Semi-Tough Read online

  Puddin was wearing a T-shirt, shorts and shower slippers, and Cissy Walford had never seen anybody that big out of street clothes. Puddin is six feet eight and goes about two seventy.

  Cissy looked at Puddin and quietly said, "Oh, wow!"

  Puddin asked if I had realized that T.J. Lambert broke his all-time chili cheeseburger record this morning at the squad meeting.

  I didn't know it.

  Puddin pointed out that T.J. must have stayed out all night somewhere and came straight to the meeting with eight chili cheeseburgers from Tommy's Drive-In over on Beverly and Rampart.

  "Eight of 'em," said Puddin. "And he inhaled ever one of them cats before we got through fifteen minutes of film."

  The phone just rang and it was Commissioner Cameron, who said he was calling up both team captains to wish us luck and also to remind us that both teams are expected to be at a Friday luncheon at the Century Plaza.

  At the Friday luncheon, I'm told, everybody on the two teams is supposed to meet a lot of governors and retired generals and movie stars and get a bunch of gifts, like watches and rings and blankets.

  I may have neglected to mention that I'm the Giants' captain.

  Commissioner Cameron said he had already called up the dog-ass Jets' captain, which is Andy Odom, who is not a bad tight end.

  "Did you remind him that his ass is in deep water on Sunday?" I said.

  Commissioner Cameron laughed.

  He's a good old boy who's really helped all the players in the league get a lot of money out of their owners, most of whom are a pack of spoiled rich kids who give you bad stock tips.

  Commissioner Cameron also likes a cocktail now and then, which I think is good. And besides that, it may not hurt to mention that on certain occasions around New York, Commissioner Cameron has been known to turn up in places like our apartment when word had circulated that some stewardi and light hooks had come over for an all-skate.

  I asked the Commissioner if he'd got any good wool lately.

  THE PHONE RANG AGAIN A WHILE ago but I didn't get mound to answering it because it happened that at the time I was in the pleasant process of pulling Cissy Walford's wool down over my ears like a helmet.

  I'VE BEEN THINKING THAT TRYING to write a book during the week of the biggest week in my life is probably less fun than being next-to-last on a high school gang-fuck.

  There are parts of it which I don't mind because it helps me relax and take my mind off Dreamer Tatum. These are parts which I think of as being amusing.

  It's the other parts that are a pain in the ass. All of the explaining you have to do. Things that Jim Tom says the publishing company, LaGuerre & Koming, will insist on being in the book. A lot of background stuff.

  You better not be shitting me, Jim Tom.

  I've been at it for over an hour now, telling all about last night and this morning. And I've just realized that I haven't ever begun to tell about people like our coach, Shoat Cooper, or the rest of the team, or in any depth about Shake Tiller or Barbara Jane.

  Shake's in his bedroom of our palatial suite, either taking a nap or reading another book that some Russian wrote about God. And Barbara Jane has gone off to have some drinks with some advertising people.

  That's another thing. I've forgotten to mention that Barbara Jane models for a lot of commercials on TV and on signboards. In the world of modeling she's a stud, is all she is. Probably everybody has seen her who has ever watched TV or driven a car. She's the girl on the signboards — right now, in fact — smoking those Kentuckians, those long skinny cigarettes. And she's the Pacific Basin Airlines girl looking back over her shoulder with just the bikini bottoms on, strolling along Waikiki in Hawaii.

  About a year ago she was the girl on TV who did those funny imitations of a vampire bat, trying to get some kids to eat the right breakfast cereal. And she was also the girl on TV they dressed up like Cleopatra and put in a Volkswagen floating on a barge down the Nile.

  DDD and F did all those.

  Barb remembers having quite a time making that airline commercial in Hawaii, mainly because of Burt Danby, who's the head of Doff, Danby, Dendle and Frederickson. Ever since Burt Danby thinks he discovered Barbara Jane he's been trying to nail her.

  Harb says she had to run a whole lot better than I ever did against the Cardinals or Eagles to keep from getting blitzed by Burt over in Hawaii when we weren't around.

