HERB SCOTT’S HELMET
Kevin Grauke
Other than my four cherished Star Wars posters from Burger King, everything in my room when I was nine years old back in 1978 was silver and blue, the colors of the Dallas Cowboys. The team poster, with the players standing in six numerically ordered rows, was thumbtacked to the wall beside my bed, the sheets of which were festooned with the names of all the NFL teams except for the recently added Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Seattle Seahawks. I had all of the Cowboys memorized, from placekicker Efren Herrera (#1) to tight end Billy Joe DuPree (#89). Tony Dorsett (#33) had a poster all his own tacked above my desk. On it, he was evading the grasp of future Hall-of-Famer Carl Eller, one of the famed Purple People Eaters of the Minnesota Vikings.
From my window, I could see Mr. and Mrs. Depew’s house, which looked identical to ours and all the other ones in our subdivision of cloned ranch houses on the edge of Garland, a nondescript suburb on the northeast edge of Dallas. The Depews were not from Texas, and the Cowboys meant nothing to them. Nonetheless, one day, Mrs. Depew told me about a friend of hers who worked for the team. My mouth must have fallen open. I now knew someone who knew someone who worked for my favorite team! He works in the equipment room, she told me, and then she said that she’d told her friend that she knew a really big fan of the team. I probably smiled at this, knowing that she was talking about me. It was at this point that she brought her hands from behind her back and handed me a Dallas Cowboys helmet. Just like that, I was holding a genuine, honest-to-God Dallas Cowboys helmet! It was heavy.
I thanked her and thanked her, but whose helmet was it?
She shook her head. “I have no idea. I just picked one that wasn’t too beat-up.”
On the white stripe that divided the starred sides of the helmet, a blue embossed label (clearly from one of those hand-held contraptions with the alphabet on a wheel that my mom used) said SCOTT. My brain whirred through the roster. Was this Scott Laidlaw’s helmet? I asked Mrs. Depew even though she wouldn’t know. She told me she thought there was a number inside. I looked inside. 68. That was not Scott Laidlaw’s number. His was #35. Who was #68? I envisioned the team poster and went down the rows. #67 was Pat Donovan, and #68 was . . . Herb Scott, offensive left guard. I now owned the actual helmet of Herb Scott, Dallas Cowboy! Had he worn this very helmet earlier that year in Super Bowl XII, when the Cowboys crushed the Denver Broncos 27-10?
It’s not difficult to imagine what I did next: I unsnapped the chinstrap and put it on. It wobbled left and right, forward and backward. I wore it home, delirious. But then, back in my bedroom, by myself with an actual Dallas Cowboys helmet, a worm wriggled in my brain. Mrs. Depew had said that she’d “just picked one that wasn’t too beat up.” That meant she hadn’t been given no choice but to take this one. That meant she could’ve picked others but didn’t. That meant she could’ve picked the helmet of Roger Staubach. Or Tony Dorsett. Robert Newhouse. Randy White. Ed “Too Tall” Jones. Harvey Martin. Drew Pearson. Charlie Waters. Cliff Harris. Golden Richards. Each name hurt. How could she have been so incredibly stupid? I looked at my poster, thinking about all the other less exciting Cowboys who would’ve still been better than Herb Scott: Mel Renfro. D. D. Lewis. Mike Hegman. Bob Breunig. Larry Cole. Even Scott Laidlaw, who almost never got the ball. Was there even anybody on the team who would’ve been worse? The other offensive lineman would’ve been just as bad but not worse. So, no, Herb Scott’s helmet was the worst helmet she could’ve picked. Of this I was certain. I cried angry tears at what had been denied me.
I would like to say that these tears were immediately followed by an epiphanic moment of self-awareness and that “my eyes burned with anguish and anger” as did the narrator’s at the end of James Joyce’s “Araby,” but this didn’t happen. Instead I burned furiously for weeks whenever I thought of what so nearly could have been mine. Gradually, however, over the next few weeks, I cooled, forgetting about what could have been and appreciating what was. When I grew hot again, it was with shame at my ungratefulness. Mrs. Depew had been under no obligation to do anything nice for me, the little boy across the street, and yet she’d gone out of her way to get me something that she understandably believed would mean a great deal to me. And how had I repaid her? With rage, though thankfully she never witnessed it.
The Depews moved away the following year, and I moved on to middle school, then high school, then college. My sophomore year, Jerry Jones bought the team, and on his first day as owner, he fired the only head coach the Cowboys had ever known, the legendary Tom Landry. I hated Jones for this, and I quit the Cowboys cold turkey that day. The great years with Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and Michael Irvin would mean nothing to me. The helmet became a burden rather than a treasure, but I wouldn’t let myself get rid of it—not because of its value, but like the albatross hanging from the neck of the ancient mariner in Coleridge’s poem, I deserved to be reminded of my failings. And so I moved from apartment to tiny apartment with it, even though I no longer even unboxed it. By this point, the facemask had grown so brittle that it broke off entirely, leaving its noble profile looking pitiable.
At some point along the way, the helmet “fell off, and sank / Like lead into the sea,” releasing me, though I don’t know where, exactly, or even in what year. When I finally realized that it was no longer with me, all I could do was feel regret at my selfishness, young though I was, and trust that its lesson had been learned.
Kevin Grauke is the author of Shadows of Men (Queen's Ferry Press), which won the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Blue Mesa Review, and the Cimarron Review. He teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia.