North Dallas Forty (32 page)

On the first day of camp Machado took twenty milligrams of Dexamyl to run “B.A.’s Mile.” The linemen had to finish the four laps around the track in six minutes and thirty seconds to prove they had come to camp in condition. Gino took four hearts before he left the locker room. He went blind on the third lap and fell down six times before he crossed the finish line. It took him over eight minutes but he finished. He lay in the dummy shack while everyone else went to lunch. He was still there when we returned for the afternoon workout.

The cab to the stadium took me through Central Park.

“You afraid you ain’t gonna get a seat?” the driver asked. “You’re goin’ to the stadium pretty early.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I know.”

“I went to see them bums last week, when the Colts was here,” he continued, alternating his attention between the road and the back seat. “The Giants stink. They ain’t hadda good team since they got rid of Huff an’ all them guys—remember? How can they run a football team and be so stupid?”

“The same way they run everything else, I guess.”

“Well, them Texas boys’ll kick their ass, I’ll tell ya. I got twenty bucks on it.”

“Invest your winnings in real estate,” I advised.

Two cabs, doors open and trunk lids up, were parked at the players’ entrance to Yankee Stadium. The trainers were unloading bags of tape and medication.

“Phil, grab a couple of these bags,” Eddie Rand ordered as I stepped away from my cab.

“Sure.” I shifted my flight bag to my left hand, tucked my record player up under my arm, and crabbed two black medical kits from the cluster stacked behind the cabs.

I started down the ramp toward the uniformed guard defending the entrance. As the distance closed between us he began to eye me nervously for some identification.

“Player,” I said casually, looking him straight in the eye. He waved me past.

Just act like you belong. It was the advice my older brother had given me to get me into bars before my twenty-first birthday. It was the only thing he ever said that made sense. An All-American in high school and college, he graduated with honors and became a successful high school coach. Last spring he quit his job, left his wife and three girls, and ran off with the senior-class valedictorian. She came back after three weeks. No one has heard from him since.

Instead of heading down the tunnel to the locker room, I turned up one of the ramps leading into the stadium seats. I walked down ten rows and sat. The ground crew was removing the tarpaulin covering the patches of green and brown that made up the playing field.

In a far corner of the stadium a high school band was countermarching to the shallow sounds of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” done in march time. The band members were in full uniform but wore coats and sweaters against the damp morning chill. A row of shiny silver sousaphones executed the gyrations of a routine that seemed to combine the techniques of a marine close-order drill team with the intricate moves of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

Several rows in front of me a television-camera crew was setting up. The camera operator was talking into his headset to the director in the mobile van, discussing just what America was going to see today.

Near the New York bench three men stood in a semicircle, chatting and pointing to different parts of the playing field. One of the men was Frank Gifford. I didn’t recognize the other two.

I sat for several minutes trying to imagine how I would look and feel down there on the field in a few short hours.

Two concessionaires in aprons and tricornered paper hats walked up and stood two rows in front of me. They surveyed the field.

“Hey—” the shorter of the two, a man in his forties, nudged his companion, “—that’s Frank Gifford over there.”

“Where?”

“There, the guy in the trench coat.” The shorter man leaned over and let his friend sight down his arm and out his pointing finger.

“Oh yeah,” the taller responded. “Hey—hey—Frank ... Frank Gifford!” Both men waved and called frantically.

Gifford heard his name and turned toward the sound.

“Hey, Frank,” the shorter man shouted, “we need you out there today. Whattaya say? Huh?”

The man who for more than a decade had lived this city’s football fantasies waved back and returned to his conversation.

“What a great guy,” the tall man said, as they turned back toward the tunnel entrance. “Just a great guy.”

His partner seemed equally excited but a serious look chilled his eyes as the two passed me.

“You know,” the taller huckster began, “somebody told me that he wears a hairpiece. Do you believe that?”

“Frank Gifford? Are you kidding?”

“I didn’t believe it either.”

“Not Frank Gifford.”

They disappeared down the ramp.

