Fight, Scrub, Fight!

Chapter One One Man’s Way

Anthony Strega stood tall and straight at the edge of the practice field, where the grass was autumn tarnished and torn with cleats. Sunrise, behind him, cast a long and brooding shadow that bisected the faded white lines.

In the end it all came down to a question of mathematics and dimension. Take eleven men and train them so that each would act as an extension of his own body, then place them on a rigidly defined area, carefully instructed in a series of maneuvers that would inexorably carry the ball the length of the field.

It was the welling red line made by the surgeon’s scalpel, the dividers against the navigator’s chart — it was real and understandable, and thus a satisfying occupation, uncomplicated by emotional perplexities, by sloppy thinking.

He stood and felt the power that was in him, the determination and the coldness, and at last he turned and walked with long strides back to the small frame house they had given him at the far end of faculty row.

As he walked back he thought of Jackson’s report about the Greely ends playing too wide and in his mind he made various compensations for that defect, selected the one most likely to take the best advantage. And he smiled tightly as he thought of the quality of the Greely coaching staff, a staff that would permit the ends to play too wide.

If he were back with the pro team he would look with suspicion on the wide ends and he would sense a trap. But in this small college league, this younger brother of the Ivy League, traps were not so devious.

His destiny was as clear in his mind as though it had been charted. His square brown hands were tight on the helm and there would be no deviation.

He entered the house by the back door. Loren, her eyes still misted with sleep, smiled at him, lifted her lips to be kissed. She was Irish and her dark hair was black as a raven’s wing, her blue eyes warm and tender and gently mocking.

After eight months of marriage she was the only segment of his life that contained the unexpected, that consistently remained unpredictable.

Her lips were warm and, as he sat down, she got up and went over to the stove to start his breakfast.

“Walking and worrying?” she asked.

“Just walking, Loren. You don’t have to worry when you know what you can do.”

“Two and two is always four, huh?” Her warm voice held laughter.

He felt the rising sharpness of his tone. “Always!”

She set the orange juice in front of him, rumpled his hair. “Not always, darling,” she said softly.

The anger faded. “Not always for you, you Irish mystic. Just for me. I know what I can do and what I can’t do. Life gives you a full return on the investment.”

She sat down suddenly, cocked her head on one side, her chin resting on her fist. “Tony, lad,” she said. “You are a nice guy and I love you. But you can’t measure everything and weigh it and tie it down. Don’t you know that?”

He grinned. “No, I don’t.”

“You’ll learn it one day.”

“Or you’ll learn my way.”

They left it at that. In their eight months of marriage it had become a fixed gambit, the grooves worn deep.

He had told her of the way life had forced his philosophy down his throat. He had been born a year after his parents had arrived in New York from the north of Italy. When he was five his father had fallen to his death from the steel framework of a new building. When he was seven he was a runny-nosed kid, ragged and sharp and scrawny, toting a shoe-shine box around Times Square and the Public Library, chased by cops, beaten by the older kids, contemptuous of the squalid apathy into which his mother had sunk.

Then an uncle had come on the scene, a jovial but miserly man who had gotten hold of truck-farm acreage in New Jersey, who was looking for cheap labor, who brought pale little Tony Strega out to work exhausting hours on the land.

He had begun to grow then, to fill out. When he was fourteen he was nearly six feet tall and weighed a hundred and seventy. On his fifteenth birthday he thrashed his uncle and won the right to continue with school.

Life had begun to pay dividends. He became an All New Jersey high-school back, and received bids from half a dozen colleges. He cannily selected the college on the basis of the kind of football played there. He liked tough, hard, competent ball.

Two years of All American play got him a berth on a pro team. They called him the “Mechanical Man.” Tall, tough, hard, merciless and exact. In the Army he played on service teams. When he was discharged he was twenty-nine. Though he was flat-bellied, wide-shouldered, hard as a slab of granite, he knew that the rate of muscle regeneration was fading. Split-second timing was gone for good; powerful legs lacked the spring they had once had.

In college he had been careful to wipe out the last traces of his beginnings by learning to speak with care, to balance a tea cup if necessary, keep his mouth shut when there was nothing to be gained by speaking. He was handsome in a dour way, impressive in the way he carried himself — slowly, carefully, but with a hint of power.

And so he made a circuit of high schools and in 1946 he took over the coaching job at a school which had a poor record. After three defeats he built up a string of twenty-two victories in a row. On the basis of that record, Adams College hired him.

Two days after the contract was signed in January, he had married Loren Quinn.

The road ahead was clear. He would make his record at Adams as impressive as the record at the high school. There would be other offers. Bigger offers. And in the end there would be a top-flight school, an impressive contract, a national reputation.

He knew that he would achieve all those things by doing what he knew how to do in the way he knew best how to do it. Tight, hard, competent football. Dimensional mathematics. Plays that snapped like a bull whip handled by boys who had been given so many hours in fundamentals that they could block, tackle, handle the ball with the precision of professionals.

