By the time the Homecoming Queen staggered out onto the field, starry-eyed, badly rumpled, and bloodstained in the rear, the ceremonies were over. The president of the college, in desperation, had named Mrs. Hoover the honorary Homecoming Queen, but then it had turned out she wasn’t in the stands after all. The alumni had taken it all in their stride, business as usual, and passed around their flasks of bathtub gin. In a couple of short seasons, they’d suffered a stock-market crash, the outbreak of war in Manchuria, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, a Bonus March by a lot of ex-enlisted riffraff on Washington, and the defeat of the Republican Party — what was a mere assault on their Homecoming Queen? They settled back to watch their football team get taken apart once again, hoping only that the gin held out.
The Poets always fumbled the opening kickoff, it was a Homecoming tradition. But in 1932 the tradition was broken. Gloomy Gus hauled the ball in and ran eighty-five yards through the entire opposition for a touchdown, the first of his career. So spectacular was it, the fans just sat there in stunned silence. Gus had this knack for leaving people with their jaws hanging open, I’ve witnessed it myself. This silence rattled him for a moment and he may have wondered if they’d noticed he had his pants on inside out. But then they erupted in wild cheering, screaming, foot-stamping. Old men rushed out onto the field to hug him, kiss him, lift him on their shoulders, even though there was still a whole game to play. And what a game. He scored seven touchdowns all by himself in the first half. The coach finally had to take him out of the game so the other team would go on playing. He let him back in for the last three minutes of the game because the alumni had been throatily demanding it, and he scored yet again on three straight power plays. It was a school record. The whole town went delirious with joy. Luckily, he’d practiced riding around on shoulders and receiving accolades, maybe in fact it was one of the first things he’d practiced, so he carried himself elegantly as long as it lasted. The Homecoming Queen lay in the supply room, taking on anyone who’d approach her in the plain speech. The coach put on Indian feathers and led a dance. Everybody told him he was a genius. The party went on for three days, though Gus, of course, had long since withdrawn — as soon as he’d come down off the shoulders, in fact — in order to stick to his timetable.
Now that he was playing first-team football and having it off with girls regularly, there were some adjustments in his practice schedules, but it did not get easier for him. He still had to preserve all the old drills, and now there were new subtleties to learn, new plays on the field, new challenges from girls. He had to learn to cope with various forms of intercourse hysteria, for example, and to talk with sports reporters, address student rallies without running for office, pose for photos. The coach, too, had things to learn, such as to leave well enough alone. In the very next game, for example, after Gus had scored four touchdowns in the first quarter, he instructed him to “take it easy, killer,” and nearly paralyzed him. Then the Chief tried to take over Gus’s entire practice schedule — partly, it should be said, because Gus’s mother and brother begged the coach to be relieved of this burden once and for all — and he made the mistake, in spite of the brother’s warnings, of canceling or just ignoring some of the fundamental drills, such as how to turn while running, how to fade back for a pass, how to hunker down, ball the fists, break from a huddle, and so on. The result of this was that Gus spun into illegal motion the first ten plays of the next game. The coach was wild with panic. He kept pinching himself in the face and shaking his head. Gus’s brother came to the rescue.
“I took Dick out behind the bleachers for fifteen minutes of offside drill. It was just luck I drilled him that long, any more I couldn’t have taken, but a minute less and it wouldn’t have been enough. We didn’t find this out right away, but it turned out if he missed any practice time, he had to make it up completely. He could cut fat from the schedule, but not any single increment of it. He’d gone a week, seven days, without his offside drill, and at two minutes a day that meant he was fourteen minutes behind. All I knew that day was that suddenly he seemed to get it and I was barely able to walk. I told the coach: ‘I think he’s all right.’
“We were losing 14—0 at this point — it would’ve been worse, but luckily we were up against one of the worst teams in the circuit — so the coach rushed him back into the game. He didn’t go offside, but that was the only thing he didn’t do wrong. He seemed to understand the plays, but his legs didn’t work. His mind seemed to be racing ahead and his body made motions they would have made forty yards downfield, but his feet were rooted to the spot. Sometimes he didn’t even get turned around and facing the right direction after a huddle. The coach was in a terrible funk. He’d begun to think he might get invited to coach at some school where they paid real money and had real football players, maybe even the Ivy League or the pros, and so he was frantic that Dick was blowing it for him. I tried to help, but the Chief was completely incoherent and kept making strange Indian noises, and I was afraid he was going to take out on me what he was feeling toward Dick.
“At halftime, though, I was able to get through to the Chief. We were behind by four or five touchdowns by then, and the coach couldn’t even talk. He kept his Indian feathers in the lockerrooms now for celebrations, and he just sat there eating them. We all thought he’d had a stroke. I asked to see Dick’s practice schedule for the past week. I studied it over and said: ‘I think he can still throw passes if somebody will tuck the ball in his hands.’ I’ll never forget the look on the Chief’s face, Meyers. It was one of those moments when you think either you or the rest of the world has to be crazy, and you’re no longer so sure you’re the one who’s all right. He swallowed the feathers he was eating and said in a throaty whisper: ‘Throw? Passes?’ ‘It’s not what he does best,’ I said, ‘but you’ve ruined him for anything else.’ This hit the Chief very hard, I felt sorry for him, but he knew it was true.
“Well, he was grasping for straws at this point, so rather than quit or scalp us both, he took the chance. What did he have to lose? I took Dick out behind the stands again for fifteen minutes of practicing feints and breaking out of the huddle. I hoped this would loosen him up and that some of the other skills would come back to him in the course of the game. It didn’t matter, after all, where he did his practicing, on the field or off. Anyway, it worked. It wasn’t Dick’s most brilliant day maybe, passing was something he never completely perfected, and the Poets didn’t have anybody who could catch the ball, but he hit them squarely enough so that they managed to score a touchdown and only fumbled or got intercepted half a dozen times. More important, I told the coach to repeat plays over and over like a kind of drill. This was completely against the Chief’s instincts, of course, but he had no choice. This worked, too. It was the same as practice time for Dick, and his legs slowly came back to him. We lost the game, but the last eight minutes of it were so fantastic it felt like victory. Dick played both offense and defense and he scored three times in those eight minutes. They tried to stall, but Dick hit them so hard it was impossible for them to hang on to the ball. You know, Meyers, when my brother was good, there was nothing in the whole goddamn world he couldn’t fuck over!”