  He still tries, now and then. But Shake and me never get hot about it.

  I think everybody in New York has been in love with Barbara Jane at one time or another. She's had every known swipe taken at her, but of course she doesn't love anybody but Shake Tiller — and maybe me.

  Barb came up to New York when we did, just after we had signed with the Giants. We were all really happy to have been chosen by fate to wind up in the big city.

  The Giants had told me ahead of time that they were going to draft me. They had the second choice in the first round. I had said that I wouldn't sign unless they drafted Shake Tiller also. We were determined to play for the same team, even if we had to go to the Canadian League. I was taken first, of course, being a "white runner."

  The Giants worked it out that Dallas, which had the third choice in the first round, drafted Shake for them. I think they had to give up three or four players and some future draft choices to get Dallas to do that.

  Anyhow, that's how Shake and me became New York Giants.

  Barb hadn't given any thoughts at all to becoming a model when we moved to New York. She immediately got a job at CBS as a secretary. She just strolled into the CBS sports department one day and one of their producers saw her and said, "If you can make coffee, you're hired."

  She could have walked into any building in Rockefeller Center and done the same thing. Barb is just so pretty she sometimes frightens people.

  Her main job at CBS seemed to be going to lunch for about four hours every day, to places like Mike Manuche's on Fifty-second Street, which is a restaurant with a lot of sports paintings on the walls where Giant fans go to discuss trades.

  It was in Manuche's one day that Burt Danby saw Barb for the first time and decided she ought to be a model. I've heard her say that this was her introduction to the hip ways of New York. Burt spotted her, walked over to the table, unzipped his fly, looked down at his crotch, and said, "Now, sir. Would you please stand up, give us your name, and tell us what you do?"

  When Barb roared laughing, Burt knew he'd found a good chick. He turned her over to his creative department at DDD and F and said, "I want her to be big, big, big."

  In those days, even though Burt learned that Barb belonged to us, he high-played her all around town. He would always be thinking up reasons why the two of them had to have dinner or cocktails.

  I think he just likes to turn up at all of his joints with a winner on his arm. He likes to put on velvet jackets, hot-comb his hair, hang a bunch of gold shit around his neck dogtags and animal heads and the like — and prance into Elaine's up on Eighty-eighth and Second Avenue with a Hall of Famer in his company.

  Burt takes considerable pride in being able to get a table anywhere he wants one, even Elaine's, where movie stars and archdukes and shoe company presidents and a grand assortment of born-rich fools have been known to stand in line for hours.

  Barb doesn't mind going along occasionally, even now. Especially if me and Shake are out of town. It gives her something to do, and of course everybody likes front row center.

  "He's harmless," she says. "And he's actually kind of sweet."

  To which Shake says, "He wears Gucci underwear."

  Well, I can joke about my employer, but I'll tell you how strong he is. One night he took Barb and Shake and me up to Elaine's and the narrow front room up there was packed as usual with all of the semi-artists and spoiled rich pricks who sit there and stare at each other's dates and clothes.

  Seeing Burt was there and needed a table instantly, Elaine herself personally cleared out a bevy of brooding poets and eye
-shadow junkies so we could sit down.

  Burt leaped for the chair with his back against the wall, banged his fist on the table, and said, "Isn't this the super-est place in the whole world? Broadway, I'll lick you yet."

  So anyhow Barb's off with Burt Danby now and some other advertising nitwits, and Shake is either asleep or reading, and who I basically have on my mind is Shoat Cooper.

  I'll tell you something. The great miracle of our age is that the Giants are in the Super Bowl with Shoat Cooper for a head coach. Him being the coach was a stroke of genius on the part of Burt Danby, by the way.

  When me and Shake were drafted, the head coach was Doyt Elkins, of course, who had originally been hired by the Maras, the old organization. I thought Doyt was a pretty good coach, considering that he only communicated with the players by memo.

  We could have done all right with Doyt. But he went to the Cowboys and took the whole staff with him, except for the head scout, which was none other than Shoat Cooper.

