The Humminest Little Football Movie in Town

turning kris kristofferson and burt reynolds into genuine gridiron monsters for the making of "semi-tough" proves to be semi-difficult

I guess by now there can't be too many people anywhere who haven't heard about Billy Clyde Puckett, the humminest sumzbitch that ever carried a football. Maybe you could find some Communist Chinks someplace who don't know about me, but surely everybody in America does if they happen to keep up with pro football, which is what I think everybody in America does. That, and jack around with somebody else's wife or husband.

--"Semi-Tough," by Dan Jenkins

It's semi-humid and about half hot in the Orange Bowl this Saturday night; not for nothing did an airline pilot once characterize Miami for me as "the green hell." Football players and fairly reasonable facsimiles thereof are scattered around the artificial turf. Actually, it isn't hard to tell the real ballplayers from the bartenders and beach boys and rhinestone cowboys of the leisurewear commercials--the ballplayers know how to perch on their helmets. It's going to be a brutal night. This is the last week of filming of Semi-Tough and director Michael Ritchie has to shoot scenes from three different games.

In Jenkins' randy gridiron romp over about 100 yards of pro-football myths, Billy Clyde and his whimsical, passcatchin' sumbitch of a side-kick, Shake Tiller, played for the New York Giants. Their mutual love, Barbara Jane Bookman (rated number two on their scale, " 'cause there ain't never been a one"), is a Manhattan model. In the film version, the boys play for Miami and Barbara Jane is the owner's daughter--for the simple reason that owner Joseph Robbie of the Dolphins was the only National Football League owner who would cooperate with producer David Merrick's $5,500,000 venture. "I think the problem," says Merrick, conspicuously dapper on the side line, "was that the owners were afraid of being made to look foolish." Not that Merrick intends to make them look foolish. He may look like he just stepped into the Orange Bowl from a John P. Marquand novel, but he is a fierce fan and close friend of several owners and he wants to buy the New York Jets. Still, N.F.L. owners, like medieval bishops, will not tolerate the slightest irreverence, even from the most sympathetic sectarian prince.

This is one of the reasons that the scene on the field does not look quite right--the uniforms are slightly off. Also, there are only a couple of thousand people in the stands, mostly Biscayne Bay bombers aching for a glimpse of Semi-Tough's half-strong stars, Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson. (Barbara Jane, played by Jill Clayburgh, doesn't appear in game sequences.)

Yet there is something more important, more profound, that is amiss. The side lines are a twisted coil of camera cable and Ritchie gives orders calmly to his lieutenants as he sets up his cameras for the main shot of the evening. There is no need for klieg lights, of course; the stadium lights will do. But as Ritchie's cameramen begin lining up their angles and the assistant director and the resident football expert, former player and coach Tom Fears, counsel the extras, I begin to focus on the nagging anomaly: the cameras. There are just a couple of puny little cameras the technicians are, it seems to me, rather leisurely tooling into readiness. That is what's wrong; not, God knows, that there are cameras present at a pro-football spectacular, but that there are so few of them. We are missing in the Orange Bowl this March evening the dozen or more cameras strategically situated around the field like machine-gun emplacements--not to mention the out-posts of microphones manned by blazered bromides named Bud and Jack and Chris. No instant replays, no slow-motion recaps, no split screens, no isolations, no quick pan to the pacing coach, no long, loving caress of the girl with the knockers in section EE--this is merely a movie. Not just any movie, mind you: Semi-Tough, backed by Merrick of Broadway and United Artists of Hollywood, is the biggest, splashiest, most ambitious sports movie ever made. Yet, compared with the squadrons of men and matériel deployed in the N.F.L. theater every autumn Sunday by network commanders, Ritchie and his ragtag band of irregulars look like a local crew filming a high school game.

Ritchie is standing out in sauna field with a loud-speaker, trying to convince all those bare-limbed, sweetly perspiring young things that they are in Denver and Green Bay. "OK," his voice booms, "get those parkas and overcoats on, it's cold out here." Squeals, giggles, rustling and shuffling of winter gear from the stands; hell, yes, they'll put them on. For Burt and Kris, they'd don mukluks and Russian-army greatcoats and swim the length of every salt-water pool on Collins Avenue.

