Dianne slows down, but Y.A. doesn’t want to stop. He tells her to turn right, then left, until she pulls up alongside a park, fenced up and unkempt.
“This is the old football field,” he says.
Dianne hits the brakes. “Dad, I have to get out.” She jumps from the SUV, past men sitting on their cars and drinking out of brown paper bags, past rusted gates with broken locks, up concrete stairs blanketed in shattered glass, and looks out onto a shaggy field that she’s never seen before. “Wow,” she says.
She takes off her shoes. She needs to run. She owes her life to this field. It wasn’t where her parents first made eyes—that was in the town square—but it’s where they fell in love. Before he graduated from high school, Y.A. gave Minnette a bracelet with their initials in hearts. He left for LSU, she for the University of Arkansas, putting their relationship on hold. As a senior, Y.A. was asked by a reporter what he planned to do after graduating. “Marry my high school sweetheart and play professional football,” he said. Minnette’s boyfriend at the time was not amused. Months later, she and Y.A. were married.
A train whistles by. Dianne reaches the end zone and raps her knuckles against the rusted goalpost. She stands with her hands on her hips, tears and sweat soaking her face . . .
Y.A. slams the horn, ready to leave. Dianne takes a final look and climbs into the car, adrenaline filling her chest. Before she can turn the keys, her dad does something rare: he begins to sing. When those old Marshall Men all fall in line, we’re going to win that game, another time. And for the dear old school we love so well, we’re going to fight, fight, fight and give them all hell!
She is in awe. Since she landed, she’s been questioning why she made this trip. Is it for her dad? For her? Is it to cling to a fanciful dream? Finally, she’s in a moment that beats the hell out of the alternative.
Two blocks later, Y.A. says, “Did we go by the old Marshall Mavericks High School?”
That afternoon, outside the house, an electrical worker approaches Y.A. as he gets out of the car. “I know who you are,” he says. “Y. A. Tittle. New York Giants. You’re a baaaaad boy!”
“Well, thank you,” Y.A. says.
A few minutes later, on the couch, he opens a dusty commemorative book celebrating the Giants. He turns each page slowly, back to front, present to past. Legends pass on the way to the middle of last century, to the era of Gifford, Huff, and Tittle, a team of Hall of Famers known for losing championships as their peers on the Yankees—with whom they shared a stadium, a city, and many rounds of drinks—became renowned for winning them. Y.A. stops at a black-and-white shot of a man standing alone on the field, covered in mud.
“That’s me,” he says.
It’s from 1963. The same year in which Y.A., at age 37, set an NFL record with 36 touchdown passes. But he injured his knee early in the NFL title game against Chicago and threw five interceptions. It was his third straight loss in a championship game, and it effectively marked the end of his career. For years, he was the rare quarterback in the Hall of Fame without a title. It hurt. He always covered it up by poking fun at himself, making jokes about the weather during the championship games. But that last loss to the Bears was the worst day of his career: cold, bitter, violent. It marks him, even today. That game, he will never forget.
He turns to a page dedicated to the best performance of his career, against the Redskins in 1962, a game when he set a record with seven touchdown passes.
“I didn’t know I was that good,” he says.
Y.A. often talks about how he misses football. He misses the camaraderie, misses raising a vodka and saying, “We did it.” The game was, as Dianne likes to say, his “emotional home,” and in retirement in Atherton, he “was homesick for it.” Y.A. and Minnette fought a lot during those early empty years, struggling to adapt to a new reality; Dianne once screamed at them so loud to stop arguing that she lost her voice. Y.A. spent the next few decades running an insurance company, giving speeches, and informally advising quarterbacks. He developed real estate in the Bay Area and made a lot of money and traveled the world and bought houses around the country. He buried his older brother, his sister, his wife, and one of his sons. As the voids in his life piled up, the party at Caddo Lake became more important. Dianne considered it noble that her father strived to host it each year the way he had once strived for a championship. Each party was a win. That’s why she hates the blood picture too. The image of defeat that the world associates with her father does not resemble the man she grew up idolizing, the man she desperately hopes is still inside the current one, pining for what she calls one last “moment of victory.”
