The Legend of Jesse Smoke (16 page)

“Really?”

“And she’ll win the job, too.”

“We’ll see.”

With the Raiders just two days away now, we were done planning what we’d do on the offensive side of the ball. I figured, even if we brought in another kicker, it would be silly not to let Jesse kick at least one field goal. Or an extra point. Why not?

It was a game that didn’t count.

You’d have thought it was a championship game. The goddamn stadium was completely packed. Standing room only. Everybody wanted to see Jesse play, even if she was only going to kick off.

But she didn’t kick off. She sat on the bench and watched as our newly acquired prospect, a slightly balding ex–Canadian Football League kicker named Justin Dever, handled all the kicking duties. Dever had a strong leg and got it high and deep enough on the opening kickoff that the Raiders barely got the ball out to the 25-yard line. But that opening kick was the only time we needed a kicker in the game. The Raiders shut us out 44 to 0. Except for every single player on the Raiders, nobody played particularly well.

Corey Ambrose completed 4 out of 10 passes, unable to stay on his feet long enough to look for secondary receivers. Walter Mickens had 3 carries for 8 yards. Darius Exley and Rob Anders did not catch a ball. The Raiders played their starters for the first two offensive series, and we did the same thing. The rookies and scrubs went the
rest of the way. But while our rookies and scrubs played like it, theirs played like starters.

We were being booed more loudly than I’d ever heard, in any stadium, anywhere in the league. Ninety-four thousand booing fans can make a lot of noise. Nobody was happy.

The thing is, most of them started hollering near the end, “We want Jesse! We want Jesse!” as though she might be able to change the way things were going. This infuriated Coach Engram. “Bunch of boobs only came out to see if we’d put her on the field,” he said as we were walking off at the end. Then he looked at me. “It’s a goddamn distraction, Granger. And I don’t like it.”

“Don’t put this on her,” I said. “She’s not why we lost.”

“She’s a distraction, all right? You hear what they were all yelling at the end there?”

“I heard it.”

“I’m not going to let this year get away from me.”

“So let her play, then, and they’ll shut up.”

Engram shook his head and trotted ahead of me so he could get away from the reporters who would have a field day with him anyway in the postgame press conference.

What we didn’t know at the time was that, in the fourth quarter of that game, Jimmy Kelso had fractured the hamate bone in his wrist. He didn’t know it either, right away. He just had pain there. But after the third game of the regular season, he would have an MRI and discover the fracture. He would miss most of the season.

Right about this time the press was reporting that Coach Engram and I were feuding about Jesse Smoke. She was already being talked about as a “distraction” in the media, which cannot have gotten to them by way of my friend Mr. Engram. That’s not how he operated. The word is frequently used whenever somebody thinks that a team is not playing together—it’s either “dissension” or “distraction.” The two
horrible
d
’s. Nobody wants dissension, because there’s little that can be done when teammates begin to hate each other.

As I’ve said before, a team is a human community, with the defense and offense being individual communities within it. The special teams, because many of their players come from both offense and defense, operate as a kind of bridge between the two. There never has been a really great football team—I mean a truly cohesive unit—where the special teams were not up to par. That’s just how it works. Psychologically, that is. We had one of the best special teams units in the league, and the guys on both offense and defense really did respect each other. But Jesse put a strain on it. The defense didn’t like it one bit, and when we practiced they gave her a hard time. Oh, they knew better than to knock her down by now—which showed that she had earned at least a modicum of respect—but because of her they got really intense, playing like it mattered even in intrateam scrimmages. And that, to Coach Engram, was a distraction. A distraction that could very well lead to dissension. He would not have it. He didn’t care what kind of player Jesse was. All he saw was her sex, and that’s all the media saw, too. It had become, just as I worried it might, a joke that she was on the team at all.

So I was not surprised when Coach Engram called me into his office the Friday before our second exhibition game. We were going to play the Mexico City Aztecs—or as they used to be called, the Houston Texans. (Houston just couldn’t support an NFL team, and they’d had two chances.)

