The Franchise (2 page)

Life as demolition derby. The athlete’s life. Taylor wouldn’t have it any other way. He couldn’t.

Simon hadn’t been ready to hit the wall. He didn’t know about it.

A.D. crashed early. While others lost it in the curves, he picked up the pieces and the loose change. But he still crashed.

Red Kilroy skidded along the wall for years, tearing up his family and his insides.

Dick Conly built the Franchise for Cyrus Chandler, and they pushed each other to the wall, yoked together by a deathbed promise, a bond of hate and greed. Their poisonous feud raced through the economic and social fabric of Texas, putting lots of people into the wall. The crashing and burning boggled Taylor’s mind.

During the Franchise’s building years, even fans hit the wall. Too many times, Taylor Rusk had opened the Monday paper to face orphaned children and a fat widow. Father had hit the wall, leaving a note blaming his suicide on “the Pistols’ constant turnovers and their inability to move the ball in sustained drives.” In those days, Taylor’s voice echoed through the ancient, nearly empty Colony Stadium as he called snap numbers and audibles.

“Four-three ... set.”

Ghostlike, his voice would return from the empty seats around Lamar Jean Lukas, the First Fan. One of the few survivors.

“Four-three ... set.”

The rats in the locker room used to eat the leather earpieces out of headgears, and scorpions joined the players in the showers. Now fans fought and killed to get possession of
the ticket.
Big-bucks fans. Five-thousand-dollar-bond fans. One-hundred-thousand-dollar luxury skybox fans. Now divorce settlements hinged, not on custody of the children, but on custody of the Pistols season tickets. One woman successfully pleaded, “What’s the use of having the goddam kids if he’s got the football tickets?”

The Pistol Dome and the Pay-Per-View TV were Dick Conly’s parting brainstorm. The monument to his fiscal and creative genius. Commissioner Burden had wanted Dick to wait until the League got complete antitrust exemption through the Congress, but Dick Conly didn’t wait on anybody, the League or the Congress.

Dick didn’t make money, he created value—and he wanted to have his legacy in place before the rules changed and somebody got a hand in his pocket. For the ten Pistols home games the past season, Channel Thirty-three Pay-Per-View drew a hundred thousand households at forty dollars apiece, paid by Electronic Funds Transfer.

Four million dollars for every home game, collected at the speed of light.

Forty million dollars a season
unshared.
There was no League provision for the sharing of home-game pay-television revenues. And with their own pay-TV broadcast hardware and brand-name software, there was no limit to the Pistols’ market. A truly national football team.

Beat the spread.
That was Taylor Rusk’s part in Dick Conly’s last great scheme for the Franchise. It finally came down to that.

Taylor stood at the hotel window and watched the night overtake the city. The sun sank behind the ridgeline, lights twinkled, the sky glowed pink. The Pistol Dome turned darker as the daylight faded. Soon it was hidden in the growing shadow of the rock scarp, crouched out in the dark south of town. Waiting. It was waiting for him, waiting for the Franchise.

Taylor Jefferson Rusk had come a long way and traveled such a short distance. It seemed like yesterday.

Now the kingdom was in disarray.

I
T WAS THE
heat that awed Taylor Rusk as he played football in central Texas, watching the surf of hot air rising up off the baked earth, a gauze curtain rippling the blazing rising sun that greeted the morning workout. The hot waves distorting, wobbling the orange ball as it climbed, growing hotter.

The heat. Taylor Rusk would play football in Texas for twenty years and was continually amazed when it got so damn hot he could see it.

He first noticed it his freshman year, the first morning practice at Park City High School.

Taylor’s parents didn’t live in wealthy Park City. They lived in Two Oaks, a small hill-country town between San Antonio and Austin. The Park City coach flew in and recruited Taylor his eighth-grade year. His father told him it was an opportunity to “advance,” and so Taylor Rusk advanced down out of the hills and moved in with his aunt and uncle in Park City.

Taylor spent the early morning of his first high school practice watching the waggling sun tottering up into the blue clear sky.

