Chapter 10
JOHN GALE GOT TO THE HOUSE JUST AS Ted and Rita finished their supper. Rita dashed for the bedroom to put on some clothes while Ted answered the door.
"Come in, John. We'll have some coffee. How'd the Chiefs do?"
"They won. Eighteen to seven over the Packers."
"Let's see. That's pretty close to the score in our game with the Packers. Didn't we take them twenty-one to seven?"
John nodded. "You know? I was thinking this afternoon. The Raiders haven't missed an extra point all season!"
"That could make the difference in a close game," said Ted.
"It could," agreed John. He grinned. "You're not going to have any more close games this year."
"I'm not?"
"Not after what I saw this morning. Coach, those kids of yours are frightening!"
"Frightening? They frightened me in the second half!"
"Well ... yeah ... Something happened to them. Anyhow, here's the story on the Chiefs."
And when Ted had digested the report on the Chiefs, he knew that next Saturday's game would not be close. The Chiefs depended on their ground game. They ran the ball, favoring wide end sweeps. The few passes they attempted were wasted effort. They had no receivers who could either run fast enough to outdistance the defense or fake well enough to shake them. And their own defense consisted of an eight or nine man line with two or three safeties. In the game with the Packers, they had overpowered the Packer line, smothering the pass plays which would otherwise have beaten them. But he knew the weakness of that Packer line.
Monday's practice followed the pattern set the previous week. Little was said about the second half against the Rebels, but Ted overhead remarks among the boys that indicated the queasy feeling they'd had by half time. Teddy expressed it for the team to Rita, who passed his comment on to Ted.
"He said they got to asking themselves how they'd feel to look so awful in front of their folks after that long drive over to Oakdale. Especially after the way the Rebels' center cried when he let them through to the quarterback." She rubbed her cheek against Ted's shoulder and fingered his jaw. "The kids you've turned out with this team are something special, honey. Tough and hard-and sentimental!"
Loren Thompson was as good as his word. Ted and Bill and Al drove to the Thompson house together Wednesday night to view the films of the Bronco Charger game. The Chargers had kicked off to Ron's Broncos. After a short runback, the Broncos put the ball in play at their own twenty three yard line. Two running plays moved them to the twenty-seven, with the Charger middle line backer making the first tackle and assisting on the second. The third play was an attempted pass, which the same boy broke up by blitzing. The punt on the fourth down was a good one and the Chargers returned it only to their own thirty.
On the Chargers' first offensive play, their quarterback rolled out to the left and handed off to the flanker. Ignoring the ball carrier, three Broncos hit the quarterback after he'd gotten rid of the ball. Charley Hershel got to him first, hitting him in the small of the back with his shoulder, moving in at a dead run. The Broncos' right defensive end came in from the side with his forearm up to catch the quarterback in the throat as he started to fall forward. Another player leaped on the fallen boy's side with his knee.
Thompson stopped the projector and reversed it.
"Mind if I run that back in slow motion, coach?" he asked.
"You filmed this game in slow motion?!" Ted gasped at the thought of what the film must have cost. Then he remembered Thompson's position in the community. He could afford the film for something he considered worth it.
The play unfolded in the dream-like display of grace of slow motion. With his telephoto lens, Loren had caught the quarterback wheeling away from the center with the ball in his outstretched hands, taking five floating strides back and to his left and reaching far out toward his accelerating flanker. There was no deception and the flanker's grace and bunched power was a clear tip-off as to the reason. On this play, the Chargers didn't need to fool the opponent: they'd run over him.
The quarterback stopped in two more steps, arresting his forward motion with pogo-stick type hops as he rotated his body to the left-his back to the line-and watched the flanker gather blockers. A yellow jersey loomed into the frame, shoulders pumping and helmet aimed at the now motionless quarterback. A shoulder connected with the white jersey, just above the top of the pants and the quarterback's arms left his sides to float upward over his head and back. His feet left the ground and he pitched slowly forward.
A second gold jersey closed with the white figure. The face of the approaching player showed above his raised forearm. Through his face-guard, his eyes were fixed steadily on his target, with an expression of fierce pleasure. Ted watched the forearm laid like a bar across the exposed throat and the awful forward snap of the white-helmeted head. The third impact came so late that it seemed impossible that the officials could have allowed it and Ted gagged as he watched the knee drive downward into the side of the writhing figure on the ground.
Thompson stopped the film again for a moment. "Coach, I'd call that scene enlightening."
"My God!" breathed Bill. "That was a cold blooded execution!"
"I checked today," replied Loren. "He's still in the hospital-and still listed as serious. So is that flanker you were looking at."
"Was he the other injury?"
