The Legend of Jesse Smoke

by Robert Bausch

  Finally we had a meeting with Andy and Nate and Jesse. We also included Justin Peck, her football agent; Harold Moody; and Coach Engram. The meeting was Engram’s idea, but I agreed to it. Something had to be done to stem the tide of demand on Jesse’s time. We planned to meet on the Monday after the Kansas City game—an off day for the players.

  What we couldn’t have predicted was Edgar Flores showing up just as we were all sitting down at the table in the coaches’ meeting room.

  “Well,” Flores said. He wore a white sports jacket, a black shirt, gray slacks, and black-and-white wingtip shoes. His dark hair piled a little higher than normal on his head. He looked tan—as if he’d just walked off a beach or a golf course. He was carrying a manila folder. “Just the folks I wanted to see,” he said.

  Coach Engram got up and offered the seat at the head of the table, but Flores waved his hand and sat down next to Jesse. She looked at him, her chin a little tucked in and her eyes kind of quizzical, but he smiled and held out a cigar. “I don’t suppose you’d want one of these, but would you mind if I had one?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” she said. “The smoke makes me cough.” She looked like a college student in her large blue turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and sneakers. Sweet and smart and feminine. She reached up and touched the Band-Aid across her freckled nose, and then she turned to face the table. There followed a very long pause while Flores stared rather forlornly at his cigar before putting it back in his pocket.

  “Here’s the thing,” Flores said, leaning forward with the folder in front of him and both arms on the table.

  We all sat there in silence.

  “Jesse’s mom has written me a letter. She’s also written the commissioner, the head of the players’ union, and Coach Engram here.”

  I looked at Engram. Jesse was staring at the desk in front of her.

  “I think she’s written Jesse, too.”

  She nodded, without meeting his gaze.

  “She’s expressed concern over Jesse’s health.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “And her contract. She read in the paper that Jesse is making the minimum salary.”

  Justin Peck said, “I’ve communicated with Jesse’s mother as well, and I’ve worked out what I think is a very reasonable—”

  But Flores went on, without even acknowledging that sound was coming from Peck’s position at the table. “What I’ve got here is a very handsome insurance policy, in Jesse’s name.”

  “Insurance,” both Coach Engram and I said at the same time.

  “Health insurance and life insurance. I’ve also got a considerable proposal for a contract extension.”

  “Really,” Coach Engram said.

  “Wait a minute,” Justin Peck said. “I’m her agent in these matters …” He was a curt little man, who always paired gray suits with brightly colored shirts and ties, always neat and pressed and positively glistening. “If there’s a new contract being proposed—”

  Nate, who sat on the other side of Jesse, suddenly raised his hand to silence the agent. “Who does the insurance protect?”

  Flores said, “Jesse, of course.”

  “How?”

  “Any injury, permanent or otherwise, will be fully covered by the team. This policy will insure her well-being in perpetuity—until, of course, she dies.”

  “Insurance won’t prevent an injury,” Nate said.

  “No. No, it won’t, young man. Nothing will do that.” Flores suddenly turned to Coach Engram. “Who is this fellow?”

  “He’s my friend,” Jesse said.

  “What about the life insurance?” I asked.

  “Goes to her mother.”

  Jesse looked at him now. “I don’t have a mother.”

  This surprised Flores.

  “Look, I haven’t seen her or spoken to her since I was eleven years old,” Jesse said. “As far as I’m concerned, we’ve never met. I don’t even remember my mother, if you want to know the truth.”

  “You don’t have pictures?”

  “Just a collection of letters. That’s all.”

  Nate said, “It might be in your interest to let her back in your life.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “Might put to rest all those rumors about you really being a man who’s just had a sex change operation.”

  She turned away from him. I met her gaze briefly and was ashamed that she must have seen the agreement on my face. I didn’t say anything, though.

  “I don’t care about that,” she said. “Anyway, I haven’t made up my mind about her. I don’t know what I want to do.”

  Flores didn’t seem bothered by this. He pushed the folder a bit in her direction. “Well, you can just look these over and decide for yourself about the beneficiary for the life insurance.”

