Blow (6 page)

Luckily for George, the path toward becoming a big man at Weymouth High was paved most readily not by getting good grades but by playing football. During the team's nine-week schedule, players served as the focus of attention, not only in the classrooms and corridors of the school, but also among the townspeople at large. Shortly after twelve noon on an autumn Saturday, by the time the players had suited up in their maroon-and-gold uniforms and were leaving the locker room for the half-mile walk to Legion Field, the streets of Weymouth would be lined several deep with people ready to cheer and clap and wave their banners as the heroes marched by, their cleats clattering on the pavement like a company of horse guards. Seats were reserved and almost always sold out. You couldn't get a parking space within a mile of the field. The pulse of the town mounted feverishly as the day approached for the pinnacle event, which occurred at 10:00
A.M
. on Thanksgiving Day as Weymouth went up against its arch foe, Brockton, in a contest that would draw a hysterical crowd of more than ten thousand people. “Football back then, it's hard to convey the feeling, but it was just everything in Weymouth,” says Buzzy Knight, an alumnus who later became the school's principal. “On Saturdays, for a home game, in good weather, this town simply came to a standstill.”

Weymouth's fervid interest in football stemmed partly from the fact that in the way of local pride it had nothing much else to greatly distinguish it. Despite its location on the water and a history that stretched back to the Pilgrims, Weymouth emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a drab blue-collar town, made up of a mishmash of development-style houses, low-end shopping centers, and little of the charming colonial residue found elsewhere in New England. Like nearby Brockton, it relied for employment on deadening jobs in the shoe factories or work in the shipyard in Quincy, both of them industries that deteriorated after World War II and in recent years have become extinct. Populated in large part by the Irish, many of them first-generation suburbanites who'd fled the Dorchester section of Boston (for years Weymouth was known as the Irish Riviera), the town had much less social cachet than its three WASPy neighbors, Hingham, Scituate, and Cohasset, whose high schools might have stood little chance against Weymouth in football but sent more than twice the percentage of their graduates to four-year colleges. In 1961, the year George graduated, only 108 of the 502 graduates in his class put themselves down in the yearbook as college-bound. More males from the class enlisted in the armed services than went on for further schooling.

The Weymouth teams were usually pretty spectacular. Harry Arlinson had coached his boys to seven undefeated seasons, and by the mid-1950s Weymouth had become “the terror of the Commonwealth,” as it was put in
Look
magazine, a reputation that, despite some stumbles, went undiminished under his successor, Jack Fisher. In 1956, under Fisher, Weymouth became the first school in Massachusetts history to play an entire schedule of Class-A teams and still finish undefeated. As half the town still remembers, it creamed Brockton that Thanksgiving 48–6, and at graduation the following June Weymouth sent off players who eventually starred at Brown, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, among other colleges.

Although George, in standard younger-brother fashion, tortured the daylights out of his sister practically up until she left home, he and all his chums regarded her boyfriend, Otis—team captain who later played in the Orange and Cotton Bowls for Syracuse—with uncamouflaged adoration, and before they got to high school they hung on his every piece of advice as to how to prepare themselves to make the big team. In imitation of Otis, George quit playing Little League baseball at age thirteen—despite the fact that with his bewildering left-handed sidearm pitch he'd thrown the league's first no-hitter—and gave over all his spare time to lifting weights in order to build up his upper body for the backfield. His pals quickly followed suit, and pretty soon all day on Saturdays the guys—George, John Hollander, Barry Damon—could be found trying to pump up their muscles in a homemade gym set up in the garage of Mike Grable, who played quarterback with George at junior high. Finally getting some payback now for being Marie's brother, George, with his friends in tow, was allowed to go over and observe the great Otis himself during his private backyard practice sessions, where he got himself into shape for smashing through the opposing line. He would wrap his right arm in padding, lower his body into a crouch, and charge at full tilt into a telephone pole, striking with such force that the top of the pole could be seen to shiver, as if the thing had been rammed by a wrecker's ball.

In the end, thanks to Otis's inspiration, all the effort the boys put into building up their bodies did not go unrewarded. George and most of his garage set did indeed succeed in making the varsity team when they arrived as sophomores at Weymouth High School in 1958 (in Weymouth the junior high school went through the ninth grade). The fact that George's own performance on the football field never quite reached the total triumph he'd so achingly longed for had less to do with any lack of ability or preparation on his part than with an increasing tendency to behave, particularly where adults were concerned, in a manner that was becoming more noticeably and perversely defiant.

