Life Its Ownself (31 page)

Boredom began with overexposure on television. It reached its zenith with parity—

and it looks like the only thing that will cure all of it is another Great Depression. That would bring everything back to reality.

This season, the players are in a rebellion, quietly, underground. They may as well be on strike for all of the effort they're putting into the games.

They know they could never win a strike against the wealthy owners, so they're trying to win their demands their way. They're giving the league total parity. No team is worth a damn.

If you say you've watched the games and you don't believe me, that's your problem. Keep watching. You must like sick humor.

As bad as things seem in the NFL, we aren't without remedies. Here are some ways to pump life back in the game:

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Award bonus points for teams that recover their own spikes in end zones.

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Award bonus points for all white guys who score touchdowns.

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Eliminate the extra-point kick. It's a yawn. Make teams run or throw for their conversions.

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Allow only one field-goal try per game—and if the kicker misses, he has to go back to Rumania.

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No more holding calls. Let the weight- lifters fight it out in the line.

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Outlaw the quarterback sneak, the draw play, the prevent defense, and the kill-the-clock incompletion.

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Do away with the fair catch.

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Take up the artificial turf. Tear the roofs off stadiums.

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Find out what "encroachment" is and get rid of it.

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Move the two-minute warning to the start of the game.

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Shorten the regular season to 12 games.

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Cut back to 16 teams in the league. When did Buffalo, San Diego, Denver, Atlanta, Tampa, Kansas City, Seattle, New Orleans, Foxboro, Indianapolis, Houston, and Minneapolis ever get the idea they were major-league in the first place?

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Take periodic urine samples from the league's investigators.

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Make all owners live in the cities where they own teams.

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Shoot down the Goodyear blimp. Show more closeups of cheerleaders on television.

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A team forfeits one game for every Hollywood celebrity who turns up in an owner's luxury box.

A last word about Charlie Teasdale and his family.

Not that it would have stood in the way of journalism, but one fact made this expose easier for me to write. Mrs. Teasdale is legally blind.

I am told that Mrs. Teasdale will think the picture of Kim Cooze is an architectural illustration of the twin domes on a new stadium complex.

I hope Mrs. Teasdale's friends, out of sympathy for her feelings, will use good judgment in what they tell her about the contents of this article.

Finally, the reader is entitled to have the following question answered: why would a former NFL player like myself write these things about his sport?

Because I used to love pro football and I want my game back.

Shake's story was all over the newspapers. EX-PLAYER ACCUSES GAME OFFICIAL OF 'FIX.' EX-PLAYER SAYS NFL GAMES ARE 'JOKE.' NFL SHRUGS OFF EX-PLAYER'S ACCUSATIONS.

It was front-page news in most of the league cities.
The Fort Worth Light & Shopper
even gave it banner play over the prominent state legislator who had confessed to operating a child-pornography ring in Austin.

The story in Jim Tom's paper was compiled from wire reports. It pretty much covered all of the repercussions to Shake's piece.

Charlie Teasdale was quoted as saying, "We don't allow magazines like
Playboy
in our home, therefore I can't comment on the story. I can tell you that the name 'Kim Cooze' means nothing to me."

To which Kim Cooze said, "He never heard of me, huh? Ask him how Old George is. That's the name of his whatyoucallit. The story is absolutely true."

Tom Buckner of the 49ers, the president of the Players' Association, said, "In a free society, Shake Tiller is entitled to his views, and the First Amendment guarantees a magazine the right to publish those views. The leadership of the Players Association has no knowledge of a specific plan to destroy the game, but we can't speak for every individual member."

Dreamer Tatum said, "There are so many intangibles in football, it's impossible to say whether Shake Tiller is right or wrong in his theories. If I were a fan, I can only say I would be intrigued."

Commissioner Bob Cameron said, "Pro football has never been healthier. Commercials for the Super Bowl are selling for nine hundred thousand dollars a minute. I rest my case."

Pete Rozelle, the ex-Commissioner, now a U.S. senator, released a statement through his office. It said:

"There are forces at work in this country that would like to change our way of life. We must oppose these forces with all of our vigor."

The reaction of all of the NFL owners was the same. In a matter of words, they said: "Consider the source."

Burt Danby said it more colorfully.

"Mondo whacko," said Burt. "I've known Shake Tiller a long time. The guy's a complainer. He'd turn down Ali MacGraw if he knew she had a cavity."

When I came out of my bedroom the next morning at the Hyatt Regency, Shake was hanging up the phone in the living room of our suite. He was laughing.

"That was Bob Cameron," he said.

"You took the Commissioner's call?"

"He liked it."

"He
liked
your story?"

The Commissioner had told Shake he naturally wouldn't be able to say so publicly, but everything in the article was accurate. The Commissioner said he had guessed the players were up to something. He was going to urge the owners to give in on the wage-scale and free-agent issues.

Bob Cameron wasn't a bad guy. We had known him well, even hung out with him, when he had been an assistant under Rozelle. He had once worked in Network Sales for CBS, and in the days when we chased whup with him around New York, he was the liaison between the Commissioner and TV. It was because of his expertise in knowing how to heist the networks on television packages that he became the logical successor to Rozelle. The owners elected him

Commissioner by a unanimous vote after Rozelle resigned to run for public office.

