Life Its Ownself (35 page)

Barb said, "A couple of snaggled teeth and a case of acne would help."

I smoked one of Barbara Jane's cigarettes.

"Marriage is a full-time job, Barb. Happiness is a state of mind. I'm ready to work on it if you are."

Barbara Jane looked around the hotel suite, mystified.

"Who am I talking to? When did Joyce Brothers come in the fucking room?"

"What do you expect me to do?" I said.

"Leave."

"Just walk out? Walk out that door?"

"Yeah. You put one foot here, the other foot there, and pretty soon..."

"I think I will."

"Fine."

"I think I won't be back."

"Better."

"You don't have a good enough reason to give me all this shit, Barb."

"Oh, really? I've got five years to look back and wonder how many chicks you made it with and I don't have a good reason?"

"None," I said. "Starting with Kathy."

I didn't think it would serve any useful purpose in our discussion if I confessed that making it with Kathy had crossed my mind. Deep down, I felt I would never have gone the distance with Kathy that night in Dallas. I would have pulled up lame somewhere. With Kathy, it had been a question of trying to get to the bottom of a puzzle. Once the puzzle was solved, the game was over. I didn't know how many people would ever believe this, but I knew it was true. Christ, it wasn't as though I'd never scored a pretty girl before.

"Goodbye, Twenty-three. I know how lonely it is on the road, but you'll manage," Barb said.

"You're gonna be God-damn sorry if I walk out that door."

"Life is full of gambles."

I went to the door.

"You don't want any of your clothes?" she said.

"Fuck clothes," I said. "I got clothes and broads stashed all over the country!"

I doubt if T.J. Lambert could have slammed the door any harder than I did. As an old inanimate object kicker, I gave it my best effort.

Shake Tiller's pro football expose had created some havoc in the television industry, of course. Because of the cloud that hovered over the quality of the competition one might expect in the playoffs, CBS's leading announcers, Pat Summerall and John Madden, were advised by their agents and business managers to withdraw from broadcasting any of the playoff games or the Super Bowl.

Their advisers felt that their reputations would be damaged if they lent credibility to what might well be a noncompetition. Only the players knew how seriously the playoff games were going to be contested.

Richard Marks tried to quadruple their fees, but Summerall and Madden rejected the offer, which was how Larry Hoage and I wound up doing those games. I didn't have a broadcast reputation to worry about. It didn't matter. And Larry Hoage would have thrown a side-body block on Mother Teresa to get at a microphone.

The pro football scandal had finally overtaken Larry, although he and his friend Hoyt didn't discuss it as often as they discussed topsoil, garden tools, and Orange County zoning quirks.

I had become good friends with Teddy Cole, the producer, and Mike Rash, the director, partly because we had a common dislike for Larry Hoage.

Teddy and Mike were in their late twenties. They had come out of the University of Miami. They were quicker than laser beams at their jobs. They saw life through the monitors in their control unit, never missed the right picture, knew when to go close, when to pull back. They were young pros, the type of electronic journalists who could witness a live assassination and instinctively know to alert the tape operator, bring up the audio, point cameras at everything that moved. They had given me some good tips. Things like keep your sentences short, you can't mention the score of a game too often, and always try to think of the one characteristic that will describe a ballplayer—Dreamer Tatum has the suede market cornered, Dump McKinney's got a 6.2 voice on the Richter scale, Point Spread Powell tapes his ankles up to his neck.

Teddy and Mike both did fine imitations of Larry Hoage behind his back. At a dinner table or around a hotel bar, their routines kept all of us loose.

Teddy might say:

"This is Larry Hoage comin' at you today with a wingding of a bell-ringer from Hiroshima, Japan, friends! Here comes the Enola Gay now. She's up there in the sky looking like a fat old hen that's ready for roastin', but I've got an idea she's cooking up a soo-prise of her own. Yep! It's bombs away, as I like to say. The old egg's heading for the heart of the city! We'll be here to bring you all of the action, but right now, let's go back to Brent for an update on the race at Daytona!"

