Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (8 page)

“How, after all you've been through, Meyer,” Leo once asked me, “can you fuck around making these goddamn emptyheaded palookas?”

“It's social realism,” Simon said, defending me, and Leo laughed, thinking Simon was making a joke. But Simon's too dense for humor; I supposed he was thinking of all those muscular Soviet posters (though in that respect, the Fascists are even better social realists than the Soviets). Either way, he was wrong about it. True, I believe in social realism, after a fashion, but I don't think you can know it before you start. True dialectic means letting your own work teach you as you go along. Art as process, as Dewey says, as interaction, shared celebration. You have to expose yourself before the world will show itself to you: a truth from the Torah.

I often get criticized by my friends for the athletes I make (and Leo's right in a way: my welding techniques often use suggestion more than solid matter, so the heads are often, quite literally, empty). They argue that professional American sports reflect the sickness of American society: the exploitation of players, manipulation of followers, the brutality and competitiveness of the game, the record-keeping mania and personality cults, even the hokum reenactment and reinforcement of the rags-to-riches mythology. Bigtime football especially enrages them. They hate the raw, naked aggression, the implicit imperialism in the battle for yardage, the dehumanizing uniforms and training schedules, the lionization of the bully, and the celebration of violence as a way of discovering the self.

“It stinks!” Harry has barked, getting emotional. “A shandeh, Meyer! A game of Fascists!”

“Or feudalists,” I once offered in reply. “King Quarterback and his knights in the backfield getting all the glory, the peasant serfs up on the line taking all the punishment…”

“Right! F'kucken Cossacks!”

“No wonder the game's full of goddamn Irish Catholics,” Leo said. “Either they're employed as cops heating up working stiffs, fighting for the Fascists in Spain, stealing us blind down at City Hall, or playing football for fucking Notre Dame!” We've all been down on Irish Catholics of late, though one of our best friends is—or was—a socialist priest named Clanahan who used to live and drink over on Larrabee; we haven't seen him since the war broke out in Spain: had he been horrified by the Republican massacre of priests and nuns and returned to the fold, or has he, as rumored, joined the Basque Resistance in Bilbao? (Now collapsing under the weight of the Fascists' superior arms, sad to say, yet another piece of today's dismaying news mosaic.) Leo himself might once have been a Catholic for all we know, depending on whether his real name is Leopold, Leonardo, León, Leonid, or Leonides, all of which—and more—I've known him to use at one time or another.

“Shit, the silly ball don't even bounce straight!” Jesse put in. “It's a insult to common sense!”

“Good point!” Leo laughed. “Bunch of damn perverts!”

“F'kucken nihilists!”

Oddly, nobody ever complains about the jugglers and dancers, which belong to the same set of images: bodies in motion, for me the central thing about life. I don't miss the dead gods and vanished mysteries; motion is all the magic I need. And these figures of mine are real sentient bodies at full stretch—I don't like amoebic or inanimate shapes, I like something that knows itself and tests itself. The first print I ever owned was one of Remington's “Western Types.” Remington is popular now for the wrong reasons. I'm not interested in “the American scene,” the current “quest for a usable past,” local color, what Harry calls “all that acreage on canvas, poor art for poor people.” What excited me about Remington—and still does—is the way everything in his paintings, even the landscapes, expresses a kind of contained dynamic, some inner—perhaps tragic—force struggling, through matter, to free itself. I like things that move from the inside out, not things you look at from the outside in. I'm no voyeur, I hate the Impressionists, and was sorry when Picasso turned to Cubism, which is a hall-of-mirrors trick, not revelation—he could learn something right now from guys like Hopper and Benton. Expression is everything for me, and working as I do for the most part with figures only about a foot high, I feel that athletes, less likely to rigidify into archetypal positions than, say, workers or warriors, leave me more room to swing.

Also there's the ball. Boxers, pole-vaulters, and swimmers also work at full stretch, but I'm less drawn to them. The strange ambiguity of the ball fascinates me, so much so that it never appears in my sculptures. It often seems to be there, but it isn't. This creates a strange tension, especially with the jugglers, where the longing, the anticipation, seem more intense. Yet the jugglers always turn out too flat somehow, too static. I prefer the greater dynamism of the ballplayers, the outflung limbs, the twisted torsos, the seeming defiance of gravity and the collision of forces: they all seem actually to move, because without the logic of motion they make no sense. And football is not about violence or atavistic impulses, like Harry says, it's about balance. The line of scrimmage is a fulcrum, not a frontier, the important elements of football being speed and weight. The struggle is not for property, it's for a sudden burst of freedom. And the beauty of that. In football, as in politics, the goal, ultimately, is not ethical but aesthetic.

