by Peter Gent
By then Simon D’Hanis was All-State guard. He worked every summer, changing tires at the truckstop on the traffic circle, and turned hard.
A.D. Koster discovered amphetamine sulfate and was an All-State back. Second team.
A.D., Simon and Taylor Rusk were friends by acts of omission. At preppy, sophisticated Park City they really didn’t belong to any group and so became a group themselves.
Strangers in a strange land.
Taylor was an exceptional athlete as a freshman. Simon and A.D. became really great football players as juniors.
Taylor possessed great athletic ability and the willingness to work and develop his skills. He grew four inches, put on twenty pounds between his sophomore and junior years and at the same time increased his agility, playing basketball and drilling five hours a day. Every day. Taylor never drank or smoked and was beginning his athletic blooming at exactly the right time, in exactly the right dimensions. And at Park City he filled a very necessary slot in the Three-Deep charts.
He advanced. He looked good on paper and on the field, breaking school and state passing records the next two years. By Taylor’s sophomore year the Park City coach had nothing left to teach, so the coach, a strict disciplinarian, became frightened of Taylor, spending most of Taylor’s junior year trying to convince him he wasn’t that good. It was the first lesson Taylor learned about coaches’ mind games, and by then it was too late for the coach. Their relationship was never more than a business deal.
Park City, behind the quarterbacking of Taylor Rusk, won the state championship twice. A.D. and Simon were also stars, and with their support Taylor controlled the team.
“I was just testing you as a junior,” the Park City coach told Taylor his senior year. “To see if you could take the pressure.”
“I was testing you too,” Taylor replied. “And you graded out prime asshole.”
The Park City coach’s face tightened and he stomped away yelling, “Jocks! Prima donna sons of bitches!”
“The man loves the game,” Taylor told Simon. “Loves the game—hates the players.”
Taylor, Simon and A.D. went to the University together. They were recruited by Lem Carleton, Jr., the University regents chairman. Lem took them to the Spur Club dining room, bought them steaks, got Simon and A.D. drunk, then pointed out that the most important people in the state, including himself, had gone to the University and the real important ones were tapped into the Spur Club.
“You guys are real blue chippers,” Lem said. “You think I’d bring any football player up here? This is the Spur dining room. Right, Taylor?” Lem asked cannily, preempting Taylor’s response. Taylor had forced Lem to invite A.D. and Simon.
“Yeah.” The quarterback was not enthusiastic. “Real blue chippers.”
“You said it, bubba,” Lem junior gushed.
“I guess I did.” Taylor watched Simon twist nervously in his ill-fitting suit while A.D.’s head swiveled, eagerly devouring the expensive wainscotting, the furniture, the lovely hostess, the elegance of quiet wealth and power.
Later, Regents Chairman Lem Carleton, Jr., took Taylor Rusk, Simon D’Hanis and A.D. Koster from the Spur Club over to a whorehouse in an apartment building just off campus. Simon, Lem and A.D. grabbed women and went upstairs.
Taylor Rusk stayed in the kitchen and talked to Madam Earlette.
She told him about the moonlighting wives and mothers picking up a few bucks with their bodies.
“We’re all on scholarship here, sonny.” Earlette gestured up with her head, making her heavy jowls wobble. “I ain’t even got my first team here tonight.” Her rheumy brown eyes narrowed. “They all spend one night home with the family in Park City.”
It was a momentous occasion. At the whorehouse Lem junior signed the three to NCAA National letters of intent and A.D. Koster discovered amyl nitrite.
THE MAKING OF THE TEN-CENT DOLLAR
AS TAYLOR, SIMON and A.D. were bagged by the University recruiter in a cheap off-campus apartment house, another meeting was beginning in the sanctum of the Spur Club.
“In twenty years every poor son of a bitch up north that can afford it is gonna head south before the lights go out and the niggers take over,” Cyrus Chandler said in his amiable drawl. Cyrus was convincing his business associates that the city needed a professional football franchise. His full head of black hair was streaked with gray, his jaw was firm. He was sixty years old. “We want the next franchise in the South to come here, and I can get it. I am asking will you support the Franchise when I bring it in?”
Everybody around the table said yes.
