No Place to be Nobody

for the hot-shot college quarterback, it's the first pro training camp--for others, it's the last

Chequers' Restaurant sits at an angle to black-top crossroads on the western edge of Amherst, Massachusetts; it's a low, attractive brick building fringed by squat evergreens. East from Chequers' corner, the road rises leisurely with the hillside, past large genteel New England homes with yards of thick shade, and meets South Pleasant Street at the town's busiest intersection. Three blocks from there, the academic-red brick and rolling lawns of Amherst College begin. Many stores on the square post no bare feet signs in their windows, taking dead aim on fashionable student slovenliness.

A wide banner sags high above South Pleasant. Its red capital letters say welcome patriots. The banner has yellowed, having hung through three summers while the New England Patriots football team has trained in this town. North from Chequers' are the dormitories and football stadium of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst's second campus and the Patriots' training site.

Chequers' draws a mix of college students, local families and passing salesmen who often stop before they reach nearby Northampton to have a quick drink and dust off their sales-pitch voices in conversation with bartenders.

For the past three summers, Chequers' has also filled up with another group of customers. From mid-July until late August, it is where Patriot football players have come to drink. Most of them prefer beer from frosted mugs, but tonight a few gin and tonics and a glass of tequila on the rocks are in evidence.

"These guys have been, historically, the worst bunch of drinkers I've ever seen," says the bartender, Bill Carty. "They used to come in here at seven-thirty, eight at night and start drinking like there was no tomorrow. They'd every one of them drink eight gallons of beer, not have the sense to stop and eat something, and by nine-thirty they were completely shit-faced and looking for a civilian to beat on until they had to be back for curfew at ten." Carty is young, has a beefy face and is very large, easily 6?4', 250 pounds; not someone to beat on. His size and the weight that has sifted down from his chest to rest ponderously over his belt indicate that he's had experience with drinking and football. He played tight end for the University of Massachusetts in the stadium just a half mile from Chequers', was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys and quickly cut. The brevity of his stay bothers him today. More than anything, he would like to sit on the other side of his bar, at the table with Jon Morris, Tom Neville and Joe Kapp--the tequila drinker--and complain with them about the injustice of assembling football players in the middle of July. As it is, Carty draws pass patterns in beer foam on the bar and gives bold preachments about the game.

"Tight end is the most important position on a football team," he says to a customer.

"Well, it's certainly one of the most important."

"It's the most important," says Carty. "I should know, I played the fucking position."

Many New Englanders share Bill Carty's enthusiasm for football, but that doesn't necessarily make them Patriot fans. This has long been New York Giant country. Steve Owen, Mel Hein and Ken Strong were their early heroes, Charlie Conerly, Kyle Rote and Frank Gifford their more recent ones. Since the Patriots have played poorly during most of their history, they've been unable to lure huge numbers of Giant supporters.

In January of last year, during the professional draft, the Patriots attended to the matter of winning future football games. Head coach John Mazur left his chair at the club's Boston-area draft office and dialed the Downtown Athletic Club in New York to tell Jim Plunkett, who was there to receive the Heisman Trophy, that he was now one of the Patriots. Plunkett accepted the news with no surprise, since Patriot president Billy Sullivan had asked him to inform the Patriots where he'd be at ten a.m., when the first pick would be made. No other team had made that request.

Plunkett, still to sign his contract, is not in Chequers' this night but in a room at the Orrington Hotel in Evanston, Illinois, studying his College All-Star playbook, preparing to face the world-champion Baltimore Colts. Even if he had been in Amherst, he would not have been at Chequers'. Rookies leave Chequers' to the veterans for a respectful week or so before making a first appearance. This is unspoken but understood, and custom is a most resistant force in professional football.

Many players believe that making this trip, to sweat at some isolated college for six weeks, is itself a musty custom. "We could get just as much accomplished--and it would be a helluva lot less boring--if we stayed at home to work out," says center Jon Morris at the table in Chequers'. "But George Halas started doing it this way and no one wants to be the first to change it."

• • •

On the practice field behind the University of Massachusetts football stadium, Mike Taliaferro is running a mile and a half. A narrow highway parallels the long sides of a half-mile rectangle that he is lapping for the first time. On the other side of the pavement, green terrain slopes to a sprawling New England farm, its big white main house supported by additions built onto all its sides, giving the place a rested, haphazard architecture. Above its shingled roof, the Berkshires are blue and final.

As a quarterback, Taliaferro is expected to run the distance in ten minutes or less. Linebackers and linemen, weighing 20 to 50 pounds more than backs, are given 12 minutes.

As Taliaferro moves into the second half mile, he's pleased that it's his chest that aches and not his back. In the second regular-season game the year before, against the New York Jets, he had just released a pass and a defender jumped on his shoulders. The weight squeezed Taliaferro's back like an accordion. He was assured by trainers that the damage was muscular and temporary, but that diagnosis was increasingly hard to accept. Each time he raised his throwing arm, he felt a stabbing pain. After the season, a Patriot trainer suggested he fly to Boston from his Houston home for further tests. They revealed a ruptured disk, which was repaired by surgery that April.

Taliaferro had been the starting Patriot quarterback in the Jet game and had been satisfied with his early-season performance. (He is coolly objective about his talent, a mental exercise perfected when he was with the Jets, watching Joe Namath flick his wrist, releasing a football faster than Taliaferro could believe.) Because of this contentment, his mind went blank with confusion when he answered the phone at nine o'clock on the Tuesday morning after his injury and heard a coach say, "You'd better drive in to practice. Joe Kapp's here." Taliaferro started the following game against Baltimore, was replaced in the third quarter by Kapp and played rarely thereafter.

