4th and Goal

by Monte Burke

  But for whatever reason, that potential was never fully realized when they got to the professional level. They got injured, overlooked, cut. Some had had a taste of the NFL only to have it taken away. Some had never had a seat at the table. They were now professional athletes at the very margins of their sport, scrambling for their last shot to capture the glory that was now fading like daylight at the bottom of a deep, cold canyon. Their big dreams, which had once seemed very achievable if not inevitable, had been dashed along the way, in a sometimes brutal fashion. It had been a while for many of these players since the game of football had been all about fun.

  After that first meeting, the players knew that this season would be different from any they’d experienced before. It was a good bet that no other professional football coach in the country was talking about core competencies and life after football.

  Joe had gone out on a limb and opened himself to possible ridicule. He was an unproven commodity, out of football for decades. His players and most of his coaches had never even heard of him until just a few months beforehand. And here he was, talking mostly about things that, on the surface, seemed to have little to do with their game. In this cynical, snarky age, his words could have been seen as exceedingly corny and easily mockable. They seemed like something a college coach—or even a high school coach—would say. And indeed they were, for they were the same words Joe himself had once used. The game might have changed and the level at which he was coaching certainly had. But Joe had not. That stuff about being a man and treating women with respect? It was literally right out of the playbook of his first head-coaching job at Archmere Academy, back in 1971.

  Except now he was dealing with players who, for the most part, and for better or for worse, had already been molded into men by the ups and downs and various hardships of the game and their lives. They were professionals. They still loved the game, but they played it for money. They would be naturally harder to reach. It was a risky approach on Joe’s part. His players could feel pandered to, could feel like they were being treated like boys. But this was Joe. This was how he did things, as a coach, as a businessman. This is what he believed was right. He was not afraid to put himself on the line.

  Some players bought in right away. Others held back, slightly skeptical.

  During training camp in football, there is no sense of individual days of the week, save for Sundays, when players report to the facility at noon, allowing them to sleep in or attend religious services. Camp is a blur of meetings, practices, weight lifting, treatment, and eating. As part of the NFL’s new collective bargaining agreement, their teams can no longer practice in pads twice in a given day (known as “two-a-days”). The UFL doesn’t have that rule. And for the first week of camp, Joe drives his team hard, making them do two-a-days for five straight days in temperatures that reach as high as ninety-eight degrees. With time so short, he feels like he has to push them. But there is a delicate balance between going too hard and not hard enough.

  The practices all start with “individual” drills. The offensive linemen gather in the corner of one end zone with Don Lawrence, and endlessly work on the transition from a three-point stance (one hand on the ground) to the standing position, where they shuffle backward on their feet as they “punch” the onrushing defender. At the other end of the field, coaches Brandon Noble and Mike Gallagher bounce huge exercise balls at their defensive linemen, who sprint toward the balls, then bend down and thrust their arms skyward to catch them. The drill is meant to help them focus on gaining leverage at the line of scrimmage. Brock Olivo uses a broomstick with a red boxing glove taped to one end to try to punch the ball loose from his running backs, who all seem to be made up only of thick legs, big butts, and rounded trapezius muscles. Kevin Daft’s comparatively lithe receivers run through agility ladders splayed on the ground and catch balls fired at them with serious velocity from a JUGS machine.

  Eventually, practice moves into its “team” phase, where the coaches run the offense against the defense, first in seven-on-seven plays, then with the full eleven-on-eleven.

  The offense, as might be expected because of the unfamiliar scheme, looks off-kilter. The linemen are having trouble maintaining the wide splits, which are completely foreign to them. Joe goes so far as to bring an actual yardstick to the field, and he frequently stops practice to measure the distance between the linemen, to make sure they are spread far enough apart. Later, Don Lawrence will pore over the practice film of his guys, using a remote control device known as a Cowboy clicker to maniacally rewind and fast-forward individual plays. What he’ll see is linemen who are slow to react, who are still learning, and who are routinely being run through by the defense. Lawrence will just shake his old, bald head. “That’s a tough deal,” he’ll say, over and over again.