“I’ll bring Red Kilroy over from the University as head coach and general manager,” Cyrus continued, to convince the already converted. Red Kilroy had the best record of any coach left alive. A lot of them had died young.
The people around the table represented banks, newspapers, radio and television stations and politicians. Cyrus sold them on supporting the Franchise and the big-league-city image. They were all members of Spur.
Before the war, during his senior year at the University, Cyrus had been president of Spur. During the war Daddy, Amos Chandler, had gotten Cyrus “deferred” to work as an assistant to Amos’s lawyer, Dick Conly, who was “detached” as a civilian adviser to the Department of the Navy. The Navy used lots of oil, and Amos Chandler had discovered oceans of it. Conly arranged for the Navy to buy it. Dick Conly and the war made the Chandlers richer.
After the war, brilliant young lawyer Dick Conly showed wealthy oilman Amos Chandler how to do all his deals, from pipelines and refineries to airlines and racetracks, oil fields and uranium mines, on other people’s money. OPM. Opium.
“We are going to have god-awful inflation, so put every cent of cash in gold and real estate,” Dick Conly advised. “Borrow up to the eyebrows and pay it back in thirty years with ten-cent dollars.”
After Amos died, Dick Conly had remained as Cyrus’s adviser, the guiding genius behind every profitable Chandler Industries enterprise. The Franchise was Dick Conly’s idea. It wasn’t easy. Trying to get the Franchise, Cyrus Chandler had threatened everything from lawsuits to underwriting another professional football league. Conly’s suggestion to bribe Senator Thompson swung it. For twenty-five thousand dollars the senator’s communications subcommittee came down on the football league and the FCC.
The senator was Spur and Spur was the wedge, but the twenty-five thousand dollars was the hammer. There was also the promise of five percent when pay-TV became feasible. The teams were already cutting up a hundred million yearly in network television money alone.
“Gambling thousands against millions,” Dick Conly said to Cyrus about the bribe. “A measly twenty-five thousand.”
The Franchise price was thirty-eight million dollars to buy into the cartel, while special tax legislation allowed straight-line depreciation of those millions over five years, a sizable write-off against Cyrus Chandler’s other income.
Dick Conly’s same thinking got Chandler Industries two hundred million dollars in government tax credits to build offshore oil-field equipment during the Crisis. As well as one-hundred-percent writeoffs during the Glut.
It took four years to get the Franchise, and Dick Conly had finally had to bribe a United States senator. It had all cost large amounts of time and money.
OPM. Other people’s money. The taxpayers’ money.
Not other people’s time, though. Dick Conly’s time. The Franchise had cost Dick Conly too much time. It was all he had and all he valued; there was no way to write it down against someone else.
Everybody does his own time.
Taylor Rusk had done his own time since the day he left Two Oaks to make his first “advance” in the world.
“Can’t stay here, boy,” his father had said, and he was right. “A country boy can fall way behind, and most Texans are already a generation off the pace. Change is inevitable, but growth isn’t. You need a place to grow.”
Taylor grew, almos
t as fast as Chandler Enterprises. When television finally came to Two Oaks, Taylor Rusk was on it and Chandler Communications owned it.
Taylor Rusk’s family had been in Texas since the war for independence, living on the small remains of a generous land grant for service to the Republic; the pitiful ridge-running remnants of a once hopeful family of yeoman farmers worn down by taxes and richer men.
Men like the Chandlers.
The Chandler family established itself in Texas from Virginia before the close of the Civil War. In fact, only moments before.
Racing the news of Appomattox west, their saddlebags bulging with Confederate money, five Chandler brothers started buying land the minute they crossed the Sabine River into Texas. Using the worthless scrip, they bought thousands of acres of prime East Texas timberland, which naturally led the family into the exploitation of natural resources. When gas and oil were found under the timberland in 1917 by a one-eyed driller from Pennsylvania, the Chandler Timber and Oil Company was founded. The combination of the basic criminal inception of the Chandler family enterprise, coupled with the fact that East Texas was probably populated by the meanest people in all of Texas (excepting several strips along the Rio Grande), led to a series of feuds between the Chandlers and the Others.