Later Taylor would be described in his Park City High senior yearbook.
The Wildcat
, as “a popular and friendly transfer who led the Cats to consecutive state championships. He plans to attend the University.” He didn’t remember being all that popular or friendly, but he did know it’s what’s on the paper that counts.
The statistics.

“We exist only on paper,” Simon D’Hanis, another transfer, said. “We are the stats.”

D’Hanis came from Vidor, near Beaumont, in East Texas. Hard folks, swamp people from the Big Thicket. His father was a mean drunk; his mother, Silsbee trash, was kind and cowed and beaten. “It’s a way out, Simon,” she said, signing papers making the Park City coach Simon’s legal guardian. He never saw his parents again.

Simon D’Hanis lived in the locker room.

Taylor also got to know A.D. Koster, a wise guy, whose house slipped into the Park City school district by one of those bureaucratic accidents that make life worth living. Abraham Dwight Koster had been in the streets since he was nine, when his mother married a merchant marine in Los Angeles and sent A.D. back to live with her mother in a tiny bungalow backed up against the toll road. All through high school Koster drank and dealt pills and weed. Abraham Dwight Koster also was kind and attentive to his senile old grandmother, forging her shaky signature so he could cash her personal and Social Security checks long after she had died.

Abraham Dwight Koster had great natural athletic ability, with good bone and muscle structure. He had a quick mind, always probing for weakness, looking for the edge. A.D. was a natural football player, drunk or sober, and by his senior year at Park City he had played both ways an equal number of times.

By then Simon D’Hanis was All-State guard. He worked every summer, changing tires at the truckstop on the traffic circle, and turned hard.

A.D. Koster discovered amphetamine sulfate and was an All-State back. Second team.

A.D., Simon and Taylor Rusk were friends by acts of omission. At preppy, sophisticated Park City they really didn’t belong to any group and so became a group themselves.

Strangers in a strange land.

Taylor was an exceptional athlete as a freshman. Simon and A.D. became really great football players as juniors.

Taylor possessed great athletic ability and the willingness to work and develop his skills. He grew four inches, put on twenty pounds between his sophomore and junior years and at the same time increased his agility, playing basketball and drilling five hours a day. Every day. Taylor never drank or smoked and was beginning his athletic blooming at exactly the right time, in exactly the right dimensions. And at Park City he filled a very necessary slot in the Three-Deep charts.

He advanced. He looked good on paper and on the field, breaking school and state passing records the next two years. By Taylor’s sophomore year the Park City coach had nothing left to teach, so the coach, a strict disciplinarian, became frightened of Taylor, spending most of Taylor’s junior year trying to convince him he wasn’t
that good.
It was the first lesson Taylor learned about coaches’ mind games, and by then it was too late for the coach. Their relationship was never more than a business deal.

Park City, behind the quarterbacking of Taylor Rusk, won the state championship twice. A.D. and Simon were also stars, and with their support Taylor controlled the team.

“I was just testing you as a junior,” the Park City coach told Taylor his senior year. “To see if you could take the pressure.”

“I was testing you too,” Taylor replied. “And you graded out prime asshole.”

The Park City coach’s face tightened and he stomped away yelling, “Jocks! Prima donna sons of bitches!”

“The man loves the game,” Taylor told Simon. “Loves the game—hates the players.”

Taylor, Simon and A.D. went to the University together. They were recruited by Lem Carleton, Jr., the University regents chairman. Lem took them to the Spur Club dining room, bought them steaks, got Simon and A.D. drunk, then pointed out that the most important people in the state, including himself, had gone to the University and the
real important
ones were tapped into the Spur Club.

“You guys are real blue chippers,” Lem said. “You think I’d bring
any
football player up here? This is the
Spur dining room.
Right, Taylor?” Lem asked cannily, preempting Taylor’s response. Taylor had forced Lem to invite A.D. and Simon.

“Yeah.” The quarterback was not enthusiastic. “Real blue chippers.”

“You said it, bubba,” Lem junior gushed.

“I guess I did.” Taylor watched Simon twist nervously in his ill-fitting suit while A.D.’s head swiveled, eagerly devouring the expensive wainscotting, the furniture, the lovely hostess, the elegance of quiet wealth and power.

