McInally, Bengal in Limbo, Quietly Returns to Harvard

"They want me to try soccer style, so I'll try soccer style," Part McInally said as he sat on the wet grass outside Harvard Stadium Saturday morning, lacing a pair of football cleats. "But boy, my ass is sure sore. I've never done it before. I can't do it worth shit."

McInally stood up and placed a soccer ball about 20 feet in front of the green baseball backstop next to Watson Rink. He studied the ball for an instant, then flung his lanky frame at it, arms and legs flying in clutzy precision. THWACK! His foot hit the ball. THUD! The ball hit the wooden backstop and bounced back to McInally. He frowned.

He kicked the ball again. THWACK! His foot made contact. THUD! The ball hit wood. McInally stopped the ball with his foot and kicked it again. But this kick didn't please him any more than the last. He was hitting the ball with the wrong part of his foot.

"It looks so awkward," he said to Jim Brynteson, a senior who was there to help McInally practice. McInally is not accustomed to soccer-style kicking. He didn't kick that way in high school and he didn't kick that way at Harvard, where until he graduated last year he was the school's biggest football star in over 30 years.

He set all sorts of records as a split end, but his kicking pleased him the most: Long, booming punts and kickoffs that drew gasps from the crowd even as McInally sauntered cockily back to the sidelines.

He kicked footballs with his toe then, but now his employers, the Cincinnati Bengals of the NFL, want him to kick with his instep, soccer style. They figure he will be a better kicker that way. They also figure that this is the time to teach him new tricks: McInally broke his leg and fractured his ankle in the College All-- Star Game last August, and has sat out the season thus far.

The leg and ankle are better now, so the Bengals sent their untested rookie back to Massachusetts to work out with a kicking specialist in Milford, which is why Pat McInally, on the morning of the Dart-mouth game, found himself standing in a drizzle outside Soldier's Field, practicing.

THWACK! THUD:" I can't do it," McInally said. The ball came to rest near his foot.

THWACK! THUD! "I just hurt my fucking knee."

THWACK! THUD! "Ican still flip bottle caps," he said, picking one up and flipping it. The cap zipped gracefully through the air. McInally watched it, smiled, and returned to kicking the soccer ball, which now had wet blades of grass clinging to it.

THWACK! THUD! Jim Brynteson offered some advice. "Too much whirlwind," he said. "Use the whirwind at the beginning, not the end." McInally was still hitting the ball with his toe, not his instep.

THWACK! THUD! "Goooood!" McInally said. It felt right that time. "Oh boy!"

THWACK! THUD! Too much toe.

THWACK! THUD! Too much toe again. "Years and years," McInally muttered, discouraged.

Thirty yards behind McInally, the field was full of people, but none seemed to notice him. They were watching Radcliffe field hockey, or next to it, Harvard rugby. Occasionally a huge cheer would go up. The Harvard and Dartmouth bands were on faraway fields practicing their halftime shows, and McInally could hear the music as he kicked. It was only a couple of hours before game time. Tailgaters with picnic spreads were arriving, and McInally knew that inside Dillon Field House, the football team would soon be showering and dressing, getting tape applied, getting ready.

He used to love the pre-game excitement, when he'd walk around Dillon half-dressed, shouting bragadocio. Junior year, for example, he predicted that the Brown game would earn him "total immortality." He then went out and hauled in thirteen passes, setting a Harvard and Ivy League record. He once told Dave Matthews, director of sports publicity "I'll run your inkwell dry."

THWACK! THUD!

But he wouldn't visit Dillon today, as he had on a visit earlier this year. He felt sort of embarrassed about the whole thing now. McInally had graduated amid much hoopla-- he was the first Harvard All-American since Endicott "Chub" Peabody '42 and the owner of a three-year contract with the Bengals-- but in the past four months he hasn't done much except nurse a broken leg, collect coins in his Cincinnati house, read Henry Miller, and draw his full salary (which he won't disclose.) He has yet to wear his Bengals jersey, a jarring detail to those who remember McInally going virtually everywhere last year wearing a big 84, his Harvard number. (At times, it seemed as though he had stepped straight out of a Doonesbury cartoon.)

So he would not visit Dillon. "I feel self-conscious coming back," he said later. "Sometimes our society says if you've done well somewhere, you don't come back."

THWACK! THUD! A young man with smoothly coiffed blond hair walked up as McInally was kicking.

"Hi, Bob," McInally said, breaking into a wide grin. It was one of McInally's freshman coaches.

"How the hell did you mess it up in that game?" the coach said. McInally smiled. People will ask him about that game last summer for a long time-- in part because the way he broke his leg has the ring of Doonesbury to it.

