by John McPhee
So I said to Dick MacPherson, “You must have known Tad Wieman.”
Responding in a split second, he said, “Unbalanced line. Unbalanced mind.”
In the mid-twentieth century, Princeton football hung on to a fossil offense called single wing while most college teams were mating the quarterback to the center of the line in the formation called “T.” Tad Wieman’s single wing was pure power football. The center was not in the center. One side was overloaded, and, with certain exceptions, you battered that side.
I acquired some of this knowledge at an early age by osmosis. Not only were Wieman and his family next door but my father, an M.D., was the football team’s doctor. Margaret Wieman, the coach’s wife, was a close friend of my mother. In the fall in Palmer Stadium, the two of them attended every home game in a fifty-yard-line box over a vomitorium. I was six or seven when they took me with them for the first time. I sat between my mother and Mrs. Wieman. On each play, offense and defense, Mrs. Wieman screamed. It began low. As a play developed, it crescendoed. Before runner and tackler came together, it had become a major shriek, which abruptly stopped as the play ended. Bronco Van Lengen took the snap from center, followed his blockers on a sweep, and before he was halfway around, Mrs. Wieman’s voice was curdling blood. And that was my basic introduction to football.
Aged eight, I was promoted to a position on the field. Actually, I was with the college players on various fields all week long. I was in grade school in what is now a university building, and every fall day after soccer I went down the street to university football practice and hung around my father, the trainers, the student managers, the coaches, the team. A football jersey—black with orange tiger stripes on the sleeves, the number 33 front and back—was made for me by the same company that made the big guys’ uniforms. On Saturdays, I went down a slanting tunnel with the team and onto the playing field in Palmer Stadium. After they scored—and in those days they really scored—I went behind the goalpost and caught the extra point.
There were indelible moments. Bronco Van Lengen goes off tackle at the closed end of the horseshoe and a great cheer rises, but Bronco is lying on the grass and not getting up. It looks so serious that not only the head trainer but my father as well hurry to the scene and kneel beside Bronco’s unstirring body. Bronco opens one eye. He sees the teams collected on the one-yard line and waiting to resume play. He says, “Didn’t I score?” Actually, not that time, Bronco. Bronco leaps up off the grass, adjusts his helmet, and joins the huddle.
Wieman won four straight against Yale in those years. Before one Yale game, he collected his team and unfurled before them a banner large enough to cover ten guys at once, or so it seemed to me. The banner was black with orange block letters a foot and a half high that said “PRINCETON.” Speaking quietly, Wieman told his cloistered team that the banner represented what they were about to do, and nothing they had ever done was more important. Before then, I had never witnessed such a solemn scene. Wieman, of course, was not alone in this genre of forensic coaching. And a decade later, Herman Hickman, of Yale, was said to up the ante, telling his players that representing Yale on the football field would forever be the pinnacle of their lives.
* * *
BEFORE MY FATHER played football at Oberlin, class of 1917, he was winning varsity letters at Rayen High School, in Youngstown. Contemplating one of those letters, he cut the leg off the “R.” He had never been east of western Pennsylvania but had nonetheless developed a mystical sense of Princeton, whose athletes were national gods during his high-school years. Later, as a doctor, he worked first at Iowa State but soon found his career post at Princeton. The younger of my father’s two brothers had the same names I have, first and last. He was my Uncle Jack. He was the executive secretary of the Youngstown Y and later sold industrial lubricants to the steel industry, but on weekends he was a football official. It was Uncle Jack who threw the first flag in big-time football. Ordinarily a field judge or head linesman, he was in this instance refereeing a game at Ohio State. Officials used to carry wee horns strapped to their wrists. On observing an infraction—anywhere on the scale from offside to unnecessary roughness—they blew the horns, and that was their penalty signal for more than fifty years. Uncle Jack had been there, blown that, and in Ohio Stadium he had experienced louder, more continuous dins than he ever would in any steel plant. Much of the time, no one on the field could hear the wee horns. At the suggestion of his friend Dwight Beede, the coach of Youngstown College, Uncle Jack took a red-and-white bandanna to Columbus and instead of blowing the horn whipped the bandanna out of his pocket and dropped it on the ground. The idea had arisen here and there across the years, but now its time had come. John Griffith, the conference commissioner, instructed all Big Ten officials to show up at all Big Ten games with flags in their pockets the following week.