Head coach Jack Fisher had developed something of an attitude himself, having arrived at the school in the long and heavy shadow of his predecessor. He had been given to feel from the start that serious questions existed as to whether he could measure up to the great Arlinson. “Jack Fisher was very aware that he followed God,” says Buzzy Knight, the principal. “He was never allowed to forget it; they never let him off the hook.” Arlinson had rarely raised his voice, exercising control over the players by gentle manipulation, by using the force of his brilliant record to make them stretch themselves to their fullest. Fisher, on the other hand, was excitable and temperamental, and worst of all where George was concerned, a strict disciplinarian, who shouted at his players and demanded they abide by his rules or face warming the bench. And most of all, in no small part to prove that he stood equal to his predecessor, Fisher wanted desperately to win.

A wiry man with a shock of white hair and aquiline features, Fisher had been a notable star himself, as quarterback at Fordham University behind the original “Seven Blocks of Granite,” which constituted one of the most impregnable lines in college-football history. The blocks won their name from the sportswriters during the 1930 season after executing three successive shutouts over Boston College, Holy Cross, and New York University, then football powerhouses, by scores 3–0, 6–0, and 7–0, respectively. Coach of the famous squad was Frank Cavanaugh, known as “the Iron Major” for the shrapnel wounds he carried in his head from World War I, and whose exploits—he went nearly blind from his wounds in his final coaching days and died in 1933—became the subject of a 1943 movie starring Pat O'Brien.

Comporting himself at Weymouth in the take-no-guff style of the major, Fisher succeeded in ruffling feathers his first season by kicking six seniors off the squad for believing, as he saw it, that having played under Arlinson earned them the right to dog it during drills. Whether its purpose was to enforce discipline or just expunge the team of Arlinson worship, the move didn't go down too well in Weymouth, considering that football was the town's major social event. Fathers not only came down at nights to hang around watching their sons practice under the lights but would also follow the players back to school and mingle with them in the locker room. “I got a lot of phone calls and letters over that one,” says Fisher, who had to finish out the season with a team composed mostly of sophomores. “I remember we did knock off Brockton that year, though.”

By the time George arrived at Weymouth High, Fisher had a state championship under his belt, thanks in no small part to Otis Godfrey, and felt assured that his rules were producing results. On Friday nights, for instance, he wanted the players to be in bed by 10:00
P.M
., instead of staying up late and raising hell, as they had under Arlinson. He told them he didn't want to drive around town and see them hanging out. “I'd tell them, ‘Go to a movie or a friend's house, but whatever you do, I want you to get home early and I want you to stay off the street corners.'” Practice sessions were tightly organized drills, and he demonstrated little shyness about singling out a player over some transgression and yelling at him in front of the squad. “I coached hard, but I coached fair,” he says. “I used to say to them, ‘The time for you to start worrying about whether you're playing is not when I'm yelling at you but when I stop yelling at you, because then I don't think you're worth it.'”

Needless to say, George didn't respond positively to getting yelled at or to Fisher's rules in general. One of these rules required sophomores on the varsity squad to play Saturday mornings on the junior varsity as well as show up in the afternoon for the main event. George saw little profit in doing the JV nonsense, since the games drew a tiny crowd and produced little in the way of glory. He thought himself especially abused after the second varsity game against Medford, when he was put in as a substitute halfback late in the contest and smashed across the goal line for a score, his only carry of the afternoon. The following Saturday he decided not to turn out for the JV game. Coach Fisher responded by benching him not only for that day's game but for the rest of the season and a good part of his junior year as well.

To compensate partially for his football failure, George won a place on the varsity track team as the discus thrower, the same event in which Otis Godfrey had set the school's record. Track didn't command anywhere near the attention everyone paid to football, but George did eventually beat Otis's toss by seven feet. By his senior year, George had also inched his way back into Fisher's good graces, enough to become the team's starting right halfback. But even that experience turned sour. He got to carry the ball less than half as often as the other backs, despite averaging a fairly impressive 5.7 yards a carry, the best on the team. And he ended up missing the big Thanksgiving game because of a knee injury during a scrimmage, when he got decked by his pal John Hollander—which was probably just as well, since Weymouth got killed by Brockton that year, 54–0.

