by Monte Burke
In his unguarded and reflective moments, Dvoracek acknowledges the toll that the game has taken on his body, and what it might mean for his long-term health. Former NFL nose tackle Kris Jenkins once described his football job in gladiatorial terms: “You may not die now, like in an old Roman arena, but five, ten years down the road you could. You know that.”
Dvoracek agrees. He sees the alarming number of former professional football players—and, in particular, linemen—who are dying at premature ages, wracked with injuries to their brains, hearts, and other key parts of their bodies. “I’d be surprised if I make it to fifty-five,” the twenty-eight-year-old says quietly, with a calm, serious look on his face. “But I would do it all over again. I really would.”
Herein lies the modern conundrum facing football players: Thanks to scientific advances, they are now fully aware of the physical and emotional toll that the game will exact upon them. But most of them choose to play anyway, for as long as they physically can.
The reason that Dvoracek would literally die for the game is that it provides him with something that he feels he can find nowhere else, something, paradoxically, that he feels is vital to living fully. In this battle of wills on every snap with another man (or in his case, often with two other men), he reaches something deep and profound within himself, some sort of absolute clarity. Every play on the field for Dvoracek is what T. S. Eliot once described as “the still point of the turning world.” It’s something he is not willing to give up just yet, no matter the cost.
In the locker room before the game Joe introduces Bo Pelini, the Nebraska head coach who has come up from Lincoln to watch his former intern in action. “If it wasn’t for this guy, I wouldn’t have had this opportunity,” says Joe. Pelini waves a modest hello, then cedes the floor to Joe.
“Men, this is a gift we’ve been given here tonight. How many times in life do you get a real second chance?” Joe asks, before delivering a few succinct admonitions. The special teams units, he says, have to be more physical; they were blown away in the last game. The offense has to find its groove and score points. And the defense must redeem itself. Olivadotti nods, then stares grimly at the floor.
Angelo Crowell, the muscled linebacker and captain of the defense, walks to the middle of the room. “We all stood up individually before the season started and talked about where we were from, who we were, what our goals were. Tonight is the night we put all of those words into action, together.”
Then the teams take the field. It’s a beautiful, soft, Indian summer evening in Nebraska. The fans are out in full force, 17,600 strong, one of the biggest crowds in the UFL season. They are loud. They get louder when Joe and Pelini run out onto the field together. Then the sideline, in the VIP section, becomes a snapshot of Joe’s life: His daughters and their husbands and his grandkids are standing next to his stepsons, who are standing next to his former Merrill and TD Ameritrade colleagues and Bo Pelini. Amy is in a skybox, as always, nervously watching over the proceedings.
On the opposing sideline, Fassel paces back and forth, his face already worked up into a game-day crimson. Hambrecht and Huyghue are in attendance. It’s apparent that some decision on the league will be made here tonight.
Dvoracek runs out onto the field with a noticeable hitch in his gait, then takes a seat on the bench and starts violently vomiting. It’s part of his pregame routine.
The Nighthawks kick the ball to the Locos. Omaha’s defense sets the tone right away. Olivadotti has them ready. On the first play from scrimmage, four Omaha defenders run Locos quarterback Chase Clement out of bounds for no gain, their thudding feet sounding eerily like a troop of galloping horses. “C’mon, Clement, you got more than that, man!” seethes Crowell.
On the second play, defensive linemen Jay Moore and Kevin Basped plant Locos running back Marcell Shipp on his rear in the backfield for a loss.
On the third play, a slow-developing run, Dvoracek slaloms through a few offensive linemen. As the play unfolds, the Nighthawks players on the sidelines whoop and leap in the air, like a boxing crowd sensing an impending knockout. They get their wish. Dvoracek blasts into Shipp for another loss, this one of four yards.
The special teams match the defense’s intensity. On fourth down, Matt Wenger—the rookie linebacker who’d been signed to take the place of the injured Pat Thomas—slices through the middle of the Locos line and blocks the punt. The Nighthawks recover the ball on the Las Vegas 8-yard line. The crowd works itself into a frenzy. Everything is going the Nighthawks’ way.