  Burt Danby didn't even look for anybody else. He said the press liked Shoat because they got drunk together. Besides, Burt said, he was sick of coaches who made the game so mysterious.

  When Burt announced that Shoat had the job at a press conference, he said, "God, I'm just so up to here with zig-outs and fly patterns. I mean, the way they all talk, they just practically make me do a total face-down in the old salad. Shoat Cooper keeps its simple. And lake it from an old advertising cock that if no one knows what you're saying, you couldn't sell welfare in Harlem."

  What Burt didn't add was that Shoat Cooper came cheap.

  I'm not sure where to begin to describe the country sumbitch.

  Shoat's big. He doesn't have much hair left. He looks like he's got about twelve six-packs of Pearl in his belly. And he's always looking around for somewhere to spit.

  He's got a slow, deep, country voice. A husky kind of voice, like somebody who just woke up, or like a deputy sheriff talking to a spook who forgot to park his pickup truck between the white lines.

  I don't think I've ever seen Shoat act like he's excited.

  The one time back during the regular season when we were behind, which was at a halftime when the Redskins had us down by thirty to fourteen on some lucky passes, Shoat Cooper just acted like nothing was any different.

  When we all walked into the locker room at Yankee Stadium and slammed our hats down, there was Shoat on a little stool in front of the blackboard, looking down at the floor.

  Everybody was bitching and moaning for a few minutes, those that hadn't peed yet or done various things. Finally we plunked down and got quiet and looked at him.

  Shoat sat there, chewing on a toothpick, and then he got around to telling us about the first half.

  "Well, defense," he groaned slowly. "Seemed to me like you all just kind of stood around and let 'em eat the apple off your head."

  Then he spit.

  Nobody said anything back for a minute or so and then Puddin Patterson said, "They stuntin', Coach. On Blast and Cutback, that fuckin' Seventy-six is comin' from somewhere and I can't get a piece of him."

  Shoat said hmmmmm.

  Puddin said, "I believe we can catch 'em, coach. We gonna roll like a big wheel this half."

  Shoat said, "Well, we ain't gonna catch nobody unless our defense gets together and decides that they ain't gonna let 'em piss another drop."

  Shoat said for the defense to go down to the other end of the locker room and get their problems worked out.

  T.J. Lambert drew himself up and said, "Awright, defense. We got to screw our navels to the ground now and get them tootie fruities."

  The defense moved away as T.J. hiked his leg and cut a big one.

  Puddin Patterson said, "Coach, where that Seventy-six comin' from?"

  Shoat looked at the floor for a while and then he said, I tell you what let's do, Puddin. Let's you just go out there this half and concentrate on tryin' to hit ever sumbitch that's wearin' a different colored shirt."

  Shoat's idea for the second half was for Hose Manning to throw a couple of new patterns in the third quarter, rel something else on the scoreboard, and then "outgut" the Redskins in the last quarter.

  He would always go back to the running game if you gave him half a chance.

  "If you run the football up somebody's ass," Shoat says, "then it's them that has to get their hands dirty tryin' to pull it out."

  Early in that second half against the Redskins, Hose Manning hit Shake for fifty-five yards on a fly, and that brought us up to thirty to twenty-one. T.J. recovered a fumble right after that and Hose kicked a field goal to make it thirty to twenty-four. But after that, we didn't do anything but run old Billy Clyde.

  I carried the ball twenty-two times in the fourth quarter, and scored two sixes, and we finally won it, thirty-eight to thirty.

  I was a heavy-breathing sumbitch on the sideline toward the end, but Shoat Cooper put his arm around my shoulder pads and said, "Stud hoss, I ought to buy you

  a rubber dolly. That was pure dee football out there."

  Shoat Cooper had been a great player in the NFL himself. The old-timers will tell you that there weren't many linebackers any better. Maybe Tommy Nobis was. Or Dick Butkus.

  But Shoat in his day was some kind of pisser, they say. They say he craved action so much he would beat his head on the locker room wall until they let him loose for the kickoff.

  Shoat came out of Arkansas, like his name suggests. He was from Possum Grape and played ball at the University of Arkansas, where the freshman team is called Shoats.