Before that, when I was a child, Uncle Jack had been an Eastern College Athletic Conference official, and his work included games in what is now the Ivy League. In the locker room before my first of those games—when I was with the team and about to go onto the field—my father leaned down and said to me, in a low steely voice, “Remember: do not talk to or even recognize your Uncle Jack.” I had long since been taught that Uncle Jack—head linesman, in black-and-white stripes—was an official officially impartial.
Down the tunnel we went and out onto the stadium field. I saw the officials clustered near the fifty-yard line. I have never suffered from oppositional defiant disorder. Pure excitement stripped me of restraint, and in my orange-and-black tiger-striped jersey I shouted, “Uncle Jack! Uncle Jack! Uncle Jack!”
A year or two later, on a November Saturday of cold, wind-driven rain—when I was about ten—I was miserable on the stadium sidelines. The rain stung my eyes, and I was shivering. Looking up at the press box, where I knew there were space heaters, I saw those people sitting dry under a roof, and decided then and there to become a writer.
* * *
IN FOLLOWING YEARS, I did not play football, but in one way or another it continued to be close around me. One of my college roommates won the Heisman Trophy. Another played safety, catching punts and getting crushed in the absence of the fair-catch rule. A third—an English major like me—was the quarterback. Their coach was Charlie Caldwell, and the team was undefeated two straight years. One day on the campus, I happened to encounter the coach, and he told me he was writing a book—on football, what else, although it could have been baseball (he had pitched three games for the New York Yankees and had coached Princeton baseball for two seasons). He said he was having difficulty finding a title for the football book and asked me to help him, adding, “If you come up with something good, I’ll give you a nice piece of change.” I went away thinking, mostly about the piece of change. A week later, I suggested that he call his book Phi Beta Football. He called it Modern Single Wing Football.
One of my cousins (who was also a college classmate) was an All-American end in two of his three eligible years. Freshmen had their own teams then. Some of us played freshman basketball. Our coach was Eddie Donovan, a former Holy Cross athlete, who also coached Princeton baseball and J.V. football. Even in his fifties and sixties, Eddie Donovan seemed to be the best all-around athlete who had ever set foot on the Princeton campus, whether he was hitting his precision fungoes, outshooting Bill Bradley at h-o-r-s-e, or besting various champions in squash, tennis, and golf. He took his J.V. football team to Maryland when the Maryland varsity was among the highest-ranked nationally. Right from the kickoff, Donovan’s J.V.’s outscored the Maryland J.V.’s and pushed them all over College Park. In the second half, things changed. Maryland scored, scored again, scored again. Sending in a substitute, Donovan said to the player coming off the field, “What is going on out there?” The player said, “Coach, those are the same uniforms but different guys.”
The varsity quarterback I mentioned was George Stevens, who went on to be headmaster of New Canaan Country School. The punt-catching safety was John McGi
llicuddy, who became the C.E.O. of Manufacturers Hanover Trust and eventually merged it with Chemical Bank. His high-school field in Harrison, New York, is named for him. The Heisman winner was Dick Kazmaier, who went to Harvard Business School instead of the N.F.L. All three are no longer alive. There were ten of us around a central living room, where a sign on a wall asked what it might have been like to be a college roommate of Red Grange. As I said in an introduction at an event some fifty years later, we knew what it was like to live with Dick. He had better things to do than play gin rummy. He drew a tight circle around his teammates, roommates, and other friends. Across the years, he often said that what mattered to him most at Princeton was, in his words, “what I was part of: I was like every other student.” He alluded to the Heisman Trophy and all that went with it as “an unusual external part of the picture.”
