Six Points to Remember

In our second game of the season, Steen at left half broke two bones in his foot, and a season that had promised to be one of the best in the history of Northern Tech immediately turned into a rat race. Steen had been our scatback; the boy who could run as though his pants were on fire, stop dead, go high and rifle a jump pass into a lunch pail at twenty-five yards.

We hunks of lethargy in the line had felt good with Steen behind us on offense, along with Big Junior Temple at full, hard-running Les Schuman at right half, flashy little Chris MacLay at quarter. When you are in the line there is a satisfaction in taking your slow count from the signal, busting the hole and knowing that the T is timed so good that, as you bust the hole, the back coming through will just miss your pants with his cleats.

Also there had been a lot of kidding in the offensive backfield. Maybe because there had been one Jewish guy, one Irish, one German and one Englishman, they called themselves the Four Norsemen. In the first game and for the first half of the second game we all knew that the combo was right. The whole team broke on the plays with that bounce that pays off.

All that kidding stopped when Steen was carried off. A good backfield is like an overpopulated marriage. Or like a fancy differential where every gear has to mesh just right.

Bill Logan filled in the last half of the game. He tried hard to fill Steen’s shoes, but it was pretty evident that he was just another back. Chris dropped down the ladder to the simpler plays off the T, but that meant that he couldn’t spread the opposition so good. Once we blocked Logan down the field and shook him loose, but he tried to double back from the safety and was nailed from behind on the twenty when he had been down as far as the eight. Even so, it was a thirty-yard gain from midfield;

Two plays later Logan bobbled a pass into the hands of the opposition and missed his tackle on the man coming through. He took it ninety yards for a touchdown and on the conversion Guy Martin, the tackle next to me, burst through and caught the kick on his chest. So we held our one-point lead and won the game. With Steen in there it would have been thirteen points — maybe.

Offensive backfield practice was rough all the next week. About the time that Tiny Hubbs, the line coach, told us to take twice around the field and call it a day, those backfield boys were just starting new series of run-throughs that would take them until late under the floodlights.

We could see that Sam Henninger, the head coach, was alternating Bill Logan with a kid named Juan Procuna. This Procuna was a chunky kid with an impassive face and long curling eyelashes around liquid brown eyes.

On Thursday in the locker room, Stan Blount, the center, and I talked it over. He said, “Wade, I’ll pick Logan. Hell, his feet get in the way, but Henninger’ll have him running those plays in his sleep.”

“How about the arm on that Procuna?” I asked. “Did you see him pegging them fifty yards the other day? Not floaters, either.”

“So he’s got an arm. Logan doesn’t do bad.”

“One out of every two passes is bad. And how about Procuna’s running? That chunky little guy can really spin through. When we were trying to stop the scrubs a few weeks back, I though I had him good. I had my face right against the side of his knee and he rolled right out of it. Nearly tore my arm off.”

“My bet is Logan. Junior, Chris and Les Schuman want him too.”

“Procuna has more stuff,” I said.

“In practice, sure. But did you ever see one of those Mexicans in competition? Hell, I don’t know of a good one. He looks better than Logan in a lot of departments, but I’ve got to see him in a game first.”

And we saw him in a game. Henninger started him in the Mid-Eastern U. game the following Saturday. In the line, we didn’t get much of a look. Those big linemen of Mid-Eastern kept us very, very busy. But during the times I was benched for a rest I watched Juan Procuna out there.

He carried out his assignments with deadpan precision. And all the rip was gone out of our offensive backfield. That infected the whole team and it seemed to turn into one of those endless afternoons. Three or seven plays and then kick. Stop the opposition and let them kick. Try again. The passes were batted down and neither side could shake men loose. Eight yards was a long run. One of those games where the lines come together with a solid sound, chunk and grunt.

Since I had picked Procuna over Logan I watched close to see if Junior, Chris and Les Schuman were fouling him up. They weren’t. The handoffs were just right and the shovel passes and the flips were hung right up in front of him so that he didn’t have to reach off balance.