Shake was still grinning with amazement from the phone call as he said, "Charlie Teasdale's through after this season. So are eight other zebras. Bob says they'll be allowed to retire for 'personal reasons.' That way, it'll save the league embarrassment. He says he's been trying to think of a way to get rid of those guys without a scandal. Now he has the ammunition. My story. If they don't go quietly, he'll put 'em in the joint."

"You kicked ass," I said.

Shake said, "The Commissioner said me and him ought to get drunk together some night—like the old days. He said if I'd keep it off the record, he'd tell me some real horror stories about the zebras."

"What else did he say about the players and owners?"

"He says his sympathy is with the players, but the owners approve his expense accounts."

"Life its ownself," I said, somewhat relieved, somewhat bewildered. "You never know what that old boy will think up next."

"No, you don't," said Shake. "He's got a bag of tricks, doesn't he?"

We took the farm roads to Boakum. It turned the journey into a three-hour drive in my rented Lincoln, but Shake and I agreed it would be fun to look at the knobby hills and pastures and live oaks and Herefords and goats of Central Texas. We weren't in as big a hurry as the heavy haulers that stormed past you on the freeways and tried to beat you to the next place to stop for a Lone Star and a hot link.

We drove slowly and sometimes lingered for a minute or two in a lot of little towns that brought back memories of Friday-night high school football games, of car chases in which we all should have been killed, of punchouts and cussfights, of brassieres and panties that had been left in the back seats of Buicks and Dodges, of terminated pregnancies, of good greasy cheeseburgers you couldn't find anywhere anymore.

We wondered if our old high school coach, E. A. (Honk) Wooten, was happy in retirement, now that he couldn't greet all the pretty girls as "Gizzard Lip," beat everybody's ass with his paddle, and lift his leg to make a clever noise like T.J. Lambert and blame it on "them damn cafeteria beans."

We talked about all of the girls we had known, about the ones we'd liked to have known better, the ones who had undoubtedly gained too much weight by now, the ones who had kept their looks, and the ones who were raising hell because the dentists they'd married hadn't filled enough teeth to buy them a house in River Crest.

Shake might have married Barbara Jane at one time, though he says not. Since then, he had not even been close to marrying anyone, although he spent more time under the covers than a chronic invalid.

Now he guessed he might never marry—not until he was fifty, or so he was saying in the car.

He said, "I'm pretty selfish of my time, B.C."

"No shit."

"I don't know how you do it. I couldn't deal with the crap that married guys have to take. If I was married to Barb and she put one minute of rage on me, I'd drive a stake through her heart."

"Barb doesn't do rage," I said. "She does lip."

"You know what I mean."

What he meant was the heat his mother, Matilda, had strapped on his father, Marvin senior, when he was growing up.

Marvin senior owned an electrical-supply store. Marvin senior and Matilda both worked there. So had Shake when he wasn't at football practice. Tiller Electric made them a nice living, but that didn't mean they were country-club rich. Shake had suspected this was one reason why his mother was mad all the time.

Barbara Jane and I had never thought of Matilda as an angry person. We knew her as demanding, a perfectionist, but she had never been anything but charming around us.

Shake said we didn't know the real Matilda. Nobody did but him and his dad, an easygoing guy with a fixed smile on his face. If Shake was right about Matilda, you had to wonder why Marvin senior ever smiled. In the privacy of their spotless, ranchstyle home, Matilda would turn into Magda Goebbels.

Matilda had a penchant for telling Shake and his dad how to dress, what to eat, what to say, where to sit, what to watch on TV, how much money to spend on anything, where to keep the thermostat, how many logs to put on the fire, why they couldn't have a pet, where they should go on vacation, which movies to avoid, what vitamins to take, who their friends should be, how to balance a checkbook, why a certain posture was bad for you, when it was going to rain, and why crisp vegetables were healthy.

If Shake and Marvin senior ever disagreed with any of this, they had the Third Reich to deal with.

We were seniors in high school when Shake's mother died. She never recovered from an operation after an automobile accident. Shake had lived at All Saints Hospital while the doctors struggled with Matilda's internal complications. He had watched her fail slowly.

Matilda had still enjoyed periods of consciousness in which she would tell everybody where to sit, what not to eat, and why smoking and drinking was bad for you. Knowing the hour was near, she even found the strength to dictate her own funeral arrangements. She wanted to be buried in her light blue summer dress by Geoffrey Beene. Felipe from Neiman's should do her hair. She requested mood music from a Gordon Jenkins album, no organ, please. Matilda's funeral demands weren't unreasonable if you measured them against those of Lucy Wood, a Pi Phi we had known in college. Lucy was the daughter of a wealthy rancher in the Panhandle. She was also a diabetic who did herself in on Dr Peppers. She had left a note asking that her father see to it she was buried in an evening gown sitting up behind the wheel of her red Ferrari with a carton of Dr Peppers beside her.