“Jesse! Jesse, you all right?” I hollered into my headset.
She didn’t respond. So I called the next play and tried to get her to look my way. “Jesse, let me know you’re all right.” She brought the team out of the huddle; I could see she had them in the formation I had called. She glanced over the line, shook her head a bit, then leaned down and called the signals, her voice high and girlish—it had no bass in it at all—and when the ball was snapped, she dropped straight back, looked to her right, then her left, bodies flying all around her. She hit Gayle Glenn Louis going up the seam about 30 yards downfield and he raced up the numbers just outside the hash marks all the way into the end zone. The crowd went ballistic. And all the more so when Jesse kicked the extra point.
Now we were leading 7 to 6. The Eagles took the ensuing kickoff out to their 30. On the next play, Talon Jones batted a pass into the air, snatched it, and took it to the house. Suddenly and very finally, we were ahead, 14 to 6.
The rain picked up shortly after that, and for most of the rest of the game both teams ended up just pushing each other around in the mud in the middle of the field. The Eagles had, I think, one first down in the second half. Again, Orlando Brown made riotous incursions into their backfield, and Talon Jones looked like he had learned a whole lot from Drew Bruckner. Maybe he couldn’t rush the passer the way Bruckner did, but he was sure something to see in pass coverage. He knocked two other passes into the air and almost intercepted a second one.
We were glad when the final whistle sounded. As Jesse came off the field, I noticed she was limping a little bit.
“I’m all right,” she said with some exasperation when she saw me staring at her. “Don’t make a big deal of it.”
“Why are you limping then?”
“I’m sore. Okay?” She was in a bad mood, so I let her alone.
∙ ∙ ∙
Coach Engram said all the usual things in the postgame press conference. How hard the Eagles always are to beat; how we just played as well as we could. Somebody said, “So, when Jesse Smoke got knocked out-of-bounds on that run play, did your heart stop?”
Engram stared at the questioner, a sardonic smile on his face. “Jesse’s tough,” he said. “All right?” It got quiet in the room, and he looked around at the others. “You people ought to leave her alone.”
“But Coach, was she hurt? I saw her favoring one leg as she came off the field.”
“She’s okay,” he said. “We’ll see what the trainer says.”
“You said we should leave her alone?” a reporter asked.
“Look, I’m not going to let this business go on anymore,” he said. His voice was utterly cold. “I’ve watched you guys—not just in this room, and not all of you in this room—but I’ve watched a lot of you guys hound her and distract her from what she should be doing. She’s a great football player; a great quarterback. I ought to know, because I played the position myself pretty well for a few years.”
A chorus of voices went up—all starting with “Coach,” for there were other questions, but he raised his hand to quiet them. “I’m closing practices from now on. And Jesse’s informed me she will no longer grant interviews. I expect you guys to honor that.”
“Isn’t closed practices prohibited by league rules?” somebody said.
“No, it isn’t. I can do it occasionally as conditions demand. Well, these conditions demand it every week from now on. Or until I say otherwise.” He looked around the room one more time, again with the voices raised and thrown at him, and then he bent the microphone in front of him down and away from his chin, turned, and walked out of the room. Naturally, I followed.
The first reporter to come to see me was Roddy, of course. He had a female from the Washington Times with him—a woman named Debbie Croft who was short and lean and wore a business suit that accentuated her waist and hips. Her hair was tight and formed to her skull with curls around her ears, and it bounced when she walked. She did all the talking and Roddy listened. I realized she had no questions for me but a kind of proposal. “You get Jesse to talk to me and I promise she won’t regret it.”
“What about me?” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Will I regret it?”
“See? I’m a woman, also in a man’s job.”
“Come on. Women have been doing your job for more than five decades,” I said.
“And it still does not feel like a woman’s job.”
“I’ll grant that.”
“I think I can help her.”
Roddy nodded agreement.
“What makes you people think she needs help?” I asked. “Do any of you even know her?”
“Well, we don’t know her like you,” Debbie said.
“I don’t know her,” I said, with some energy. “You understand that? I discovered her and I don’t know her, really. I’m not sure anybody does. She’s her own person, Jesse. She is entirely self-possessed. I know what she wants me to know and nothing more.”
“So I’m wondering if maybe she would open up to me.”
“She opened up to me,” Roddy said. “I mean, she told me things.”
“She gave you nothing, okay,” I said, immediately regretting it. Now he thought I knew something shocking, or at least intimately revealing. The look in his eye would have made a housefly sick.
“What’d she tell you?” he said.
Debbie looked at him oddly.
“She didn’t tell me anything,” I said. “I just meant she didn’t tell you anything either.”
“Come on, Coach,” Roddy said impatiently. “You know something. I can tell.”
“What’s there to know? Goddamn it. Why does there always have to be a worm in your apple?”
He blinked. The question was completely opaque to him. “It’s the world.”
I said nothing. It was quiet for a moment, then Debbie said, “Is it true about the sex change operation? That she’s really a man?”