Suddenly, out he trots from the locker room, wearing his permanent wry, self-deprecatory smile and his old faithful number 22, same number he wore as a halfback at West Palm Beach High and Florida State, the gator gaucho himself, Burt baby, waving, smiling as the shrieks go up. "Oh, God! Look, Marcie, God, lookit! It's Burt, isn't he gorgeous? Isn't he goddamn gorgeous?!!" Reynolds, in his Miami uniform, slows down, saunters out to mid-field with a familiar rolling swagger, and you are reminded that he is the rebellious son of a Florida lawman, that he did play a couple of very real games in this here Orange Bowl and that he is viewed, for better or worse, as the embodiment of the American male principle.

The cries and moans of the possessed die down momentarily, then flame again as number 81, slight of build, salt-and-pepper beard, emerges, surrounded by a small cordon of Miami cops. The girls leap to the railing and press over it frantically, their young breasts bobbing in a row like plump pears on a wind-rippled stand of trees, straining to spot the brooding, tightly strung muleskin balladeer who also played himself some college ball (four years at Pomona in California) and who can quote Yeats and Blake as surely as he can sing Hank Williams. "Kris! Kris! Look up here, Kris, please look up! Please!" Pop! Pop! go the flashbulbs. "Oh, Jesus, Kris, come on over here, lemme kiss you, Kris! Pleeeease!!!"

it is Kris who really rings their dear young chimes, and the reason, of course, is that he can sing; Burt, as he has persuasively demonstrated, cannot.

The jockstrap extras swap thumbshakes and fanny slaps with Burt and Kris, perform the obligatory tribal rituals, as if a real game were about to get under way. Ritchie leaves them for a moment to explain to the crowd, "We're going to run a series of plays and the only difference between this and an actual game is that we'll take longer between downs. But the defense, in this case Denver, will not know what the plays are and the hitting will be real."

Ritchie talks over the shot with his stars but is interrupted by an agitated Darryl Levine, the assistant wardrobe chief. A problem has arisen. The next shot will be an option pass, Puckett to Tiller, for a touchdown. The most engaging figures in this scene, as they are in what passes for real life, are the cheerleaders. Earlier in the day, Ritchie had begun shooting, courtesy of the Miami management, the very, very lovely, very, very young team cheerleaders, the Dolphin Dolls. Trouble is, in the original shot done two months previously, Ritchie had used the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, who, in their jerrybuilt halters, look as dewy and virginal as the chorus line at Caesars Palace. Levine wails, "Christ, the Dolphin Dolls are nothin' but jailbait. If we even look at them, we get arrested. Anyway," he says, all business now, "we'd have trouble with release forms on them. Not that it makes any difference--we've got to match up these cheerleaders with the older girls we shot in Dallas." Happily for Darryl, the stands are spilling over with all--Dade County debutantes with--as Billy Clyde might say--bodies like your basic bagful of bobcats and eyes of hardest agate. While the camera crews and electricians sprawl on the turf and begin one of those endless, unfathomable colloquies about scale, overtime, etc., Darryl gets down to serious work. "Hey, Jordan, that one up there, blue on red, yeah, blue boobs on red bottom there, get her...."

Another assistant adds, "Pay no attention to them if they're wearing engagement rings." Sly wink. "Won't do us any good for our vacation day tomorrow."

The police pitch in; cops can be pigs, too. "Hey, honey, what say you come on down here?" The selection is soon completed, with some sense of discernment; the ad hoc committee passes up a Dyan Cannon double in a scoop-neck sweater and Dutch Boy cap who has been brandishing a sign at the players bearing the frank legend: I've got what u want.

While Darryl instructs his makeshift squad (no surprise that most of them are ex-cheerleaders) and Fears exercises his congeries of castoffs, Ritchie interrupts his war conference at the side-line camera to talk about his movie. "I probably set out to make Semi-Tough for the opposite reasons that David Merrick and United Artists bought the book," he says. "They wanted to make M*A*S*H on the football field; I wanted to make the time-honored romantic comedy. Billy Clyde and Shake play in the Super Bowl still, but it's not that important anymore. Walter Bernstein [the screenwriter] and I just took the last chapter of Dan's book, where Billy and Shake and Barbara Jane define their relationship, and we use that as a springboard for a script. Every Howard Hawks movie had that same theme, only the other guy--usually Ralph Bellamy or Macdonald Carey--turned out to be a wrongo. I sort of brought in the Cyrano problem: How do you schtup your best friend?"