Y.A. closes the Giants book, and family members filter into the room. Tonight everyone wants to eat at the Longwood General Store, a roadside steakhouse. Back in the day, it was one of Y.A.’s favorite joints. Now he doesn’t want to go. “We came 3,500 miles to see this,” he says, pointing outside. “We got vodka and a meal and the lake. Why leave?”
Anna nudges him out the door. But then his memory circle restarts. Why leave? He refuses to get in the car. Family members buckle their seat belts, hoping the air of inevitability convinces him. But now he has to use the bathroom. Then his memory loop kicks in again, and he makes his old argument with the conviction of it being new. The family is exhausted. One of the most painful aspects of dementia is that it not only robs Y.A. of memory and identity, it robs him, as Dianne says, “of the capacity for joy.”
Five minutes later, Y.A. relents. The restaurant is a shack of Americana, with a stuffed alligator and old signs offering baths for 25 cents, exactly the type of place that could stir some memories. The family orders steaks and beers. Y.A. orders catfish and a glass of milk and barely utters a word all night.
It’s Friday. Party time. Dianne is stressed, hustling to prepare. Y.A. is stressed too, aware that something he cares about deeply is out of his control. “Dianne,” he says, “did you make a guest list?”
“No.”
“What kind of party doesn’t have a guest list?”
The truth is that she didn’t want to. She still doesn’t know who’s coming. But one of Y.A.’s oldest friends, a 90-year-old woman named Peggy, helped spread the word. And at 5:00 p.m., on a sunny and warm evening, guests arrive in droves—mostly neighbors and friends of the family. Y.A., dressed sharp in a navy blazer, greets everyone at the kitchen table. It’s hard to tell if he remembers any faces, if not names. The party swells to 50 or so people. Dianne leaves her dad’s side to catch up with old friends, reliving memories of her own.
A white-haired man approaches Y.A. and says, “I know every game you ever played, what you did, and who you played with.”
“Oh yeah?” Y.A. says.
He hands Y.A. a copy of the Marshall News Messenger from September 30, 1943. Y.A. opens the fragile paper and scans the Mavericks roster until he sees Yelberton Abraham Tittle. He shakes his head.
“I’ve got the worst name in the world,” he says.
The party moves to the porch, and Y.A. sits in front of a guitar trio, tapping his feet. Every few minutes he repeats a thought as though it has just occurred to him. He requests “On the Road Again” over and over, and the band acquiesces most of the time. Between songs, his friends tell some of their favorite Y.A. stories. About how he used to fake injuries to keep from losing at tennis. How he was benched once because he refused to cede play-calling authority to the head coach. How he once persuaded a referee to eject his coach rather than throw a flag. Y.A. occasionally laughs but mostly stares at the lake.
Midnight nears. People leave one by one, kissing Y.A.’s head and saying, “God bless you.” He gives a thumbs-up for the cameras, and he autographs the only photo people brought—the blood picture, of course—by signing his name neatly on the white of his shoulder: Y. A. Tittle HOF ’71. A palpable finality lingers, as if everyone knows this might be the last time they see him.
The musicians move inside to the living room. Y.A. gives his all to hobble clo
ser to them, one foot barely shuffling in front of the other. He sits on the couch, coughing. It is past his bedtime. Only six or so people remain. Y.A. holds his watered-down vodka but doesn’t drink, humming along to country songs.
Then someone plays the opening chords to “Amazing Grace.”
“Oh God,” Y.A. says.
His face reddens, like dye touching water. His eyes turn pink and wet. His breathing becomes deep and heavy. He brings his left fist to his eye, then puts down his drink, and soon both hands are pressed against his face. Memories are boiling up. Only he knows what, and soon they will be gone. The only thing that’s clear is that Y. A. Tittle is finally whole. He opens his mouth but can’t speak. He stares at the ground, his face glossy and damp, and begins to mouth the words, I once was lost but now am found.
Something feels different the next morning. Y.A. sits in a recliner with a blanket warming his legs, holding a coffee. Sun lights the room. Dianne and Anna lean on the counter; Don and Steve, Dianne’s husband, sit on the couch. All are tired, their voices scratchy. But they’re huddled in a sort of wonder. Y.A. is telling stories that have been told before but seem sweeter now.