"Yeah. You'll see it in a couple of plays. The flanker played both offense and defense. He was that tough middle line-backer that broke up Ron's first set of downs. The Chargers' star-until Saturday." Loren started the projector at normal speed.
The next play opened with the replacement quarterback faking a handoff to the flanker, who charged out to his right, then handing the ball to the fullback, who ran it over his own left tackle. The empty-handed flanker charged hard for a half dozen steps, then slowed and straightened up. Hershel threw off his blocker, brushed past the charging fullback and followed the flanker. As the latter slowed and straightened, Hershel dropped his shoulder and drove it into the boy's back. Another gold jersey converged on the scene to club the falling back with his elbow. Again, Loren reran the scene in slow motion and they saw that the second Bronco was a line-backer, who fixed a collision course for the flanker through the opening weak side of the Charger line.
"That's almost hard to believe," whispered Ted. Suddenly he straightened. "Back that up, Loren!"
Loren backed the film and reran it, showing the flanker going down for the third time.
Ted left his breath out slowly. "Is that a number eighty-three on that line-backer's jersey?"
"Yes, it is," Loren replied. "I already jotted down the player numbers from these two plays."
The rest of the film showed a rough, dirty foot ball game, with the gold jerseys scoring at will against a demoralized white team, but there were no more players deliberately crippled. The officials appeared to have done their best. The Broncos were repeatedly penalized. Short of stopping the game and awarding it to the Chargers, no two men could have done any more. But the film revealed countless cases of holding and kneeing and tripping and elbowing that neither official could have seen.
At the end of the showing, Bill turned to Ted. "What are you going to do, Ted?"
"I don't know, Bill. I just don't know."
"Boy!" Bill put his face in his hands and his voice was muffled. 'I'm not going to put my kids up against that kind of tactics."
Ted had a mental picture of Dana in the place of the flanker and knew that Bill saw it too. "I agree, Bill. We aren't going to go into that game until we have this thing settled."
"My God, boss coach!" Al sounded awed. "I've watched special film clippings on dirty play in pro games, but I've never seen anything anymore brutal than this!"
Loren nodded. "My boy isn't going to play in the game against the Broncos unless there's an answer to this kind of thing." He continued rewinding the film.
"Look, Loren," said Ted. "I'd like to look at the first eight or ten plays again. Okay?"
"Sure. As soon as I finish rewinding."
As the screen came to life again, Ted scanned the Bronco offensive unit, looking for number eighty-three.
"Hold it, Loren!"
Loren stopped the projector.
"Run that play again-slow motion."
Loren backed the film up, then put it into forward in slow motion. It was the Broncos' third play, where they'd attempted to pass.
"Watch the tight end-number eighty-three," Ted told Bill and Al. "See if you can make out his face."
As the play developed, they watched the tight end take two steps across the line and flare out, coming toward the camera. Then the lens zoomed in to pick up the charging line-backer as he descended on the Broncos' quarterback.
"Could you see his face?" asked Ted.
"Yeah. It was pretty clear just before the camera lost him," said Al.
"Recognize him?"
"Tough with that helmet and face-guard, boss coach."
"Run it again, Loren."
Loren gave Ted a speculative glance and reran the play, still in slow motion.
"Look close," Ted said.
"Hmm ... can't quite ... Hey! That's Darryl Strong!" Al jumped forward to get a closer look. "Sure as the devil!"
"You're sure?"
"Ted, I used to have nightmares about that kid last year. I knew we'd run into him at the end of the season. You bet I'm sure!"
"Do you remember Mike Terrence?"
"Terrence? Terrence? He wasn't out last year."
"No, but do you remember him?"
"Yeah. He's one of the kids we decided we couldn't use this fall. It was his first try at football and he just didn't have the coordination to protect himself."
"That's right," said Bill. "I remember him. He was part of the common draft pool. I remember him because he tried too hard and screwed up so often. Ron finally picked him up, I think." He stopped and his eyes widened. "Do you have a copy of Ron's roster, Loren?"
"It's in the association schedule, isn't it?" asked Loren.
"Yeah."
"Okay. There's a copy of the schedule on that little table over there."
Bill got the schedule and studied Ron's roster. "Number eighty-three-Mike Terrence!" He stared at Ted. "That kid in the film isn't Terrence! Mike's black!"
Ted grinned slowly. "That's right, coach. Mike's black."
Al whistled. "Now what are you going to do, boss coach?"
"I'm going to ask Loren for the loan of these films and his projector, first."
"You've got 'em, coach!" Loren said.
"And then we're going to hold a council of war at my house ... you and Bill and I."
"There's nothing more that I can do, coach," said Loren. "You won't need me, will you?"
"No. Not tonight. I may need you later, though, to swear that you took these films."
