes to go on Carmel’s thirty-five.

  Raftery again on an end around. I thought for a moment he would break away and end my agony.

  Alas, the Carmel safety stopped him with a shoestring tackle. But he made fifteen more yards. First and ten on the twenty.

  We had spread them out. Okay, now, through the center. Antonelli over the middle to the fourteen. Then Pete Delvecchio on a reverse from Vince to the seven. First and goal. Time-out. A minute and twenty seconds left.

  Chucky the magician.

  I should note that my principal concern after calling the play and watching the snap from center was to get the hell out of the way of the befuddled and now angry Carmel linemen. Indeed, I was so far from the action that no one bothered to lay a hand on me.

  My success was hardly going to my head. I was convinced that I was living in a nightmare and that soon the gorillas from Carmel would eat me alive.

  The stadium was as silent as a cemetery, whether in astonishment or awe or fear I did not know. The Fenwick bench seemed to be paralyzed. Angelo, I learned later, couldn’t bear to look at the field.

  My luck then ran out, the magic deserted me, my number was up.

  I called Vince around the near side, figuring they would hardly expect me to do that. It was a perfect call, only the pass from center was wide of the mark. I watched in fascinated horror as it spun in my direction and bounced dead in front of me. Fortunately Vince dashed over and fell on it before the Carmel monsters destroyed the ball and me.

  In the huddle, no one complained that I didn’t grab the ball. I was still magic. Second and fourteen. Okay. Vince, pass it to Joe in the end zone.

  “I haven’t passed to him all year.”

  “That’s why you’re passing now.”

  Perfect pass. Joe dropped it.

  Third and fourteen.

  “Sorry, Chuck.”

  Vince around the near side again. “Make the pass good,” I barked at the center.

  “Sure will, Chuck,” he promised contritely.

  Eight-yard gain. Fourth and six. Less than a minute.

  Fool them real good. Another Antonelli pass. “Don’t drop it, Joe!” I ordered.

  “I won’t,” he said grimly as we broke the huddle.

  Someone on Carmel had me figured out. A tackle and a guard came storming in. Vince had to hurry his throw. The big tackle, now twenty feet tall, leaped into the air and blocked the pass.

  Then the whole world crunched down into slow motion. Slowly, lazily, teasingly, the ball arched in my direction, taunting me as it came. My father would later say that he was afraid it would bounce off my helmet. That was my thought precisely. To avoid that disgrace I put up my hands to ward it off. The blocked pass, losing most of what little momentum it had, nestled contentedly in my hands.

  And ten million howling Mount Carmel monsters, all thirty feet tall, swarmed in my direction.

  I did the only honest thing under the circumstances. I ran—fearfully—for my life. If I had been facing toward the other goal line, eighty-eight yards away, I would have run in that direction. I would not have gone very far because I was so slow. As it was, I paid no attention to where I was going but simply ran.

  As it turns out, toward the goal line.

  Not fast enough. As I approached the point where sideline and the goal line intersect, called appropriately enough in my case the coffin corner, not caring much which line of safety I crossed first, I was hit by the Burlington Zephyr roaring through Lisle, Illinois, at seven-thirty in the evening. Or so it seemed.

  I felt my body rushing through space, my arms flung out in front of me, the ball slipping out of my fingers. Then the first aluminum, diesel streamliner tossed me aside and I fell to the ground with a deadly thud. The train, not sure that it had finished me off, returned to run over me again.

  And then there was nothing at all.

  As to what actually happened, I’ll have to rely on folklore and the account in the next morning’s Herald-Examiner.

  SUB SAVES DAY FOR FRIARS

  Reserve quarterback Chuck O’Malley carried the Fenwick Friars over the prostrate bodies of the Mount Carmel Caravan into the Catholic League play-offs today with a dramatic catch of a blocked pass from Vince Antonelli.

  O’Malley, whose previous role in three years on the Fenwick team has been holding kickoff placement, came into the game after three other quarterbacks were sidelined by injury or illness. Trailing 19–14, O’Malley sparked the team to a dazzling last-minute drive from their own forty to the Mount Carmel six.

  When the drive fizzled, O’Malley called the fourth-down play, made a leaping catch of Antonelli’s blocked pass, and scampered toward the goal line. Mount Carmel safety Ed Murray rammed into the five-foot-six-inch sub at the one-yard line, but O’Malley, in a desperate leap, flew across the goal line, breaking the plane just as the ball slipped from his fingers.

