Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Pre-season practice was satisfactory. The coach understood about the special relationship between Hugo and Smathers and always played them together and Hugo’s performance was respectable, even though nobody was confusing him with Sam Huff or Dick Butkus or people like that.

The exhibition games didn’t go badly and while Hugo didn’t distinguish himself particularly, he made his fair share of tackles and batted down a few passes, listening carefully to Johnny Smather’s instructions and not being caught out of position too many times. It was a more-or-less normal September for Hugo, like so many Septembers of his life—sweaty, full of aches and bruises and abuse from coaches, not making love on Friday and Saturday, so as not to lose his edge for Sunday, feeling frightened for his life on Sunday morning and delighted to be able to walk out of the stadium on his own two feet in the dusk on Sunday afternoon. For want of a better word, what Hugo felt was happiness.

Then, just a minute before the end of the first regular league game of the season, something peculiar happened. Hugo’s team was ahead twenty-one to eighteen, and the other team had the ball on his team’s eight-yard line. It was third down and four to go and the crowd was yelling so much, the opposing quarterback, Brabbledoff, kept holding up his arms to get them to quiet down enough so that he could be heard in the huddle. The crowd hushed a bit; but, even so, Hugo was afraid he wouldn’t be able to hear Smathers when the play started. He shook his head to clear the sweat from the inside of his helmet and, for a moment, his left ear was parallel to the opposing huddle. Then the peculiar thing happened. He heard what Brabbledoff was saying, just as if he were right there next to him in the huddle. And the huddle was a good fifteen yards away from Hugo, at least, and the crowd was roaring. “I’m going to bootleg it to the weak side,” Brabbledoff was saying. “And, for Christ’s sake, make it look real!”

The opposing team lined up and just before the snap, Hugo heard Smathers yell, “Around end to the strong side, around end to the strong side, Hugo!”

The two lines leaped into action; the guards pulled out to lead the run to the strong side. Hugo could have sworn he saw Brabbledoff hand off to Frenzdich, the halfback, who churned after the screen of interference, while Brabbledoff sauntered back, as though out of the play. Everybody on Hugo’s team scrambled to stop the strong-side thrust. Everybody but Hugo. It was as though a button had been pushed somewhere in his back, making his moves mechanical. Struggling against the tide of traffic, he trailed Brabbledoff, who suddenly, in the clear, with no one near him, began to run like a frightened deer toward the weak-side corner, the ball now pulled out from behind the hip that had been hiding it. Hugo was there on the line of scrimmage, all alone, and he hurled himself at Brabbledoff. Brabbledoff said something unsportsmanlike as he went down with Hugo on top of him, then fumbled the ball. Hugo kneeled on Brabbledoff’s face and recovered the ball.

Hugo’s teammates pummeled him in congratulation and they ran out the clock with two line bucks and the game was over, with the score twenty-one to eighteen.

The team voted Hugo the game ball in the locker room and the coach said, “It’s about time you read a play correctly, Pleiss,” which was high praise, indeed, from that particular coach.

In the shower, Johnny Smathers came over to him. “Man,” Johnny said, “I could have killed you when I saw you drifting over to the weak side after I yelled at you. What tipped you off?”

“Nothing,” Hugo said, after a moment’s hesitation.

“It was a hell of a play,” said Smathers.

“It was just a hunch,” Hugo said modestly.

He was quieter than usual that Sunday night, especially after a win. He kept thinking about Dr. Sebastian and the sound of roses opening.

The next Sunday, Hugo went out onto the field just like every Sunday. He hadn’t heard anything all week that a man wouldn’t ordinarily hear and he was sure that it had been an acoustical freak that had carried Brabbledoff’s voice to him from the huddle. Nothing unusual happened in the first half of the game. Smathers guessed right about half of the time and while there was no danger that Hugo was going to be elected defensive player of the week by the newspapers, he served creditably for the first thirty minutes.

It was a rough game and in the third quarter, he was shaken breaking into a screen and got up a little groggy. Moving around to clear his head while the other team was in the huddle, he happened to turn his left side toward the line of scrimmage. Then it happened again. Just as though he were right there, in the middle of the opposing huddle, he heard the quarterback say, in a hoarse whisper, “Red right! Flood left! Wing square in! R down and out … on five!”

Hugo looked around to see if any of his teammates had heard, too. But they looked just the way they always looked—muddy, desperate, edgy, overweight, underpaid and uninformed. As the opposing team came out of the huddle, up to the line of scrimmage, Hugo moved automatically into the defensive formation that had been called by Krkanius, who played in the front four and ran the defense positions. “Red right! Flood left! Wing square in! R down and out … on five!” he repeated silently to himself. Since he didn’t know the other team’s signals, that didn’t help much, except that “on five” almost certainly meant that the ball was going to be snapped on the fifth count.

Smathers yelled, “Pass. On the flank!” and, again, Hugo felt as though a button had been pushed in his back. He was moving on the four count and was across the line of scrimmage, untouched, a fraction of a second after the ball was snapped, and laid the quarterback low before he could take a half step back into the pocket.

“Have you got a brother on this team, you son of a bitch?” the quarterback asked Hugo as Hugo lay on the quarterback’s chest.

After that, for most of the rest of the afternoon, by turning to his right, Hugo heard everything that was said in the opposing huddle. Aside from an occasional commonplace remark, like “Where were you on that play, fat ass, waving to your girl?” or “If that Hunsworth puts his fingers into my eye once more, I’m going to kick him in the balls,” the only operational intelligence that came across to Hugo was in the quarterback’s coded signals, so there wasn’t much advantage to be gained from Hugo’s keenness of hearing. He knew when the ball was going to be snapped and could move a step sooner than otherwise, but he didn’t know where it was going and still had to depend upon Smathers in that department.

Going into the last two minutes of the game, they were ahead, fourteen to ten. The Studs were one of the strongest teams in the league and Hugo’s team was a twenty-point underdog on the Las Vegas line and a win would be a major upset. But the Studs were on his team’s thirty-eight-yard line, first down and ten to go, and moving. Hugo’s teammates were getting up more and more slowly from the pileups, like losers, and they all avoided looking over toward the bench, where the coach was giving an imitation of General George S. Patton on a bad day along the Rhine.

The Studs went briskly into their huddle, keyed up and confident. Hugo had been blocked out of the last three plays (“wiped out like my three-year-old daughter” had been the phrase the coach had used) and he was preparing his excuses if he was pulled out of the game. The Studs were talking it up in the huddle, a confused babel of sound, when suddenly Hugo heard one voice, very clearly. It was Dusering, the leading pass catcher in the league. Hugo knew his voice well. Dusering had expressed himself to Hugo with some eloquence after Hugo had pushed him out of bounds in what Dusering considered an ungentle-manly manner after a thirty-yard gain on a pass to the side line.