“You know who spreads rumors like that?” I said, not even bothering to contain my anger. “Men who can’t stand the idea that Jesse can do things with a football that have always been the province of men, and she can do them better than any man ever did them.”
“Can I quote you?” Roddy said.
“You always strive to tell the truth, Roddy, don’t you?” I walked away from them and didn’t look back.
Thirty-One
Our next game was against the Jets. They had a pretty good offense, but their defense was weak against the pass. Their record was 6 and 5, and they needed a win to stay in the race for the AFC East title. They trailed Buffalo, at 7 and 4, by one game, so a victory against us would certainly help their cause. We were now 8 and 3, having won six straight—all six games Jesse had started—and trailed the Giants (9 and 2) by only one game. So we needed a win pretty badly as well. Dallas, meanwhile, was coming on behind us at 7 and 4. Philadelphia was out of it, having fallen to 5 and 6. Eleven games into the season, the standings in the NFC East looked like this:
TEAM W–L PF PA
New York 9–2 214 89
Washington 8–3 256 141
Dallas 7–4 204 160
Philadelphia 5–6 205 219
While we were playing the Jets in New York, the Giants were going to Dallas to play the Cowboys, who had split their last two games but were starting to execute very well—they were talented and they’d had to play some really solid teams. Oakland barely beat them, 17 to 13, following which they beat Cleveland 27 to 10. They were healthy, too. Whereas the Giants were hurting in the secondary, having lost their starting free safety and their weak-side linebacker for at least six games each. They had to bring in a new punter because their starter broke his leg. Their best wide receiver had suffered a slight ankle sprain, but he was due back for Dallas. Sometimes, the league schedule was so good I set my DVR to record several of the games so I could watch them later. I really wanted to see how the Giants did against Dallas. And not just as a coach either. As a fan.
In practice that week, Jesse still had a very slight limp when she walked from the huddle to the line, but once the ball was snapped you couldn’t notice it. She finally admitted that she’d twisted her ankle slightly, but an MRI showed no structural damage. Still, we let her rest it on Wednesday and Spivey practiced with the first team. It didn’t really matter to Jesse—who was always ready to play—and since practices were closed, nobody noticed Jesse wasn’t in there.
Back then, as you may remember, the Jets had one of the few open-air stadiums left in the league—we still had one in Washington—and even the Jets themselves complained about how bad the weather could be there. We went to New York on Friday and had a walk-through practice on Saturday. Both days the air was still and the weather only crisply chilled—like the best kind of fall day. Sunday by noon the field was frozen solid and wind slashed across it so hard and fast it looked like it would pick the whole surface up and send it out over the Hudson River. Snow started swirling in the air just before kickoff. It swept in white churning clouds along the hard surface and made the whole field look like the yard lines and hash marks were yielding up their whiteness to the wind.
It was almost impossible to pass the ball in those gusts of wind. Jesse’s arm was strong enough to throw a few tight spirals 10 or 15 yards downfield, but anything deep got blown so far off course you couldn’t be sure where it would land, or in whose hands. I hated it down there on the sideline, freezing to death in the icy blasts of air. Coach Engram kept calling running plays and sweeps, trying to wear down the Jets. I might have insisted that we take advantage of their pass defense, but I understood what was going on. In those conditions, Coach didn’t want to risk it with Jesse. She was wearing gloves for the first time, and twice she almost fumbled the ball on the snap from center. When she took the gloves off, her hands froze so quickly her fingers got stiff and she couldn’t grip the ball then either. She kept her hands in front of a heater on the sideline and pulled the gloves on each time she had to take the field. Jesse’s got big hands for a woman—not man’s hands either. Just a young woman’s hands, a little bigger than normal, with long, wide fingers. She usually didn’t have trouble gripping the ball in bad weather. But this day was something else.
It was a hell of a time. We couldn’t move the ball. The defense played well enough, but we just couldn’t sustain a single drive. I don’t know how many times the offense went three and out. At the half we trailed 10 to 0.
In the middle of the third quarter, trailing 10 to 3, Andre Brooks, our right guard, went down. He was small for a guard, 6′ 2″ and around 290 pounds, but he was one of our best blockers, run or pass, and he was devoted to Jesse. Trying to push off on a defensive lineman charging at Jesse, he tore a muscle in his right forearm. He didn’t want to come out, but he couldn’t play with only one arm. The backup at that position was a fellow named Dave Busch. He was much bigger than Brooks, 6′ 6″ and 334 pounds; he was strong and we liked him for the position, but he was not the blocker or athlete that Brooks was.
When Brooks came to the sideline Coach Engram looked at me and the serious expression on his face said a lot. He was thinking what I was thinking. Jesse might be in trouble out there with a weak spot on the line.
