The Best Game Ever Read online

  “Why did you use my brush?” Raymond asked, accusingly.

  Donovan didn’t even try to lie.

  “How did you know?” he answered.

  “When you put it back, it wasn’t lined up on the shelf the way I had it.”

  Impressed wasn’t the right word for how that made Donovan feel about Raymond. He was impressed, sure, but the feeling also leaned slightly in the direction of appalled. Maybe the right word is wonder. You give a guy like that a little more room.

  Raymond had been drafted before pro football teams had extensive scouting organizations, and before there were film libraries on college prospects. He was taken in the winter of 1954 as a “futures” pick, which was a throwaway category, down in the lower echelons of the draft where teams grabbed players in a what-the-hell frame of mind. He still had another year of eligibility for college ball. An entire college season went by, and still no one from the Colts’ organization had bothered to travel to Southern Methodist University to scout their new possession. They never laid eyes on him before he showed up at training camp. Even Raymond was unsure how he came to be chosen. But when his name had popped up in the draft, it had changed his life. He had never even started a game at SMU, and because he already had enough credits to graduate, he had pretty much decided to quit football and go back home and look for a real job. Then his college teammates, in recognition of his inspirational work habits more than his accomplishments on the field, unexpectedly voted him cocaptain. These two things, the draft and the vote, had so honored and inspired him that he decided to stick around for that final season. Maybe it was possible for a man like him to have a future in the game.

  The story of Raymond Berry is more than the story of an overlooked, talent-deprived young athlete who by dint of sheer effort, will, and dedication, turns himself into a star. There are players who fit that description on every team. It is a cliché. Raymond’s story goes beyond that. His personality and his obsessions changed not only his own life, but those of his teammates and the Colts’ organization, and ultimately the history of pro football.

  He had always been an extraordinarily organized and self-possessed young man, tall and lean, with narrow, wide-set eyes, wavy brown hair worn longer on the top than the sides, and a thin smile that unfolded at a slight angle that made you wonder what else he meant by it. He looked more like a grocery store clerk than a football player. He was quiet, but not shy. His dad was known to one and all back in Paris as “Ray,” which is why young Raymond insisted on the full pronunciation of his name. He was his own man. He was poised, as though he had pondered everything a little harder than anyone else. This made him generally impervious to what other people thought or preferred, and made him, among other things, uncoachable—or, more accurately, in no need of coaching. More than any player Winner would ever meet, Raymond was his own coach. The way you handled him was to leave him alone. He could be present and also not present, lost in his own thoughts, which ran along very disciplined lines. Off the field, he carried slips of paper in his shirt pocket on which he made lists of reminders and observations.

  Football was a game played for the most part with speed, brute strength, and natural athleticism. Star running backs simply knew how to elude tacklers; great receivers and pass rushers relied on speed, strength, and instinct to shed defenders and blockers. Great players were typically at a loss when sportswriters wanted to know exactly how they accomplished something remarkable on the field. They would give this look: How pathetic to even ask. The very idea that something as fluid and beautiful and natural as an athletic move in the heat of a game could be explained! It was meant to be admired. Athletic ability was uncomplicated; it just was. It was the opposite of thought. Indeed, there were those who held that thinking itself was the enemy, it slowed you down, it muddied the ideal of a pure act. In the split second of opportunity, if you had to decide, you were dead.

  Not Raymond. He was the opposite of this kind of player. His teammates considered him a nut. Sportswriters found that he could talk your ear off not just about why and how and when he had made a particular move, but about how, why, where, and when he had dreamed it up and planned it. He had sketched it out at some point, broken it down into its component parts and named them, rehearsed it a thousand times in his head and then a thousand more times on the field, and held it in reserve to employ at precisely the right moment. To a degree considered hilarious and sometimes tiresome, Raymond was entirely cerebral in his approach to the game, or, more precisely, to his position, because he knew he was suited for only one job at the pro level. He was deconstructing and reinventing the position of wide receiver.

  The idea of splitting a player out to one side to concentrate exclusively on running pass routes was relatively new. It had only been nine years since Los Angeles Rams coach Clark Shaughnessy, one of the game’s greatest innovators, had created the position by placing Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch seven yards wide of the line of scrimmage. Hirsch had become famous running the ball for the universities of Wisconsin and Michigan, and his nickname heralded both his speed and the surprising moves he made in the open field, but by the time Shaughnessy got him he had injured his leg and lost a step. In part to spare Hirsch the bruising contact at the center of the field, his new pro coach split him wide of the scrum. He was free from that position to sprint unmolested into the other team’s backfield, a dangerous target for Rams quarterbacks Bob Waterfield and the rookie Norm Van Brocklin. Shaughnessy split another receiver wide on the other end of the line and he, along with the tight end, opened up a passing attack unlike any the league had ever seen—the Rams breezed through their regular season that year before losing the championship game to the superb defense of the Philadelphia Eagles, who were aided by a cold rainstorm that dampened the air show.