And Mike might say:

"This is Larry Hoage comin' at you from Auschwitz, Poland, friends, and have we got a barn-burner for you today! These rough-and-tumble Nazis are rarin' to go. They've got the coaching, the desire, and like they've said all season, this is the one they want! Be that as it may, Billy Clyde Puckett, I've got a hunch about these pesky Jews. I think they just might take it!"

Christmas deal.

It hadn't meant much to me since the Christmas morning I had awakened to discover I'd made that mysterious transition from cap pistols to sleeveless sweaters.

Now it had even less meaning because Barbara Jane and I were estranged. It was just as well that the holiday fell between two playoff games.

Christmas Day found me in a motel on the outskirts of Detroit. I endured a turkey dinner in the company of Kathy, Mike, Teddy, Larry, and Hoyt Nester, who kept us entertained with zany tales of his fun-filled years as a CPA.

Teddy, Mike, Larry, and Hoyt all exchanged funny gifts that came from adult bookstores. Kathy gave me an engraved cigarette lighter to go with the other three I had. I gave her a tricky sweater that a saleslady at Henri Bendel's had picked out for me.

I tried to call Barbara Jane on Christmas Day. She was unfindable. Ying, the houseboy at Jack Sullivan's, informed me that Barb and Jack were spending the weekend in Del Mar with friends of the director. Ying wouldn't give me the Del Mar number even though I threatened to crawl through the phone and dust his chop suey ass.

I wouldn't have minded knowing if Barb had liked the emerald ring. It wasn't a ring her mother would have been dazzled by, but I thought it was a decent present to give someone who no longer spoke to me.

Barb had sent my present to the apartment in New York. It was a Porsche wristwatch, one of those multi-gadgeted things that nobody can tell time on but an extraterrestrial visitor.

Coincidentally, we both quoted lines from Elroy Blunt songs in our cards to each other.

My card to Barb had said:

I can't taste the gravy

When there's heartache on my plate.

And her line to me was:

He leased a high-price body

For his low-rent mind.

Okay, she topped me. There was nothing to do but fall back on my old philosophy and remember that laughter is the only thing that'll cut trouble down to a size where you can talk to it.

The playoff games thrilled Dreamer Tatum and the Players' Association more than they thrilled the fans.

Larry Hoage and I worked the wild card game between the Cardinals and Vikings on Dec. 19 before we went to Detroit. That game set an NFL record of twenty-two turnovers before the Vikings came away with a nine-to-six victory.

In the game between Minnesota and the Lions on Dec. 26 in the Silverdome, the Christmas spirit carried over an extra day. The Vikings gave away six fumbles. The Lions gave up the ball five times on interceptions. Half the time, I thought I was watching volleyball or soccer.

When I said as much over the air, Larry Hoage only caught the word "soccer."

"There's an interesting game," he said to our audience. "From what I hear, soccer's really starting to take off in Europe."

The Lions defeated the Vikings in Detroit by the score of 10 to 3. They broke the 3-3 tie in the third quarter with an 80-yard drive that featured three pass-interference penalties. Detroit's quarterback, Kelvin Thorpe, sneaked across for the winning touchdown on his fourth try from the 1-foot line.

The fourth quarter offered little more in the way of excitement than incomplete passes and offsides penalties.

We were in Dallas, back at Texas Stadium, for the NFC championship game on Jan. 2, a memorable contest between the Cowboys and Lions. Kelvin Thorpe of the Lions scored two quick touchdowns for Dallas in the game's first five minutes by throwing interceptions to Len Ikard, a Cowboy linebacker. Dallas held on to the 14-to-0 lead for the rest of the game.

In the last three quarters in Dallas, neither team advanced the ball past mid-field. There was so little action on the field that Teddy Cole and Mike Rash threw every insert into the telecast they could muster up, most of them having to do with the off-season hobbies of NFL players.

