Full Many A Flower

the author of "rich man, poor man" dreams of how to win the super-super bowl: one crazy gypsy millionaire and a team that's all suicide squad

You have no doubt heard of me. My name is Carlos Romanovici. I am a gypsy, suffering from a deep psychic wound and unutterably rich.

Among my other credentials is the fact that I am the first and only gypsy to be admitted to the Maidstone Club in Easthampton, Long Island. I am married and have four children. All daughters and all Episcopalians. I believe I am the only gypsy to have played three full seasons as a defensive tackle for a major American university. I am a graduate of the Harvard School of Business, a teaching establishment that led me to ignore all accepted theories of economics, currency, finance and management; to fear experts in whatever field and to reject informed statistical advice. As a result of my skeptical years in Cambridge, I own, to all intents (continued on page 174) Full Many A Flower (continued from page 171) and purposes, the entire state of Vermont, am the president and controlling stockholder of a large chain of television and gasoline stations, among other holdings too numerous to mention, and am, as I repeat, unutterably rich.

About Vermont. By playing hunches and ignoring trends, I had already done remarkably well in the stock and commodities markets when a geologist friend of mine, who was no longer in a state of grace with his peers because he had to be put away in a mental clinic for years at a time, came to me with a map of North America that he had drawn himself on which he had traced lines that suggested to him that Vermont had been linked since paleolithic times by profound tropical forests and marshes with the newly discovered oil fields in Alaska. Vermont, known until recently as fit only for the habitation of inbred Puritans and exiled French Canadians, as a stony waste hostile to agriculture and inimical, because of its uncertain climate, even to skiers, concealed under its rock-strewn fields, said my geologist friend in his daft way, a vast pool of high-grade petroleum.

His insistence upon this so-called discovery of his was received by the officers of the oil companies to whom he divulged it in much the same manner as the account of Saint Joan's visions was received by her judges in Rouen and contributed, I'm afraid, to the geologist's later visits to the mental clinic. Unfortunately, although later events proved that he was saner than any of the vice-presidents he harangued at Shell or Exxon, the strain of the struggle against educated disbelief overcame him once and for all and he is at present weaving baskets under guard in Connecticut. At my expense.

Knowing nothing about the oil business and open to all seminal ideas as a bonus of my straightforward unorthodoxy, I listened carefully to the poor man and studied his map. Since no one had ever suggested that anybody could extract any wealth from the state of Vermont except by such marginally lucrative enterprises as tapping maple trees, quarrying for marble, building ski lifts or renting rooms to travelers on the way to Montreal, leases for the right to drill for oil cost no more, as my wife jokingly put it, than the price of a meal at La Grenouille, a French restaurant in New York that she favors.

Now the inconspicuous squat pumps that cap the wells of my company can be seen dotting the landscape from Manchester and Pawlet in the south to Burlington and Winooski in the north, nodding like steel hens pecking in a barnyard, bringing enough oil to the surface each day to give pause to any Arab potentate.

Wealth to the very rich becomes a toy, an adult version of building blocks, Erector sets and miniature electric trains, a diversion to fill the hours of the day, a game of one old cat for idle boys on a vacant lot. My own diversions are limited. I do not drink or smoke, I am bored by travel, repelled by art galleries, safaris, philanthropy and the competition for political office, the ordinary playthings of men who do not have to worry where their next dividend is coming from. Athletics, except for football, are of no interest to me, and I am well past the age when stopping a fullback at the line of scrimmage could be considered a possible form of amusement. I am happily married and would not stoop to running after women. But I am not built merely to sit back and watch money roll in. Since my wound, and conscious of my racial heritage, my pleasure has always been to demonstrate to the world that I am right and it is wrong and it remains so to this moment. In my heart, I knew that there were other Vermonts to conquer. One day, I was sure, in a random overheard phrase, a fragment of a dream, what I was searching for would be revealed to me.

•

Now to the wound to which I referred earlier.

