The Legend of Jesse Smoke

by Robert Bausch

  The crowd was really into it then.

  I should say something about Coach Engram’s ability to make adjustments at halftime. You can’t change very much about a game plan once you’re in a game, but you can do various subtle things to take advantage of what you see during the action of the first half. Of course if you’re getting your ass handed to you, the changes you make have to make a difference, and the tendency is to try to make drastic changes. Engram never did that. He always said that panic was not the way to respond to adversity. He’d stick with what we planned and practiced, but he’d change the look of it a little bit, or move players into different positions to see what impact that might have. In the Dallas game he noticed that their defense was almost always playing in a two-deep zone, with the safeties paying special attention to Anders and Louis. So he decided to go with a three-wide-receiver formation in the second half and put Jeremy Frank in the slot. Since Jeremy returned punts for us and was fast and very shifty, Engram reasoned that one of the safeties would have to look toward him on pass plays to that side.

  “We’ll run him across the front and on deep outs behind Anders,” Engram said. Then he looked at Jeremy. “You got to sell it,” he said. “Make them believe.”

  “That will tie up the safety eventually,” I said. “But at first they’ll try to cover it with a linebacker and maybe a nickelback.”

  “That’s what I’m counting on,” Engram said.

  Jesse nodded. She knew exactly what he was trying to set up. “Run Sean from the slot, too,” she said. “No linebacker out there can cover him.”

  We talked it over and went into some of the other variations from the three-wide set. We were going to use Gayle Glenn Louis there too. In the first game against Dallas, we killed them with passes to the backs and quick fades up the sidelines. Now we were going to get into the same formations, but we were looking at the middle of the field. We’d split the safeties eventually and if it worked, we’d have something open deep on one side or the other.

  Coach Engram worked the last few minutes of halftime with the defense and Coach Bayne. Dallas had been running on us, reading the tackle stunts we ran on running plays, catching both defensive ends by running inside their outside pass rushes. Bayne decided to keep the tackles in their lanes and stop running the stunts. What we gave up in the pass rush would be offset by shutting down the running game. Orlando Brown and Elbert James would take up some of the slack in the rush and we’d give them a little help with Talon Jones and one of the corners. Our defense was good enough that if we could get some points on the board early in the second half, we’d make a game of it.

  I was worried about Jesse’s confidence. She hung her head a bit when we were heading through the tunnel on the way back out to the field.

  “You okay?” I said.

  She looked at me. Her eyes were as bright as ever. “I hate this place,” she said, and trotted out onto the field, the offense following behind her.

  We kicked off in the second half, and Dallas got a good return out to their 36-yard line. But on the two running plays they tried, they gained nothing. On third down, they tried a deep pass down the middle that fell incomplete. Jeremy Frank called a fair catch on a relatively short punt at our 33-yard line. I’d gone over the first few plays we’d run with Jesse before she took the field. We started again in the three-wide set, and Jesse handed off to Mickens who ran behind Dave Busch for 4 yards. On the next play, Anders and Rice went deep, Gayle Glenn Louis ran a quick slant to the right side of the field, and Jeremy Frank cut to the outside and caught a 14-yard pass for first down. The play looked like this:

  From the Dallas 49, Jesse flipped a quick pass to Mickens in the flat and he gained about 3. On the next play, we were in a three-wide set again and this time Rice was in the slot. Jesse dropped back, faked it to Frank on the left, then hit Rice crossing in front about 5 yards downfield, and he cut to the center of the field and gained 16 more yards. Now we had a first and ten on the Dallas 23. The crowd was still into it, but they’d quieted some because of how quickly we’d marched down the field.

  On the next play I called Mickens off tackle. He cut to the outside and gained seven yards, but we got called for a false start. Now it was on the 28, first and 15.

  Jesse shook her head and leaned down in the huddle. I called a slot right, corner fade to Anders. Wilber told me later that Jesse said, “I’m not kicking a field goal down here.”

  I could just hear her saying something like that. Her voice, when she was in the heat of competition was so inspiring I’d almost burst out laughing.

