I confess to you now, I was pretty bothered by all that. Not that I ever said anything directly to anybody, of course. And I was happy to see that Coach Engram credited me with the whole thing in his book on Jesse. I understood how those things worked, how they could be misunderstood; still, it bothered me. I’m not saying it took courage for me to bring her to the Redskins, or to sign her to a contract without letting anybody know what I was actually doing. Anybody might have jumped at the chance to sign her once they saw her play. Look, if anybody in all of this had courage, it was Jesse. What she was doing, to put it bluntly, and no pun intended, took one hell of a pair of balls.
We were now 3 and 3. Next, we had the Los Angeles Rams on the road. They were 1 and 5 on the year and fighting both injuries and age. They had made the playoffs the year before with a 10 and 8 record. In the first game of the season they lost the entire right side of their offensive line to injury. Since their protection was not very good, they lost their quarterback to a fairly grizzly knee injury in week three. Their stadium was a noisy place to play, but we went up there and Jesse started her second game. We made her wear an extra pad under her flak jacket to protect her bruised back. She already wore pads that encased her chest and protected her ribs in front. The hit she took in the Raiders game gave her a sore neck, but she claimed the big bruise between her shoulder blades didn’t hurt at all.
In Los Angeles she looked terrific on the last artificial turf field in the NFL. She moved around in the pocket, dropped back as swiftly and keenly as any pro. We ran the ball a lot—handed it to Mickens and sometimes the fullback Jack Slater, who bulled into the line like a water buffalo. Mickens rushed for 158 yards and scored a touchdown. Jesse had no interceptions, no fumbles, and she did not get knocked down even once. She went 11 for 14, for 266 yards and 3 touchdowns—2 of them to Exley. We won 28 to 3.
Now we were 4 and 3, and everywhere we went, the stadium was packed. People wanted to see Jesse play.
The Giants were still undefeated at 7 and 0. Dallas was tied with us at 4 and 3. Philadelphia had won 3 and lost 3.
The rest of our schedule looked like this:
Week Eight (October 16) Kansas City Chiefs
Week Nine (October 23) at Mexico City Aztecs
Week Ten (October 30) Bye
Week Eleven (November 6) at Cleveland Browns
Week Twelve (November 13) Philadelphia Eagles
Week Thirteen (November 20) at New York Jets
Week Fourteen (November 24) at Dallas Cowboys
Week Fifteen (December 4) Cincinnati Bengals
Week Sixteen (December 11) Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Week Seventeen (December 18) at San Diego Chargers
Week Eighteen (December 24) at Green Bay Packers
Week Nineteen (December 31) New York Giants
The best team in the league was probably the Oakland Raiders, but there were some real powerhouses on our schedule. As I mentioned earlier, the Cowboys were better than the score indicated in our first win against them; the Giants were going to be hard to beat, even at home. They were running on everybody, and it wasn’t just trickery; they were very good at pushing people out of the way.
I worked with Jesse all week as usual on the offensive game plan. Monday was usually an off day for the players, but Jesse came in to work with Coach Engram and me on the game plan for Kansas City. At our first offensive meeting, she asked if we could have a talk.
“Sure,” I said. “When?”
“How about right now?”
We were in one of the smaller meeting rooms and we’d been watching films of the Kansas City defense. Coach Engram was not there yet, so it was just the two of us.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“I’ve heard from my mother.”
“Really?”
“I got a letter,” Jesse said, slouched in an office chair. She wore sweats, as usual, and I saw she’d gotten another haircut. She always wore it in tight curls, close cropped but just slightly unruly. It didn’t cover her ears which, maybe, were a little too large for a face so perfectly structured. When she told me she’d heard from her mother, there was no tone in her voice. “She saw my face on the cover of that magazine.”
“Hunh,” I said. “I mean, your face has been out there, all over the media, for a long time.”
She nodded, considering.
“You sure it’s your mother?”
“It’s her. I’d know that handwriting anywhere.”
“Didn’t you tell me you didn’t remember her?”
She sat forward. “I was young when she went away.”
“Can I see the letter?”
“I gave it to Coach Engram.”
“What the hell’d you do that for?”
Her eyes widened a bit, and I realized I had been a little too loud and emphatic. I didn’t want her to know how I felt about how Engram had taken her “under his wing,” as the Washington Post had phrased it. At the time, though, I admit I was kind of touchy about it. She said, “I didn’t tell him about it. She wrote to him too.”
“You’re kidding.”
Her face was impassive, expressionless. Even her normally bright blue eyes seemed muted. There wasn’t a lot of light in the room and it was early in the morning. I didn’t want Jesse thinking about anything but the Kansas City Chiefs, but this was an issue I knew we couldn’t just brush aside. Coach Engram would join us soon, so I lowered my voice. “Do you know what she said to him?”
“No.”
“He wouldn’t tell you?”
“Why are you whispering?”
“No reason.”
“He said he’d go over it with me after our meeting today.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Just, you know, how proud she is and all. Stuff like that.”
“She’s not asking for anything?”