In my last year at the university, I had an excellent season on the football field. I attracted national attention by gathering in a forward pass that had been tipped as it left the hand of the opposing quarterback and running with the ball for 70 yards for a touchdown. I was mentioned for ail-American in several polls and almost automatically picked as the 14th draft choice by a National Football League team whose name I do not wish to divulge, as I have no desire to embarrass men who are still making a living from the game by holding them up to possible ridicule. In short, I reported to the team's training camp along with over 100 other players, confidently prepared for a career of autumn Sundays full of glory and terror in the stadiums of the country. After one week, in which I knew that I had performed with honor and occasional spurts of brilliance and had clearly, I thought, outshone all the other candidates for the defensive-line positions, I, along with some 30 other aspirants, was cut from the squad and sent home and later--luckily, in my case--to the Harvard School of Business. Though things in the long run turned out well, I have never gotten over the damage to my self-esteem, which was compounded some years later when I met an assistant coach under other circumstances (he was looking for a job in one of my companies) and I questioned him about my summary dismissal. "Well, you know," he said, "by league rules we can only finally carry 43 men and we had to cut somewhere. When your name came up at the meeting, the coach said, 'Isn't he a gypsy? I have enough trouble as it is. What the hell do I need a gypsy for?' "

I gave the man the job he was looking for (he turned out to be absolutely incompetent and is still working for me at $43,000 a year, a figure whose significance I am sure he has never wondered at) and went back to old newspapers and game programs and studied the records of all the players who had been cut on the same day as myself and then the records of the players who had been cut in similar depletions from the other teams in the league. Almost invariably, I discovered that they had been stars in high school and college, had been the captains of their teams, had been cheered by hundreds of thousands of spectators, had trophy rooms lined with game footballs given to them by grateful teammates for outstanding performances, yards gained, tackles made, crucial blocks thrown. Surely, I thought, a team that could go all the way, to use the language of the sports page, could have been formed without the benefit of computers, reports and the cold-blooded estimates of dozens of assistant coaches from any 43 of the men who had desolately packed their bags and departed from their locker rooms on the same day as myself.

My new Vermont slowly began to take shape within my head.

•

At first, I thought of buying a franchise to test my theory. I found that it would not be difficult. My millions and the possession of a nationwide television network, it was intimated to me, would make me most welcome to join the fraternity of club owners. But after consideration, I decided that putting together a single team of 43 players chosen from one season's culls would prove nothing or almost nothing. Even the most obstinate of the believers in the present system could admit that by the law of averages, a mere handful of deserving athletes had for one reason or another been passed over in the early days of (continued on page 217) Full Many A Flower (continued from page 174) practice sessions. Even if the team I chose went on to win the Super Bowl in its first year, I might be at best praised for my acumen as an architect of victory, which would leave matters more or less where they stood before and bring the bitter taste of ashes to my mouth. I did not wish to be congratulated for gypsy luck or gypsy guile--what I wanted was a gigantic demonstration that the entire system of choice in the modern world was founded on illusion and the frivolity and towering egos of theory-bound gurus and false messiahs in all theaters of endeavor. The reputation of the class of men who had dismissed me and scores of other players after one week on a hot practice field would have to be shattered and the mindless belief in their powers held by their countless followers dissolved into dust.

I would have to create not one team but a confederation of teams, a league of rejects who would play a full, scheduled season of games, under the pitiless eye of the television camera and in the full glare of publicity, to choose a winner among them that could then challenge, successfully, the victor in the pompously named Super Bowl.

In the middle of the summer, when the dejected athletes were beginning to stream back to their homes from the training camps, I had my staff prepare lists of positions, addresses, phone numbers. All this was done quietly, without fanfare. Equally quietly, I made the round of cities that had what I considered suitable or at least tolerable stadiums. The major cities were, of course, already taken, but if Tampa could support a major-league football team, what forbade Tallahassee, Toledo, Trenton from also enjoying the pleasures of first-class sport? Out of decent respect for luck, I included Montpelier, the capital of Vermont, among my choices. My guarantees were in cash, the advantages of my having a television network at my disposal were mentioned, old favors were invoked. When necessary, politicians were bribed. In every case, I signed firm contracts for five-year leases. Actually, no risk was involved. From the point of view of my complicated relations with the Internal Revenue Service, a loss of venture capital over that period would prove more profitable than not.

