The Franchise (48 page)

The
turistas
waited about ten minutes for the boy to resurface. They looked up and down the breakwater and then walked away shaking their heads.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the old man said. “I wonder where the devil he went.”

“To live outside the law you must be honest.”

BOB DYLAN

“Absolutely Sweet Marie”

W
HEN
R
ED
K
ILROY
heard Dick Conly had quit and moved off to the Pecos Mountains, the head coach dialed Cyrus Chandler. Suzy Ballard answered and told Red that any questions should be asked of A.D. Koster, the
new
general manager.

Red slammed the receiver down, realizing finally what Suzy’s plan had been—ambitious for a carhop but apparently attainable.

Red had released A.D. after his rookie season when a report came through from the commissioner that Koster’s name had been picked up on an FBI phone tap on a bookie operation that included Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Park City and San Antonio. This particular tap also recorded the Texas Pistols’ team doctor calling his bookie on Mondays with the injury report.

The commissioner passed that information to Dick Conly, then sat on it. In the meantime the doctor ruined Simon D’Hanis’s knee and made $550,000 on the side from the bookie. The publicity of being the team doctor for the Pistols increased his orthopedic practice three hundred percent and he was elected president of the AMA.

Conly had hired A.D. for the front office after some particularly intensive sensual lobbying by Suzy. Dick promised Red that A.D. would be kept isolated.

Now that Conly was gone, Red Kilroy tried to find Taylor Rusk. The rumors of his number-one quarterback going to Los Angeles for one million dollars a year were in the news, along with the stories of Conly’s abrupt departure and A.D.’s quick ascent to the general managership. A.D. had not stayed isolated long.

Red Kilroy did not panic. He waited until he could reach Taylor Rusk. He found his quarterback when the news of Bobby Hendrix’s death in the Yucatán hit the wires.

Red Kilroy gathered up all the films of Texas’s previous season’s games and called around the League to his contacts on other teams for them to send scouting films of the Pistols’ upcoming season’s opponents.

The head coach loaded all the films in the back of his station wagon and drove home. He stayed holed up in his basement office for several weeks, watching films and plotting his season.

He considered his options. Time was even more precious than ever before. Stable management was a necessity in order to win consistently. Turbulence and executive churn made winning a Super Bowl almost impossible.

Almost.

Red’s nostrils flared and he smiled in spite of his problem. He loved the rush of solution. There was a way. A one-time shot. No more thinking about
next
, only about
now.
Gamble it all on this season, he decided then and there. Bet the pot.

“Well,” the head coach said, “I came to play, not to stay.”

And play he did.

That season Red Kilroy decided he would cash all his chips. Now or never. Yes or no. Win or lose. Live or die.

Red Kilroy gambled correctly that the commissioner and the owners would never allow Taylor Rusk to move to Los Angeles.

Allowing the new owner, Richard Portus, to offer five million dollars ran counter to every obstruction the League had erected—from blacklists and option clauses to compensation agreements—designed to inhibit player movement and upward pressure on salaries that the second merger had not already stopped.

But Red now put his own upward pressure on Pistols players’ salaries. Had Cyrus offered him the two and a half percent that Conly suggested, he might have had a reason to hold player costs down. But Cyrus didn’t. So Red increased bonuses and salaries. High-dollar football.

This had to be the Super Bowl season, and the coach installed a cash-bonus system for each game. He paid players in cash at his locker immediately after each game for performance: yards gained running, catching, turnovers, tackles, blocks, injuries inflicted, many other categories. It was all illegal, but Red Kilroy had come to play, not to stay.

Red also guessed correctly that the commissioner would punish the new Los Angeles owner. Red watched the Los Angeles films over and over until he decided on the man he wanted. When the commissioner issued his ruling and sanctions against Dick Portus “for tampering with Texas property, i.e., Taylor Rusk,” Red demanded Los Angeles running back Greg Moore—six foot three, 228 pounds and 4.56 in the forty-yard dash.

Also, Los Angeles had been forced to take Simon D’Hanis in a “nonconditional trade,” and Portus had to give Texas two number-one choices in the draft. Portus had to trade two players for Phoenix’s number one, then give the choice to Texas.

