Once a Runner (17 page)

"Well, Coach!" said the old man heartily, rising to shake hands. "Have a seat, my boy. Make yourself comfortable." In the battle of the giant offices, Prigman had it all over Dick Doobey, even though his carpet did not bear a giant Daryl the Swamp Dawg. It was decorated much more in the taste of a former state supreme court justice. Dick Doobey envied the dignified brown and tan hues that commanded the respect that his colorful mishmash of caricatures and trophies never seemed to elicit. The aura of the office was, in a word, impressive, and Dick Doobey never sat in that chair without feeling he was near the very top.

"Well, what kind of spring practice are we going to have this year?" Prigman asked. Doobey had not expected this kind of question, so frenzied had been his other problems of late. He started to launch into his routine about some junior college transfers and redshirts that were going to be "of real great help to us out there next year," but he didn't get very far before Prigman cut him off.

"Fine, fine. I know what some of our detractors are saying about last year's record, but I know you're going to pull the program together once you get your feet on the ground here."

"Well, yes sir, I feel that I'm just now getting to the point where I can..."

"Fine, fine. Coach, what I wanted to ask you about..." he reached over to a corner of his huge polished desk and held up a legal-sized Xeroxed page "... is this. Do you know anything about it?"

Dick Doobey took the sheet, held it away from his face as if it were a small serpent, and studied it carefully. He tried to act as though he had never seen the likes before. Prigman knew better. At the top of the page was a paragraph that began: "We, the athletes of Southeastern University, hereby wish to make known certain grievances..." The page Doobey held contained 38 signatures. There were other sheets as well, and Doobey knew that all in all, about 125 varsity athletes, including many of his own football players, had signed the petition.

"Well, sir, I do happen to know something about this particular matter."

"Perhaps you'd like to fill me in." There was the faintest hint of menace in the old man's voice.

"Well, sir, this morning an athlete from the track team dropped by a stack of these, uh, petitions. It seems that quite a few of the athletes have signed them and ..."

"How many?"

"Well, sir, I don't know exactly but somewhere I would say, oh, around 100 or so, sir, and..."

"A hundred!" He practically shouted it. Dick Doobey felt himself pressing backwards in the soft chair.

"Well, yes sir, more or less, sir ..."

"Any football men among 'em?"

"Oh, I don't know, sir, I didn't check the lists out very carefully or any ..."

"I
asked
... if there were any football men ...
on the lists?"
Very quietly, this last.

"Yes sir! There were, oh forty or so, I would say offhand, sir."

"Forty!" Prigman rested his chin on the steeple of his hands, turning his chair to the side, either deep in thought or too angry to speak. Doobey prayed to God it was the former.

The old man swung the chair back around and leaned forward, skewering Doobey against the chair with a stare that seemed a physical force. It was the kind of gesture Prigman had developed to a high art, and he noted with satisfaction Doobey's bobbing Adam's apple.

"Well,
Coach
Doobey, perhaps you can explain to me what in the devil all this is about?" Doobey started to say something but the old man continued.

"I mean, just for instance what is this stuff about 'unwarranted neo-gestapo raids upon athletes' rooms ...' and 'militaristic hair and dress regulations . , .' Perhaps you could explain just what in the hell is happening on
my
campus,
Coach
Doobey!" He was half standing in front of his chair, but slowly forced himself to sit back down, giving the impression of rage brought under control only with great effort. Doobey had been thinking all morning what he would say at this particular time, and though he thought he had it worked out several times, it all left him now. He stared at the petition as if it would provide him with some clue.

"Well, Mr. President, it seems that some of the athletes are a little upset over our new hair and dress code, sir, and then there was an incident at the track dormitory the other night which was not authorized on my part and which perhaps was a little, uh, unwarranted, I mean, trying to be subjective about the whole thing and all.,."

"What in the hell are you babbling about, man? What hair and dress code? What incident?"

"Well sir, the code was a little idea of mine to try to boost morale a little, sir ..." Doobey told the old man, in the best way he could, what had been going on during the past few weeks. When he finished, the elder man sat sideways again, in deep thought. After a while, Doobey thought he had been forgotten such was the length of the old man's meditation. Finally, Prigman swung around to face Doobey, but he spoke so sofdy the coach had to lean forward to hear.

"I had a call from Walter Davis this morning, you know Walt?"

"Well sir, I..."

"He's the UPI man out of Miami, Coach Doobey. But I couldn't talk to him right away because I had Norman Johnson on the other line. You know Norm?" Still very quiet.

"Yes sir, I..."

"He's the AP man out of Miami. Well, it seems these representatives of our nation's wire services were pretty much interested in the same thing..." He held up the petition with one hand, tapping it briskly with the back of his other hand.

"...the same thing as the fellow from
Sports Illustrated—
I've never had the pleasure of talking to those folks before— and the sports editors of about twelve or so major newspapers around the Southeast. Roberta has been real good about that. Anything with a circulation below 50,000 and the call gets diverted to a vice president or a dean. Now, of course, I don't know how many calls they had ..."

"I talked to quite a few myself and ..."

"I'm not
interested!"

"Yes
sir!"

"What I am interested in," calmly now, "is exactly what in the name of all that's holy are we going to do about this thing now that you have so blithely gotten it rolling for us,
Coach
Doobey?"

"Well I..."

"I mean, do you realize the implications, sir, of an athletes' revolt? Do you know, can you appreciate the fact that we've just gone through several years of strife and violence on our campuses because of our country's selfless efforts in Vietnam? And that throughout that time of crisis our athletes have been our mainstay, our rock? No matter what kind of crap was going on everywhere else, our boys were out there every Saturday, hitting hard, blocking clean, going at it like there was no tomorrow, giving it the old guts-balls
college try.
Why, those boys have been carrying on, in our darkest hour, our very American traditions!"

