Life Among Giants (15 page)

8

I don't know why I'm so dismissive of my National Football League years. Regret, perhaps, a kind of mourning, what might have been.
Th
ough when you think about it, the whole thing is pretty impressive, a history few can claim. I guess I just don't actually think about it much. But I promised to fill those years in. So:

After my solid career at Princeton, and after a particularly big senior year (record running yardage, record scoring in the league, positive winning percentage), I reluctantly entered the NFL draft, where I was a seventh-round pick of the Miami Dolphins. My initial salary wasn't stratospheric but more than my father had ever made, about standard for rookies at the time: $42,500.

Th
e kind of thing you call your folks about, but of course I couldn't do that: my folks were dead. Instead I stood in the hallway of my dorm, gloomy March afternoon, and called Kate.

“Dickhead,” she said.

By then I didn't expect much more from her: “Kate, it's a big deal.”

“You can talk to Jack.”

It took a while for him to come to the phone—maybe she just threw it down for him to find—me there in my regular student housing, not a guy to join any fraternities or secret societies or even to live off campus—but when he finally answered he was generous. He had no clue about professional football or the NFL draft; still he was warm and excited for me, apologetic about Kate. “She's climbing out of it,” he said, the usual optimism. Climbing out of her tailspin after college, he meant.

And he said, “She's playing tennis again. Wants to get on the tour. A rough road, David, as you know. But by god, she's finding her way, four years since she touched a racket.” A year or so after the deaths of our parents she'd quit the Yale team, but not before she'd made a scene or two, flinging herself on the clay of a tournament court her very last game and crying into it after
winning,
no tears of joy, her face and her whites completely orange by the time they picked her up. “She's back up to weight, she's beating the club pro. I mean drubbing him, little cocky bastard, nice to see. She's going to Forest Hills unseeded next month, if all goes well.”

“I was insensitive,” I said.

But Jack didn't catch any irony: “You have every right to your excitement, David. And she can't wait to see you play. We can't wait.”

“Well, you'll have to wait, I guess. I'm just going to be a scrub, and only if I make the spring cut.”

“You'll make the cut, David.”

I made the cut, all right, didn't call with the news.

T
H
AT
J
UNE, WITHOUT
Kate's particular blessing, I rented out the family house and furnishings and drove to Miami, same old Volvo wagon Jack had loaned and then gifted years before, taking only what would fit. A beautiful city, I quickly decided, scruffy and a little mean, with shark's teeth among the shells on the beaches and good Cuban music clubs back in the neighborhoods, black beans and rice. Which I mention because I was more excited about the shark's teeth and beans and music than about football, or anyway quite numb about football, nothing new, a vacuum of feeling that Coach Keshevsky had tried to fill repeatedly, talks in his office, talks at his home, talks in the bleachers at Big Brothers/Big Sisters boxing matches in Trenton: “You're an all-time great, David. If only you'd love the game. You must love it more than life itself!” He also liked to point out that there were some five million kids playing high-school football, some fifty-five thousand playing NCAA college ball, but only some twelve hundred in the NFL, only about two hundred draftees each year, of which at most ten were quarterbacks. I'd barely made it, was my only observation.

On the Dolphins I was third quarterback behind the superstar Bob Griese and the remarkable Don Strock, both of them single-minded lovers of football—life itself, you bet—never quite my friends, though frequent hosts on their deep-sea fishing boats off-season and in their handsome houses. I worked very hard at football, arrived early for practice every Wednesday through Friday, got to the airport two hours early on Saturday mornings, or got to the team's (secret) Miami hotel on Saturday afternoons, first player there.

I played nearly every game those first few years, it's worth remembering, if only to set and hold the ball for Garo Yepremian, our brilliant All-American Armenian-Cypriot place kicker. I was cycled in for particular running plays, too, short yardage mostly, fourth and one. Don Shula, of course, was head coach, a guy who always had time for me, who called me in nearly weekly my first couple of years. “Son, you were great.”

Great? I felt I'd done nothing, game after game.

“You're part of the master plan, mister. You're right in the middle of it. Big picture. Future payoffs. Work your way up. Pay your dues.”

He'd put me in his beautiful creaking leather chair at the big desk in his chilly office at the stadium, rub my shoulders absently. “It's a mental game,” he'd say, kneading away. “And you are great at it. One of the very best. A mental game. But try telling your body that! Body says, follow me!” And having separated mind and body, he'd enumerate my flaws, which were all in the area of attention, focus, concentration, edge, the dumb body taking over and leaving mind behind. “Mental, mental. A mental game.”

Coach Shula seemed to know an awful lot about me that I hadn't told him, asked the team for silence in the locker room on or near every October 30, “In memory of a great dad and mom.” I'd play like a monster next couple of games, get to play whole quarters, even an entire second half once when Strock puked from the flu, a good half, too: three touchdowns (the first a faked field goal), nearly 200 yards passing, over 200 rushing, big spread in the
Miami Herald
in the armchair edition next day. And several of the other teams in the league developed the “Lizard Defense” against my goal-line work: the backfield standing as tall as they could behind their frontline, a nice idea, though they forgot I could pass, always left me a receiver.

Th
e professional game is much faster than the college version, much more painful both physically and emotionally, far more intense, more cerebral, too, as Shula never stopped saying, less fun, never a moment to rest, twice as many games to pump up for, always the game coming at you, the coaches, your teammates, the opposing players, all of it bearing down, very much more a business than college ball (which is a business, too, just not your own). Your NFL contract states that you are
paid to practice.
Th
e games, they're just supposed to be gravy.

