Life Its Ownself by Dan Jenkins Page B

kicked four field goals to get its 12 points. The Frogs salvaged 3 points on a field goal in the last minute before the half. A 40-yard pass-interference penalty gave TCU the ball on Rice's 1-yard line. Three running plays lost 5 yards, and T.J. settled for the field goal.
    In the locker room, T.J. was livid. He wasn't outraged so much at the score, at the fact that his team was down by 9 points, as he was at the indifferent way the Frogs had performed.
    They had shown no zip. They weren't hitting. They weren't alert. They didn't even look concerned.
    "I'm takin' the blame for the way you puked up them two quarters," T.J. said to the team. "It ain't a question of no guts, it's a plain case of no energy, and it's my fault. Your problem is, you done left your blockin' and tacklin' in a bunch of that sorority whup!"
    Girls were the enemy of football players, T.J. said. "If the truth was known, ever damn one of you got spermed out last night. Don't nobody look at me like I'm wrong!"
    He spit tobacco juice on his pants leg, wiped off his chin, and said:
    "I've give up on this game. Fuck it! You can let them slant-eyed sumbitches embarrass you if you want to, but next week things is gonna be different! The women on this campus is gonna get a lot less football cock on Friday night!
    "When I was a young shitass, they said it was bad to mastrebate. Well, it took some time, but we put an end to that myth—and you're gonna do the same thing! Mastre- bation is good for a football player! It's particularly good for a football player on the night before a game. Mastrebation takes the pressure off. Mastrebation has been the secret to more than one football team what kicked somebody's ass!
    "You're gonna find out if you mastrebate instead of dippin' your wick, you'll conserve energy. It'll take the pubic hair off your brain. You fuckers done pubed me out in the first half. Embarrassed yourselves in front of Billy Clyde Puckett, a great All-American, and a good many of your mommas and daddys no doubt. If you'd mastrebated last night—right hand fast, left hand slow, don't make a shit— it wouldn't have happened, and it ain't gonna happen again to the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs, you can bust my ass if it does! Now get outta my sight! I ain't got no more time today to watch worms fuckin'."
    The Frogs thoroughly dominated the second half. Sonny Plummer flapped his seal-like arm for two touchdown passes—they were end-over-end, but they worked—and Webster Davis plowed 12 yards for another touchdown, the longest run of his career. TCU won the game, 24 to 12. T.J. was triumphantly carried off the field on the shoulders of three beefy linemen.
    I may have been the only observer who could appreciate the jubilant gestures the Frogs made with their left and right fists as they trotted past the south goal posts and disappeared into the tunnel leading to the Coliseum dressing room.
    It may also have been true that others down on the field couldn't have understood what several of the Frogs were chanting as they pumped their fists up and down:
    "Right hand, left hand, don't make a shit!"

    Tonsillitis Johnson was a staggering sight.
    There would have been no mistaking him as he stood in a corner of the Lettermen's Lounge after the game. Apart from the maroon satin warmup suit and yellow mirrored sunglasses he wore, he was the young man whose terrifying thighs threatened to burst out of his pants, whose chest, shoulders, and arms were carved from granite, and whose towering, rounded Afro looked capable of nesting a flock of tundra swans.
    Before meeting him, I asked T. J. to refresh my memory about something. Wasn't it against the rules for a Southwest Conference school to bring in a prospective athlete to visit the campus before his high school football season was over?
    T.J. answered with a suitably logical question of his own.
    "Who the fuck's gonna tell anybody?"
    Tonsillitis was accompanied by his older brother, Darnell, a