Once They Heard the Cheers Read online

  "We're giving you three months vacation," Keats Speed was saying. I was sitting in his office off the City Room on the day after we came up the Bay and you could barely make out the Statue of Liberty if you had seen it before and knew it was there. "We're also giving you a $1,000 bonus."

  He was the managing editor, and from all I had heard about him and read about him in one or two memoirs, I knew he had once been a great newspaper man. Like the once great paper, though, and it was now 112 years old five years before its death, Speed was also getting old.

  "I thank you," I said. "I didn't expect this."

  "You've earned it," he said.

  "About the bonus," I said. "A couple of months ago Mr. Bart-nett cabled me $600 for additional expense money, and I still have about $300 of that left."

  "If I were you," he said, "I'd just keep that, and forget about it."

  "I thank you again."

  "But I've saved the best for last," he said. "Phelps Adams has asked to have you as the second man under him in the Washington office, and I've approved."

  How do you tell them? They have put on the party and raised the toasts and now, with the music rising and everyone standing and applauding they bring it in, all decorated and with the candles on it all ablaze. How do you tell them that they must have been thinking of someone else, because that's not your name on it and it's not your cake?

  "I don't know how to say this," I said, "because I appreciate everything you're doing and the Washington offer. The trouble with me is that, since I was a kid, I've always wanted to be around athletes and write sports. Covering the war, where the material was so dramatic, I think I started to learn how to write. I want to continue to learn, and writing sports, where men are in contest, if not in conflict, and where you can come to know them, one can grow as a writer better than anywhere else on the paper."

  "But we don't want you to write the hard news in Washington," he said. "We want you to do features."

  "I'm sorry," I said, "but for me it just wouldn't be like being in sports."

  "There are no openings in the sports department," he said.

  "I was afraid of that," I said. "I guess I'll just have to wait and hope."

  "When you come back from vacation in September," he said, "report to Mr. Bartnett again in the City Room."

  He was no longer looking at me. That handsome, aristocratic head, the gray hair smoothed precisely back, was lowered and he was looking at some papers on his desk.

  "Yes, sir," I said, "and thank you again for everything."

  All that summer, while my wife and I bicycled from New York City to twenty-five miles from the Canadian border, and lived in a cabin on the east shore of Lake Champlain where only the lightning storms that sounded like artillery landing in a town bothered me, I wondered and worried about how I could do it again in the City Room. I didn't see how I could stand it, covering the routine court cases and fund-raising luncheons and doing rewrite on fires and holdups and updating wait-order obits and meeting the Twentieth Century Limited with some Midwestern politician or musical conductor or Hollywood star on it. I would never really get to know any of them or any of it, or get to grow as a writer.

  I fully expected that on that first day back in the City Room I would find at my desk, as a starter, a sheaf of publicity notices to be ground down, each one, into a B-head, which is what we called a one-paragraph item. There was nothing on my desk, however, and for more than an hour I just sat there, reading the morning papers while around me the others rewrote the publicity or took the phone calls from the leg-men covering the districts or suddenly got up, folding copy paper into a pad as they started for the door.

  It occurred to me, sitting there and reading in the morning papers, news that really didn't interest me but that I had to prep myself on in case I should be assigned to the story, that perhaps Ed Bartnett was hesitating to send me out, or to have me take the first phone call, on the first routine story. He was, and still is I am sure, a reserved but kind man, and I wondered if, because I had covered D-Day and then, after the liberation of Paris, all of it on the drive east into Germany and the fighting and the Huertgen and The Bulge and then, finally, the meeting with the Russians on the Elbe, he was embarrassed and reluctant to reassign me to the prosaic. When, finally, he called me over, he said he wanted me to do a piece on the control tower at LaGuardia airport, so I called there and made an appointment for one o'clock that afternoon. I had just hung up, and I was assuring myself that it could be worse, when I felt a hand on my shoulder and it was Wilbur Wood.

  "Get out of here," he said. "I've just talked to Speed again, and he's letting me have you. You're now in sports."

  "You're not kidding?" I said.

  "Follow me," he said. "I'm your new boss."

  "In a minute," I said.

  I walked over to the City Desk and told Ed Bartnett. He said that he'd just heard it and that he was sorry to lose me but that he knew that was what I wanted. I told him about the one o'clock appointment at LaGuardia, and he told me to give that to Millie Faulk, who had the desk next to mine. When I did she said something, kidding, about the cushy jobs in sports. I took my automatic address finder, with the phone numbers of the American Dental Association and the District Attorney's office and the Bronx Zoo that I wouldn't need any more, out of my desk and walked out of the City Room and down the hall and into sports.

  "You had better go up and see Lou Little," Wilbur Wood was saying now at his desk. "We need some football in the paper, and if you're going to write sports in this town he's one guy you should get to know well."