“No.”
I sat back. “She will,” I almost said, but thought better of it. No need for cynicism before it was totally necessary.
“She lives in Tennessee,” Jesse said, and now her voice sounded kind of sad.
“You all right?” I said.
“Yeah.” But she didn’t sound convinced. I wanted to put my arm around her and give her a good squeeze. I’d seen her frustrated and determined; I’d seen her angry, ecstatic, and happy. I’d seen her when her blood was up and she was so focused you’d have to hit her with a two-by-four just to get her attention, but I don’t think I’d ever seen her looking sad.
“Don’t you want to respond to her?”
“She loved my father once.”
I nodded.
“She knew him when he was young. I don’t know. After she left she kept sending me letters and e-mails. For years she wrote to me. I never answered her.”
“Why not?”
She looked at me, as if I should know. Then she said, “I hated her for leaving my father.”
“How old were you, Jesse?”
“I was eleven.”
And then Coach Engram poked his head in the door. “Be right with you.” I noticed Jesse smile brightly when she saw him. When he closed the door she looked at me. “Have you seen Darius Exley’s dolls?”
“I think he prefers ‘action figures,’ no?”
“Pretty amazing, aren’t they?”
I studied her. “You like Coach Engram, don’t you?”
She shrugged.
“He’s forty-four years old, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean … he’s pretty old.”
“Older than you?”
“I’m fifty-one.”
She crossed her legs and leaned back in the chair almost luxuriously. I wondered sometimes if she knew how beautiful she was. A woman built that tall—with angular bones and small breasts, not much in the way of hips and all—could easily have no sense of just how attractive she really is. She was not masculine, Jesse—not even slightly—until, of course, when she stepped onto a football field. As I
said earlier, with her uniform on, the flak jacket and her helmet, she looked like a lean guy on the wiry side. She carried herself, I mean, in such an athletic way, you’d never say she was feminine in the traditional sense of that word. She certainly wasn’t prissy; didn’t scream easily, even when she was pleased. She walked into a room as though she’d just been placed in charge of it, and yet always with a sort of glittery-eyed wonder.
“What do you think of Darius?” Jesse asked.
“Exley’s as cool and wily as a cat,” I said, smiling. “That’s what I think of him. And he can catch anything you throw at him.”
“What about Dan Wilber?”
“What’s with the questions, Jesse?”
She raised her brows a bit and seemed to give a slight shrug. Then she said, “They want to go out with me.”
“I hope you don’t mean that the way I think you mean it.”
“How should I mean it?”
“What do you mean ‘go out with you’? You mean like a date?”
She nodded, her brow still slightly elevated.
“We can’t have that kind of thing on this team,” I said.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” She sat forward a little. “I’ve said no to everybody. Only I kind of like Darius.”
“You do?”
“He’s smart, and I like the way he carries himself.”
“Jesse, if you get involved with any of these players, you know what that will mean.”
She nodded.
“Everyone who hates this idea predicts this very thing.”
“I know.”
“You can’t get involved with any of the coaches, either.”
“So I’m not supposed to have any kind of a private life?”
“Away from this team, sure you are. You have to stick to that, though, Jesse—one hundred percent.”
Which is when Coach Engram came back in. “She has to stick to what one hundred percent?”
“Avoid sex with every player, coach, equipment man, administrator, or owner on this team,” I said.
Engram blushed as he sat down. “Yeah, that’s probably best.”
“It’s not like any of you have to worry about that,” Jesse said, a bit of a smirk on her face. It was as if she knew something we could never know.
It was quiet for a while. I think both of us expected her to say more, but she just sat there, with that half smile on her face. Finally, Coach Engram asked about our game plan.
“I think we can run a few screens to Mickens,” Jesse said.
“Yeah,” I piped in a little awkwardly. “On the film they’re willing to give up a little more than most teams to get to the quarterback. They blitz a lot.”
“I noticed that too,” Engram said. He was sitting next to Jesse.
I said, “It looks like we can do some real business with a middle screen or shuttle pass behind the center when we get inside their twenty.”
“They stunt to the outside a lot down there, don’t they.” What he meant was that the Kansas City defense sent their tackles in a kind of exchange where they would crisscross over the center, one racing to the right and the other wheeling around to the left behind him. It is a tactic that can confuse an offensive line, but if you block it right, you can open a huge hole up the middle.
And he was right. On film, they had a tendency to run that stunt whenever anyone got inside their 20-yard line. We could run a draw, a center screen, or even a quick underhand flip to the running back cutting behind the center, and if it worked, get some good yardage out of it. Of course the Chiefs knew that play was vulnerable that way, so they’d try to disguise when they were going to run it. We studied the film to look for what we call “keys” to the play—little signs that it’s been called and they’re going to run it. What Jesse and I had noticed on the film earlier that morning was that whenever Kansas City called that play, their right tackle leaned back a little and his knuckles would raise a fraction off the turf—just enough so you could see a shadow under them. Every time he got in that position, he pulled out to cross behind the other tackle.
