Once They Heard the Cheers Read online

  "Look, look," Little was saying to one of them who had just thrown the ball. "Don't just stand there. When you're not ready to throw it, don't just stand there. Keep moving around. Move around. Move around."

  The player was just a kid. He couldn't have been more than 5'9" or have weighed more than 165 pounds. He had his helmet off, and he had dark curly hair and dark eyes. As Little talked to him he listened carefully, nodding his head, and a few minutes later Donelli was shouting at him.

  "Hey!" Donelli was shouting, running up to him, when the play had stopped. "What's the reason you're always bumping into him? You've got no reason to be bumping into him. You're supposed to take two steps and then drop back. You're not supposed to be anywhere near him, but you're bumping into him all the time."

  After I had watched for a while longer I walked over to the bench at the side line near midfield, where Doc Barrett and Jimmy Judge were sitting. Doc Barrett introduced me to Dr. Stephen Hudack, the team physician, and I sat down near them. I was listening to their talk when one of the student managers came running across the field.

  "Jimmy!" he was calling, "Mr. Little wants to see you, Jimmy!"

  Jimmy Judge got up and ran out onto the field. When he came back he had one of the players with him. It was not the little kid with the dark wavy hair and the dark eyes, but an older one, husky and with his black hair starting to thin in the front,

  "He's sick," Jimmy Judge said to Dr. Hudack, motioning with his head toward the player.

  "You're sick?" the doctor said, standing up and looking at the player. "What's the matter, son?"

  "I don't know," the player said. "I get all congested and spit up cotton, and then I start to feel sick to my stomach."

  He was standing in front of the bench in his soiled uniform, his face pale and the drops of perspiration on it and on his neck. He had his helmet in his hands.

  "Have you been sick lately, or have you had a cold?" the doctor said.

  "No," the player said, shaking his head.

  "Do you have any idea what it might be?"

  "Well," the player said, "I think I may have T.B."

  "You think you may have T.B.?" the doctor said. "T.B.? What makes you think you may have T.B.? Is there any T.B. in your family?"

  "No, sir, there isn't," the player said.

  "Then what makes you think you have T.B.?"

  "Well, sir," the player said, "I drank some raw milk."

  "You drank some raw milk?" the doctor said, looking right at the player. "Don't you know better than to drink raw milk? Don't you know that you should boil raw milk before you drink it?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Then why didn't you boil it? Why didn't you boil the milk?"

  "You see, sir," the player said, slowly, "I was in a German prison camp for fifteen months. Once all we had was raw milk."

  We were all looking at the player. Then I looked at the doctor.

  "Oh," the doctor said, and I could see and hear him soften. "Oh. Is that so?"

  "Yes, sir," the player said.

  "Were you sick in the camp?"

  "Sometimes. I lost forty-one pounds, but I got it all back."

  "So," the doctor said. "Well now, you're going to be all right. I think maybe you're just pressing too hard. I think you're just trying to do too much. Too much exercise isn't too good for you. I'll tell you what we'll do, You come in to see me tomorrow morning, and I don't think you should do any more today."

  "Yes, sir," the player said. "Thank you."

  He started back toward the barracks, but I stopped him and introduced myself and I talked with him for three or four minutes. He said he had been a gunner on a Flying Fortress and that he had been shot down over Northern Italy.

  "You'll be all right," I said.

  "I hope so," he said.

  "You'll be fine," I said.

  He walked back to the barracks and I walked out onto the field and I found Lou Little. I told him I thought I had better get back to the office, and then it came to me that he might wonder what I would write about. I didn't want him to think that I was lazy or careless, leaving so early during the practice.

  "One of your players was just sick," I said. "I mean the one you sent back with Jimmy Judge, and it turns out he was in German prison camp for fifteen months."

  "He was?" Lou Little said. "Is that so?"

  "Yes," I said, "and I think I'll write something about that."

  "Fine," Lou Little said. "Good. Come up any time."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Any time," he said.

  Riding back downtown on the subway I started to put together in my mind the piece I would write describing the practice. I would have to work the contrast between the little kid with the curly hair and brown eyes listening so carefully while Little and Donelli lectured him, and the older one coming off the field and, when the doctor asked him what he thought his trouble was, saying he might have T.B. I would have to show somehow without saying it that, at first, the doctor had been a bit patronizing, and then even incredulous when he heard about the raw milk, before he learned that the player had been a prisoner of the Germans, because that should be the way it should come to the reader, too, if I could get that dialogue—the pauses and the emphasis—just right.

  The name of the little kid was Gene Rossides, and the older one was Vince Pesature. Rossides was still some weeks away from being eighteen, and during the next four years he became one of the best of all Columbia backs. In his first game he ran eighty yards for one of the three touchdowns he scored, and on a number of Saturday afternoons I sat in press boxes and watched him pull games out. One October afternoon two years later I watched his passes and Bill Swiacki's catches end by 21-20 Army's string of thirty-two games without defeat, and this was almost as important to Columbia and Lou Little as their Rose Bowl game.