  "That's fine with me," I said. "Whatever you say."

  "You won't have any trouble," Wilbur said. "He's a very nice guy."

  "From what I've read about him," I said, "I expect so."

  I went over to a phone and called Lou Little at Columbia. He said I should come up to see him at the field at three o'clock, and although he was being friendly I could tell that he had never heard of me. While we were writing the war, I guess we all thought that everyone should be reading everything we wrote because we had never had such material and we had never written so well. In New York alone, though, there were nine papers then, and we should have remembered that.

  At two o'clock I took the subway and it is a long ride to Baker Field where the Columbia football team practices and where it plays its home games. The subway comes out into the open and goes down into the ground again. You ride to the end of the Eighth Avenue Line, and after I became bored with reading the paper I realized that I was nervous about meeting Lou Little.

  After all, he was a famous football coach, and I was just starting to write sports. I did not know the things I should know about him, but I could remember that New Year's Day of 1934, when I was just out of high school and wanting to be a sportswriter, and I sat by the radio in a corner of the living room listening to the Rose Bowl game.

  It had said in the newspapers that the California sports writers had been referring to Columbia as "Pomona High School in light blue jerseys," and when Columbia beat Stanford, 7-0, it became one of the great upsets in football history and, of course, a major professional accomplishment for Lou Little. Almost twelve years later, they were still referring to it, and to KF-79, the naked reverse with which Columbia scored its touchdown.

  At the end of the subway I followed the directions they had given me at the office. The afternoon was warm, even for early September, and I walked along the sidewalk with the hilly park on the left. In the park, the leaves were turning yellow and the grass drying, and I walked by the small narrow stores and the used car lot and the gas station and turned left up the hill where, across the street and on the right, the chain-link fence runs around the field.

  I crossed the street and looked for a gate in the fence until I saw one that was open and walked in past some green wooden barracks. I walked around the end of the barracks and along one side under some elms. There were two college kids with books under their arms walking ahead of me and they
went through a doorway into the barracks, and when I came to the doorway I followed them.

  There were metal lockers around the walls of the room and there were about a dozen kids undressing in front of them. They were talking in loud voices and kidding back and forth, and I walked around the room and down a hall and looked into a smaller room with white walls and with a rubbing table in the middle and a long wooden bench along one wall.

  A couple of kids were sitting naked on the bench and there was another sitting on the rubbing table. There were two men working on the kid on the table, each bandaging an ankle. One of the men was thin, with an Irish face and wearing a white linen cap like Ben Hogan used to wear. The other was rather stout and with white bushy hair and a rather florid face. There was some talk going on in the room.

  "You're an athlete?" the large man with the white hair was saying to the kid on the table. "You're an athlete, my elbow. A man of my years and experience and the great athletes I've handled, and at this stage of my life they send me children. You're no athlete."

  The kid sitting on the rubbing table was grinning and winking at the kids sitting on the bench along the wall. I waited for the talk to quiet.

  "Excuse me," I said, "but is Lou Little around?"

  "He hasn't come in yet."

  It was the large man with the white hair who answered. He had stopped bandaging, and he had turned his head and was looking at me out of the tops of his eyes. I told him who I was and he said he was Doc Barrett, and I recognized from his name that he was the head trainer. He introduced me to the other whose name was Jimmy Judge.

  "How's Will Wedge?" Barrett said.

  "He's all right," I said. "He's covering the Yankees."

  "Don't you think I know he's covering the Yankees?" Barrett said. He was looking at me again out of the tops of his eyes. "Don't you think I read your paper every night?"

  "I'm glad you do."

  "How long you been writing sports?"

  "I've just started."

  "You want to know something?"

  "Yes."

  "Read Will Wedge," Barrett said. "You'll be all right if you write like Will Wedge. He's a good writer."

  "Yes, he is."

  "He could write a book. He's a learned man. He's a gentleman. He comes up here a lot. He wrote a good story about me once."

  "I'm sure he did."

  He looked at me again in that same way, studying me.

  "Will Wedge is not a knocker," he said. "He doesn't knock people. There's too many sportswriters knocking people. What do they think they are? You don't have to tell me. I know them. Their noses still run. They come up here and sit around and yes people. They're such timid little men. They ask you for favors, and they can't even wipe their own noses, and you're nice to them and then they go back and knock you."

  He tried to show disgust in his face.

  "I'd like to punch them in the nose," he said. "If I wasn't associated with a fine and respectable institution, I'd punch them in the nose. Who do they think they are anyway?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  They had finished with the boy on the table, and he got up and another boy climbed up and lay down. It was quiet in the room for the moment.

  "What kind of a team are you going to have this year?" I said.