Taliaferro's back feels good and his wind is holding as he moves into the final 300 yards of the run. Some of the backs running with him are whining and snorting for air. Taliaferro trained for this run every day in Houston after he had recovered from his operation. Taking a stop watch with him to a local track, he learned the precise exhaustion required to run three 3:20 half miles, gauging his pace by the pumping rhythm of his heart and the tightening in his thin calves. He has trained harder for this season than he has for any since he's played football, and has come to Amherst in the best shape of his life.

"I was just cocky enough to believe that they had made a horrendous mistake last year by bringing in Kapp and that it was up to me to show the coaches. I wanted to put them on the spot and prove that I could do a better job than Kapp. You see, I never resented a day sitting on the bench behind Namath, because I knew that every other quarterback in the league would be sitting there with me. But I resented like hell sitting on the bench one minute behind Kapp."

Taliaferro eases past the stop watch and bends for air.

"Keep movin'. You'll get your breath faster if you're movin'," shouts line coach Bruce Beatty.

Taliaferro's time is 9:48.

• • •

Joe Kapp leans into camera range for photographers who want to file a shot for their evening editions. Kapp's skin is brown. His black hair, which is graying evenly at the temples, hangs over the tops of his ears and curls up from the back of his neck. When he smiles, his teeth are very white and fill an inordinately large area of his face. He looks like a handsome Anthony Quinn, say the Amherst matrons watching this Press Day picture taking. The litheness of Kapp's body will surprise you if your indelible image of him is the moment when he hurdled Cleveland linebacker Jim Houston, knocking him unconscious, in the 1969 N. F. L. championship game. You somehow assume the body that did that to be low and compact.

Taliaferro, aware of the attention Kapp is receiving, sits in the first row of bleachers, elbows on his knees. No one has asked him to pose for a photo. His face is long and thin and has kept some freckles. His brown curly hair lies flat near a high part and stays close to his head. His eyes are pinched, causing wrinkles to spread out from the corners when his face erupts in a full smile or when his mood turns dark, as it is now. Finally, he stands and walks toward his friend Bake Turner. The two of them were teammates with the Jets when Turner was single and used his easy Southern charm to great romantic advantage in East Side singles bars.

"Mike has a hell of an arm," says (continued on page 156)No Place to be Nobody(continued from page 134) Turner. "I'd rather catch him up to forty yards than any quarterback I've ever played with. [Turner has played with Namath.] He puts it right in your gut." Turner is beginning his second year with the Patriots, his tenth as a pro. "I thought about retiring after last season, but it means more pension money for me if I play ten years. I'll hang 'em up after this year, if I make this team."

He talks about Taliaferro's attitude in light of Kapp's presence and the attention that's waiting for Plunkett. "It's been rough on Mike. He went through this same thing in New York when he lost his job to Namath. But he'll catch on with some team."

The sun holds the temperature in the 70s through the noon hour and early afternoon. After lunch, some of the players mill outside their dorm, James House, chewing on fruit and hooting at braless summer school coeds sloshing by. Others hurry to the third-floor lounge to play poker until 1:45, when they leave for the locker room. Mike Taliaferro, on the other hand, occupies the noon hour by calling on general manager Upton Bell and asking to be traded.

"There was complete disregard for my existence on Press Day. It all added up, so I figured, why beat my head against the wall? Bell and I agreed that it would be the best thing for me to be traded." Bell assures him that there will be interested teams. He knows this because he had previously decided to trade Taliaferro and has had promising reactions to already-placed telephone calls.

• • •

A few hundred people, mostly local businessmen, have come to watch the first full practice. A group of bare-chested boys run to the top row of bleachers, wanting the warm sun. Summer school students with books lie on the grass. Two middle-aged couples, wearing Miami Beach outfits and nursing deep tans, shield their eyes from the sun as one of the husbands points to the field, where Bell is inspecting the ground.

"See that guy in the red shirt?" says the husband. "That's the general manager, Bell. He's Bert Bell's son."

"Who's Bert Bell?" asks his wife.

"He was the first professional football commissioner. That's his son and he's the general manager here. He's only twenty-nine years old."

Actually, Bell is 33, but he could pass for a man in his early 20s. His black hair sweeps down and across his forehead, almost to his eyebrows, and he looks too boyish to be handsome, although he frequently jokes that he is. He can be disarming, if one prejudges the personality by the innocent face that accompanies it. Bell has come to the Patriots from Baltimore, where he was the Colts' player-personnel director. He has supreme confidence in his ability to judge football talent and sometimes his comments suggest that he has special perceptions.

"I'm not high on Jack Tatum," he says of Oakland's number-one draft choice. On another occasion, he will predict that "Archie Manning will be the league's prize bust."

At 3:15, players walk from the locker room, cleats grinding on the parking-lot gravel. There's a bit of applause from the spectators. "Where's Jim Plunkett?" many of them ask.

The offensive backs group with coach Sam Rutigliano. The first-string backfield--Kapp, the quarterback, Jim Nance, the fullback, Carl Garrett, the other running back--always rehearses together. Its timing is critical. Other backs fall in without regard to rank when the second- and third-string quarterbacks, Taliaferro and Brian Dowling, call the plays.

Kapp looks to his left and calls a play, looks to his right and repeats it. His voice is dry and hoarse--he even sounds like Anthony Quinn. He hands the ball to Nance, then follows through, giving Garrett, who trails a step and a half behind Nance, his empty hand.

Mazur runs a clean, disciplined offense, a reflection of his conservatism. A Notre Dame quarterback, Marine officer and devout Catholic, he is excited by austerity. (He abhors white football shoes.)

Rutigliano detects a tiny flaw in the motion of a play. "Take your depth step, Jim! Take your depth step." He's telling Nance, who's taking a pitchout, to step away from the ball as the guards pull from the line to lead interference. They do it again and Rutigliano senses guards moving majestically and in time.

"Much better! Much better."

The backfields now work on passing plays and all the quarterbacks, without the distraction of a defensive rush, throw with mechanical accuracy.

