Read Online The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels - Free Book Online Page B

was looking for a sound to define my day, that chant was the answer. It would begin small, somewhere indistinct, like a random match dropped in a dry forest, a single voice: “Dee-fense.” A section of the stadium would call back in response, “DEE-fense!” Then half the stadium, and by the fourth or fifth round, the syllables would thunder— “DEE! FENSE!”— from deep in the guts of every one of the eighty thousand of us, a bellow of shared passion for stopping someone who was trying to push us around.
    We could do it with our voices. We could stop the Raiders. We were vital. All we had to do was make ourselves known, to roar back into the mouth of Lake Erie.
    *  *  *
    The cold was brutal. I couldn’t understand how the players were able to catch a hard football or run into one another. Everything I touched felt as if it would shatter. My eyeballs were made of candy glass. My lips were hardened Silly Putty. Packed tight between my brothers, I kept dropping to my seat to rub my hands together between my knees. By the end of the first quarter, I couldn’t feel my toes and was nearly in tears as I bounced on the soles of my thin, woeful sneakers, desperate for warmth.
    â€œI told you, you should have put on those boots,” my dad said.
    I refused to admit my pride.
    Down on the field, the players seemed to be playing against the weather even more than themselves. Brian Sipe, the Browns quarterback, the SoCal native, looked desperate, with a turtleneck underneath his jersey, hands crammed into pockets sewn to the front. He looked as cold as I felt. When he dropped back to pass and tried to set his feet, he would slide on the icy brown-green surface. Offense was nearly nonexistent. Running plays looked like the ones my brother and I concocted on the vibrating metal sheet of our Coleco Electronic Football game, stiff-armed footballers pushing chaotically against one another without advancing. The two teams traded punts and interceptions, neither ever really moving the ball.
    Halfway through the second quarter, I couldn’t take the cold anymore and my dad sent me down to walk around in the concourse, where he thought it might be a little warmer. He didn’t want me to go alone, but there was no way he was missing this. So my eleven-year-old brother, Louis, and I tramped down the stairs to the filthy promenade. It smelled like beer and piss and the flaccid perfume of boiled frankfurters. As we made our way through the interior, the sound of the slightly distant crowd was almost haunting:
    â€œDEE-FENSE . . . DEE-FENSE . . . DEE-FENSE . . .”
    But then, all at once, it changed. The sound rose above its already-impossible volume, a cacophonous roar. Something was happening . . . something big . . . something from which we had been omitted.
    Louis looked at me.
    â€œShit,” he said, a word he’d just learned from the thermos drinkers.
    He knew I’d made him miss something, and even then his freckled baby face seemed to reveal a bitter wisdom, that this was something he would regret in something like a historic way. We raced back to our section, catching the scoreboard on the way.
    Browns: 6
    Raiders: 0
    â€œYou missed it!” Ralph screamed, wild-eyed, holding his hands against the sides of his stocking cap. “Bolton intercepted! He ran it back for a touchdown!”
    The three men behind us were a tangle of arms and blankets and slaps and head bumps.
    â€œTake that, ya fuckin’ Indian!”
    The Browns lined up to kick the extra point. As Don Cockroft gingerly made his approach on the frozen mud, a Raiders player blasted through the line and blocked the kick.
    The game continued on this way, a constant struggle for footing, for position, for inches of advantage. Failure. Failure. Failure. All afternoon, the wind kept ripping in from Lake Erie. The old concrete of Municipal Stadium felt like