The Legend of Jesse Smoke (36 page)

All of us thanked our lucky stars that we had the Bengals coming to our place, so at least we wouldn’t have all the preparations for travel getting in the way. During that hectic week, Charley Duncan gave
our Canadian kicker Justin Dever an immediate raise. And Coach Engram, while he kept Jesse on the roster, elevated Terry Fonseca from the taxi squad to second string. Fonseca already knew the offense better than anybody else Charley might sign and he’d been with us since Kelso went down, so he would be ready to play if he had to. But the team released Corey Ambrose. There was no room for him on the roster once we elevated Fonseca, and he knew he was now the odd man out. Coach Engram said nothing to him. His release was announced, and that was that.

The team was unanimous in its support for Jesse. They got down to business in practice, sure, but they were all angry and you could see it. Orlando Brown announced to the media that the players’ union didn’t represent him, or anybody on the team. “They don’t know nothing about what we got here,” he said. Dan Wilber said, “I haven’t noticed anybody laying back against us; we work just as hard blocking every down as when a man’s playing quarterback. And none of us support this lawsuit.” Rob Anders said, “They’re just pissed because they can’t get to her. Have to blame
some
body.”

Darius Exley refused to talk to reporters, at first, but on Wednesday of that week they accosted him outside of Redskins Park on his way home from practice. “I’m playing,” he said. “My hamstring’s fine.”

A reporter said, “You going to miss Jesse?”

“Hell,” he said, “
you
all will, that’s for sure.” He paused for a moment, then glared into their faces. “Look, I’d rather play with Jesse, but if we got to go with somebody else, we’ll do it. Ain’t nobody afraid to hit her on the field
or
off. That’s what it looks like to me.”

“Have you had a date with her, Darius? Can you verify she’s really a woman?”

Darius shook his head in disgust, walked to his Mercedes, and drove away.

Some players talked about how unfair it was to take away one of our best weapons at this time of the season, with the playoffs on the
line. A lot of them also wondered what
that
might do to the integrity of the game. All of them, when asked if they supported the players’ union, said no. I was as proud of those guys as I ever was. And watching Darius speak with such contempt for the lawsuit and for the media—hearing more words from him than in all the time I’d worked with him—that brought tears to my eyes.

Flores and Charley Duncan and the three lawyers went to New York on Wednesday for a preliminary hearing. Needless to say, the press went with them and followed them all over New York. All Flores kept saying was, “We will deal with this and respect it as we should, but everyone should understand: This is a frivolous attempt to stop our team from achieving its potential. That’s all.”

The judge in the New York court ordered closed hearings on the case, which angered just about everybody, but I myself was glad. I just wanted the damn circus to end, and nothing turns the jackals away better than a stripped carcass. Cause that’s all they had now with the doors closed: nothing but bones.

I have to say, Flores was pretty amazing. He didn’t want to rush into the courtroom unprepared, but he also didn’t want us to have to play too many games without Jesse. His “staff,” which I should mention is considerable and goes well beyond football, they pretty much came to our rescue, enlisting help from both the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union. These two groups got a groundswell going on the Internet with blogs and petitions and postings to what seemed just about everybody in the world. Flores found out from Jesse’s mother which hospital in Japan Jesse was born in and sent a guy all the way to Tokyo to see about getting her birth certificate.

I’m sure you remember all the fuss. Even the president talked about how “advanced” the Redskins were in the realm of human equality. He wondered how the integrity of the game could possibly suffer from the addition of a player of Jesse’s skill. “I think she has increased interest in the sport,” he said. But he’s a politician, and he also made
a point of saying that he worried about her, that an injury in the toughest sport on earth might be “fatal to a young woman.” That’s what the TV and the blogosphere and the press paid most attention to, of course—the
Washington Post
headline, for instance, read:
WHITE HOUSE SAYS JESSE COULD SUFFER FATAL INJURY
.