  “Why does she have to have life insurance?” Nate said. There was a silence. Everybody looked at him as though he was asking the most obvious question, but he persisted. “No, really. You know what I mean. Do the other players have life insurance policies paid for by the team?”

  “Good point, actually,” Peck said. “The team may be paying for this insurance, but that does not count as part of her compensation.”

  “Excuse me,” Flores said. “My general manager is not here. We cannot discuss Jesse’s compensation without him in the room. So would you kindly shut up?”

  Everyone at the table took in a bit of air at that. Coach Engram made a very slight clicking noise in the back of his throat. As for Justin Peck, he got up, picked up his legal pad and pen, and quietly left the room. He didn’t even look at Jesse, but she got up and moved to follow him.

  “Where are you going?” Flores said.

  “I’m going with my agent.”

  “You don’t have to.” He looked at me. “Skip? Explain to her how this works?”

  “Jesse,” I said, before even knowing what else I might say to her.

  “Look, I’m paying for your insurance,” Flores said. “All right? Nothing comes out of your pay. Your contract extension is for another year, at double your salary, and a substantial signing bonus. You get every penny of it.”

  She was standing over him now, looking down, while he was turned around, looking up at her, his hands still on the table. It had the appearance at least of a very odd reversal of power.

  “Every penny of it is guaranteed,” he said.

  “Except, if my agent is right,” she said. “Double my current salary is not nearly what an average starting quarterback in the NFL makes.”

  “Come on, the signing bonus puts you well in that range,” Flores said. “And let’s face it, we can’t commit to you like we can to a man.”

  “Why not?”

  He seemed exasperated. “You might want to play football now, Jesse. But you got this clock ticking, you know what I mean?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know.” She wanted him to say it.

  “I don’t want to use an old cliché, but you won’t always want to play football. I need to plan for that.”

  “This is about her being a woman,” Nate said.

  Flores looked at him for a second, as if not even quite believing the notion of sound coming from Nate’s place at the table. Then he said, “Of course.”

  “I’m not trying to be difficult, Mr. Flores,” Jesse said. “But you’ll have to negotiate a new contract with my agent.”

  “Okay, then—go get him. We’ll all sit down and—”

  “This meeting isn’t about the contract,” Nate said. “We have to work everything else out.”

  “Work what out?” Flores asked.

  “About the demands on Jesse’s time, for one thing.” He pointed to the folder on the table. “This business about insurance.”

  I think it was at that moment that Jesse may have begun working out in her mind who really cared about her. It was probably not anything she had ever considered before. She looked at me, and I said, “You do what you think is best.”r />
  Then she looked at Engram. He stared at her, thinking. Flores turned back to the table and slowly placed the folder where Jesse had been sitting.

  “What we were going to talk about here,” said Harold Moody, “was how to manage the demands on Jesse’s time. She can’t be in more than one place at a time.”

  “I want her concentrating on her job,” Coach Engram said.

  As Jesse moved back to her chair, I got up and went outside to find Justin Peck. Whatever we talked about, I wanted him there for it. Not that I was being that much of a gentleman. In future negotiations, I knew, he would remember that I’d looked out for him that way.

  As the meeting went on with all parties at the table, it finally became clear what Nate meant by his question about the insurance. He was worried about what life insurance for Jesse would say to the rest of the team, and what that meant for Jesse’s future. What he wanted to know was: How expensive was that insurance? Did anybody really think that she might die? Was that somehow truer of her than the other players?

  Flores assured him that he was only trying to think of everything with Jesse; most players had the same kind of insurance, although it was true, not everybody had it through the team. If Jesse’s policy was so lucrative, it was because she was, after all, and according to the insurance underwriters, “of the slighter sex” and might incur an injury that would be, well, worse than a man might suffer under the same circumstances.

  “Are my bones more fragile than yours?” Jesse said.

  “They’re smaller,” Flores said.

  She wrinkled her face. “No they’re not.”

