The Lions used to be favorites

The Lions used to be favorites

SPORTS

By

Jon Carroll

Pro football starts at 10 a.m. in California, when television coverage of the first Eastern games begins. This morning the Los Angeles Rams are playing the Detroit Lions on the local CBS outlet, while over on NBC the Baltimore Colts will visit the New York Jets. We’ll try CBS. Their announcers are usually classier.

As a loyal San Francisco 49er fan, I am impelled to root for the Lions and against the Rams, since the Rams pose the more immediate threat to my hometown stalwarts. It’s not easy. The Lions used to be a favorite club of mine, an enthusiastic, even abandoned team with a strong sense of personality and style. But the post-Plimpton, post-Karras Lions are mostly a drag, the kind of team that elevates a competent nonentity like Mike Lucci into a star. The Rams, on the other hand, are now coached oy Tommy Prothro, a bridgeplaying college coach with an addiction to the peculiar play — flea-flickers, the NFL establishment calls them, a derogatory term intended to imply that you can’t win with that fancy (even, for Chrissakes, faggy) stuff. But Prothro, I suspect, will outlast his critics. He has a history of pushing mediocre teams into championships with smart (as opposed to Lombardi-dynamic) coaching. I’d love to love Prothro, but at the moment my heart belongs to Joe Schmidt’s anonymous laborers.

Among the latter is Steve Owens, the famous backlash winner of the Heisman trophy. Sports writers, in their heart of hearts, dislike anddistrust flashy players, especially black flashy players, because they make it look so simple and effortless and, as we all know, football is hard work and it should look sweaty and dirty and difficult. Usually, though, there’s a player who is so flashy that he gets the Heisman anyway, because his feats can’t be ignored. But when someone like Owens, a huge, slow Oklahoma strongboy, comes along, he immediately becomes a sentimental favorite because he’s so clearly ungifted. The establishment always chooses determination above talent, because they feel threatened by talent. And now Steve Owens is the leading rusher on the Lions, setting the tone for the team.

(The guy the establishment really hates these days, incidentally, is George Allen, coach of the Washington Redskins. The TV experts, beholden to the NFL, can scarcely conceal their contempt for him. Here’s why they dislike Allen: he hates owners, and he wins. At the moment he’s taking a patchy team with a long history of losing to at least a division championship, and the crusty rulers of the game are hating every minute of it. They’d much rather see Tom Landry’s Dallas Cowboys win, because Landry is a company man, even if he is an asshole who has never managed to take his talent-loaded team to a Super Bowl victory!)

The Rams and the Lions fart around in uninspiring fashion, and we switch to the Jets and the Colts. I decided quite a while ago that the McCafferty Colts are generally despicable. The secondary plays a kind of chicken-shit zone, and even their winning efforts' are usually graceless and ugly (the Super Bowl victory, pre-eminently — did you know that the Colts are Spiro Agnew’s favorite team?), lacking in aesthetic consciousness or sensibility, stupid, blind football.

Having said all this, I should note that the whole Colt aura changes when Johnny Unitas heaves his ancient body off the bench and enters the game. Something mysterious and lovely happens to a football team when he squats behind the center in that odd, upright posture which comes not so much from style as from the lack of it. Unitas has an amazing mind, and even when his arm cannot obey the . commands of his brain (and this is happening more and more), the intellectual texture of his tactical patterns is so rich and subtle that execution becomes a secondary matter.

The Colts look uninspiring as usual, but the Jets look worse, especially offensively. Still, the New York club is keeping it close. It’s hard to derive a recognizable style from these current Jets —Weeb Ewbank is probably the only great coach without a recognizable mannerism. His later teams have tended to be eccentric, but that’s primarily because they’ve been led by Joe Namath, who is admirable because he understands what’s funny about football, and uses his sense of humor strategically in a way no quarterback ever has before. But Joe is hurt again, and his team is floundering. Still, like all Ewbank teams, they have a way of playing above their heads. There must be a considerable amount of psychological skill hiding behind Weeb’s flabby-lipped, dull-witted face.

Back for a while to the Lions and Rams. The Rams have gone ahead. The color man for the game is Irv Cross, a former cornerback and CBS’s latest entry in the token nigger sweepstakes. They’ve been looking for someone of the Negro persuasion who could wrap his mouth around the mindless pablum of football TVese, but they’ve been having trouble. They backed Don Perkins, an ex-running back, for a while, and Perkins was certainly bland enough, but his, uh, lack of formal education betrayed him, and the suburbs snickered at his mis-pronounciations. He was cleanly eliminated, and now we have Irv Cross, who is even blander and much more glib. Look for this kid to go far.

The games end. The Rams have upset the Lions, and I find that I’m not as unhappy as I should be. The Jets fuck up and lost to Baltimore, and I wonder how Ewbank will motivate his players after so dispiriting and silly a loss.

The action continues on NBC. The Cleveland Browns, who over the decades have been consistently the best team in pro football, will meet the Kansas City Chiefs. The Browns at the moment have lost three in a row, and another loss would set a club, record for consecutive defeats. Leroy Kelly is getting old, running on memory now more than skill, and the whole team moves slowly, like tired ghosts, sick of the season and each other. I had heard the most humiliating of their losses two weeks ago, as I was driving through the glorious Indian summer of Eastern Michigan, and the Browns had fumbled and fuddled their way through a game with the Atlanta Falcons, a (earn whose sole asset would seem to be a kind of incompetent enthusiasm. They come to play, as the football heavies like to say, to oppose them to the host of football players who come to buy draperies, say, or whittle, or eat a cheeseburger. And even the million flaming trees tipping the horizon could not distract me from moody contemplation of discontent which had settled around the Browns like a shroud.

On the other hand, we have the Kansas City Chiefs, surely the most likable of the super teams, overloaded with personality and grace and imagination. This puts them in direct opposition to their principle AFC rivals, the Oakland Raiders, a football machine controlled by a computer and maintained under neo-fascist security conditions. If it weren’t for George Blanda, whos,e joyful essence not even the Raiders could destroy, enraged citizens might start staking out hotels and airposts for a chance to abuse or injure the Raider stars. And it would surely be aggravated assault.

In their favor, it must be said that the Raiders are hated by the NFL brass with fervor equal to that with which George Allen is regarded. A1 Davis, who is the Oakland Raiders, is an unreconstructed partisan of the old AFL. He was against the merger, hates Pete Rozelle and his lackeys, and as a consequence has built himself a fiefdom which is almost independent from the league office, a remarkable tribute to his courage and ability. He is also a prick, of course, but anti-establishmentarianjsm makes strange bedfellows.

This day the Chiefs look punchless offensively, as Otis Taylor, (who, along with Charlie Taylor and Paul Warfield, is the best pass catcher there is) is effectively double and triple-teamed, but the Chiefs’s amazing defense hold true and they finally prevail. Four in a row for the Browns, and after the game Hank Stram of Kansas City puts a paternal arm around Nick Skorich of the Browns and whispers advice into his ear. God knows what he can be saying — nothing will help Skorich now.

Morning has faded into afternoon, and another Sunday has slipped under the bridge. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.