The Franchise (3 page)

“Can’t stay here, boy,” his father had said, and he was right. “A country boy can fall
way
behind, and most Texans are already a generation off the pace. Change is inevitable, but growth isn’t. You need a place to grow.”

Taylor grew, almost as fast as Chandler Enterprises. When television finally came to Two Oaks, Taylor Rusk was on it and Chandler Communications owned it.

Taylor Rusk’s family had been in Texas since the war for independence, living on the small remains of a generous land grant for service to the Republic; the pitiful ridge-running remnants of a once hopeful family of yeoman farmers worn down by taxes and richer men.

Men like the Chandlers.

The Chandler family established itself in Texas from Virginia before the close of the Civil War. In fact, only moments before.

Racing the news of Appomattox west, their saddlebags bulging with Confederate money, five Chandler brothers started buying land the minute they crossed the Sabine River into Texas. Using the worthless scrip, they bought thousands of acres of prime East Texas timberland, which naturally led the family into the exploitation of natural resources. When gas and oil were found under the timberland in 1917 by a one-eyed driller from Pennsylvania, the Chandler Timber and Oil Company was founded. The combination of the basic criminal inception of the Chandler family enterprise, coupled with the fact that East Texas was probably populated by the meanest people in all of Texas (excepting several strips along the Rio Grande), led to a series of feuds between the Chandlers and the Others.

The Others were usually made up of the people or their kin, heirs and assigns who had been swindled with Confederate money, plus a continually changing cast of newcomers seeking profit in promoting turmoil.

It can be said that the Chandlers were victorious, since it was from Chandler Timber and Oil that the billion-dollar conglomerate Chandler Industries descended. But the mortality rate was high, and Chandlers were a limited resource. The Others drew on an endless supply of manpower, especially in the tumultuous years between the end of the Civil War and the First World War.

The day Amos Chandler Number Three blew in—at three thousand barrels a day—Amos Chandler’s only child, Cyrus Houston Chandler, was born. The last male heir in the Chandler family. When Number Three blew in, it also killed the one-eyed driller. Amos thought it was a small price to pay.

The Chandler Field helped the Allies win the War to End All Wars. Amos got a medal for helping. He took the medal and the cash.

In 1939, Chandler Drilling brought in the Big Tex Field. Amos found that oil himself using a witching stick, soaked in crude oil, dangling from the dashboard of his Model-A Ford.

In 1941, Amos “detached” Dick Conly to Washington to help the Department of the Navy build an oil pipeline from Chandler’s latest oil field to the East Coast. Amos sent twenty-five-year-old Cyrus to DC with Conly “to learn the ropes.” Chandler Pipeline did the general contracting and all of the river crossings for the Navy on a cost-plus basis. When the war ended, the government sold Chandler Industries the pipeline for one-fifth of the cost of construction. Nice rope work.

While in Washington, Cyrus Chandler met and fell in love with the glamorous and infamous Gatlin twins, Wanda Jane and Wanda June, two stunning brunettes who had come from a vague Virginia background to wartime Washington to catch themselves rich husbands.

Cyrus Chandler spent most of the war in the Mayflower Hotel with one or both of the twins, plus assorted congressmen, admirals, generals and bureaucrats. The Gatlin twins waged an intense battle for Cyrus Chandler. Wanda June won her war on VJ Day.

Wanda June Gatlin, at two
A.M.
on the day the Japs surrendered, landed Cyrus Chandler, Texas oilman’s son, in his Mayflower suite. Cyrus’s last gasping lurch on the overstuffed couch was the final punctuation to a great war effort.

During the war Amos Chandler moved Chandler Industries from Tyler in East Texas to a small city in Central Texas, knowing this new city was destined to grow along with the rest of urban Texas. He quickly purchased large ranches and cotton farms on the edge of town directly in the path of the as-yet-to-be-announced interstate highway system that would connect the city to everywhere.

Gas was twenty-five cents a gallon, and the US Geological Survey swore to the Congress that US reserves of five hundred billion barrels would last forever, but Amos and other independents began drilling in the Middle East with great success. The big oil companies wanted Chandler’s cheap independent $1.50-a-barrel Middle Eastern oil put on a quota “for reasons of national security” and the fact that big oil was selling domestic oil at $2.50 a barrel. The government responded with the Import Allocation Allowance. Imported oil was held at twenty percent of the total crude in the US market, even though it was one dollar a barrel cheaper than the big oil domestic. Amos called it the “Drain America First” law. The law stayed until the Crisis and oil-price explosion. The import allocation was rescinded. Quietly. The USGS revised its US reserve figures down tenfold. Oil was forty dollars a barrel. OPM.