He was enduringly superstitious. When he went down the tunnel into Palmer Stadium for football games, he was always the last player. It had been so augured. Somewhere. He told George the quarterback never to let him touch the ball on Princeton’s first play. In the old single wing, the tailback and the fullback always lined up where either one could take the snap. Dick was the tailback, Russ McNeil the fullback. After other teams somehow became aware of Kazmaier’s superstition, Russ McNeil, on the first play, went down like General Custer. The number that Kazmaier wore—42—became his lucky number. His Massachusetts license plate was KA42. His e-mail address was [email protected] (’52 being his class year). When he was in a restaurant, if the check came to x dollars and forty-two cents he was made happier than he could ever be by the sum contents of ten thousand fortune cookies. Seat number 42 in any kind of theatre or arena was a good-luck seat. His company, Kazmaier Associates, on Elm Street, in Concord, Massachusetts, seemed to have a tentacle in every aspect of most known sports, from the international licensing of basketball broadcasts to the manufacture and sale of baseball uniforms and football helmets. Dick’s parking space at Kazmaier Associates was No. 42. There were thirty-six spaces in the parking lot.
* * *
THOSE OF US who are still around are in our eighties now. For a decade or so, I have been back on Princeton sidelines in the sorcerous capacity of Faculty Fellow of Men’s Lacrosse. This has not passed unnoticed by my daughters, least of all the youngest, Martha, who also teaches writing in a college (Hofstra) but does not haunt the stadium there. Recently, after listening to one of my game summaries over the telephone, Martha said, “Dad, when you were eight years old, you were a mascot on the sidelines at Princeton, and you’re a mascot on the Princeton sidelines now.”
Bill Belichick has come to Princeton with the Johns Hopkins men’s lacrosse team. Belichick loves lacrosse. He once warmed up a Hopkins goalie. The fact that recent N.C.A.A. final fours in college lacrosse have been held in the N.F.L. stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, owes itself to the fact that he coaches there. He grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, where lacrosse goals are in people’s yards and lacrosse has more status than football. He played lacrosse for Annapolis High School, and in a PG year at Andover. He played at Wesleyan. His children are lacrosse players. I have not had the moxie even to think of approaching him. What on earth could I possibly say to the coach of the New England Patriots?
Early in the season, Princeton football practices often occurred in high heat. Not to mention humidity. Charging, blocking, punting, grunting, everybody dehydrated by the quart. My otherwise benevolent father forbad them to drink ordinary water. They were losing electrolytes, and they needed to hydrate and electrolyze. Buckets beside the practice fields held the only fluid my father would allow the players to drink. They complained. They further complained. But they were so thirsty that they dipped ladles into the buckets and drank. The fluid tasted awful, as I can testify, because—age eight, age nine—I drank it, too. It was an aqueous solution of sodium chloride, sodium phosphate, and potassium chloride. Why am I telling this story? Because, twenty years later, researchers at the University of Florida College of Medicine, responding to a request from Coach Ray Graves, developed a drink full of electrolytes to hydrolyze the Florida Gators. The difference between Gatorade and the solution in my father’s buckets was sugar and fruit flavoring—healthless components that were evidently of no interest to my father or I would be writing this from one of my seasonal villas.
The Orange Trapper
Fishing from a canoe in the Delaware River, I like to ship the paddle and let the boat go where it will. I watch the stony bottom, which flies by under fast-moving water. This is not Philadelphia. This is two hundred river miles above Philadelphia, where the stream-rounded rocks are so clear they look printed. Shoving the rocks, anadromous lampreys have built fortress nests, which are spread around the river like craters of the moon. Mesmerized, I watch the rocks go by. Fly-casting for bass, I see golf balls.
