Nov. 24, 1989: Great Job, Except You Gotta Work Sundays

Way the day before Thanksgiving is around this place, no one is left around except the ones that haven’t anyplace else to go, like it is day before Christmas and around New Year’s and all such holidays. You’d think it’d be the best time to get serious work done, with two-thirds the gang gone and all, but one person’s singing “Over the River and Through the Woods” most the day, another person’s on his phone to his family all the time and you’d think it was Albania where they were from the amount of shouting he had to do to make himself heard, and another person just wants to mingle, and so even if working serious was your intent you couldn’t any more get serious work done than you could make a turkey dinner out of venison.

People that hang around are people who live here, people without any family and people whose family live too far away so it’s too expensive to go, which means it’s the usual die-hards holding down the fort-- O’Strowsky, Bulk, Baumer, Mort, and Don and Maggie, plus the postcard lady, the coin guys (King George is around, from the sound of things), and the old-cars crew. Baumer can even act mellow day before Thanksgiving because all the deadlines are dead and no one’s around for him to call on the phone and harass for money or lie about position.

Day like this, when it winds down around toward the end and everyone only moves fast when they’re cleaning up their desk and bustling out the door, people talk about whatever pops into their heads, which with sports guys is sports. Bulk I think it was started playing the “stupid kicker” game, where he names off a kicker and anyone else who’s playing has to name off someone worse. Surprising amount of ground rules with this game, like there are some kickers so stupid that they’re off limits. Happy Feller is one, because even if Happy Feller had been good he’d still have been Happy Feller, and that’s enough to win the stupid-kicker game by itself. Dean Dorsey is another one off limits. He’s a Packer kicker who once shanked an extra point so bad it went out of bounds. Wasn’t a Packer kicker for long, shanking extra points out of bounds like that, but longevity’s not a requirement in the stupid-kicker game.

Mort had won the stupid kicker game with Richie Szaro, so then people started talking about stupid positions in general, and what the most useless job is on a football team. Obviously you talk to a football coach he tells you every position’s important on a football team, and that’s Baumer’s line, too, but guys with imagination, like the editors, don’t settle for that explanation.

“I don’t know if it’s useless or not, but I know the best position on a football team,” Bulk says. “Backup quarterback. What’s better than backup quarterback? You go in when the starter’s hurt. If you do good you’re a hero. You do bad, what’d you expect? You’re a backup quarterback. Look at Zeke Bratkowski all those years. Goes in when Starr is hurt, throws three touchdown passes, he’s a hero, next week he’s on the bench again. No pressure in that. Gary Cuozzo, Earl Morrall, all those guys. Backup quarterbacks. Nothing better.”

“Yeah, you gotta draw the line between the backup quarterback and the third-string quarterback,” Mort says. “Third-string, you never even get to play. Maybe you’re on the taxi squad, maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re cut because they need another offensive tackle that week. Drive you nuts, living like that. It’s like this issue of the magazine they need you to edit the feature article and next issue they decide to do a photo spread instead, so it’s so long. Second-string, though, they always need you. Good job there.”

“What I think the guy is with the best job is the guy hikes the ball to the punter,” O’Strowsky says, and right away everyone knows he’s right, that the best job on a football team is the guy who hikes the ball to the punter or kicker, but they let him go on and say why anyway. “You’re not the usual center, so you’re not getting beat up on all game by these nose tackles and big defensive tackles and middle linebackers. You got maybe eight plays max where you’re in. Less if your team is any good. Eight plays is about the right amount to play in a game. Keeps the blood flowing, keeps you in shape. People are trying to kind of speed-rush past you and you’re trying to get the ball hiked and then hustle downfield, so it’s not a deal where you have to be 300 pounds and so muscle-bound you can’t lift your arms over your head. Not saying a skinny guy like me could do it, but almost. Gotta believe you could do that job until you’re 40, at least, without so much damage as a sore wrist when you get up in the morning.”

“Not like Jim Otto, where it takes him half the day just to get out of bed and the other half the day just to get back in bed,” says Mort, who comes from the place where Jim Otto went to high school.

“Yeah, right, like that,” O’Strowsky says.

“Gets paid enough, too,” Mort says, and heads nod around the area, even Baumer, seeing as the talk had turned to dollars-and-cents money. "Great job."

"Great job," O'Strowsky says, but with that Polish-Irish glint in his voice, "great job all right, but you gotta work Sundays."

“Think it’s too late for me? I think I’ve got the wrists for the job,” Bulk says. He may have the wrists for the job but the rest of him is in need of about 100 pounds of development.

“Perhaps,” O’Strowsky says, deadpan like he can get. “Why don’t you go home and see? In fact, why don’t we all go home and see?” And everyone who was pretending to work stops pretending, grabs their coats and bolts. No one cares to stop them.