"Everybody up!" yells Mazur. Players run instantly toward him for a light-contact scrimmage. He refers to this as "nudging each other around." Blockers hit, hold, and no one tackles the quarterback. Considering this restraint, pads crack with a force that startles the ear; it's the same surprise the eye gets watching a golf ball fly to the green from the impact of Julius Boros' slow-motion stroke.

The quarterbacks are passing on nearly every play. Kapp drops straight back, plants and throws long, incomplete. If his throwing motion were filmed and run in stop-action segments, it would look disjointed. He stands very erect and leads radically with his chest, back bowed, at the moment of release. His body comes all the way through, spends its force, then waits for the arm to follow. The addition of a defense in front of Kapp takes the edge off his accuracy and he doesn't complete a pass in this scrimmage.

Taliaferro's passes smack insolently into receivers' hands. He is bitter, for things have not gone as planned in Amherst.

As he thought about this camp during the winter, did he give much consideration to the rookie Plunkett? "I didn't follow the draft news, since I was sure they'd pick the guy number one anyway; not like I did when I was with the Jets and they drafted Namath. Jesus, I read everything I could find about Joe. Of course, I was just a rookie then. But chances are Plunkett won't be able to contribute much this season."

Taliaferro throws what receivers call a heavy ball, much harder than Kapp's. Now that he can't have this job, he wants to refine his accuracy for some new team.

"Mike believes," says Bill Rademacher, a wide receiver who played in New York with Taliaferro and Namath, "that he has as good an arm as anyone in football. He's told me this. He remembers the days when he's accurate."

As Kapp seems to grow taller than 6'3? when he stretches to throw, Taliaferro appears to shrink shorter than 6'1? while passing. Taliaferro sets up and throws high and long to Ron Sellers for a touchdown. His long passes, according to the Boston press, are often underthrown, but this one leads Sellers perfectly.

"Everybody up!" shouts Mazur to end practice. It's five o'clock and players are exhausted from this 30-minute scrimmage. Kapp refuses fatigue, running backward off the field. He does this to get the feel of moving quickly away from the center.

• • •

At 9:30 p.m. Eastern daylight time, Bell calls a press conference. A media room has been improvised in a long tiled lounge off the James House lobby. Bell walks through the door to a television cameraman and about ten reporters, including a long-haired editor of the university newspaper, who regards this event with the requisite youthful cynicism. "I came over only because nothing else was going on."

Bell begins. "I'm happy to announce that we've come to terms with Jim Plunkett. The final conditions of his contract were worked out last night. Discussions with Jim and his lawyer, Wayne Hooper, have been friendly from the very beginning and I'm sure they're pleased with the settlement." Bell offers that the contract is a "multiyear" agreement but declines to give a dollar figure, since he doesn't believe in revealing players' salaries. He goes on to say that Hooper and team president Billy Sullivan are now waiting in a room at the O'Hare Inn in Chicago and that Plunkett will be calling momentarily to answer reporters' questions.

Across the room from Bell, a telephone-company electrician is setting up an amplifier so that the conversation with Chicago can be easily heard. Bell sits down after finishing his statement and there's an odd silence in the room. Reporters drink cans of Schaefer beer, scribble notes and prepare questions, leaning over classroom desks that have been provided. They look like students in an adult-education class.

"Do you think we should call him?" Bell is asked.

"No."

"This is about as exciting as watching last year's games," says a writer from the Worcester Telegram.

The phone rings. When Plunkett comes on, a reporter asks how he feels.

"I'm relieved to have the load off my back."

"Are you satisfied with the contract?"

"Yes, I'm very happy with it." Now Plunkett's lawyer takes the receiver and says that he's happy because his client is happy. All the while, the telephone company's amplifier is squeaking intolerably while the electrician wildly turns knobs that don't stop the noise. The television man is noisily dismantling his equipment and throwing parts into a large trunk. The student editor scornfully sips his second or third beer. Bell hangs up the phone and the reporters flee to typewriters, one of them grabbing a six-pack to help the words come. The telephone man is winding wire into concentric circles. He shakes his head and apologizes in behalf of New England Telephone and Telegraph.

• • •

Kapp moves furtively about the dormitory quadrangle on the morning after Plunkett's signing. He disappears down the stairway to Bell's room for minutes at a time, then goes back up to the lobby phone, ducking his head deep into the phone box. He's talking to his lawyer, John Elliott Cook, in San Francisco, turning his back to the continuous lobby traffic in order to hear Cook's words. Kapp is involved in his second contractual fight in as many seasons. When he came to New England, he had been allowed to sign something other than a standard player's contract. In January, Cook had resolutely refused to consider an official contract, insisting that his client already had one. In Amherst, Bell has met three or four times daily with Kapp, sympathizing with his devotion to his lawyer while reminding him that there is also an obligation to his teammates. Bell has also assigned Kapp's friend, Patriot kicker Gino Cappelletti, to work on him, and the two of them have stood outside James House after dinner for long conversations, arms folded, staring down at the lawn. Now everything has come down to this very nervous day. Commissioner Pete Rozelle has ordered Kapp out of camp unless he signs.

Kapp is finally convinced by Cook's long-distance assurances and begins to pack at 3:30 p.m. Sullivan and Bell call another press conference and explain the news to virtually no one, since most reporters left Amherst the previous night with the week's big story. After the press conference, Kapp and Sullivan leave James House together. Sullivan carries Kapp's bags as they walk down cement steps to the driveway where a limousine is parked. The chauffeur meets them at the trunk and lifts the lid while Sullivan opens the rear door for Kapp. The limousine backs slowly out of the driveway and turns toward Boston.

• • •

"The boy's all football," says John Elliott Cook to reporters over the phone, drawing his voice out dramatically. "Joe just wants to play. And that's all I'm at liberty to say."