And how do you keep from getting your $5,500,000 jock knocked off at the box office? Sports movies (and Semi-Tough will be identified by the public as(continued on page 202)Football Movie (continued from page 196) a sports movie, no matter how its makers characterize it) have notoriously poor track records. But Ritchie, Harvard educated and at 38 a hot young director who professedly knows nothing about sports, did a nice job of capturing snowflakes on canvas in his first jock outing, Downhill Racer, and hit at least a ringing double with The Bad News Bears. So if anyone can properly distill all the liquor and sweat and sperm and blood and Gatorade that fuel and lubricate pro football, I guess Michael Ritchie can. We'll see. Observes author Jenkins: "I predict that Semi-Tough will be a better football movie than Navy Blue and Gold."

Ballplayers and cheerleaders are nearly ready and Ritchie must return to his cameras. Before he leaves, he says, "One more thing. This is the last sports movie I'll ever direct. Know why? The uniforms. I'm dead-serious. You don't know the hours we've spent matching up numbers, helmets, every last grass stain and patch of dirt, getting all the scenes to mesh. Brutal.

"So I'm doing a circus movie next. It's got action, all right, but at least the performers don't have numbers on their backs."

Ritchie leaves and I introduce myself to Mike Ballou and his wife, Maxine. He's a former N.F.L. journeyman, she's a TWA stew, and both have small parts in the movie. Mike is in uniform, Maxine wears a T-shirt with Many Thanks, Burt Reynolds inscribed around a heart. "We've had a lot of fun with this," Mike is saying. "When we were shooting down in San Diego, we watered the field and got it good and muddied up. We saw Burt up in the stands talking to Chris Evert--she used to come out to see him. We thought it'd be nice and romantic if we grabbed him and dragged him through the mud, so we did. Then there's this bar scene where I'm the stand-in and I eat this glass. One of the other players says, 'What the fuck you doin', eatin' another glass?' I say back to him, 'What the fuck you mean, "another"? This is my first of the night....' "

"Offense on the field!" cries a spindly assistant in tie-dyed T-shirt and cutaway jeans. Mike trots out and Maxine takes over. What does Maxine do? Anything she wants, I think, but I don't say it, Mike is one big sumbitch. "Ritchie needed a stew for the flight after the Super Bowl, and I was around, so why not use the real thing?" She laughs, big white teeth, blonde hair swishing, bosom tugging at Reynolds' heart.

"I was in the locker room yesterday, pulling my T-shirt off, when Burt walked in. What could I do? He just laughed and said, 'Well, I finally caught you without your husband.' Anyway, I do the airplane scene, and then a party scene at this ranch, where one of the players is holding a girl over a balcony three stories up, and the guys below are saying gross things like, 'If you drop her, drop her on my face.'

"The only real problem they've had," she continues, "was when they started shooting and the guys just weren't hitting. A few of the name players didn't want to get hurt, things like that. Ritchie saw the rushes and decided they didn't look real enough. He gave Fears some shit about it. Fears said, 'OK, I'll take care of that.' So he started giving out lines of dialog on the field to the guys who hit the hardest. Boy, did Mike come draggin'-ass home! He wasn't worth a damn that night, but he was one of eleven guys who got lines."

Now Ritchie is ready to shoot. Burt is to take the hand-off from the quarterback as if he's going to sweep around end; then he will pull up and fire a pass to Kristofferson in the corner of the end zone. "This is a take!" Ritchie calls, and the cameras roll with Burt, who lofts a nice spiral into the end zone--whoops, Kris muffs it.

Ballou trots off the field and confides, "Kris is nervous out there. The crowds are starting to get to him."

Kris is also pissed at the wardrobe man because his uniform isn't right, and it is affecting his play. He drops a couple of balls, spits out "Damn!" pounds his fist. Some of the players try to loosen him up.

"Number eighty-one!" one yells. "Fifteen yards for overacting!"

Another, a tough pro linebacker named Steve Kiner, cries, "Hey, Kris, let us know when it's you and not your double. No reason for you to die!"

Kris shouts back, "Not to worry. I've got arrows pointing to me, saying, 'This way to Kris Kristofferson.' "

Fears and his assistant, Frank O'Neill, a professional trainer, pace the side lines behind Ritchie. After all, this is their big game, too. Fears is the real article, all right, a former All-Pro end with the Rams and, more recently, a coach in the now-defunct World Football League. But with a three-day gray stubble and a tiny hat perched on his head, he looks disturbingly like Walter Brennan as Eddie in To Have and Have Not. He comments nervously as Ritchie talks to Kristofferson, "Our stars are both good athletes--Burt, particularly. He was a damn fine halfback at Florida State. He doesn't want to do a tough shot several times, but he'll take a good lick once."