  Crouch and Masoli are particularly off, missing open receivers on short routes and demonstrating little ability to throw effective deep balls. Andrus’s offense is designed to make big plays, but right now even the small ones seem unachievable. It doesn’t help that Maurice Purify, perhaps the Nighthawks’ best receiver, who once had a cup of coffee with the Cincinnati Bengals, tears a medial collateral ligament in his knee during the first practice and is done for the year.

  The defense, however, looks solid, particularly in the secondary, which is loaded with NFL veterans like Reynaldo Hill (Titans), Ricardo Colclough (Steelers), DeMarcus Faggins (Texans), Clinton Hart (Chargers), Stuart Schweigert (Raiders), and Eric Green (Cardinals). It is not unusual for the defense to be ahead of the offense in camp: with fewer plays to install, that side of the ball is more instinctive early on. But with the Nighthawks offense playing so poorly, Olivadotti says he has no read on the quality of his defense.

  The problem of player evaluations is particularly challenging in the UFL for several reasons. “The cart is before the horse here. Usually, you look at a guy on tape then bring him in. Here we bring a guy in to see if we want to look at him on tape,” says Olivadotti. “And usually there are three phases to the evaluation period of the players you’ve got. The coaches install the plays. Then the players put on pads and forget everything they’ve learned. Then there are the preseason games, where the real competition for spots and the real evaluation takes place.” Since the UFL has no preseason games, Olivadotti says he won’t know what he really has until after the first game.

  Nonetheless, Joe finds his rhythm right away. He situates himself into his coaching pose on the slanted Kroc field: legs akimbo, arms across his chest, thumb and forefinger on his chin, the brim of his Nighthawks hat pulled over his eyes. During the first week of camp, he stops practice occasionally to chastise the players for being sloppy, or for not paying attention to the action when they are on the sidelines (what he calls taking “mental reps”). He seems relaxed and very much in his element. Joe often stands deep in the secondary during team drills, scanning the field, intently watching the entirety of the action. “You need not see what someone is doing/to know if it is his vocation/you have only to watch his eyes,” as Auden wrote.

  Still, he feels the pressure and knows the stakes. “The bottom line is that if I don’t win any games this season, I’m pretty sure my career in football is over,” he says.

  In the evenings, Joe makes the last half hour of dinner mandatory for everyone on the team. The reason: each night, for the duration of training camp, he will be asking the players and coaches, one by one, to stand up at dinner and introduce themselves. He wants them to talk not only about their careers in football but also about their lives. A few of the more bashful players will end up talking for only thirty seconds or so. But most of the folks jump at the opportunity to share their stories.

  A few of the coaches go first. Olivadotti is short and to the point, briefly glossing over his impressive résumé to tell the players that they “all have God-given talent and it would be a sin for us not to get it out of you.” Robert Hunt, who assists Don Lawrence with the offensive line, talks about his own short NFL care
er, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “I still have my signing bonus. I’m driving it right now. I’ve been driving it for twelve years.” (It’s a big black Suburban with dinged-up bumpers and balding tires.) Richard Kent, the jittery special teams coach, stands and speaks in his “hoarse farmer’s voice,” as Joe calls it, and admits that he’s “a little weird sometimes.”

  Then it’s the players’ turn. Some of them talk about their jobs outside of football. Crouch sells medical devices that help women deal with vaginal prolapse. (“You don’t want to know what that is,” he tells the team.) Linebacker Angelo Crowell, once the captain of the Buffalo Bills defense, is a Jersey Mike’s Subs franchisee. Hulking defensive end Curtis Johnson is a professional bass fisherman. Linebacker Morlon Greenwood, who sports a black tattoo that encircles his bald head like a Roman wreath, is a rapper known as Ultimate 56.