• • •

Taliaferro first felt Kapp's absence at the afternoon team meeting, noticing, around one o'clock, his empty front-row chair. Other players saw it, too, but for Taliaferro it had reminiscent importance.

"Namath used to do this kind of thing all the time, but he'd always be back after a day or two. The first thing that came to mind when I realized what had happened was how glad I was that I hadn't signed my contract. Since I was the only veteran quarterback in camp, I figured that this would be a good chance to negotiate. But I wanted to get my lawyer up here right away. There's no telling when Kapp might come back."

Taliaferro hurries to the lobby phone and calls his attorney in Boston, Bob Woolf. Woolf agrees that the timing is indeed opportune and fills his briefcase with Xerox copies of Boston sports columns that give unkind reviews of Taliaferro's leadership qualities. That night, Woolf spreads out the Xeroxes on Bell's unmade bed to instruct him on the deep abuse Taliaferro has taken. A figure is agreed upon.

"Kapp's absence allowed Mike to get a very generous contract," says Woolf.

• • •

It's raining hard on July 30, All-Star game day, a full, rinsing rain that turns parched lawns soft. Exactly two weeks have passed since Kapp departed, leaving players to work out their confusions and sorenesses in the summer heat. Roughly 70 players remain of the 110 that arrived here on the 13th. Many of the men cut early had brought small expectations to Amherst and could leave camp content that they had been given the chance to officially fail. Those remaining have practiced twice a day.

"The worst part of two-a-days," says Taliaferro, "is having to put on pads in the afternoon that are still wet from morning practice."

Tonight, players are gathering in the room that has formerly accommodated the press to watch the College All-Star game. Couches and chairs have been collected and grouped over a yellow rug. The room has been ruled off limits to coaches and reporters.

"I want my boys to be able to relax and say anything they want to, without having to worry about a reporter or a coach hearing them," coach Mazur explains. He is watching the game with his friend the monsignor at the university's Newman Center. "I'll have a hotline to the Man Upstairs if one of our rookies gets hurt," he says with a smile.

The players applaud an end sweep by John Brockington for the All-Stars' first touchdown, set up by a Plunkett pass and a pass-interference call that put the ball near the goal line. Later in the first half, Plunkett rolls to his left, is rushed and tackled hard by Colt defenders.

"I'll bet Mazur just lost fourteen pounds," says a Patriot scout. The first touchdown drive is Plunkett's best series of the night; he will play disappointingly, seeming confused by the Colt zone defense.

Earl Morrall's head and arm keep Baltimore fully in control and, except for some spots of unintimidated All-Star defense, there is little to distinguish this game from most of its predecessors. The All-Stars lose, 24--17, but the game wasn't that close.

In Evanston, Plunkett returns to the Orrington Hotel around 1:30 a.m. to drink medicinal beers with teammates until he and other Patriot rookies Julius Adams and Tim Kelly catch a seven-a.m. flight to Bradley Field, 40 minutes south of Amherst. A Patriot official meets them and they drive north, pulling into the James House parking lot at 11 o'clock. Their arrival qualifies as the secondary news item of the morning.

Carl Garrett has been traded to the Dallas Cowboys. At 9:30 a.m., Mazur tells him that the Patriots are getting running back Duane Thomas, lineman Halvor Hagen and wide receiver Honor Jackson for Garrett and two draft numbers. The news that he's expendable startles and shocks Garrett, who believes in his desirability as an athlete and a specimen. Within an hour, however, he has fully recovered.

"At first I was depressed. Jim Nance and me, we'd had a lot of long talks about what we were going to do this year. And I like Boston. But then I got to thinking, the Patriots were getting three players and giving up me. It makes you feel good to know you're worth three players." He pauses to consider his future. "I wonder what number they'll give me. Danny Reeves already has number thirty for Dallas."

At 10:30, Garrett sits in the large James House office that is serving as a general reception area, a telephone receiver cradled deep in his neck, telling his wife the good news.

• • •

Plunkett has spent his first morning in Amherst, having met the press, eaten lunch across the table from a TV movie camera and its floodlights, and returned to his room for a nap that lasts the afternoon. Around five o'clock, he wakes, dresses in red Bermuda shorts and walks to the dining hall. Many of the players have gone home for the weekend, free, after a morning scrimmage, until six p.m. Sunday. The dining hall is scattered with those few who remain. Plunkett stands in line, waiting to be served two seared steaks. One of the cooks, who looks like an owl wearing a silver wig, says, "Are you one of the boys who just came in today?"

"Yes," says Plunkett.

"You aren't Jim Plunkett, are you?"

"Yeah, I guess I am." Plunkett is awkwardly shy.

"Well!" says the lady, having waited two weeks for this moment. The steaks come. "Here you go. Now, you just watch the other fellows and do like they do and you'll be just fine."

After dinner, Plunkett returns to James House and sits with Tim Kelly and Julius Adams to watch a telecast of the Oilers-Rams Hall of Fame me.

Plunkett is still tired and he eases his head down to his shoulder. The most striking thing about him is his thick neck, which he habitually moves in slow circles, as if he had a nagging cramp. He seems uncomfortable with its size, not quite knowing what to do with it. When Plunkett rests, he stares with an open, vulnerable expression. His skin is very dark and he looks more Mexican than he photographs.

After the game, he and Adams hitch-hike uptown to a bar called Quicksilver, one of the few places in Amherst that welcome bare feet and animals and that is, therefore, filled with both. They drink one hurried beer.

• • •

Bake Turner and reserve linebacker Ed Toner are carrying bags to Toner's car. They have been cut. On a team that loses, veterans are susceptible to quick unemployment. The two men drive south, swing into the stadium parking lot to cruise past Monday's practice, then change their minds and turn out again. The car continues down the road and pulls into Chequers'.