  This time Anders was in the slot. Not many teams can run more than one or two players from that position. It’s like having four men on a baseball team who can play shortstop. But every one of our guys has to learn how to run patterns out of the slot and every one of them can do it. (That’s another quality of Jonathon Engram’s coaching.) Anyway, Anders lined up in the slot, and the corner assigned to him man-to-man didn’t go to the slot with him—he stayed on the outside. Dallas looked confused on defense. They had shifted to the nickel (which means they had added a fifth defensive back) and played a three-deep zone. Jesse noticed it. She sent Anders in motion to the left, just to confirm it. When nobody in the Dallas defense followed Anders she knew he would be getting a lot of attention on his side of the field from a safety and at least one cornerback. As she called signals, she stood up and looked back at Mickens. Then she leaned over center again and changed the play. Or, I should say, she called a variation on the play I’d called. Anders would still do what he was supposed to do—cut to his right, toward the middle of the field, then run for the corner looking over his left shoulder. The two wide receivers would run long, shallow posts up the seam, and Mickens—who was supposed to block on the play I called—would circle out of the backfield and run to the middle of the field. It looked like this:

  It was wide open. Jesse stepped back, looked downfield, then fired it to Mickens—hit #29 between the 2 and the 9—and he turned around and ran straight for the goal line. He hit the safety in the chest and carried him into the end zone. Jesse kicked the extra point and with 11 minutes left in the third quarter we trailed 21 to 13.

  The defense was so fired up by now we stopped Dallas on three plays and got the ball back. This time we couldn’t get a first down on a third and 1. Mickens got stuffed by the Dallas right tackle and middle linebacker on the sweep. We punted from our 42 and then, by god, Dallas got moving again. They started on their own 26 and took a lot of time, completed a few short passes, made just enough yards on a few runs up the middle and off tackle, and now with 6 minutes left in the third quarter, they were on our 33 and looking ready to take it away from us.

  On third and two, though, Orlando Brown swept into the backfield and tackled their fullback for a 4-yard loss. They had to punt.

  They tried for the coffin corner—that is, they tried to put the ball out-of-bounds inside our 5-yard-line—but the ball went into the end zone and we took over on our 20. Things sort of settled after that into a kind of back and forth rut. We drove the ball to midfield and then stalled. (Jesse got sacked, pulled down by a blitzing safety on a third down play.) We punted, Dallas went three and out, punted back. On a sweep to the right side, Mickens fumbled. Dallas drove to our sixteen yard-line and then their quarterback got hit by Orlando Brown and fumbled. From then on Jesse took charge of the game.

  It didn’t look like that was going to happen at first. I called a play that allowed for a deep pass if it was open. Jesse dropped back, moved her arm up and down the way she does, and then she got hit hard from behind by a Dallas linebacker. She held on to the ball, but she really went down hard. The crowd cheered in an odd way when that happened. Normally when their defense gets a sack, an NFL crowd makes a lot of noise, but this time there were as many groans as there were cheers.

  And then Jesse didn’t get up, not right away. The crowd got quiet. Compared with the earlier noise, they were suddenly absolutely silent. Dan W
ilber leaned over Jesse and after a moment, she turned over on her back, reached for his hand. He helped her to her feet. She shook her head and walked back to the huddle and the crowd cheered. The Dallas crowd was actually cheering her.

  On the next play, she dropped back again and this time she fired a quick strike to Rice 15 yards downfield on a hook pattern. He turned, caught the ball in his gut, then got creamed by the safety. He, too, got up fairly slowly.

  We had the ball at our own 35, first and 10, when the quarter ended.

  When Jesse came to the sideline during the commercial time-out between quarters, she had blood running down her cheek. She didn’t take her helmet off.

  “You all right?” I said.

  “Just got the wind knocked out,” she said.

  “I want the doc to look at you.”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I want to run that play again.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one I got hit on. Call it again. Anders was open.”

  Sure enough, on the first play of the fourth quarter, Jesse dropped back, found Anders up the sideline, and hit him in stride. It was a beautiful ball, a perfect bullet of a spiral that arched slightly over his shoulder and fell into his waiting hands. He took it all the way, and now we were just trailing 21 to 19.