And I couldn’t see what Stan had hinted at either. Juan Procuna took his lumps without trying to sideslip or run out of bounds. If he could make another three inches by staying on the field, he stayed. But the team had somehow lost that wonderful unforgettable bounce. It’s like what the Satch said about jazz. If you got to ask what it is, you’ll never know.

The big break came in the early minutes of the last quarter. Mid-Eastern was on its own thirty-three, fourth and a half yard to go. Any ten-year-old child would have said they had to kick. They lined up in punt formation and their quarterback sneaked right between Stan Blount and Brownie Elvers, our right guard, for a yard. That seemed to wake them up. On the next play their left end showed more speed than he had all afternoon. He got two steps beyond our defensive right half, gobbled up the pass and romped down to our forty before he was nailed.

They banged off three and five right through the middle. I was in on defense. After the next play my face was red. Like a high-school hero, I’d been mousetrapped so nicely that they ran their delayed buck for twelve yards right through where I had been. On a fast opening play, there was a lot of beautiful faking in their back-field and out of the confusion a pass soared neatly into the hands of their right end on the goal line. The conversion made it 7–0.

They kicked off and our offensive back-field was missing Procuna. Henninger had sent Logan in. The lineup after Les’ runback had more zip, but the zip slowly faded as they stopped us. The clock slowly marked off the long minutes of the kicking duel. They froze the ball whenever they could. With two minutes to play, they had to kick again. Logan took it and came up the middle, cut toward the sidelines, spun and arched a basketball pass back to Junior Temple. The trouble was that Junior wasn’t there. Two hungry Mid-Easterners stood under it like children looking at the top of the Christmas tree. The pass was way too high. Logan had pushed it up there from an off-balance position.

I was rolling to my feet, and hoping to cut across to intercept whichever one of them grabbed it Then Junior Temple, the Big Freight, came up out of nowhere. He ran right up an invisible staircase and grabbed the ball. As he came down he knocked one of the opposition spinning and ran away from the other one. I angled across and made my third block of the play. I was beginning to feel as though I was going to be out there blocking on that play for what was left of the game. When I sat up Junior was thudding across the goal line.

The kick was nearly blocked before Les got it away. They tried two pass plays, and the game ended. We had grabbed a precarious tie out of thin air. We were a weary group trudging to the locker room that day.

Henninger sauntered through, accompanied by his staff, giving us all a look of mild distaste.

On Monday afternoon Logan wrenched his knee practicing quick cuts.

The Saturday game was a breather, the only one of the season. The offensive backfield played an emotionless game. They were four guys who could have been wound up with big keys in the small of their backs. The timing was all right, but not inspired. Against Lewiston it didn’t have to be. Lewiston had spirit, but their line was too light, their replacements too shallow. We won 28-6, with everyone on the squad getting their feet wet.

On the following Thursday night we all went down to the station and climbed onto the train for our traditional intersectional game deep in the heart of you-know what.

And we didn’t climb on the train like a group going down there to trim the Big Green. It was like going to a wake. The Big Green had been burning up the sports sections of the papers. According to the starry-eyed sportswriters we were going down there to play tag with such a collection of supermen that we half expected them to soar onto the field wearing capes, their feet two yards off the ground. According to what we read every man on the team weighed 220, could do the hundred in 9.5 and ate a raw steak for breakfast, preferably chewing it off the steer on the run. It was enough to scare you.

The previous year, with Steen, we had lucked out a one-point victory. And now they were stronger and Steen was out.

Henninger wandered around and talked to us in small groups. He looked tired. Louie DeJohn, the offensive right end, John Staik, right tackle, and I were talking when he came up and slid into the seat with us. He smiled and said, “Win, lose or draw, I’m proud of the line. They might run around you boys, but not through you. We’ll talk it up a little tonight and take a light workout tomorrow morning. From then on we’ll forget ball until game time.”

We hashed over plays and he passed around, the stills he’d had made from the movies we’d watched of the Big Green in action, stills that illustrated specific weaknesses in fine play.

The big glaring white stadium was packed with sixty thousand leather-throated fans. The lightweight uniforms were right for the sun glare, for the heat that seemed to bounce off the banked fans and settle across the line markers.

