Semi-Tough

by Dan Jenkins

  In the secondary I'd guess that we've got more speed than a bunch of hookers at a convention.

  Jimmy Keith Joy and Story Time Mitchell give us the two toughest corners in pro ball, I think. Jimmy Keith Joy is from Kansas State and Story Time Mitchell is a rookie from Purdue whose whole life got changed by football. In the spring of his junior year at Purdue, Story Time Mitchell got caught being a lookout on a grocery market holdup. The school decided, however, that it wouldn't be a good thing for an All-American, which he was, to have to go to jail. And the team voted that he ought to get to stay on the squad, figuring it would help rehabilitate him, and that way he could also keep returning punts and intercepting passes.

  This has just reminded me that when I made one of my best runs this season against St. Louis, Jim Tom Pinch called me up that night to tell me he'd seen it on TV and that during the run when I side-stepped two tacklers I had made "the greatest move since Story Time Mitchell went from armed robbery to probation."

  Story Time Mitchell has played real good for the Giants and stayed pretty much out of trouble with the law, although his roommate on the road, Perry Lou Jackson, says, "It sure is a lot of trouble all the time to have to take a shower with your money in your hand."

  This leaves only our free safety and our on-safety and they happen to be absolute streaks named Varnell Swist and Bobby Styles. Varnell Swist is from San Diego State and I don't think there's a better free safety in football. And Bobby Styles is from LSU, where he was a running back. In Baton Rouge, they say, the radio stations still play a recording of Bobby's great run which beat Ole Miss a couple of years ago.

  The radio stations play Bobby's run every fifteen minutes all day long before a Saturday night game. Shoat Cooper likes to kid Bobby and tell him, "I don't see how you can be any kind of coon ass legend when you ain't got no x's or u's in your name."

  Shoat means of course that everybody from LSU seems to have a name like Bou-ax and Loubedo.

  Well, this just about takes care of everybody important on our team, except for Randy Juan Llanez, our utility stud. All I can say about Randy Juan is that he comes from somewhere in South America, played college ball at Florida State, and says he learned to run fast in riots after soccer games.

  So there they are, folks, the New York Giants. Get 'em, Giants.

  Cissy Walford came in a while ago and she's getting dressed for the CBS cocktail party, and for our dinner with Big Ed and Big Barb, so I am doing some more work.

  She said everybody in the whole world was in the hotel lobby. This means there are six or seven people down there that she knows from around midtown New York.

  She said Burt Danby was down there with Camille Virl, the movie queen, and he was really having fun introducing her around. She said Shake was signing a lot of autographs around the table he was at with Big Ed and Big Barb in the Eucalyptus Bar, just off the lobby.

  She said some photographers were there and they were setting up a picture of Shake and Camille Virl when Boke Kellum rushed up and hugged Camille Virl in the middle of the photograph, and got himself in it.

  She said several writers were hanging around, getting funny statements from Shake about the game.

  And here she comes now, folks, right out of heaven, as I'm talking into the old tape recorder. I do believe this little pet is wearing fewer duds than she did at the Sports Illustrated party.

  All I can see from here are these elegant thighs and that long yellow hair streaming down off an angel's face. Get over here, woman. As T.J. Lambert once said, "Psycho wants pussy."

  Well, this is Friday morning, friends, and this is Billy Clyde Puckett, the disk jockey's disk jockey. I'm here to wake you up with tunes of pleasure and semi-sadness as sung by that merry philosopher Elroy Blunt.

  Here's our first tune by Elroy. It's titled "Watch Old Billy Clyde Brush His Teeth and Throw Up."

  Now I'm back from doing my household chores. Washing my face and hands and teeth and body parts and all. Everybody else is still racked in and I guess I'm up early because this is Friday and it will be our last serious workout of the week. I believe I'm getting my game-face on.

  We won't do anything tomorrow, Saturday, except play catch and trot for about thirty minutes in shorts.

  We probably won't even look at any more film after late this afternoon because Shoat Cooper has already said, "The hunt's over. It's time to piss on the fire and call in the dogs."

  This of course has not been an ordinary week in terms of how we prepare for a football game.