“Tell the snake story, Dad,” Dianne says.
“We saw a big snake,” Y.A. begins. “This was 10, 15 years ago. Right out there. We were scared to death. I tell everyone to get back.
“I get a hoe. I sneak up behind it and hit it and hit it and hit it and hit it. I was protecting my family. Finally, it flipped over. I looked and it read, ‘MADE IN JAPAN.’” Everyone laughs. Y.A. is on a roll. He is trying hard—too hard—to convince everyone that as a single man he rarely exploited his fame for any backseat pleasures. “I would sometimes get a kiss,” he says. Just then, Anna brings a plate filled with Y.A.’s medicine, tethering him to his current reality. “Anna!” Y.A. says. “I’m telling a bunch of lies over here and getting away with it—until you brought these pills.”
For a moment, at least, nobody is searching for a glimpse of what Y. A. Tittle used to be. They’re enjoying what he is. A few minutes later, Dianne watches with pride as he heads toward the door, waving off any help. “I can walk anywhere,” he says. “I can run anywhere.
“I can still play football.”
The next day, Dianne, Anna, and Y.A. board their 6:00 a.m. flight back to San Francisco. A tornado is destroying the region. Dianne is bracing for another rough trip. Y.A.’s cough seems to be worse, and Dianne knows that very soon her dad will forget about the party. Yesterday afternoon, discussion turned to the plans for the night. Y.A. said, “We’re having people over for the party, right?” A bit of the color drained from Dianne’s face when she heard it.
But the plane takes off smoothly, leaving the storm behind. In the air, Y.A. breathes easily. No oxygen is needed. When they land back in California, where time and memory stand still, he says to Dianne, “That was one of my best trips home.”
CHRIS JONES
One Thousand Two Hundred and Fifty-Eight Pounds of Sons
FROM ESQUIRE
GORDY GRONKOWSKI, the patriarch of those very same Gronkowskis, America’s First Family of Smashmouth Football, the man who somehow parlayed five orgasms into 1,258 pounds of relentless physical force—a first baseman, two tight ends, and two fullbacks—the first father in 20 years to see three of his sons play during a single NFL season, and the first father in nearly 30 years with an even-money chance to see a fourth, might have gone after it a little hard last night.
He spent the evening and a good chunk of this morning in downtown Buffalo, watching his alma mater, the Orange of Syracuse, lose by two points to Dayton in the NCAA tournament, and suddenly it’s obvious how his sons learned to shake off disappointment by laying waste to themselves and one another and however many blocks of their battered hometown. It’s Sunday afternoon, and Gordy’s still moving a little more slowly than his usual terrifying pace, sipping from a bottle of water, shaking his head at himself and his hangover. “That was rough,” he says. “I don’t know why that kid didn’t drive to the basket.”
The kid in question, for once, is not one of his. His kids would have driven to the basket. He’s referring to Syracuse guard Tyler Ennis, who in the dying seconds launched a long three for the win when he might have driven for the push, dooming the Orange to elimination rather than sending the game and their season into overtime. For most of the people in the arena last night, Ennis’s snap judgment was just a bad call made by a teenager under the clock’s adult-sized pressure. But Gronkowski doesn’t watch sports the way the rest of us watch sports. For him, games are not just games. “They are everything,” he says. They are morality plays, tests of will and feats of strength, definers of men and boys and their good family names for generations. In sports, Gronkowski sees justice and beauty, companionship and teamwork, discipline and sacrifice. He sees blessings earned or squandered, and he sees fundamentals learned or forgotten. Most of all, he sees belief and the power of it, and he sees the terrible blackness that roosts in its absence. And when you see sports and therefore the world the way Gordy Gronkowski does, nothing makes less sense than a divinely talented kid launching a no-hoper when the lane and the universe were wide open to him. “You drive the basket,” he says, and he says it as though he’s expecting not only agreement in this particular instance but a lifelong conversion to the idea: in the dying seconds of every basketball game that remains to be played here on earth, every basket shall be driven.
