didn’t like it especially. If you ever want to get a Mansfield mad, pick on another Mansfield. We’ve got almost too much family pride. I remember there was a big kid around Campbell’s Cabins, where we lived for a while. I did everything I could to avoid him. But he picked on my little brother Odie, and I went after him and nearly coldcocked him. I had no fear when one of my brothers was being picked on. But even after I whipped that big kid, I was still scared of him.”
Bill tells an old family story: “This guy, thirty-five, got into an altercation with our grandfather, Pa, when Pa was sixty-five years old. Our Uncle Granville was seventeen, and he goes flying through the air, kicks the guy’s ass through the dusty streets till the guy whimpers like a dog and gets out of there. My dad’s eyes gleam when he tells about it. That’s why it was good having Moynihan in the U.N. You can’t take too much shit.”
Ray and Bill Mansfield and I were drinking and getting profound in this place in Kennewick, and Bill said to Ray, “Remember when we were working out — I was just getting ready to go to Washington State — and you said, ‘Bill, don’t ever, ever accept getting beat. Don’t ever let a guy beat you and walk away and say, “Well, he beat me.” You have to fight and scratch and bite. If you’re bleeding and crying and scratching and shitting, keep on fighting and that guy will quit. As long as you don’t.’”
Not many occupations today bring together fighting and working the way football does. But working was a kind of fighting for Owen. And both working and fighting were kinds of sports. “I’d get a kick out of troweling cement with other trowelers,” he said. “Out of staying about the length of this table ahead of the other fella. That would tickle me to death.” The story about their father that made Ray’s and Bill’s eyes light up the brightest — Bill almost boiled up out of his chair telling it — was the one about the steps.
“He laid and finished nine sets of steps in one day. Did a Cool Hand Luke shot. Then two thousand, three thousand square feet of concrete. It was superhuman. How it happened: It was a Monday, and the man told him it had to be done by Wednesday. My dad said, ‘Don’t worry.’ The man said, ‘Well, you better get it done.’
“That made my dad mad. So he said, ‘I’ll show you.’ And he did it all in eight hours. Edged it, everything. He was running the whole time, and he was forty-five. When he finished, there was smoke coming off his body, but there were the nine sets of steps. All those assholes were scratching their heads and saying, How did he do it? It’s still a legend around here.”
Right after Ray’s last season, Owen was talking to Gene and Odie, and they told him he’d better do something about his hair — he’d let it grow awfully long. “I’m not going to get a haircut,” Owen said. “I’m going to go buy a dress.” And he rocked back laughing and suddenly died.
Afterward, Ray’s brother told him Owen had been glad that Ray was retiring from football. Owen had said he’d always thought of Ray as a boy, of course, but that Ray was getting too old to play a kid’s game.
How May Human Chimneys and Fresh-Air Fiends Share the Same World?
T O CONFIRMED SMOKERS, SMOKE is a balm. To devout non-smokers, it is an abomination. Just what we need: another religious war.
Cigarette smoking, I am smugly pleased to say, is one of the few halfway legal things that have never caught my fancy. I can enjoy a joint or a good cigar if someone hands me one (aren’t you glad people don’t pass the latter around the way they do the former?), and when I was younger I smoked a pipe often enough that I gave some thought to developing the knack of gesturing, in conversation, with the stem. Then one day I bade an expansive “Hey there!” to someone I knew, forgetting that my pipe was in my mouth, and the whole thing — stem, bowl, ashes,