From a distance the Big Green looked like an aggregation of giants. But from close up they turned into people. It was just a good design job on the uniform that made them look so enormous. But they were sun-darkened, hard and used to the heat.

After bouncing out a few of the nervous kinks, the eleven of us, the first-string offense, went into the team room under the stands behind our bench. Everybody seemed to have learned Juan Procuna’s deadpan expression. The atmosphere in the room was heavy.

Henninger walked over to Juan Procuna and looked at him for a long moment. The rest of us couldn’t figure out what was up. Henninger said, “I can use Tillotson, Juan. That is, if you think it would be a better idea.”

For the first time I saw Procuna smile. It was a nervous smile, but warm. “I’d like to play,” he said.

Henninger slapped his shoulder. “Good boy.”

He turned and looked at us. He said, “Make ’em go home tonight and read over their scrapbooks.” Then he walked to the door and shook hands with each of us as we piled out.

As we went out I raised my eyebrows and shrugged at Stan Blount and said, “Can you figure that?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” he said.

We received. My stomach was a big frozen sponge wedged too tightly against my heart until I saw the ball lift, saw the Big Green, spread wide, racing down toward us. The hard endless hours of practice paid off. I feinted and nailed my man, hitting him solidly across the thighs; glancing back as I rolled to my feet, I saw Les cutting toward my right. I angled in and dumped a man for the second block, and it gave Les another good eight yards. He brought it all the way out to our thirty-eight. Then was when we should have been talking it up, when the back-field should have been on their toes. But the moody silence of the last games persisted.

We use a tip number and a count on the T. Like this. Suppose it’s part of the twenty-six series. Chris starts the signal with the twenty-six, followed by the number of the play. Suppose it’s number eight in the twenty-six series. At the moment he says the eight, every man starts a metronome count in his head. You say to yourself, “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four.” As you say four, you dive into your assignment, and it comes perfectly on the snap of the ball. At the same time the back in motion is counting and judging his stride to be exactly at the right spot at the four count.

Junior Temple took the ball in a straight handoff for a direct line smash to pull in their defensive backfield. He smacked through for three.

As we lined up, the guard opposite me gave me a nasty grin and said, “Now send me that greaser you got back there.”

The line-backer behind him said, “Yeah, we got presents for your Mex star, boy.”

Procuna was the man in motion on the next one. He jogged from his position, crossing behind Chris MacLay at the count. Chris faked the handoff to Procuna, continued his spin around and flipped it to Les Schuman who had faded back six feet. Les jumped and rifled a short pass into the flat to Anson Redlo, the left end. Anson made it for a first down and three more.

Procuna climbed out from under the pile-up. He flexed his knees and trotted back to his position.

“See what I mean?” the lineman facing me said. “We’ll show you how fast those Mex wonder boys come apart at the seams.”

“Try it through me, Greaser!” their right tackle yelled.

And I knew then what Henninger had been talking to Juan Procuna about. Chris took the ball, fed it to Schuman who slipped it to Procuna as he went by. Juan dropped back and pegged a beauty into the hands of Louie DeJohn before he was smothered. The penalty against them was roughing the passer.

We called a time out and everybody was looking out of the corners of their eyes at Juan Procuna. If anything, he was more impassive. But his eyes seemed a bit narrowed, with a dangerous glint in their liquid depths. A bruise on his cheek was beginning to purple.

Chris said, “That left eyes is going to swell shut, kid. How’d you get the bump?”

“Fist,” Juan said shortly.

We had lugged the ball well down into their territory. They had to forget Juan for a while and concentrate on smart defence. But when they got a chance to pile into him, they did it right. It was funny, somehow. Usually if the opposition is roughing somebody on your team you take care of them. We seemed to be waiting for something. We didn’t know what.

I think the reason for the waiting was because Juan had held himself so aloof from the rest of us. He did his job and did it well, but he didn’t waste time on any gestures of friendliness.

They took the ball away from us on downs on their eighteen. I stayed in and the offensive backfield trotted off. One of their boys yelled, “Come back for some more, Greaser. Or have you had enough already?”