While linebackers hop back and forth over conical tackling dummies to the arm direction of coach John Meyer, and receivers chase passes thrown teasingly long, the ball boys wheel a construction of metal poles onto the field. It's an involved piece of welding that looks like a horse-racing starting gate and seems obliged to have a motor, to be powered in some way, but is a total invalid. It's called a passing pocket and substitutes for an offensive line during drills in which the quarterback, running backs and receivers try to complete passes against line-backers, cornerbacks and safeties.

Standing in the middle of the passing pocket, Taliaferro grips a football with his right hand and calls a play. Looking into his face is a ball boy, holding a stop watch in one hand and a whistle in his mouth. At the moment Taliaferro steps away from the pocket, the ball boy will start the watch. When it runs to 3.2 seconds, he will blow his whistle. Patriot coaches calculate that if Taliaferro has not thrown the football in that length of time during a game, he'll find himself between the ground and defensemen.

"Shit, I wish I had three-point-two seconds in a game," he'll say privately. Taliaferro is not agile; in order to give himself maximum quickness, he wears no pads below his waist--no kneepads, no thigh pads, no hip pads. The area from head to chest takes most of his contact as he stands, waiting to release the ball or watch its flight. He runs with the ball only in moments of crisis.

"Blue thirty-five," says Taliaferro. This is an audible signal that, in practice, means nothing. "Blue thirty-five! Hut! Hut!" His right leg starts back and he takes eight steps, then sets his right foot into the ground. While he watches backs and receivers run patterns, his heels come up into the air and he begins to dance on his toes, the football at his ear. Twelve yards down-field, Sellers turns left and into the middle. Taliaferro throws. Complete. No whistle is blown.

Plunkett steps into the passing pocket. He has never seen one before. ("It bothered me at first, trying to see over it.") Plunkett looks very large in pads. He weighs more than 220 pounds but feels strong and the coaches have told him to report at a weight he feels comfortable carrying, an uncharacteristic concession.

"Green eighteen," says Plunkett, looking to the New England postcard farm. "Green eighteen"; he turns his head to the largest number of people ever to watch the Patriots practice. "Hut! Hut!" Plunkett pulls away from the poles, straight back nine steps, and plants. His body jiggles and jerks from the impact of his feet meeting the ground. He holds the ball at his chest and it jumps in his hands as if it were alive and squirming. Receivers and backs scatter hectically in front of him. On his left, end Gayle Knief slices toward the middle of the field. He is the primary receiver on this pattern. Plunkett's arm moves forward, releasing his first pass as a contracted member of the New England Patriots. Mazur's eyes, hidden under his baseball cap, follow the ball. A muscle in his cheek twitches. He looks thin. Fifty-seven of the 70 players are not moving to catch the ball or to prevent it from being caught. They are watching it in the air, intensely curious. Plunkett lifts himself to peer over the passing pocket as the ball seeks Knief, and sees that he's overcompensated for the height of the pocket. The ball continues past Knief, high above his hands.

"Bring it down, Jimmy. Bring it down," says Rutigliano. Plunkett will complete his second pass and most of the others he'll throw in his first practice. One will be intercepted.

• • •

Duane Thomas and his friend line-backer Steve Kiner are standing beneath the parking-lot lightpost behind Herman Melville House, leaning against a brown Ford, talking softly. It is Monday, 11 p.m. Thomas has been in Amherst since Sunday afternoon, 30 hours that have built to this unfortunate night.

He is wearing a knee-length brightly patterned dashiki, blue jeans and sandals, and carries a cellophane bag filled with fruit, which has swung at his side as he's walked around the campus. Thomas has had to reach into the bag often, for he has become a vegetarian and has found no sympathetic menu in the training-camp dining hall. The dashiki hangs full and loose, hiding his physique. He is thin, weighing 204 pounds, more than 15 pounds below 1970's weight and, according to alarmed coaches, too light to carry the football.

The Patriots had been able to trade for Thomas because of an angry impasse between him and the Dallas Cowboys. Going to Dallas from West Texas State, where he had played a schedule that produced easy Saturday heroics, he signed a three-year $20,000 contract. In 1970, he gained more than 800 yards, and before this season, asked for a raise. Tex Schramm, the Cowboy general manager, pointed out that he was already signed. Things stayed that way until Bell called Thomas and welcomed him to New England.

Soon after meeting on Sunday, Bell brought up the subject of football and the amount of money Thomas expected to receive for carrying one. They talked without the inconvenience of a lawyer and were close to agreement. Sunday night, Thomas was pleased enough to relax and share some opinions with his roommate, Brian Dowling, who found them out of place in Amherst.

"I knew after twenty minutes of talking with him that he wasn't going to be playing football for this team. He was talking about how we should all love each other and that individualism should be rewarded. I couldn't agree with him more, from January until July. But you have to set those feelings aside when you put on pads."

On Monday morning, Thomas came late to the team meeting. Afterward, Rutigliano asked him to stay and talk about the Patriots' offense. "Don't mess my mind, man," said Thomas.

After lunch that day, a sportscaster stood beneath the second-floor bay windows of Melville House with Thomas to get an interview for the 11 p.m. news, while players idled down the cement staircase from the dining hall to the lawn and took in the conversation.

"What's Duane doing," asked tackle Mike Montler, "announcing his retirement?"

At five p.m., after practice, Mazur and Thomas remained on the field to review some primary Patriot football.

"In Dallas, the backs set up with their hands on their knees so they'll be higher and able to look over the line at where the linebackers are standing," explained Thomas.

"Well, here, our backs come to a set in a three-point stance."

"I think I'll still set like I did in Dallas."

"You're not going to set any way. Get the hell out of here!"

Three hours later, the Patriots' team physician drove with his wife from their home in Concord, New Hampshire, to hear Thomas refuse to complete the Patriots' physical examination, which included a urinalysis.

He was then asked to leave.