We’d always understood the dangers of the sport, for anybody playing it. But for Jesse, from the start, we in fact took extra precautions. She wore a full-body flak jacket that made her almost invincible—you really could pound on her with a baseball bat and she wouldn’t feel a thing. It covered her entire upper body, that thing. Her arms were free, of course, and her legs—but they were well padded, too, and as long as she didn’t get twisted too badly the wrong way, she’d be able to play for years. She had not undergone a concussion protocol yet. She was strong and smart and quick and immensely talented. I’m being truthful when I say that, except for that first time she got hit and fumbled, I never really worried about any significant injury. It just wasn’t something any of us thought about. Certainly no more than we did with any other players.

Jesse’s worst injuries that year, before the lawsuit, were a bruised back and cuts to her nose and forehead. And she’d slightly sprained her ankle. That was it. And in the course of all that, she’d thrown 213 passes in 8 games, completing 186—that’s an 87.3 completion percentage, which was unheard of in those days—for 2,364 yards and 27 touchdowns. She’d only thrown 3 interceptions, and her passer rating was 146.6. The best in the business, by far.

No, if the league didn’t want this woman playing, it was because she was doing better than any man had ever done. That was the
only
reason, and everybody knew it.

Our defense, when the Cincinnati game began, was angry, and our offense, even angrier. The whole team went into that game in one helluva bad mood. They thought they were going to take it out on
the Bengals, who were coming in with a 3 and 10 record and some real problems on offense and defense. Problem was, our guys were so intent on beating the stuffing out of the other team, they kept making stupid mistakes. On several plays, they took themselves out of position to knock somebody on his ass and ended up getting taken for big yardage. It took the whole first half to calm them down, by which point, we were trailing 14 to 10. Dever made one field goal from 23 yards out but missed two others. His first attempt, from 46 yards, went wide right. The second one, from 42 yards, went wide left. That kind of inconsistency, well, it’s a pretty bad sign. If your kicker’s going to miss, you want him to miss either one way or the other. That, you can work on. When he misses wildly in more ways than one, though—you’ve got yourself a problem. Nobody spoke to Dever when he came back to the sideline after those misses. You had to feel bad for the guy. After all, everybody knew that Jesse would not have missed even one of those kicks.

Spivey played well, stayed within himself, determined and flinty, but he was rusty and you could see it. He missed the first five passes he tried, and then, when he started hitting them, he was just a little bit off—a bit high one time, a bit behind his man the next—and, when they managed to catch the ball our guys were getting creamed. Darius was screaming at Spivey to get it to him; Spivey tried a few deep passes, but we only got one touchdown out of it. Mickens kept hitting the line like he wanted to batter somebody into powder.

Engram was something at halftime. I walked off the field with him, but in the confusion of everybody piling into the locker room, I lost him. When we were inside, and it quieted down, I realized he wasn’t there. Everybody took a knee or sat on a bench and waited. The rest of the coaches and I looked into their tired, angry faces. Finally I took the floor myself. “You guys
know
you can play better than that. We kick ass in this league
together
, as a team, all right? No one guy is going to make up for Jesse with a hit in this game. We
all
have to do it, by playing together, staying within ourselves, and executing.”

A few acknowledged what I’d said, and I looked around for Coach Engram, who still had not appeared. I stepped outside looking for him. Time was running out. I figured we could stick to the offensive game plan and do fine once we got them to start playing as a unit instead of an angry gang of individuals. But if we were going to make any defensive adjustments, we’d have to hurry. To be honest, everybody knew we should have been ahead by several touchdowns already, and we all expected that Coach Engram would come at us with a vengeance. When he let loose—when his temper came into play—he was as eloquent as a poet, and scary too. He could motivate men, for sure. And that is what I thought he was going to do at halftime. But time ran out and he still had not shown up in the locker room. None of us knew where he was. Then, just as everybody was preparing to go back out on the field, we heard him coming down the hall, whistling. I made the men wait. They watched the door.

He got to it, swung it open, and started in, but then he stopped and looked up at all of us. “Oh, excuse me, boys,” he said. “
I
thought this was the
men’s
locker room.” Then he backed out matter-of-factly and closed the door behind him.

