by Irwin Shaw
The poor man was near tears as we reached the locker room, which resembled a forward medical station during the battle in the Ardennes rather than a football locker room. “Mr. Romanovici,” McGill said brokenly, as he pulled me aside to a corner of the room, “I hereby tender my resignation. I would like to remain indoors for the second half. Give out any story you wish—tell the papers I’ve had a heart attack or that I slipped and broke my leg—anything.…”
“Nonsense, man,” I said, putting a soothing hand on his arm. “You’ll do nothing of the kind. You’ll go out on the field with the team and you’ll look cunning and confident. You may even smile if you catch a camera pointed in your direction.”
“Smile, man,” McGill said. “I’m not going to smile again for the rest of my life. What is there to smile at?”
“We’re going to change our tactics,” I said.
“Change tactics!” McGill was spluttering now. “What do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve tried every trick in the book.”
“In the book,” I said. “There’s the trouble. You’re now going to throw out the book.”
“What do you propose?” McGill asked, with just the merest hint of curiosity.
“First of all, we are now going to encourage the boys to block and tackle.” After our first touchdown, the power and deception of Dallas had thoroughly intimidated the Montpelier team and the blocking and tackling had gone from being tentative in the first quarter to a demonstration of the gentlest courtesy in the second.
“Block and tackle,” McGill groaned. “How do you expect to arrange that?”
“In a minute, I’m going to ask for silence in the locker room,” I said, “and I’m going to make a little speech.”
McGill hit his head in despair. “Mr. Romanovici,” he said, “these men are professionals. This isn’t a high school team that you fire up with a pep talk between halves. You could read them a new Sermon on the Mount and they’d still lose by forty points.”
“Listen to my speech,” I said and climbed onto a rubbing table and called for quiet. The room had not been noisy. There had been only a small whispering, like the fall of rain on a newly dug grave, until now, and that stopped abruptly at the sound of my voice. “Gentlemen,” I said loudly, “there is no need to dwell on our performance in the first half.”
A small sigh, like a vagrant wind, swept the room.
“We are now going to forget it and get on with the business of winning a ball game.” As I said this, two of the players sat down on the floor and turned their faces to the wall. “We are going to be a different team in this half. For one thing, as of this moment, there are no regulars on this squad. We are going to put in the suicide squad and they are going to stay in there, on both offense and defense, as long as it seems wise.”
“Mr. Romanovici,” McGill wailed, “they never even ran the ball once in practice all season.”
“I understand,” I said. “But they all have their playbooks, which I believe they are charged with memorizing.”
“Memorize,” McGill said. “You don’t beat Dallas out of memory.”
“I don’t like to bring it up, Coach,” I said, “but we don’t seem to be beating Dallas with the team that’s been running the ball ever since August, do we?” I turned back to the men. “In going over our roster,” I went on, “I see that most of you at one time or another in your careers in high school and college have played various positions. We have twelve ex-fullbacks on the club, who now back up the line or fill in at guard or go down under punts. In this half, you may very well find yourselves carrying the ball three times in a row. Let me ask you gentlemen a question. How many of you have ever thrown a forward pass in a game? A show of hands, please.”
Ten hands went up.
“Some of you or maybe even all of you,” I said, “may be called on, when the occasion seems propitious, to throw a pass or pretend to throw a pass and run with the ball when that seems advisable to you. Any member of the team may also discover that he is playing a position, on either the defense or the offense, that he has never played before. For the next thirty minutes out on that field, there are no set offensive and defensive units. There are forty-three football players and that is all.”
“I am going back to Kansas,” McGill said, “by the first plane.” But he said it in a whisper, for my ears only.
“There is an excellent play by a distinguished Italian author, unfortunately now dead,” I went on. “The title of the play, translated into English, is Tonight We Improvise. The writer of the play, if my memory is correct, won the Nobel Prize. I am asking you to take heart from his title and do as much this afternoon to win a mere football game.”
Here and there on several faces I could see a fugitive gleam of hope, but the general mood was still one of abject surrender. So far, McGill’s warning that professional athletes could not be moved by locker-room appeals was an accurate appraisal of the situation. “One more detail,” I said, holding up my hand as some of the athletes, looking like men on the way to their own execution, prepared to leave the room. “If you win today,” I said flatly, without emotion, “each member of this club, including coaches and trainers, will have his winning share doubled by me.”
The men who were moving toward the door stopped dead in their tracks. “What’s more,” I said, “again, if you win, each and every player, coach and trainer in our confederation, the men you will be facing for the rest of your careers, will receive a bonus of ten thousand dollars.” I did not feel I had to add that what they would be faced with in the following seasons would be either lifelong gratitude or murderous fury.
A curious sound could now be heard in one corner of the room, like the growling of wild animals some distance off. The growling grew to a roar, frightening and inhuman, and filled the locker room, and the athletes were jostling one another in their eagerness to race out onto the field.
McGill helped me down from the rubbing table. His face was white. “Shades of Knute Rockne,” he said. “One for the Gipper. Two for the bank. Permit me to shake your hand, man.”
We shook hands gravely and went out, walking slowly and in a dignified manner, to the bench.