  "How would I know?" Barrett said, looking at me again. "We don't know anything in here. You can come in here if you want, but you won't learn anything. If there's anything you want to know, you'll have to ask Lou Little. Lou Little does the talking around this club."

  "That's all right with me," I said.

  There was a man standing in the doorway, and I presumed he had been listening. He seemed to be in his mid-forties, but he was well built and only starting to get soft. He had on a dark blue suit and a blue shirt and a dark blue tie.

  "Excuse me," he said. "Is Lou Little around?"

  "He's not in yet," Barrett said, looking up from his work and at the man.

  "I played fullback here in 1921," the man said. He had walked into the room and he was standing in front of Barrett and he put out his hand. "My name's Charley Appleton."

  "Don't you think I know?" Barrett said, stopping his work and shaking hands. "I don't forget a face. How are you?"

  He introduced the man named Appleton to Jimmy Judge. He went back to his work, and I walked outside and back into the locker room and I waited around there. After a while Appleton came out and stood there until Lou Little came in.

  I recognized Lou Little, with his large nose, from all the pictures and cartoons I had seen of him. He had two boys with him, and he led them down the hall to where there was a Dutch door with the top half open, and I could hear him talking in a husky voice to someone in the room beyond the door while the two boys stood in back of him.

  "Fit these gentlemen out with uniforms," he was saying. "These gentlemen are going to play a little football for us."

  When he walked back toward us Appleton walked up to him. He stuck out his hand and Little took it.

  "Can I have a uniform too, coach?" Appleton said.

  "Sure," Little said, looking at him, "but you're a little heavy, ; aren't you?"

  "That's right. My name's Charley Appleton, and I played fullback here in 1921. You weren't here then."

  "Sure," Little said.

  "Next year is our twenty-fifth anniversary," Appleton said. "What I want to know is if I can borrow a jersey to be photographed for a little book we're getting out."

  "Sure," Little said. "One of the boys here will fit you with a jersey, and take a helmet too. Want a helmet?"

  "Yes. A helmet would be fine too. The photographer is right out here."

  "That's all right," Little said.

  He started to walk through the locker room, and I stopped him and introduced myself and we shook hands. I could tell that he still thought that maybe he should know me.

  "I'm glad to see you," he said. "Come up any time."

  I followed him into the small room where several other coaches were getting out of their clothes, and he introduced me to Buff Donelli and Tad Wieman and Ralph Furey and a couple of others. Then he started to undress in front of his locker, and I was impressed by his flawless taste in clothes. Everything was a shade of tan, trousers, sports jacket, shirt, suspenders, tie, shoes, and socks.

  "What can I tell you?" he said after a while, looking at me.

  I was sitting on a stool near his locker.

  "I'm not sure," I said. "I just thought I would come up and write a story telling what a practice is like. I think it might tell some people something they don't know."

  "That will be all right."

  "You know," I said, "coming up here I was remembering something. I was remembering when I was just out of high school and sitting by the radio in our living room and listening to you beat Stanford in the Rose Bowl. I can still see that radio in the corner. That was a big thrill, and I'll never forget that game."

  "I'll never forget it either," he said.

  He was pulling on a pair of baseball pants and then a sweatshirt, and I was still ill at ease, because he was Lou Little and I was still new at this. I wanted him to accept me, and I did not want him to be aware of my ignorance, and finally I asked him about his team and he named off some names which I wrote down.

  "My line isn't much," he said. "I've got two or three good backs who can run, though, and I like some of the boys I'm getting from our Naval R.O.T.C. They're bigger and better football players than our V-12 boys. Our V-12 boys were all right, but they were mostly pre-med and pre-engineers, which means they were smart enough, but they weren't always football material, if you know what I mean."

  "Yes," I said, "I know what you mean."

  "Some of our backs are out there now," Buff Donelli said.

  He was coaching the Columbia backs then. He was wearing a pair of black shorts and a white T-shirt, football shoes and white woolen sweat socks, and he was standing by the open door that looked out onto the practice field.

 
"I guess they're ready," Lou Little said. "We might as well go."

  He turned to me.

  "Come out on the field," he said. "Watch us work as long as you want, and if there's anything else you want to know, you can ask me when we come in."

  They left the dressing room, and I followed them out under the elms and onto the field. The sun was starting to get well down now and it was beginning to cool a little. On the field the kids in the light blue jerseys were kicking and passing footballs back and forth. There was the sound of the footballs against shoes and the sound of their shouting, and when Lou Little blew a whistle they stopped what they were doing and ran to him and formed a semicircle in front of him.

  Lou Little talked to them for a while in that husky voice, and he kept it low. I did not stand close enough to hear what he was telling them, but after a while they turned from him and joined into groups and spread around the field. I walked to the far end of the field and watched and listened while Little and Donelli worked with the backs.