Now, at 11 p.m., Thomas and Kiner, his roommate when they both played for Dallas, wait to be driven away by the Patriots' pro scout, Rommie Loudd, whose blackness, the team's management reasoned, especially qualified him for this tense drive. Kiner will ride along to lubricate the silence in the car. He is sitting on the trunk lid, dangling his legs. The white clogs he wears pick up and throw back the light. Words stay low and are extinguished almost immediately in the heavy air. Occasionally, Thomas becomes animated. When he does, the fruit bag swings and his words rise up and over the top of the Ford, but they are only sounds by that time. At 11:40, Loudd drives into the parking lot and, just as president Billy Sullivan's chauffeur did two and a half weeks earlier, he helps two people with car doors, then heads toward Boston.

Bell remains in his room for 36 hours as he sits on the edge of his bed, talking on the phone, working to erase the trade. His meals are brought from the dining hall. The empty trays are picked up from the floor beside his closed door by a secretary; everyone acts as if the person in the room were ill.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Patriots announce that Garrett is coming home and that they will be allowed to keep the two other players who came to camp with the Thomas trade: Hagen and Jackson. They have forfeited two draft choices in return. From Dallas, Tex Schramm issues a statement that says he feels "morally and ethically bound" to negate the trade--after 36 viciously argued hours. That night, Bell sits in the lounge, talking with reporters until four a.m. He feels very sly.

• • •

"What's the news on the waiver wire?" a reporter from The Providence Journal asks Bell, who is ducking under the ropes and walking out to the practice field. Every afternoon at four o'clock a telex machine hidden behind a wooden folding screen in the big James House office starts to print names onto a roll of yellow paper. The names are those of players who have been placed on waivers by all the other teams. The Patriots' last-place record gives them first claim to any waivered player. So Bell steps eagerly behind the screen and waits for the machine to give him a name that might be coming to Amherst.

"A body every day," he replies with a big grin, "a body every day." This is what he asks of the telex, but it is not always so benevolent. He is in a good mood, perhaps having seen a name.

It is cool and clear after a week of rain, a fact that displeases him. Bell feels the weather has been too kind to his players. "Hell, in Baltimore, it was so hot and muggy where we trained that everybody came out of camp in fantastic shape. I don't think these guys have sweat enough up here."

The crowd is large at practice today, after the rain that kept them home. Among them, drinking beer from a six-pack, is a long-haired reporter from The Phoenix, a Boston underground paper. He had planned to see Duane Thomas in Amherst. He shrugs, feeling the beer in the sun, and says he'll interview Thomas' friend Kiner instead. "He'll be of interest to our readers. He was busted for dope, you know."

Taliaferro plays catch with Sellers. Plunkett does the same with Dowling, as the passing pocket is moved into position. Taliaferro is asserting his first-string status, never choosing another quarterback to catch his football but always a receiver. Taliaferro throws compulsively. Between turns in drills, he tosses quick passes, as if he feared instant atrophy of his passing arm if he were to rest it. If he can't get anyone to catch him, Taliaferro will throw at the goal post or a blade of grass.

Al Sykes breaks from the huddle and sets wide on Taliaferro's left. Sykes, a rookie 14th-round draft choice from Florida A&M, is showing enough natural ability to be playing first string. This is surprising to no one more than to him, and he spends so much time wondering how long it's going to last that he often runs sloppy patterns. At times he will even forget the count.

"Can't anyone count past the number two?" asks Mazur. Sykes has started his route one count early. "Think, Al!"

Sykes glides into the center of the field and Taliaferro's ball ricochets away from his shoulder pads.

"Get big in the middle, Al! Big in the middle!" A coach is telling Sykes to turn so that his shoulders are perpendicular to the passer's arm as he fights for space with defensive backs. In that way, the ball will have a better chance to find some part of his body. There is not much of knife-thin Sykes to find.

Sykes starts on the count, cuts to his right and drops the ball. "Catch the football, Al! That's what you're paid to do! Catch the football!" By the end of the pre-season schedule, a combination of player trades and Sykes's continued inconsistency will force him to a spot on the reserve taxi squad, where he'll spend the remainder of the year.

Plunkett calls his signal and starts back, his feet beating the ground; now he rolls to his left and his steps are lighter. He throws to Sellers 40 yards downfield. The ball clatters as it settles into Sellers' pads.

Quarterback Dowling is watching. "He threw that ball with his arm. He was running to his left and threw it with just his arm. I can't do that."

• • •

The first game of the 1971 season, against the Vikings in Minneapolis, was arranged to exploit Joe Kapp's popularity in Minnesota. But only 30,000 people have come to watch Minnesota play a bad football team that no longer has Kapp. From the field, the steep, bowl-shaped stadium seems close and intimate. Nearby 3M Company has supplied the playing field. It's called Tartan Turf and looks like a living-room rug.

"I'm afraid to spit on it," says Taliaferro.

In warm-up drills, players, wearing rubber-cleated shoes, move about with a new silence over the carpet. Taliaferro, on top of his nerves, throws to Sellers. Plunkett throws beside him. This is the first football game in his memory that he will not start.

On the Patriots' bench, trainers are soaking large green bath towels in pails of ice. When the game begins, they will distribute the towels to players coming off the field, who'll wear them like head scarves to fight their body heat. Taliaferro walks to a table and finds a can of resin to powder his hands. Sellers, wearing a glob of Vaseline to grease a shin splint, takes an aerosol can and coats his hands with sticky spray.

"Here we go! Big season, Ron Sellers! Big season!" shouts center Morris.

From the field, there is the thunderous impact of pads and the players' obscene shrieks and grunts. From the (continued on page 168)No Place to be Nobody(continued from page 165) stands comes a persistent buzzing, flavored with pleas for enemy blood. "Tear him in half, Carl! Tear the bastard in half!" yells a red-faced man in the first row to Viking defensive end Carl Eller.

