The Legend of Jesse Smoke (2 page)

Are you beginning to figure it out? I recruit players on the spot for tryouts in my job, so I’d just claim I’d invited this new guy. Then I’d figure a way to spring Jesse on them. I could already imagine their faces when they saw her throw a football. I might even be able to make them all believe I’d actually signed her. It would kill Coach Engram. It really was just a whim.

“I’ll pay you,” I said. “Just for fun.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Put it this way: There’s a few players at your position in this game I’d, ah, like to humble a little bit.”

She had nothing to say to this, and we stood there quiet a moment. Nate said, “And what’ll you pay her?”

I put my hands on my hips, screwed up my face a little to think. “When do you try out for that women’s team?”

“She’s got to be there next Tuesday.” He put the ball back in her hands.

And then she smiled at me, a broad, innocent show of white teeth. Everybody on earth knows that smile now, and it was just as disarming and pretty back then, scrunching up those brown freckles spattered across her broad, flat nose. She was definitely striking to look at with those white teeth, those large, sea-blue eyes.

“Can you throw a ball with somebody in your face?”

“She’s a scrambler,” Nate said.

“Ever been knocked down?”

“Sure. Lots of times. That’s how you play flag football. You tackle the ball carrier and then pull out the flag.”

“You want to have some fun?”

They both waited. A few of the men standing around, getting impatient with this little interview of mine, started urging her to throw at something else.

“You’ll be in Washington anyway.” I took a card out of my wallet and handed it to her. “I get back in town on Monday. Soon as you get in, call me.”

“Really?”

“I’ll pay you for your time.”

“What is it you want, exactly?” She tilted her head. Nate moved a little toward me, waiting for my answer.

“I’d just like a few of the players and coaches on the team to see you throw a ball. And I really will pay you.”

“How much?”

“You tell me.”

“Five hundred?”

I laughed. “Honey,” I said, “you got a deal. And let’s call it seven.”

“All right, then,” she said.

I grabbed her hand and she gave me a very firm handshake. I couldn’t help feeling like I’d hit some sort of jackpot.

I had no idea.

As everybody knows, Jonathon Engram was the head coach of the Washington Redskins back then. An All-Pro quarterback before he went into coaching, he had been almost unstoppable—like Joe Montana. Average size for a quarterback, and not that strong of an arm either, maybe fifty yards tops, but the guy could win games, knew just how to get a team down the field and score. He threw accurately, with the right touch on the ball: When he needed to fire it, he fired it; when he needed to lob it softly and drop it over a guy’s head and shoulders, he did that. He knew the game as well as anybody ever knew it, and then some.

He was a winning coach almost from the start. When he took over the Redskins, they had been losing for almost a decade. Middle-of-the-pack losers. They went 8 and 8 a few times, but mostly they were in the 7 and 9 or 6 and 10 neighborhood. The NFL switched to an eighteen-game season in Engram’s first year coaching and he won 10 and lost 8. It was a pretty impressive turnaround for a guy’s first year,
because they won their last nine games straight, after starting out 1 and 8. The next year they won 11 and lost 7, then went into the playoffs as a wild card team and made it all the way to the NFC championship game. They lost (badly) to the Arizona Cardinals. (The Cardinals won the Super Bowl that year for the first time in their history.)

The next year the Redskins went 12 and 6. They lost again in the NFC championship, this time to the Eagles. Coach Engram said we’d win it all the next year, and we almost did it. We went 14 and 4 and made it to the Super Bowl, but lost to the Cleveland Browns. (31–30; it was a hell of a game.)

Then the year before I met Jesse, we lost the final four games of the year to finish 9 and 9. A lot of players were getting old or leaving for other teams in free agency, and we’d had a few drafts that didn’t pan out. (We drafted one guy, a running back, who would have been a great player if he hadn’t drowned in a freak accident before the season started. He was offshore, somewhere a hundred miles east of Buxton, North Carolina, fishing as first mate on a charter boat, trying to gaff a fish, and the line got tangled around his wrist. The fish—a huge blue marlin—still pretty strong after a long struggle to get it near to the boat, sounded and took him with it. The last time anyone saw him, he was struggling to get his glove off and unwind the line, even as the fish disappeared with him into the darkness.)

The whole year we had that kind of luck. No deaths besides that one, but freak accidents that robbed the roster of some very fine players. A blown knee, a blood clot in somebody’s lung. Before the season was over, we had three players from our practice squad starting. It was a bad year.