I memorized playbooks and signals and patterns like an understudy learning the big role; at practice I played the part of opposing quarterback and took the blows in blitz-formation trials. I threw the ball in pattern drills, too, nailed the receivers (many of whom I'd idolized from my junior high school years forward), passes as hard as I could make them, which was very hard most days, drew complaints. But Coach only grinned and said to throw harder. I was surrounded by men as hungry as I, hungrier, and all of them more dedicated. I was no longer the fastest man on the field, and no longer tallest, no longer smartest either, not even most tragic (that honor went to Cleveland Morris, whose entire family had famously died in a hotel fire at his sister's wedding). And I was not the best quarterback, though I could put on a pretty good show.

Th
ose were winning years, the Dolphins' golden era, and really, it was more than I ever thought I deserved: two Super Bowl rings, muscular pay raises year after year, plenty of attention, expiation for the sin of quitting on my father, I mean quitting football way back when, quitting the game when the game was our only bond.

K
ATE CLAIMED IN
later years to have never finished at Yale, but she does have a degree—I've seen the diploma. It must have come in the mail, or maybe Jack picked it up: she refused to attend her graduation. What she didn't finish was tennis, so maybe that's the confusion. Anyway, I was privy to almost nothing in her life at that time, and anything I did know was because of Jack, who called every Tuesday and filled me in. Kate would seldom take the phone, and the times she did she was overexcited, often incoherent. Jack tended to leave out the bad news, talked a lot about tennis. Her game was erratic when she resumed playing after Yale, but she was more powerful than ever when she was on, and eventually she got seeded on the women's tour, peaking at number eighteen or so—eighteen in the world, I mean, very serious. She had a serve no one could hit; she was strong and car-crash fast. She was beautiful, too, sneer and all, and that made her a natural for certain kinds of endorsements, the tough girl, the rebel, the babe: Virginia Slims, Victoria's Secret, cervical caps and spermicidal jellies (“I whack 'em with my racket” was her joke).
Th
ere's no way not to count her a success.

But Kate could do strange things under pressure, especially when ahead, impulsive acts that got her disqualified from matches, like leaping over the net and hitting her own lob back to her own empty court. How do you score that? She spanked a line judge with her bare hand, bent him over, pulled down his shorts, and walloped him, film that made the evening news. Really, everyone loved her—easy when you didn't know her. She lasted three seasons before the final blowup. I still don't know all the details, just that her team's plane had to make an emergency landing at Heathrow, where she was met by security and jailed, later hospitalized, her first full-blown breakdown, something in the bipolar range, certain doctors said; schizoid tendencies, said others.
Th
is was before people began to realize how serious the symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome might be, and how delayed, not that I'm offering a diagnosis.

Back in the states, months of misdirected rehab, and then, with her usual furious energy, she started on a graduate degree in social work, left after a partial semester, her usual paranoid complaints. No matter—Jack had a grander vision, the two of them traveling to Egypt then camel-trekking through all of North Africa to Morocco, where they lived in some splendor for an entire expatriate sabbatical year.
Th
ere were weekly letters from Jack, occasional notes and gifts from her (a fez!). Home again, she got it into her head to begin a career, though she had no particular career in mind. So several years of assorted jobs, from Christmas-tree farmhand to furniture salesperson, from executive assistant at an alternative energy company to philosophy-bookstore clerk (where she may have had an affair with the hunchbacked owner), from day-care manager to tennis-camp coach. I'm filling all this in from later stories she'd tell when the mood struck her, wildly funny stories, and dark ones, very dark. Whatever steam she managed to build up at each job, she got fired from all of them.

I felt powerfully that I could have prevented her pain, equally powerfully knew that I could not, walked around with my head split thinking about her. I loved her, adored her, but was antsy in her presence, too much of Dad there. She and Jack visited me in Florida a number of times in the off-season, and generally we went somewhere else for the week or two they'd allotted—the Keys, the Everglades, the Gulf Coast. But all I ever wanted was to get back to my workout schedule, all the stuff Coach Shula put in front of me as I worked to become franchise quarterback. Our visits were drawn-out disjunctions moderated by Jack and punctuated by diving on the reefs at Pennecamp, say, or paddling canoes on the Seminole Trail through lost mangrove thickets, athletic adventures our best bet.

I
LIVED
S
PARTAN,
never bought a house, instead rented a series of fairly nice but plain apartments in one or another of the new towers on South Beach. I bought a table, two chairs, a single bed, a cheap television, one large bookshelf, and wherever those things were was my home, walls painted real-estate linen-white, no art, just the big and then bigger windows looking out high and then higher over the ocean, the increasingly dazzling heights from balconies, always a Gulfstream tumult out there, great ships passing day and night, the water a Kate's-eye blue, Sylphide's-eye green near the beach.

For a while there were women. In fact, and unhappily, I was featured in the
Miami Herald'
s “Ten Most Eligible Bachelors” article, posed for photos with my shirt off and butt showing, stupid, bales of letters, temptation I never entertained.

But I dated here and there (the league issued endless memos on conduct, recommended written consent from any sex partners, definitely a mood killer over dinner), women the team wives introduced me to. I had only one real girlfriend in those years, the sister of a teammate, an excitable Detroit girl named Honey (she was sweet and she stuck, she said). And don't get me wrong: I enjoyed Honey's sense of humor, loved her bad habits (red wine and soap operas and screaming fits around policemen), enjoyed her rousingly inventive sexuality, also something I hope it's fair to call her African-American sensibility, a certain kind of heat and light, a skeptical charm, incisive judgment about absolutely everything, no dithering, never. She was a great cook, and after the initial year or so of intense and frequent sex our intimacy was about eating, anything to do with food—buying it together, searching out recipes together, bringing home ideas from our many trips (she was a Ford Motor spokesperson, always on the road for trade shows). She got plump, then plumper yet, very sexy in my eyes, but lost her job with Ford: she couldn't fit in those narrow spokesmodel gowns anymore.