Red worked over his three-deep charts, moving Screaming Danny Lewis from running back outside to flankerback, replacing him at running back with Moore. Lewis would make an exceptional wide receiver, fearless going across the middle for the ball, a dangerous runner after he caught it. Screaming Danny Lewis’s running ability made him dangerous on reverses as well as on pass plays. Speedo Smith and Screaming Danny Lewis made a dangerous pair.

After he had been moved out wide, away from the giant, crazed defensive linemen, Danny Lewis never screamed again.

Red Kilroy knew his defense was solid after days of looking at the films in his basement and planning for Texas’s next season, but he would need at least two new offensive linemen. Simon D’Hanis was gone and Darryl “Ox” Wood was old and couldn’t be expected to last the whole season going the full game. Ox would need spells of rest, more cocaine. Red knew Ox could get enough cocaine, but it was up to the head coach to provide rest for the ferocious lineman.

There were several good college linemen in the draft. Red figured he could get one starter. The first Los Angeles choice would be the third in the first round behind Atlanta and New Orleans, who were maneuvering for the big running backs that had finished one and two in the Heisman voting. Both backs were clients of Charlie Stillman and had signed contracts with him in August before their senior seasons. They had believed Charlie’s promise to keep it quiet and appreciated the loans of cash that Stillman advanced them. Stillman would deliver them quickly to whoever drafted them. He would advise them to take big-bucks contracts with low base salary, long-term payments, deferred and contingent upon services performed after their playing careers ended.

Red decided he would take the two best offensive linemen available in the draft. He called Charlie Stillman; they were his clients.

“I have both of them,” Stillman said, clutching the phone in his continually sweating palm. “Wilbur Wilkins I signed on the back of a check when he was a sophomore, and I signed up Leon Donat before he played in the Sugar Bowl. What do you want with them?”

“I want you to hide them,” Red said, “until I can draft them both.”

“It won’t be easy,” Stillman said, changing hands with the phone and wiping the sweat off his free hand on his pocket handkerchief. Charlie sweated heavily when he talked on the telephone.

“Bullshit, Charlie. If they’re stupid enough to let you tamper with their NCAA eligibility for a few bucks and some Italian baby laxative stepped on with crystal meth and procaine, then passed off as cocaine, they’ll do whatever you say about the draft. If they don’t, explain to them how being drafted
could
resemble being taken prisoner.

“I’m going to draft Wilkins third in the first round using our early choice from LA, so he won’t be much trouble. But we don’t get LA’s other pick in the first round until thirty-two. Last. Someone else might want Leon Donat earlier. So hide them and let out the rumor that they may go to Canada.” Red paused for an idea. “In fact, take them to Toronto. Knuckles Nelson is still coach up there. I’ll get Knuckles to meet you. Keep them hidden so nobody else can talk to them, and tell anyone who asks that they are going to Canada. Nobody will draft them without a deal in front, and that’ll keep Donat free until I can grab him.”

“What’s in it for me?” Stillman’s shirt was soaked with sweat.

“I won’t let Ox Wood break your legs. How is that?”

Red hung up before Charlie Stillman could reply, but the head coach knew that the agent would deliver. He
had
to deliver. There was an endless supply of football players to be betrayed and sold out, but there was a limited number of franchises. As Red had told Charlie many times, “It’s my way or the highway.”

Red called Knuckles Nelson in Toronto. Knuckles met the two college boys and their agent, Charlie Stillman, at the airport. Charlie convinced them that the Toronto trip was a negotiating ploy.

“The Canadian league is our only
real
bargain chip,” Stillman told the overgrown college boys. “It’s our hole card. You guys got some international value.”

Stillman then gave them each one thousand dollars and a half an ounce of heavily cut cocaine, which he had put in their baggage before going through customs.

Knuckles Nelson took them drinking and to a whorehouse full of French-speaking girls from Quebec. They were ecstatic the following day when Charlie Stillman told them he had managed to get the Texas Pistols to draft them both in the first round with contracts amounting to over a million dollars apiece for five years—including deferred compensation beginning in the year 2020 and continuing until the year 2040.