Of course, I admit, most footballers are probably ignorant of all this. All but the odd exception go banging unreflectively through football and then life, vaguely nostalgic at the end for something beautiful they had and lost, but unable when called upon at their testimonial dinners to put their fingers on it. This is true of all of us. One of the main tasks of socialism has to be to give all men what artists take for granted: time and incentive for reflection. Capitalism has made us overvalue action as power (the early bird gets—and consumes—the worm, and that's the beginning and end of it: a plate of worms), and contemplation has become, not merely a kind of unpatriotic idleness, but socially and psychologically hazardous as well.

Which is one risk Gloomy Gus never took. The only All-American in the history of his little college, the first Heisman Trophy winner (I heard at the hospital today from the sportswriter doing that retrospective piece on him that because of his involvement in the Memorial Day riot, there's a move underfoot now to erase his award from the books—but can history be erased? yes, yes, it always is, in fact that's the
first
thing that happens to it…), an All-Pro halfback for the NFL Chicago Bears, and it still isn't clear he ever understood what the game is all about at the most fundamental level. Or ever wished to know. Certainly, he had not been attracted to freedom, mystery, beauty—if anything, he was frightened by such things. He apparently lacked any capacity for joy, so how could he have known these other things even if he'd encountered them? He would probably have registered them as some kind of vexatious disorder, and added yet another calisthenic to his schedule.

So what drew him to football in the first place? I'm not sure. When his brother came through looking for him a couple of weeks after Maxie's party, I asked him how it had started, and what he said was: “I think it was because of the challenge. It was the thing he was worst at. That and getting on with girls. He used to be good at lots of things. Like mashing potatoes, for example. Or debate. Studies. We all thought he was going to be a teacher or a lawyer. Dick was always reserved. He was the studious one of the bunch, always doing more reading while the rest of us were out having fun. But what he did well, he took no pleasure in, while what he did badly made him very upset.”

“Did he talk about these things?”

“No, he just got tics.”

Most of what I've come to know about Gloomy Gus, I learned from his brother on that surprise weekend visit and from the Hearst reporter doing the whatever-happened-to wrap-up. Neither man was very intelligent and I had to piece a lot of it together myself, but I was helped by the sportswriter's notes and a scrapbook of Gus's football career that his brother brought along with him, together with some testimonials from girls he'd had. This brother is a grocer and souvenir seller with his father back in Gus's hometown, and I gathered they'd been cleaning up by playing on Gus's national fame—he showed me a picture of the store and it was full of Chicago Bears programs, pennants, publicity shots, and the like, as well as footballs, jerseys, autographed photos of famous ladies, and other mementos of the Bears' All-Pro halfback. He expressed a great deal of concern for his brother, but it was obvious that underneath he was angry and embarrassed by the way Gus had let him down. “So this is where he's ended up,” he said, gazing around my studio. “I never realized Dick had fallen so far…”

Apparently, the critical turning point in Gloomy Gus's life came during his freshman year at Whittier College out in southern California. At that moment, he did what sooner or later we all do: he began to simplify himself. I can understand this: my sculpting is not something that was added to an expanding life, but that which remains after all the other things have been peeled away, things that, who knows, I might have been better at. We all have too few lives to live. Later, in an unpublished interview, Gus was to say that all he ever wanted to do was play football and screw girls, but up till that autumn in 1930 he had been trying to score everywhere at once: as a scholar, a politician, an organist, pianist, and violinist, a carny barker, gas station attendant, Quaker Sunday School teacher, debater and actor, entrepreneur, journalist, songwriter and playwright. A familiar pattern: he seemed destined to become president of the local Chamber of Commerce, or maybe a judge. He'd won scholarships, elections, awards, leading roles, oratorical contests, and public praise. But he still hadn't been able to make the football team or coax a girl's underpants down.