But the offense doesn’t get the memo. After a six-yard run by John Griffin to the 2-yard line, Shaud Williams is stuffed for a loss. On third down, Masoli rolls out to his left and throws the ball to Greg Orton, who, with Jackson out, is perhaps Omaha’s best healthy receiver. Orton, in the end zone, is as open as a professional wide receiver could hope to be, which is to say that he has one small step on his defender, a narrow window that will close in a matter of seconds. The ball is thrown a bit low, but is catchable. Orton reaches his hands down to the tops of his shoelaces. He seems to have the ball in his hands for a moment. But then he drops it. Wolfert hits a field goal the length of an extra point.
Early in the second quarter, Colclough almost returns a punt for a touchdown, but is tripped up by the last man standing between him and the end zone. After a few incomplete passes, Omaha’s drive stops at the Locos’ 14. On fourth and eight, Wolfert comes on for a thirty-two-yard field goal attempt.
During the week’s special teams film sessions, Kent noticed that on field goal attempts, the Locos sometimes lined up only three men on the right side of the line of scrimmage, where he had four. Plays at the line of scrimmage come down to numbers. Whoever has more men usually wins. Kent thought if the situation arose, Omaha could run a surprise fake (they had not run one all season). The fake would entail Mante, the Yalie punter and kick holder, running the ball.
As the Nighthawks line up for the field goal attempt, Wolfert sees that there are indeed four Locos on the right side. He’s supposed to kick. But he and Mante, through some confusion, make the wrong call.
The ball is snapped and Mante takes off with it. Mante, who is not a big man as professional football players go, six feet tall and maybe two hundred pounds, gains only two yards before the unblocked Locos player crushes him. With the unsuccessful fake, the Nighthawks fail to score a point from the 14-yard line. And the tackle results in a broken collarbone for Mante—something he will neglect to tell Kent about until after the game.
The Nighthawks defense, however, is still on fire. Led by Crowell, who has four tackles for losses in the first half alone, and Dvoracek, who’s enabling Crowell and his linebacker brethren to have the space they need to disrupt plays, it’s working exactly as Olivadotti had envisioned. With eight minutes left in the first half, Schweigert intercepts a Locos pass. Masoli leads the offense down to the Las Vegas 1-yard line. Garrett Wolfe gets a carry on third down, and runs parallel to the line, trying to gain the corner of the end zone. But he takes only one step before being taken down by a Locos defender who has blasted Omaha center Donovan Raiola three feet into the backfield.
Raiola jogs to the sideline with his head down. Joe runs over to him. Joe’s face is flushed. Frustration with the offense is boiling over on the sideline.
“What happened?” Joe says.
“I wasn’t ready, Coach,” Raiola replies.
“What do you mean you weren’t ready? The guy was right in front of you. Block his ass!” says Joe. Then, as if trying to move Raiola past the mistake, Joe adds: “Donovan, you’re one of the leaders on this team. Now get your ass out there and show it.”
Wolfert kicks another field goal. The Nighthawks go into the locker room leading 6–3. They’ve held the Locos to minus-one-yard rushing in the half. They’ve owned the line of scrimmage. They’ve dominated the game. Being up by only three points feels like a huge disappointment.
Because the average play in the football game, from snap t
o whistle, is only four seconds long, it may seem like folly to try to reduce a game to a single one. But sometimes the success or failure of one critical play ends up being the standard by which everyone and everything—the offensive scheme, the players, the front office, the coach—is judged. Games can change in four seconds. Seasons can, too.
Had Greg Orton caught that pass thrown at his shoelaces, the Nighthawks would have been ahead 7–0 and had all the momentum in the game. Holding the Nighthawks to merely a field goal after they had the ball at the 2-yard line was a huge lift for the Locos, a confidence-boosting victory in a key battle in the larger war.