This meeting has been characterized as a knock-down, drag-out battle, two old allies in the football wars nearly coming to blows. But even accounts back then tended to exaggerate things. All the books talk about our battle over Jesse, and some of them even have me as the one bent against putting her in a game. And of course that’s not at all how it happened. We raised our voices a little bit, sure, but it was only to be emphatic about a point or two. I don’t think either one of us was ever truly angry.

“Collect Jesse’s playbook,” Coach Engram said with a slight wave of his hand. I didn’t even get a chance to sit down. “I’m cutting her today.”

“Without even giving her a chance to play?”

He sat down behind the desk but said nothing.

“Seems like a rotten deal to me. I mean not even to let her kick the ball. Why cut her now?”

“She’s going to be a source of trouble on this team, that’s why.”

“You don’t know that.”

“It’s already a problem. I sense it, okay? Don’t argue with me.”

“Well, I’m not going to ask her for her playbook. She doesn’t need it, anyway. She’s got it memorized.”

“Really?”

“She knows it better than Kelso, Spivey, or Ambrose. Maybe better than you do.”

“Get the playbook anyway. I won’t say it again.”

“Have you at least put her on the waiver wire?”

He looked at me. “You think anybody else wants her?”

I thought for a moment. “What’s Flores say about this?”

“Haven’t said anything to him about it. It’s none of his business.”

“Does he know it’s none of his business?”

He looked away.

“Have you told him it’s none of his business?” I persisted. “It’s his team. He approved of that contract. I expect he took some satisfaction in seeing ninety-four thousand fans in the seats for an exhibition game.”

“He won’t interfere, Skip, and you know it.”

“You got to at least see her kick in a game,” I said. “At least do that.”

“Goddamn it, Skip,” he said, standing up, and this is where he got slightly loud. “This is
my
ass on the line. Not yours.”

“You think so? Because if you go, I go. And that’s not loyalty, either; it’s just a fact.”

He shook his head.

“You think Flores would keep me around if he fired you? Come on, Jon—what’s really bothering you?”

He sat down again and stared at his desk pad for a bit. Then he said, “I can’t believe any of this. I feel like we’re letting something go here—some element of the game we’re not even thinking about.”

“You don’t want her here because she’s a woman.”

He said nothing.

“That’s it, then, isn’t it? It’s got nothing to do with distractions or her ability or anything, really, but the fact that you can’t stand the idea of a woman playing this game alongside the big boys.”

“She can’t play this game. That’s what I know.”

“Look, I’m not trying to force Jesse on anyone,” I said, half believing it. “I mean, I know she probably won’t ever throw a ball in a real game. But she
can
kick it. We’ve had kickers that were five feet eight and weighed less than a buck and a half. One of the greatest ever, Garo Yepremian, he couldn’t have been five and a half feet tall. She’s six feet two. A hundred seventy pounds of solid bone, muscle, and sinew.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“If she was a man, you’d be licking your chops, Jon, and you know it. And you wouldn’t have gone out and signed that Canadian castoff either.”

“Dever was just insurance.”

“Well,” I said. “Keep him, then. But let her kick. Give her that chance.”

Now he actually smiled, shaking his head. “This is almost comical. Of all the things to happen this year—this has got to be—”

“Let her kick it until she misses. Tell her one miss and she’s out.”

“Really?”

“You’ve seen her in practice. She doesn’t miss.”

“Anybody can do what she does when there’s no pressure on. If I put a six-by-eight plank on the ground, every single one of the men out there, and Jesse, too, could walk right across the field on it without blinking an eye or wavering even a little bit. But I put the same plank a hundred fifty feet in the air? Hardly any of them could make themselves take a step on it, much less walk across it to the other side of the field.”

“And I bet Jesse could dance across it.”

“Jesus, Skip—you in love with her or something?”

“I’m in love with her ability.”

“Ability,” he said quietly. You’d have thought it was a word new to him.

“She’ll make every kick inside the forty. Fifty yards or less, every time. How much you wanna bet?”

“How much?”

