Happy, Happy, Happy (9 page)

Word quickly spread around campus that I had fish. Even a prominent former Louisiana legislator, who wanted to help me while I was in school, was one of my clients. When the politician paid me, he insisted that he was not buying the fish (selling game fish in Louisiana is illegal) but only paying for me to clean and dress them—to which I readily agreed.

Not everyone on campus was fond of my hobbies. After football practice one day, one of my coaches informed me that the dean of men wanted to see me. I wasn’t sure what I had done
wrong, but I knew they had me on something. I walked into his office, and he asked me to close the door.

“We have a problem,” he said. “Do you know what street you live on? Do you know the name of it?”

“Vetville?” I asked him.

“Let me refresh your memory,” he said. “You live on Scholar Drive.”

Apparently, the president of Louisiana Tech had given members of the board of trustees a tour of campus the day before.

“When he went to where you live, it wasn’t very scholarly,” the dean told me. “There were old boats, motors, duck decoys, and fishnets littering your front yard. He was embarrassed. This is an institution of higher learning.”

“That’s my equipment,” I told him.

“But everybody’s yard is mowed—except yours,” he replied.

“At least the frost will get it,” I said. “It will lay down flat as a pancake when the frost gets it.”

“It’s July,” the dean said. “Cut your grass.”

One summer the Louisiana Tech football coaches got me a job in Lincoln, Nebraska, as a tester on a pipeline that was being built. Kay loved it and thought it was the biggest adventure of her life, but I missed being in the woods and lakes back home. I could hardly stand it. We only had a company car, which I drove to work, and we lived in a tiny apartment and didn’t have a TV, so
Kay woke up every morning and walked miles and miles all over town. I feared Kay was about to die of boredom, so I brought her a little white kitten I found in a cornfield. We named it Snowball, and it was a lot of company for her. When we flew back to Louisiana at the end of the summer, we hid Snowball in a basket packed with sandwiches and travel necessities that we carried on the plane. That cat stayed with us in Louisiana for the next several years and became the first of her many pets.

By then, my interest in playing football was really beginning to wane. My game plan was to hunt and fish full-time and get a college education while doing it—putting as little effort into school as possible. The reason I went into education (I wound up getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, with a concentration in English) is because you have the summers off, as well as Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays. Consequently, I would have more time to hunt and fish. The only reason I wanted a college degree was so that when people thought I was dumb, I could whip out the sheepskins. Unfortunately, Louisiana Tech didn’t offer a degree in ducks.

Unfortunately, Louisiana Tech didn’t offer a degree in ducks.

My interest in football was secondary to ducks, but it was paying for my education. I remember riding on a bus going to ball games and scoping out the woods we passed as to hunting possibilities.
I just didn’t have my mind on football. As a result, I had a checkered playing career. In spite of my God-given talent, I was never fully devoted to the game. Even in junior high, it was merely a social event. When I was playing defensive halfback, I would lightheartedly wave to people in the crowd and grin at things shouted.

I had in my mind that football was a game, something you did solely for entertainment. You go out there and win or lose, but it’s certainly not life or death. If you did well, you won. If you didn’t do too well, you didn’t win. But as far as making a career of football, that never entered my mind—I didn’t see the worth of it. I couldn’t make much sense out of making a living from work that entailed large, violent men chasing me around—men who are paid for one reason: to run me down and stomp me into the dirt. I just didn’t see it.

Despite football not being my primary interest, I still had a decent career at Louisiana Tech. I played quarterback for the Bulldogs from 1965 to 1967 and was the starter in 1966, throwing for more than three hundred yards against Southeastern Louisiana University. During preseason camp the next year, I looked up and saw a flock of geese flying over the practice field and thought to myself, “What am I doing out here?” I walked off the practice field and never went back.

The coaches came to my apartment the next morning and found me cleaning a deer in my kitchen.

“It ain’t season,” I told them. “I had to bring the meat inside.”