  If this were just a regular season game, the week would go sort of like this: nothing on Monday, see the film breakdown of last Sunday's game on Tuesday, run through our entire repertoire on Wednesday, set the draws and screens on Thursday, light-polish on Friday, rest the legs on Saturday, and then kick the pee out of somebody else on Sunday.

  This being the Super Bowl, it's different.

  We've had two weeks to get ready since we dough-popped the LA Rams for the National Conference championship back in good old Yankee Stadium.

  We had a three-day rest and victory celebration after that because it was such a colossal thing that the Giants won their conference. They hadn't won anything in fifteen years except a few coin flips.

  Then we started boning up on the dog-ass Jets, who had dusted off Oakland thirty-five to ten for the American Conference title. Dreamer Tatum broke two Oakland jaws in the game and personally caused six limp-offs.

  Ten days before the Super Bowl we left New York and went to Rancho La Costa, which is near La Jolla and San Diego. Shoat Cooper worked it out for us to go to Rancho La Costa and do our hard preparations. It was warm there, and, besides, Shoat knows a cocktail waitress there who is sort of a Stove but she likes coaches.

  We got here to the Beverly Stars Hotel last Monday, pretty much ready to play a ball game. We know what to do. It's only a matter of polish, timing and execution. And, anyhow, the last few days before a Super Bowl are given over to talking and interviews and mental health.

  What the dog-ass Jets did was stay back in New York practically the whole time. This meant they got their asses caught in several blizzards and ice storms and had to practice in Madison Square Garden in the mornings.

  Rudi Tambunga, the coach of the dog-ass Jets, was quoted in the papers as saying that if he had it to do over again he would take his team to Fiji.

  They got out here Tuesday on their charter jet after what I read was a fairly hectic flight. First, they had to sit on the ground for seven hours at La Guardia because of the blizzard. And then when they arrived, the smog was so heavy that a small private plane nicked them in the wing tip on their approach.

  Nothing real bad happened on the landing, however, except for some minor burns to the pilot. The collision, they say, caused him to spill coffee on one of his hands and drop a lighted cigarette in his lap.

  The papers have been full of a lot of junk about the trip out here taking something out of the dog-ass Jets, but nobody can fool me. I know they're ready.

  The dog-ass Jets are professionals and I have plenty of respect for them, both as athletes and as people.

  Physically and technically, they have been completely rebuilt since the Mastrioni brothers, Angie and Tony, took over the team and hired Rudi Tambunga for a coach.

  I know that everybody said they wouldn't make a comeback after Joe Namath retired a few years ago, but they've had some good drafts and made some stud trades.

  One of the slickest moves the Mastrioni brothers made four years ago was getting the dog-ass Jets to lose their last five games so they could finish last in the whole NFL and be allowed to draft Dreamer Tatum.

  In case nobody knows it, the last-place team gets the first draft pick. I heard a story that the dog-ass Jets celebrated their final loss to the Patriots in Shea Stadium by carrying their quarterback, Boyce Cayce, off the field because he had thrown four interceptions for touchdowns.

  "This is a great bunch of guys," the papers quoted Rudi Tambunga. "I'm p
roud to be associated with a bunch that wants the first-round draft pick as much as the management does."

  After the dog-ass Jets got Dreamer Tatum, they made a stud trade with Dallas and got Jessie Luker and Gruver Allgood to pep up the offense.

  Jessie Luker is a hot dog from Alcorn A&M who's got hands on him like snowshoes. Instead of his name on his jersey across the back, he's got "See You Later" stitched on there for guys to read when they're chasing him.

  In the regular season he caught the most balls of anybody other than Shake Tiller.

  Why Dallas gave up on Gruver Allgood has baffled a lot of people. He only gained a thousand thirty-five yards last season for the Cowboys and took them to the Super Bowl, where they lost down in Mexico City to the Chiefs, fifty-six to three.

  Gruver was popular in Dallas despite his two arrests on sodomy. And that scandal he got into when he got caught stealing women's underwear off the clotheslines in backyards.

  He's sure done a fine job for the dog-ass Jets, and he's stayed fairly clean in New York.

