Irv Goode grew up in northern Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati, in a house with his parents, his six siblings, and his grandparents. “We didn’t have a pot to pee in, but we didn’t know it,” he says. After a long day playing in the mud, the three boys would have to share bathwater, his older brother going first. “Oh, it was a mess.”
Goode was an entrepreneur, coming up with creative ways to scrounge a few dollars. A neighbor lady made dandelion wine, so he’d sneak onto the golf course behind his house, fill shopping sacks with the yellow flowers, and sell them to the woman for 50 cents a bag. He shoveled coal, delivered newspapers, caddied.
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He and his friends used to play a game called tires. One team would roll a set of old tires down a hill, and the other team had to intercept them before they reached the bottom. He also spent a lot of time beating on his brothers. They knew to leave their sisters alone, or Dad the disciplinarian would get involved.
When he came after them, they’d hide under the bed. “We’d hold onto the springs with our hands and our toes,” Goode says. “He’d be moving the bed trying to get us, and we’d be hanging on like crazy. He’d be taking a broom handle and stabbing, trying to get us out.” Eventually, he’d give up, saying, “You have to eat sometime.”
Goode, a two-way star, played linebacker and center in high school, then went on to the University of Kentucky, becoming an All-American. The Cardinals took him in the first round of the 1962 draft, the 12th overall pick. His first contract was for $15,000. His signing bonus was a Chevrolet.
When Jackie Smith became Goode’s roommate with the Cardinals, he couldn’t believe Goode had grown up in Kentucky and didn’t know how to hunt. “I thought you had to hunt in Kentucky if you wanted anything to eat,” Smith says.
Smith grew up in Louisiana, spending his childhood outdoors. “We were either climbing trees or going fishing or hunting or playing rough-and-tumble football,” he says. One time, he and a couple of buddies were on a float trip and steered into a little inlet, thinking there might be good fishing. Instead, they stumbled upon a shack back in the woods. They went to investigate, and suddenly a pack of dogs came flying down the hill.
“We thought we were dead,” he says. “Just as the dogs got about 10 feet from us, somebody screamed at them and whistled at them, and they stopped. That’s how we met Uncle Boots.”
Uncle Boots was a hermit living out on the river. From that time on, the boys would make regular trips to visit, spending the night and eating his turtle stew. He taught them about fishing, about how to paddle a boat. It was such a unique boyhood experience, like something out of a Mark Twain novel, the sort of thing that today would make fearful parents faint.
In high school, Smith’s best sport was track. He ran the low hurdles, the high hurdles, and the mile relay, and he threw the javelin and the discus. He never tried the decathlon because, he says, “we don’t do anything in Louisiana that we can’t spell.”
In college at Northwestern State, his scholarship was for track, but it also required him to make the football team. He did—but when the Cardinals later drafted him, it was because of his track background. And even that was a bit of a fluke: It was the 10th round in 1963, and the Cardinals were running out of time, when a trainer who’d seen Smith run blurted out, “Just take the redheaded kid from Louisiana!”
Mark Arneson is a warm, religious man, the sort of guy who uses the word “blessed” two-dozen times in an hour-long interview. And he loves to tell football stories.
His favorite is one of violence and faith. It was 1973, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association came to St. Louis for a crusade. Walt Enoch, who ran the team’s Bible study in those days, asked Arneson if he would speak, and he reluctantly agreed, uneasy about addressing thousands. The event was scheduled for a Monday night.
The day before, the Cardinals played the Denver Broncos. On the punt coverage team, a cornerback was assigned to block Arneson. The guy was fast, but he wasn’t strong enough to block a linebacker. “So every time that we punted, I grabbed this cornerback, I threw him down, and I made every tackle on the punt coverage team,” Arneson says.
Late in the game, the corner got tired of this routine. Just as Arneson was about to make another tackle, the guy ran him down from behind. “He came from my blind side, and he punched me right in the throat,” he says. Arneson forgot all about the ball carrier and went after this corner, holding him down on the ground, punching him again and again, slamming his head into the turf. The referee didn’t see the initial punch, but he saw what Arneson was doing, so he threw him out of the game.
Over on the bench, future Hall of Famer Roger Wehrli, Arneson’s roommate, walked over with a smirk on his face. “Aren’t you supposed to give your testimony about what Christ means in your life tomorrow?” he asked.
“What have I done?” Arneson thought. He had just beaten some guy up in front of 50,000 people at Busch Stadium and countless more watching on TV. He called to say he needed to cancel.
“Well, answer one question for me before you decide,” Enoch said. “Were you going to share that you’re perfect and you’re a goody-two-shoes and you never make any mistakes, or are you going to share that by being a Christian, that even though you did that, your sins are forgiven?”
