John D. MacDonald
Coward in the Game
It all happened in the famous, fabulous college football season in the fall of nineteen forty-six... the year that had the old boys dreaming up memories of nineteen-nineteen and nineteen-twenty, when, as in forty-six, a big bunch of hard-bronzed men hit the gridirons all over the country and hung up records for all to see. Maybe a kid who hasn’t done very much living can get pretty impressed with the idea of diving low into a flock of cleats coming around left end. I don’t know about that. I do know that a joe who has wormed his way under a bunch of small arms fire isn’t going to do a lot of gasping at the horrors of the so-called “physical contact” sports. And that’s the way it was in forty-six. It’s a year for the books.
As soon as I got out of the service, I tried to get into any college or university with a decent journalism course. I only had one year to go, plus a lot of experience on army sheets. They sent me their regrets. At last a little eastern outfit called Chemung University in the small city of Chemung, New York, wrote me that they might have room in the fall term. I looked them up and their journalism course rated fair. It had to do. Naturally the name of Chemung University wasn’t as well known before the fall of forty-six as it is now.
The idea of existing on the education allowance in the G.I. Bill didn’t look like a very good deal to me. Also, I don’t like small towns. But I went.
The city of Chemung is in a steep-sided valley. The university sits up on the top of the hill south of town. I registered a few days late, and the only place they had left for me was half of a room in a condemned dormitory that they were using for the football boys. I growled at the gent in charge of living quarters, but there was nothing I could do to change it.
I lugged my gear over to the first room at the top of the stairs in a frame dormitory. I crowded through the door and a husky kid jumped up from one of the two beds.
I stuck out my hand and said, “Sorry to move in on you like this. My name’s Tom Western.”
He grinned. “That’s okay. They told me somebody would be moving in with me. Glad it isn’t one of these little kids I see walking around this place. I’m Sven Stockwitz. Don’t let the name stop you. I’m half Swedish and half Polish.”
I liked his looks. He was about five eleven and I guessed him at a hundred and ninety or so. Square face with good solid bones in it. Pale blue eyes, quite small. Hair so blond it was almost white. A grin that hiked one side of his mouth halfway up to his eye and made a million wrinkles around his eyes. He had a good heavy handshake.
After I got my stuff settled and spent some time looking out our two double windows down toward the town, we sat around and smoked and talked. We found out that we’d both spent four years working for Uncle Sugar. He’d been with the Seabees in the Pacific. I’d spent my time overseas as a combat correspondent in the Italy affair.
Then he told me that he was going to lay off smoking pretty soon. Said he was going to play football.
“Doesn’t that seem like kid stuff?” I asked him.
“Sure it does. But what the hell. They give me a snap job of looking after a couple of furnaces, oil-burning jobs, and pay me sixty bucks a month for it. I need the dough and I did well enough as an end before the war so that they want to pay me to play. I need the dough. Mary Anne and I talked it over.”
“Mary Anne?”
“Yeah. My wife. Little old girl named Mary Anne McCarthy before I married her. Just like the name of the gal that went to gather clams. She’s living with her folks now, but I’ve lined up a house here so that she can come out and join me in the spring.”
“Then dear old Chemung U is going into the football racket?” I asked.
“Why not? With things the way they are, they got a chance to pick up a bunch of guys like they’d never get in normal times. So they’re laying it on the line. They ought to have about two hundred turn out for it, and I bet there’ll be forty top guys on the payroll. Nearly all of them service joes. And I’ve really seen a few rough boys around this town already. Rough!”
So that was it. I could see their point. A chance to make a great big name without too much expense involved. With a hot coach, and they’d hired Marty Dorrence, there wasn’t much excuse for little Chemung not tripping up some of the giants. Then the new kids coming up would be interested, and they ought to be able to go along for years on the momentum.
You remember Marty Dorrence. When he came off a Kansas farm back in the late twenties — I got a new bicycle the year he first made All American — he was a gangling black-headed kid with vacant eyes and a loose mouth. He looked fat and sloppy around the waist, even then, but he could snap into full speed in a step and a half. He’d run with his knees rising as high as his chin. After the first ten minutes or any game, he’d be making his own holes in the line. Psychological warfare. He’d come in like a freight train, all knees, elbows and shoulders. One good man could stop him dead about three or four times before they took that good man off the field and got out the wide adhesive.
I picked Marty out in those years as a sort of hero. I followed him after he got out of school, just like a hundred thousand other Americans... followed him through the four years of pro ball when he drove big cars and played it high and wide. I was disappointed when he got too soft to play, and then excited again when he landed the coaching job with Murnane Tech.
You remember what happened then. The story made all the papers. The practice session where Marty, for the hell of it, took the ball and rammed through the line of kids he had coached. Apparently he drove at the weakest sister of the lot. He went through into the backfield where they nailed him. Everybody got up but the kid in the line. Broken neck. Died an hour or so later. Remember those headlines? Brutality in College Football. Sadistic Coach Kills College Student. What Is Happening to College Football?
Those things happen, but Marty was through in college ball. Finally he angled a job as a backfield coach for the Plumbers, that rough old New Jersey pro outfit that has been mauling them for fifteen years.
That was when I met Marty. The school where I took my first three years of journalism had the idea that you try to work up an exclusive yam in any field in which you are interested. I liked football, and after I dug around for a while, I decided to see if I could get some facts for a feature on the way members of pro teams make money on the side bets. I hoped to get a good grade out of it, and get away without getting my head punched in.
I didn’t realize the dynamite in that yarn. When I got my facts together, the hottest angle was about Marty Dorrence. He and two other guys were rigging a pro pool and cleaning up. I turned it in. It was printed and reprinted all over the country. Actually the set-up was not dishonest but looked it. Marty got the pink slip and he was out of football for good... so everybody thought. I was sick about it. He looked me up and asked me what the hell I’d done it for. He wasn’t mad — just hurt. I couldn’t even answer him. I can still see the way his back and shoulders looked when he walked out of my room.
But old Marty fooled them all. Right after the story broke, he enlisted in the Marines. He got his field commission after a patrol on Tulagi. He got the Navy Cross on Guadal, and his majority after Tarawa. He earned his way up there; no politics. They made him a Lieutenant-Colonel just before he got his discharge. That’s what cleared him. That’s what sweetened the name of Marty Dorrence up so that Chemung was glad to take him on as coach.
Stockwitz and I talked some more. Then we went out and ate and came back with some bottled beer. We talked until three, when he got off onto the sterling qualities of his Mary Anne. I yawned my way out of it and went to bed. When he stripped down to climb in the other bed, I sat up to get a better look at that build. He had the neck, chest and shoulders of a guy that ought to weigh two and a quarter. The slimness of his hips and ankles brought him down to around one ninety something. He had a tropical tan burned well down into the fair skin. The muscles were smooth, not bunchy. I counted four places on which he carried the distinctive puckered scars of mortar fragments.