Life Its Ownself (9 page)

Richard Marks didn't seem to know whether to be flabbergasted or accuse me of an out-and-out lie.

"All I do is play football," I said. "My wife has an agent in L.A. Actually, he's a lawyer. She's never seen him, but he does her stuff. Barry somebody."

"Barry Sloan?"

"Could be. All I know is, some guy told her that in Hollywood, she'd better have her own Jew or they'd play racquetball with her liver."

"I'll give Barry Sloan a call."

"Why?"

"Why? You and I can't talk money, Billy Clyde. Things aren't done that way."

"Make me an offer. I'll probably accept it. What's the big deal?"

Richard Marks took a pocket calculator from his coat. He began pecking on it.

"Hmmm," he said. "Twelve games left in the regular season... playoff possibilities... these darn lashups are getting more and more expensive. Looks like our budget can stand to make you a... one-year deal for... well, let's round it off...a hundred thousand."

I cleared my throat. I wasn't balking. I honestly had to clear my throat.

So Richard Marks said, "Heck, I know you've talked to NBC. Make it one-fifty and we'll wrap it up."

NBC had only offered me $75,000. Richard Marks had already doubled it because I cleared my throat. It made me wonder what a violent coughing spell would have done.

"NBC mentioned something about expenses," I said.

"Look," he said, "I hate this bargaining business. Of course you'll get expenses at CBS. We fly first class. Let's say two hundred thousand for the regular season, we'll negotiate the playoffs later—okay?"

I took the job with CBS. I would begin work the first week in October. A regional game. Me and Larry Hoage.

Some people might have thought that being paid $200,000 for going to twelve football games was sinful. Ordinarily, I would have agreed. But later on, when I thought about the fact that I would have to spend three hours at each of those games with Larry Hoage, and no telling how many dinners the night before, I decided I had sold out too cheaply.

Before he departed that day, Richard Marks said, "I don't think you need voice lessons. You still have your Texas accent. Good! It will create an aura of sincerity on the air when you're discussing the socioeconomic backgrounds and behavior characteristics of your fellow athletes."

Barbara Jane was delighted with the news that I had taken the color job with CBS.

"You'll like the grownup world," she said on the phone from California. "What did you think of the new head of CBS Sports? It's fantastic he came to see you personally. They usually send a drone."

"He's just another TV guy, as far as I can tell," I said. "Throw a Ping-Pong ball in a boxcar and you've got a Richard Marks."

T.J. Lambert said he would fold me up like a taco if I didn't stop in Fort Worth on my way out to the Coast to join Barbara Jane.

He demanded I be on hand for TCU's home opener against the feared Rice Owls. Rice was the only school in the Southwest Conference with a worse football record than TCU over the previous twenty years.

A week had gone by and I was out of the hospital.

The cast on my right leg reached from mid-thigh to the ankle and made my leg look like a parenthesis, but I could get a pant leg over it. I was on crutches, but I could hop around without them if I could grab on to things. And I could drive a car.

I rented a Lincoln from Budget at the D/FW airport and pointed it west on a freeway. The skyline of Fort Worth sprang up and loomed ahead of me, taller and fatter than ever, and I marveled at how my old hometown was beginning to resemble Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, all of those cities that were striving to become a bigger Dallas.

Certain cities would always have their own look, their own feel. New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., part of L.A., Chicago below the skyscrapers, even a Jacksonville, Florida. But all other cities in my mind were starting to look alike, think alike, live alike.

Take the snow out of Minneapolis and you had Phoenix. Take the cactus out of Phoenix and you had Denver. Take the crab cakes out of Baltimore and you had Kansas City. Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta were the worst examples of progress. They were already Freeway Heaven, cities intent on linking high-rise suburbs to new shopping villages to new country clubs with condos. Cities where people in the future were only going to communicate by word processor or over strawberry Margaritas at Happy Hour.