O'Neill adds, "Kris is good, but he hasn't worked at catching a ball in a while. Remember, he's a musician ... he tries to stab at the ball, as if it were a violin, instead of letting it come to him. That's how he tore a tendon in his third finger earlier, but he got right back out there. Trouble is, when he misses a ball, he comes back to the huddle mad at himself. Maybe he tries too hard."

Kristofferson jogs back to the huddle. Everyone is tired and edgy now; even the stands have thinned a bit. The tension is as heavy as the Miami humidity, like the tension in a real game when it's getting late and some points are badly needed on the board. "OK, let's get it rolling!" Ritchie cries. He leaves the director's seat on the camera to move down the side line toward the end zone. "Right here!" He points out the spot to Kris. "Look for the ball here!"

As the cameras whir, the Miami cheerleaders chant it up, "Here we go, Miami, all the way!!"

Ritchie gets caught up himself, hollering, "All right, gang, all the way!"

Burt takes the hand-off, fakes wide, stops, plants, fires a sharp spiral toward the corner. It looks wide, but Kris, driving into the end zone, dives for the ball, pulls it in, bounces hard on the turf--"He's got it!" Teammates and cheerleaders pour into the end zone, some of the players swarm over Kris, some of them swarm over the cheerleaders. Flesh is fondled, boobs bob and jiggle as the girls soar into the sky. Score!

One butt-whipped lineman stumbles off-camera and falls on his back, puffing and laughing. "For Chrissake, will someone say, 'Print it!'?" the gasps.

•

Afterward, there is a dinner break, training-camp style: Line up with your trays outside the locker room. There are many humorous comments about its being feeding time at the zoo, but, indeed, the slight, bemused figure of Merrick is almost trampled in the stampede. Once the initial terror is past, Merrick shrugs it off; he doesn't mind anonymity. He is that rare figure, the shy impresario. There's a good reason for that. He is David Merrick, producer of Hello, Dolly!, Fanny, Gypsy, The World of Suzie Wong, Irma la Douce, Promises, Promises and Oliver!, among others, for Broadway; and The Great Gatsby for Hollywood. Do you realize what he can do for someone's career over supper at Sardi's, with a word at the Polo Lounge? So they pursue him (continued on page 258) Football Movie (continued form page 202) everywhere, fabulous girls, little boys, old men, dog acts, trained seals; they follow him into airports, into restaurants, into men's rooms....

Merrick is saying, "The rushes so far look good to me, but I'm told the rushes always look good, and look how many wretched pictures are made.

"This is quite a bit different from the theater," he continues, as the chow line pushes forward. "I like the theater, where I'm working with four or five plays at a time. Of course, one bad night of reviews and you're through. But you can always take a play to Boston and fix it. Many a Broadway show has been manufactured on the road, and many more vastly improved. Here we're playing for keeps. It's a roll of the dice, especially in comedy, because if they don't laugh...."

After dinner, I make my way through the crowd of girls on the ramp to Kristofferson's trailer in the Orange Bowl parking lot. Security around the trailer, as Shake might put it, is by God strong. Inside, Kris pops the tab on a diet cola. Kristofferson, the new Renaissance man. By accident of conversation, the subject of the Army comes up immediately. I mention that I was stationed in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, in 1964-1965. Turns out, so was Kristofferson.

"Goddamn!" he cries. "You were in B.K., too? Yeah, I was the general's helicopter pilot. General--what was his name? General Russ, that's it. You were on the newspaper? Listen"--he turns to his press agent--"the head of his office had this great name, what the hell was it?"

"Major Booz," I remind him. "He was from Kentucky distilling people, and the term came from his family."

"That's right!" Kris yells delightedly. "Major Booz!

"Jesus, Bad Kreuznach," he recalls. "That's where I started hittin' the sauce really hard. Here I was, flying for the general, and they're pouring me into the helicopter every morning, shades over my eyes, sackin' out, dyin' of a hangover. Fortunately, in a helicopter, all you've got to do is go up and down. I totaled two cars and four motorcycles, running around with bad guys."

By that he means bad officers and bad Germans. I was a bad enlisted man, and that's why our paths didn't cross, even in a burg like Bad Kreuznach.

Kristofferson props up in the corner and continues: "At least I started writing songs while I was there. I got myself up a group and we played the E.M. clubs in Baumholder and places like that for fifty dollars a night. As soon as I got out, I headed for Nashville."

