The game was being played at home in Whittier’s Milhous Stadium before what was anticipated to be a record-breaking underflow crowd of ten thousand. (Capacity was 68,000.) Nor could those who attended be characterized as loyal Stonewall fans. What pulled them out was the prospect of seeing the Pittsburgh Steelers in action— even if the action was expected to he no more than a one-sided scrimmage for Terry Bradshaw and his teammates. There was no such thing as an optimistic Whittier fan. Two scoreless seasons had made cynics of them all.
To pit the Whittier Stonewalls against the Pittsburgh Steelers, cracked one sports columnist, was the most uneven sports contest since the lions chewed up the Christians. There was one difference that the columnist couldn’t have known about. The morale of the Christians had been much higher than that of the Stonewalls. Both groups, however, sought mercy by the same means, one which was frowned upon by the Establishment responsible for their plight.
My first inkling of this insofar as the Stonewalls were concerned came when I slipped into the locker room john at Milhous Stadium to take a piss. There, kneeling on the tiles of the lavatory floor, were two members of the secondary and a wide receiver. Standing in front of them and reading from an open Bible was defensive linebacker Simon Sabbath.
“Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. . . .” I watched unnoticed as he read the entire psalm. When he finished, he bowed his head. “Let us pray together,” he suggested. “Dear Lord, please just get us through this day without fatal injury.”
“Lead me not into the path of Franco Haiirs, Lord.”
“Deliver me from John Stallworth.”
“Yea, though I walk in the shadow of Mean Joe Greene, protect my weak ankles, Uh Lord.”
“Hear us, O Lord,” Simon Sabbath prayed fervently. “Save us, we pray, from the terrible and bone-breaking destructive wrath of the Steeler’s offense and from the cruel and merciless crunch of the Pittsburgh defense, as well.”
“Jiggers!” Another player stuck his head in the door behind me. “Coach is heading this way!”
Immediately the four praying Stonewlls leaped to their feet and affected casual attitudes. Simon Sabbath hid the Bible under his jersey. One of the secondary defense players lit up a joint and passed it to the other one. The wide receiver began talking in a loud, jocular voice: “. . . so the farmer’s daughter has her feet in the stirrups and the traveling salesman’s just getting on top of her when all of a sudden the farmer sticks his pitchfork in the hay and . . .”
Coach Newtrokni shouldered through the door, his hands already unzipping his fly as he headed for the urinal. “What are you guys doing here?” he demanded over his shoulder as he started to pee.
“Just relaxing before the game, Coach, like you said we should.”
“You sure you didn’t sneak in here to pray?”
“Break training right before the game, Coach?” Simon Sabbath replied in an injured voice. “We’d never do a thing like that.”
“Well, you’d better not ever let me catch you doing it! Game or no game, I’ll bench any player caught so much as folding his hands suspiciously!” He zipped up his fly. “Why are you standing there in the corner like that, Victor?”
“Just meditating.” I said the first thing that came into my mind.
“Is that like praying?” Coach Newtrokni had a suspicious nature.
“Only if you write Zen poetry,” I assured him.
“How long you been here?”
I shrugged.
“You see these guys do any praying?”
Half a ton of Stonewalls managed to look at me pleadingly and threateningly at the same time.
“Nope. All I saw them do was sniff, shoot up and jerk off.” I like to think I wouldn’t have finked even if I didn’t bruise so easily.
Coach snorted and left the john. The players followed him out. I did what I’d come in to do. While doing it, I reflected. (Nope, Coach, that's not the same as praying.)
Pre-game prayer meetings were common among some pro football teams, most notably the Dallas Cowboys. Such rites usually took the form of praying for victory. Praying for victory was considered to be a way of keeping up morale.
But the Stonewalls who prayed had never mentioned victory. They had prayed only not to be seriously injured. They had no morale to keep up. It was no attitude for players to take into a ball game.
“God help us!” I said aloud. And then I found myself looking around guiltily for fear that the Coach might have heard. Nevertheless, I whispered it again. “God help the Stonewalls!”
Pittsburgh won the toss and chose to receive. Word was that Bradshaw had injured his arm in practice the day before and Swann was playing with a badly sprained ankle. Because of this, the point spread against Whittier only totalled twenty. Still, the bookies couldn’t give away the short end.
The rumor about Bradshaw’s arm was probably true. He called a running game through most of the first quarter. Pittsburgh scored only one touchdown on an eight yard run straight up the middle by Franco Harris. But the seven-zero first quarter score didn’t really tell the story. That was reflected by the respective times of possession which were Pittsburgh twelve minutes forty seconds, Whittier two minutes twenty seconds. During the time they held the ball, the Whittier Stonewalls managed to lose only twenty-seven yards.
Coach Newtrokni chose not to put Terry Niemath in during the first quarter. He was understandably nervous about what the response would be to the league’s first lady quarterback. Besides, he was saving her for when things got really bad.
“Really bad” is a matter of definition. When it began to rain quite heavily at the start of the second quarter, it was a break for Whittier rather than for the Steelers, because Pittsburgh continued to maintain its one-sided possession of the ball throughout the period. This meant they had more of a chance to slide around in the mud, take occasional pratfalls, miss passes, and fumble the slippery ball.
Pittsburgh lost possession through fumbles three times in the second quarter. (Whittier lost it back the same way and added three more fumbles all their own.) The ball popped in and out of Stallworth’s hands twice on long passes and Lynn Swann fell on his face twice diving for incompletes. Bradshaw’s legs slid out from under him in the pocket before he could pass and he managed to do what the Whittier defense hadn’t even come close to doing yet—sack himself. He switched back to a running game in which the mud continued to give Pittsburgh more problems than the Stonewalls’ secondary. The result was that Pittsburgh scored only one touchdown in the second quarter, so that, going into halftime, we were behind only fourteen-zip. Considering the Stonewalls’ history, we were doing fantastically well.
“Don’t let it go to your heads,” was the kickoff to Coach Newtrokni’s locker room pep-talk. “They’re a powerful team and they’re known for piling up points in the second half. We have to guard the lead.”
“Pittsburgh ahead by fourteen, Coach, sir,” the f.a.c. reminded him.
“I know that. It’s their lead I’m talking about. My strategy is not to let them add to it.”
“What about winning, Coach?” the team captain wondered.
“Don’t ask for the moon, Marzipan. Not when we have the stars.”
“What stars, Coach?” The center was confused.
The Coach merely winked at him and changed the subject. “Now, I want you guys up for the second half,” he said, “so, to get our blood boiling, we’re going to have a rousing cheer for Ralph Ingersoll, Madeleine Murray, and atheist Americans everywhere.”