On the kickoff, the team swept down the field like an assault of dervishes inflamed by visions of heaven, impervious to wounds or death. The kicker, who had not made a tackle since his sophomore year in high school, brought the runner down on Dallas’ 21-yard line. He hit the man so hard that the ball spurted out of the melee and was scooped up by a lumbering tackle who fled across the goal line with the speed of an Olympic 100-yard-dash man. The kick for the point was good and the score after just a few seconds of the half was now Dallas 27, Montpelier 14.
From then on, the ambulances came and went. The ferocity of play was so great that I told myself that if I were in a position of political power, I would abolish football except in prisons and commando camps.
“It’s like nothing anybody has ever seen before,” McGill kept whispering hoarsely beside me, as safety men dropped quarterbacks behind the line of scrimmage, ends threw passes, tackles drifted, guards changed positions with halfbacks and plunged for first downs or ran lonely weird pass patterns into the end zone. Our kicker, because of his new enthusiasm for going down under his own kicks, was hurt, but a substitute center fell back and drop-kicked a crucial field goal from 33 yards out. Barefooted. Blockers appeared in places that reason told they could never reach, tackles split wedges like walnuts, men whose names had hardly ever made the line-ups called signals, ran away from their interference, instead of behind it, and galloped toward the Dallas goal, broken plays were the rule rather than the exception as the heat of battle made men forget their playbooks entirely and scramble savagely through pile-ups. I had the firm impression that none of our players knew what he was going to do or actually did on either the offense or the defense and the spotters were screaming helplessly over the telephone lines to the bench.
With all order gone and confusion rampant, Dallas began to disi
ntegrate. Since our men usually had no notion of where they were going, there was no way in which Dallas, a highly trained, logical group of athletes, could foresee any development, and the poor Dallas fullback was heard to say, as he was thrown out of bounds by four tacklers. “Why the fuck don’t you guys play football?”
Still, with only seconds remaining in the game, Dallas led 34 to 30. On the side lines, McGill stood with his back to the field, staring desolately up to heaven. The ball was on the Dallas 30-yard line, but even if we had had a place kicker we could depend upon, three points would still leave us on the short end of the score. We used our last time out and the last substitutes trotted onto the field, one of them with instructions from me to call for an end-around play. A halfback who had been out of the line-up for the last four games with a concussion of the brain started toward the bench, moving in a peculiar manner. Suddenly, I realized that he thought he had been pulled from the game and was heading for the bench, which would have left us with only ten men on the field, making whatever play we ran invalid. I shouted at him to stand still and he came to a halt two feet from the side line, a puzzled look on his face.
The ball was snapped, the quarterback scampered to his rear and turned to hand the ball off to the right end. Just as the end reached the quarterback, he and the quarterback were hit simultaneously by the left end, who, he told me later, had thought he had been designated to run the play. The three men dropped to the ground as though they had been felled by sledge hammers and the ball spurted out of the melee and back to the 50-yard line, with what seemed like dozens of players racing for it and bodies dropping on all sides.
Our left guard, who had thought it was a pass play and had come back to protect the quarterback, managed to grab the ball and run backward. Meanwhile, the halfback who had thought he had been removed from the game was walking pensively, all alone, his head down, toward the Dallas goal.
“Throw it! Throw it!” I yelled.
Surrounded by Dallas players, his eyes blank with fear, the guard, who in eight years of football had never thrown a single pass, leaped above the menacing hands all around him and threw a wobbly, end-over-end high pass that moved so slowly you could count the lace holes on the ball. The halfback, walking all alone toward the Dallas goal, turned, as though he had just remembered he had left something behind him, and was hit in the chest by the ball. It bounced off him and above his head. He put his hands up as it came down and he had it. He was only ten feet from the goal line and he limped across it, put the ball down in the end zone and dropped on it.
Final score, Montpelier 36, Dallas 34. The silence of the crowd was funereal as our players ran hysterically off the field. McGill was so exhausted he had to be carried to the locker room by two trainers.
The official celebration of our victory came in March, after the checks had been mailed out to all the teams in the confederation. I hired the large ballroom in the Waldorf Astoria for a banquet for over 2000 of my guests, who included all the personnel of the eight clubs and whatever family and lovers of either sex they wished to invite.
I made the only speech. I thanked them one and all, announced that I was retiring, because of reasons of health, from all connection with the sport, though I would, of course, keep a strong sentimental attachment to those once-scorned athletes who had needed only a fair second chance to show their worth. Bo McGill would succeed me as president of the confederation. I didn’t say so, but I feared that another game on the bench would endanger his life. In farewell, I announced that I was turning over the ownership of the teams to the men themselves, though naturally I would expect to be paid back through the years for my original investment. I did not bring up my strongly held belief that wanton charity is counterproductive. The announcement gave rise to a wild demonstration, in which 1000 glasses were broken and half that number of chairs were destroyed in various ways. The next day, the newspapers hailed my gesture as a landmark in creative capitalism.
I left the Waldorf before the celebration reached its peak and later, without hesitation, paid the quite impressive bill for damage done to the premises.