The same reckoning applied to the contracts I offered the players. As I had anticipated, almost every one of them responded eagerly to my explanatory telegrams. They felt, as I knew they would, as I had on that fateful day when I was turned away, that they had been denied their fair chance at fame and fortune and were ready to jump at this unexpected second opportunity to prove themselves. There was to be no bargaining for terms--each man was to be offered the same sum, $30,000 a year for two years, with a no-cut clause and a no-limit insurance policy in case of injury.

The selected players themselves, their names taken at random out of a hat, were to elect their own head coaches, assistant coaches, club managers and staff. I promised in no way to interfere with the running of any of the clubs after the offensive and defensive 11s, the special teams and the taxi squads had been picked by lot in my office and assigned, again by lot, to the various cities with which I had contracted.

Many of the replies I received to my telegrams to the players I had rescued from lifelong obscurity were embarrassing in their expression of gratitude. One letter from a player who had probably majored in English literature contained a quotation from the works of Thomas Gray:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

"Dear Mr. Romanovici," the scholar-athlete wrote, "I guarantee I will not blush unseen. Thanks to you."

I welcomed him among the chosen in a letter written in my own hand.

Naturally, my activities did not go long unnoticed. Howls of pain rose from the owners of the established clubs, suits were filed in the courts--to no avail--the newspapers, those guardians of the public welfare, poured abuse on my head, as I had expected. One eminent syndicated sports columnist, who also was in much demand as a commentator for special events such as the Olympics and championship prize fights, reached a new low in competitive prose by writing. "The gypsy has raided the henhouse." He was a peculiarly distasteful man, but I hired him at twice his yearly income to serve as chief commentator at the games of the new league. His attitude suffered a not surprising sea change in his new position and the authority of his famous voice made instant stars out of a good many of the players in my employ.

I refused to compete head on with the National Football League. Our games were played on Wednesday and Friday evenings, when the viewing public had recovered from the weekend satiety with the sport. At first, I refused all advertising sponsors, contenting myself with a modest announcement before the start of play at each half that the spectacle was being presented (tax-free for me) on behalf of one or another of my national companies. Because of this, I did away with the endless time outs and tasteless promotions of beer, razor blades, laxatives and armpit protection that made the viewer pay a high negative emotional price for his pleasure. This simple improvement met such a huge response with the public that before the first season was half over, I was besieged with offers from advertisers for the same minimum, low-key and now demonstrably effective exposure.

Another innovation that met with instant acclaim was the elimination of the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner before the start of each game. I had never seen the connection between watching an exercise in professional brutality and patriotism and the polls I had taken among the spectators on the spot and the television audience in their homes confirmed my belief that the usual roar that arose as the anthem came to its last notes was not a demonstration of allegiance to the nation but a sign of relief that the game was finally going to begin.

Indulging myself in a long-standing prejudice, I forbade the marching and foolish tootling of high school bands between halves. If my clients liked parades and martial music, they could join the Army. Instead, I picked rock combinations at random, merely by placing small advertisements in the specialized journals devoted to what has always seemed to me to be mindless noisemaking, but which I recognized as a part of our current culture, and had the groups that flocked to my office perform when the athletes were off the field. The change was greeted with screams of joy, especially among the younger element, as the pathetically underpaid musicians in outlandish costumes who answered my invitation blared away under the lights in the autumn evenings.

I even went so far as to improve the quality of the frankfurters and rolls to be hawked in the stands and the high percentage of sales per spectator was satisfactory evidence to me that the national palate had not been permanently ruined by the years of munching on plaster-of-Paris rolls and the sweepings of the abattoirs of America.

With all this, the experiment would have been a failure if the play itself had not been up to standard. By constant exposure, the public had become a body of sophisticated critics and they responded gratifyingly to the reckless ferocity shown by the athletes who had nothing to lose and everything to gain by giving their utmost efforts at every moment of the game. Professional football has been compared all too often to the gladiatorial combats of Rome, but here, at last, the simile almost achieved the status of actual fact rather than remaining another example of rhetoric born in the feverish minds of bemused journalists.