Later, Regents Chairman Lem Carleton, Jr., took Taylor Rusk, Simon D’Hanis and A.D. Koster from the Spur Club over to a whorehouse in an apartment building just off campus. Simon, Lem and A.D. grabbed women and went upstairs.

Taylor Rusk stayed in the kitchen and talked to Madam Earlette.

She told him about the moonlighting wives and mothers picking up a few bucks with their bodies.

“We’re all on scholarship here, sonny.” Earlette gestured up with her head, making her heavy jowls wobble. “I ain’t even got my first team here tonight.” Her rheumy brown eyes narrowed. “They all spend one night home with the family in Park City.”

It was a momentous occasion. At the whorehouse Lem junior signed the three to NCAA National letters of intent and A.D. Koster discovered amyl nitrite.

A
S
T
AYLOR,
S
IMON
and A.D. were bagged by the University recruiter in a cheap off-campus apartment house, another meeting was beginning in the sanctum of the Spur Club.

“In twenty years every poor son of a bitch up north that can afford it is gonna head south before the lights go out and the niggers take over,” Cyrus Chandler said in his amiable drawl. Cyrus was convincing his business associates that the city needed a professional football franchise. His full head of black hair was streaked with gray, his jaw was firm. He was sixty years old. “We want the next franchise in the South to come here, and I can get it. I am asking will you support the Franchise when I bring it in?”

Everybody around the table said yes.

“I’ll bring Red Kilroy over from the University as head coach and general manager,” Cyrus continued, to convince the already converted. Red Kilroy had the best record of any coach left alive. A lot of them had died young.

The people around the table represented banks, newspapers, radio and television stations and politicians. Cyrus sold them on supporting the Franchise and the big-league-city image. They were all members of Spur.

Before the war, during his senior year at the University, Cyrus had been president of Spur. During the war Daddy, Amos Chandler, had gotten Cyrus “deferred” to work as an assistant to Amos’s lawyer, Dick Conly, who was “detached” as a civilian adviser to the Department of the Navy. The Navy used lots of oil, and Amos Chandler had discovered oceans of it. Conly arranged for the Navy to buy it. Dick Conly and the war made the Chandlers richer.

After the war, brilliant young lawyer Dick Conly showed wealthy oilman Amos Chandler how to do all his deals, from pipelines and refineries to airlines and racetracks, oil fields and uranium mines, on other people’s money. OPM. Opium.

“We are going to have god-awful inflation, so put every cent of cash in gold and real estate,” Dick Conly advised. “Borrow up to the eyebrows and pay it back in thirty years with ten-cent dollars.”

After Amos died, Dick Conly had remained as Cyrus’s adviser, the guiding genius behind every profitable Chandler Industries enterprise. The Franchise was Dick Conly’s idea. It wasn’t easy. Trying to get the Franchise, Cyrus Chandler had threatened everything from lawsuits to underwriting another professional football league. Conly’s suggestion to bribe Senator Thompson swung it. For twenty-five thousand dollars the senator’s communications subcommittee came down on the football league and the FCC.

The senator was Spur and Spur was the wedge, but the twenty-five thousand dollars was the hammer. There was also the promise of five percent when pay-TV became feasible. The teams were already cutting up a hundred million yearly in network television money alone.

“Gambling thousands against millions,” Dick Conly said to Cyrus about the bribe. “A measly twenty-five thousand.”

The Franchise price was thirty-eight million dollars to buy into the cartel, while special tax legislation allowed straight-line depreciation of those millions over five years, a sizable write-off against Cyrus Chandler’s other income.

Dick Conly’s same thinking got Chandler Industries two hundred million dollars in government tax credits to build offshore oil-field equipment during the Crisis. As well as one-hundred-percent writeoffs during the Glut.

It took four years to get the Franchise, and Dick Conly had finally had to bribe a United States senator. It had all cost large amounts of time and money.

OPM. Other people’s money. The taxpayers’ money.

Not other people’s time, though. Dick Conly’s time. The Franchise had cost Dick Conly too much time. It was all he had and all he valued; there was no way to write it down against someone else.

Everybody does his own time.

Taylor Rusk had done his own time since the day he left Two Oaks to make his first “advance” in the world.