Books > State of Grace > Excerpts

Chapter 1: The Lynvets

On a mild December day in 1959, Tommy Wall was leading the Woodside Chiefs to a lopsided victory over St. Vincent's Home for Boys, a team from an orphanage in Brooklyn. At five foot eight, 155 pounds, Tommy was small for a quarterback, but he was quick and smooth, a sure if not spectacular passer. More to the point, he took charge. The Chiefs always fielded a talented team in the Pop Warner league's Junior Division, which consisted mostly of high school kids from the many city schools that did not have football, but they had a reputation as undisciplined and poorly coached. Tommy, at seventeen a tough Irish kid out of Woodside's coldwater Mathews Flats, not only knew the game but kept his rowdy teammates in line. He was slick, too. On one play, he faked to his fullback as he dove into the line, faked a second time to a flanker coming around behind him, dropped the ball to his hip, and drifted untouched into the end zone. The officials lost the ball, clustered over a pile of St. Vincent's players who had tackled the flanker. "Yo, ref, over here," shouted Tommy, holding the pigskin aloft.

Near the end of the game a guy named Sal DiFiglia, whom Wall knew from sandlot football circles, stopped by the bench. "Tommy Wall," said DiFiglia, his tone laughingly formal, "Larry Kelly, the head coach of the Lynvet Seniors, is up in the stands. He'd like to see you after the game." Typical of Kelly to send a messenger rather than coming down himself, Tommy later thought.

But not then. At the moment DiFiglia delivered Kelly's summons, Tommy felt a stab of excitement. The game over, Sal hurried him, still in uniform, into the stands. His cleats clattering on the cement steps, Wall saw Kelly in a maroon Lynvet parka at the center of a clump of Lynvet players he knew, if only by reputation: Chipper Dombo. Tommy Vaughan. The one everyone said was nuts, Peter Connor.

Kelly was younger than Wall expected, twenty-five at the most, and more Ivy League in dress and demeanor than seemed plausible for someone with roots in City Line. Wall noticed that Kelly wore white bucks. In Woodside, Tommy reflected, only fags wore white bucks, fag being his all-purpose word for anyone who went to school regularly, stayed out of the bars, or lived in a detached single-family house. Kelly greeted Tommy cordially, if not effusively, congratulating him on a nice game. Then, with studied nonchalance, Kelly said, "We'd like you to come out for the Lynvet Seniors next year. Bring Ted Horoshak and John McCann and Buster Fiore and anybody else on your team you think can play for us."

Wall, whose mind was as nimble as his personal life was chaotic, quickly processed Kelly's words. During the course of that one game Kelly had singled out the three best players on the Chiefs other than Tommy himself. That was part of Kelly's growing reputation, an unerring eye for talent. Most important, Kelly -- facing the loss of his All-League quarterback -- was at the game primarily to scout him, Tommy Wall. Kelly asked him for his address and phone number, said he'd be in touch, then, as Tommy recalled it, "basically dismissed me," as if he were a kid who had been called to the principal's office.

In the years to come, Kelly's occasionally off-putting manner would strike Tommy as curious, as if the coach felt compelled to discourage familiarity between himself and his players, at least those who weren't his close drinking buddies. After all, this wasn't the big time, not college, not the pros. This was sandlot football, for Christ's sake. But as Tommy thought more about the day he met Kelly, he realized that it had been a big deal. That day, sure, but in the years that followed, too. Larry Kelly and the Lynvets wanted him. Yes, a very big deal. It would be too strong to say that Tommy Wall, during that brief conversation in the stands, felt touched by God. But it was close.

It didn't feel anything like that to me when I decided to go out for the Lynvets the previous year. I was just a month out of high school that summer of 1958 when I saw a small announcement in the sports section of the Long Island Daily Press, which was not exactly the New York Times but covered the smaller movements of ordinary lives like mine in Queens, a world away from the glamour of the city, which meant Manhattan. The notice said the Lynvet Seniors, whoever they were, would be holding tryouts the following Saturday at some place called Cross Bay Oval, wherever that was. I was preparing to enter St. John's University, a few miles from where I lived in Kew Gardens, but St. John's did not have a football team and I wanted to play football -- it didn't much matter where. I called the number in the paper, spoke briefly to somebody named Larry Kelly, telling him who I was and of my experience as a running back at Stuyvesant High School.

"Come down to practice -- we'll see what you can do. Bring your equipment," said Kelly, his tone maddeningly neutral.

True, I hadn't actually played my senior year at Stuyvesant, but I had been slated to be a starting halfback and, after a season-ending injury, had been replaced by a kid who was probably going to make All-City that fall. See what I can do? A sandlot team was going to see what I could do? How about, "Great, glad you called, anything we can do for you, need a ride to practice?"

Bruised pride and all, I went to practice. Cross Bay Oval turned out to be in Woodhaven, which was accessible from the apartment building in Kew Gardens where I lived with my mother and two younger sisters only by catching the bus at Union Turnpike and Queens Boulevard, then transferring twice, about an hour trip -- assuming you didn't have a car, which we didn't. If you had a car, something that practically no one I knew had, Cross Bay Oval was fifteen minutes away.