Amos Chandler bought a bank and built a high-rise office building of black glass and steel right in the center of town. All on borrowed money. And then he died.

Dick Conly took over as CEO of Chandler Industries. Cyrus and Wanda June Chandler took a trip around the world, then returned a year later to Texas to hold court as social butterflies and second-generation money.

Wanda June gave birth to a girl they called Wendy Cy. As Wendy grew up and Junie old, Cyrus began to look for new interests. The Franchise was Dick Conly’s idea, but Cyrus quickly claimed paternity to the tax advantages and shelters that the Franchise offered and waited for the phenomenal projected revenues.

The toughest part was getting the Franchise. Cyrus Chandler approached the League and was rebuffed, so he turned over the problem to Dick Conly. The League had a monopoly on professional football and wasn’t anxious to cut the pie any thinner. Dick Conly baked a new pie.

Dick Conly was a problem-solver.

“W
HO THE FUCK
cares what the New York Athletic Club thinks?” Taylor Rusk said to Vic Hersch, the University director of sports information.

“The New York
Downtown
Athletic Club,” Vic corrected the quarterback. He had hailed Taylor in the hallway and asked for a moment of his time.

Taylor was on the dodge from T. J. “Armadillo” Talbott, the University athletics director. If T.J. could corral Taylor in the athletic complex, he would drag Taylor back to his office, senile, shaking, sad, and repeatedly tell the stories behind his medals and trophies, team pictures and championship plaques. All the funny, angry and incomprehensible anecdotes led to the same conclusion: ten years earlier a conspiracy involving Regents Chairman Lem Carleton, Jr., had moved Red Kilroy into T. J. “Armadillo” Talbott’s job as the University head football coach.

Armadillo was right about the conspiracy but wrong about the conspirators. The real leader was T. J. Talbott’s chief assistant and best friend, who was angling to be head coach. The first thing Red Kilroy did was fire the whole staff, including the chief assistant.

“Lem Carleton got to feeling guilty,” Armadillo said, “so they give me this job of motherfucking, cocksucking, ass-kissing, flatdick, ball-busting, shit-hole, scumbag athletics director.”

T.J. put it eloquently;
athletics director
sounded dirtier than any of the adjectives.

The way Armadillo Talbott put it could last for hours. T.J.’s great football teams won national championships in the fifties and sixties; so, figuring an hour for each decade, plus open-ended raving on T.J.’s conspiracy theory, Taylor Rusk took momentary refuge in Vic Hersch’s Office of Sports Information.

“It could mean the Heisman Trophy,” Vic pleaded. “Just take a look.”

“Fuck the Heisman Trophy.” Taylor checked out the hallway, peering left and right. Armadillo Talbott had such a nasty habit of appearing out of thin air that Taylor suspected the building contained secret passages. Nothing about major college football would surprise him anymore. Not after those two guys from Houston got away with drowning the fag in the bathroom of the athletic dorm.

Taylor checked the hall again. “Is Armadillo in the building?”

“He ain’t even on the planet, Taylor.” The sports-information director sniggered at his own joke while digging behind the metal desk in his narrow, windowless office. “Just take a look at this thing, then write something nice and humble to go with it. I’m mailing it to sportswriters and broadcasters all over the country. We can’t crank this campaign up too early.”

“You should have started when I signed my letter of intent. The New York Athletic Club: a bunch of bald stockbrokers who think that racquetball and shuffleboard are sports.”

“It’s the goddam Heisman Trophy, Taylor!” Hersch continued to dig through the pile behind his desk. “I suppose you don’t want the Heisman.”

“You can’t spend the son of a bitch.” Taylor leaned out the door, checking the hall for the ever-roaming athletic director. “So who needs that fucking millstone?”

“Here it is!” Vic yelled, and straightened up.

Taylor jumped backward at the sports-information director’s cry and sudden move. The quarterback was edgy. He checked the empty hall again.

