bloody and weeping. The chants shift. “Kill Somerville!” we scream. Neither Johnson nor any of the other coaches says a word to stem the blood lust.
Mace Johnson himself is off the Tamerlane-like tone and is now hitting a quasi-philosophical note that I’ve heard him touch before. “These are the best years of your lives, boys!” he cries at us, in a knowing, almost statesmanlike voice. “Best years of your lives!”
And as he says it, my heart gums up with fear. Could this possibly be true? Is there a chance that from here it runs downhill? For I cannot imagine anything worse than high school—at least anything inside the chain-link park-fence bounds of American life—that is more tedious, mean, anxiety-ridden, and sad. If this is the best, then I think I will do away with myself before I have to taste what’s left simmering in the pot.
“Third quarter!” Johnson hollers. And I and all my compeers in pain scream out in antiphonal response, for this is religion, American religion: “Third quarter!” Kill Somerville (and the invisible Cong)! No mercy, not for anyone, least of all us, in the best years of our lives.
Mace Johnson was a man of mantras, talismanic phrases that sewed life together at its seams. “Atta boy!” was the leading commendation, applied to any display of guts. “First off the deck!” was another, meaning that once you’d gone down, you had to spring up first, faster than your opponent, and go block someone else; then you were two men rather than just one forked thing scrambling on the field.
Johnson’s pet verbal formula, the one that, from his perspective, I imagine, elevated him to higher grounds of urbane eloquence, went this way: “There are three things in life that I cannot abide: small dogs, women who smoke in public, and [fill in the third spot with whatever abomination has just assaulted his eyes] quarterbacks who won’t stand in and take a hit”; “linebackers who don’t stick their heads into a tackle”; “runners who cannot understand that a good back
never
loses a yard.” I’m sure Johnson was serious about the small mutts. He was the sort of man who would own a mastiff or a Doberman, and that dog would be
trained.
But did he really abhor women smoking in public? Did the new Virginia Slims—cigarettes of, by, and for the female—cause him bouts of anxiety as women hoisted to their lips derogatorily reduced versions of the royal scepter and manly wand? I can’t really say.
Mace Johnson had little capacity for the ambiguous or the equivocal, much less for being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubt, without irritable reaching after fact or reason. (Keats called this negative capability and I had, up until Frank Lears, who eventually displayed it in remarkable measure, never met anyone with a turn for it.) It was Johnson’s emphatic downrightness, his willingness to promulgate and live by a code that was nearly chivalric, that drew us to him. Here was a blue-collar bastion of Camelot, created by the coach; here was a place where you could be measured by a discerning eye and given a seat—or denied one—at the Round Table. You’re not a man, it’s been said, until the other men acknowledge you as one. In Mace Johnson, overemphatic, loud, monovocal, we had identified someone with the right of investiture.
It was a touch absurd, this male business—we saw it even then. We’d pass each other in the halls and call out “Atta boy!” or “Get ’em up!” and fall out laughing. But the whole enterprise was elevating, too; it pushed you to places you would never have reached on your own.
Football is a Homeric world, and like the assault on Troy, it attracts hitters, orators, and orator-hitters. In every coach there is the urge of Nestor or Odysseus to rally the troops with high-sounding hymns to fathers and manliness. Girls watch and chant madly from the sidelines, spinning and prancing, urging on the combat.
It’s important that Achilles, the apogee of
Mace Johnson himself is off the Tamerlane-like tone and is now hitting a quasi-philosophical note that I’ve heard him touch before. “These are the best years of your lives, boys!” he cries at us, in a knowing, almost statesmanlike voice. “Best years of your lives!”
And as he says it, my heart gums up with fear. Could this possibly be true? Is there a chance that from here it runs downhill? For I cannot imagine anything worse than high school—at least anything inside the chain-link park-fence bounds of American life—that is more tedious, mean, anxiety-ridden, and sad. If this is the best, then I think I will do away with myself before I have to taste what’s left simmering in the pot.
“Third quarter!” Johnson hollers. And I and all my compeers in pain scream out in antiphonal response, for this is religion, American religion: “Third quarter!” Kill Somerville (and the invisible Cong)! No mercy, not for anyone, least of all us, in the best years of our lives.
Mace Johnson was a man of mantras, talismanic phrases that sewed life together at its seams. “Atta boy!” was the leading commendation, applied to any display of guts. “First off the deck!” was another, meaning that once you’d gone down, you had to spring up first, faster than your opponent, and go block someone else; then you were two men rather than just one forked thing scrambling on the field.
Johnson’s pet verbal formula, the one that, from his perspective, I imagine, elevated him to higher grounds of urbane eloquence, went this way: “There are three things in life that I cannot abide: small dogs, women who smoke in public, and [fill in the third spot with whatever abomination has just assaulted his eyes] quarterbacks who won’t stand in and take a hit”; “linebackers who don’t stick their heads into a tackle”; “runners who cannot understand that a good back
never
loses a yard.” I’m sure Johnson was serious about the small mutts. He was the sort of man who would own a mastiff or a Doberman, and that dog would be
trained.
But did he really abhor women smoking in public? Did the new Virginia Slims—cigarettes of, by, and for the female—cause him bouts of anxiety as women hoisted to their lips derogatorily reduced versions of the royal scepter and manly wand? I can’t really say.
Mace Johnson had little capacity for the ambiguous or the equivocal, much less for being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubt, without irritable reaching after fact or reason. (Keats called this negative capability and I had, up until Frank Lears, who eventually displayed it in remarkable measure, never met anyone with a turn for it.) It was Johnson’s emphatic downrightness, his willingness to promulgate and live by a code that was nearly chivalric, that drew us to him. Here was a blue-collar bastion of Camelot, created by the coach; here was a place where you could be measured by a discerning eye and given a seat—or denied one—at the Round Table. You’re not a man, it’s been said, until the other men acknowledge you as one. In Mace Johnson, overemphatic, loud, monovocal, we had identified someone with the right of investiture.
It was a touch absurd, this male business—we saw it even then. We’d pass each other in the halls and call out “Atta boy!” or “Get ’em up!” and fall out laughing. But the whole enterprise was elevating, too; it pushed you to places you would never have reached on your own.
Football is a Homeric world, and like the assault on Troy, it attracts hitters, orators, and orator-hitters. In every coach there is the urge of Nestor or Odysseus to rally the troops with high-sounding hymns to fathers and manliness. Girls watch and chant madly from the sidelines, spinning and prancing, urging on the combat.
It’s important that Achilles, the apogee of
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