“Look, Marty. This is a university. Football’s a nice game. You’re supposed to keep it clean. You’ve been crumbing it up and I got a hundred bucks to your one that even if I don’t publish the article, you’ll get busted out of here after the season’s over. There’s some damn fine gentlemen coaching ball in this country, and I’ll bet you that more than half of them don’t like the name of Marty Dorrence.”
It wasn’t pretty to watch. He’d built his self-esteem and I was ripping it down. He cursed me and then he cursed the system. He unraveled at the edges and he was scared. He saw Fate getting ready to bog him again. I pushed my advantage.
“Marty, you put Sven Stockwitz in and you clean up your brand of ball. Keep that first team of yours from playing sixty minutes. When you get a lead, yank ’em out. Don’t give the boys the idea they got to bust legs to earn their keep. Okay?”
That started him off again. I had to sit and listen to him bluster until I got tired of it. I stood up and yawned. “Okay, Marty. Have it your way. Tomorrow I send out the article. Maybe I ought to change tine name to ‘Let Dorrence Kill Your Kids.’ ”
I walked toward the door. Slowly. He caught me by the arm as I went out the door. “Wait a minute, Tom. This is one hell of a spot to put me in. I got my strategy all laid out. Besides, that Stockwitz is yellow.”
I shoved his hand off and walked away along the path. He caught me after I’d gone fifteen feet. He spun me around roughly, and said, “Okay.” His voice was tired. He added a few choice terms about my probable ancestry. I don’t insult easily. I walked back toward the room wondering if I could really sell the article — if I sat down and wrote it.
The fourth game was also a home game. But it was the first really rough team on the schedule, Worker Tech. That’s the school that claims to take the boys that Minnesota doesn’t have uniforms big enough for. And they’ve always had a rep for playing smart and very heavy football. They, like Chemung, were undefeated, as you will remember, and had no intention of letting us bust up their string. In spite of the fact that I consider the do-or-die-for-old-Chemung attitude to be a lot of kid stuff, I couldn’t help feeling excited about the game. I had only seen Sven for a few minutes and we’d both been a little shy with each other. He’d told me that Mary Anne was staying over for the game. I told him that a bird had told me he might get in the game. He liked that. Marty had stopped the track running stuff and had had Sven working out with the fourth team.
The afternoon was perfect — clear, bright and chilly. I sat in my usual spot on the bench next to Marty and watched the big boys from Worker warm up on the field. I wondered about Sven. The first team from Chemung was pounding around out there. I didn’t want to remind Marty because I didn’t want to make him mad again. At the last minute, just before the kickoff, he hollered down the bench, “Stockwitz! Get in there for Carson!”
Sven jumped up and tossed off the blanket. He grabbed a helmet and ran out. I heard the guys on the bench mutter, and I noticed that Marty looked a little grim. Carson came walking off the field. He slung his helmet down so hard that it bounced almost into Marty’s lap. He said, “You gone nuts, Coach?”
“Shut up and sit down!” Carson muttered something and wedged himself in on the other side of me.
Worker Tech kicked off, a high end over end that carried well down. Bates took it on our ten and started up. He made back up to the twenty-six before they clipped him down. Those men from Tech were big, fast and hard-hitting. They looked good on the field.
The first play was a delayed buck through center. We made two yards. The next play was a fancy one. I recognized it as soon as it started. It was a play where the left wingback comes around right end with a lot of power. Sven, playing right end, has to drift back for a slow count and then cut out wide and fast, giving the ball carrier a chance to cut inside of him with the interference. The idea is, the right end is then available for a lateral when it gets too tight for the man with the ball.
But they didn’t do it that way. While there was still open ground in front of the ball carrier, before Sven had a chance to get into motion, the wingback flipped him the ball.
He was a sitting duck. The opposition end came in fast and rolled him back about four yards. I began to understand what the boys were going to do.
The quarter, Negreno, called one more line buck for no gain and then kicked well out of danger. Sven trailed the safety man on the Tech thirty-two.
The Chemung team worked the same deal on defense. It was a dangerous way to play, but they rigged it so that they knifed in and funneled every play they could right into Sven’s lap. They always had him backed up, but they didn’t help him. What was worse, the Tech team caught on and began to run every other play right over the top of Stockwitz.
It’s bad enough when the opposition concentrates on one man in the line, but when both teams are going out of their way to make it rough, the man in question is in a very bad spot. In a certain sense I didn’t blame the Chemung boys. They’d figured him as yellow. They didn’t want to play with him. So they were taking the smart way to show him up quick and get rid of him. The only trouble was, they might lose the ball game while trying to bust one man out. I began to ache every time Sven was hit. I wondered how Mary Anne was taking it. I knew that she was just as lonesome up in those stands as Sven was out on that unfriendly field.
In the last few minutes of the first quarter, Tech shook a man loose around Sven’s end. He danced across the payoff line without a hand anywhere near him. Sven didn’t get up. The funny thing was, the guys didn’t gather around like they usually do with an injury. They walked away from him. The fixers started out from the bench, but he got slowly to his feet as they got near him. He brushed them off and ran jerkily after the team. I looked at Marty. His jaw was shut tight. I couldn’t read anything in his face.
The second quarter was like the first. They dished everything out to Sven. I didn’t see how one man could absorb it all. They didn’t help him a bit. He got up slower after every play, and yet he made fantastic time getting down the field under punts. He played hard ball. He was playing over his head — but no man can take that sort of thing forever. The Chemung team ran him into every tough spot they could think of on offense, and gave him no cover at all. They sent him out and let Tech shoot him down. Once, on a flat pass, he wiggled loose and made twenty-five yards before they smothered him.
The Tech center was injured and had to be taken out. Marty took our center out and put in the second team boy. He glared at me after he did it. Sven began to limp between plays, but he kept his speed up during the plays. Just before the half ended, the Tech fullback got a bad knee out of a line plunge. They had to take him out. Marty sent in a second string fullback for Chemung. I began to understand what he was doing.
At the half, I drifted back to the locker room with the team. He had a red and purple bruise on one cheek that had nearly closed his eye. Somebody had come down on his left hand with a foot full of cleats. Three of his fingers looked like nothing human. They were cut and so badly swollen that they bulged out above and below the knuckles. A front tooth was chipped. When Moe pried his right shoe off, the ankle puffed up to the size of his calf. He lay on one of the benches with his eyes shut while Moe worked on the ankle.
Marty strolled around and looked them all over. I noticed that all the guys who had been in the game avoided each other’s eyes. Sven was still breathing hard, his big naked chest rising and falling rapidly.