Offensive tackle Tom Neville is being cannonaded by Eller's arms and hands. At the snap, Eller pounds Neville's helmet and moves past him. "Eller is the best I've ever played against," he will say later. "I didn't know anyone could be so fast. Every time I looked up, he was running by me. In our huddle, everybody kept complaining about the Vikings' tackle Alan Page and how fast he was. He can't be faster than Eller."

Taliaferro bends over center and takes the football. Eller is already sliding past Neville. In desperation, Neville is holding onto Eller's jersey, so openly that he is penalized. Neville, on his knees, pounds his fist on the Tartan Turf.

Eller brings only efficient brutality to his work. His quickness allows him to play football at a graceful level that is beyond violence. He has no need to waste contact at the line, taking the easy way into the backfield, past Neville's outside shoulder, avoiding the dark unnecessary pile in the middle of the line.

Mazur sees this. Between offensive series, he groups his backfield on the side line. "OK, Mike, I want you to run a sixty series. That'll keep your backs in to block and give you protection. Now, listen, Garrett, if nobody else gets through and Eller's coming in, I want you to slice his ass!"

It works. Taliaferro retreats and Eller is around Neville. Garrett ducks low and cuts Eller to the ground. The pass is underthrown, incomplete. But on the next play, Eller moves to the inside and starts to climb bodies like steps. Taliaferro throws into his forearm.

"Eat him alive, Carl!" screams the red-faced man.

The Vikings lead 10--0 at half time and early in the third quarter, when the Patriots are called for pass interference in the end zone, Dave Osborn scores from the one-yard line: 17--0.

Neville is frantic, working to think of a way to slow Eller. He begins to take his stance some distance from the line of scrimmage, so that when he stands to block, Eller will not be already behind him. He also drops his right foot back in the manner of a receiver as he crouches into his stance. That way his body will be at a better angle to meet Eller outside. This is good strategy, but Eller has Neville upset. At the snap, Neville first brings his right leg forward, losing both angle and time. Eller flies past him.

"Jim! Jim!" yells Mazur, turning to the bench early in the fourth quarter. Plunkett rises and trots to Mazur.

"Do you feel like going in?"

"Yeah."

Warming up, Plunkett throws deliberately off his front foot, a habit he believes hastens the blood through his arm. While the Vikings are moving the ball, Taliaferro talks with Plunkett. "Delayed passes over the middle will work for you. Their linemen will rush and their linebackers drop off, so that frees the middle." He wishes Plunkett luck and walks away, to the soothing Texas sympathies of his friend punter Tom Janik.

With 11:09 left in the game, Plunkett steps over the side line, having earlier decided what play to call. The score is 17--7. The Patriots' touchdown came minutes earlier on an intercepted pass.

Plunkett looks to his bench as his hands reach under center. "Blue eighty-eight!" He turns his head and repeats, "Blue eighty-eight. Hut! Hut!"

As he drops back, he reads the Minnesota defense. Their backs are floating into a loose zone, concentrating their coverage on his left. He has called a "44 out." The split end on his right side--Gayle Knief--is the primary receiver. Plunkett has called the right play.

Knief, nine yards downfield, turns right and to the side line. As his shoulders begin to move with his cut, Plunkett releases the ball and it arrives, hard and low, slapping into Knief's stomach.

After a few running plays, he completes a pass to tight end Roland Moss, who turns into the center, six yards past the line of scrimmage.

"Roland really should have run farther and not cut until he had the first down. As it was, we only got six yards and had to punt. I'm a firm believer in a curl pattern. There's not much chance of interception."

On his second series, Plunkett moves the Patriots, calling a good mix of running plays. On third down, from the Minnesota 27-yard line, he throws incomplete into a crowd of defensive backs and receiver Tom Richardson. The Patriots take a field goal. The final score is 17--10. In his quarter of play, Plunkett completed two of five passes.

"I threw well. Actually, every one of my passes could have been caught. If we're going to win, our receivers are going to have to come up with those catches when it counts."

Taliaferro walks slowly up two steps and onto the team bus as it pulls away from the stadium parking lot.

"How do you feel?" asks Janik.

"Shell-shocked."

• • •

Three days after his first professional game in Minnesota, Plunkett stands in the dark doorway of James House watching the rain. Taliaferro comes down the stairs, heading for Chequers', and asks Plunkett if he'd like to come along.

"Sure."

The conversation in the car during the short drive is difficult for both men. Plunkett unconsciously catches some of Taliaferro's Houston accent and his words stretch and flatten. At 8:30, they pull into the parking lot to begin Plunkett's first night at Chequers'.

Plunkett is squirming in his chair at a table with Taliaferro, Morris and Len St. Jean. He is very nervous in their company. His voice starts loudly, then catches itself and adjusts to a low volume. The words are so eager to be out of his mouth and finished that they stack up at a point just beyond his lips. His speech pattern is like the turning of a radio dial across the band, picking up sharp bursts of sound and static.

"Let the rookie buy," he says, waving a dollar bill, a "multiyear" dollar bill. He is still naïve about his salary, having had little to do with negotiating his worth. His lawyer often praised Plunkett for avoiding contract talk.

"Let the rookie buy," he says again, but Taliaferro has already paid for the pitcher and is filling mugs.

"That's all right, Jim," says St. Jean. "With the war between the leagues over, you probably didn't get much to sign."

"Yeah, that's right," lies Plunkett. He continues to be uneasy and sings monotone lyrics to the jukebox.

Taliaferro is relaxed. He uses his eyes to illustrate his conversation. He raises his brows to underline a word and it has the same impact the slapping of a palm on a tabletop has for men who gesture with less thrift.

The talk is of Tartan Turf. "It burned my elbows like hell," says Taliaferro. "I don't wear elbow pads, 'cause their weight affects my passing arm."