  There's another old boy who makes the dog-ass Jets what they are and that's Boyce Cayce. I don't think he's any Hose Manning but you'd have to put Boyce in your top half of quarterbacks around the league.

  The sports writers have been calling him "the grand old man" for several years although he's never played on a great team until now. Boyce started out with the Rams about twelve years ago, I guess, and since then he's been with the Redskins, Saints, Oilers, Raiders, Browns, Bears, Dolphins, Chiefs and Broncos.

  The dog-ass Jets got him four years ago and he sort of became a different person. Rudi Tambunga has handled Boyce real good. They say Boyce has cut down a lot on his fights in bars. He hasn't stolen a city bus in a long time. You don't hear so much about his drinking in public or his betting.

  It's hard to pin down the personality of the dog-ass Jets. Some say they're about half-rowdy, off the field. They've always been cocky. As I've said, I don't know any of them too well because they mostly live in Queens and low-rent places like that and they hang out in bowling alleys, or somewhere.

  I think you'd have to say that Rudi Tambunga is the dominant personality of the whole outfit.

  He's a natty little man who always wears a gray felt hat with a wide brim, a black shirt and silver tie, and a striped suit.

  Tambunga calls all of their plays during a game; all but the ones that Boyce Cayce rejects because he hasn't learned them.

  Tambunga hangs around lower New York City and you can nearly always see him in a restaurant on Mulberry Street sitting with his back to the wall. The name of the place is Paloggia's and it is popular with Italians when it isn't being blown up.

  Rudi Tambunga is very thick with the owners of the dog-ass Jets, the Mastrioni brothers, Angie and Tony.

  Somebody once told me they all grew up together in Newark.

  I do know that Rudi Tambunga introduced both Angie and Tony to their present wives, April Mastrioni and

  Dawn Mastrioni. Not bad lookers for Vegas shills, in fact.

  I saw them once at Jimmy Weston's on Fifty-fourth Street when all of them were having dinner and entertaining Dreamer Tatum before they signed him. Weston's is kind of a supper club for horse players.

  The wives, April and Dawn, were sitting on either side of Dreamer and whispering in his ear. Angie and Tony and Rudi Tambunga were whispering to each other.

  I was there with Shake and Barbara Jane, and when Barb saw the Mastrioni wives in their stacked-up amber hair and their stacked-up lungs and their dark glasses and their white fur coats around their shoulders, she said, "It's One and One-A."

  We decided it would be polite to go say hello. This was our first introduction to Dreamer Tatum. He reached out between April and Dawn and shook hands and smiled. But nobody else looked up at us.

  I think I said something like, "Hope you come up here. It's not a bad town."

  Without even looking at us, Tony Mastrioni said, "It's the only town."

  We would have stood around exchanging pleasantries a while longer except that either April or Dawn peered at us over the top of her dark glasses through a stream of cigarette smoke and said, "You could do us all a very sincere favor if you'd fuck off."

  We laughed and went back to the bar up front and Barb said, "I kind of like her. I think I'll put her up for the Junior League."

  It seems everybody is waking up now. Me and Shake have a meeting to go to, and then that luncheon at the Century Plaza, and then our last workout. Later I'll tell you about last night's dinner and the CBS party.

  Semi-hilarious is all they were.

  I mark the exact time at six oh two P.M. upon a Friday night in January in Beverly Hills, California. It is about forty-eight hours until the minute when the gun sounds to end the Super Bowl and the New York Giants will be champions of the world in professional football.

  I have marked the time on my old East-West Shrine Game wrist watch, which is laying on the toilet seat while I am enjoying a lemon-lime bubble bath in the bathroom of me and Shake's palatial suite in the Beverly Stars Hotel.

  Shake is enjoying a boysenberry-blackberry bubble bath in his own bathroom of his own bedroom of our palatial suite.

  We have come back from our last stud workout and from that low-rent lunch at the Century Plaza where nothing happened except that Dreamer Tatum had to get up and make a short talk about me and I had to get up and make a short talk about him. Some phony fuckin' emcee thought that stunt up.