“Ain’t this a beauty?” Vic Hersch held up a green-and-white-striped envelope, legal size and half an inch thick. “It’s a die-cut mailer. We are going to put out about five thousand of these. You got to write a little note, something personal. Christ, you’re in communications. Communicate.”

Taylor took the heavy envelope and opened it. Inside was thick, one-hundred-pound, cast-coated white paper intricately printed in five colors, folded, blind-embossed and gold-stamped with the University seal.

“Just slide it out here on the desk. It’s great, Taylor. Every sportswriter in the country and the membership of the New York Downtown Athletic Club will get one,” Vic said. “I’ll get you the Heisman.”

Taylor Rusk dumped the contents of the envelope. The folded cast-coated paper lay flat, then slowly seemed to come alive; the edges peeled back, more edges and shapes appeared, unfolded, and then the whole thing bloomed into a scale model of University Stadium filled with printed people. The goalposts and team benches grew into place. The green midfield turf opened up and slowly telescoped like a time-lapse beanstalk growing into a three-dimensional, scale-model, lithograph die-cut, arm-cocked-to-pass Taylor Rusk.

It was a wonder of printing and design genius. It was very expensive.

“I’m not writing anything to go with that,” Taylor said. “I’m not having
anything
to do with that.”

“Taylor, you owe it to the University. If you get the Heisman, we get the press.” Vic was disappointed; it didn’t stop his pitch. “I can show you figures on alumni donations directly relating to schools producing Heisman Trophy winners. You
owe
us.”

“I owe you shit, Vic. You get the season and probably a Bowl Game out of me. Your share from the television revenue of that Bowl Game alone is four hundred thousand dollars. Don’t tell me I owe the University. I’m not writing anything.” Taylor turned to leave.

“You know,” Vic said, “that means I’ll have to write it.”

“Vic, c’mon ...” Taylor stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “I come off looking so dumb....”

“Goddam, Taylor, these things cost five dollars apiece ...”

“And you got five thousand?” Taylor turned loose of the knob and slapped his own forehead. “Give me the goddam twenty-five thousand dollars, I’ll go to New York and jack off everybody in their goddam Downtown Athletic steamroom.”

“Jesus, that’s disgusting....”

“And that’s not?” Taylor pointed at the waving figure in the center of the pop-up stadium. He turned back to the door and jerked it open.

“Taylor! Where you been?” Athletic Director T. J. “Armadillo” Talbott was standing in the hallway. “I got some things I want to tell you....” He grabbed the quarterback’s arm and pulled him toward his office.

“But, T.J.... ah ... I got to study.” Taylor tried to resist; T.J. pulled harder, digging in, the reason for the nickname Armadillo. Taylor protested more. “No fooling, T.J., I got exams.”

“Fuck exams.” T.J. hauled him down the hallway. “I’m talking
football,
mister.”

Taylor let the athletics director drag him off to spend hours spinning tales of manic success and paranoid woe.

Sports Information Director Vic Hersch looked into the hall and waved as the unhappy quarterback was dragged around the corner, out of sight.

“Goddam, Taylor, this is big-time football.” Hersch walked back into his office and quickly composed a paean to sportsmanship by Taylor Rusk. They had his signature on file. The mailing would be finished before October first.

Hersch leaned back in his wooden chair and looked at the opened mailer.

The die-cut pop-up Taylor Rusk quivered like a brand-new pecker.

Hersch started a harsh, loud laugh. It echoed through the halls of the sports complex all the way to the Athletic Director’s office, where it interrupted T.J.’s story of how sick the society had gotten now that beating up and drowning fags was against the rules.

Armadillo looked out his door. Hersch’s laugh was getting louder and he was pounding his desk.

“What the fuck is that little asshole laughing about?” Armadillo Talbott asked.

Taylor shrugged, but he knew. It was what he liked about Vic Hersch.

T
AYLOR
R
USK WAS
sensational his senior year, despite the five thousand pop-up peckers Vic Hersch sent out with a forged message. No one was a better quarterback than Taylor Rusk, either statistically or as a leader of his teammates.

And no one outcoached Red Kilroy that year.

Red had reached a stage where the opposing coaches were not challenging him mentally. His game plans and preparations, his practices and meetings, were all precise, exact, lean, with no extra mental fat to slow up a player.