On my next visit to my poor demented friend, the geologist, in the clinic in Connecticut, I explained to him over a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, his one remaining interest in the world outside the walls, something of what had happened. As he drank, he nodded politely, but I could see his mind, such as it was, was on other things. “There’s a fellow here,” he said, “I believe he’s something of a chemist, worked for Dupont, the rumor goes, who claims he’s discovered a new process—I think it’s a cheap way of producing hydrogen for fuel. Dupont laughed at him. I told him about you and Vermont and he said he’d like to meet you. Should I call him in?”
“By all means,” I said.
Since then, I have visited the clinic 20 times in two months.
Circle of Light
There was mist lying low along the ground and the headlights made a milky thin soup in every dip of the road. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning and they didn’t pass any other cars as they wound along the narrow road up the hill toward the house. There were only four other houses between the main highway and the Willards’ house, and they were all dark.
They were sitting in the front seat, Martin and his sister and her husband. Linda had the radio on and was singing softly, accompanying the orchestra, singing, “It’s the wrong time, and the wrong place …”
John Willard sat comfortably at the wheel, driving fast, smiling when Linda leaned over and sang into his ear, burlesquing passion in the style of a nightclub singer, “Though it’s such a pretty fa-aaace …”
“Be careful,” Willard said. “You’re tickling the ear of the driver.”
“There were more fatalities on the roads last year,” Martin said, “from tickling the ear of the driver than from drunkenness, national holidays, and faulty brakes.”
“Who said that?” Linda asked aggressively.
“It’s a well-known statistic,” Martin said.
“I don’t care,” Linda said. “I’m crazy about the ear of the driver.”
Willard chuckled.
“Wipe that complacent grin off your face, soldier,” Linda said.
Willard chuckled again and Linda went back to finishing the song, her head leaning against Martin’s arm, her face lit dimly by the dashboard glow, looking gay and young, framed by her loose dark hair.
Ten years after I get married, Martin thought, glancing sideways at his sister, I hope my wife and I feel like that on the way home after a night in the city.
Martin had arrived from California late that afternoon, after sending a telegram that he was giving up his job and was on his way to Europe and could he count on a bed and meal enroute. Linda had met him at the airport, looking the same, he thought, after the two years of separation, and they had picked up Willard at his office and had had a couple of drinks and a good dinner and an extravagant bottle of wine to celebrate Martin’s arrival. It was Friday and Willard didn’t have to work the next day, so they had gone to a nightclub and listened to a girl in a white dress singing French songs. Martin and Willard had taken turns dancing with Linda, and Linda had said, “Isn’t this nice? If you had given me more warning I’d have felt I’d have had to find a girl for you for the evening and there would’ve been four of us and the whole thing would’ve been ruined. Don’t you hate the number four?”
Martin was seven years younger than Linda, and her favorite brother. When he was still in college he had spent his summers with Linda and Willard, acting as spare man at parties, playing tennis with Willard, and endangering the lives of their two small sons, as Linda put it, teaching them how to swim and dive and ride bicycles and catch a baseball and fall out of trees.
“Oh, God,” Linda said as the car swung through an overgrown stone gate, “two years are too long, Martin. What’re we going to do without you when you’re in Europe?”
“Come and visit me,” Martin said.
“Listen to that,” Linda s
aid.
“It’s only overnight by plane.”
“You know anybody wants to give us a free ride?” She waved her hand at the dark woods outside the car window. “It’ll take ten years before we get through paying off Gruesome Acres.”
“It looks very nice.” Martin peered through the misted window at the dripping black woods. “Very rural.”
“It’s rural all right,” Linda said. “Seventeen acres of impenetrable underbrush.”
“Can’t you clear part of it,” Martin asked, “and grow something on it?”
“Taxes,” Willard said briefly, swinging out of the woods and into the circular driveway in front of a large brick house with white pillars, rising dimly out of the mist.
There were no lights showing downstairs, only a pale glimmer coming from a curtained window on the upper storey, and the house bulked impressively in the darkness.
“There ought to be at least one light left on at the entrance, Linda,” Willard said.
“It’s the new maid,” Linda said. “I tell her all the time, but she’s a demon for economy.”
Willard stopped the car and they all got out, Martin taking his bag off the back seat.
“Notice the exquisite architecture,” Linda said, as they climbed the steps and went between the pillars to the front door. “Spectral Greek.”
“Wait till you see the inside, though,” Willard said, opening the door and turning on the light. “It makes up for the whole thing. And the land around it is great for the kids.”
“It has one other glorious advantage,” Linda said, taking off her coat and throwing it across a chair in the wall-papered front hall. “The television reception is horrible.”
They went into the living room and Linda switched on the lamps and Willard poured them some whiskeys for Martin to admire the house on. The living room was big and airy and pleasant, with a clutter of paintings on the walls and a lot of books and magazines and small semiuseful objects not quite in place. Martin smiled, looking at it and recognizing his sister’s undisciplined, cheerful touch in the bright choice of colors, the profusion of vases, flowers, antique odds and ends, and in the air of comfortable disorder that the room presented now, at one o’clock in the morning, after it had been empty and unused all evening.