Authors: Bryan Mealer
Little things, like the center’s ballooning weight, stymied them:
“Coach,” Mario screamed toward the sideline, “the ball keeps getting stuck between Cubby’s legs.”
“You gotta get up under there!”
After the Raiders won 24–7, even Pastor Dez channeled his frustrations to heaven when the team gathered for prayer:
“Father, it could have been prettier, but nonetheless, we thank you for the victory.”
A sloppy victory in any other town in America was a victory nonetheless. Despite playing with a torn ligament in his shoulder, Mario passed for nearly three hundred yards and two touchdowns. It was his best game so far, but one that also included three interceptions. Once again, the insults had rained down from the stands, then later flooded the message boards:
“everybody knows that [Rowley] can not handle the qb position but hester keep using him. that same qb gonna have you lookin for a job next year.”
“DAM JET YOU GON LET US GET TO THE PLAYOFFS OR STATE AND LOSE BECAUSE OF THE LACK OF DEVELOPMENT AT QUARTER BACK AGAIN THIS YEAR!!”
On Saturday the quarterback’s Facebook status read, “ME AGAINST
THA WHOLE BELLE GLADE.” For all of Hester’s encouragement, for all the times he’d stood before the team saying, “I don’t care what
nobody
says. He’s
my
quarterback,” the ever-private coach withheld arguably his best line of motivation—his own personal struggles with insecurity and the battle a city had once waged against him.
• • •
“IT FEELS WONDERFUL,”
Jessie Hester told the
Los Angeles Times
in May 1985, shortly after the L.A. Raiders selected him in the first round. “I’m just overwhelmed. I just can’t believe I’m part of this organization.”
The Los Angeles squad that Hester joined in 1985 was older, more hobbled than the Super Bowl champions of the 1983 season. Injuries had riddled the entire offense, in particular the thirty-seven-year-old body of warhorse quarterback Jim Plunkett. The Raiders had finished the previous season 11–5 and suffered a crushing loss to the Seattle Seahawks in the AFC playoffs.
By choosing Hester in the first round, Raiders owner Al Davis was hoping to fill a crucial gap in the receiver corps that had once sliced up secondaries and helped the Silver and Black to three Lombardi trophies. And it was a gap of legendary proportions. Jessie the Jet, with his 4.23 speed and thirty-eight-inch vertical leap, was being unveiled as the next Cliff Branch.
Branch was the three-time Super Bowl champion and the league’s leading postseason receiver, a man of heart-stopping ninety-nine-yard-pass plays, who, in his thirteenth year in the same jersey, was still being described by his coach as “a feather … he just kind of flies over the ground.” He was also turning thirty-seven in August and breaking down. The legendary wideout had been injured most of the previous season and had caught no touchdowns, leaving the Raiders with just Dokie Williams and Malcolm Barnwell.
Going into the draft, the Raiders had rated Hester higher than both Al Toon and Jerry Rice, who’d gone tenth and sixteenth to the Jets and 49ers,
respectively. Head coach Tom Flores had said publicly that he expected the Florida burner to be more than the acrobatic highlight maker he’d been with the Seminoles.
For the shy, twenty-two-year-old Jessie, the sudden pressure was incredible and, in his own mind, seemed to magnify his every move: from the first touches in training camp before an audience of All-Pro teammates Howie Long, Marcus Allen, and Lyle Alzado, to renting the ritzy Foxhill apartment for himself and Lena, who’d just learned she was pregnant with Jesse junior, to the party invitations from Dionne Warwick and Hollywood events where Magic Johnson and Janet Jackson knew him on sight.
Look, there was Jessie Hester, the million-dollar man. The next Cliff Branch.
• • •
“I GOT THE
Bonus Baby,” shouted Lester Hayes, the five-time Pro Bowl cornerback, as he lined up against Jessie the first week of camp.
“Let’s see what you got, Bonus Baby. Let’s see if that money was worth it.”
Hayes was six-two and 225 pounds, one of the greatest defensive backs to play the game, a man whose nickname was “the Judge.” Hester was accustomed to beating bigger guys off the ball with his quickness, but the orders from the sidelines were to go straight through Hayes. Employing his signature bump-and-run, Hayes made the rookie pay for every step, clawing at his eyes and nose and grabbing his throat, everything but throwing a blanket over his head and beating him.
