Life Its Ownself (13 page)

It may also have been true that others down on the field couldn't have understood what several of the Frogs were chanting as they pumped their fists up and down:

"Right hand, left hand, don't make a shit!"

Tonsillitis Johnson was a staggering sight.

There would have been no mistaking him as he stood in a corner of the Lettermen's Lounge after the game. Apart from the maroon satin warmup suit and yellow mirrored sunglasses he wore, he was the young man whose terrifying thighs threatened to burst out of his pants, whose chest, shoulders, and arms were carved from granite, and whose towering, rounded Afro looked capable of nesting a flock of tundra swans.

Before meeting him, I asked T. J. to refresh my memory about something. Wasn't it against the rules for a Southwest Conference school to bring in a prospective athlete to visit the campus before his high school football season was over?

T.J. answered with a suitably logical question of his own.

"Who the fuck's gonna tell anybody?"

Tonsillitis was accompanied by his older brother, Darnell, a confident-looking man of about twenty-seven. Darnell wore a beige polyester suit, a wool checkered tie, and he carried a valise. He was built as if he might have played football himself, but his physique was nothing to compare with that of Tonsillitis.

And it didn't take a person from Harvard Grad School to figure out that Darnell was his brother's agent and financial adviser. Come to think of it, a person from Harvard Grad School
wouldn't
have figured it out.

A high school athlete with an agent was nothing new. It was as old as a university's desire to win football games, as old as a sports-minded daddy who wanted to get the best deal for his kid. It was older than Knute Rockne—not that the discovery of it didn't constantly send a ghastly wave of shock through the minds of your beard-stroking educators and your naive sportswriters.

When Shake and I had been persuaded to become Horned Frogs, we'd had Uncle Kenneth for an agent, and Big Ed Bookman for a financial adviser. We joked later on that we had been undersold. I got a Pontiac Grand Prix and Shake got a Mercury Cougar. Uncle Kenneth got four tickets on the 50-yard line for all of TCU's home games. Big Ed got a couple of listless roughnecks on one of his drilling rigs in Scogie County during the summers.

These were small prices to pay for a couple of guys who became All-Americas and put some folks in the stands, but TCU was going to get our services anyway. We had planned to stay home. It had to do with Barbara Jane selecting TCU even though she'd had a choice of the finest institutions. She wanted to make her mother hot, I think. Big Barb's heart had been set on sending her daughter off to Holyoke, Sweet Briar, or Wellesley.

"Mom, I already know which fork to use for dessert," Barb had said.

Shake and I never regretted going to TCU, even after we'd heard tales about the real world.

In the real world, there was a thing called The Million Dollar Walk in Norman, Oklahoma.

The Million Dollar Walk at OU was a path that led from Owen Field to the dressing room. After an Oklahoma victory, the path would be lined with wealthy boosters eager to shake hands with those Sooners who had done the most to crush a Missouri Tiger or a Kansas Jayhawk.

A guy could shake hands, we heard, for as much as $5,000 on a good Saturday. Multiply that by five or six home games, it could keep a kid in beer and cigarette papers for a whole semester.

We understood that mail returned to the sender for postage due was a nice thing to receive if you happened to play for the Crimson Tide at Alabama. The player wouldn't be the actual sender, of course. Phony name. Which left everyone blameless. All the student-athlete had to do was count the crisp hundreds in the envelope, donor unknown, when Alabama was hovering around No. 1 in the polls.

The Designated Cigar Box in Athens, Georgia, was a receptacle for a recruiting fund, money used to entice blue-chippers to learn how to say "How 'bout them Dawgs?" at the University of Georgia.

We were told the box would move around from one motel to another each Saturday of the season in Athens. Generous Georgia alums would hear on the sly where the motel room was going to be—"210, Ramada"—and they would be expected to drop by before or after the game.

An off-duty redneck cop would guard the door and refuse admittance to anyone who looked like an NCAA investigator or a reporter. Inside the room, the Dawg supporter would find no people, no cocktail party, only a cigar box on a dresser with a slit in the top that was conveniently large enough for folding money.

Around the Southeastern Conference, it was suspicioned that when Georgia's slush fund fell below the $3.5-million level, there were desperately fewer Herschel Walkers on campus.

Dump McKinney had been a highly recruited quarterback from Daytona, Florida. All through his senior year of high school, every week, he would find a parcel of twelve prime New York strips on his doorstep. They were the gift of an anonymous University of Florida fan who hoped Dump would transport his gifted arm to Gainesville. The parcel of frozen steaks would include a note, something on the order of
"Go Gators, beat hell out of them Dawgs!"

To this day, Florida fans rarely get to celebrate a victory over Georgia, even though the rivalry is bitterly intense and their annual clash in Jacksonville's Gator Bowl takes on the dimensions of Disneyland Meets Holy War.

But Dump liked New York strips. He did indeed seek his higher education at the University of Florida. And he kept on getting the prime cuts of beef until the middle of his junior year. They stopped coming after the Gators lost yet another close game to Georgia.

All Dump received after that game was the usual unsigned note, only this time it said:

"You heartbreakin choke-up motherfucker, I'm shippin your ass back to Oscar Mayer!"

Before the quest for Tonsillitis Johnson, T. J. had worn out a set of tires in the relentless pursuit of a most-wanted running back named Artis Toothis, a 188-pound speedster from Willow Neck, Texas.

T.J. made six illegal trips down to the Big Thicket, to Artis Toothis' home, a little shack which harbored the athlete's mother, father, aunt, and eight younger brothers and sisters, three of whom were squealing infants, not to mention six cats and four cur dogs.

On each visit, T.J. would sit for two and three hours with the family and animals, everyone watching soap operas on daytime TV. T. J. would smile politely as he bounced the babies on his knee and let the cur dogs hump his right leg.