He put a sketch pad beside his plate and, as he ate awkwardly with his left hand, he outlined the play variations which would take advantage of those wide ends on the Greely team.

Adams was a small school. The alumni group wanted a good team. They had financed Tony Strega’s intensive travel from January to June, had backed up his offers of scholarships and jobs to the boys he wanted.

Adams was in a sleepy little town, and it had been a college almost since the nation had been free. Once it had had great football teams. Tradition hung over the college like a proud banner, and Anthony Strega was mildly amused at the poorly concealed scorn of ancient faculty professors who privately decried the “descent into commercialism.”

He pushed the pad aside, looked across the small table. Loren’s eyes were speculative over the white rim of her coffee cup.

“The battle all planned?” she asked.

“All planned. We’ve got a chance. A fair chance to tie. A slim chance to win.”

“They’re good?”

He shrugged. “Greely has been recruiting longer than we have. They’ve had a tougher schedule. We took Barnum seven-six. They made it twenty-nothing. But we’ve been improving with each game. I can’t see that they have.”

“You know, Tony, this Adams is quite a place.”

He raised one eyebrow. “You like it?”

“I like it a lot, hon. It begins to get you after a while.”

“Don’t let it get you too much, baby. It might make it too much of a chore to tear yourself loose.”

“It doesn’t get you, does it, Tony?”

“Get me? I don’t know what you mean. I walked into a tough job here. I’m doing okay. That makes me like the place.”

“Oh, I mean the sense of time, of this school having been here so long. The list of the names of the boys who were killed in the Civil War. The chapel bell and all that.”

Tony looked at her incredulously and then laughed. “Baby, you’re falling for corn. Adams has been here a long time. But so what? You’re falling for a lot of green lawns and ivy and gray-stone buildings.”

“Two and two is always four, huh?” she asked for the second time that morning.

He had no desire to carry on the same old argument. He stood up, tossed his napkin on the table.

“Sit down a minute, Tony, darling. Just for a minute. I went to that tea yesterday at Mrs. Grayson’s. She’s a sweet old gal, Tony.”

“Grayson is the one with the spinach. The old boy who’s as old as the buildings?”

“Yes, and the two of them are fans. Real fans. Mrs. Grayson asked me a lot about the team.”

“So?”

“So are you going to use Mercer and White on Saturday?”

Tony felt the hot flush of anger. “What goes on around this place, anyway? For two weeks I’ve been getting the needle on those boys. Look, baby, I’ve got a small squad. Exactly twenty-four boys. Divide that by eleven and you get two teams with two guys left over. Believe me, those two guys left over are Mercer and White. If I’d been able to do just a little more recruiting, they wouldn’t be on the squad at all.”

“But it’s always been—”

“I know, I know,” he said roughly. “In Nineteen Hundred and One Frank Mercer and Julius White played in the backfield and helped win the Greely game. In Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-five Frank Mercer, Jr. and Julius White, Jr., seniors like their pappies had been, helped win the Greely game. Now I’ve got Frank Mercer, the third, and Julius White, the third, and this is their last year, and so I just naturally put them in and they win the Greely game. Nuts!”

“But don’t you see, Tony, that—”

“I don’t see a thing. My first-string backfield is Forsi. Jabella, Stanisk and Maroney. Frank Mercer is third-string fullback. He’s big and he looks rugged, but I can’t cure him of flinching away from a tackle. He just plain doesn’t go for physicial contact. Julius White is eager as hell, but he’s too frail. He doesn’t go over one-fifty-five. Ten more pounds and I could make a decent scatback out of him. I’m putting winning teams on the field. If they want tradition they can all go climb the chapel tower and beat on the bell.”

“You won’t use them?”

He shrugged. “When there’s two or three minutes to play and we have a lead of at least two touchdowns I could send them in for old time’s sake, I guess.”

“Like a man throwing a dog a bone?”

“Just like a man throwing a dog a bone. I’m thinking of Tony Strega. First, last and all the time. Nobody else but you in this wide world gives a damn about Tony Strega. So I put them in. So we lose the game. Am I the guy who upheld tradition? Not on your life! I’m the guy with a hole in his season record. Believe me.”

“You’re hard, Tony,” she said softly.

His anger was gone. He shrugged. “Maybe. At least not soft in the head. I’m sorry I blew. But I’ve had old grads shoving big bellies up against me for two weeks now, telling me that they’re looking forward to the way the boys are going to lick Greely. To them, the ‘boys’ are Mercer and White. Today is Wednesday. They’ll keep needling me right up until game time, but after we rack up the win they’ll forget all about Mercer and White.”

“But what about the boys themselves, Tony? How are those two boys going to feel?”

He reached over and took her hand, “Honey, if I spent my time worrying about hurting the feelings of the boys on the squad, I might just as well buy a pick and start looking for a construction gang.”