"They're really not that heavy," says St. Jean. "You ought to try them."

"Well," says Taliaferro, "if one of my offensive linemen tells me to wear them, maybe I should get some."

Plunkett says, "Elbow pads don't bother my throwing."

Earlier in the evening, he told a reporter, "I think I'm a better passer than Mike." Then he quickly added, "But he has the experience." Plunkett thinks this camp has been easy.

To the question "What if you fail as a professional football player?" he says, "Oh, I can't do that." He needs the sport. It keeps any notion of poverty in the past, where it belongs, and justifies his right to a bit of quiet conceit.

"What time is it?" asks Morris, sucking the ice in his gin-and-tonic glass.

"About a quarter to ten," says Taliaferro. "We'd better go." He has paid for all the beer with after-dinner poker winnings.

"Man, it's been raining up here since I can remember," says Plunkett back in the car.

"If you want sunshine," says Taliaferro, "you've come to the wrong state."

• • •

The drive from Boston to Foxboro and the Patriots' new stadium is scenic and relaxing, with late-summer evidence of New England's finest scenery along the way. Branches extend high out over narrow Route 1, paving stretches of the road with late-afternoon shade. But today, over 60,000 people are making this drive within a few hours of one another, too many for the unsuspecting countryside to bear. Traffic becomes choked and backed up for miles. People leave their cars on the highway or alongside it. The first game to be played in Schaefer Stadium--fittingly, against the New York Giants--will begin in a few hours, and the crowd is nearly double this team's previous record.

The stadium sits on a high dirt hill. From inside, its aluminum-bench rows glimmer under the lights and make the structure look portable.

As the game begins, both teams trade spectacular plays--it's N. F. L. Highlights, with the dull plays edited out. Giant rookie Rocky Thompson runs the opening kickoff to the Patriots' 31-yard line. On the Giants' first series, Tucker Frederickson fumbles on a draw play. The Patriots recover. They move close enough to get a field goal: 3--0.

The Patriots kick to Thompson again and he starts north, splitting the field's width in half. At his 25-yard line, the blocks are on time and he is through, the side line drawing him close. Now he becomes another runner, with long strides, and uses them all the way to the end zone. New York 7, New England 3. The Patriots' lead lasted 11 seconds.

Garrett takes the following kickoff, heads upfield, finds the blocks, makes the side line and gets to mid-field. On the next play, Taliaferro gives Nance his hand and Garrett the ball. Garrett is through a big hole made by Neville. Garrett breaks a tackle, throwing his course right, breaks another and beats a defensive back to the end zone. New England 10, New York 7.

Everyone stops for a moment to inhale and things become a little more sane. Now neither offense works consistently, although Neville is keeping his side of the line clean.

Near the end of the half, Sellers breaks from the huddle and moves wide to Taliaferro's right. Sellers bends into his stance, stretching his right leg out behind him, setting it, then kicking it into the air again, like a sprinter settling into the blocks.

At the snap, Sellers breaks with agonizing slowness, or so it looks. His legs are actually consuming yards at a time and he is free down the side line. Taliaferro gathers his body around him and throws for a spot well in front of Sellers. Sellers sees that the ball will be behind him unless he shortens his stride and waits. He has his defender so badly beaten that, although the ball is under-thrown, he is able to move ahead a few yards after catching it to the Giants' nine-yard line before being tackled.

"A dying quail," says a Boston sports-caster in the press box. "Should have been intercepted."

Two running plays get two yards and Taliaferro throws incomplete on third down. The Patriots take a field goal. At half time, the score is 13--7.

Midway through the third quarter, the Patriots put together a drive and go ahead, 20--7, when Nance slides into the corner of the end zone.

At 3:46 of the third quarter, Plunkett moves onto the field and the crowd erupts. On his first play, Garrett gets one yard. Now Plunkett calls a curl pass pattern. He takes the snap, finds halfback Odell Lawson cutting across the middle, throws a soft lob into his stomach and is gone, beneath Giants.

"Did you see that?" says the Boston TV man. "The way he stood in there? Reminds me of Roman Gabriel."

Later in the period, Plunkett rolls to his right as Sellers angles toward the goal line on a deep post pattern. Plunkett rears and releases, the ball spinning hard off his fingers, looking for Sellers. It's a low line drive and Sellers opens his arms to take it. It is intercepted. The Giants' free safety returns the ball to the Patriots' 33. It is a costly mistake. The Giants get a quick touchdown and the score tightens at 20--14.

But Tarkenton is having a bad night for the Giants. Everyone knows he must pass in order to catch up. He's throwing long on every down but isn't accurate. New England keeps the ball primarily on the ground. Plunkett throws five more passes, two of them complete, two incomplete, and has another intercepted. On the final play of the game, he ducks ahead for a yard gain. New England wins, 20--14.

In the locker room, tucked into unfinished wood cubicles, the players sit in stages of nakedness, surrounded by stacks of cement blocks covered with plastic blankets. The smell of sawdust deodorizes the room.

Plunkett's locker is located just inside the doorway, a convenience to reporters, who are already encircling him. He answers their questions crisply and confidently, the game still with him, stripping while they write in note pads.

"I played well. I threw two interceptions, sure, but the first one was a good pass. I was at fault on the second one. They always tell you in college, 'Don't pass over the middle when you have to throw late.' So what did I do? I threw late, over the middle. But that's just inexperience."

Morris is drenched with sweat but still fully dressed and smoking hard on a cigarette. The players are happy, a few even boisterous, but the room, more than large enough to accommodate the mood, is quiet.

Taliaferro, outside the showers, is talking to no reporters. He stands, drying himself, looking pale and pubescently naked. His eyes are narrowed. Taliaferro is not tired, having rested for more than a quarter. He has finished his shower quickly, as he did after games last year, and when he played for the Jets in New York.