  Dreamer said, "I respect Billy Puckett as the best running back in the National Conference (he wouldn't say the whole league), and I just hope to slow him down some on Sunday."

  I got up and said, "Obert Tatum has proved he's the best cornerback in the game. I say this with all due respect to my good buddies sitting down there who play for us — our own stud hosses at corner, which are Story Time Mitchell and Jimmy Keith Joy."

  I also said, "I want to say, too, that as the captain of the Giants it is a real thrill for us to be here in the Super Bowl."

  And I said, "So far as the game itself is concerned, I don't know what's liable to happen. Probably a big break one way or another will decide it. But I do know this. Our side is ready."

  I was real flattered that when I said that, all of the New York Giants stood up and clapped.

  It made me feel good and warm inside to see our men do that, although it also embarrassed me when I looked down in the midst of it and saw the dog-ass Jets giggling and whispering to each other.

  Later on at workout at UCLA, I thought I had some real spring in my legs, and I thought Shake looked slick catching balls from Hose Manning.

  I really do believe we're ready.

  I have forgotten to say where Barbara Jane and Cissy are.

  They are in the living room of our palatial suite, as it happens, entertaining a whole mess of folks, including Big Ed and Big Barb, and Burt Danby, and some television people, and Boke Kellum.

  And there is an ugly rumor circulating that Elroy Blunt his own self is due in tonight.

  Our plan is to stay around the hotel tonight and not exert ourselves too much, just like we will tomorrow and tomorrow night.

  I guess a lot of people will be dropping by our palatial suite during the evening. Me and Shake have told Barbara Jane to order plenty of everything to eat and drink for everybody.

  All I know is, for the next hour, old Billy Clyde is gonna lay here in his lemon-lime bubble bath and write on his book and relax.

  Maybe Cissy Walford will drop a young Scotch on me from time to time.

  Now about last night.

  We started out at the CBS cocktail party, which was semi-massive.

  That was perhaps the high point because that's where T.J. Lambert did his number.

  The party was held in the Señor Sombrero Cafe on the second floor of the hotel. It was a big L-shaped restaurant room, all glassed-in with a view of all of the smog from Sunset Boulevard down to little Santa Monica. It had a terrace outside the sliding g
lass walls, which hung out over one of the hotel swimming pools.

  It used to be that players didn't go to parties like this because there was drinking and the coaches and the old commissioner, Pete Rozelle, frowned on it. Commissioner Cameron, however, took a more modern view when he came into office on the forty-eighth ballot. He said players were going to drink anyhow and he said they might as well drink in public because that way maybe they would drink less.

  That holds true for some, I guess. But it doesn't hold true for somebody like T.J. Lambert.

  The party which CBS gave was mainly for the National Conference people, which are their friends, and therefore there weren't any dog-ass Jets around, or any of their dog-ass fans.

  What caused the trouble with T.J. Lambert, I think, was the fact that the CBS bars pretty quickly ran out of any decent Scotch and T.J. started drinking gin mixed with rum and brandy and tequila.

  I remember Puddin Patterson telling him, "Say, cat, if you drink that kind of mess, you liable to catch a silver bullet before this night's over."

  T.J. has a big old pink freckled face and small squinty eyes, and he said,

  "Shit, I've drink everything from dishwater to polio vaccine in my day, Daddy. I don't never kill nobody. And I don't never puke."

  T.J. Lambert is not the sort that anybody tells what to do, ever.

  He had once been shot in the belly, point blank, by an irate husband. And all he did was drive himself to the hospital and recover. That was in the off-season once, back in Tennessee.

  I personally saw T.J. beat up four cops one night in Dallas, the night before a game with the Cowboys. We had rented a car and driven out on the highway to a place called Dorine's Paradise, a country music place. We wanted to unwind a little, and take our minds off the game.

  Coming back to the hotel, however, T.J. was driving and he started going across people's front yards and scraping the car off the sides of office buildings on the sidewalks.

  Two squad cars finally hemmed us in on a neighborhood street. Fortunately the cops recognized us and put away their guns and offered to escort us back to our hotel and not say anything about it.