  Football had long been afraid of the forward pass. It was unveiled in 1906 by St. Louis University and it led their team to an undefeated season. It was considered so powerful a weapon that an assortment of rules were put in place to limit it. The quarterback was allowed to throw only from a spot five yards directly behind where the ball was snapped, and his throw had to travel at least five yards to either side of that position. This was to prevent quick passes up the middle, which were thought unstoppable. The rule briefly turned the gridiron into a checkerboard—lines were drawn not just from side to side every five yards, but from end to end, so that referees could more easily determine if a thrown ball met the five-yard rule. Incomplete passes were turnovers, and an uncaught ball thrown across the goal line was a touchback. As a result, teams used the weapon sparingly.

  But crowds loved it, especially the bomb, which could move a team from one end of the field to the other in one brilliant arcing throw. Passes opened the game up to a much more freewheeling, exciting brand of play. Before the throwing game, football was more like a rugby scrum, and when evenly matched teams played, it could resemble a prolonged wrestling match. The checkerboard pattern vanished four years later when college and pro teams loosened the passing restrictions, allowing the quarterback to throw the ball anywhere over the line of scrimmage. Some years later the rule requiring the thrower to be directly behind center was also scrapped, so quarterbacks could roam anywhere behind the line of scrimmage looking for open receivers. Thus was born the rollout, and the option—plays where the ball carrier (like Ameche in the 1958 championship game) ran laterally with the option of either throwing or running. Incomplete passes became simply a loss of down.

  Two other major innovations led directly to Hirsch and, ultimately, Raymond Berry.

  The first was a change to the football itself. It was originally a rugby ball, much fatter, designed to be easily drop-kicked and to fit comfortably in the curve of a man’s arm. To better accommodate the pass, the dimensions of the ball were changed in 1934. It became skinnier and more pointed so that it fit more easily into a man’s hand, and was more aerodynamic when thrown. The change inadvertently eliminated the drop-kick, because the more tapered ball bounced s
o erratically that a quick, short kick might end up bouncing almost as far backward as it was booted forward. Few mourned the drop-kick, though, and talented quarterbacks hit sprinting targets half to three-quarters of the field away.

  The second innovation was more significant and more controversial. In the beginning, football teams fielded the same players on offense and defense. This was part of the rugged appeal of the game. Men took the field at kickoff, and unless they were too injured to continue, played until the final whistle. Substitutions were strictly limited. But as strategies for moving the ball became more complex, evolving from the single-wing formation to double-wing, and then the T-formation and the forward pass, coaches were more and more tempted by specialty players. A smaller, quicker man who could evade defenders and catch the ball with great skill would find his size a serious detriment when forced to play defense, to shrug off blockers and make tackles. There were three-hundred-pound men who could seal off an offensive backfield like a brick wall, but who lacked the stamina to play every down, and the speed and agility to rush the passer on defense.

  Slender, speedy, agile men did not look like football players. Hulking, big-bellied linemen didn’t even look like athletes. But with free substitution all types found their place on the field. The change meant trading a vital piece of the game’s mystique for an improvement in the quality of play. The upstart All-American Football Conference adopted free substitution when it was formed in 1946, and began playing games with separate offensive and defensive squads. When that league merged with the NFL in 1950, free substitution was also adopted, all but ending the age of the two-way player. There were still a few athletes remarkable enough to play both ways—the last was the Eagles Chuck Bednarik, who played both center and linebacker until retiring in 1962—but the fifties ushered in pro football’s age of the specialist.

  Which meant that the key to success was no longer all-around athletic ability. It would take some time for this notion to penetrate down to the high school and college ranks, however, where coaches still defined talent mostly by an assessment of size and speed. When the position of wide receiver was invented, Raymond Berry was sixteen years old. He saw a movie about Crazy Legs Hirsch and decided, in the way Raymond decided things, to become a football player. His father was head coach of the Paris High School football team. Raymond wanted to play, but he was too skinny, and too slow. He had a bad back. He was near-sighted, and because he couldn’t wear glasses on the field, competed in a fog. He wore special shoes to correct his gait because one leg was much shorter than the other. His feet were so big that his nickname was “Skis.” Ray Berry put his son on the roster, but Raymond didn’t make the starting team until he was a senior. Ray Berry was the kind of coach who liked intelligent football players, so much so that he didn’t strictly abide by the tradition of letting the quarterback call the plays in the huddle. He picked the smartest kid on the field, whether he was a lineman or a running back or a tight end. Raymond called the plays in his senior year. By then he was the best football player Paris High School had ever seen, one who really understood the game, and one who had an unmistakable genius for catching a football.

  Along with those big feet came big hands, really big hands, and Raymond could jump. He wasn’t very fast, but became a standout on the high school track team as a long jumper and high jumper. He had always been told he was too slow to play football, but discovered that it wasn’t necessarily how fast you were, it was how you used your speed. He could fool a defender into thinking he was slower than he really was, and then startle him with a burst at a critical moment that left the defender behind. When he couldn’t outrun a defender, Raymond figured he could outsmart him, out-position him, and outjump him, and with those big hands, he could catch better than anyone he knew. Boy, could he catch. He was what football coaches called “a big target.” All a quarterback had to do was put the ball in Raymond’s vicinity, and most of the time, no matter how closely defended he was—because Raymond wasn’t capable of running away from most defenders—he came down with the ball.