There McInally was, after all, in the College All-Star game, an Ivy League end starting against the World Champion Pittsburgh Steelers. He was basking in the glory of a national TV audience, having a great time. On the fourth play of the game, quarterback Steve Bartkowski of Berkeley hit McInally on a short slant pass, and the lanky All-American stretched every muscle to beat the Pittsburgh defenders to the goal line. At about the four, a tackler leapt at McInally-- McInally still doesn't know who it was, although he has seen the vide tape replay--and made the stop. The impact broke McInally's leg, but he fell into the end zone for the touchdown; and later, after he was carried off the field on a stretcher, he would tell reporters that the experience had been a great thrill. To score a touchdown against the Pittsburgh Steelers! A Harvard split end!

Still, there are those who doubt McInally has the sturdiness to play pro football. They say he is too lanky for his own good.

"They said that of Leonardo da Vinci," McInally answers.

They said da Vinci was too lanky?

"No, they laughed at him."

According to the McInally scenario for pro football success, this is his rebuilding year. "It's given me a lot of time to mature and adjust, and I'm making the most of it," he says. "There's a great possibility I'm not ready for pro football, as I wasn't ready for college football when I was a sophomore."

But even if he is ready to play next year (he almost certainly won't play this year), McInally faces stiff competition from excellent Bengal ends, with more on the way, probably, after this year's draft. But he still thinks he has a future in the NFL-- kicking.

"Kicking has always been the greatest joy of my life," McInally says. "I'd put it a little ahead of Henry Miller, but not ahead of the finer things in life he tends to treat."

THWACK! THUD! Tom Lincoln, a senior fullback, saw McInally kicking and asked what was going on.

"Do you know Tony?" McInally said, referring to the kicking specialist in Milford. "Well, he's convinced me I could kick soccer style. I'm the worst. I'm the worst in the world. I have no instep."

Lincoln delivered news about mutual friends--graduates, people with jobs, people at medical school. McInally was hungry for details, maybe because he now lives in a midwestern boondock through which few Harvard paths cross. Cincinnati is not New York or Washington, and if not for his roommate John Keogh, who works in Cincinnati for Procter and Gamble and once played second-string tackle, McInally would almost be starved for familiar faces.

His Cincinnati life has been sedate so far, partly because of the injury, but partly because he has wanted it that way. "Girls from the neighborhood come to our door asking to see the Bengal, the celebrity," says Keogh, who was here Saturday for the Dartmouth game. But he says McInally only talks with them and nothing more.

"I don't tap the resources I could," McInally says. "There are groupies. But I don't feel like going out with a quote unquote 'beautiful chick' who's eight on a ten scale." He laughed. It was a reference to a Crimson article last year that reported McInally liked to rate women according to their looks. He says now it was all a joke.

Even though he isn't an active player, McInally keeps a football schedule, working out every day with the Bengals. He says the players don't resent the elitism of his Harvard background. "They never hold it against a Harvard guy," he says. "I always feel they wish they could have had the experience I had. There's a lot of intelligence on the Bengals." The teasing he gets because of Harvard is good natured: Isaac Curtis calls him "The Wizard."

The camaraderie of the Bengals is the only part of pro football that has surprised McInally so far. He says the team has the esprit de corps of a college team. The same kidding around he remembers from Harvard football.

THWACK! THUD! McInally shook his head, upset that he still hadn't mastered the business of kicking soccer balls with his instep. He would practice a few with a football. "It's hard after all these years," he said to Lincoln and Brynteson. "And I was never coordinated."

"We all knew that. Pat." Lincoln said.

* * *

After the workout, McInally returned to take a shower in Brynteson's room; Brynteson stopped off at Elsie's to get his friend a Turkey Deluxe.

An hour later they were at the game, sitting high up in section 32 near Derek Bok and Edward Kennedy and other VIPs.

By the second half, with Harvard firmly ahead, it was raining hard. McInally's corduroy racing cap was soaked, and he tilted his program down every few minutes--"to drain it," he said.

"Boy it sure is raining," he said several times.

He was in a giddy mood, even though Bob McDermott had tied a record McInally shares for most touchdown receptions in one game (three).

"They haven't made people forget about me," he said of the Harvard players slicing through Dartmouth. "They've made people think about me. Because every time they break a record of mine, they mention my name."

It rained harder and harder, and finally with 7:53 left in the game, the new, mellow, post-graduate, non-Doonesbury Pat McInally shone through.

"Would I have a bad attitude if I left?" he asked, and without waiting for an answer, stood up and walked to the aisle.

He made his way through a pack of spectators standing in the dry of the collonade, down the concrete steps and out of the stadium.

"Well," he said, "we're beating them. We looked good in the first half. I thought (quarterback Jim) Kubacki looked good."

He crossed Anderson Bridge and began talking about his Harvard career-- still the new and mature Pat McInally, pro football player.

"Objectively, I don't have any records that will remain," he said. "They're not great records."

But everyone made a big deal about them last year.

"Oh, yeah, they're good records, but not great records." And then a glimmer of the old Pat McInally appeared. "It was more the way I made the records than the records themselves-- one-hand grabs, clutch catches. They don't show up in the records. That's what I stand for."