Nobody said a word. We went back out on the field and those guys played like one beast; they hit and tackled so completely, it was a clinic to watch it. Spivey was like an engineer out there, directing the offense down the field every time they got their hands on the ball. He completed 13 straight passes in the third quarter and finished the day with 18 completions in 31 attempts, for 266 yards and 3 touchdowns. Mickens ran for 233 yards on 17 carries and scored 3 touchdowns himself. We won 52–14.

The only thing I hated about that weekend was the headline on the front page of the
Washington Post
the next day, which read,
JESSE WHO
? And then, under it:
REDSKINS DOMINATE BENGALS WITH SPIVEY, MICKENS
.

I liked Spivey. He was a good guy, if you didn’t push him around too much. And he had a good, accurate arm. But he never saw the
day he could play with Jesse. If she had been on the field that day? The damn Bengals would’ve had to call the police to stop it.

We were 10 and 4 now, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were coming to town the following Sunday. We didn’t know if Jesse would be with us or not, though. She wasn’t even allowed to watch the Cincinnati game from the sideline, but Mr. Flores had her in his box—his guest of honor. She cheered with everybody else, and reporters who saw her wrote that she seemed to be having a good time. But after the game, as I was leaving the stadium, I saw her ahead of me walking toward the player’s exit. We were in a long corridor under the stadium that everybody called “the tunnel,” and she was far up in front of me, but I knew it was her so I called out.

She stopped and waited for me.

“Hanging in there?” I said.

“I’m fine.” Her face revealed nothing. She was in a business suit and shiny black pumps, her hair curled and framing her face like black smoke. She wore just a little bit of lipstick, though she had clearly smeared something on her face to obscure the freckles. As I’ve said many times, those freckles were the best thing about her face; and that delicate, broad nose of hers, perfect for their display. Without them she looked a little like a good-looking prizefighter with lipstick on.

“We kicked their asses,” I said.

She nodded.

“Our guys played like they were up against the players’ union.”

She put her arms around my neck, then rested her head on my shoulder. Taken aback, but happy for the contact, I wrapped my arms around her. Was she crying? I couldn’t tell. Then, after a moment, she let go of me and stepped back. “In case this is finished,” she whispered. “Thank you for all of it.”

“It’s not finished, Jesse.”

Now she did have tears in her eyes. “I’m not going to a damned gynecologist, Coach.”

I had no response to that.

“It’s just … too much to ask, you know?”

“Jesse, it’ll put half of their case in the can.”

“I’m not a man, okay? I’m not Robert Ibraham, whoever he is. I shouldn’t have to prove that.”

“But if it’s the only way …”

“No one else in this league has had to undergo that kind of—of … scrutiny. It isn’t fair and it sure shouldn’t be legal.”

“Jesse, it could take weeks for our guy to get back here with that birth certificate. The last I heard, the hospital was having trouble locating it. They’ve sent him to some census bureau. By the time it gets here, the judge will have made his ruling. If he lets this go forward … it’s going to take months, and your season’s over.”

A few of the players came out into the hall now. Jesse smiled and they all passed by to shake her hand, tell her how much they missed her.

“Yeah,” she joshed, like the good sport she was. “I could really
see
you guys missed me.”

When Spivey came by, she grabbed his hand with both of hers. “Great game, Kenny.”

“You’d have buried them in the
first
half,” he said. “Took me a while to figure them out. But I had a good second half.” He wasn’t such a bad guy, Spivey. And if we had to go with him, we’d make do I guess. But right then … I hated him. I did not want him feeling so smug about beating one of the weakest teams in the league. He did say something very kind to Jesse as he was leaving, something truthful. “You’ll be back in there, Jess. Everyone knows you’re the best player for the job.”

When he was gone I said, “The video we’ve made, Jesse,
proves
you have not been treated any differently than any other quarterback. All we need is to put to rest this talk about your—about this Ibraham fellow.”

“Who says I’m him?”

“Somebody in the league office is supposed to have traced you back to him.”

“How?”

“You think your mom had anything to do with this?”