I ran my eyes up and down the field, trying to fathom its condition. It looked soft, but I couldn’t really tell anything until I got on it. I considered mud cleats, deciding to wait until after the pregame warmup before making up my mind. Combination baseball and football fields like Yankee Stadium were difficult to gauge during wet weather, some parts being wet and soggy, others dry and quite hard. It had something to do with the drainage being set up for baseball.

Mud cleats, helpful on wet, loose ground because of their excessive length, were a danger in dry areas for the same reason. In Cleveland I sprained an ankle by hitting the dry clay of the infield at full speed wearing mud cleats. Suddenly the consideration of which cleats to wear struck me as foolish. I wasn’t even sure I would get into the game, let alone cover all areas of the field.

Standing up, I felt a stitch in my back. I remained in the aisle for several minutes, rotating my trunk and rubbing my back, trying to work out the muscle spasm.

They say you should quit when you still hurt on Sunday from last Sunday. I wasn’t sure I wasn’t still hurting from exhibition season. I entered the tunnel and began winding my way through the catacombs to the dressing room.

Clusters of men in paper hats and chance aprons stood around talking and laughing. Rubbing their hands together against the morning chill, some of the men nodded hello, but most just stopped what they were doing and stared at me as I passed.

“Where the hell have you been?” Eddie Rand screamed as I entered the dressing room. “You’ve got all the flesh-colored tape.”

“Sorry, Eddie,” I said, tossing the medical bags on top of a blue equipment trunk. I walked to my locker and sat down.

My nervous system was beginning to take over, trying to get my body and mind into the right chemical balance to survive the afternoon with a minimal amount of damage, whether it was to be a physical beating on the field or mental degeneration on the bench. I was becoming extremely tired and wanted to lie down and pull a blanket over my head. Stretching and yawning, I stood up and began to undress.

Hopping from foot to foot because of the cold concrete against my bare feet, I checked around to see who else had arrived. Tony Douglas stood naked on one of the wooden tables, the trainer tightly strapping the inside of the linebacker’s right knee. The knee was missing both inside and outside cartilage, and the medial ligament had been totally reconstructed with tissue from his thigh. Without elastic tape, Tony wouldn’t be able to set foot on the field. It was a great invention. I have been making it on elastic tape—and codeine—for years.

Gino Machado was sitting on a towel, leaning back against an equipment trunk. By the look of his eyes and his tapping feet, he was already well into his day’s dosage of Dexamyl. We exchanged silent waves, though we were not more than twenty feet apart.

I walked to my locker to sort my equipment, already neatly arrayed according to tradition by the equipment manager. Shoulder pads turned upside-down on the top shelf of the metal cage, with my newly polished helmet sitting in the neck hole. Hanging from hooks inside the locker were my game pants and jersey.

On the floor of the locker were neatly shined and newly laced game shoes and a tidy stack of miscellaneous knee, thigh, forearm, elbow, and hip pads. The hip and knee pads were squares of half-inch sponge rubber. The thigh pads were quarter-inch thicknesses of molded white plastic. I made the pads myself and if I was injured in a spot protected by my homemade pads I could be fined as much as five hundred dollars. But they were lighter, more maneuverable pieces of equipment. As injuries slowed me, I made it up by cutting down on the weight of my pads, either paring them down or discarding them altogether. If things kept up as they had been, I would soon be hitting the old gridiron stark naked.

“Phil,” Eddie Rand yelled, “you ready?”

“Yeah.”

With practiced efficiency he quickly taped my ankles, locking my left and leaving my right free. He used a base of elastic tape to allow more flexibility, then put the final straps on with white adhesive tape for extra support. He finished the second ankle and slapped the bottom of my foot. I rolled over on my stomach and he began spreading analgesic on the backs of my legs. Lifting my shirt, he rubbed the hot cinnamon into my back. At the end of the rubdown he slapped my ass and I immediately stood up on the table while he wrapped both thighs with Ace Bandages to retain heat and give additional bracing. When he finished, I stepped down, pulled a new elastic knee brace over my right knee, grabbed a roll of white tape and walked to my locker.

