Life Its Ownself (8 page)

"Yeah."

"Poor babe."

"They're gonna cut on me tomorrow. Tie stuff back together. I'll be in a cast for four or five weeks, who the hell knows."

"I'll take the red-eye tomorrow night after rehearsal. I can spend a whole day with you. They won't mind me taking a day off. I mean, they will mind, but they'll understand."

"Don't bother to do that, Barb."

"I want to be with you."

"One day won't make any difference. I'm fine."

"Sweetheart, I'd stay longer—you know how much I want to be there—but an awful lot of people are counting on me out here. I can't let them down."

"Stay there, please."

"You mean it?"

The honest answer was no.

I said, "I wouldn't want to make a bunch of Hollywood guys so mad, they'd beat me to death with their pendants."

There had been a tenderness in Barbara Jane's voice but now it had vanished.

"Come on B. C., you're not being fair! We're talking about a football knee, not a heart transplant ... a kidney removal!"

"Football knees are worse, if you play football for a living. I'm serious about you staying out there."

"I'm coming to New York."

"No!"

Not for only a day, I was thinking.

She said, "Okay, I know you feel rotten. You've blown the season. And I know you're worried. You're thinking it's curtains for Old Twenty-three if the knee doesn't mend. I know you're in pain. I'm sorry for all that, I really am, but, sweetheart, give this some thought: this show has a chance to make a big difference in our lives."

"How?"

"You mean aside from money, fame, and fortune?"

"We have that."

"Major money, B.C. If the show clicks, we can buy our own football team! What do you want to call them?"

"What about the Hollywood Pendants?"

"The new script came in yesterday," she said. "It's better than the others. It's not
Mary Tyler Moore
, but... it has charm. That's what everybody said today. Tomorrow they'll call it a piece of shit, but I have to hang in, don't I? Is it my fault the dippy network wants to spend a billion dollars to get a pilot they can fondle? Anyhow, I'm not a quitter."

Nobody was asking her to quit. I had only thought she would want to come back to New York and baby-sit me in my hour of need.

But just then, I only grunted, or sighed, whatever.

And she said, "If it were urgent, I'd be there and you know it! You're trying to make me feel guilty."

"You are guilty."

"I'll call you every hour. Well, every two or three hours. It depends on rehearsals."

"There must be more to showbiz than rehearsing. Don't you get to go to a lot of those 'in' restaurants where they invented trout pizza?"

"I love you," she said.

"Isn't there a lot of talk about heightening the dynamics of the storyline?"

"It'll be great to have you out here—even on crutches."

"Can I tour a studio?"

"I want you here as soon as you can travel. God knows how long I'll have to stay. If they like the pilot, we'll go right into episodes. You have to recuperate, anyhow. Do it with room service."

"I'll think about it."

"No, you won't think about it, you'll get on a fucking plane and you'll be here!"

Our conversation ended after I yawned—the pills were starting to kick in—and said, "Barb, I didn't mean to start an argument. You have too big an edge. Women can't remember pain."

Dreamer Tatum was the first person to autograph the cast on my knee the next afternoon, but his visit to the hospital was only partly social.

"We need you, Clyde," he worked up to saying. "We need you more than ever now. You can put your limp on the media, look real pained, and say, 'God, grant me the strength to march with my buddies.' We can do some shit with your ass, baby."

Dreamer was vice-president of the NFL Players Association, and what he wanted more than anything in the world, what he had always wanted, even more than another vintage Mercedes, was a strike.

He wanted football players to become auto workers, coal miners, teachers, machinists, garbage collectors, public- utility employees, and elevator operators.

For the fourth time in his career, Dreamer was trying to encourage all of the players on all of the teams in the National Football League—about 1,300 guys—to walk off the job. Quit. Not play football. And stay on a picket line for as long as it would take to force the twenty-eight owners to pay us more money and give us more freedom of movement, to put it in simple terms.

I had never been in favor of a strike. I had debated the issue at other times with Dreamer and Puddin Patterson. In my judgment, a strike had no chance to succeed, and never would, for an excellent reason that I now put to Dreamer in the form of a question.

"How the fuck can you picket a yacht?"

"They got the tents but we got the dog acts, baby," Dreamer said. "We have the 'names.' You'd be a great spokesman for us, Clyde."

"You can't win, Dreamer. The owners have too much of that born-rich money behind them. They're members of the Lucky Sperm Club. You guys strike and they'll cancel the season, start over next year with new players."

"They need the 'names.'"

"You know how long it takes to make a 'name'? One headline."

"Sixty-five percent of the guys are ready to go out now. The rest will follow if we can get more people like you involved."

"How much have you got in the bank, Dreamer? Even if you sell all your cars, you can't live the rest of your life on it. A football team is just another toy to an owner. In the spring, they sail regattas around their off-shore drilling rigs. You strike and you're history. The Players Association will be the Window Cleaners Association. The dope dealers will be all right, but they're still the minority."

Dreamer said, "You don't understand about rich dudes. They hate to lose money worse than anybody. If we go out, they blow fifteen million apiece on their TV contract."

"Pocket change. A franchise is worth seventy, eighty million now."

"The common man's on our side, Clyde."

"The common man doesn't know shit about us or them. The common man thinks Vince Lombardi's still alive. All the common man cares about is something to bet on besides ice dancing. How do you bet on that—which one has the tits?"

"Clyde, you could double your salary if you were a free agent. Thought about that?"