That year I met Jesse Smoke, we ended up with three quarterbacks on the team, not one a rookie. We had a promising draft of other position players two months after I went on vacation, and Coach Engram said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the coming year. “It will be tough, though,” he said. “I’m going to have to be tough on everybody. These men
will
be ready to play.”

One of the top draft picks you may remember was a defensive end named Orlando Brown. That’s right, the great Orlando. He was a rookie that year, a little heavy for a defensive end—315 pounds—but at six feet eleven inches tall, he looked lean as a racehorse. And he could run almost as fast. He’d played wide receiver in high school, so he could catch a ball if you wanted him to, though all anyone wanted to see was him on the defensive line, charging a quarterback or rooting through offensive linemen to find a runner. He was definitely a kind of freak, and that became a theme for us because, hell, we had a few on the team.

We had a guy named Daniel Wilber, a center, who was only five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 342 pounds. He looked like one of those old minivans in his uniform, but there was not an ounce of fat on his body and he was probably the best center in all of football. You couldn’t budge him, and if he wanted you out of a play, you were gone. He made All-Pro in his second season and would continue to make it every year he played after that. What the guy did in his spare time was—are you ready for this?—he taught yoga classes. I’m not kidding. It was really funny watching him doing some of those stretches, pointing his toes like a goddamn ballet dancer.

Drew Bruckner played middle linebacker. He was an artist, you know, a painter, with a canvas and a palette and brushes. He could produce the most beautiful pictures of birds and foxes; mountains and lakes. Didn’t do many people. He said he thought folks were mostly either ugly or too pretty to be interesting. As for football, he played like a man who wanted to end it all. At six feet and 250 pounds, he wasn’t as big as your average middle linebacker, but he was twice as mean on the field. Didn’t care who he ran over, or what kind of collision he caused, he just went after it. That’s what he called it too, “going after it.”

You remember Darius Exley, our tall, lithe, unbelievably fast wide receiver. Guy could leap as high as a pole-vaulter and snatch the ball out of the air almost from any angle around his body. If you got the
ball near him, he would get it. He collected action figure dolls. Like hundreds of them, with all their various weapons. He was proud of that collection. Guys on other teams would tease him about his “toys,” but he said nothing, quiet as a stopped clock, like he couldn’t care less what anyone called him. He could move so swiftly, he’d catch eleven balls and score four touchdowns and have nothing whatever to say about it. Nothing excited him, it seemed, but that doll collection.

Lined up on the other side of the line was our so-called possession receiver, Rob Anders. Rob was gay, one of the first players to admit it while still playing the game. He was only five feet eleven inches tall, and weighed barely more than 170 pounds—pretty slight for a wide receiver—but he was a great roll blocker. He could put a bigger man on his belly so quick you’d think somebody blew off the guy’s legs. He never put anybody on his back, but if a defender was running forward, coming up to tackle a runner on Anders’s side, it was really something to see how fast Anders would make him disappear. From the opposite side it looked like the guy fell into a ditch or something. Anders could also catch anything near him, sometimes with one hand. He scored so many touchdowns leaping parallel to the ground and grabbing a ball just before it hit the ground with the palm of one hand, and flipping over on his side before he landed—he could roll in the air like a fish in water—that after a while, folks stopped calling him anything other than “Porpoise.”

At running back, of course, was Walter Mickens, from Georgia. He was six feet, weighed around 220, and could run as fast as anybody in the league except maybe Darius Exley. He could also move diagonally, or sideways, and even jump backward and come down still moving; he hit the ground full speed from any angle. He was hard to bring down, too. He had a little twist he’d make with his hips and if you had your hands there trying to drag him down, he’d throw you off like water from a bucket. The fans called him “Mighty Mickens.” He was a religious fanatic. Had one cross tattooed on his neck and
one on each arm. He believed god was a football fan and kept a little shrine to Christ in his locker.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go over the whole roster—that would take too long, and to tell the truth, not all of them are that interesting. (There’s a roster in the back of this book that you can consult if you need to, along with a schedule and some other things.) Just the superfreaks, most of whom, by this point, were fully established players you knew would make the team. And the rookie, Orlando Brown, was a shoe-in. Unless he turned out to be weak in the knees, literally—because at his height just about everybody who tried to block him would be at his knees—he would definitely be what Coach Engram and everybody else called an “impact player.” If we could only get these guys to play together—to work together and become one beast—it seemed like nobody would be able to whip them.