From shallows in the Merrimack in Manchester, New Hampshire, I once picked up a ball that bore the logo of a country club two and a half miles upstream. If the river brought it there, the ball had come through deep water and then over the Amoskeag Dam. In the Connecticut River above Northampton, Massachusetts, I’ve seen golf balls by the constellation—too deep to reach and too far from any upstream golf course for their presence to make sense unless people hit them off their lawns. Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain. Mine include watching for golf balls, which I do with acute attention, the fact notwithstanding that I quit golf cold when I was twenty-four. These days, my principal form of exercise is on a bicycle, which I ride a good bit upwards of two thousand miles a year. I go past golf courses. How could I not? I live in New Jersey, which has a golf-course density of five per hundred square miles, or twice the G.C.D. of Florida, which has more golf courses than any other state. Moreover, the vast undeveloped forests of the southern part of New Jersey tend to shove the densities toward and beyond Princeton, in whose environs I ride my bike. The woods that lie between public roads and private fairways remind me of the dry terrain between a river levee and the river itself. In Louisiana along the Mississippi this isolated and often wooded space is known as the river batture. If you’re in Louisiana, you pronounce it “batcher.” From my bicycle in New Jersey, if I am passing a golf-links batture, my head is turned that way and my gaze runs through the woods until a white dot stops it, which is not an infrequent occurrence. I get off my bike and collect the ball.
The Delaware is less accommodating. When you are flying along on fast current, you don’t just get off your canoe and prop it up on a kickstand in order to pick up a golf ball. Over time, seeing so many golf balls in the river was such a threatening frustration that I had to do something about it. Research led to the telephone number of a company then in Michigan. A real person answered and was even more than real. She understood me. She knew what I was asking and did not call 911. Instead, she had questions of her own: What was the speed of the current? What was the depth of the river? Was the bottom freestone? Sand? Clay? Silt? After completing the interview, she said, “You want the Orange Trapper.”
“The Orange Trapper?”
“The Orange Trapper.”
It came in various lengths. I said I thought the nine-footer would do. The nine might be stiffer in the current than the twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, or twenty-four. Besides, nine (actually 9.6) just felt right. It was the length of my fly rods.
What came in the mail was only twenty-one inches long, with an orange head, a black grip, and a telescoping shaft that consisted of ten concentric stainless tubes with a maximum diameter of five-eighths of an inch. You could conduct an orchestra with it. It was beautiful. The orange head was a band of industrial-strength plastic, as obovate as a pear and slightly wider than a golf ball. A depression in its inside top was there to secure one side of a ball, but the genius of the device was in a working part, a bevelled “flipper” that came up through the throat and would waggle into place on the other side of the ball. The Orange Trapper worked two ways. It had no upside or downside.
You could surround a golf ball with either side, then lift it up as if you were playing lacrosse with no strings. You could turn the head over—a hundred and eighty degrees—and the ball would generally stay put. But flip the thing over once more and the ball would always roll free. Made by JTD Enterprises, it could have been designed by Apple.
Even so, finesse was required to trap a ball in shallow current. After seeing one, and swinging around, and going hard upstream, and shipping the paddle, you had about five seconds to place the head of the Trapper over the ball. I missed as often as not. It wasn’t the Trapper’s fault. My average would have been higher chasing hummingbirds with a butterfly net. The river is an almost endless sequence of shallows, riffles, rapids, and slow pools. For the real action, I went below some white water into a long deep pool with Don Schlaefer in his johnboat. Don is a fishing pal. He plays golf. He had no interest in the balls in the river, but he could put his boat right over them and hold it there while I fished with the Orange Trapper. I picked up a dozen golf balls in half an hour.
Marvelling at the craziness, Don said, “Why are you doing this? They’re only golf balls. Golf balls are cheap.”
I said, “Money has nothing to do with it.”
A Titleist Pro V1, currently the Prada golf ball, costs four or five dollars on the Internet and more in a pro shop. If a person of Scottish blood says money has nothing to do with that, he is really around the corner. True, I don’t find balls of such quality often in the river. But they’re a high percentage of what I pick up in the roadside woods of New Jersey. Titleist makes about a million balls a day. In the United States, for all qualities and brands, a present estimate is that golfers lose three hundred million golf balls a year.
Why? Ask George Hackl, who grew up playing golf on courses around Princeton, now lives in central New Hampshire, and is a member of Bald Peak, Yeamans Hall, Pine Valley, and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.
