7
The football was an accident, and as you might expect, came from some ideas Denny got. The day after the big afternoon on the bay he was due to leave for Frederick, but didn’t. Baltimore Polytechnic, where I had entered the year before, opened, and you’d think Frederick High School would have opened too, but he didn’t start for it, and every time I’d see him there’d be a lot of mysterious talk about something he was cooking up. Then one Sunday his parents were in town, and they came over to the house. Then I was called in to answer questions about my teachers. Denny’s mother was a tiny little woman, that smiled and listened to what everybody said, but his father was a big, two-fisted customer, that wanted attention whenever he talked, and what he wanted to know about was physics. So it turned out that Denny was so serious about engineering, and the course so limited at Frederick, that it was practically a necessity that he check in at good old Poly, where I was, and where everything of that kind was wonderful. Now this holy consecration that had come over him was news to me. I think I’ve mentioned I’ve a mechanical gift myself, and I was hep, even if they weren’t, that his lech for cam shafts and turbines and belts was about as hot as last night’s potato, and what he didn’t know about them would fill a public library, and what he did would go on one side of a rubber washer, with plenty of room for his autograph. So when it was all fixed up about Poly, I took him out into the garage, and threw on the squeeze. “What is it, smart guy?”
“Weren’t you listening? As prerequisite, for all engineering, every one of these technical schools put physics first on the list, because—”
“I’m asking you, what is it?”
“... Well look, I could show you about this mechanical stuff, but—”
“All right, show me.”
I threw open the tool chest of my car, which at that time I carried under the seat, and he looked at it. I pointed at a Stillson wrench and said: “What is it?” He looked uncomfortable and said: “So all right. What difference does it make?”
“Listen, this is not them. It’s me. Talk.”
“It could be football.”
“Football?”
“It’s a game. Or feetball, maybe you call it.”
“And?”
“Maybe I’m going out for it.”
“Why here?”
“Why not?”
“Why not Frederick?”
“Does anybody pay attention to Frederick?”
“Who pays attention to Poly?”
“Everybody... Listen, dope, you think I’m passing up all that moola? It’s amateur, sure it’s amateur. Just the same, they slip you. Don’t tell me they don’t.”
He was awful sure that he was on the trail of something big. “To cut in, you’ve got to have a rep, and the only one place to get that rep is in some high school that gets in the papers. For Frederick you could play till you dropped and not one scout from anywhere would come to see you. Poly, though, that’s different. So — engineering, physics, what’s the dif? You got to tell ’em something.”
Of course that made sense. That you could tell your father the truth and not fool him wouldn’t occur to you at that age. Well, can you? If Denny had come out with that stuff about football, what would his father have said? That he was crazy, as of course he was. Just the same a crazy guy came for a good time too, and now and then, not too often but sometimes, a crazy horse wins.
Denny didn’t have his growth yet, but he wasn’t far from it, and at least he looked like something that ought to be playing football. He was about medium height, five feet eight or nine, but stocky, specially in the chest and upper legs. His waist was small, but his torso bulged out above it, and from his hips to his knees he was thick, specially in back, so his hindside stuck out like a girl’s. But you had to see it to believe how fast he could pump his legs along, and after he went out for practice and I stood around watching him, I suddenly got it through my head that maybe he was right, he could be going places. The coach must have thought so too, because pretty soon he had Denny standing by the first team to learn formations. And then sure enough, on Friday, when we played our first game, with an outfit I’ll call Calvert, there was Denny in the opening line-up, at right halfback. But on running, blocking, passing, and kicking, everything except tackling, he was as bad as he could get and still have on a suit. Toward the end of the second quarter he got yanked, and Gus Schoenfeld, who had had the job in the first place, was put in, and Denny wasn’t put back. That ended his career, for the time being anyway, in spite of his big talk, his limp, and his alibi, which was that he had turned his ankle on the kick-off. He kept going out for practice, but was shoved over to the third team, or the ninth maybe, some outfit that the coach never even saw.
But I kept wondering why. In the first place, I’d tangled with him a lot, and he could take it, I knew that. Maybe he folded after round one, but for that long he was a tornado. And in the second place, there were those tackles he made. Football’s rough, every part of it, but the tackle can’t be faked. A guy that’ll come up fast, slip past the interference, line out his runner, then cut him down and really cut him down, so he’s on the grass and the ball is dead, that guy has something. Mind, I don’t say he’s much good to his team yet. Tackling’s defensive, and you can’t win games with a o-o score. For that you need touchdowns, but if they take more than the guts that tackling takes, they don’t take any less either, and that’s what crossed me up. Because that much Denny had. And yet, even in Scrubville where he was now, he couldn’t make two yards before he was thrown. Then after a while I saw what the trouble was, and as usual it came from a slight case of looky-looky-looky. On defense that was all right, because on busting up plays he could show off fine and nobody did it better. But on offense, advertising how fast he could run, shooting past his interference until he was away out front, that may have been a fine way to lead a parade but it was a poor way to hit a line. Because then the line hit him and it was the same old story: second down, ten to go. I argued with him about it, and he got hot and said he knew what he was doing and what counted was speed and he had it and he meant to use it and soon he’d get the recognition that was coming to him. I said he should follow his interference, and I even put on a suit and went out there, got myself put in the squad that he was in, and because I could run a little too, made the backfield. When I was part of his interference I’d try to keep him near me, but it was no soap. And then one time when he was out in the open, with no protection, some kid piled into him head-on, and it was an hour before they could get him quiet, from the hysteria the shock brought on, and he was so ashamed of the way he had blubbered that he came over that night and at last asked me to lay it out for him, what he had to do.