Semi-Tough (7 page)

I guess he might smile when we win Sunday. But in the three years he's been our coach, he hasn't.

You would think that Shoat might have smiled once or twice during our regular season since we're undefeated and untied and already have a diamond ring cinched for winning the National Conference.

We won that, incidentally, by dough-popping the LA Rams thirty-three to thirty-one. I scored three sixes.

But all that old Shoat has said all along is, "A football team with one more game to win ain't no better off than a tired old farmer with one more pig to slop."

As the head coach of the New York Giants I guess the best thing you can say about Shoat is that he doesn't fuck us around. Maybe there's something to that. Maybe a team of pros can just get together and do the job, like
we
would have done last year if a lot of us hadn't been injured and gone seven-seven.

Shake says this is true, and Shake is semi-intellectual about the game.

Shake says, "Winning is a happy accident of getting a bunch of guys together who want to."

Shake has studied it a lot and he says that coaches are
not
so important in the pros. He says they're important
in
college because there are those who can outsmart the
others
and outrecruit the others.

"But in the pros," he says, "there are studs on every team, and anybody can beat anybody else on a certain Sunday. It's all a matter of which team don't have the rag on."

Shake says that in the pros the teams that win are the ones that stay mentally tough.

When my old buddy talks like this, I tell him he sounds about half like a Darrell Royal or somebody.

Shake says hustle ain't nothing but acting like a gorilla.

"That's the part that's fun," he says. "Hitting people and getting hit and rolling around on the carpet is easy. The hard part is making yourself do something right
—
at the right minute."

He says, "When you get twenty-two studs who find losing a football game the most distasteful thing in the world, then you got yourself a winner. Hell, everybody wants to win, or says they do. But
not wanting to lose
is what it's all about."

Shake talked like this at our meeting this morning.

"We're just not gonna
accept
a loss to those dog-asses," he said.

"There'll be a minute out there Sunday," he said, "when one of us will do something better than he's ever done it before, and we'll win. One of us will do it because we'll
all
be tryin'."

All Shoat Cooper said at the meeting was that we'd stress the kicking game in workout this afternoon at UCLA, and then pose for some photographs with some starlets.

They better not let
T.J.
Lambert get too close to those starlets.

Hi, there, friends and neighbors. This is old Billy Clyde Puckett back from practice and showered and shaved and dolled up in his white-on-white-on-white, seeing as how I'm out in California.

Shake and Barbara Jane and Cissy have gone on off to dinner with Puddin Patterson and his wife, Rosalie. They all wanted to go hear somebody sing while they tried to eat but I said I didn't like anybody's singing but Elroy Blunt. And anyway, I wanted to write some more.

I said to call me later and I would go join them somewhere for half a dozen young Scotches.

I got my burgers and fries and my coffee here in our palatial suite and I'm finally going to get it off my mind about Marvin (Shake) Tiller.

Well, now, I presume that most everybody is aware that Shake Tiller is the greatest ball-catching end there ever was.

He hasn't been anything but All-Pro since we came up. I guess he catches eighty or ninety balls a year, and this makes a pretty good quarterback out of Hose Manning, who I think is the best since Joe Namath and Sonny Jurgensen hung it up.

Even the dumbest of the sports writers
—
and there aren't many smart ones
—
says Shake is probably better than Hutson or Alworth or any of those studs we've heard about in history.

The thing which makes Shake so great, aside from his hands and his speed and his moves, is that he runs a route so good. If he's supposed to go seven and a half yards down and four and a half yards out, then Shake runs seven and a half yards down and four and a half yards out.

Nobody knows it but not many receivers can do this.

Shake of course is a good-looking dude. He's got this red-blond hair that's thick and flops around. He's got a sort of dimpled chin and lots of good white teeth and some green-blue eyes that Barbara Jane says have an evil sparkle. His expression makes him look most often like he knows deep down everything there is to know, but naturally he doesn't.

He's trim like split ends are supposed to be, which is kind of like country club lifeguards. And his voice is soft and cool. As long as I've known him, which is forever, I've never been able to figure out his voice. He has this way of making things sound like you never know if he's truly serious. Even when he's serious.

The main thing is, Shake is my good buddy for a lifetime, and I really guess that he's my family since I never actually had another one worth mentioning.

Not that I'm complaining about it.

I couldn't have had more fun growing up. Between Shake's parents and Barbara Jane's, and an uncle named Kenneth, I had plenty of folks concerned about me.

Not that it matters any, but I guess you could say that I was from a broke fuckin' home. My daddy ran off before I ever knew him. He was a tool dresser in the oil field, and I guess a fairly good bad-check artist.

My mamma was a waitress and maybe a couple of other things, and she ran off, too. Which left me with Uncle Kenneth, who was not much more than a golf hustler, a pool shark and a pretty good gin rummy stud.

Anyhow, kids grow up. And once they get to be fourteen, it's out of everybody's hands about what might happen to them except their juvenile delinquent friends.

I was lucky that I had Uncle Kenneth to take me to all the football games I wanted to see, and to teach me how to run the six ball in snooker and that the best thing to do in gin was hit the silk when you got ten or under.

Uncle Kenneth always told me, "If you like sports and know how to gamble, then you'll always be interested in something and you won't come to no real harm."

Me and Shake never had anything but good times. I can't think of anything that ever happened to us that we didn't think was funny, even some bad things. Really bad things, and not just losing the city championship once.