The Others were usually made up of the people or their kin, heirs and assigns who had been swindled with Confederate money, plus a continually changing cast of newcomers seeking profit in promoting turmoil.
It can be said that the Chandlers were victorious, since it was from Chandler Timber and Oil that the billion-dollar conglomerate Chandler Industries descended. But the mortality rate was high, and Chandlers were a limited resource. The Others drew on an endless supply of manpower, especially in the tumultuous years between the end of the Civil War and the First World War.
The day Amos Chandler Number Three blew in—at three thousand barrels a day—Amos Chandler’s only child, Cyrus Houston Chandler, was born. The last male heir in the Chandler family. When Number Three blew in, it also killed the one-eyed driller. Amos thought it was a small price to pay.
The Chandler Field helped the Allies win the War to End All Wars. Amos got a medal for helping. He took the medal and the cash.
In 1939, Chandler Drilling brought in the Big Tex Field. Amos found that oil himself using a witching stick, soaked in crude oil, dangling from the dashboard of his Model-A Ford.
In 1941, Amos “detached” Dick Conly to Washington to help the Department of the Navy build an oil pipeline from Chandler’s latest oil field to the East Coast. Amos sent twenty-five-year-old Cyrus to DC with Conly “to learn the ropes.” Chandler Pipeline did the general contracting and all of the river crossings for the Navy on a cost-plus basis. When the war ended, the government sold Chandler Industries the pipeline for one-fifth of the cost of construction. Nice rope work.
While in Washington, Cyrus Chandler met and fell in love with the glamorous and infamous Gatlin twins, Wanda Jane and Wanda June, two stunning brunettes who had come from a vague Virginia background to wartime Washington to catch themselves rich husbands.
Cyrus Chandler spent most of the war in the Mayflower Hotel with one or both of the twins, plus assorted congressmen, admirals, generals and bureaucrats. The Gatlin twins waged an intense battle for Cyrus Chandler. Wanda June won her war on VJ Day.
Wanda June Gatlin, at two A.M. on the day the Japs surrendered, landed Cyrus Chandler, Texas oilman’s son, in his Mayflower suite. Cyrus’s last gasping lurch on the overstuffed couch was the final punctuation to a great war effort.
During the war Amos Chandler moved Chandler Industries from Tyler in East Texas to a small city in Central Texas, knowing this new city was destined to grow along with the rest of urban Texas. He quickly purchased large ranches and cotton farms on the edge of town directly in the path of the as-yet-to-be-announced interstate highway system that would connect the city to everywhere.
Gas was twenty-five cents a gallon, and the US Geological Survey swore to the Congress that US reserves of five hundred billion barrels would last forever, but Amos and other independents began drilling in the Middle East with great success. The big oil companies wanted Chandler’s cheap independent $1.50-a-barrel Middle Eastern oil put on a quota “for reasons of national security” and the fact that big oil was selling domestic oil at $2.50 a barrel. The government responded with the Import Allocation Allowance. Imported oil was held at twenty percent of the total crude in the US market, even though it was one dollar a barrel cheaper than the big oil domestic. Amos called it the “Drain America First” law. The law stayed until the Crisis and oil-price explosion. The import allocation was rescinded. Quietly. The USGS revised its US reserve figures down tenfold. Oil was forty dollars a barrel. OPM.
Amos Chandler bought a bank and built a high-rise office building of black glass and steel right in the center of town. All on borrowed money. And then he died.
Dick Conly took over as CEO of Chandler Industries. Cyrus and Wanda June Chandler took a trip around the world, then returned a year later to Texas to hold court as social butterflies and second-generation money.
Wanda June gave birth to a girl they called Wendy Cy. As Wendy grew up and Junie old, Cyrus began to look for new interests. The Franchise was Dick Conly’s idea, but Cyrus quickly claimed paternity to the tax advantages and shelters that the Franchise offered and waited for the phenomenal projected revenues.
The toughest part was getting the Franchise. Cyrus Chandler approached the League and was rebuffed, so he turned over the problem to Dick Conly. The League had a monopoly on professional football and wasn’t anxious to cut the pie any thinner. Dick Conly baked a new pie.
Dick Conly was a problem-solver.