  Vince Pesature was never much of a football player, and I saw him play only once, late in a one-sided game. What he did in that game I don't remember, but I remember that once he was in a German prison camp and a year later I saw him at Baker Field. He was trying to make the Columbia football team, and he was standing on the side lines, coughing up a little cotton and saying that sometimes he felt a little sick and that he thought he might have T.B. from drinking raw milk.

  And I was writing sports. About a month later I was on the field at the Polo Grounds, where John McGraw, Christy Mathew-son, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Frankie Frisch, Red Grange, Bronco Nagurski and dozens of the other heroes of my youth had performed. I was watching the New York Football Giants practice, as I would do every Tuesday morning during the football season. I would be at the Polo Grounds at ten o'clock, and I would stand around there, watching Steve Owen coach the team. I looked forward to those Tuesday mornings because Steve Owen was a big, open, and honest man, and I was trying to appreciate his problems and the problems of his players. After practice I would go into the locker room and talk with him and with his players, and sometimes I would go to lunch with him. We would sit in a darkened pseudo-Spanish restaurant on Forty-third Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, with its decorative wall tiles and archways and wrought-iron railings, and he would tell stories about the early days of professional football. After lunch I would walk back with him to Forty-second Street, where he would go up to the Giants's office to work out his problems, and I would take the subway downtown to work on mine.

  On this morning it was cold, but the air was clear and the sun was shining. The Giants were running through passing plays in deep right field near the outfield wall with the signs, painted on the dark green, advertising razor blades and hot dogs and ice cream. Steve Owen was standing with his hands in his hip pockets talking to several of us and watching Arnie Herber throw the ball.

  Herber threw a pass to an end named Hubert Barker. It was deep and Barker ran for it, but when he was about to run into the wall where the sign advertised Gem blades, he slowed and the pass went over his outstretched hands.

  "What are you scared
of Barker?" Owen said, shouting at him. "What are you scared of?"

  "He's scared of the five o'clock shadow," Bert Gumpert, who wrote sports for The Bronx Home News, said.

  Owen turned to Bill Abbott. Abbott was the publicity man for the Giants, and Owen asked him for a copy of the team roster. When Abbott gave it to him Owen ran a finger down the list of players.

  "Take this McNamara off the list," Owen said to Abbott, and he was talking about Edmund McNamara, a tackle from Holy Cross. "I just sold him to Pittsburgh."

  "In other words," Gumpert said, "McNamara's banned."

  "He's a pretty nice kid," Owen said, "He has the Silver Star, and they needed tackles more than we do, and I like to give those war kids jobs."

  That was how Abbott got to explaining about Marion Pugh. Marion Pugh was one of Owen's good backs, and before that he had been a star at Texas A. & M. I could remember hearing another broadcast of another game, and Ted Husing was doing the game and he talked a lot about Pugh. He kept calling him Dukey Pugh, and Husing had a resonant voice and afterwards the name kept running around in my mind . . . Dukey Pugh . . . Dukey Pugh . . . Dukey Pugh.

  "A year ago he was fighting in Europe," Abbott said. "He had a company of tank destroyers. He was wounded twice and got the Bronze Star."

  "You should talk to him," Owen said to me. "You might get a story."

  After the players had finished running through their plays he had them run up and down the field a couple of times, and then he sent them to the showers. When Pugh came down the old, worn wooden steps from the shower room he was still drying himself, and he walked across the room to his locker. As he started to dress I walked over and introduced myself and stood talking with him.

  "They tell me you were in Europe?" I said.

  "That's right," he said.

  "Where were you?" I said.

  "Oh, from France all the way into Germany."

  "What outfit were you attached to?"

  "The Second Division and the Fourth."

  "Is that right? I was with both of them."

  "Also the Twenty-eighth."

  "Were you with the Twenty-eighth when they were in the Huertgen Forest?" I said. "I mean that time they were chewed up at Schmidt and Kommerscheidt?"

  Marion Pugh was not large for a professional football player. He was rather slim, but nicely muscled. He had started to pull on a pair of slacks, but he stopped and straightened up.

  "You know something?" he said, looking at me. "You're the first guy I've met who has even heard of those places."

  We stood in the locker room of the Polo Grounds and talked about one of the bad beatings the Americans took in the war. Schmidt and Kommerscheidt were two small towns in a break in the Huertgen, and the German attack there was a prelude, a first step by which they positioned themselves for their breakthrough later in The Bulge.

  "I lost eleven of my twelve T.D.'s in that," Pugh said, and it is what tank destroyers are called. "We were cut off for six days."

  "I remember one thing about it in particular," I said. "There were some wounded Americans cut off in a forester's cabin in the woods, and we were trying to get to them. I wrote a story about it, and I also remember that that was the day we had our first snow."

  "I was in that cabin," Pugh said, looking at me again. "That's an odd thing. I was in that cabin."

  We had been, with Germans between us, not much more than the length of a football field apart, and now he stuck out a finger. He showed me the scar on it.