No matter how hard they tried, the coaches couldn’t persuade me to come back. The quarterback behind me on the depth chart was a guy named Terry Bradshaw, who was a lot more serious about football than I was. Terry started the next three seasons at Louisiana Tech and was the number one pick in the 1970 NFL draft. He became the first quarterback to win four Super Bowl championships, with the Pittsburgh Steelers, and was selected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I still tell Terry that if I had never left, he wouldn’t have won four Super Bowl rings.

The quarterback behind me on the depth chart was a guy named Terry Bradshaw.

After I graduated from college, former Louisiana Tech running back Robert Brunet, who was playing in the National Football League, encouraged me to come to Washington, DC, and try out for his team, the Washington Redskins. Vince Lombardi had just been hired as coach.

“You won’t beat out Sonny Jurgensen,” he told me. “But they’ve got this hot-dog rookie coming up, Joe Theismann. Robertson, you can beat him hands down. No problem. You make the team, they’ll pay you sixty thousand dollars a year.”

Some people might think that was pretty good money in the 1960s, but it sure seemed like a pretty stressful way to make
a living. I told Brunet, “I don’t know—you’re up there in Washington, DC, and you miss duck season every year. Do you think I’d stay?” He took a long look at me and said, “Nah, you wouldn’t stay.”

As far as I was concerned, my football career was over. And as it turned out, my career choice of chasing ducks and whatnot turned out to be a pretty good one. Besides, at the time, I had a young wife and a baby boy. I had their future to worry about, too.

I didn’t know I was about to find out how good of a woman my wife really was.

Rule No. 5 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

Always Wear Shoes (Your Feet Will Feel Better)

A
ccording to the Guinness book of world records, a police constable in India set a world record last year by running 150 kilometers (93.2 miles) in twenty-four hours in his bare feet. A couple of years earlier, a forty-one-year-old man in Oregon ran 102.6 miles barefoot on a rubberized track in less than one day. I’m not sure why Guinness World Records doesn’t recognize his
feat
as the record—it seems to me the guy who ran farthest would be the record holder, but what do I know?

While I might not be Zola Budd or a world-record holder, I know neither of those cats have anything on me. When I was about twenty-five or twenty-six years old, I chose to go shoeless for about two years. I simply didn’t put any shoes on my feet day after day after day. Here’s what I found out: if you don’t wear
shoes for about two years, you develop pads on the bottom of your feet made of about a half inch of solid, thick, tough callus. You wouldn’t believe how tough a man’s feet can get! You can literally walk on hot coals—or briars, hot pavement, cold ground in winter—without any shoes. I went duck-hunting with no shoes at all—no waders and no hip boots—just walked out into the water like it was summertime.

We’d go duck-hunting in mid-January, and everybody would be covered up with clothes, but I would be barefoot. We would take people on guided hunts, and one of them would look down and say, “Good grief! This cat doesn’t have any shoes on!” I went like it was a summer’s day, even if it was only thirty-five degrees outside. I guess you condition your mind and train yourself to be oblivious to pain. On many nights, Miss Kay would have to remove embedded thorns from my feet with a long needle and magnifying glass. Of course, my hunting buddies and I were drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle, so that probably numbed the pain.

After I gave up football at Louisiana Tech, I started running with a pretty rough crowd. It was during the turbulent 1960s, when people my age questioned everything about the government and society in general. The Vietnam War was raging, and I wasn’t sure why my brother Si had been sent to Southeast Asia to fight in some country we’d never heard of. It was an era of disillusionment.
The status quo and old ways of doing things were being scrutinized with a jaundiced eye. Buttons proclaiming, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”—and a lot worse—were being worn in colleges and elsewhere nationwide.

I listened to the protest songs of Bob Dylan; John Lennon; Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Byrds; and others, and owned a number of their recordings. Clint Eastwood’s rebel roles on the screen appealed strongly to me. Years later, when we started making our hunting movies, some of the Eastwood phrases and gritty realism still resonated with me. We had parties and everybody got drunk except for Kay, who wanted nothing to do with the tomfoolery. It went on from when I was about twenty-one or twenty-two until I was about twenty-eight. We got drunk on anything we could get our hands on—running wild and duck-hunting.