On their opening drive in the second half, the Locos finally get something going on offense, using a mix of runs and play-action passes to keep Omaha’s aggressive defense on its heels. But, deep in Nighthawks territory, a blitzing Crowell breaks through the line and pressures Locos quarterback Chase Clement into a forced throw. The ball sails directly at the chest of Omaha linebacker Steve Octavien, who seems surprised at his good fortune. So surprised that he turns his head just a second before the ball reaches his hands, already scouting out the lanes through which he’ll run with the ball. But there will be no running because the football slips through his hands and bounces off his chest, falling harmlessly to the grass. On the Omaha sideline, professed Christians use their Lord’s name in vain. A minute later, the Locos score a touchdown. And, astonishingly, they are now ahead by four points in a game in which they could have been down by at least fourteen.
The Nighthawks offense responds with an impressive drive, but one that ultimately stalls in the red zone. Wolfert, the UFL’s best kicker and one of the most reliable kickers in NCAA history, comes on for a forty-yard field goal attempt. Mante, his holder, now hampered by his broken collarbone—which he still hasn’t told anyone about—gets the snap and can’t quite spin the laces away from the spot where Wolfert’s foot is supposed to meet the ball. (Kicking the ball on its laces is thought to be a mortal sin; kickers believe it reduces their ability to control the flight of the ball.) The kick goes wide, and with it, Wolfert seems to lose the one thing he has relied on most throughout his successful athletic career, first as a diver, then as a placekicker: his confidence.
In the fourth quarter, on another Omaha foray into the red zone, he misses another kick, this one from thirty-seven yards. The Locos, buoyed by the misses, get one more drive going. They have a third-and-one at the Omaha 15. A touchdown will pretty much seal the game, given the state of the Nighthawks offense. But Basped tackles Shipp in the backfield. The Locos settle for a field goal. They now lead 13-6 with five minutes left in the game.
After a quick possession, the Nighthawks punt back to the Locos. Clement leads Vegas to the Omaha 20, where they face a fourth-and-one. Fassel, looking to end the game, decides to go for it. Joe speaks through his headset to Olivadotti in the coaches’ box: “One more stop.” They get it. Omaha has the ball back with two minutes to go. Masoli completes a pass, then scampers for twenty yards. The ball is on the Locos 33. But on fourth down, Masoli overthrows his receiver. The Locos take a knee. And somehow, the Nighthawks have lost.
Despite the devastating loss, Olivadotti and his defense have redeemed themselves, holding the Locos to 283 yards in total offense after giving up 401 the week before. “I couldn’t have been prouder of the effort you gave tonight,” Joe tells the defense. “You were physical, tough, and aggressive, and you made plays again and again and again.”
The special teams, too, have done their jobs. Kent, after a tough start to the season, has improved his unit dramatically. Wolfert’s misses seem an anomaly. “Jeff, you won us the game in Sacramento. You had an off night tonight. I still have faith in you,” Joe says.
But regarding the offense, Joe is mum. Masoli was off-target all night. The line had regressed. The offensive stats on the game were brutal. Omaha had gotten the ball in the red zone five times (three times, they had been handed the ball there by the defense and special teams). They’d had the ball within the 5-yard line on three different occasions. And they came away with only six points. “The absolute worst display of offense I’ve ever witnessed” is what Joe will call it later. Adding to his frustration was the fact that powerball—which employed exactly the type of scheme and play calls that put the ball in the end zone from the 2-yard line—still had not been fully installed by Andrus and his staff.
The dark mood in the Nighthawks locker room is brightened slightly by the news that in the other UFL game that night, Sacramento had upset Virginia. With two scheduled games remaining, Virginia and Las Vegas were both 3-1, and Sacramento and Omaha were 1-3. All of the teams are mathematically still alive for the championship. That is, if the owners decide to finish the season. The players and coaches are sure there’s no way they can call off the season now.
But any hopes Joe has of a continued season are dashed immediately. As he walks out of the locker room to go address the media, Huyghue—who had been waiting in the hallway—appears at his side. “It’s over, Joe,” he says as they walk down the hall. “Virginia and Las Vegas will play for the championship next week.” Cutting the season short will save the owners $3.5 million. Joe nods and shakes Huyghue’s hand. The bad news swiftly filters back to the Omaha locker room.