As only T. J. Lambert could describe it, the house smelled like six hairy dykes playing anthill in a room with no ventilation.

On his last visit, Artis Toothis was not at home, but T.J. was promised the kid would be along any minute. Four hours went by. T.J. bounced the babies on his knee, gasped for fresh air, and watched the dogs hump his leg.

Artis Toothis finally stuck his head in the door, and said, "Be right back, Coach, I forgot somethin' at the library."

Seconds later, T. J. glanced out of a window. He saw Artis Toothis slide behind the wheel of a new white Jaguar in the company of an assistant coach from SMU.

Driving back to Fort Worth that night, the battle lost, T.J. almost turned his Ford Escort around three times.

"I wanted to go back and kick them fuckin' dogs," he said.

Coaches and faculty members will always insist that recruiting violations are minimal and can usually be blamed on "overzealous alumni," who are impossible to control. It helps their indigestion to believe that.

Getting the best available athletes on your team is one thing. Keeping them eligible is another. USC raised this to an artform. Thirty-two Trojans on one of USC's Rose Bowl teams were once discovered to have passed a Communications course they didn't know existed.

The cold, hard truth is this: no team that's ever appeared in your Top Twenty over the past 100 years is guiltless of cheating in one way or another, and this includes that pious campus with a golden dome out there in South Bend, Indiana, the unindicted Notre Dame. When USC and Notre Dame collide every year in their big intersectional game, they ought to call it the Transcript Bowl.

But if you stop to think about it, what's so criminal about giving a kid a football scholarship, supplementing his income, or doing surgery on his grades? College football takes a bunch of kids off the street and exposes them to something besides car theft and armed robbery.

And college football is big business. The money it generates from endowment has built more wings on libraries than all of the intimate friends of Beowulf.

College football has raised more than one chemistry professor's salary and bought more than one computer on which some chinless wimp can get a business degree by learning how to fuck up my bank statements and credit references.

If you can get a free ride through college by playing the oboe or repairing participles that dangle, why can't you do it by putting 50,000 people in a football stadium?

I didn't need to use those arguments on T. J., Tonsillitis, or Darnell. They were realists like me. And the four of us were now in a private confab discussing money while purple-blazered TCU immortals drank spiked punch in other nooks of the Lettermen's Lounge.

"Look here," Darnell said. "We can max out at Oklahoma at thirty thou a year. At Texas, we can max out at twenty- five a year, but Tonsillitis be startin' as a freshmens in Austin. Tonsillitis don't be needin' that E.O.S. shit, you dig?"

"E.O.S.?" said Coach Lambert. I was equally puzzled.

"End of sentence, baby. OU don't guarantee freshmens to start. Tonsillitis be winnin' the Heismans his first year."

"We'll start him as a freshman," T.J. said. "He can call plays if he wants to."

"Tonsillitis don't be callin' plays. Tonsillitis' brain be needin' to res' up for G.B.O.S."

"G.B. who?" I said.

"Get bad on Saturday."

Tonsillitis was also a person of character, Darnell said. When Feb. 8 came around, the national signing date, Tonsillitis would honor the L.O.I, he signed.

"Letter of intent?" I said.

"You cool."

I attempted to engage Tonsillitis in conversation by asking if he was worried about injuries this season, his senior year in high school.

"It could be expensive," I took pleasure in saying.

"Tonsillitis don't be gettin' hurt," Darnell said. "Tonsillitis be hurtin' other folks."

T. J. patted Tonsillitis on the back. "You're the best, hoss. Best I ever saw."

I kept looking at Tonsillitis for
his
answer. I would liked to have seen his eyes, but I could only see my forehead in his yellow sunglasses.

Tonsillitis said, "You have ast me if I am worried about injurin' myself in my las' season. My answer to you is no. That would be undue worriation."

Darnell related a story about their childhood, the purpose of which was to convey to us that Tonsillitis had always been a tough competitor.

There was this night when the two boys had been taken to a double-feature by their father, a handyman. Tonsillitis was only seven years old at the time. The movies they had seen were
Blood Beach
and
My Bloody Valentine
.

"Kids is funny," Darnell said, smiling. "We came home and the first thing Tonsillitis said was 'Daddy, I'm gonna get a knife and cut you up.'"

Darnell and I laughed together, he at what Tonsillitis had said, me at the double-feature their daddy had chosen.

Tonsillitis' name had been intriguing me. I was compelled to ask Darnell where it came from.

"He was named for his uncle, Tonsorrell," Darnell said. "Everybody had trouble sayin' it right. We started callin' him Tonsillitis when he was little. Might as well be his real name."

The meeting adjourned with T.J. urging Tonsillitis to have a great year at Boakum High and not make any college decisions until he checked with the Horned Frogs.

TCU's head coach was asking for the right of last refusal.

"What number you want to wear on that purple jersey, hoss?" T. J. squeezed Tonsillitis' shoulder lovingly.

"Thirty grand," I said, answering for him.

"My man!" said Darnell, offering me his palm to slap.

Satisfied I had done all I could to help T. J.'s recruiting for the moment, I left to go meet an old newspaper buddy and see if Fort Worth nightlife had anything new to offer.

Mommie's Trust Fund was on the southwestern edge of the city in a half-finished shopping village bordered by half-finished condominium units. Beyond the condos lay infinity—and the dreams of other developers.

There was no room to park near Mommie's Trust Fund. I eased the Lincoln around a corner to another area of the shopping village and found a space by a Red Lobster, next door to an Arby's, pretty close to a Houlihan's, three doors from a TGI Friday's, just behind a Bennigan's, half a block from Chi Chi's, and directly in front of a topless-bottomless club called The Blessed Virgin.

I almost took a look inside the topless-bottomless club because of its marquee, which said:

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