Fisher is now eighty-eight years old, but his memory of that team remains sharp, unfortunately so, in his view, because it produced the worst Weymouth record since World War II. “That's a class I'd kind of like to forget,” he says. Of George in particular, he recalls a boy with a lot of natural talent and potential who, for reasons that remain a mystery to him, never fulfilled his early promise. “George, well, yes, in junior high he was a standout. He had all the physical tools, more so than most young boys. But something was going on with him, I couldn't understand. His attitude, something, where he just wasn't with everybody else.”

*   *   *

During George's high school years the headlines were beginning to reflect the worrisome kinds of events that would dominate the coming decade of the 1960s. The Russians were leap-frogging America in outer space with the launch of the
Sputnik
satellites. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to send in federal troops to protect black students during desegregation of the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. Fidel Castro was coming down from the mountains to take over Cuba. That was also when Charlie van Doren of Columbia University was convicted on perjury charges for denying that agents of the NBC-TV quiz show “Twenty-one” had supplied him the answers. Elvis had arrived, of course, but rock and roll still had to share slots on the jukebox—five plays for a quarter—with the likes of “Tom Dooley,” “Volare,” and “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” The grown-ups, meanwhile, were trying to figure out the cha-cha.

In Weymouth, the football guys all had their hair cut down at Dick's Barber Shop on Washington Street, known as “Dirty Dick's” for the
Playboy
magazines and the more raunchy stuff perusable on the premises. Most ordered up crew cuts, which needed constant laminations from the old wiffle stick so the hair stood up right. George opted for the cooler, more sophisticated Peter Gunn style, after the suave TV detective—the hair a little longer and lying flatter than a crew. The girls wore long pleated skirts, and round-collared shirts under their sweaters, and if they were lucky enough to be going with someone on the varsity, their boyfriends' maroon and gold letter jackets with his name embroidered on the right sleeve. Weymouth being basically a one-class town, social divisions among teenagers were fairly narrow and ran pretty much along the lines of what kind of car your father could afford. Kids in the vocational high school, which was located in the rear of the regular school, were looked down upon slightly, but if vocational-program guys like Barry Damon (carpentry) or Brian Dunbar (sheet-metal working), played football—Barry at center, Brian in the backfield—they could hang out with the other football guys and partake of all the attendant privileges.

Friday nights were party nights. One of the girls invariably offered up her house for a gathering. Armed with beer bought by one of the guys whose beard was thicker than most, the boys drove over into Johnny's Lane near the sandpit and drank until half of them threw up, which in most cases required four or five beers apiece. George could usually hold the most, and Barry Damon, whose snow-white hair earned him the nickname the Great White Rabbit, often barfed first, not necessarily missing his sneakers and the shoes of some of the other guys. George had a firm policy of never taking his father's car out on Friday nights.

Saturday night was date night; guys would grab a car, a girl, and head to the Weymouth Drive-in for
Psycho,
or
Tammy and the Bachelor,
or Troy Donahue in
A Summer Place.
After that it was a race to Weymouth Great Hill, a 153-foot-high glacial drumlin with room at the top for fifteen to twenty cars that provides a spectacular view over Wessagussett Bay to the lighted spires of Boston. The movie would end at about eleven, and the girls had to be home by midnight, which meant the guys inside the cars with the windows steaming up fast had less than one hour to devise a strategy that would culminate in the laying of a hand on top of a female breast. “Let me tell you, you weren't going too far in those days,” says George. His regular date, Gerry Lee, rated high up in the “nice girl” category, which compelled George to take one or two other girls out during the course of a weekend to explore a wider set of possibilities. “Every girl had her standard code. Some of them, if you tried to do anything, they'd start to cry. I liked to try to take out older girls; they were a little more, you know, liberal.” The sexual revolution, after all, was a good five years off, and while few teenagers in Weymouth at that time gave any thought to sexually transmitted diseases, there was certainly plenty of anxiety about other exigencies. In one notorious incident, a boy at school had gotten his girlfriend pregnant his senior year, and the two had to quit school and get married, and he joined the navy; their future, for all its former promise, was now regarded by their friends as a closed book.