football in the South, and especially in Texas, comes charged with the oversized power of a two-hundred-pound linebacker. In Mansfield, Friday night high school football was a cult, a quasi-religious experience at the very core of town life, something for Mansfield to hold on to as its children and its traditional values slipped away into the ’60s. Friday night grit, its courage, its sacrifice, mirrored in concentrated form the plight of white working-class men and women in their struggle against the encroaching forces of—everything. It was not entertainment but social self-affirmation, and the town spirit distinctly reflected each Friday’s win or loss. All this—on the padded shoulders of teenagers.
The players were up to the task. They too lived for Friday nights, and imagined themselves gladiators, Christians going up against a variety of lions, ready to bleed for the lustful shouts of a juiced-up crowd. This was their most important rite of passage, males and females alike, for the players on the team and for the golden-haired girls in short skirts and tiger-striped, patent-leather boots—the Mansfield Tiger Rebelettes—anointed to cheer them on. For these young men and women, Friday nights were a high beyond booze, beyond drugs, beyond even sex, to be equaled only by the rumored descent of the Holy Ghost into the bodies of the chosen. The season might end with a sacred pilgrimage: a trip to the high school playoffs, the most intoxicating sports event in the world, possibly to go all the way, to push on to Jerusalem itself, to “State”!
Though a decade had passed since Brown vs. Board of Education, not a single black face could be found in the hallways, classrooms, or locker rooms of alma mater. But now Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had stipulated that federal funding would not be allocated to school systems practicing discrimination, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 had offered vastly increased federal funding to public schools operating under the integration guidelines.
There was much agony that summer at the Mansfield Independent School District. But as the Vietnamese say, “If one has money, one can even buy fairies.” And so, after eleven years of white resistance and black frustration, in the fall of 1965 thirty black teenagers were registered at Mansfield High, with no repetition of the events that had marked Arnold’s initiation into school.
But it wasn’t fairies some people in town were interested in: nine of the best black athletes were signed up to join Mansfield Tiger football, and several others were about to join the school band.
A cynic like Stella Rawson would claim that there was absolutely no social motive in the desegregation effort, that the “Big Change” in Mansfield had everything to do with percentages, how many whites, how many blacks, how much federal money, how many yards gained, how many touchdowns. There was no integration—just desegregation. Perhaps she was right. But the school district’s money grab and football strategy changed Arnold’s understanding of the world.
Ten
Six foot one, bright, handsome as a god, he was still only fifteen and a despised sophomore to boot. Others would have their turns before him. Not, however, in the hospital—he was at the head of the line. Perhaps it was an accident; perhaps Brian Hedder had really wanted to hurt the young punk, teach the handsome sailor something about the reality principle, Texas style. In an early-October after-school practice, the two-hundred-pound seventeen-year-old decided to show his young teammate what he would be up against if he held on to the ball a second too long before passing. With Beelzebubian momentum and Satanic accuracy, he charged through the sophomore scrimmage line and hurled his huge shoulder at Arnold’s leading left knee. With his foot cleated into the ground, Arnold’s joint buckled inward with a twist and an agonizing pop, and he crumpled to the ground as the junior team pounced on the loosed ball. Coach Crews ran onto the field as Arnold lay there writhing.
“All right, kiddo,” the coach said, “you OK?”
“Do I look like I’m OK?” the victim responded.
“Try to get up. Brian, gimme a hand with him.” Both teams gathered around the rescue scene.
“Can you bear weight?”
Arnold stepped away from the coach’s shoulder onto his left leg. His assailant, Brian, caught him before he went down.
“All right. Let’s get him into the shop.”
The “shop” was the training room, a dingy, windowless, sweat-smelling cubicle under the bleachers in Old Rock Gym, a room crammed with two padded tables, a sink, an ice machine, and metal lockers full of gauze, peroxide and tape. Three padded men on five legs squeezed through the door, following Coach Crews. One was in severe pain.
“Get him up there on the table. Can you bend your knee?”
“Not any more than this.”
“Lemme poke around. Scream when it hurts.”
“Aaaaaarggh!”
“Good scream. Hedder, Reynolds, get back on the field, tell em everything’s OK.”
“Everything’s not OK!”
“Don’t be a crybaby, Hitler. You guys get going!”
Brian and Lonnie clicked their way out of the shop. Tommy Crews pulled on Arnold’s knee.
“Pretty stable there.” He began to sing: “The shin bone’s still connected to the thigh bone. . . .” He palpated the inner and outer sides of the joint.
“Yaiiiii!”
“OK, OK. That’s called army anesthesia.”
“What?”
“You hurt the patient, and when they scream, you say, ‘OK, OK.’”
“And you keep on hurting them.”
“Sure. No pain, no gain.”
“Yeeeeow!”
“OK, OK,” offered the coach as he continued his exam, “but I wanna tell you about Steve Godkin in the ’56 Olympics. Melbourne. You were just a little twerp then. Steve was a swimmer—two-hundred-meter freestyle. He was just about to go down to Australia when his right lung collapsed. Spontaneous. Spitting up blood. So he goes to the doctor, and they throw him in the hospital, shove him full of tubes, cut him open . . .”
“Yowww!”
“OK, OK . . . repair his lung, and sew him back up. ‘I gotta swim next week,’ he says. ‘That’s what you think,’ the docs say. ‘For one thing, you’ll stress the wound, for another, it’ll be too painful.’ ‘I’m going anyway,’ Steve says. He’d wanted to be in the Olympics since he was nine. So the doc shakes his head, makes him sign a release, and hands him an Rx for big-time pain pills. But when Steve gets down to Melbourne, he finds out pain pills aren’t allowed in competition, so he decides to swim without them. So he’s standing at poolside, already white-faced from pain, and the gun goes off and he dives in, makes the first lap, does a spin-turn and pushes off, and he’s gotta come up for air in the middle of a blood-curdling scream. He plows into the water again, this time makes a split turn, pushes off—and his stitches break, his chest splits open right here, and he starts bleeding like a pig. Over the last two laps he loses two pints of blood. Good thing there weren’t sharks in the pool.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Cause that’s the kind of kid we need on the team. That’s the kind of strong character you want in your corner, you know? He was a fighter, Steve Godkin. Didn’t win, but he was a fighter.”
“Just don’t press over here.”
“All right. I got it diagnosed. You’re in deep shit. I think you got a mangled meniscus in there. But we’ll have to get Doc Printz to confirm.”
“What does that mean, a mangled meniscus?”
“It’s like cartilage pads inside your knee. Keeps the bones from grinding. I think you nipped a nice fat hunk off of this one here. Let’s get some ice on it.”
Tommy