Well, what's worse than somebody dying?

It was really terrible one time but Shake's real mother
—
not his mother now, but his real one
—
got killed in a car wreck when we were about sixteen.

She didn't die right away, where she got hit by a carload of drunk priests, but about three days later in the hospital. She died one night just after Shake and me had left her room and gone to the cold drink machine.

We knew she was likely to die, though. She never had got conscious from the wreck, and Shake's dad, Marvin, Sr., a really good old boy, had prepared us for the worst.

But what I'm getting at is that after Shake had sort of put his arm around his dad and strolled
off
down the hall with him, and after he had hugged his grandmother and his aunt while Barbara Jane and I just stood around, Shake came back and told everybody he just had to cut out. Move it on.

The three of us left and didn't say anything to each other. We just kind of walked off in the general direction of Herb's Cafe, where we hung out.

But as we were walking along, Shake said something that I didn't think I heard right
—
something that sort of summed up how he was, and still is.

"Well, it's a wrap on the squash," he said.

I muttered a huh, or something.

And Shake said, "I've been trying to think of what good there could be in my mom dying, and the only thing I can think of is that I won't have to look at any more fuckin' squash on the dinner table."

Shake Tiller has always had what some people might call a strange sense of humor.

People themselves have always been the funniest things of all to him. He's a good imitator and he could always listen to somebody talk for just a little while and then sound like them.

To this day, Shake can still imitate Big Ed Bookman so good it makes me and Barbara Jane collapse. Big Ed Bookman is Barb's daddy.

Big Ed Bookman is in the "oil bidness," as Shake would say. Big Ed talks a lot about a "tax break for the oil bidness." He talks about "buyin' pipe," and all of his production out in Scogie County. Things like that.

Big Ed is a big man in Fort Worth, which some people say is not so hard a thing to be. Fort Worth is not exactly Dallas or Houston. It's near Dallas, about thirty-five miles away on a toll road. But that's geography.

In looks and money and getting things done, Fort Worth is about as far away from Dallas as I am from Shakespeare.

I'm afraid my old home town is in that part of Texas which doesn't have the charm of the flat plains or the piny woods or the coastline or the mountains.

The land looks like it could be almost anywhere in twelve or fourteen different states. The wind that sometimes blows across it is the same wind that blows across Oklahoma
—
untouched.

We've played ball down there in ever kind of weather you can imagine. In October it can get as hot as summer. And there are days during the summer when you can see the heat in the air. It looks like germs.

It can also get colder than a nun's ass. I don't know
if
many people outside of Texas know what a norther is,
but
a norther is when the sky turns the color of a battleship and you can feel the icicles stabbing you in the chest.

We've played a lot of ball in northers.

Fort Worth has some pretty parts. There are neighborhoods with little creeks running through them and lots of sycamore and oak trees. There's a river winding around called the Trinity, and this could add something to it if it wasn't always the color of meatloaf.

My old alma mater of TCU
—
that's Texas Christian University, of course
—
doesn't have quite as much ivy covering its great halls of learning as your normal McDonald's. It is just a bunch of cream-brick buildings and parking lots but the buildings are not so ugly compared to some grain elevators rising up on the outskirts of town.

The good things about the town are most of the people, who are honest, unpretentious and work hard. And the Mexican food and barbeque, not to forget the chicken fried steak and cream gravy. But I'm not sure this makes up for some kind of pride in ignorance that somebody like Big Ed Bookman seems to have.

There's an old city slogan that Fort Worth is "Where the West Begins," and I suppose at one time there were a bunch of cowboys hanging around instead of used-car dealers and Jaycees.

There used to be another slogan which went something like, "Dallas for Culture, Fort Worth for Fun." But none of us ever knew what fun they were talking about, unless it was trying to get on one of the thirteen roads leading out.

Maybe they meant the fun we had to dream up for ourselves, which was always plentiful.

We used to ask Barbara Jane why somebody as rich as Big Ed Bookman would stay in Fort Worth. She always answered the same thing. "Would a czar leave Russia if they weren't pissed off at him?" she'd say.

It still bewilders me somewhat. Big Ed Bookman can live anywhere he wants to, but he stays in a town where you still have to stop your car for freight trains and look at signs which need repainting or have one neon light missing.

Big Ed always said Fort Worth wasn't such a small town if you looked at it a certain way. If you took all the Jews out of Dallas, all the niggers out of Houston and all the spicks out of San Antonio, Fort Worth was a pretty good-sized place, he'd say.

Big Ed is big in everything in Fort Worth, of course. Big in "bidness." Big in golf. Big at River Crest, his country club. Big in TCU football, having bought the AstroTurf for the stadium when TCU fired a couple of assistant coaches he didn't like. Big in what passes for society in Fort Worth.

Big Ed Bookman is always flying down to Houston, where he keeps his "oil bidness" office, or he's flying out to Colorado to one of his ranches, or he's flying up to Washington, D.C., or he's flying to Acapulco.

For as long as I can remember, Big Ed has always been on the board of a lot of banks. And he's talked about the governors, senators and Presidents he's helped elect.

Doesn't seem like anybody
—
to this day
—
can do anything in Fort Worth unless they ask old Big Ed Bookman about it.

Big Ed is married to Big Barb, and in her own way Big Barb is as big as Big Ed around Fort Worth.