  “Look, you possess a reproductive apparatus that may be vulnerable. That’s what the underwriters are telling me. Okay? And that insurance happens to cost more for you than it does for any man.”

  Jesse let a wry smile cross her face, but she said nothing more.

  After that the meeting went pretty smoothly. It became fairly clear that one of the reasons Edgar Flores had upped Jesse’s contract and provided such an expensive insurance policy was that in return he expected her to be available to the media as much as possible—preferably wearing a Redskins sweatshirt or hat. He wanted that logo everywhere in her ads and commercials. He’d even approved two ESPN camerapeople and a film crew from NFL Films—both of which would follow Jesse around just about anywhere she went at the compound and even to her apartment. Both crews were making documentaries. They wanted her to wear a mike in one of her games, too, but we wouldn’t allow it. “She’s got to call signals, for Christ’s sake,” Engram said.

  Besides, it was bad enough getting Jesse’s chords to the level where everybody could hear her on the field. Coach Engram joked that the “high pitch of her voice would blow the little transmitters all to hell.”

  Still, Moody was using her for all she was worth. And you couldn’t blame him. Jesse brought in fans unlike any other player in the history of football. Everybody from the beer-drinking macho crowd that wanted to see her get her head knocked off to the real aficionados of the game, who wanted to see her play. And women from every walk of life wanted to get in and see her. What had once been a sport in which lots of women were interested up to a point became a national phenomenon that interested virtually every woman. The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair ran articles about nearly all aspects of Jesse’s existence. She was the “mystery girl from the Far East.” The “legendary daughter of an unknown coach.” There were no pictures of her as a young player, smiling at the camera, holding a football helmet under her arm; no pictures of her with her father, or in the uniform of any high school team. But the American high school on Guam released a transcript of her grades (except for Cs in golf and calculus, she was almost a straight-A student) and old newspaper articles about her prowess on the field when she played in a women’s league there. There were a few published pictures of her in action in the women’s league, and Vanity Fair ran those, only she looked exactly like a young man in a uniform, running with or throwing a football. You couldn’t tell it was her, except maybe for the long legs and that whiplike arm moving so fast it only registered as a blur in the photos.

  Ladies First magazine did an article about her presence in the locker room. On the road she frequently had to dress in a hotel room then ride to the game in a cab provided by the team. After games, she’d walk out of the stadium and take a cab back to her hotel room. It didn’t take long for the press to realize they could talk to her immediately after the game on the field, or in the lobby of the hotel after she’d showered and dressed. At home games, I gave up my office in the locker room of the stadium. There was a shower in there, so she could clean up, get dressed, and then meet the media in the press room. So she never had to enter the locker room where the men showered and dressed, either at home or on the road. The magazine ran detailed pictures of her equipment—the flak jacket she wore that protected her upper body, for instance—explaining that you could pound on it with a baseball bat and she wouldn’t feel a thing. The piece showed her knee pads, her thigh pads, her shoulder pads, the headset she wore inside her helmet so she could hear Coach Engram or me.

  Sport magazine ran her vital statistics, 6′ 2″, 175 pounds; her score in agility drills; her speed in the 40-yard dash. (At 4.33, she was the third-fastest player on the team—a virtual tie with Rob Anders. Her feet were so quick she could outdo all of them, even Darius, in the agility drills.) All of that was very plainly laid out for the world to see and know. Still, there were stories on the Internet about how she walked around the locker room naked. How the men ogled her after a victory. How they held her up, naked, and celebrated with her in the shower. If you believed what was being said on the web, Jesse had daily sex with Coach Engram, me, Dan Wilber, Darius Exley, Orlando Brown, and even Rob Anders. She was Edgar Flores’s secret lover in one tabloid that ran a picture of Jesse’s bright-eyed face inside a bright yellow oval border and next to it, Flores, standing by a small plane with a cigar in his mouth. He flew her to exotic places of the world, the story had it, so they could have their “romantic trysts” in private. Everywhere she went, somebody was taking her picture.

  I did what I could to protect Jesse from all that, but the tabloids are right out in the open on supermarket aisles where you check out. Pictures of Jesse and everybody she was supposed to be involved with. It made me sick.