The rest is some kind of history, including the rasslin' with the devils that kept him besotted for years. "I haven't had a drink in six months," he says, "and I don't even want one anymore. Quitting's done great stuff for my conditioning. I had gotten to the point where my coordination and timing were way off. Now I can punch the bag with good rhythm and run three miles a day. I feel like, here I'm just forty and I've taken a great weight of years off, kickin' that booze...."

He jumps up, pulls another diet soda out of his refrigerator. "I'll tell you why I did this movie," he says. "So I could replay my college days. Robert Frost once said that football was the most important part of college life. Damn sure was for me. At Pomona, I had a reputation for having hands like a pair of claws. I wasn't big, but I was slow. It was like Don Meredith said about Fred Biletnikoff during the Super Bowl, 'It takes him about a week to run a hundred yards, but he gets there.' Well, a light bulb went on in my head. I used Biletnikoff for a model and went back to look at his films. I had pulled a hamstring tryin' to keep up with those guys out there, so I just tried practicing graceful moves instead of reaching for speed and it worked. Christ, I was catching passes better than I was twenty years ago." He laughs. "If I had had Tom Fears as a coach at Pomona, maybe I could have made the pros."

He pauses, reflective now. "Tonight, though, was bad because I was pissed off. I was dropping balls because I didn't give a shit. That's how I got hurt in college, getting mad and not concentrating. I've felt that way in concerts, too, when I just look at my feet and feel that self-destruct coming on. So tonight I came back to the locker room and got over that. I just mind-over-mattered it and went back out and caught some balls!

"And it all came back more easily than I thought it would. Listen, there's a recalled sense of that great feeling, when your equipment is just right and your ankles are taped solid and you're feeling good and tight and ready to go out there and do some damage. I felt like, man, I was a football player again."

He was also a visibly nervous football player out there. "I know," he sighs. "Man, I know. This kind of celebrity is new to me. At least at concerts, they know your music and they've come to hear it, and a few smiles and a couple of waves will do it for them. But the thing about all that attention I get out there is, I don't know how I'm supposed to react. I don't know what to give back. Tonight I had so many cameras in my face I wanted to say, 'Fuck you,' to the whole gang. I felt like David Cassidy, for Chrissake. Other times, though, I feel like saying, 'Don't do that, I'm not any better than you.' But either way, you insult them. You hurt their feelings, and I can't stand to do that.

"That's why I'm studying Burt's moves now, to see if I can learn to handle this celebrity business the way he does. He has the knack of acknowledging them and being cordial without being an asshole who looks like he believes it.

"And you see," says Kristofferson, "that's what I like about athletes--their sense of humor. They seem to have a better perspective about how unimportant they are in the greater scheme of things. In show business, we're surrounded by people who will hype us until we begin to believe the myth. But an athlete can't harbor those illusions about himself or he'll get them kicked out of him fast."

I thought about that after I left the trailer, and I recalled that it was not too long ago that pro football was so heavily padded with pious illusions and shopworn shibboleths that, come Sunday, America could scarcely distinguish between church and stadium. We just moved dreamily from shrines at Holy Trinity and Saint Luke's to shrines at NBC and CBS. The spirit of mindless reverence was much the same in both temples; only the platitudes were changed to protect the duly invested--and not by much, at that. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death ..." translates readily into, "Well, Lindsay, it looks like the Steelers really came to play today." Is "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" any more substantial or profound than "He'll give you 110 percent every week"? And when the deadly liturgy is done, you may substitute for "Amen": "That's right, Bud."

Sure, pro football's rounders used to get their share of ink. But the Paul Hornungs and Max McGees were forgiven and thus redeemed by their father-confessor, Vince Lombardi. Even Joe Willie wore his crucifix and loved his mother. Then, in 1972, along came Dan Jenkins with Semi-Tough and its cheerful rogues, two all-pro football players who drank like fish, fucked like goats, smoked an occasional "anti-God cigarette" and generally stood about as much chance of getting into the Fellowship of Christian Athletes as a pair of masturbating monkeys.

The book caused a bit of an uproar. It was branded as racist (Reynolds managed to reinstate in the script a choice Jenkins line: "If niggers are tough, how come you never see one on a motorcycle?") and sexist ("stewardi and light hooks" playing such rambunctious parlor games as Unhitch the Boxcar and Down Range Target Practice). It even dared suggest that here and there, the spirit of the Greek warriors still burned in the N.F.L. Nowadays, of course, the love that once dared not speak its name not only won't shut up, it wants to climb into the training-room Jacuzzi with you.