In short, in the first season, the Players' League, as I named it, turned out to be a huge success, but I made no claims and carefully refrained from issuing any challenges to the older league.

But the next year, when one of the less successful teams in the new confederation happened to be conducting preseason practice in the same area in which one of the N.F.L. teams was preparing for the upcoming campaign, I innocently suggested to the owner of the club, who was a friend of mine and owed me a favor, that it might be useful to stage an informal scrimmage between the two teams. With no spectators or newspapermen present, of course. My friend did not leap at the opportunity and was not encouraged by the reactions of the other owners when the idea was presented to them. I reminded him, gently, of the favor he owed me, which was no less than keeping him out of Federal prison for at least three years, and he consented, with the worst grace possible.

The scrimmage was duly held, with ambulances coming and going. No scores were kept and no official word was vouchsafed to the newspapers, but the rumors were delightful. Two weeks later, my friend called me to say, bitterly, that it would have been better for him if he had spent the three years in prison.

Confident now of the future (wrongly, as it developed), I suggested no further relations between the leagues and through the season allowed the sportswriters to do their work. By December, the clamor for the meeting between the two champions was irresistible. I pretended to be loath to risk my inexperienced young men against the triumphant veterans of the N.F.L., and the clamor swelled into an uproar. There was even a speech on the subject on the floor of the Senate in which the doctrine of free enterprise was invoked and fair competition under the democratic rules of the game was mentioned. My hesitation paid off in my dealings with the N.F.L. and was reflected in certain concessions that were finally included in the contract, chiefly concerned with the percentages assigned to the two parties involved. But try as I would, I could not persuade the opposing lawyers to agree to the sale of the improved frankfurters and rolls I preferred. I am not a stubborn man and at the end gave in gracefully on this point.

We were lucky, or so it seemed at the time, that the race in our league was undecided until the last Sunday in December, which kept the attention of the public, especially the bettors among them, riveted to our games, while the championship in the N.F.L. had become a foregone conclusion early in October, with the Dallas team monotonously running up lopsided scores against all opposition and finishing the season undefeated, with the absurd combined total of 620 points gained to 34 points scored against them. At their own Super Bowl, they won 56 to 17 and there were empty seats in the stands.

By a happy coincidence (for me), Montpelier was the victor in our league and grimly went about its preparations for the test ahead of it.

•

The Sunday of the big game dawned clear and balmy. The Las Vegas line indicated a Dallas victory by 24 points. I had avoided Texas almost successfully during my career and was not prepared for the delirium, inflamed by drink, with which the natives of the Panhandle celebrated, well in advance, the massacre of the invaders from the North. One would have thought that Davy Crockett, smiling and in perfect health, had strode forth from the Alamo on Saturday evening.

The stadium was a bedlam of sound, even before the game and the warming-up period of the two teams and during the marching of the massed high school bands, a ceremony I had been unable to prohibit.

We won the toss and Montpelier received the kickoff. I was sitting with my wife in one of the ornate boxes, high above the field, in which a family could live comfortably for months. At the beginning. I watched with composure as Montpelier ground out yardage and advanced steadily toward the Dallas goal. But even as the crowd groaned with each new first down, I began to feel uneasy. There was something methodical, craftily planned in the manner in which the Dallas defense yielded territory. It seemed to me, if not to the other spectators, that they were permitting Montpelier to gain, allowing plays to form and surge forward so as to be able to study, with disturbing serenity, the separate moves that constituted the Montpelier offense. Even before Montpelier scored within the first six minutes, I suspected ambush.

By the middle of the second quarter, my suspicions proved to have been all too well justified. After the first score, Montpelier hadn't managed another first down. The Dallas defense was subtly rearranged and handled our best runners and pass receivers with ridiculous ease. Meanwhile, the Dallas offense moved the ball smoothly through huge gaps in the Montpelier line and their receivers were more often than not completely in the open for long receptions, short receptions and bruising and ground-devouring screen plays.

By that time, I was down on the field, on the bench, which now resembled an encampment of soldiery in full retreat, all hope gone, waiting only for the final blow that would sweep them all from the face of the earth. The coach, Bo McGill, who had led a Kansas high school team to a state championship, seemed to have fallen into a numb reverie as the score mounted against us, and even our spotters in their booth above the stands had drifted into dejected silence.