  Safety Stuart Schweigert talks about his four-year stint as a starter for the Raiders, and says he has a young daughter. “If anyone has any advice for having a boy, I’m all ears,” he says. Someone from the crowd yells: “Keep your socks on!” Schweigert also mentions his collection of more than 150 throwback sports uniforms, including a 1987 Central Michigan University Dan Majerle basketball jersey (“He’s a bad-ass white boy from Michigan, just like me,” says Schweigert) and a 1978 New England Whalers Gordie Howe hockey sweater. The only one he doesn’t seem to have is a Greg Louganis throwback diving Speedo. “I don’t think I’ll be getting that one,” he says.

  The introductions go on every night. Walter Curry Jr., a gentle-looking bearded giant, tells the room that he’s a member of the PEFL: “Played in Every Football League.” And indeed many of these players and coaches have been, for most of their professional football lives, in the here-today-gone-tomorrow subculture of alternative football leagues.

  One common thread among the guys who have had careers in the NFL is that injuries are the reason many of those careers were derailed. Nose tackle Dusty Dvoracek was All-Big 12 in both academics and football at the University of Oklahoma. He was drafted by the Bears but was injured in his first two seasons. In the fourteenth game of his third season—a stellar one to that point—he tore his biceps while tackling the Vikings running back Adrian Peterson. “No NFL team wants a guy with an injury history like mine,” he tells the room. “I want to show that I can stay healthy, and make it back to the NFL. I love the violence of this game. I love the locker room.”

  Fellow defensive lineman Jay Moore, a big, brooding blond-haired man, was drafted out of Nebraska in 2007 by the 49ers, but was hurt almost immediately and had to sit out a year. Then he, too, tore his biceps the following year. He is now back living with his parents in Omaha, which has a few perks, like the free taxi service they provided him to and from social gatherings.

  Chad Jackson, whose eyes have the luster of black onyx, was taken by the Patriots in the second round of the 2006 NFL Draft, but he tore his ACL in the AFC Championship game that year against the Indianapolis Colts. Christian Anthony, a defensive end, had a heart attack in 2010. Dan Gay, an offensive lineman, has a cyst on his heart. “No NFL team wants to touch me,” he says. Cornerback Dovonte Edwards intercepted a Brett Favre pass on Monday Night Football in 2005 and returned it for a touchdown. The next year his NFL career came to a halt because of an arm injury.

  Many of the players are professed Christians, especially Schweigert, the receivers, Andrew Brewer and Roy Hall, and the long snapper, Matt Overton.

  One of the players went to Yale (the punter, Tom Mante).

  Another common theme for many of the players is that they came from broken—sometimes badly broken—homes. Clinton Hart’s father was in jail during most of his childhood, and the safety still has a visible dent in his head from where his aunt dropped him when he was six months old while she was fighting with her boyfriend. Reynaldo Hill stands one night, his bushel of cornrows held behind his head with an elastic band, and talks about his drug-dealing father, and how he turned to other members of his family and outdoor play for succor as a child. The sugarcane company next door to his house used to burn its fields every year, and Hill would chase down the fleeing rabbits for food. (That’s how he found out he was quick.) Both of running back Noel Devine’s parents were dead of AIDS by the time he was eleven years old. Devine had two children of his own by the time he was in junior high.

  Football has been the centerpiece of these players’ lives. It is the reason they were injured. It is the reason that they fight back from these injuries. Football is what saved them from their fractured home lives, from futures that might have been irretrievably lost, from the fate of others—both family and friends—who weren’t lucky enough to be big, strong, fast, and agile.

  On the seventh night of training camp, Maurice Clarett, the troubled former Ohio State star, stands to speak at dinner. This is the introduction that many have been waiting for. The dining room goes utterly silent; there are no forks scraping plates, no ice tinkling in water glasses.

  Clarett speaks in a raspy, barely audible whisper. His voice, like Mike Tyson’s lisp, doesn’t seem to fit his body—five-eleven and 230 muscled pounds—nor does its softness jibe with what the public knows about his past. His gentle, thoughtful demeanor does, however, seem in sync with his current path, which is taking him on a long, slow walk toward redemption.

