MAGIC by William Goldman Read Free Book Online Page B

hard, but it paid, better’n massagin’ I can promise you that, and I read in the papers that Nagurski was gonnaplay. Now that wasn’t the news. See, it was wartime, there wasn’t enough blue chippers around, so to fill out the rosters they brought in what they could get, and I read that Nagurski was coming back, but only to play substitute tackle, not to ever run with the ball.
    “But this Sunday in Chicago the papers said maybe,
maybe
they would have to try to let him run, on account of there was only three fullbacks and one was injured and another wasn’t up to snuff. So if the half sick one got hurt and his replacement too, well, they had no choice but to give the ball to Bronko and they asked would he do it if that happened and he said he didn’t much want to but he’d try.
    “Fourteen years, Corky. He’d been out of college
fourteen years
. He’d been retired from the pro game for half that long and for an athlete, that’s seven lifetimes. He was old.
Old
I’m telling you. And I’m in Chicago, remember, and I’m due back east, but I thought, I got to see this today, I got to watch, even if it’s a million to one against him ever carrying, I got to be there if the Bronko gets the ball.”
    “You said you cried,” Corky said.
    “I took the bus out to old Commiskey Park. See, this wasn’t just an ordinary game, this was a city rivalry, the Bears against the Cardinals, and Nagurski, he was with the Bears and it wasn’t even an ordinary city rivalry—the division title was on the line. The Bears had to win to get to the play-offs. The Cardinals were dying to stop ’em. This was something—think of a Normandy-Liberty shoot out and multiply it a hundred times and you got some idea what it was like for the Bears to be going against the Cardinals, two Chicago teams, with everything riding. If you’d have given the players lead pipes, they would have all been dead after the opening kickoff, that’s how hard they hit. And I was there to see it all.
    “And the Cardinals slaughtered ’em. Just really took it to ’em. And Nagurski sat on the bench. I tried gettinga look at him but I didn’t have binocs, he just looked like anybody else. Big, sure, but nothing special, and in the second quarter I think it was, the fullback for the Bears who was feeling poorly, he got racked up bad and he was done and I thought omijesus, am I glad I come to this, there’s only one healthy fullback left.
    “Then in the third quarter the Cardinals went to town. They were the underdogs, see, but they weren’t going to let the Bears go on to glory and when it got to be twenty-four to fourteen with the Cardinals stopping the Bears cold, well, some people even started getting ready to beat the crowd, and the Bears tried a run and the Cardinals wouldn’t let nobody go nowhere and everybody unpiled—everybody except the Bears’ fullback.
    “The whole park knew it, Corky. You could tell. The word was whizzing all around the stands. ‘He’s comin’ in. The Bronko. The Bronko.’ And I sat there thinking, omijesus, what a great spot for a legend to be in, coming back after so many years, one quarter to play, the title on the line and ten points behind. You lead your team to victory, you can’t ever die after that.
    “And then the crowd started screaming like nothin’ you ever heard because on the bench, he stood up. Nagurski. And he reached for his helmet. And he come onto the field. And right then as I watched him I knew I was the fool of all the world and if there was one place I didn’t want to be it was Commiskey Park in Chicago with Nagurski coming in to play.”
    “Why, Daddy?”
    “Because you could tell when he lumbered on. He was
slow. Fourteen years since college
. Old. Old. It was gone, every bit of what he had was gone, he was nothing, you could see that when he was to the huddle and I knew they were gonna piss on him, they brought him back from Minnesota just so they could piss on him, it didn’t matter