Juan didn’t turn around or give any indication that he’d heard. The guy opposite me said, “How come you let one of them on your team, chump. We’d never let that happen in this school.”

I said, “I’ll show you something else that shouldn’t happen in your school, Tex.”

At their snap of the ball I handed him a body feint and went over him into their backfield as he sprawled on his face to push me aside. Once I got into the back-field I grabbed the first pair of thighs I could find and rolled through with the tackle, slinging my heels high and feeling them thud into somebody. On my hands and knees I watched the ball bound free, watched their end swing back to down the fumble on their nine.

As I lined up again I said, “You like that, Tex?”

He called me two names that wouldn’t fit in a drawing room. I smelled a kick coming, but I had a hunch the Big Green would try a play on the ground first. The play was run from kick formation. I kept my head up and let Tex push me back a little, but I kept my feet under me. When I saw the play form up and swing to the left, I pulled away from Tex. The linebacker and I raced down. The defensive left end blocked out one of the interference and the line-backer and I slid through and cut down the other two. We knew one of them had to have the ball. He did. That put it on the seven and they kicked, the kicker standing a foot or so behind the goal line.

The hot wind twisted it a little and it fell out of the reach of the safety running over to get it, rolled out on our thirty-one. A hell of a fine kick.

They made some switches and our offensive backfield came back on. Several of the Big Green yelled, “Here he comes, guys. Let’s send him back south of the border.”

Again Juan gave no indication that he’d heard.

Chris called Les on an end sweep that made two, then faked to Les, then Juan, then Junior, stepped back and passed a short one to Les. It made a nice eight yards, but it was nearly intercepted. The sticks came out and they called it a first down.

The next number was the one that Steen did so well on the year before. A naked reverse with some slick faking by Chris MacLay.

The big difference was that Chris was sending Juan around there bare and alone instead of our scat cat.

Stan Blount gave Chris a nice pass from center, but Chris made the unusual error — for him — of trying to turn before he had the ball in his hands. He hobbled it once, stepping back as he did so. It threw the timing of the play off. What little Chris MacLay should have done was cancel out the play right then and take it back to the line of scrimmage by himself. But everybody has those blank moments when thought processes work too slowly.

After hobbling it, with everybody sweeping right, he managed to thrust it into Juan’s hands. Juan was going left all alone. Chris might just as well have hung a sign on him that said BALL–CARRIER.

The whole backfield of the Big Green plus a couple of linemen cut Juan off and swung in to smear him. Juan was over near the sidelines. I got up onto my knees and the whole play was like slow motion. Like a bad dream. One chunky little ball carrier with more drive than speed, and the thundering herd roaring down on him.

Me, I would have taken it right over the sideline for the four-yard loss.

Juan faked toward the sideline, cut back hard, put his head down, and with knees high, he hit the massed tacklers — one hundred and seventy-five pounds trying to run right over a ton and a half. For a moment he bent them back and then they gathered their forces and tossed him hard. The officials were in close on the play and they had to unwrap the bodies like an artichoke. Everybody got up but Juan. He was out like a Christmas candle on New Year’s, but somehow he had the leather tucked under his chest and his arms wrapped around it.

The referee marched the ball back to the farthest point of the advance, and we found that Juan had, impossibly, banged us out one yard on that mangled play.

We called time and pretty soon Juan gagged and tried to sit up, a green look around his mouth. He coughed and gave a weak grin, but he was able to answer the usual questions.

Doc said, “You’ve had enough.”

Juan came up fast then. He stood up and he stuck his chin out at Doc and he said in a tone loud enough to reach the ears of the Big Green. “I’m in here to stay. They want me out of the game, they better bring out a pistol and shoot me.”

Doc gave him a long look. “Okay, okay. Save it for them. Don’t waste it on me.”

Juan turned toward Chris. We expected him to take a hack at Chris. Chris had set him up as a clay pigeon. Juan said, “Amigo, shall we try that one again?”

Chris’s baby-blue eyes were wide. The grin was slow, but it was a good grin. He said, “What do your friends call you?”