Now it was slowly happening to Fort Worth, once the world headquarters for white socks, Western music, and Tex-Mex food, an honest town where a man wasn't considered drunk unless he was lying down in a livestock pen and couldn't speak his native language.

Fort Worth was giving birth to clusters of those steel- and-glass towers of its own, needles rising among boxes of reflective glass, and its suburbs were starting to crawl with eateries overdosed in blond bentwood furniture and imitation Tiffany lampshades.

For some, a rowdy night out in Fort Worth was still a fistfight, a two-step, and a high school football game. But for most guys it was an inane conversation with a racy receptionist while a hot stock tip was passed across a platter of plastic nachos at Mommie's Trust Fund, the newest singles bar in town.

Prairie geography was responsible, I was convinced. Fort Worth was the same size and had the same lack of pretension of a Jacksonville, but it didn't have an Atlantic Ocean, a St. Johns River and an intracoastal canal to keep the land developers from shredding every outlying oak into mortgage paper.

Fort Worth seemed as determined as Atlanta to imitate Dallas. One day soon, if the planners had their way, everybody in Fort Worth could step gingerly into a restaurant specializing in fern salads and carrot boats.

Although I was surrounded by modern architectural wonders as I motored through downtown, one thing had yet to change. There weren't any people around. It wasn't a bomb scare, it was just Fort Worth. The rich folks were as cloistered as ever, and the people I did see were either bent over from age or had dents in their foreheads and prison haircuts.

I dropped off my bags at the Hyatt Regency and drove to the TCU campus for an audience with T. J.

"Your cast and them crutches is gonna help inspire my pissants," T.J. said. We were sitting in his office in the Daniel-Meyer Coliseum on a Friday in mid-September, the day before the Rice game.

T.J.'s office had a big window looking out on my old stadium. The office was almost entirely decorated in purple and white, TCU's fighting colors.

Each new head coach over the past two decades had added more purple decor to the coaching offices. He had then lost more football games than the coach he had replaced.

The carpet in the office was purple, T.J.'s desk was purple laminate, the walls were purple with white trim, and there were the mandatory messages on the walls that were intended to motivate the college athlete who could read.

One sign said:

MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN!

Another said:

ANGRY PEOPLE WIN FOOTBALL GAMES!

My eyes lingered on the catchiest sign in his office. It said:

PRETTY COEDS DON'T SUCK LOSERS' COCKS!

"Has the chancellor seen that?" I asked T. J. innocently.

"He's a good old boy. Wants to win."

T.J. was probably right about the chancellor, Dr. Troy (Tex) Edgar, a man with an ever-present smile who wore purple, Western-cut suits and was more interested in raising funds for the university than anything else. Dr. Edgar could live with a T.J. Lambert who won football games. Like most chancellors, Dr. Edgar had no doubt been promised by his well-to-do alums that he could scare up more endowment in the end zone than he could at all of the Christian Fellowship dinners he attended.

One of the things T. J. had in mind for me while I was in town was an appearance in the TCU dressing room before the game. He wanted to introduce me to his players, whereupon I would say something to make their little hearts beat quicker.

"Tell 'em one of them bullshit Gipper things," he said.

"Like what?"

"Fuck, I don't know. Tell 'em how you went whistle to whistle against Rice one time when you had three broken ribs and a sore on your dick."

T.J. also instructed me to attend a reception for the coaching staff in the Lettermen's Lounge after the game. It was going to be a very nice function. I would see a lot of ex- teammates, probably, and several ex-TCU greats who had progressed from Honorable Mention to First Team All-America in the thirty years that had elapsed since they had worn the purple.

"Tonsillitis will be there, too. I want you to meet him," T.J. said.

"Who?"

"Tonsillitis Johnson."

"Is that his real name?"

T. J. looked at me sternly. "Tell you what, son. Tonsillitis Johnson can turn our whole program around if we can get him."