  Clarett begins by telling the room that football was his first true love. He played the sport nearly every afternoon in his Youngstown, Ohio, neighborhood. When it rained he played carpet football with his brothers inside the house. He would pretend to be Emmitt Smith or Thurman Thomas.

  But trouble happened to be his other passion. He was arrested multiple times before he was fourteen years old, mainly, he says, because he was trying to impress the older kids in the neighborhood. In the eighth grade he was arrested for breaking and entering a house. While attempting to flee the scene, he jumped out of a second-story window and hit his head. He got thirteen stitches for the wound. That’s why, since high school, he has always worn the number 13 on the football field.

  He was sent to a juvenile detention center. There he met a high school football coach who took him under his wing, and who intervened on his behalf with the judge and negotiated a house arrest. Clarett worked out with the coach every day after school.

  In high school, Clarett was a dynamo on the field. He rushed for 248 yards in one of his first games as a freshman. He says he never really went to class, and he was allowed to slip through the academic cracks because of his football ability. In his senior year he was named the best prep player in the state of Ohio. He was heavily recruited, but decided to stay near home and attend Ohio State. He loved the coach there, Jim Tressel.

  Clarett made the team as a freshman as a backup running back. Tressel told him that in the team’s first game—at home against Texas Tech—Clarett would get three series of work. “I did nothing in my first two series,” says Clarett. But on the third one, he broke a long run. The home crowd went crazy. “The fans put you in games, at least at Ohio State,” he says. He finished that game with 175 rushing yards and three touchdowns.

  He was a hard worker in practice and in games. But off the field, he was living a completely different life. “I took golf, fishing, and softball as classes,” Clarett says. “Away from class, anything you can think of I did in my thirteen months at Ohio State.” Drugs and women were two of the things. Cars were another—he owned three of them at a time, including a brand-new Cadillac and Lexus. “I was living the NFL life in college,” he says. “I got paid more in college than I do now in the UFL.”

  In the 2003 national championship game against Miami, Clarett made the two crucial plays that led to Ohio State’s win: He stripped the ball from Sean Taylor’s hands after the Miami safety had intercepted a pass in his own end zone, which led to three important points for the Buckeyes. Then he scored the championship-winning touchdown in overtime. The sky seemed like the only limit for Clarett.

  Instead the sky fell on him. C
larett was suspended from the team for receiving what were deemed “improper benefits.” He also falsely alleged that $10,000 worth of goods had been stolen from him. (He later pled guilty to the lesser charge of failure to aid a law enforcement official.) Clarett tried to enter the NFL Draft. But by NFL rules, a player had to be at least three years out of high school to become eligible. He sued. His case eventually went to the Supreme Court. He lost.

  The next two years were lost in a fog of drug and alcohol use. “I would ride around in my car carrying life sentences, with pounds of weed and bricks of cocaine,” he says. In 2005 he worked out at the NFL’s Draft Combine and performed woefully, mainly because he was high on marijuana most of the time. Surprisingly, he was drafted by the Denver Broncos in the third round that year. In Denver’s training camp, he says, he was partying hard at nights and clashing with his coaches during the day. He was cut before the end of camp.

  And that was when the real trouble began. “I was popping pills and getting paranoid. I was robbing everyone I knew,” he says. In January 2006 he was arrested in Columbus for allegedly robbing two people at gunpoint and taking $150 and a cell phone. His trial was postponed until September.

  Clarett says he didn’t want to go to jail. So he attempted to pay off the man whom he had robbed. He wanted him to drop the charges. The man refused to be bought. On a night one month before the trail, Clarett’s life literally came to its crossroads.

  Clarett jumped into his car wearing Kevlar body armor and carrying a loaded assault rifle and three handguns. He drank half a bottle of Grey Goose vodka as he drove. He missed his intended exit off the freeway. He got off at the next exit and made an illegal U-turn. A cop car happened to be there. The cops pulled him over and used Mace to subdue him.