"Of course! Any time!"
Outside, Ted suggested that Bill and Al pick up their wives and bring them along.
Bill started to laugh. "Thinking about games after the meeting, Ted?"
Ted shook his head. "Not tonight. But I think we need a big helping of feminine intuition in this conference."
"Okay, boss coach."
A half hour later, the three couples huddled over Ted and Rita's dining room table. Ted quickly explained that they had a decision to reach relative to Ron's tactics.
"I've already told Rita what we saw on the film. You two told Elsie and Cora, I suppose."
"Sure!"
"Of course!"
"Okay. There was an emergency meeting on player eligibility and game injuries Saturday, with Hensen and Wilson and Ron and me. At the end of the meeting, I told them there'd damn well better not be any bad injuries in that play-off game."
"Good enough," growled Al.
"Ron left with me when the meeting broke up. You all remember the spaghetti dinner."
Cora shivered. "And he turned out to be a filthy brute! I should never have asked Elsie to invite him!"
"Well, Ron remembers it too. He hinted that he'd spread that story if we made any trouble for him."
"That dirty, blackmailing bastard!" exclaimed Al.
"He'd do it!" Cora said.
Ted agreed. "I believe he would. So do we pretend not to have seen the films?"
Bill tightened his lips and shook his head. "I know one thing for sure! I'm not going to set Dana up like a duck in a shooting gallery. Not if I have to bench him for that game!"
"And Al's not going to put Mark out there and I'm not laying Ted Jr., open to Ron's firing squad. Okay. We're the coaches. We're not going to expose any of our kids to that kind of thing, are we!"
"Hell, no!" Bill scowled.
"How do we protect them?" Ted asked quietly.
"Bill, we can't let the kids know that ...!" Elsie choked off her sentence, her voice full of panic.
Ted drew a deep breath. He had a moment of fury when he realized how shaky it sounded as it went in. "Maybe we've got to introduce us to ourselves. Is there anyone here who's a goddamn liar?"
Head shakes around the table.
"Then we're all going to face our kids with the fact we've had a round robin screwing party going all season."
A stunned silence, then a chorus of objections.
"All right. I agree. We're not going to do that. Meet six goddamn liars!"
"Ted!" Rita's wail was full of pain.
Ted felt terribly tired. He kept his voice low. "Look. We're honest people. We don't lie or steal. We keep the promises we make. We teach our kids to obey the law. But we figured there were some laws that violated our personal rights-laws that butted into areas that were our own business and had nothing to do with anyone else. We decided we'd make up our own minds about our personal relationships. Right?"
Nods.
"Do we still feel that way?"
Silence.
"But we're not about to tell the kids, are we?"
Vigorous denial.
"There's only one thing we can do."
"What's that?" whispered Elsie.
"Blow this thing wide open for Ron before he knows what's happening. When he starts shooting off his mouth about us afterward, we let everyone think he's making up the story for revenge."
Bill sighed. "Label the sonovabitch a liar!"
"Right! And go ahead and be the liars that we are by using the opportunity to show the kids what depths a person with Ron's character can sink to. Be self-righteous, sanctimonious bastards, ourselves."
"And vomit when no one's looking," added Elsie.
"I'm afraid so," muttered Ted.
Cora straightened in her chair and glared round the table. "I don't make speeches," she said.
She's right, thought Ted. She does, rather than talking.
"I don't make speeches," she repeated, "but I've got something I've got to say. I love Al more than anyone else in the world. I can't remember either of my parents and I hated every set of foster parents I had. But Al's been good to me and I love him. I love you other two guys, too. In a way, you make up for love I didn't get as a kid. I like you to screw me." She paused for breath and raised her chin.
Ted held his breath as he waited for her to continue. There was a note of strength and self respect in her tone that he hadn't been able to put into his.
She went on. "I don't feel a goddamn bit guilty about what Ted suggested. I'm not very smart and I've always tried to live by the rule that you don't hurt other people. Period. You don't hurt other people. If you try to, you get it in the neck. We didn't hurt anyone. Ron did-lots of people like those kids and their parents. He's got it coming to him! I'm not going to lose one hour's sleep over it!" She leaned back, her jaw set.
By God, I wish I felt that way, thought Ted. It feels right; it just doesn't fit the goddamn code I grew up with.
There was a long silence. At last, Bill cleared his throat. "Just how are we going to spring this trap on friend Demming, Ted?"
"Well ..." Ted pondered the question. "The association board of directors is going to have to take formal action, or else the federation."
"Right."
"And they're going to have to take the action before Ron has a chance to spread his stories."
"Right."
"They're going to have to be mad as hell to make an announcement before notifying Ron."
"Right again."
"I think this is what we'll have to do."