“Oh no!” shouted Hayes. “They done gave that money away!”
Hester was humiliated.
“I was never so frustrated,” he said. It wasn’t until he appealed directly to Davis, who appeared on the sidelines (“Let me get off the ball the way I know how”), that he was finally able to get open.
Jessie had little time to let the hazing get to his head. Before the season
opener, the Raiders had already sent Branch to injured reserve and traded Barnwell to Washington, leaving the young rookie to start opposite Williams in the number-two slot.
For any rookie receiver thrust into such a fire, it was a fine season: thirty-two catches, 655 yards, and four touchdowns, some of them thrilling—like the impossible grab over the helmet of Kansas City cornerback Kevin Ross, or the catch-and-vanish between two Chargers that left them clanking skulls like Keystone Kops.
Hester’s season performance set a franchise record for a first-year player, but it came with an asterisk. Hester had developed a tendency to drop passes. While the team listed only six official drops for the season, the rookie’s hands soon became the subject of weekly scrutiny in the sporting press.
There were two drops in the exhibition loss to Miami, one in the end zone. The bobble against San Francisco. The potential game-winner in Cleveland that flew out of his hands at the goal line, and the one in Atlanta worth another six. The drop in Cleveland earned Hester a public lashing on the sideline from receivers coach Tom Walsh, his trusted corner man.
“When the Los Angeles Raiders had the ball and the game safely in hand, rookie wide receiver Jessie Hester had no problem catching any number of elegant, exciting passes,” wrote the
Miami Herald
after the Raiders were eliminated by New England in the first round of the playoffs. “But when the game was on the line and passing yardage crucial, Hester’s supple hands quickly turned to stone.”
Hester had “hyper nerves,” the story said. The receiver could not explain the drops, even to himself. They were like a curse, a virus ripping through his methodical, orderly nature.
“Mentally, I was gone,” he remembered. “Marcus and these guys would try to talk to me, ‘Man, just play ball. Don’t listen to that. Play ball.’ But they didn’t know how deep it was.”
After sitting out the first quarter of the ’86 season with a sore Achilles tendon, Hester returned off the bench in a game against San Diego, roping
in a forty-yard shot from backup Marc Wilson to win the game. The next week against Kansas City, back in the starting lineup, Plunkett hit him for eighteen yards and another game winner.
“The Jet is back,” wrote Mark Heisler of the
Los Angeles Times
.
Heisler, the sharp-witted, now-venerated sportswriter, had given the first-rounder from Belle Glade a celebrity welcome upon his Hollywood arrival, then quickly shown him the ways of the wild kingdom. Hester’s unraveling, like Al Davis’s endless court struggles and team controversies, became the sweet pulp of Heisler’s L.A. stories. When Hester’s bad luck found him again, dropping three big-potential catches over three consecutive weeks, Heisler quipped, “Jessie Hester is once more putting the ball on the floor as often as Magic Johnson.”
The next game, a demoralizing loss to the shoddy 3–9 Eagles, Heisler struck again: “The young Raider receivers dropped passes all over the lot, including one by Jessie Hester in the end zone. He caught two others for touchdowns, but in this league, .667 doesn’t get it.”
“At this point, I thought it was personal,” Hester said. “I wanted to hurt the guy.”
Hester spent the majority of the ’87 season on the bench, still haunted by the occasional drop and never safe from Heisler’s lens. Afraid to get open, he hid in the secondary and managed only one catch for thirty yards.
“I didn’t want the ball thrown to me,” he said. “I did whatever I could not to be open. I didn’t want it thrown and have things said about me.”
The next season the Raiders drafted first-round receiver Tim Brown from Notre Dame and traded to get wideout Willie Gault from Chicago. Brown had won the Heisman Trophy; Gault was a former Olympic qualifier in the 4×100 relay (unfortunately for him, the United States boycotted the 1980 games) and was considered one of the fastest receivers ever to have played in the league.
The message was clear. In August, under new head coach Mike Shanahan, the Raiders finally traded Jet to Atlanta for a fifth-round pick. As
Hester left Los Angeles, crushed and dejected, his nemesis, Heisler, didn’t miss the chance to chalk the outline of another fallen star.
