OLEAN -- The thing about the Internet is this. It can transport you back to your youth in an instant. Actually, The New York Times helps a little, too.
My habit when I'm reading the Sunday book reviews in that paper is to keep a pen and scratchpad handy because I invariably come across new books I want to read. (Often, I merely possess them, not finding the time to read them after purchase.) Unless I jot down the title or author, I forget about them. I am a fan of obscure tomes.
A couple of Sundays ago, after grappling with the voluminous Times all day long, I looked at my scratchpad and saw the name "Cowser" on it. For the life of me, I couldn't think of why I'd written it down. So I went to the Internet and punched it into a search engine. Up came the title "Dream Season: A Professor Joins America's Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team," by Bob Cowser Jr.(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004, 225 pages, $24).
Immediately, I knew it was about the Watertown Red and Black.
Immediately, I was 12 again.
The Watertown Red and Black -- a major iconic influence of my youth -- was first fielded in 1895, and through the 20th century evolved into the athletic psyche of that small northern New York city where I was born.
As the scrappy mill town -- like other North Country communities -- lost its industries and population to tax flight, globalization and other foibles of modern business, the Watertown Red and Black in recent decades became, in some ways, the very soul of hope, pride and achievement for that city.
Bob Cowser is a professor of English literature at the small, private, much-respected St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. -- about an hour's drive to the northeast of Watertown. He is in his early 30s, and with his shaved head, goatee and stocky, muscled body (five-foot-nine and 230 pounds) is often mistaken by small children in shopping malls for a professional wrestler. In high school in his native Tennessee, he played defensive end with some success. In college, he forsook football to concentrate on academics as he successfully pursued a master's and doctorate.
Now, freshly remarried with a new baby and local working wife, the intellectual Cowser -- after following Red and Black exploits in the Watertown Daily Times (my first paper of publication) -- is afflicted like many men his age with a haunting desire to make one last stab at gridiron glory before it is too late, to capture once more the particularly fulfilling experience of flattening a fellow human being.
It is a particularly non-professorial pursuit, and he has trouble fitting it into his professional and domestic routine. Much of the well-written book covers that conflict.
Cowser is not the first writer to produce estimable literature on the Red and Black.
Frederick Exley, a substitute English teacher for a spell at my old high school, in 1968 wrote "A Fan's Notes" -- a classic memoir in fictional form that is still taught in college writing classes throughout the nation. He wrote much of it hiding on a couch in his mother's attic. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel, and was made into a film that almost won the Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Exley's father, Earl, was an early star of the Red and Black. Those who remember say he could have made it in the NFL. Earl Exley is today in the team's Hall of Fame (located in a shopping mall just outside the city).
Fred Exley's exquisite prose was personal, confessional, direct, insightful and pristine. It reflected the youthful frustration of trying to meet a famous father's athletic expectations, and failing.
It mirrored the dreams of millions of American males who tasted maybe a second or two of athletic glory on some distant dusty field or diamond -- accessible only through the fog of exaggerated and erroneous memory -- then faded into a lifetime of unfulfilling fandom. It made the young Exley a minor celebrity in the world of literature.
Fred Exley was among the first in the New Journalism era to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, but in a way that revealed inner truths. He wrote a couple more memoirs, tried teaching and magazine writing, but was mesmerized by good conversation and cheap vodka.
Eventually, he lived reclusively over a bar in the St. Lawrence River resort town of Alexandria Bay -- smoking three packs a day and holding forth in wonderful and witty and searing conversation with visitors who brought a fresh bottle along.
Fred drank himself to death and died in 1992 at the age of 63. His biographer, the famous Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, titled his 1997 study of the younger Exley "Misfit," an apt tag that Fred probably would not have found insulting.
Fred Exley rarely signed copies of "A Fan's Notes." If you find a signed one today, it is worth about $1,500.
Yardley wrote that Watertown was a city that has always faced the world with a sort of pugnacity born of geographic isolation and endless winters, and that football has always been a means of proving its worth to the larger world. In my youth, many of the players were factory workers and mill hands. Today, a large contingent of excellent Red and Black players come from nearby Fort Drum, home of the military's crack 10th Mountain Infantry Division, or from the ranks of hard-bitten correctional officers at nearby prisons, a questionable growth industry in that financially beleaguered part of the state. The current star quarterback, Doug Black from General Brown High School, my alma mater, is a correctional officer.
Cowser includes one of the more famous Exley passages in "Dream Season" -- a paragraph that many of those who have played the game of football have memorized to explain their crazed, residual, semi-violent behavior and inability to shed the experience:
"Why did football bring me so to life? I can't say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to go out and do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it. ... Whatever it was, I gave myself up to it utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive."
I didn't know any of this, of course, when I was coming into my teen years, nor how exceptionally lucky I was to find interest in the Red and Black at the absolute peak of the team's glory years. Between 1954 and 1958, a formative period when I was 12 to 16 years of age, the Watertown semi-pro football team went 28 and 1, with two ties. Incredible.