We couldn’t get anything going in that wind, and now Jesse had to throw in more of a hurry. The first time she tried something deeper than 20 yards the wind blew the ball up and away from Anders and the safety intercepted it. It was early in the third quarter, and it didn’t cost us anything but the end of another promising drive. The whole game it just seemed like every time we got something started, the Jets would find a way to stop it. They didn’t sack Jesse, but they hurried her, and she was not used to throwing a football with gloves on. I don’t think she wanted to admit the gloves were a problem, but you could see the flight of her passes had a little too much arch—they were too susceptible to the wind.
On the third play of the fourth quarter, with the wind in our faces and the ball on our 15-yard line, Jesse rolled a bit to her right and tried to fire it in between two defenders to hit Gayle Glenn Louis on a quick slant. Dave Busch had been fighting his heart out and he blocked well for her, but on that play he got pushed flat by the defensive tackle and the cornerback blitzing from that side leaped over him to hit Jesse just as she threw. She went down in a heap on the hard field and the corner landed on top of her. The ball sailed high, Louis barely tipped it into the air, and the same safety grabbed it out of the air for his second interception. This time, he ran it the 15 or so yards to our end zone and made the score 17 to 3.
Jesse was good and angry as she went out after the kickoff. The steam rushing out of her mouth might just as well have been smoke. Dan Wilber told me she got into that huddle and said, “We are not going to lose this game.” She was something to see right then, he said. She told me before she went in, “I want pass plays now. We got to pass.” I could tell from the strain in her voice that she’d hurt her ribs when she hit the field with the cornerback on top of her.
Coach Engram started feeding her what she wanted. She threw two quick-out passes to Exley, one for 8 the other for 11 yards. Each time he stepped out-of-bounds to stop the clock. We were down to less than 2 minutes, so on the next play she dropped back, looked left at Exley, let her hand move with the ball, up and down—lots of Jets players left their feet—then she turned to the right and fired it to Anders moving up the sideline. He caught it without breaking stride and ran 35 yards before he got knocked out-of-bounds on the New York 18-yard line. It was so noisy nobody could hear Jesse at the line. She started using our silent count and the team performed it to perfection. (With a silent count, everybody watches the ball. If the quarterback says it’s on “three,” the center counts to himself, “one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three,” and snaps the ball. The quarterback counts too, everybody else watches the ball; when it moves, they do.) On the next play, she hit Anders on a quick post just over the goal line. It hit him right between the numbers and she threw it so hard it actually moved him in the air. He’d left his feet to catch it and the film showed that when the ball hit him he got propelled at least a foot farther downfield—just enough to cross the goal line when he came down. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ball thrown that hard.
We were down 17 to 10 now. There was 1:30 left and the special teams knew what they had to do. We needed the ball back. We tried an onside kick and Talon Jones almost recovered the ball. It bounced high in the air and a lot of folks fought over it—for a second I thought Jones had it, but after the referees sorted out the pile, they gave the ball to the Jets.
We still had a chance if the defense could stop them. The ball was on our 44-yard line. We had two time-outs left. The Jets ran two running plays and gained a total of 7 yards. We called a time-out after the first run, but let the clock go for the second one. Now it was third and 3 on our 37-yard line. The clock ticked down and down but we knew they had 30 seconds before they incurred a 5-yard penalty, so they’d have to snap it with about 50 seconds left. If we stopped them on third down, even if they used up another 5 seconds, we could call our last time-out and still have about 45 seconds to try to move the ball. In that wind, with people running around and hollering on the sideline, our defense getting ready to stuff another running play, the Jets did something pretty amazing. Their quarterback faked a handoff to the fullback then threw a 5-yard pass for a first down to the tight end breaking out of the line on the right. He ran with the ball for another 14 yards before anybody brought him down. The game ended with
the Jets taking a knee at our 18-yard line.
We lost 17 to 10.
As we were walking off the field, the Jets quarterback stopped Jesse and congratulated her. Other Jets players crowded around her and shook her hand. I hadn’t noticed before that day, but it seemed like she was earning a fair amount of respect among some of the players. A professional football player is a special kind of person, and having the respect of a foe, especially concerning the way you play this game, is as good as it gets between players of opposing teams. Jesse had tears in her eyes and her face betrayed nothing but disappointment and bitter defeat; still, I think she noticed too that she was being given something right then, something precious.
The following Tuesday, after practice, I agreed to meet Jesse for dinner again. This time we went to a restaurant in Fredericksburg, Virginia, called La Rosetta International Cuisine. It was a spacious, pleasant place far away from Redskins Park and Washington. The restaurant was on the corner of one of the main streets in the town. Jesse said she just wanted to have dinner, but I knew something was up. It was a long drive south and east of Ashburn, where Redskins Park is located, so she wanted to get pretty far away from the place. Even at eight in the evening, the traffic down I-95 was pretty thick. I knew it would be bad, so I left myself plenty of time and got there early. It wasn’t hard to find but when I arrived, Jesse was nowhere in sight. I was a bit apprehensive that night standing in front of the restaurant waiting for her.
The Legend of Jesse Smoke Page 24