Tonsillitis Johnson was something to behold, if I could believe T.J. He was a once-in-a-lifetime running back from Boakum, Texas, a little town in the central part of the state. He was 6 feet 3, 235, and so fast, he made Herschel Walker and Earl Campbell look like paraplegics.

Fast was only half of it. Tonsillitis had a 34-inch waist, a 52-inch chest, and could benchpress the King Ranch.

"He has a three-point grade average, right?" I said. "Over a thousand on his S.A.T.'s?"

T. J. blushed and looked away for a second. He opened a drawer of his desk and took out a document.

"I hadn't ought to show you this," he said, holding what looked like a questionnaire in his hand. "Lord knows, I wouldn't want no English professors to see it."

T.J. studied the questionnaire.

"They's a conference rule what says a high school athlete has to fill out one of these in the presence of the head coach. I asked Tonsillitis to fill it out this morning. He said he'd take it home and send it back to me. I said, naw, you got to do it here, hoss. It ain't hard, I said. Just put your name down there... your address... your high school. That kind of thing. Your momma and daddy's name. He started to fill it out. When he come to the place where he was supposed to put down his favorite sport, he looked at me and said, 'What we be doin' ratch ear?' I said, Put down your favorite sport. It's football, ain't it? He gimme a nod. I said, Write it down, hoss. So he did. Only...here's what he wrote."

T. J. handed me the questionnaire.

Tonsillitis Johnson had written down the word "booley."

"Booley?" I looked up at T.J.

"Something like that."

"Booleyball," I said, rolling the word around, unequipped to fend off a grin.

T.J. snatched the questionnaire away from me. He put it back in his desk, locking the drawer hastily.

"Booley," I said again, repeating the word to myself as I gazed out the window at the stadium, a fine old gray concrete edifice.

"He can make a difference around here, son," T. J. said firmly. "We get Tonsillitis Johnson wearin' that purple, we'll kick some serious ass."

Later in the afternoon I caught up with Uncle Kenneth at Luther's Barbecue, a reliable emporium on a decaying side of town. No good barbecue joint ever flourished or even lasted in a swank neighborhood. Why would anybody eat in a place where they might encounter nouvelle brisket?

A platter of coal-black ribs sat in front of Uncle Kenneth. They reminded me of how much I hated Continental restaurants. I ordered two slabs of mesquite-smoked ribs, sauce on the side, with pintos, fries, cole slaw, and garlic bread. I then wallowed in all of it while Uncle Kenneth told me what was wrong with pro football.

Everything, he said.

The sixteen-game regular season was too long. Teams didn't try half the time, not until December. They held back, hoped to coast on through. The result was that every team was sloppy, undependable.

You shouldn't be allowed to lose seven games and reach the playoffs, much less the Super Bowl. The pros were the best thing that ever happened to college football.

In college, you had to tee it up every Saturday, and you'd better not lose more than one game if you wanted a shot at No. 1.

The draft and the parity scheduling were making every NFL team ordinary. Why reward mediocrity? Make the weak sisters work their way back to the top.

The no-bump rule was a disgrace. Why were they making it harder and harder to play defense? So they could turn humdrum quarterbacks into heroes?

How come the pros had a way of taking a great ballcarrier out of college and teaching him how to fumble and slip down?

How come the pros had a way of turning great college pass receivers into split ends who dropped key passes?

How come most NFL teams had a head coach you never heard of?

Where did all of the 300-pound subhumans come from and why were they needed to fill gaps and paw each other?

When was everybody going to wise up to artificial turf? It made players bounce higher than the ball.

Who the hell watched Monday-Thursday-Sunday-Friday Night Football on TV? Gamblers were even tired of it.

Where were all the characters in the game, men like Bobby Layne, Sonny Jurgenson, Alex Hawkins, Bill Kilmer, Paul Hornung, Mean Joe Greene, Doak Walker, Jim Brown, Max McGee, Bubba Smith, Jake Scott, and Fred Dryer?