The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [46]
There was more than one audience for this. Ben risked a glance toward the near sideline where Ted Loudon, Bruno's pet sportswriter and nobody else's, was taking in the coach's every word hungrily. Why? He'll keep making up whatever he wants to about "the team that can't find itself" anyway. Loudon even trigged himself up in camel-colored topcoat and snap-brim hat in imitation of Bruno but fell short as a fashion plate due to newspaper pay.
"Listen up, people," the coach intoned, as if they had any other choice, "do you know what you want to be as a team? Slick. Operating together smooth as shit through a goose. I want teamwork from you so slick the sissies across from you won't be able to see straight, you hear me?"
Nearest across the scrimmage line from Ben, Purcell uncomfortably did. The lanky sophomore was blushing red-hot at the coach's choice of language. Where the hell was he raised, in a Sunday school? A walk-on from six-man nowhere, Merle Purcell had been turning pink since the first day of practice when he stepped into the locker room wearing a droopy high school sweater that showed he had lettered in football, basketball, and track. Instantly he became known as the three-letter man and crude suggestions were made as to what those letters stood for. He wasn't necessarily hazed any harder than any other sophomore scrub, but on him it seemed to stick. On the field the freakish kid could outrun anything said about him—Ben, who was quick, comprehended the cosmic difference between that and fast—yet when he wasn't in motion he lapsed into a sitting duck. Purcell was a handful in more ways than one, but right then Ben had everyone else on the squad to worry about.
Bruno paused again, then resumed like a thunderclap:
"There is not, I repeat, not an opponent on the schedule that the Treasure State University Golden Eagles of nineteen hundred and forty-one can't beat the living piss out of, if you will merely play this game my way. If! Do you hear that word? I-F! And now that I have your attention, may I point out to you something there is no goddamn if about. It is one week from today to the season opener. One week! That gives you seven days to pull together into a team that devotes itself heart, soul, and fart hole to this ball."
Now—Hollywood could not have cued him better, Ben had to admit—the coach put the football down gently as an egg. By then varsity and second-stringers alike knew Animal indeed was prophetic, here it came. "People?" the coach addressed them as if dubious about that. "To help you concentrate on the loving care of this miraculous object, you are now playing under the Golden Rule."
Despair followed those words like jackal tracks behind a caravan. The only thing biblical about Bruno's Golden Rule was that it was blunt-edged and carried the whiff of Hell. The dreaded maxim was actually a catchall for his wrathful coaching canons—no fumbling the football, no missing a tackle, no messing up a play, no time-outs to fix shoulder pads, no anything else that could conceivably offend the exacting eye on the sideline—but what sane person in a football uniform was going to stand out there arguing singular and plural with the gridiron lord and master?
Not Ben, not quite yet. Not in front of everybody. He'd run the legs off all of us up to those big white sons of bitches just to show me.
His involuntary glance toward the butte looming out there beyond the end zone stands was not the only one. The Letter Hill was roundly hated. Of all Bruno's raging innovations this year, trickier drills, tougher calisthentics, full-length slam-bang practice games that pitted the varsity against the scrub team twice a week, the punishment runs up to those pale letters halfway into the sky were the hardest to take. Penalty laps around the field were a custom as old as football cleats, but nobody had signed on to clamber up a junior mountainside any time a volcanic coach blew off steam. Dex would be his bet, for