Doobey perked up. "Why yes sir, that's exacdy why ..."

"I'm not
through.
And now, Coach Doobey, now just as our athletes had come to symbolize all that was good and loyal and patriotic about our country, now we find them running around and ... and ...
signing petitions!"

"I'm as surprised as you are sir!"

"Surprised
batshit!
" He picked up another sheet of paper. "Sideburns not to be lower than a line extending perpendicular from the bottom tip of the earlobe ...' Where did you get such ... such
notions?"
His contempt was barely contained.

"Well, sir, some of them I picked up from my military training..."

"Mmmmmmmm."

"... some of them were suggested by assistant coach Slattery, uh, he came up with the one about shirts with no collars ..."

"Collars," said Prigman, miserably.

"... and some of them I just sort of made up myself, sir." "Somehow I might have guessed that one all by myself," said Prigman very softly to the ceiling.

Their conference went on into the afternoon. Prigman, his rage somewhat mollified, now concentrated on the pragmatics of solving the problem at hand. He pretty much knew what Doobey was going to tell him anyway, but was not about to forgo the pleasure of his pound of flesh. He would deal further with this dodo son of Sidecar's later; for the time being he was content to watch the involuntary quiver of fear that ran through the portly body every time he emphasized the word
coach.
But this was a time for action; policy had to be formulated, the media had to be dealt with. It called for swift, clear, imminendy intelligent decision-making. It required, in short, the kind of grit that Prigman proudly reflected was precisely the reason he was where he was. Secretly, he relished the prospects.

"Who brought the petitions to your office?"

"It was a track man. A Quenton Cassidy, sir. He just dropped them off."

"Did he say anything when he left them?"

"Yes. He told Mary Lou, that's my secretary, that he would be glad to talk the situation over with me at our mutual convenience."

"At your..."

"Mutual convenience, that's what he said, sir." "Jesus H. Christ."

22. Brady Grapehouse

Qver the whirlpool in the large training room a hand-lettered sign read: You can't make the CLUB Sitting in the TUB Brady Grapehouse presided here and since he ding waters sometimes had not so much to do with real physical injuries as with providing a good place to hide from a hurtful world, the sign—like everything else in this domain—was his idea.

He had been the head trainer at Southeastern for 10 years before Dick Doobey arrived as football coach. Many genera-dons of athletes felt a single emotion for Brady: love, pure and unabashed. If an interrogator were to corner the toughest, meanest son of a bitch of a lineman from among Brady's former customers and ask him point blank if he loved Brady Grapehouse, the lineman would say: "Godamn right I love Brady Grapehouse.
Everybody
loves Brady Grapehouse." Everybody except Dick Doobey, who hated Brady Grapehouse.

It was probably the love he generated among his athletes that did Brady in; everyone knew that Dick Doobey had told him his contract would not be renewed in order to bring in Zip Simmons, a sycophantic dolt Doobey knew from the Army, who he liked having around because he was one of the few grownups Doobey had ever been around who didn't make him feel at least a little dim-witted.

Like many men who found competence puzzling, Doobey did not like to have much of it around him at any one time.

Brady was nearly a caricature of himself. Short and round, he always had a cold stump of a cigar in his mouth (there was speculation he bought them that way from some furtive supplier). He had short wavy black hair flecked with gray; he gave the impression not so much of age as of having been around. He moved around the training room gracefully on the balls of his feet like the old boxer he was. Had he been in the service, he would have been the tough old top sergeant whom everyone would admit, when cross-eyed drunk, was a pretty good son of a bitch.

Brady had seen them all. Hot shot All-American quarterbacks, hostile giant linemen, seven-foot basketball freaks, flashy tennis stars, future pro golfers—most of whom would make hundreds of thousands of dollars with their incredible legs, hands and eyes. All of these were mixed in with the myriad ranks of steady performers, who were (though they didn't realize it at all) at the pinnacle of a life destined to peak so early that the remaining long slide is not so much a career as a wistful reminiscence of days when poetic deeds were the order of the day.

Brady ministered to them all with the same gruff efficiency. They would come to him, at times when they were physically quite well, tapping on the glass partition of his fishbowl office in the training room, usually in the morning when there was no taping going on and the place was a cool, tiled chapel.

"Uh, Brade," they would say, a little hangdog, "Brade, you gotta secont?"

"Gotta secont? Gotta secont? Now what else would I have better to do than sit around here jaw-boning with one of you jacklegs all mornin'?" The door would close and he would take it on. He was an uncle, priest, medical advisor, psychiatrist. They came to him with things they couldn't discuss with their closest friends. The married ones, cut off from the rough intimacy of the athletic bachelorhood, came in to talk about problems of the hearth: children, sex, fidelity, money. He took them all, listened to them with the stub of cigar going round and round, still gruff and impatient, but with a look in his eyes that clearly intimated a deep understanding, forgiving and nonjudgmental, a look of someone who could not be shocked, who had his own agonies and wasn't ashamed. When he heard enough he cut them off and told them whatever it was he had to offer. Sometimes he picked up a phone and in a few whispers a medical specialist was enlisted. Many times his counsel was no more complicated than: "Hey Jimbo you got to stop mewing and stand on your hind legs to her. Don't you think she expects that? Why else would she be workin' so hard at it?" Or he might simply listen and console, offering only the comfort of one who saw life in all perspectives at once, the pigeon droppings as well as the statue, and who could make others see it too. They almost always left feeling better, not infrequently laughing, glad to have found solace in someone so wise, so knowing, a man who also found humor in the leavings of incontinent wildlife.