When the P.A. system said, “Single wing for a while,” I wondered if maybe old Mike Kaydee had the same ideas that I knew Shelevat had.
Blair was calling them — no instructions from Mike. Old Mike likes to develop smart quarters. You never can tell when you might need one. Look what quarterbacking did for Columbia in the ’47 season.
They swept around left end, and the play piled up after six yards, with Sir Gallahan on the bottom. The next time they smashed through the other side of the line from me, and I called it in time to swing out and come down on it from the side. Both Gallahan and I dumped the ball carrier.
Gallahan bounced up like a rubber ball. He had a wide grin on his face. “This is the way we did it at Yohannus!” he said. “This is football!”
“Don’t take it so serious, kid,” Big Hunk said mildly. “This is practice. Remember?”
Sir Gallahan gave him that blue-eyed look, but he wasn’t smiling. “I like to take it serious,” he said flatly. “To me it’s important. I’m going to earn myself a berth in the top backfield you got at Karr.”
It’s the sort of a thing you might think, but you don’t say it. Not in front of a lot of guys who get some of the bread and butter from the top-team slots.
Then it began to get really rugged. For Gallahan.
Shelevat mumbled to Blair and the next powerhouse play bounced off the left side of our line. Then Toroki ran wide and flipped a lateral outside to Shelevat, and Gallahan rolled onto his feet after a vicious block and yelled as he cracked into Shelevat.
Sir Gallahan got up, and Shelevat didn’t.
Johnny Jerome came out and the P.A. system told us to take it twice around the field and into the showers.
Gallahan was dressing ten feet down the bench from me when Sid Raegen strolled in. Raegen is the black and bitter type.
“Nice going, kid,” he said to Gallahan, his voice loaded with contempt.
Sir Gallahan looked up quickly, his pleased smile slowly fading as he saw the expression on Raegen’s face.
Raegen said, “We keep a fast, smart club here, kid. We save the old school try for the schedule. Maybe Shelevat will be okay for the first game. Maybe not. So you’ve helped us a hell of a lot. Skimmer is worth nine of you.”
Gallahan stood up. The blue eyes suddenly were narrow, dangerous. “If the coach wanted us to play pattycake, Mr. Raegen, he would have said so. I didn’t hit Shelevat any harder than I was hit.”
“You’re a smart little backwoods punk, Gallahan. I don’t like your face.”
Gallahan moved toward Raegen like a cat. He flowed along. It was a sort of movement that didn’t go with his build, and with that wide-open face. But as be got close, his balled fists slowly dropped and the fury left his face. It was then that Raegen hit him.
I remembered catching a sledge hammer in my middle and waited for the counterpunch. It didn’t Gallahan stood there, the blood trickling down his chin, looking almost sleepy. “I might have known it,” Raegen said, almost to himself. He turned on his heel and walked away.
Gallahan smeared the blood with the back of his hand, gave me a broken grin and said, “He might have been right about Shelevat. If I’d hit him, Ed, I might have broken his jaw.”
“That excuse is as good as any, kid,” I said. I finished lacing my shoes and left him there.
After that, Gallahan was no longer the butt of the rough gags. They left him alone. Even Big Hunk treated him with mild contempt. The boys had him cased. A showoff, an ambitious guy, and saffron in the clutch.
I guess I was the only one in the group that was a little uncertain about the correctness of that analysis. In some subtle way, the kid bothered me. I didn’t have much to say to him, and he stopped trying to make conversation when we were in the room.
He didn’t read or anything. Just stretched out on the bed with his hands locked behind his bead and stared at the ceiling.
Old Mike didn’t run many more scrimmages, and had us work hard on fundamentals. We were weak in the downfield blocking assignments, and the defensive backfield was slow in covering potential receivers.
But Gallahan did get in on one more session. He got in at Raegen’s spot, as before. Twice he ran Toroki out of bounds when he could have saved four or five yards with a clean tackle. That just gave the boys more evidence.
I noticed a few funny little things about Sir Gallahan. Whenever he was alone in the room, the door stood open. Once I shut it with him in there. I stopped in the hall and waited. In a matter of seconds the door swung open and I beard the springs creak as he got back on the bed.
By the consent of all, he was brushed off, left out of the horseplay.
Once, out of a clear sky, he said to me, “Ed, I just started wrong, I guess.”
“Started what wrong?”
“They’ve got me wrong, Ed.”
I didn’t answer him. We were beginning to shape up, and I knew that the sessions back at the school would put us in top shape. The skull sessions began to get rough with the plays that old Mike had dreamed up during the summer. We spent the last day walking through them, with old Mike correcting the positions over the P.A.
I wondered how much old Mike knew about the Gallahan situation. I guessed that he knew all there was to know — somehow Mike Kaydee even learns what you’re thinking.
Mike was putting everybody in there on the walking plays, and late in the afternoon, Gallahan came in. It was one of Mike’s inventions. We call signals on defence, of course, and the defensive team was trying to outguess the offensive team, with the rules that no man could move faster than a walk. A slow motion form of touch football, but damn good for familiarizing yourself with the fast-breaking plays.
Toroki was over by the truck, chatting with Mike. Then he came in. A power sweep around the left end was called, and Jak had called a defensive shift to the left. Toroki had a blocking assignment. As they walked it around, and as Gallahan came to meet the play, Toroki put his big hand in the middle of Gallahan’s face and shoved. Gallahan went down onto his back and got up, looking surprised.
Nick Toroki is six-two, two hundred and five, fast, hard and smart. With a lazy grin on his face, he pushed Gallahan down again. We all looked toward the truck. By all rights, Mike should have been yelling our ears off, and should have ripped Nick apart at the seams. Mike doesn’t allow that sort of stuff.
The P.A. speaker bawled, “What’s the matter, Yohannus? Yellow?”
Gallahan looked toward the truck in a stupefied manner. He began to grin. It wasn’t a pretty grin. And he suddenly looked a foot taller.
He was giving away over thirty pounds, plus a hell of a lot of height and reach. It was hopeless from the beginning, because a good big man can always lick the good little man. We had drifted into a loose circle around them. Gallahan went in like a man chopping wood with a hatchet in both hands. The fury of it drove Toroki back. We weren’t padded because we were just walking through the plays.
Toroki, after he got over the initial surprise, acted like it was a joke. He tried to clown it a little, and Gallahan caught him with a right and a left that dropped him. Toroki came up, fast and mad, and Gallahan ran into a jolting right that knocked him back.
There was no sound except the splat of fists on flesh, the sobbing grunts of Gallahan. There was something incredibly persistent about the little guy. Toroki knocked him down a half dozen times, and each time Gallahan came back like a rubber ball. His face was beginning to lose shape, but his eyes were like blue fire. Every once in a while he scored on Nick, and I could see that Nick was beginning to worry. Gallahan wouldn’t stay down. It was like hitting a rubber ball with a hammer.