It’s easy for Gronkowski to be certain: look at his boys and what they have done. He built this house in 2002, in a Buffalo suburb called Amherst, and it is a physical manifestation of his faith in them, custom-built for giants and their dreams. The rooms are huge, the hallways are double-width, and the doors are as tall as the ceilings in more-mortal shacks. (“The movers loved it,” Gordy says. “They could swing the furniture around no problem.”) Every bed those movers moved was king-sized. One bedroom contains three of them alone; they were for the boys, but not for any specific boy. “They slept in any of ’em,” Gordy says. “Wherever they crashed that night, they crashed.” In the predictably massive backyard, there is a baseball field, 325 feet down the lines; a pool and a hot tub; a full tennis court with regulation-height basketball hoops and hockey nets too. It is child-jock nirvana.
But the basement is the true heart of this home. Gordy pads down the stairs and turns on the lights, suspended from 10-foot ceilings. The walls are bare studs. “I didn’t want it plush,” he says. “I wanted that hard-core feeling.” He owns and operates G&G Fitness, a chain of 14 home and commercial gym-equipment stores across the Northeast, and his basement looks like an unfinished showroom. There is approximately $80,000 worth of gear down here, machines dedicated to every muscle group: a bench with a safety rack, a leg press and calf lift, a punching bag, free weights, pull-up and chin-dip bars, a kind of elliptical—“That’s an AMT,” Gordy says; “Precor, top of the line”—a rowing machine, and a treadmill. He climbs onto each piece of equipment to demonstrate the very particular part of his body it is designed to improve, his fatigue visibly lifting with the weights. He is 54 years old, and he is six-foot-three and 235 pounds of Polish American muscle, and he still comes down here six days a week, working out with the enormous ghosts of his five absent sons.
Along one wall, he has built five trophy cabinets, black with glass fronts. Together they are about 20 feet long and six feet high. Unlike the beds upstairs, each cabinet has been assigned to a particular son, arranged in birth order: first Gordie Jr. (first baseman, drafted by the Angels in 2006), then Dan (tight end, drafted by the Lions in 2009), Chris (fullback, signed undrafted by the Cowboys in 2010), famous Rob (tight end, second-round pick by the Patriots in 2010), and finally Glenn, dubbed “Goose” by his family (fullback, Kansas State). Today they help Gordy remember, like photo albums, but that’s a new, unintended purpose. Gordie Jr.’s cabinet is full, but it is the least full; Rob’s is the most full. They are stuffed with trophies and medals of every possible sort, footba
ll and baseball MVPs and championships but also awards for basketball, hockey, and even bowling prowess. In Dan’s cabinet, there’s a size-16 shoe he wore when he played at Maryland; in Rob’s, there’s the football delivered to him by Tom Brady for his first NFL touchdown. There are nearly 500 trophies of various sizes in all, shining under the lights.
Gordy looks at the trophies, and he takes another sip of his water and he nods, because even though he knows in his heart that the way he raised his sons was right, such hard evidence makes it easier for him to believe. He mindfully kept the cabinets segregated by child because life is a competition and triumph is often singular, and he just as mindfully kept them in the basement, with the barbells and racks, because some products are better left on the factory floor. These trophies will always remain down here, where they were made, each one a mathematical proof, each one an article of faith, so that together they might multiply.
Gordy Gronkowski’s favorite piece of basement equipment is something called a vibration plate. It looks almost like an industrial scale, with a square metal platform sturdy enough to handle a careful elephant. He climbs onto it and he grabs hold of two handles on the ends of bands and kicks an invisible button. The machine comes buzzing to life, and now Gordy sounds like he’s being mildly electrocuted. “This thing is awesome—you loosen right up, you gotta be on the balls of your feet, it hits everything,” he says, his voice warbling, his entire body seized with tiny tremors.
Vibration plates are meant to shake out sore muscles, breaking up pockets of lactic acid and staving off cramps, and they may in fact perform such an essential service. But something about this artificial earthquake seems like quackery, like a scaled-up version of magnetic bracelets or miracle tonic—which makes it odd, at least at first, to learn of Gronkowski’s allegiance to the benefits of full-body vibration. It runs counter to his more evident logical self, the man who has always subscribed so strongly to the efficacy of counting trophies.
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