I dug inside my coat and grabbed a cigar and lit it. I turned on my portable stereo and began sorting through my phonograph records, looking for one that, in addition to the various tapes, wraps, balms, drugs, and chemicals normally produced by the organs of my body under stress, might put me in an advantageous psychosomatic condition in which to endure the afternoon. I selected Country Joe and the Fish.

“Gimme an F ...”

I turned my game pants inside out and inserted the knee and thigh pads into their respective pockets and turned the pants right side out again. The thigh pads were in the wrong pockets; it often happened because turning the pants inside out disoriented my already stricken mind. I changed the pads and pulled the pants on and slid my game jersey over my head.

“Be the first one on your block

To have your boy come home in a box ...”

The silver game pants had a satin front, but the backs of the legs were made of an elastic fabric similar to that used in ski pants. The pants fit snugly, like a glove, giving a strangely secure feeling, like being hugged by an old friend. They also gave my damaged legs the feeling or illusion of additional support.

“Whoopee we’re all gonna die ...”

I rummaged through the pads in the bottom of my locker and found the thin piece of molded plastic I had made to protect my crushed back. I slipped it into place beneath my jersey, securing it quickly with tape. No sense letting anybody see me do it. Country Joe and his pals blasted into the first of “The Streets of Your Town” as I spread a towel on the floor and lay down, my head resting on a pile of elbow pads.

“As I walk around the streets of your town

And try not to bring myself down ...”

I stared up at the ceiling and listened to the other people in the dressing room: trainers, teammates, equipment men, lower-echelon stadium maintenance people chattering nervously about a variety of topics ranging from the coming game to “nigger pussy” to “The Carol Burnett Show.” Joe McDonald and the Fish tinned out of the cheap speakers.

“The tears of the insane bounce like bullets off my brain ...”

I closed my eyes and tried to rest, the chemicals in my blood flashing on my eyelids images of pass patterns, defensive backs, wobbly passes, angry linebackers, and Charlotte Caulder.

I finished the cigar and the record started over. Sitting up, I pulled on my blue-and-white striped knee socks and taped them at the tops of my calves. I folded two strips of white adhesive tape in half lengthwise leaving the sticky side out, and wrapped them around my legs just above the ankles. Then I drew my wool sweat socks on and up over the tape, squeezing them tightly against the strips with my hands. The tape would anchor the socks neatly in place and keep them from falling down during the course of the game; not a necessity but a definite plus for one who wants to look well groomed in front of fifty-six thousand attending people and untold millions of hypnotics watching at home. Nothing is more unsightly than sweat socks sliding down and bunching around one’s ankles.

“New York City good-bye.

New York City good-bye

Good-bye New York City ...”

The outside door banged open and shut and a rush of frothing athletes, thinly disguised in suits and sport coats, came crashing into the dressing room. The stream of players so neatly dressed and carrying attaché cases looked like five o’clock at State Farm Mutual.

The sights and sounds of my arriving teammates increased my anxiety. One thirty
P.M.
eastern standard time steadily approached. My mind wandered over the game plan checking to be sure I recalled all the adjustments that made B.A.’s multiple offense so deadly.

“Normal people rush through the dawn

with their normal people faces on ...”

I shut off the record player before B.A. sent an assistant over with a directive, but the music still bounced around in my skull, mixing with roll-zone tendencies, man-to-man coverages, and the anticipation of good-looking women in the stands within eyeshot of the field.

“Kickers, quarterbacks, and receivers on the field in fifteen minutes.”

Sliding the kangaroo game shoes around my tape-encased feet, I carefully laced one. I pushed the lace through the patented heel-lock strap that ran across my Achilles tendon and tugged the strings until the strap pulled taut along the top of my heel and the shoe closed snugly around my foot. I repeated the process with the other shoe, stood up and stamped a couple of times to seat the shoes, and then clacked back to the training tables. The conspicuous click and added height of the cleats further increased my awareness of the coming kickoff.