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with Sister Rosalie from the Visitation Convent School, leading the caroling at Christmas … none of that for me. No, I said good-bye to all of it, turned in my rosary, hung up the reliable old scourge, packed away the hair shirt, kissed them all farewell.
    I haven’t been inside a Catholic church in twenty years, except to honor my sister Valentine, who picked up the standard that I’d thrown down and became a nunof the Order. Sister Val: one of those new nuns you kept hearing about, running around raising hell, driving the Church nuts. Val had made the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
and
People
. Old Hugh—to his considerable dismay, at times—had sired a hellion.
    Val and I used to joke about it because she knew where I stood. She knew I’d gone inside the Church and glimpsed the machinery glowing red-hot. She knew I’d heard the sizzle. And she knew I’d been burned. She understood me and I understood her. I knew she was more determined than I, had more guts.
    The only thing I didn’t enjoy chatting with Drew Summerhays about was football. Unfortunately, as I’d feared, football was on his mind that day. It was the season, late October, and there was no stopping him as we set out on foot for one of his many clubs. He wore his impeccable chesterfield with its perfectly brushed velvet collar, a pearl-gray homburg, his tightly rolled Brigg umbrella tapping the narrow sidewalk where the jumble of financial district workers seemed miraculously to part and make way for him. It had become a raw, blustery day down at our end of Manhattan, heavy smudged clouds like thumbprints moving in after a sunny, perfect morning. There was a taste of winter working its way up the island, starting with us. Grim gray clouds were pressing down on Brooklyn, trying to drown it in the East River.
    As we sat down and commenced lunch, Summerhays’s dry, precise voice was going on about a long-ago game I’d played in Iowa City against the Hawkeyes. I made seven unassisted tackles and had two sacks that day, but the play that was lodged in the old man’s mind was the last of the game with Iowa on the Notre Dame four-yard line. The tight end had run a brutal little post pattern, I’d had to fight off two blocks, and when I looked up, the ball was floating toward the tight end in the back of the end zone. We were six points ahead, there was no time left on the clock. The end zone was flooded with receivers alert to the possibility of a tipped ball. So I’d made a frantic leap out of the mud sucking at me and intercepted the pass. Anybody standing there could havedone it. It happened to be me. My nose had been broken to start the fourth quarter and a gash over my eyes had blinded me with blood, but I got lucky and caught the damn thing. The interception became a Notre Dame legend that lasted the rest of the season, and Drew Summerhays, of all people, was remembering it and wanted to hear the whole boring story again.
    So while he was bringing down all that old thunder from the skies I remembered how it had felt when it had struck me during a summer scrimmage that I quite suddenly
understood
the game. I could see it all, as if it were a single piece of fabric: the quarterback across the humped tails and helmets of the down linemen, his eyes moving, the cadence of his raw, hoarse voice, yes, I could somehow
see
his voice; I saw running backs tense; as if I could chart the movement of molecules, I saw the receivers shift their weight, strain at the leash. I saw the linemen thinking out their blocking assignments. I saw inside the quarterback’s head, I knew what he was thinking, how the play would develop, how I should react.
    And from that day on I understood the bloody game, saw each play developing as if it were in slo-mo. I understood the absolute essence of what was going on and I became one hell of a football player. Made the
Look
All-American team and got to shake hands with Bob Hope on TV. Football.
    You tell yourself later on that you