“Jessie Hester, the soft-spoken burner from Florida State,” Heisler wrote, “leaves with a 23.7 career yards-per-catch average, but only 56 receptions in three seasons. His teammates marveled at the way he could run routes, and the opposition never could cover him, but what did they have to worry about? He dropped too many passes to live up to his billing.”
In Atlanta, playing for the lowly Falcons, Hester was hoping for a clean bill in a smaller, more forgiving southern market, to sort out his problems and prove the past no longer mattered. For a while the curse disappeared; then it found him in the worst possible places, like in the end zone of the L.A. Coliseum in a midseason game against the Raiders. The crowd broiled him from above.
Hester finished the season with only twelve catches for 176 yards. When a
Palm Beach Post
reporter found him at the Falcons’ training camp the following summer, he appeared a lonely and desperate man.
“I have to do something this year for myself, regardless of what anybody else thinks,” he said. “If I don’t do anything this year, I will be destroyed mentally.”
Three weeks later, after he dislocated his toe in an exhibition game in Philly, the Falcons released him. With his career in pieces, his mind and body a mess, Hester left Lena and Jessie junior in Atlanta and retreated to the only safe place he knew. He went home to Belle Glade.
• • •
FORMER DOLPHINS DEFENSIVE
back Louis Oliver liked to tell the story of the day Jet first came home after the Raiders drafted him, a quintessential hero’s parade that left a vapor of stardust and wonder in its wake.
“He’s driving that two-door red Mercedes down Avenue E and the
town is going bananas,” said Oliver, who was fourteen at the time. “He sees me and blows the horn. I immediately go home, put on my workout clothes, and head to the field. Then I run till I can’t run anymore. Seeing that took my work ethic to a whole other level.”
When Hester returned to Belle Glade four years later, it was nothing inspiring, and the lesson it provided was old. The world chewed up men and their dreams. And when that happened, they came home to hide.
“I was sulking and feeling sorry for myself,” Hester said. “I came and stayed with my mom. I didn’t want to deal with football again. I was here trying to figure out my life. I wasn’t even working out. I was just in the dumps.”
Depressed and restless, Hester spent the ’89 season drifting. He would stay in Atlanta with his family as long as he could, but the atmosphere of football season was impossible to stand.
It was no better in Belle Glade. People talked, the way they do:
“The boy done lost his hands.”
“He scared of the ball.”
“I knew he’d be back.”
Down at the Alabama-Georgia Grocery Store, they might slap him on the shoulder and smile, but behind his back, he knew what they were saying.
“Let’s just say they was
glad
to see me back in town.”
The only solace he found was at his mother’s house, or sitting with Willie watching television. He visited friends, helped Zara with work. He even filed for unemployment.
That spring, Cletus Jones, his old roommate at FSU, got married in Miami and Jessie went to the wedding. Also in attendance was Hassan Jones, another of Jessie’s teammates at FSU, who was now with the Minnesota Vikings. Sitting around after the ceremony, Cletus and Hassan pulled an intervention.
“Jessie, you’re making a big mistake to not go back and play,” Hassan told him. “You’re too good a player, man. You just lost your confidence, that’s all. Besides, you don’t wanna go out a loser.”
When he returned to Belle Glade, his older brother, Roger, staged an intervention of his own.
“I’d been hearing it all,” Roger said. “People sayin how he couldn’t make the pros, wasn’t good enough, this and that. Jessie felt like a failure in our community. He was my brother, and it hurt me to see him like that.”
Over the years, whenever possible, Roger had recorded every one of his brother’s games. Now, seeing him in such a state, he went back and compiled every electrifying catch to remind Jessie of the athlete that lived inside, the one now lost out in the void.
“I’ve seen you catch some remarkable balls,” he said. “Just take these tapes and go look at ’em. This is something you been doin all your life. Go look at the proof yourself.”
Hester took the tapes back home to Atlanta, but instead of watching the highlights as his brother had intended, he focused on the rest. Sitting in a dark room by himself, Hester went back and watched every dropped pass, every missed block, every glaring contradiction to the athlete he thought he had been. After he could stomach seeing them a first time, he watched them over again.
“The good times were easy to relive,” he said. “Mentally, I had to deal with the bad and accept those things that had happened. I had to ask myself, ‘Could I have really made that play?’ and then answer with the truth. That was the only way I was gonna move on. I had to accept myself as a person who made mistakes and learn how to be better.”