Riding the bus to the field, I wondered what I was getting into. Two years of high school football, though injury-plagued, had given me a sense of how a good football team should practice and play. I worried that I was about to throw in with a bunch of guys with guts hanging over their belts who played something that barely resembled the game that Murl Thrush, the Stuyvesant coach, had taught us. Yes, I wanted to play football, but I didn't want to screw around. I decided before I made it to the field that if the Lynvets fell short of my expectations, which were not all that high, but high enough, I would look for another team.

I found the field, was surprised to see players already in uniform. I located Kelly and introduced myself. He was friendly, if reserved. "Get dressed," he said, pointing to a bar called McLaughlin's across the eight lanes of traffic on Cross Bay Boulevard. "We're gonna get started in about ten minutes." The bartender was deep in conversation with a handful of Saturday-morning customers as I walked in. He looked up and gestured toward the back stairs, which led to a musty basement room complete with an out-of-order jukebox and scarred linoleum flooring, presumably the Lynvet locker room. Grumpily I changed into my pads and uniform and jogged back to the field, dodging the southbound traffic streaming toward the Rockaway beaches. Kelly had already gathered the team together.

"The latecomer is Bob Timberg," he said. "He goes to St. John's. He played at Stuyvesant. Sort of. He wants to be a Lynvet. He didn't know that when we call practice for ten, we mean suited up by ten. Now he knows."

I glanced around, saw two dozen pairs of eyes looking me over, all friendly enough, none obviously impressed. Also a few grins. At the time, I thought my prospective teammates had detected my consternation and were privately enjoying it. I would soon learn that the grins were nothing more than recognition that I was getting my first taste of Larry Kelly and Lynvet football.

As we broke up into backs and linemen, a swarthy, smiling kid a little bigger than me came over, stuck his hand out, and said, "Hey, I'm Joe Aragona. You went to Stuyvesant? That's some school -- you must be one smart guy. And you're going to St. John's? Wow!"

To me, St. John's didn't exactly rate a "wow," not in those days anyway, but I agreed that, yes, those things were true.

"And you played ball at Stuyvesant? Wow! Did you start?"

Reluctant to explain my checkered history as a high school player, I mumbled something that seemed to meet Joe's need for an answer. By then, he was on to something else, about how the Lynvets were really lucky to have me and how he was a halfback, too, but he had just moved up from the Junior team and probably wouldn't play all that much this season because the team was loaded with running backs, but he had played for Kelly the year before and he was a terrific coach and I was going to love playing for the Lynvets.

As Joe prattled on -- that first day he rarely took a breath and talked in transitions -- I looked over the field. Cross Bay Oval was not an oval at all, but a pie-shaped public athletic field surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence at the intersection of Cross Bay Boulevard and North Conduit Avenue, the service road for the Belt Parkway. Howard Beach was just across the parkway, Idlewild Airport, gateway to exotic worlds, about two miles away.

Kelly, I quickly found out, was a no-nonsense coach. Practice was crisp, businesslike, and demanding. There was very little standing around, but several of my presumptive teammates took time to wander over and introduce themselves. I met others, thanks to Joe Aragona, who squired me from group to group between drills. "Kenny, Kenny, meet Bob Timberg, he played for Stuyvesant." Other than Joe, no one seemed to care about my credentials, but each made me feel welcome. More than one used the phrase, "Kelly's a ballbuster," but with an odd twist, as if to say, don't take the coach's comments at the beginning of practice seriously, but take Kelly seriously.

Within half an hour, I knew the Lynvets were the team I was looking for. In an hour, I was marveling at my good fortune at having idly plucked Larry Kelly's phone number out of the paper. I knew nothing about my teammates, but I felt good being with them. Whatever else they might be, they came across as guys who loved the game as much as I did. More than that, they carried themselves like winners. Many of them were. Joe Aragona was just one of a half dozen players who had moved up from the previous year's Lynvet Junior team that Kelly had helped coach to the Pop Warner championship. Joe himself -- though it was not at all evident from his earnest, self-deprecating demeanor -- had been named the league's Outstanding Back. Bob Ferriola, the quarterback, had been the junior league's MVP two years before, though I gathered that something had not gone well last year, his first as a member of the Senior team. Kenny Rudzewick, a big, blond, sunny defensive tackle, had never played on a championship team in his two years with the Lynvet Seniors, but he had winner written all over him. By the time practice ended that day, I could tell I had stumbled onto something out of the ordinary.

I knew nothing of Lynvet tradition that first day. But as we drilled and scrimmaged, I knew that the Lynvets would not be a flabby, ragtag bunch of football frauds who would swill beer on the sidelines and disgrace themselves on the field. I did well in the scrimmage, breaking loose a couple of times, but I noticed the precision of the blocks that cleared the way for me and the sureness of the tackles that brought me down. These were not my Stuyvesant teammates, who almost to a man were heading for elite colleges and universities all across the country. But the Lynvets were at least as tough and easily as skilled. My first impression, which was accurate, was that many of them were the kind of kids who had dominated the schoolyard or the street corner in the days before we started sorting ourselves out through education, socioeconomic standing, and career choices. They dominated not through intellectual candlepower and rarely through physical intimidation, but by virtue of who they were, their unvarnished selves, the force and magnetism of their personalities, their personal presence.

I headed home after practice that first day thinking that at least one thing in my life was settled. I wanted to be a Lynvet. Everything else was in play.

Copyright © 2004 by Robert Timberg