When I showed that to Coach Engram, he grinned. “Damn,” he said. “This is so much fun sometimes.”
“Yes it is,” I said. “We should be able to do some business on that play.”
There was a long pause while all of us admired the film. We watched that tackle pull out to run that stunt four or five times. Then I looked at Engram. “Her mother going to be a problem?”
“Whose mother?”
Jesse gave a slight laugh.
“Hers,” I said, pointing.
He looked at Jesse. “You don’t have to broadcast the thing.”
“She can tell me,” I said. “I signed her to this contract. I’m her mentor on this team.”
He stared at me, clearly suppressing laughter.
“I’m serious,” I said. “I’m looking out for her. I’ve been looking out for her. If something’s going on that might—”
“I’d appreciate it,” Jesse interrupted, “if we could just concentrate on the Chiefs today? I mean—damn—stop talking about me like I’m in another room.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Coach Engram stared at both of us.
“Anyway, my mother is not going to be a problem,” Jesse said.
It’s a wonder to me now that I believed the only problem might be her mother.
Twenty-Four
I moved down to the sideline for all the rest of our games. I hated giving up my seat in the booth, but it was just too far from the action, and Coach Engram wanted me to be where I could talk directly to Jesse if she needed it. The day we played the Chiefs, a reporter asked me about the change. I said I wanted to be where I could speak with my rookie quarterback, which got erroneously reported as Jesse needing me down there to play well.
We whipped Kansas City without too much trouble, 35 to 10. Jesse ran the shuttle pass behind the center twice in the first half. Mickens gained 18 yards the first time we ran it—he was dragged down inside the 1-yard line. The second time, right before the end of the second quarter, he went 16 yards for a touchdown. Jesse was cheered like a rock star every time she ran onto the field, every time she completed a pass, as loud as anything I ever heard in that stadium. She completed 18 passes out of 23, for 257 yards and 2 touchdowns. She got knocked down a few times, after she’d released the ball. There was one really bad sack in the first half—she got hit so hard I worried if she’d get back up again. But she jumped up a moment later and handed the ball to the referee, who had thrown his flag and charged the defense with roughing the passer. (The guy who got charged with the penalty—a pretty good linebacker named Renaldo Kane—complained to the press after the game that it was a bad call. “Those refs feel sorry for her because she’s a girl, so we can’t even bump her a little bit. I barely touched her.” But let’s be clear: He hit her in the neck with the crown of his helmet, which is roughing the passer, whether the passer is male or female.) Jesse ended up with a bloody gash across her nose that bled for most of the rest of the half. It was all over the front of her jersey, but the men seemed to rally around her when they saw the blood and the way she herself seemed to ignore it, blocking that much harder. Those men were ready to kill for Jesse. The second half, she did much better. I think she only got knocked down once.
Jesse’s most spectacular touchdown pass was to Anders. She dropped back and held her ground for a bit, looking downfield, then she sensed a blitz coming from her right. She drifted a bit to her left, then rolled that way, looking downfield. Anders had run from wide on the left side, a deep post, so he was running across the field, deep to the right, away from where Jesse was going. Just before anyone got to her, while she was still moving those quick, beautifully positioned feet, she threw a 40-yard bomb that dropped over Anders’s right shoulder as he raced to the corner. It was a perfect pass, and the crowd could see it coming while the ball was in flight—could see it even before Anders looked back for it. You could hear their anticipation. The s
ound of that—of an entire crowd just beginning the intake of breath ahead of a scream, while the ball makes its arching way to a certain touchdown—it’s got to be one of the most wonderful sounds on earth. You have to be in the stadium to hear it. It’s as though the ball draws any noise into itself as it spins through the air toward the man running under it, his hands not yet outstretched for it. And when the ball comes down into the man’s hands so that he doesn’t even have to reach for it—when he takes it as though it’s been dropped off a shelf two feet above his head—the noise reaches its crescendo and the place erupts. It’s maybe the most beautiful thing in athletics. It beats an ace in tennis, a home run in baseball, a dunk or spectacular three-point shot in basketball. There’s nothing close to it.
After the Kansas City game, Jesse wore a Band-Aid across her nose. She was self-conscious about it, but I thought she looked cute. So did the media. The fashion world caught on to her all over again. There was still talk about Jesse really being a man, but now there was a large enough contingent of adults and people with half a brain who ignored that talk. Even the press stopped talking overmuch about it, although Roddy always wanted to know how it made her feel. To which she always answered that she didn’t feel anything. “I can’t control what people think,” she said.
Nate and Andy kept calling her and trying to set up photo shoots and meetings with every kind of commercial venture. The team public relations director—a guy named Harold Moody—bombarded her with requests for interviews from the press, from magazine writers, sports commentators, and talk show hosts. She didn’t have enough time in a day to take everything that came her way.
More people knew who Jesse Smoke was than any other human being on the planet. Hell, folks who couldn’t remember who the president of the United States was, they knew Jesse Smoke.
It was frightening.
The Legend of Jesse Smoke Page 18