“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.”
Chapter Two
Diagram for Glory
At the beginning of the afternoon session he instructed Chug Davis, the line coach, in what he wanted done with the fourteen linemen, and he took the ten backfield men down to the far end of the field.
An intense believer in demonstration, Tony Strega trotted along with them in uniform. He looked over the ten men and wished he had more depth.
In Forsi, the alert quarterback, and Stanisk, the fleet left half, he knew that he had two top men. Jabella, fullback, and Maroney, right half, were almost as good.
He had leaned hard on the squad, whipping them with sarcasm when they fluffed, giving them quiet words of praise when they worked well. He had instilled in them the professional spirit, the feeling that they were men doing men’s work capably and well, without foolishness, without wildness.
They gathered round. “Forsi, Jabella, Stanisk and Maroney. I’ll center. I want the sixty-series run, Stanisk the man in motion. Greely ends are playing wide. So, Maroney, in the sixty-series you play a yard deeper and a few feet wider. Got it?”
Maroney nodded.
“The rest of you watch close.”
The backfield lined up with snap and, at the call, Strega rifled the ball back. Forsi faked a hand-off to Stanisk, faded back. Stanisk ran straight out, cut back sharply toward the line, turned and gathered in the jump pass that Forsi fed him. Maroney had come in just beyond Stanisk.
“That should do it,” Strega said. “If the end is wide you can block him off quicker from the deeper position. Run it twice more, and we’ll work our way up the series.”
When he was satisfied with performance, he gave the four men a break, put in Newcomb, Laddis, Sharma and Brankoff. He said, “We haven’t got enough men to make a clean split on offensive and defensive. So you boys have to know this just as well as Forsi and his mob does. Take it away, Newcomb.”
It took longer to polish the second group. Then, sighing inwardly, he gave Laddis, the second-string fullback, a rest and put in Mercer. Mercer was a rugged looking boy who betrayed his lack of confidence by the way he kept licking his lips and wiping sweaty palms on his thighs.
Strega hauled Forsi in to act as center, and said, “Okay, Mercer. Your assignment is to give the quarter protection as he fades. This play I’m a lineman coming through into your lap.”
The ball was snapped. Strega pounded in, headed directly for Newcomb who had faded back. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Frank Mercer start a reluctant block. With his hand on Mercer’s helmet, he drove the block down into the ground, levering himself around the prostrate fullback, leaping high to smack the pass off into the flat.
Mercer got up, flushing. “Boy, you didn’t want to block me. You wanted to flinch off that block. When you flinch you could do better throwing feathers at me. I come in hard and your flinch slows you down, gives me a chance. This time you play the lineman coming through.”
Mercer came in hard and fast. Strega drove at his thighs, sensing that Mercer went limp a split second before impact.
He got up, said, “You should be trying to run right through me, boy, not trying to ease the shock. Oh, skip it. Take a rest. Jabella come in. White, you come in for Brankoff.”
On the sixty-series, White, as right half, had to block out the opposition end as the left half cut back toward the line to take the jump pass.
As they lined up, Julius White’s thin face was eager, his eyes bright. “Damn it, White. Don’t prance like that. You just waste energy. Get in position fast and get ready to move, but don’t bounce around.”
White nodded and tried to steady down, but his body was still filled with restless motion.
“Stanisk, you play the opposition end. And play wide. See if you can nail Sharma who’s playing your position as the receiver?”
They lined up. Sharma came jogging over and Newcomb’s fake was well done. Newcomb faded back with Jabella protecting him. Sharma cut back toward the line with White running outside him. Stanisk came in. White, too eager, outran Sharma, saw his error, slowed and tried to fall back against Stanisk. Stanisk, moving fast, bumped White eight feet away, got his hands on Sharma and pulled him down.