Which was more important to him is not clear. In later years, Gus himself spoke mostly about football, but the Hearst guy insists that under the uniform he was “ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent pure hard-on.” Gus's brother had no opinion, though when I asked he winked broadly. This wink was a peculiarity of Gus's brother, however, and could have signified anything. Girls admired Gus apparently, but they didn't have much fun with him. He developed a kind of paranoia, stimulated by some advertisement maybe, about having bad breath—each morning before leaving the house, he used to brush his teeth, gargle with special mouthwashes, and make his mother smell his breath—but at least part of the problem was that on dates he talked to the girls about such things as what might have happened to the world if Persia had conquered the Greeks, and then with no transition tried to wrestle them to the floor. This never worked. Likewise with the football: it was all verbal. Maybe his early successes with debates and elections had twisted him a bit. One teammate who knew him that freshman year summed up his talents very simply: “Dick had two left feet. He couldn't coordinate.” Then why was he allowed to go on working out with the team? “He was always talking it up. That's why the Chief let him hang around. He was one of the inspirational guys.” Of course, even the talking had required practice and so, like his acting, was cued and predictable, though maybe people failed to notice this at the time. A kind of religious recitation. We tried him out on winter nights around my stove. If you said, “Keep it rolling,” he'd say, “Fuckin' good game!” If you said, “That's showing them,” he'd say, “Make 'em eat shit!” Et cet.

The Chief was not an ungenerous man; he might have let Gus play from time to time just to be fair about it. Shut him up maybe. Besides, the Whittier Poets were terrible teams, freshmen and varsity both, they were sure to lose, no matter who played. But Gus suffered from something worse than just the two left feet: uncontrollable overeagerness. Every time he went into the game, he immediately went offside. As he bounded forward, his team marched backward, five penalty yards per play. Even if he was centering the ball himself (the Chief was resourceful, he tried that one too). He just couldn't hold himself back. Girls, too, who might have surrendered to him in a moment of whimsical magnanimity, were put off by the way he lurched out of control before the foreplay had even begun.

There seemed to be no motive behind this over-eagerness. It was just a part of him, like the two left feet—it was difficult, in fact, for him to recognize that the fault might be his: he thought the rest of the world had two right feet and tended to collapse into slow-motion sequences. This characteristic, which was less than zeal but more than a conditioned reflex, may have got a certain amount of encouragement in his early life, since in other activities less formal than football and courtship it had served him well—he was like a jack-in-the-box in classrooms and student assemblies, debates, and fraternity meetings, and he won everything simply by astonishing everybody else into silence—but it was not basically something learned. I don't know much about his birth (except that the sportswriters always liked to claim there was an eclipse of the sun that day), but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he came tearing out of his mother's womb well before she was ready. He had what I can only describe as a short-circuited stimulus–response system in which everything operated on the knee-jerk principle. He spent most of the last six or seven years of his life struggling against this flaw, but as with any fundamental characteristic, the more he fought it, the more it dominated his life. With me it's passivity, the open door; with Gloomy Gus, it was the plunge offside.

What had always worked best for him in his other activities was his discipline (also innate maybe, a kind of corollary of the overeagerness, but probably not; maybe his mother stuffed it into him with her Bible readings)—his careful preparations, self-control, dogged practice—so that's what he turned to now in the fall of 1930 in his effort to overcome his failure on the football field and in the back seats of cars. I say “turned to,” “effort to overcome,” but I don't mean to suggest there was anything overtly conscious about it. I've tried to imagine what bent him that fall and started him down the path to the Memorial Day massacre at the Republic Steel plant. He seemed uninterested in rewards, popularity, even love or happiness, and he was impervious to ridicule or criticism. Yet, at the same time, he lived in almost freakish immediacy to the world around him, a helpless puppet on a string, elbows akimbo and left feet twitching at every social whim. I don't think he even “wanted” to play football or have sex—it was the world that
told
him he wanted these things, just as it might have told him instead to work for the New Deal, market frozen orange juice, get rich in Cuba, or run for Congress. He was nothing but Self, yet so invaded, more selfless than any of us in a way; without the sense of Audience, he would have been a lifeless pile of sticks and rags. Such a system may be reinforced by rewards and applause, but by small increments only. Only one thing will turn it around: violent disapproval. Fury. Rage. A beating, even. Who tore into him finally? Was it the coach? His heavy-handed father? His girlfriend?