  It was the kind of skill that could only be demonstrated in action, however, and in football, more than in any other sport, your chance to see action depended entirely on a coach’s evaluation of your skill. It was what Joseph Heller in a few years would dub a Catch-22. Raymond had skills that could only be seen in competition, but he couldn’t compete unless the coach thought he was skilled enough to play. When it came time to run the forty-yard dash or to compete in passing drills, he was rarely the best-looking player on the field. So his career proceeded catch by catch. No college wanted him after high school, so Raymond spent one year at Schreiner Junior College in Kerrville, Texas, before convincing Rusty Russell, the longtime head coach at SMU, to give him a shot, as much in deference to Ray Berry—college coaches needed high school coaches to steer them talent the way pro coaches needed college ones—as to the young man’s potential.

  “I’ll give you a one semester trial scholarship,” said Russell. “You transfer from the junior college to here. You’re not eligible to play because of the transfer, so you’ll work against our varsity squad every day, and I’ll watch you this fall.”

  It was a chance just to practice with the team, to be a member of what Russell called his “T-team.” They wore red shirts. The coaches would program the T-team with offensive plays run by whatever team SMU faced next, and Raymond would run that team’s pass patterns against the varsity defense. Throwing passes for the T-team was SMU’s star quarterback, Fred Benners, and together he and Raymond started to light up the practice field. Raymond earned his scholarship, but his skill was considered so specialized that he was used only on occasion. He caught only five passes as a sophomore, and just eleven as a junior. At the end of that season he had still never started in a college game, which was why his selection by the Colts came as such a surprise. Without sophisticated scouting networks, pro teams relied on word of mouth from coaches and sportswriters. Some of those eleven catches in his junior year had been spectacular. A Dallas Morning News reporter named Charlie Burton had noted Raymond’s skills, and may have put in a word for him. And Benners, Raymond’s T-team quarterback, was drafted by the New York Giants in 1952. An injury ended his career after his rookie season, but he had friends in the pro game and might have talked up his old practice-field receiver. Raymond never did find out exactly.

  As a “futures” pick, Raymond still had one more year of college ball to play. He caught sixteen more passes in his senior year. There were no other pro teams even remotely interested when he boarded a plane to Baltimore, then a bus for the forty-minute drive out to the Colts’ training camp in Westminster that summer.

  The team was a new franchise, having returned from a hiatus just two years earlier (they had been a part of the AAFC in the late forties, but were disbanded after just one season when the two leagues merged). They were doormats, having won only six games in the two previous seasons, and while they lacked talent everywhere, Raymond noticed to his delight that they were particularly thin at his position.

  He made the team, one of twelve rookies the Colts kept that year, but Raymond knew that it was not much of an accomplishment. The team won only five games in 1955 under its new head coach, Weeb Ewbank, and he had hardly distinguished himself. He had caught only thirteen passes, none of them for a touchdown, and he knew why. He was overmatched by pro defenders. In college, he had run only simple, predetermined routes, hooks, posts, crossing routes. All he had to know was his assignment on a given play. If it worked as planned, he would find himself in an uncovered spot and sometimes catch the ball. In the pros, there were no uncovered spots. Pro defenders played mostly man-to-man, which meant that once the ball was snapped, Berry had a superbly trained athlete in his ear. They bumped him, pushed him, tripped him (when the refs weren’t looking), threw him off stride, and then slapped the ball out of the air or intercepted it if it got close. He could not catch a pass unless he could shake off that man, and he lacked the quickn
ess and speed to get away from most of them. The only reason he caught thirteen passes in his first year, just over one catch per game, was that the art of defending against a wide receiver was relatively new, too.

  The record didn’t show how much the team had actually improved in that first season under its new head coach. Its Heisman Trophy–winning rookie running back, Alan Ameche, crashed through the line and ran seventy-nine yards for a touchdown the first time he was handed the ball. He went on to lead the NFL in rushing and was voted Rookie of the Year. The team’s other first-round pick that year was a “bonus” pick; in some years clubs were allowed to draw numbers out of a hat and were awarded an extra pick in whatever round they chose. The Colts had won a first-round bonus, and had used it to draft University of Oregon quarterback George Shaw, who stepped right into the starting role and had a great first season. Shaw was at that point the team’s most obvious draft success. The speedy little quarterback was the cornerstone of the franchise Ewbank had boldly promised to lead to an NFL championship in just five years. There were other good rookies that season, running back L.G. “Long Gone” Dupre, and linemen Alex Sandusky and George Preas, who along with veteran defensive stars like Gino Marchetti, Art Donovan, Don Joyce, and Bill Pellington were coming together as a contending football team. They all knew they were getting good. But no one was more aware than Raymond how badly his rookie season had lagged. Any hope he had of staying with this improving club faded in the off-season when the Colts signed two new wide receivers, both of them former all-Americans. Raymond felt he was in the center of the bull’s-eye.