Free A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley

asked, with something like concern, where and why I was going, but by then it was already too late. Before leaving I wanted to say something to him. He had so successfully intimidated me up to this point that it occurred to me he did not know the real sound of my voice. In college I had gone about with a brilliant, balding Boston-Irishman, Slattery, who was much given to a certain expression: “ You ’ re some sack of potatoes, you are . ” At the moment before turning and leaving, that is what I said to Grant. They were the weirdest words that ever issued from my mouth; the voice was not mine at all but my balding, Irish friend ’ s!
     
    The next few days were among the longest and least comfortable of my life. No sooner had I reached the haven of my aunt ’ s couch than it occurred to me that Grant had been the city I had been seeking all along—the magnanimous city. What else, I reasoned, could he have done but hire me after subjecting me to such humiliation? Whether or not this was the case, in my mind I played out that interview over and over again, trying to inject into its slightest nuances the most preposterous import. I might be there yet, the scene having expanded itself into an O ’ Neill-like drama, had I not read in the newspapers that Steve Owen was being fired.
    For months I hadn ’ t been able to read anything except advertisements. Sustaining my literary fantasy had required such fierce concentration that my energies were not in long enough supply for even cursory reading, but now, in boredom, I forced myself to read. Even then I did not at first understand what was happening to Owen. The newspapers kept using the euphemisms “ retiring ” and “ resigning, ” and it was only after I had gone to the columnists that I began to piece together the truth. When I did so, I was outraged. Owen had always maintained that defenses win football games, professional football was increasingly deferring to the forward pass as the ultimate and only weapon, and apparently Owen was being asked to step aside by men whose vision of the game proclaimed it unalterably given over to offensive techniques. These “ men ” were of course shadowy, never identified; but one had only to understand the childishly petulant character of the New York sportswriter (he takes every New York defeat as if he had been out there having his own face rubbed in the dirt) to know who the men were. Owen had been losing for a number of years now, and the writers had been on him. Victorious, there was something nauseatingly reprehensible in their doleful, sentimental invitations to the public to come to the Polo Grounds on Sunday to witness Owen ’ s swan song as head coach.
    I would never have left the davenport that murderously damp Sunday had I not read that Frank Gifford was starting for the Giants at halfback. When I read that, my mind—as isolated minds are wont to do, offered the least stimulation—began to fabricate for itself a rather provocative little drama. I began to imagine how wonderful it would be if Gifford single-handedly devastated the Detroit Lions as a farewell present for Owen. I had had encounters with both of these men at different times in my life. In a way both had given me something, Gifford a lesson in how to live with one ’ s scars, and Owen no less than perhaps my first identity as a human being. And so that bleak, cold Sunday, I rose—to the astonishment of my aunt, I might add—from the davenport, bundled up as warmly as I could, took the commuting train to Grand Central, sought directions to the Polo Grounds, and got on the subway to the Bronx.
    I met Steve Owen in the late thirties or early forties, when I was somewhere between the ages of eight and eleven. I suspect it was closer to the time I was eight, for I remember very little of what was said, remembering more the character of the meeting—that it was not an easy one. My father introduced me to him, or rather my father, when the atmosphere was