  He then held for the point-after-touchdown kick that gave the Friars a 21–19 lead. Fenwick kicked off from midfield because of an unnecessary-roughness call against Murray on the touchdown play.

  Reserve O’Malley, to put icing on the cake, tackled Murray at the Carmel fifteen on the runback with such ferocity that the ball popped out of his hands. Joe Raftery fell on it to end the game.

  “Chuck is magic,” said Friar coach Angelo Smith. “He will never forget today, I’m sure of that.”

  That, as my children would say, is for sure.

  How I managed to catch the pass from center for the PAT I will never know.

  Chuck O’Malley, mountebank and clown.

  And unwitting and unwilling and literally unconscious hero.

  The image of my spiking poor Ed Murray is so implausible that I would be inclined to think that the reporter made it up if my overjoyed family did not insist that it had in fact happened just that way.

  And incidentally I was five feet nine. Well, eight and a half anyway.

  My first recollection after the game was being hugged simultaneously by my mother, Jane, Peg, and the insufferable, if glorious, Rosie Clancy.

  “Let go.” I shoved her away briskly.

  Unfazed, she screeched, “Chucky Ducky is a hero! He won the game!”

  “What?”

  “Dear, you scored the winning touchdown.” Mom was beaming. “We always knew you were an athlete.”

  “There’s been a terrible mistake.”

  I have repeatedly been assured by all present that those were my very words.

  Well, Fenwick went on, as everyone knows, to beat Tilden at Soldier Field and win city. The other three quarterbacks recovered and I returned to my regular kickoff role.

  But my unintended and unintentional feat was never to be forgotten. After we won the Kelly Bowl (as the game was called after the aforementioned Mayor Ed “Sewer Pipe” Kelly), Angelo told the press, “We knew we were a team of destiny all season. After the way Magic Chuck O’Malley beat Carmel for us, we knew we couldn’t lose.”

  Yeah?

  There was some talk of a football scholarship at Notre Dame, a joke, one more part of a joke that had run for four years and ought to have died a decent death when I was a freshman.

  But the legend lives. And my daimon cackles.

  I’m sure that if I had not been blocked into the end zone—and Ed Murray hit me at the wrong angle or I would have soared across the sideline and halfway up the stands of Hansen Park Stadium—I would not have been forced to go to the senior prom, I would not have been hailed as a hero a second time that year, and my
life would have been very different.

  The second incident, by the way, was even more ridiculous and had consequences that are far more serious.

  9

  When Vince Antonelli expressed an opinion about my sister Peg in 1946, just before graduation from Fenwick, I was astonished.

  “She’s really cute,” Vince said, leaning over my shoulder as I tried desperately to memorize Greek vocabulary for the final exam.

  Greek was my weak subject, the only threat to my A average. Why Greek? It was 1946, remember, and the Catholic high schools were convinced that the classics would help you succeed in college. They did not mean what the English meant, namely that you learned enough to be able to read the classics and profit from their content. Rather, in our part of the world, the classics were extolled because they developed your intellectual discipline and your memory power.

  “Jane?” I asked absently.

  She was cute indeed, a pretty face, sweet rather than beautiful, the rounded curves of a classic full figure that the tight corsets and drab fashions of the “wartime” world could not hide. Jane had a returned F4U marine pilot on the line, a premed student named Ted McCormack. Doubtless, he had stared dreamily at a picture of Jane in a swimsuit between flights. Now poor Ted, the pilot, could look at nothing else when he was in the room with her. Lucky Ted.

  And lucky Jane.

  “Margaret.”

  “You mean Peg.” I still didn’t look up.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Peg!” I was startled and lost my place in the Greek lexicon. “Peg, cute!”

  “Real cute.” He nodded solemnly.

  “Jeez, I hadn’t noticed.” I returned to my Greek.

  “Do you mind if I invite her to the senior prom?”

  “Peg?” Looking up in bewilderment from my book was becoming a serious distraction from my last-minute “plugging.”

  “Yeah,”

  “Suit yourself.”

  If he wanted to rob the cradle, that was his business.

  “Good. I’ve already asked her.”