The crowd, wild at the beginning, was now delirious and amused itself by cheering us when we managed to gain inches on a play or when our quarterback, exceptionally, managed to get a pass off without being knocked off his feet, even if the pass harmlessly dribbled a few yards into territory where not a single Montpelier jersey could be seen.

On the bench, all thought seemed to have come to a complete and dreadful halt, as though every mind in what had been a group of intelligent and resourceful men had been subjected to a new and much improved industrial deep-freezing process. Needless to say, my mind was racing. In the heat of the moment, I felt, melodramatically, that everything I believed in, everything I had accomplished was faced with failure and doomed forever to mockery.

At the half, we were behind 27 to 7 and all indications pointed to a final score for Dallas of between 50 and 60 points. As we walked off the field to the accompaniment of loud, ironic applause, I had finished my calculations. I had figured out, or imagined I had figured out, why the disaster had overcome us. A team that had started out as inspired amateurs had through the trials of two seasons turned into experienced professionals. In other words, experts. Predictable, playing just the sort of game that Dallas had feasted on since August. The Dallas team was composed of experts, too, but superexperts, with long years of experience behind them. If we were to have any chance against them, we would have to play unpredictably, inexpertly, at random, ignoring completely the percentages and statistics that by now were burned into McGill's consciousness as they were into the consciousness of every other professional coach.

The poor man was near tears as we reached the locker room, which resembled a forward medical station during the battle in the Ardennes rather than a football locker room. "Mr. Romanovici," McGill said brokenly, as he pulled me aside to a corner of the room, "I hereby tender my resignation. I would like to remain indoors for the second half. Give out any story you wish--tell the papers I've had a heart attack or that I slipped and broke my leg--anything...."

"Nonsense, man," I said, putting a soothing hand on his arm. "You'll do nothing of the kind. You'll go out on the field with the team and you'll look cunning and confident. You may even smile if you catch a camera pointed in your direction."

"Smile, man," McGill said. "I'm not going to smile again for the rest of my life. What is there to smile at?"

"We're going to change our tactics," I said.

"Change tactics!" McGill was spluttering now. "What do you think I've been doing? I've tried every trick in the book."

"In the book," I said. "There's the trouble. You're now going to throw out the book."

"What do you propose?" McGill asked, with just the merest hint of curiosity.

"First of all, we are now going to encourage the boys to block and tackle." After our first touchdown, the power and deception of Dallas had thoroughly intimidated the Montpelier team and the blocking and tackling had gone from being tentative in the first quarter to a demonstration of the gentlest courtesy in the second.

"Block and tackle," McGill groaned. "How do you expect to arrange that?"

"In a minute, I'm going to ask for silence in the locker room," I said, "and I'm going to make a little speech."

McGill hit his head in despair. "Mr. Romanovici," he said, "these men are professionals. This isn't a high school team that you fire up with a pep talk between halves. You could read them a new Sermon on the Mount and they'd still lose by forty points."

"Listen to my speech," I said and climbed onto a rubbing table and called for quiet. The room had not been noisy. There had been only a small whispering, like the fall of rain on a newly dug grave, until now, and that stopped abruptly at the sound of my voice. "Gentlemen," I said loudly, "there is no need to dwell on our performance in the first half."

A small sigh, like a vagrant wind, swept the room.

"We are now going to forget it and get on with the business of winning a ball game." As I said this, two of the players sat down on the floor and turned their faces to the wall. "We are going to be a different team in this half. For one thing, as of this moment, there are no regulars on this squad. We are going to put in the suicide squad and they are going to stay in there, on both offense and defense, as long as it seems wise."

"Mr. Romanovici," McGill wailed, "they never even ran the ball once in practice all season."

"I understand," I said. "But they all have their playbooks, which I believe they are charged with memorizing."

"Memorize," McGill said. "You don't beat Dallas out of memory."