  But they say that's not where he got his name, Shoat. Growing up, I hear, Shoat just looked like a baby pig, or a shoat, so somebody started calling him Shoat.

  I guess he might smile when we win Sunday. But in the three years he's been our coach, he hasn't.

  You would think that Shoat might have smiled once or twice during our regular season since we're undefeated and untied and already have a diamond ring cinched for winning the National Conference.

  We won that, incidentally, by dough-popping the LA Rams thirty-three to thirty-one. I scored three sixes.

  But all that old Shoat has said all along is, "A football team with one more game to win ain't no better off than a tired old farmer with one more pig to slop."

  As the head coach of the New York Giants I guess the best thing you can say about Shoat is that he doesn't fuck us around. Maybe there's something to that. Maybe a team of pros can just get together and do the job, like we would have done last year if a lot of us hadn't been injured and gone seven-seven.

  Shake says this is true, and Shake is semi-intellectual about the game.

  Shake says, "Winning is a happy accident of getting a bunch of guys together who want to."

  Shake has studied it a lot and he says that coaches are not so important in the pros. He says they're important in college because there are those who can outsmart the others and outrecruit the others.

  "But in the pros," he says, "there are studs on every team, and anybody can beat anybody else on a certain Sunday. It's all a matter of which team don't have the rag on."

  Shake says that in the pros the teams that win are the ones that stay mentally tough.

  When my old buddy talks like this, I tell him he sounds about half like a Darrell Royal or somebody.

  Shake says hustle ain't nothing but acting like a gorilla.

  "That's the part that's fun," he says. "Hitting people and getting hit and rolling around on the carpet is easy. The hard part is making yourself do something right — at the right minute."

  He says, "When you get twenty-two studs who find losing a football game the most distasteful thing in the world, then you got yourself a winner. Hell, everybody wants to win, or says they do. But not wanting to lose is what it's all about."

  Shake talked like this at our meeting this morning.

  "We're just not gonna accept a loss to those dog-asses," he said.

  "There'll be a minute out there Sun
day," he said, "when one of us will do something better than he's ever done it before, and we'll win. One of us will do it because we'll all be tryin'."

  All Shoat Cooper said at the meeting was that we'd stress the kicking game in workout this afternoon at UCLA, and then pose for some photographs with some starlets.

  They better not let T.J. Lambert get too close to those starlets.

  Hi, there, friends and neighbors. This is old Billy Clyde Puckett back from practice and showered and shaved and dolled up in his white-on-white-on-white, seeing as how I'm out in California.

  Shake and Barbara Jane and Cissy have gone on off to dinner with Puddin Patterson and his wife, Rosalie. They all wanted to go hear somebody sing while they tried to eat but I said I didn't like anybody's singing but Elroy Blunt. And anyway, I wanted to write some more.

  I said to call me later and I would go join them somewhere for half a dozen young Scotches.

  I got my burgers and fries and my coffee here in our palatial suite and I'm finally going to get it off my mind about Marvin (Shake) Tiller.

  Well, now, I presume that most everybody is aware that Shake Tiller is the greatest ball-catching end there ever was.

  He hasn't been anything but All-Pro since we came up. I guess he catches eighty or ninety balls a year, and this makes a pretty good quarterback out of Hose Manning, who I think is the best since Joe Namath and Sonny Jurgensen hung it up.

  Even the dumbest of the sports writers — and there aren't many smart ones — says Shake is probably better than Hutson or Alworth or any of those studs we've heard about in history.

  The thing which makes Shake so great, aside from his hands and his speed and his moves, is that he runs a route so good. If he's supposed to go seven and a half yards down and four and a half yards out, then Shake runs seven and a half yards down and four and a half yards out.

  Nobody knows it but not many receivers can do this.

  Shake of course is a good-looking dude. He's got this red-blond hair that's thick and flops around. He's got a sort of dimpled chin and lots of good white teeth and some green-blue eyes that Barbara Jane says have an evil sparkle. His expression makes him look most often like he knows deep down everything there is to know, but naturally he doesn't.