  "They ambushed my jeep," he said, "and we jumped out and hid in some bushes in the dark. A German was probing through the bushes with his bayonet,, and it went right through my finger."

  "I'd say you're lucky," I said.

  "You're telling me?" he said.

  "That was just about a year ago, too," I said. "I think it was right about now."

  "No," Pugh said. "It was November fifth. I'll never forget that."

  Around us the other players had finished dressing and Steve

  Owen was calling them together. They were preparing to play Boston on the following Sunday, and Owen was going to show them the movies of the Boston game of the previous year.

  The players pulled the wooden folding chairs up in front of a small movie screen set up in the middle of the old locker room. Somebody turned out the lights, and when the film started and the titles came on the screen, there was the date. Marion Pugh and I sat side by side in the darkness in the locker room in the Polo Grounds, and we read on the screen that the game had been played the previous year on November 5.

  "I'll be damned," Marion Pugh said.

  Five weeks later the Giants played the Eagles in the mist and rain in Philadelphia. The Eagles won easily, 38-17, and after the game the Giants, hurting and sullen and silent, had crowded into the bus. Now the bus was moving, halting and then moving again through the honking traffic of a Sunday evening and over the wet streets between Shibe Park and the North Philadelphia station.

  "Kilroy," somebody said. "Kilroy is the guy who did it."

  "How bad is it?" somebody else said. "Is it broken?"

  "They don't know," one of the players who had been the last to crowd into the bus said. "They're trying to get a cast on it so they can carry him home."

  They were talking about Marion Pugh. Near the end of the game he had just completed a pass and Frank Kilroy, the 240-pound Eagle tackle, had hit him. When they had gone down, Pugh had folded forward in a peculiar position so that he was half on top of Kilroy.

  Four players had had to carry Pugh off the muddy field. He had been half lying and half sitting in their arms, and from the press box and through my field glasses I had been able to see his face and he had been grimacing with the pain.

  When they had brought Pugh into the dressing room they had placed him on one of the rubbing tables, and then they had looked at his leg and had tried to take off his uniform. Every time they had moved him the muscles of his face had tightened and he had shut his eyes, but finally they had got him out of his uniform and dressed him in his street clothes. He had been sitting there with his leg stretched out on the rubbing table when he had looked up and seen me.

  "Hey!" he said, "How are you?"

  "That's not the question," I had said. "How are you?"

  "The way they were coming at me out there," he had said, "I thought I was back at Kommerscheidt."

  Behind me now in the crowded bus George Franck was talking. He had been an Ail-American halfback at Minnesota and he had flown for the Marines in the Pacific, and he was talking to Mel Hein, the All-Pro center.

  "When I was shot down over Wotje," Franck was saying, "I was going to kill myself."

  "You were going to kill yourself?" Hein said.

  "Rather than let those bastards get their hands on me," Franck said, "I was going to put a slug through my own head."

  "Good God!" Hein said.

  I wasn't seeking them, but when I found them I could not ignore them. They were a part of America and of a world in transition, and one Friday night about three weeks later I was walking down the hallway under the main arena seats on the Fiftieth Street side of Madison Square Garden. It was about eight o'clock, with the crowd starting to come in, and Bob Mêle, a fight manager from New Haven, was standing outside one of the dressing rooms they used for preliminary fighters. He was smoking a cigarette and he said he had two fighters in the four-round bouts that night, two brothers named Joe and Jimmy Rogers.

  "They were on the Juneau when she was sunk," he said.

  The Juneau was a light cruiser, and when it had gone down in the Pacific it had taken the five Sullivan brothers with it, and that had become a part of the history of the war. Mele was saying now that there had been four Rogers brothers on it, too, and that Pat and Louie had been lost and Joe and Jimmy had had to swim for it, and now they were waiting to fight in the Garden.

  "It's a good thing for them," he said. "All the time after they came back they kept talking about Pat and Louie. Pat and Louie we
re better fighters than these two, and they thought about them all the time. Now they've got their minds on this, and it's a good thing."

  "Do you mind if I go in and talk to them?" I said.

  "No," he said. "They're a little nervous, you know, about being in the Garden, and it'll probably help them relax a little."

  There were several other fighters and their handlers in the room. The Rogers brothers, in their ring trunks and blue satin robes, were sitting together on one of the benches and Mele introduced me. I did not want to ask them about the Juneau, but if I were going to write about them I would have to, and so I told them I was sorry about their loss and I asked them how the four brothers happened to be on the same ship.

  "We enlisted together right after Pearl Harbor," the one named Joe said. "When the war started we said let's get into it together and take care of one another. We didn't know a damn thing about war. How are you gonna take care of one another on a ship like that?"

  I was hoping very much that they would turn out to be good fighters, at least good enough to win their bouts. Joe went on first, just before the main event, and when they called him, Jimmy walked out with him and then stood at the top of the aisle, trying to see over the heads. It was a slow fight, with the crowd, impatient for the main event to come on, booing, and when Joe lost the decision and came back up the aisle, Jimmy threw an arm around Joe's shoulders.