The truth was, I looked forward to the year. I knew Engram was probably a little worried about his job because it had started to look like we were slipping, and the owner—well, I don’t want to get into talking about him yet. He’s not really as cold-blooded as everybody thinks—I mean he’s got his loyalties and attachments just like anybody else, but he’s not the kind of man who can tolerate a downward trend in anything. Coach Engram never spoke to me about it, except to mention that things were going to be tough this year, but I had the feeling he’d been given the impression that our owner was getting impatient.

See, for the past two years or so our one real problem was, as you might have guessed, at quarterback.

Now, we had a great player there. Corey Ambrose had proven himself over and over to be a winner. He could throw the ball reasonably well—accurate from forty or fifty if you gave him time to throw—and the other players liked playing for him. He had what the
receivers call a “soft ball.” It came in spinning just right, and without too much steam on it, usually out in front of them, easy enough to snatch out of the air. In tight situations, he could stand up to the pressure as well as anyone, and he almost never threw the ball so that his receivers had to stretch out and reach for it in traffic—what players call being “hung out to dry.” You could get a few smashed ribs that way, and both Exley and Anders, and the other men who were responsible for catching what Ambrose put up for them, appreciated his accuracy.

But he was always getting hurt. The kind of small nagging injuries that weren’t so bad for somebody who plays linebacker or center, but ones that cripple a quarterback. The year before, he sat out five games because of a broken middle finger on his throwing hand. Do you know how many times a guy in any other position breaks his finger in a given year? How many men play with multiple broken fingers? Nobody talks about it, but believe me, most of the lineman have broken fingers at least once or twice in the course of a season; some, in the course of a game. The year before that, Ambrose developed a severe case of laryngitis; couldn’t raise his voice above a whisper. It hung on for two weeks and just to be safe, the doctor ordered another week of silence after that. He missed three games because he couldn’t call the signals. None of that would have been so bad, but he always acted like some kind of dispossessed royalty. The guy was good and he knew it. So he would damn well stay on his ass until he was good and healed, never once fearing for his job. He knew it was his. (And let me tell you, I hate that kind of certainty.)

The guy we had playing behind him was another freak. A tall, lanky kid from Oklahoma named Ken Spivey who could whip the ball far enough and, when he was on his game, throw pretty accurately, too. Only he was erratic. He still had not fully grasped the playbook, and what was worse, he let things upset him—had a terrible temper—and when he got angry he’d lose concentration, which is to say, he’d lose his talent. I mean
all
of it. Hell, he’d lose the ability to
hold
a football, much less throw the damned thing. You could tell when he was getting upset, because his face would turn bright red. And you know
what
upset him? He didn’t like it when somebody pushed him or knocked him down. Which tends to happen a lot in football, especially when a fellow is playing quarterback.

The third-string guy was Jimmy Kelso. He’s a head coach now, but back then he was one of those fellows you like to have around because he was plenty smart and plenty willing. He played well in college, showed he could lead a team downfield. His passes were unerringly accurate—I mean he could drop the ball over a guy’s shoulder and into his arms before he had time to look for it. Problem was, he couldn’t throw the ball very far. The arm strength just wasn’t there. We used him in practice a lot, especially when we wanted our defense to be ready for a short, quick passing game, but even then you have to be able to really fire the ball sometimes. For a quick-out pass, where the wide receiver runs five to seven steps and then breaks toward the sideline, the quarterback has to be able to put the ball in the air, on a line, with little or no arch, twenty to twenty-five yards, before the receiver makes his cut toward the sideline. When he does make his cut and turns his head to look for the ball, it’s supposed to be right there in front of him. Half the time Kelso couldn’t even make that simple pattern work. He’d throw it quickly enough, but the ball wouldn’t have enough steam on it and a lot of the time the defensive back or even a linebacker would simply knock it down, or worse, intercept it. When you intercept that kind of pass, there’s only three people who can stop you from taking it back all the way “to the house,” as the players still like to say: the receiver you jumped in front of to intercept it—and he’s usually moving pretty fast in the
other
direction, and therefore isn’t likely to catch up to anybody; the quarterback, who generally isn’t very fast, or likely to be able to tackle a coatrack; and the referee, who is usually racing down the field next to the interceptor so he can signal touchdown. So an interception under those circumstances is a pretty grim development—and,
unfortunately, what you could frequently expect with Kelso leading the charge.