I actually think watching that wonderful team and its refusal to lose conditioned me to expect success, to believe hard work pays off in achievement. (This belief was somewhat modified -- until last fall -- by the lifelong poignant misery of being a Boston Red Sox fan.)
Another eventual Red Sox devotee and boyhood best friend, Dick Pound, and I used to hitch the two miles or so from where we lived in suburban Brownville (if Watertown could have suburbs) to the Fairgrounds to watch the Red and Black consistently put away visiting teams from as far away as Lockport and Rochester and Niagara Falls, or their hated arch-rivals, the Massena Warriors.
The running backs were a pair of light, fleet, elusive brothers -- Dick Doe and John Doe (their real names) -- who would probably be cut today for not being bulky enough to dodge our era's behemoth defenders. In those days they were called scatbacks, and they were blindingly fast and shifty. Linemen, and even faster secondary foes, could not lay a hand on them. One was usually set in motion out of the Red and Black's favored standard T-formation, and they had good hands, too, receiving pass after pass, often for touchdowns.
I was short, too, and weighed next to nothing. I loved the Doe brothers and fancied I could be like them. I could not. I soon realized their talent was exceptional.
Their father, a short, fanatical man with a red face and resounding voice under a trademark fedora hat, would race up and down the sidelines on his stubby legs yelling encouragement. Most players went "both ways" in those days, playing defense as well as offense, and when the speedy Doe brothers were on defense, the football-wise elder Doe -- unchallenged by coach Boots Gaffney -- would scream "PAAAASSS, IT'S A PAAAASSSS!" whenever he suspected an aerial assault from the competition. Usually, he was right. His sons would listen to him, too, glancing over and adjusting position as he hollered.
Something was magic about the Red and Black defense. In one of those terrific seasons, the Watertown team allowed only 50 points total by the opposition. The offense, run by a reliably inventive quarterback named Cracker Fox, was also spectacular.
Another object of my sports adulation was Earl Cole, the tough, sturdy fullback who ran right over men twice his size. Once I saw him carried off the field on a stretcher just before half-time with a sprain in his back. You could get real close in those days.
I heard him tell the trainer, "I think it's broken." He came back in the fourth quarter and pounded in two more touchdowns.
The Does, Fox and Cole are in the team's Hall of Fame. So is Dick Pound's older brother, Bob Pound, who was inducted in 1995, and is also a great friend of my family. Bob Pound -- five years older than Dick and me -- played quarterback as I was finishing up high school.
With a career interrupted by Army service, he became the Red and Black field general against whom all others were eventually measured. He also played defensive back. His peak years were in the early 1970s, and he was one tough sumbitch.
In 1973, after suffering a dislocated shoulder two weeks earlier and unable to stand watching the team lose without him, Bob told his gorgeous brunette wife, Jane, he was going to go down on the sidelines to offer advice. Instead he went into the locker room, got a cortisone shot to dull the pain, and donned a jersey with another player's number to fool Jane into thinking he was still off field.
In the first quarter, Bob quickly threw two touchdown passes, but it started to rain, and when he tried to help recover a running back's fumble, an opponent launched a helmet-first dive into the ailing shoulder.
"I went back to the bench with my dislocated shoulder just about dragging on the field," Bob remembered in conversation last week. "I didn't fool my wife with that one."
Cowser's new wife, Candace, like most football wives, also has reservations about his playing, but comes to accept it when she realizes the fulfillment it brings her husband, who is quite mature in his perspective about unattainable fame and why he's doing it. After all, writes Cowser, "this was a league of beer guts and knee braces and day jobs, talent in its twilight and precious little glory."
Cowser does not write with Exley's natural, elegant style, but he approaches it at points -- especially in his courageous exploration of the racial tensions that crop up with the inclusion of black players from Fort Drum in a county (Jefferson) that is 88 percent white.
Cowser does have one tendency Exley didn't -- quoting other renowned football authors who show insight into meaning of the game: George Plimpton, Don DeLillo, Archibald MacLeish, Willie Morris. Cowser doesn't get much playing time with the Red and Black, despite his devotion in driving 120 miles round-trip for practices. He ends up leaving the team after one season and becoming part-owner (with former coach Mike Britton) of a new team in the league, the St. Lawrence Valley Trailblazers. It costs him about $700 -- a sum his understanding wife, owner of a beauty salon, coughs up.
The Trailblazers are hapless, losing every game of the new season, and getting outscored a record 499-19 on the campaign. But Cowser gets to play every down. He eventually becomes team captain, and is fond of quoting Shakespeare's Henry V and his immortal St. Crispin's Day speech before the Battle of Agincourt to his impressed teammates.
He concludes the book with "It's all nonsense. All of it. A game."
But you can tell he doesn't really mean it.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Jan. 18 2005 |