The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [154]
Bobby went out for football and on the playing field met many of his closest lifelong friends. He was no more a natural athlete than he had been at Milton, but he had awesome quantities of determination and mindless physical courage. As a 165-pound end, he shared the honor with two backs of being the lightest players on the team. In scrimmage, he kept blocking Vince “Vinnie” Moravec, the 200-pound first-string fullback, a task that was akin to running into a slab of granite.
“For Christ’s sake, would you tell that little bastard to stop hitting me so hard!” Vinnie yelled at Wally Flynn, an end. “He’s gonna get kicked!”
Wally looked up the field at Bobby, hustling back to the line. “Vinnie, he’s gotta prove himself to his family, to those kids at Milton, to just about everybody. You gotta tell him. I’m not tellin’ him.”
As hard as Bobby hit in practice, and as much as he threw the ball around in the evenings with his buddy Kenneth “Kenny” O’Donnell, he was far down in the rankings of Harvard ends. In the first game of the 1947 season against Western Maryland, Bobby finally got his chance when the two starting ends were so sick that they couldn’t even make it to the bench. The game was a 52–0 rout, and Kenny, the quarterback, threw a touchdown pass to Bobby.
If Bobby had played forcefully before in practice, the next day out he was even more of a human missile, blocking with abandon, tackling with fierce resolve. The first-string ends were scheduled to come back, but with one word, Coach Harlow, sitting high above the play in his elevated chair, could change all that. Like his father, Bobby had a perfect memory when it came to slights, and he remembered that Harlow had refused to let his brother Joe win a letter by playing in the Yale game.
Harlow was now an aging, unhealthy man who looked out on the squad as if they were a bunch of malleable preppies. He shuttled players in and out for little reason except personal whim and indulged in pep talks that motivated no one but himself. Harlow was still the man, however, who would decide whether or not Bobby played. Bobby ran down the side of the field and crashed against an equipment car, crushing his leg. The accident would have been enough to end any other man’s practice, but Bobby got up and with a slight limp came back onto the field.
Three days later Wally stood across the line from Bobby in scrimmage. As Wally waited for the play to start, he saw an impossible sight. Bobby seemed to be crying. Wally stopped the game and hurried over to his friend. “Hey, wait a minute, Bobby?” Wally implored. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“I think my leg’s broken,” Bobby replied, embarrassed to be holding up the game.
Wally didn’t know a thing about medicine, but when he took a look at Bobby’s leg, he shook his head authoritatively: “Yeah, Bobby, it’s broken.”
The rest of the year Bobby had a cast on his leg, but despite that he managed to play in the Harvard-Yale game and win his letter.
The math was simple. Harvard tuition was four hundred dollars a year, and the GI bill paid a stipend of seventy-five dollars a month. A man could earn a thousand dollars in the summer and during the school year work a few hours for his room and board. And so the veterans came, and they changed Harvard forever.
Bobby spent his free time with his friends at the Varsity Club, a rambling old two-story brick house with a pool table, a television set, and knockabout furniture. They rarely talked of the war, but when they did they told heroes’ tales. “Oh, those guys were tough cookies,” Flynn recalled. “Vinnie Moravec got torpedoed in the Atlantic and spent all night saving the lives of about ten kids, getting ‘em on board.