"I don't like to bring it up, Coach," I said, "but we don't seem to be beating Dallas with the team that's been running the ball ever since August, do we?" I turned back to the men. "In going over our roster," I went on, "I see that most of you at one time or another in your careers in high school and college have played various positions. We have twelve ex-fullbacks on the club, who now back up the line or fill in at guard or go down under punts. In this half, you may very well find yourselves carrying the ball three times in a row. Let me ask you gentlemen a question. How many of you have ever thrown a forward pass in a game? A show of hands, please."

Ten hands went up.

"Some of you or maybe even all of you," I said, "may be called on, when the occasion seems propitious, to throw a pass or pretend to throw a pass and run with the ball when that seems advisable to you. Any member of the team may also discover that he is playing a position, on either the defense or the offense, that he has never played before. For the next thirty minutes out on that field, there are no set offensive and defensive units. There are forty-three football players and that is all."

"I am going back to Kansas," McGill said, "by the first plane." But he said it in a whisper, for my ears only.

"There is an excellent play by a distinguished Italian author, unfortunately now dead," I went on. "The title of the play, translated into English, is Tonight We Improvise. The writer of the play, if my memory is correct, won the Nobel Prize. I am asking you to take heart from his title and do as much this afternoon to win a mere football game."

Here and there on several faces I could see a fugitive gleam of hope, but the general mood was still one of abject surrender. So far, McGill's warning that professional athletes could not be moved by locker-room appeals was an accurate appraisal of the situation. "One more detail," I said, holding up my hand as some of the athletes, looking like men on the way to their own execution, prepared to leave the room. "If you win today," I said flatly, without emotion, "each member of this club, including coaches and trainers, will have his winning share doubled by me."

The men who were moving toward the door stopped dead in their tracks. "What's more," I said, "again, if you win, each and every player, coach and trainer in our confederation, the men you will be facing for the rest of your careers, will receive a bonus of ten thousand dollars." I did not feel I had to add that what they would be faced with in the following seasons would be either lifelong gratitude or murderous fury.

A curious sound could now be heard in one corner of the room, like the growling of wild animals some distance off. The growling grew to a roar, frightening and inhuman, and filled the locker room, and the athletes were jostling one another in their eagerness to race out onto the field.

McGill helped me down from the rubbing table. His face was white. "Shades of Knute Rockne," he said. "One for the Gipper. Two for the bank. Permit me to shake your hand, man."

We shook hands gravely and went out, walking slowly and in a dignified manner, to the bench.

•

On the kickoff, the team swept down the field like an assault of dervishes inflamed by visions of heaven, impervious to wounds or death. The kicker, who had not made a tackle since his sophomore year in high school, brought the runner down on Dallas' 21-yard line. He hit the man so hard that the ball spurted out of the melee and was scooped up by a lumbering tackle who fled across the goal line with the speed of an Olympic 100-yard-dash man. The kick for the point was good and the score after just a few seconds of the half was now Dallas 27, Montpelier 14.

From then on, the ambulances came and went. The ferocity of play was so great that I told myself that if I were in a position of political power, I would abolish football except in prisons and commando camps.

"It's like nothing anybody has ever seen before," McGill kept whispering hoarsely beside me, as safety men dropped quarterbacks behind the line of scrimmage, ends threw passes, tackles drifted, guards changed positions with halfbacks and plunged for first downs or ran lonely weird pass patterns into the end zone. Our kicker, because of his new enthusiasm for going down under his own kicks, was hurt, but a substitute center fell back and drop-kicked a crucial field goal from 33 yards out. Barefooted. Blockers appeared in places that reason told they could never reach, tackles split wedges like walnuts, men whose names had hardly ever made the line-ups called signals, ran away from their interference, instead of behind it, and galloped toward the Dallas goal, broken plays were the rule rather than the exception as the heat of battle made men forget their playbooks entirely and scramble savagely through pile-ups. I had the firm impression that none of our players knew what he was going to do or actually did on either the offense or the defense and the spotters were screaming helplessly over the telephone lines to the bench.

With all order gone and confusion rampant, Dallas began to disintegrate. Since our men usually had no notion of where they were going, there was no way in which Dallas, a highly trained, logical group of athletes, could foresee any development, and the poor Dallas fullback was heard to say, as he was thrown out of bounds by four tacklers, "Why the fuck don't you guys play football?"