"Not now, I couldn't," I said, glancing at the cast on my leg.

"The thing we're trying to do, man, is get us a salary scale that's determined by the players, not the jive-ass owners."

"I know what you're trying to do," I said. "I read in the paper where you said our demands are 'etched in stone.' That's a great way to bargain."

"You talk tough in the papers. That's what newspapers are for."

The free-agent issue had been a nagging one in pro football for years. Pro football was the only professional team sport that didn't have free agents. It worked like this: if you played out your contract with the team you belonged to—because they drafted you out of college—you couldn't go to another club unless that club "compensated" the club you were with. That was the kicker. Let's say I had wanted to leave the Giants and play for the L.A. Rams because the Rams offered me a higher salary. Fine, Burt Danby would say. If the Rams pay the Giants ten million dollars, they can have you. But the Rams wouldn't do that, so I would be stuck with the Giants. Collusion was what the players called it.

The owners argued that if it weren't for compensation, the best athletes would choose to play only in the glamour cities, places like New York, L.A., San Francisco. Nobody would want to play in Cleveland, Buffalo, St. Louis, K.C., Detroit. The owners were dead right about that in my case.

Dreamer now said, "If we don't strike, we're never gonna get the free-market value for our services."

I couldn't hold back a laugh. "Dreamer, what would your old daddy do if he heard you use a phrase like 'free-market value'? I thought we played the damn game because we loved it."

In that singular remark, I had hit upon the main reason I was opposed to a strike. Granted, the owners were richer than doctors, but they needed some deductions. We were paid better than sheetrockers. The average salary around the league was $130,000 last year, and that was for only working half a year playing a game. And guys like Dreamer and I probably made more money than the chairman of the board at Chrysler.

"Do me a favor, Dream Street," I said as he left. "Before you call a strike, give me the name of your broker."

Everyone had been right about television. That same day, an NBC executive called on the phone and offered me a lucrative contract to sit in a broadcast booth and babble.

Then the CBS executive came to see me in person.

Richard Marks was his name, and I decided he had been the head of CBS Sports for at least thirty minutes. He took a seat by my bed and began cleaning the lenses of his tinted glasses with a pocket spray and a Kleenex.

Richard Marks was a fit-looking thirty-five. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a regimental tie with a collar pin. He had an alarmingly short haircut, and his nails had been done. His face was boyish but humorless. It was a good guess he ran in marathons and had conquered wok cuisine.

He explained how it would be a major coup for him, being new in the job, if he could "bring Billy Clyde Puckett aboard." I would be his first notable acquisition.

Like the three men who had preceded him as the president of CBS Sports, all of whom had come and gone within the year, stepping over corporate bodies to loftier jobs, Richard Marks had been unearthed from the Business Affairs division of the network. This meant he was a lawyer.

But now he knew everything about television production, live or tape, and he had a "vision" of what CBS Sports should be.

"We have to become more dimensional," Richard Marks was saying as I admired his nails and envisioned a pedicure. "We have to redefine our goals as broadcast journalists. The best announce teams have what I like to call an 'interplay,'
n'est-ce pas
? Do you like Summerall and Madden?"

I uttered an approving sound.

"I take a little credit for putting their act together," he said. "The idea was to marry Pat's infectious believability with John's scatalogical humor and informative expertise."

"Informative expertise is the best kind," I said.

Richard Marks said I had "potential" as an announcer because I was "natural." I was also "current." He considered it to be an inducement that I would work with Larry Hoage on NFL games.

"Excellent traffic director," Richard Marks said of Larry Hoage.

Larry Hoage was possibly the worst play-by-play announcer in the annals of television. He was a man who had successfully defended his Fluff Dry Award against all comers for a decade. More to the point, Larry Hoage had a way of making an off-tackle run for no-gain sound like a mid-air collision of 747's. But I didn't say any of this to the person who might want to pay me good money to go to several American cities and get drunk. What I said was:

"Larry Hoage has a familiar voice."

"Yes, he does," said Richard Marks, offering me a fruit- flavored Cert. "Ideally, I would like for Larry to get fewer names wrong when he's calling a game, but he has a high recognition quotient, and you can't overlook this in television."

Richard Marks then outlined the future of CBS Sports for me.

"I want to enhance audience sympathy for the athletes as people," he said. "There are many instances during telecasts when we need to spend more time humanizing sports. You can help us do that. I plan to see to it that my network becomes the one that enriches the viewer. I want us to be frothy, keenly focused on issues; comedic at times, yes, but never pessimistic. Wary but not cynical. Aggressive but never inaccurate or chaotic. I see us as the network with texture, depth, spark, clear concepts, spontaneity, and above all, perhaps, the network with the inner conviction that a professional football game is very much a part of the human narrative."

I said, "Most of my friends seem to like announcers who just give you the score and the clock and otherwise shut the fuck up."

"That, too," Richard Marks said.

He asked if I was represented by IMG.

"Who?"

"Mark McCormack."

"No."

"The Hook?"

"Who?"

"Ed Hookstratten."

"No."

"Mike Trope?"

"No."

"Don't tell me you're with ICM! I didn't know they handled athletes."

"I'm not."

"Ron Konecky, of course. I'll give him a call and we'll bang the dents out of the fenders."

"Who's Ron Konecky?"

"Who's your agent?"

"I don't have an agent."

"How can you not have an agent? Everybody has an agent or a business manager. You don't have an agent?"