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Nightmare in Manhattan. In his junior year, Bobby and Texas were beaten only twice, by Texas Christian and Rice. As a senior, Bobby went to work for a new coach: Blair Cherry, who gave him his first lessons in the intricacies of the T. Meanwhile, Bobby had also found time to marry a pretty Texas coed, Carol Ann Krueger, but his first love was still football. Coach Cherry recalls taking Bobby and his wife to the Chicago Cardinal camp in the summer of 1947. "Bobby never forgot for a moment that the purpose of the trip was to learn about the T," says Cherry. "On the way up, we'd all get out of the car when we stopped for gas. Bobby would get his wife around behind the car, have her bend over and serve as a center while he practiced the way he thought a T-quarterback would play. Those service-station attendants probably thought he was crazy." Bobby and Texas lost only one game that year—to S.M.U. and Doak Walker, 14-13.
In his last year at Texas, Bobby made nearly every All-America team in the country; the pros were waiting for him with open pocketbooks. In those days the newly formed All-America Conference was fighting for its life (it eventually folded in 1949), and competitive bidding gave players a better break than they have known before or since. Bobby finally signed with the Chicago Bears for a bonus of $10,000, a salary of $18,000 and promised raises of $1,000.
For a couple of years, Bobby was booted around from team to team. The usually astute George Halas, coach and owner of the Bears, let the future star slip through his fingers and traded him to the now defunct New York Bulldogs.
"Brother, what a team," says Layne as he looks back on those days in Manhattan. "What a nightmare! I weighed 205 Ibs. when I reported; I weighed 176 when the season was over. We won only one and tied one out of 18 games. At the end of 1949 I was ready to give up football, but I got traded to Detroit."
Up from Snooker. When Layne joined them, the Lions, like almost every other professional team, had money troubles. Professional football had always had money troubles, and it had never become quite respectable. The fact that the first game on record (between Latrobe, Pa. and Jeannette, Pa. in August 1895) was sponsored by the Latrobe Y.M.C.A. impressed no one. Professional football, in its early days, had the social standing of snooker pool—it might be legal, but no nice person would bother with it.
Here and there, though, there were college men who developed a taste for the game. Most of the time they were paid off in black eyes and broken heads—plus whatever a teammate could pick up by passing the hat. But they played on. Princeton's Arthur Poe and Yale's "Pudge" Heffelfinger turned out in Pittsburgh around the turn of the century. In 1902 a young man named Connie Mack claimed the "Championship of the U.S." for his Philadelphia Athletics after risking the good left arm of his prize pitcher, Rube Waddell, in the Athletics' football lineup. And in the title game that year, Pittsburgh fielded another big-league pitcher: a fireball artist named Christy Mathewson.