“Juanito. Or Johnny, if you like that better.”

“Juanito suits me, amigo. Now leave us play a little ball.”

“Viva Villa!” yelled Brownie Elvers, and thus a new battle cry was born.

There was snap in the lineup. It was number four on the twenty-two series. Chris took the pass from center, spun and flipped it straight back to Junior Temple. Junior lateraled it out to Juanito who heaved a long one down to Louie DeJohn. Louie tipped it straight up into the air, but caught it on the second try and was downed.

I heard the Big Green call time and I looked back and saw one of their number stretched out at Juanito’s feet. Junior had a smug look on his face.

“Nice block,” Les Schuman said. He and Junior and Juanito traded grins.

I don’t know what the right word for it is, but all of sudden we had it again. It was there, just as in what we had begun to look back on as the good old days. Everybody had snap and everybody was getting a kick out of the game. From their thirty-eight, Junior smashed through for six and five. On the twenty-seven we spread a little hole for Juanito and he came through spinning like a top. We broke through and gave them a series of blocks in the secondary that took their minds off Juanito. And he carried the mail right on down to their eleven. Somehow Junior got to him as he was tackled. As a Big Green came plunging to pile on, Junior got the back of his jersey and pulled him back onto the seat of his pants.

“Play’s over, son,” Junior said gently.

Chris was beginning to talk it up. He yelled, “Which of you guys wants the honor of carrying it over? Or shall I?”

“Let me,” Les said loudly.

“Okay,” Chris said. He took the snap, handed it to Les. Les carried it three strides and handed it off to Junior coming in the other direction. That gave us a chance to make a nice delayed hole for Junior. I went through it myself and brush-blocked the line backer before creaming the next Green suit I could see. When I spooned the dirt out of my eyes Junior was across the goal line, drawling, “Now you boys shouldn’t have believed us. You should have known it was my turn for a touchdown. Next time Juanito will make one.”

Les Schuman made a perfect conversion. The new spirit had infected the defensive lineup. I went off this time with the backfield and the two ends and sat and watched three Big Green plays dumped for no gain.

Les Schuman said, “Lift it off the bench, Norsemen.”

I watched Juanito. The grim look was gone. His eye was slowly closing, but there was a little twist to his mouth.

One lineman made a mumbled remark about “busting a leg off that greaseball.”

On the next play said lineman made a perfect and beautiful parabola and landed on the top of his head. After that, they all seemed to get the idea.

And it was just one of those days. We’d been playing gloomy ball for so long that it felt wonderful to start getting a kick out of the game again. Tired legs picked up and muscle-ache was forgotten. Junior Temple, the Big Freight, plunged through the line like a man possessed. There was no stopping us, till in the closing minutes of the half we had it first and three on their three; goal to go. They stopped the first two plays cold.

Juanito said, “My turn.”

He tucked his head down and smashed the left side of the line just as Junior, on a fake, smashed into the opposite side. Juanito slid on his face six feet inside the goal line.

In the third quarter each of the ends pulled in a touchdown pass and in the last quarter Les made paydirt on a wide end sweep during which Juanito cut the legs out from under two of the Big Green, on one and the same block.

We were bunched at the goal line, hammering at the door when the last second ticked off the big clock.

Juanito’s eye was completely closed, but he still had that little smile hiding at the corners of his mouth.

And right then was when the Big Green captain bulled his way up to Juanito just as we were turning to race for the lockers.

I moved in fast and so did Junior. We were expecting a little trouble. Juanito stood his ground and stared into the captain’s face with his one good eye.

The Big Green sighed and stuck his hand out and said, “Every day I learn something. Nice game, kid.”

“Yeah, nice game,” another Big Green said.

Juanito stood very still as the Big Green trotted away. Junior thumped Juan on the shoulder, saying, “Come on, Mexicali Rose, your shower awaits.”

Late that night I lay in the berth and heard Juan Procuna trying to teach Junior, Les and Chris the words to a very catchy little Mexican number he called Maria Bonita.

Junior Temple can carry a tune about as far as I could have carried that locomotive that was roaring northward with us through the night.