Free Life Its Ownself by Dan Jenkins Page A

drove to the TCU campus for an audience with T. J.
    "Your cast and them crutches is gonna help inspire my pissants," T.J. said. We were sitting in his office in the Daniel-Meyer Coliseum on a Friday in mid-September, the day before the Rice game.
    T.J.'s office had a big window looking out on my old stadium. The office was almost entirely decorated in purple and white, TCU's fighting colors.
    Each new head coach over the past two decades had added more purple decor to the coaching offices. He had then lost more football games than the coach he had replaced.
    The carpet in the office was purple, T.J.'s desk was purple laminate, the walls were purple with white trim, and there were the mandatory messages on the walls that were intended to motivate the college athlete who could read.
    One sign said:
    MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN!
    Another said:
    ANGRY PEOPLE WIN FOOTBALL GAMES!
    My eyes lingered on the catchiest sign in his office. It said:
    PRETTY COEDS DON'T SUCK LOSERS' COCKS!
    "Has the chancellor seen that?" I asked T. J. innocently.
    "He's a good old boy. Wants to win."
    T.J. was probably right about the chancellor, Dr. Troy (Tex) Edgar, a man with an ever-present smile who wore purple, Western-cut suits and was more interested in raising funds for the university than anything else. Dr. Edgar could live with a T.J. Lambert who won football games. Like most chancellors, Dr. Edgar had no doubt been promised by his well-to-do alums that he could scare up more endowment in the end zone than he could at all of the Christian Fellowship dinners he attended.
    One of the things T. J. had in mind for me while I was in town was an appearance in the TCU dressing room before the game. He wanted to introduce me to his players, whereupon I would say something to make their little hearts beat quicker.
    "Tell 'em one of them bullshit Gipper things," he said.
    "Like what?"
    "Fuck, I don't know. Tell 'em how you went whistle to whistle against Rice one time when you had three broken ribs and a sore on your dick."
    T.J. also instructed me to attend a reception for the coaching staff in the Lettermen's Lounge after the game. It was going to be a very nice function. I would see a lot of ex- teammates, probably, and several ex-TCU greats who had progressed from Honorable Mention to First Team All-America in the thirty years that had elapsed since they had worn the purple.
    "Tonsillitis will be there, too. I want you to meet him," T.J. said.
    "Who?"
    "Tonsillitis Johnson."
    "Is that his real name?"
    T. J. looked at me sternly. "Tell you what, son. Tonsillitis Johnson can turn our whole program around if we can get him."
    Tonsillitis Johnson was something to behold, if I could believe T.J. He was a once-in-a-lifetime running back from Boakum, Texas, a little town in the central part of the state. He was 6 feet 3, 235, and so fast, he made Herschel Walker and Earl Campbell look like paraplegics.
    Fast was only half of it. Tonsillitis had a 34-inch waist, a 52-inch chest, and could benchpress the King Ranch.
    "He has a three-point grade average, right?" I said. "Over a thousand on his S.A.T.'s?"
    T. J. blushed and looked away for a second. He opened a drawer of his desk and took out a document.
    "I hadn't ought to show you this," he said, holding what looked like a questionnaire in his hand. "Lord knows, I wouldn't want no English professors to see it."
    T.J. studied the questionnaire.
    "They's a conference rule what says a high school athlete has to fill out one of these in the presence of the head coach. I asked Tonsillitis to fill it out this morning. He said he'd take it home and send it back to me. I said, naw, you got to do it here, hoss. It ain't hard, I said. Just put your name down there... your address... your high school. That kind of thing. Your momma and daddy's name. He started to fill it out. When he come to the place where he was supposed to put down his favorite sport, he looked at me and said, 'What we be doin' ratch ear?' I said, Put down