They never did figure out what had really happened, but they both turned into Pro Bowl linemen. They had been doing steroids since junior high school, had testicles the size of marbles and had absolutely no sex drive. They played ten years and never caused a bit of trouble.

And that is how Texas managed to get both Wilbur Wilkins and Leon Donat in the first round of the League draft.

Red Kilroy believed a precise question produced exact answers. When he began rebuilding and rewiring, Red wrote down his specific goal: “The Super Bowl, this season.”

After defining the goal, Red detailed his method.

One word.

Red’s desperate, ingenious method.

Faster!

W
HEN
T
AYLOR DROVE
up under the live oaks behind Doc Webster’s, Tommy McNamara was working in the bunkhouse.

The chatter of mockingbirds, scrub jays and McNamara’s typewriter punctuated the white rush of water sliding along the limestone bed. Taylor heard the distant wet crash against the granite boulders where Dead Man Creek made its hard turn at the base of Coon Ridge to form Panther Hole.

Inside the stone ranch house by the cold fireplace, lying on the highly polished slab of oak table, Taylor found all five articles from McNamara’s newspaper series, “The League and the Mob.”

He stretched out on the overstuffed brown corduroy sofa, started with “Ticket Scalping at the Super Bowl,” and read straight through.

It was late afternoon when Taylor Rusk finished the fifth and final article. The final piece was about gambling and the question of whether football games had been or could be fixed. Tommy used his source—called Deep Threat—to reveal that “one well-known quarterback” considered his finest moment in football when he threw an interception, then blocked his own teammate, allowing the defender to score. The quarterback’s team still won but by less than the point spread, which was how he had bet. Deep Threat also did the math on how much cash Super Bowl tickets brought via scalpers, explaining how thousands of tickets were sold through travel agencies in package plans. It involved millions of dollars and accusations of tax evasion. Deep Threat gave the percentage of tickets per Super Bowl that ended up scalped at up to one thousand dollars apiece and alleged that the large majority of the tickets came from the commissioner’s office, certain owners and the host franchise. Deep Threat alleged “a conspiracy to scalp thousands of Super Bowl tickets for millions of dollars.”

McNamara also quoted Deep Threat as saying, “The Super Bowl was fixed after the second merger in order to give Memphis and the American Football Federation teams instant credibility. They had to keep the image of the Super Bowl as the premier event in professional football. Besides credibility for Memphis, it produced several million dollars in gambling profit for those who knew the twelve-point underdog, Memphis, would win.”

All the charges were denied by everyone involved.

The article noted that Commissioner Burden announced that “the Super Bowl will still be hosted by the Texas Pistols, provided they get finished with the Pistol Dome. It will be a tremendous boost to the local economy,” Robbie Burden said. “The Super Bowl will bring in over one hundred million dollars to the merchants of Clyde, Texas.”

“Do you believe it?” Tommy McNamara stood in the doorway, his skinny arms folded across a new red and black Santa Fe Opera T-shirt. His tanned, spindly legs stuck out of ragged cutoff jeans, his brown feet fitted into tire-tread-and-surgical-tubing sandals.

“Which parts?” Taylor tossed the last article on the high-gloss slice of oak.

“Pick ’em.” McNamara crossed the room awkwardly, sandals flapping against the rock floor, the Santa Fe Opera T-shirt swinging from his collarbones like a nightgown. He fell into the wooden rocking chair beside the hearth and looked across at Taylor stretched out on the brown couch.

“Couldn’t you get a smaller-size T-shirt?” Taylor studied the red shirt with the black lettering draped across McNamara’s chest and shoulders.

“Smallest they had in men’s and I didn’t want to buy in the juniors’ with all the Indians and Mexicans around.”

“Who is Deep Threat?” Taylor decided he might as well get right to the point.

Tommy McNamara rocked faster. “Listen, man, I got everybody after me on this story. FBI, League Security, IRS, Investico, Justice Department. They all want my source!”

“So do I,” Taylor said.

Tommy McNamara stopped rocking and looked ready to run. The tan slid off his face into his Santa Fe Opera T-shirt.