“If she makes every kick, you keep her on the team and list her as the third quarterback.”

“I’m not going to cut anybody for her.” Neither one of us knew about Kelso yet.

“All right, then just list her as the fourth quarterback.”

“And if she misses one?”

“Cut her and I’ll hold a press conference to confess it was all my fault.”

“I’ll take that bet.”

“Starting tomorrow night?”

“You got it,” Coach Engram said. “But you make sure she knows: One miss and she’s out. That’s the deal.”

“You wanna put the pressure on.”

“That’s right.”

“So do I,” I said with a short laugh. “So do I.”

“You do?”

“She thrives on it,” I said. “Absolutely thrives on it.”

“Really?”

“Maybe it’s because she’s a woman,” I said. “You know? She doesn’t
have
a pair of balls. So successfully kicking a football through the uprights isn’t some verdict on her manhood.”

“Very funny.”

“You’ll see,” I said.

It really was something to see. And I don’t mean that first game she got to play in either, although that was something, too. No, I mean the look on Jesse’s face when I told her the conditions. She didn’t blink an eye.

“You know what that means,” I said.

“What?”

“You miss and you’re out. Engram will do exactly what he says.”

We were standing outside the training room after practice. She looked at me with those clear, stony blues. “I’m not going to miss,” she said.

There’s something about athletes with real talent; I’m not talking about guys who are, you know, better than average, or even the ones who get scholarships and national attention because they’ve got perfect bodies with no fat to speak of and all the muscles in the right places, along with whatever natural talent, whatever swiftness of foot. That kind of athlete is everywhere. You can find them on any pickup
basketball court in America; on any soccer or baseball or football field in any school you care to name. They’re everywhere. No, when I say real talent, I mean something beyond mere athletic ability, physical strength, or skill. That’s a part of it, obviously. But I’m talking about something else—something internal that integrates all that physical talent and uses it in such a way that it appears almost effortless.

There’s a story I like to tell about the great Joe Louis. My grandfather actually saw him fight once and said that Louis could knock a man out with either hand, left or right, and frequently did; he could move and box with the best of them; he was a superb athlete. But here’s the thing: so were many of the men he fought. A lot of them were strong, had perfectly tuned bodies, could move with the best of them. For more than a dozen years—until he got old, that is, and started losing to inferior fighters—Louis lost just one fight, to a German heavyweight named Max Schmeling. Schmeling’s trainers had him watch film of Louis in the ring, see, and they discovered a flaw in Joe’s left jab: Every time Louis threw that left jab, he’d lower it a little as he drew it back to his body—not a lot, but just enough so that if you were watching for it, you could throw your right hand over it and tag him good. And that’s what Schmeling did in their first fight. He knocked Louis down in the fourth and twelfth rounds. Some say Louis was essentially unconscious after that first Schmeling right hand. Eventually, of course, Louis stayed down. Schmeling knocked him out.

Hardly anybody saw that first fight, but for the rematch the whole world was interested. This was in the middle of the 1930s, and Schmeling was now a representative of the master race, Hitler’s golden boy. (He did not like that role and always hated it when anybody mentioned it to him, but that’s how it played in the press.) The story was, a representative of the master race was going to defeat an American Negro. Everybody was sure Schmeling would engineer another slaughter. Most of Germany, anyway, was sure of it. But Americans desperately wanted Joe Louis to win. Even white America wanted Joe to win. And few thought he could.

Right before the fight, Louis said to his trainer, “I’m so afraid.”

The trainer was shocked. “You’re afraid?” he said. “The way you’ve trained for this? You’re ready, champ. You don’t have to be afraid of this man.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” Louis said. “I’m afraid I will kill him.”

The bell rang to start the fight, and it took a little under two minutes in the first round to put Schmeling on the canvas—he’d been hit so many times with Joe’s hammering left and right hands, he screamed audibly. People said it sounded like a woman’s scream. The fight was over before anybody could say “master race.”

That’s what I mean when I say “real talent.” When Jesse said, “I’m not going to miss,” I thought of Joe Louis.