  There was even a story about a former husband who wanted to reconcile with her, but whom she was coldheartedly ignoring.

  The funny thing was, nobody mentioned a single thing about a long-lost mother.

  Twenty-Five

  We went to Mexico City to play the Aztecs. The Aztecs had a pretty good defensive line and not a bad group of linebackers. The thing was, they’d blitz more than a few times with a cornerback, a safety, and all three linebackers at once, and they were very good at disguising when and how they were going to do that. You could never predict when it was going to happen and where it was going to come from. To protect Jesse we installed a game plan that called for her to roll out more—usually to her right since she was right-handed, but we put in a few to her left too. That kind of play is called a “quarterback waggle.” We had her throw short passes to the backs and wide receivers on some plays, trying to set up deeper balls later on. We weren’t going for anything deep right away, and we planned on running the ball a lot.

  What a lot of people missed because of all the attention on Jesse was the great year Walter Mickens was having at running back. He rushed for more than 250 yards against the Aztecs and we won the game pretty easily, 24 to 10. The most spectacular play for me was a hurried field goal that Jesse kicked with only seconds left in the second quarter that made it 17 to 0. Up to that time in the game we’d been running the ball so successfully she hardly threw a single pass. Mickens kept slicing through the line for good yards and we owned the clock. But near the end of the first half we had to get down the field in a hurry, so we started passing it more. Jesse drove us up the field on quick passes to Micken
s and the wide receivers. She could get back, set up, and release the ball so fast, I don’t know why Coach Engram was so worried about Mexico City’s pass rush. She hit Darius with a quick slant that went for 15 yards. On the next play she rolled a little to her left and flipped a nice quick-out pass to Anders. Then she hit Darius again for 18 yards. In five plays, and less than 30 seconds, she drove the team all the way to the Mexico City 36-yard line. Then, with no time-outs and the clock running, she stood back while the kicking team raced onto the field and got into place. She waited for the snap and then, as the time reached 0 on the scoreboard, kicked the ball high and far and right through the uprights. Fifty-three frigging yards. The ball cleared the crossbar by at least five or six feet. As we were trotting off the field, Coach Engram said, “That would have been good from sixty-three.”

  “I know,” I said.

  In the second half, we opened it up a bit more. Or I should say Jesse opened it up. She kept changing the play at the line. We’d call an off-tackle run, and she’d get the team up to the line and change it to a pass play. She kept the offense moving with short, quick passes—as we had set up in the game plan. But on one play she dropped back 10 yards behind the center into what is called the “shotgun” formation. She took the snap and drifted a bit to her right, and the Aztecs had a double blitz from the corners. They came at her fast, and she planted her foot, looking downfield. Darius was streaking down the right sideline, and she released the ball just as one of the cornerbacks slammed into her lower legs. The ball sailed high and Darius leaped for it but it was out-of-bounds. Jesse’s legs got knocked from under her and she went forward onto her face. I thought I saw her knees buckle in the wrong direction and all of us sort of gasped when she went down. Even the folks in the stadium seemed to take a deep breath. But she got up, pulled a little on the pads at her knees, and then walked back to the huddle.

  There was no flag. On the next play she read a corner blitz on the right side and hit Anders with a quick 15-yard pass, and when the safety missed him he went for another 10 yards or so. Jesse, walking up the field after that gain, pointed right at the cornerback who had hit her in the knees. It was like she was saying, “That’s what you get.” He started talking back to her, bad-mouthing her and everything. She ignored it. She came out of the huddle and changed the play at the line again. “Run what’s called, Jesse,” I hollered into my mike. But she called another pass play, this time a quick out to Exley on the left. She fired the ball to him so quickly, the Aztec linemen barely got out of their stance before the ball was on its way. Darius snatched it out of the air and ran for 11 yards. Again, Jesse pointed to the cornerback on that side. She was not listening to me with her headset, that much was clear. I looked at Coach Engram, and he called time-out. Jesse came to the sideline and I asked her what she thought she was doing.