Understand, though, that Semi-Tough, funny as it is, did not change pro football by so much as half a yard. But it decidedly changed America's ideas about the game. Also, it at least heralded a shift in its practitioners' spiritual allegiance from the First Baptist Church on Main Street to the last dirty-leg saloon on Van Nuys Boulevard, where the Hollywood stars took their ballplayer buddies slumming. Suddenly, we realized that the quintessential pro-football fan was not Billy Graham; it was Telly Savalas.

Everyone knew, of course, that pro football had long since sold itself, mundane jockstrap and immortal soul, to television; even Lombardi scheduled his games according to the dictates of Sixth Avenue. What Jenkins perceived beyond that and limned, in his own loose, light-hearted fashion, was a return to the glittering, confluent hedonism of the Golden Twenties, when the Ruths and Dempseys and Fairbankses and Barry-mores toasted one another in radiant mutual admiration far into the blinding Broadway night.

The Depression re-established rustic verities: Sport was once again brave, clean and reverent, while show business was skulking, lustful and unholy as Satan himself. Remember when it was Hollywood stars who disappointed their fans by acting like tiresome, balky children about their studio contracts, while ballplayers did as they were supposed to and went out and played some ball?

Boy, are those clays behind us. Pro football, our glamor sport, has dovetailed with show business until the two are virtually indistinguishable. First the ballplayers went Hollywood. Twelve years ago, Jim Brown committed the heresy of quitting football before being hauled away on an open mule-drawn cart. He just decided that if he had to play the Magnificent Animal, it would be less perilous and more fun to take his shirt off and play it with Raquel Welch. Now, I suspect, as many people saw O. J. Simpson ramrod a fire-engine company in The Towering Inferno as watched him play football last year. Young Ed Marinaro of the New York Jets, a tough kid from New Jersey who worked hard to get into and graduate from Cornell, will soon appear in his first movie, Fingers, and is taking acting lessons in the offseason. On the other hand, more Hollywood heavies show up for L.A. Rams games than attend the Academy Awards nowadays.

It is a natural marriage, one that reaches its dramatic consummation this half-sultry night in the Orange Bowl, with the filming of Semi-Tough: Reynolds and Kristofferson, trying to sweat the showbiz poison out of their star-weary systems by putting on the pads again and straining, straining for the clean redemption of youthful combat.

You don't think so? Think it's just a movie? There's more to it than that, good buddy. You heard Kristofferson; now listen to a thoughtful Reynolds as he sits in the tunnel, bone-tired in his dirty Dolphin uniform, waiting for his call for the final shot of the night.

"Let me tell you something," he says quietly. "I laugh at my macho image, just the way Billy Clyde does, and make fun of it, because it's the only way I can keep my sanity and my two balls intact. People are always trying to nail them to the wall or make them out to be larger than they are or simply insist that they don't exist at all. Sometimes I think that if all I had to do for the rest of my life was go on The Tonight Show and make Burt Reynolds jokes, I'd be happy.

"So I've always found it easy to make friends with athletes, because we both understand survival, we know what it's like to suffer humiliations and indignities. Terry Bradshaw and Larry Csonka are good friends of mine, and we've talked a lot about the analogies between football and show business. Take a scrimmage where a coach just needs a warm body and yells at you, 'All right, meat, get in there.' That's not much different from standing around at casting call until some assistant director calls, 'Hey you, the one who looks like Brando, come out here.' "

He chuckles, barely. "Ballplayers are always worried about some young stud coming along and knocking the pins out from under them, right? So I look over my shoulder and there's Sylvester Stallone."

Ritchie's assistants are starting to shout directions on the field as Fears gets his jockstraps ready for one last scene.

"You see," Reynolds explains, "Don Meredith can hide in his cowboy hat, but I have to hide behind put-downs of Burt Reynolds. Still, we're both shielding ourselves from the same thing anti we're both survivors who will eventually pull through. Remember Walt Garrison, that tough running back for the Cowboys? Well, they kept saying he wasn't great, but he kept coming back every year, getting his thousand yards. They keep knocking me down, too, but every year I get my thousand yards."

Reynolds sits back against the tunnel wall and scrapes his cleats across the concrete. "In the end, the secret is that Billy Clyde and I share the same pain." Then he smiles. "And the irony is that we want to change places with each other."

"Flesh is fondled, boobs bob and jiggle as the cheerleaders soar into the sky. Score!"

"Here I was, flying for the general, and they're pouring me into the helicopter, dyin' of a hangover."