Those viewers who stayed with us saw film clips of Hudson Stone, a defensive tackle for Dallas, building model trains; of Dallas quarterback Alvar Nunez cooking beef
fajitas
; of the Lions' Oran Rippy, a strong safety, boarding a plane with his pet goldfish; and of Gregg Glasscock, a Dallas running back, being handcuffed by federal narcotics agents.

Brent Musburger did the voiceover on all of the inserts. He explained that Gregg Glasscock had been cleared of trafficking in drugs. The 5-pound sack of Gold Medal flour he had been seen to purchase from a fishing-boat operator in Key West had later tested out to be a 5-pound sack of Gold Medal flour.

Earlier that same day, the AFC championship game was played in Miami. The Seattle Seahawks had beaten the Dolphins 2 to 0 on the last play of the game. What happened was, Jackie Barnett, the Miami punter, inadvertently stepped out of his own end zone for the safety that gave the victory to Seattle.

It was a humiliating way for Miami to lose the game. A near-riot had erupted in the Orange Bowl. Barnett had been placed in the protective custody of police.

Jim Tom Pinch defended Barnett in print. He wrote that Barnett's blunder—if that's what it was—had prevented the most boring game in the history of football from going into an overtime period, an overtime that would have caused turmoil with every sportswriter's airline reservation. It was a mercy killing, Jim Tom said, and Jackie Barnett was a hero.

Dallas and Seattle were thus going to the Super Bowl on Jan. 16. And Larry Hoage said on the air that he, personally, had never looked forward to a Super Bowl with such nerve-tingling anticipation. He said it was clear to him from the playoffs that the NFL had brought "rip-snortin", rock- ribbed defense" back to football.

The TV ratings for the playoffs were drastically off from previous seasons, and at the same time, the college game dealt its own blow to the sagging image of the NFL.

In the Cotton Bowl on New Year's Day, twenty-four hours before those so-called championship games in the NFC and AFC, the Auburn Tigers (10-0-1) and Texas A&M Aggies (11-0) played for the shouting rights to who's No. 1.

Pat Summerall and John Madden did a first-rate job of broadcasting the game for CBS. Richard Marks had shown good judgment in assigning his best announce team to an event of such magnitude, even though it seemed likely the network would be sued for having breached the contracts of Terry Culver and Roxanne Lark, the popular boy and girl who were CBS's regular college football announcers.

"I'd like to see 'em try to bounce Larry off a broadcast," Hoyt Nester said.

We all watched the Cotton Bowl game on TV in Teddy Cole's suite at the Adolphus—Kathy, Teddy, Mike, Larry, Hoyt, and me. Kathy and I rooted for the Aggies, me because of the Southwest Conference, Kathy because of the Aggie fight song. Teddy and Mike rooted for Auburn. Larry rooted for Summerall and Madden to make mistakes. Hoyt kept stats from force of habit.

The lead changed hands eight times in the game. Three touchdowns were scored in the last seven minutes before Auburn made a goal-line stand and slipped by with a 38-to- 35 victory in one of the greatest poll bowls anyone had ever seen.

Only seconds after the game ended, I got a call from T. J. Lambert. He wanted to tell me that Auburn would have every starter coming back and remind me that, sadly enough, Auburn was the first opponent on TCU's schedule next season.

He said, "Here I am tryin' to bring us back from the dead and I got to play me a national champion the first pop out of the box. The game was signed up five years ago when Auburn wasn't worth a shit; now they'll be comin' in here with their dicks hard."

"You'll have Tonsillitis and Artis," I said.

"They won't have played no college game."

"Maybe it'll rain. Hold the score down."

"It could rain fish fuckin' rooftops and it wouldn't help me none against them sumbitches. How's Barbara Jane?"

In very good health, I said, as far as I knew. Her show was going to premiere in two weeks—the night of Super Bowl Sunday, in fact.

"You ought to have your head examined," T. J. said.

"Why? ABC made the decision. They think it'll get a big rating that night."

"I ain't talkin' about TV, asshole."