Later, as Huyghue stands in the elevator with a few others on his way out of the stadium, he shakes his head. “Man, they really pissed that game away, didn’t they?” he says, to no one in particular.
The Nighthawks players and coaches all believe that this is it, the end of the season. They head out of the locker room and out on the town to try to forget the loss as quickly as they can.
But no one realizes just how unwilling Joe is to take no for an answer.
Chapter Thirteen
Somewhere in the Middle of America
Once upon a time in America if one wanted to trade a stock or a bond, one had to do it through a stockbroker, who had the exclusive power to trade securities, and the exclusive information on the securities upon which such trades were made. Wall Street firms like Merrill Lynch and Dean Witter, with their legions of stockbrokers across the country, were paid handsomely for that exclusivity, taking a whopping percentage of the money that changed hands.
Then along came a revolution, started by a reserved and pious man, who believed his employees should wear blazers and red ties, be citizens in good standing in their communities as members of Elks and Kiwanis clubs and, for damn sure, be nice to people on the telephone. The man was John Joseph “Joe” Ricketts, born and raised in Nebraska City, Nebraska. His first job was as a stockbroker at a Dean Witter office in Omaha. In his five years there, he learned their playbook, in and out, and proceeded to use that knowledge to turn the industry on its head.
In 1975, with $38,000 from his business partners and another $12,000 borrowed from family and friends, Ricketts founded First Omaha Securities. Despite some serious misgivings on the part of its own founder, and some near-death experiences along the way, it would one day become the $10 billion company known as TD Ameritrade.
What Ricketts had figured out was that by using technology, there was a way to deprive Wall Street of its exclusivity—and thereby make a ton of money. In 1988, just before another disruptor named Charles Schwab would effectively do the same thing on the West Coast, Ricketts introduced automated securities trading via touch-tone telephones, knocking out the high-priced Wall Street middleman. For a fee of a mere three cents per transaction, anyone could now do a stock trade without handing over a good percentage of the money to a stockbroker. (Ricketts’s clients pressed “1” to sell and “2” to buy.)
What individual investors still lacked was the ability to access vital information on stocks and bonds—historical data, earnings forecasts, and market color. The Wall Street banks maintained a tight grip on that information. It was the last advantage they had.
Until the Internet came along. Ricketts saw the electronic wave coming. In 1995 he bought a stock-and-bond trading website called
WealthWeb. The next year, he changed the name of his company to Ameritrade and began offering low-cost trades and online research tools. The power of investing had shifted away from Wall Street and to the individual. The boom in discount online trading was on.
Charles Schwab, E-Trade, Fidelity, Waterhouse, and hundreds of smaller firms joined Ameritrade in the frenzy. E-Trade went public in 1996. Ameritrade followed suit in 1997. “We were all going like crazy,” says Frank Petrilli, then the chief executive of what would become known as TD Waterhouse. “Customers were coming in droves, the market was rocking, the parties were fun. And everyone—I mean everyone—was making money.”
To get an idea of just how fast the industry was growing, consider this: It took Ameritrade twenty-five years to reach half a million customers. It took just one year (2000) to triple that number. The polite, family-owned company in sleepy Omaha—well off Wall Street’s Manhattan grid—had become its own power source.
But the online discount brokerage industry would quickly prove that it was not immune to the excesses and follies of the financial industry that it was disrupting.
By the late 1990s the Internet and technology boom was at full roar. Online brokerages became hot stocks and irresistible investments for venture capital firms. The stock market had become a leading topic of conversation in American households and in the media. Suddenly it was perfectly socially acceptable to mention your stock portfolio at a cocktail party, if for no other reason than that a stock tip might be gleaned from the subsequent discussion. Fueling the mania was a new type of homemade entrepreneur: the day trader. In the late 1990s it became cool to sit in your house all day in front of your computer, keeping one eye on Yahoo.com’s financial chatboards and the other on the ticker crawl at the bottom of CNBC, while trading your own assets through a company like Ameritrade. Individual investors had become one-person Wall Street brokerages, achieving some sort of simulacrum of the American Dream.