Still, with only seconds remaining in the game, Dallas led 34 to 30. On the side lines, McGill stood with his back to the field, staring desolately up to heaven. The ball was on die Dallas 30-yard line, but even if we had had a place kicker we could depend upon, three points would still leave us on the short end of the score. We used our last time out and the last substitutes trotted onto the field, one of them with instructions from me to call for an end-around play. A halfback who had been out of the line-up for the last four games with a concussion of the brain started toward the bench, moving in a peculiar manner. Suddenly, I realized that he thought he had been pulled from the game and was heading for the bench, which would have left us with only ten men on the field, making whatever play we ran invalid. I shouted at him to stand still and he came to a halt two feet from the side line, a puzzled look on his face.

The ball was snapped, die quarterback scampered to his rear and turned to hand the ball off to the right end. Just as the end reached the quarterback, he and the quarterback were hit simultaneously by the left end, who, he told me later, had thought he had been designated to run the play. The three men dropped to the ground as though they had been felled by sledge hammers and the ball spurted out of the melee and back to the 50-yard line, with what seemed like dozens of players racing for it and bodies dropping on all sides.

Our left guard, who had thought it was a pass play and had come back to protect the quarterback, managed to grab the ball and run backward. Meanwhile, the halfback who had thought he had been removed from the game was walking pensively, all alone, his head down, toward the Dallas goal.

"Throw it! Throw it!" I yelled.

Surrounded by Dallas players, his eyes blank with fear, the guard, who in eight years of football had never thrown a single pass, leaped above the menacing hands all around him and threw a wobbly, end-over-end high pass that moved so slowly you could count the lace holes on the ball. The halfback, walking all alone toward the Dallas goal, turned, as though he had just remembered he had left something behind him, and was hit in the chest by the ball. It bounced off him and above his head. He put his hands up as it came down and he had it. He was only ten feet from the goal line and he limped across it, put the ball down in the end zone and dropped on it.

Final score, Montpelier 36, Dallas 34. The silence of the crowd was funereal as our players ran hysterically off the field. McGill was so exhausted he had to be carried to the locker room by two trainers.

•

The official celebration of our victory came in March, after the checks had been mailed out to all the teams in the confederation. I hired the large ballroom in the Waldorf Astoria for a banquet for over 2000 of my guests, who included all the personnel of the eight clubs and whatever family and lovers of either sex they wished to invite.

I made the only speech. I thanked them one and all, announced that I was retiring, because of reasons of health, from all connection with the sport, though I would, of course, keep a strong sentimental attachment to those once-scorned athletes who had needed only a fair second chance to show their worth. Bo McGill would succeed me as president of the confederation. I didn't say so, but I feared that another game on the bench would endanger his life. In farewell, I announced that I was turning over the ownership of the teams to the men themselves, though naturally I would expect to be paid back through the years for my original investment. I did not bring up my strongly held belief that wanton charity is counterproductive. The announcement gave rise to a wild demonstration, in which 1000 glasses were broken and half that number of chairs were destroyed in various ways. The next day, the newspapers hailed my gesture as a landmark in creative capitalism.

I left the Waldorf before the celebration reached its peak and later, without hesitation, paid the quite impressive bill for damage done to the premises.

•

On my next visit to my poor demented friend, the geologist, in the clinic in Connecticut, I explained to him over a bottle of Jack Daniel's, his one remaining interest in the world outside the walls, something of what had happened. As he drank, he nodded politely, but I could see his mind, such as it was, was on other things. "There's a fellow here," he said, "I believe he's something of a chemist, worked for Dupont, the rumor goes, who claims he's discovered a new process--I think it's a cheap way of producing hydrogen for fuel. Dupont laughed at him. I told him about you and Vermont and he said he'd like to meet you. Should I call him in?"

"By all means," I said.

Since then, I have visited the clinic 20 times in two months.

"Surely, I thought, a team that could go all the way could have been formed without computers."

"Another innovation that met with instant acclaim was the elimination of 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' "