THE LEAD SINGER
“WHO THE FUCK cares what the New York Athletic Club thinks?” Taylor Rusk said to Vic Hersch, the University director of sports information.
“The New York Downtown Athletic Club,” Vic corrected the quarterback. He had hailed Taylor in the hallway and asked for a moment of his time.
Taylor was on the dodge from T. J. “Armadillo” Talbott, the University athletics director. If T.J. could corral Taylor in the athletic complex, he would drag Taylor back to his office, senile, shaking, sad, and repeatedly tell the stories behind his medals and trophies, team pictures and championship plaques. All the funny, angry and incomprehensible anecdotes led to the same conclusion: ten years earlier a conspiracy involving Regents Chairman Lem Carleton, Jr., had moved Red Kilroy into T. J. “Armadillo” Talbott’s job as the University head football coach.
Armadillo was right about the conspiracy but wrong about the conspirators. The real leader was T. J. Talbott’s chief assistant and best friend, who was angling to be head coach. The first thing Red Kilroy did was fire the whole staff, including the chief assistant.
“Lem Carleton got to feeling guilty,” Armadillo said, “so they give me this job of motherfucking, cocksucking, ass-kissing, flatdick, ball-busting, shit-hole, scumbag athletics director.”
T.J. put it eloquently; athletics director sounded dirtier than any of the adjectives.
The way Armadillo Talbott put it could last for hours. T.J.’s great football teams won national championships in the fifties and sixties; so, figuring an hour for each decade, plus open-ended raving on T.J.’s conspiracy theory, Taylor Rusk took momentary refuge in Vic Hersch’s Office of Sports Information.
“It could mean the Heisman Trophy,” Vic pleaded. “Just take a look.”
“Fuck the Heisman Trophy.” Taylor checked out the hallway, peering left and right. Armadillo Talbott had such a nasty habit of appearing out of thin air that Taylor suspected the building contained secret passages. Nothing about major college football would surprise him anymore. Not after those two guys from Houston got away with drowning the fag in the bathroom of the athletic dorm.
Taylor checked the hall again. “Is Armadillo in the building?”
“He ain’t even on the planet, Taylor.” The sports-infor
mation director sniggered at his own joke while digging behind the metal desk in his narrow, windowless office. “Just take a look at this thing, then write something nice and humble to go with it. I’m mailing it to sportswriters and broadcasters all over the country. We can’t crank this campaign up too early.”
“You should have started when I signed my letter of intent. The New York Athletic Club: a bunch of bald stockbrokers who think that racquetball and shuffleboard are sports.”
“It’s the goddam Heisman Trophy, Taylor!” Hersch continued to dig through the pile behind his desk. “I suppose you don’t want the Heisman.”
“You can’t spend the son of a bitch.” Taylor leaned out the door, checking the hall for the ever-roaming athletic director. “So who needs that fucking millstone?”
“Here it is!” Vic yelled, and straightened up.
Taylor jumped backward at the sports-information director’s cry and sudden move. The quarterback was edgy. He checked the empty hall again.
“Ain’t this a beauty?” Vic Hersch held up a green-and-white-striped envelope, legal size and half an inch thick. “It’s a die-cut mailer. We are going to put out about five thousand of these. You got to write a little note, something personal. Christ, you’re in communications. Communicate.”
Taylor took the heavy envelope and opened it. Inside was thick, one-hundred-pound, cast-coated white paper intricately printed in five colors, folded, blind-embossed and gold-stamped with the University seal.
“Just slide it out here on the desk. It’s great, Taylor. Every sportswriter in the country and the membership of the New York Downtown Athletic Club will get one,” Vic said. “I’ll get you the Heisman.”
Taylor Rusk dumped the contents of the envelope. The folded cast-coated paper lay flat, then slowly seemed to come alive; the edges peeled back, more edges and shapes appeared, unfolded, and then the whole thing bloomed into a scale model of University Stadium filled with printed people. The goalposts and team benches grew into place. The green midfield turf opened up and slowly telescoped like a time-lapse beanstalk growing into a three-dimensional, scale-model, lithograph die-cut, arm-cocked-to-pass Taylor Rusk.