  Coach Engram decided to go for two points.

  Dave Busch came to the sideline with Jesse and Dan Wilber and Gayle Glenn Louis. “Give it to Mickens behind me,” said Busch, so fired up his eyes almost clicked when he blinked.

  Part of what made Coach Engram a great coach was he knew when to listen to his players. Jesse looked into his eyes and said, “Do it.” He smiled and called a simple off-tackle run behind Dave Busch and James Cook. The fullback would punch in between those two, leading the play, and Mickens would run behind him, looking for daylight. It worked perfectly. Nobody got a hand on him.

  With 14 minutes left in the fourth quarter we were now tied at 21.

  Our defense was still just as fired up as Dave Busch was, but Dallas took the ball and went on a time consuming drive all the way to our five yard-line. With only four minutes to go in the game, they tried a pass to the corner of the end zone, but Talon Jones of all people jumped in front of the receiver and intercepted the ball. He ran out of the end zone all the way to our 42.

  Then Jesse trotted back onto the field and I could see I need never have worried about her confidence. There was blood all over the front of her white jersey now, blending right in with the burgundy numbers on her chest, but it didn’t seem to bother her. If anything it only served to fire up the men blocking for her. She ran the plays we called, and with Mickens running well on sweeps and off tackle, she threw just three passes on the next drive. One of them was a 20-yard strike to Sean Rice on an out pattern. He moved so convincingly toward the center of the field that the corner, who had covered him so well earlier in the game, nearly fell down for the sudden change in direction. When Rice turned, the ball was right there and he snatched it out of the air just before falling out-of-bounds.

  After that, Jesse went on a streak. She looked so good and the line was protecting her so well, we started calling more passing plays from the three-wide set. She completed eleven passes in a row at one point. Sean Rice played like an All-Pro before it was all over. They were double-teaming him, in fact. He caught 8 balls for 154 yards and 2 touchdowns.

  We never looked back. In the last 4 minutes Jesse threw two touchdown passes so that we ended up winning the game 35 to 21. Jesse had completed 18 out of 26 passes, for 256 yards and 3 touchdowns. She’d kicked two field goals in the bargain, while Mickens rushed for 113 yards and scored a touchdown himself. All in all, we were feeling like a pretty powerful team again.

  At the end of the game, too, some of the opposing players came over and shook Jesse’s hand. This in spite of the bitterness of our rivalry, in spite of how much those guys hated losing a game to us. She smiled and nodded to folks. I was so damn proud of her. I guess you could say I was proud of myself, too. Not that I said any of these things out loud, or even thought about them much in those days, but right then I was on top of the world. I had found Jesse, you see, and I had helped her make it in the toughest sports league on earth. It’s sometimes not even so humbling as it is exciting when you know you are going to go down in history.

  Of course, everybody knows what took place after that Thanksgiving game. But at the time we were pretty well blindsided by it. Not one person, except for a few bastards in the league office and the head of the players’ union, expected the law to step in the way it did and threaten everything we were building.

  Thirty-Three

  We came back from Dallas Thanksgiving night to a huge crowd of fans at Redskins Park. For people to leave their homes on that kind of night—it was windy and cold, with occasional salvos of bullet-sharp rain, and on Thanksgiving no less—well, that tells you something about your fans. They all carried signs with Jesse’s likeness on them and cheered her when she came off the bus. “We want Jesse! We want Jesse!” they chanted. Then they began to shout, “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!” She waved and smiled that brilliant, open smile, which somehow was only enhanced by the cut on the right side of her head just below the hairline. (Before we got on the plane from Dallas an internist had put four stitches in it and bandaged her up.) When the crowd saw the small white bandage on her head they cheered even louder. The rest of the players surrounded her. It was such a happy time. The players had Friday through Monday off. They would get a good, long, well-earned Thanksgiving vacation.

  On the plane ride back from Dallas, Coach Engram addressed all of us about what we might hope for if the Eagles beat the Giants. “We take care of the rest of our schedule, and we’ll have them in our house, with our fans, for the division title.” And then on Sunday afternoon in New York, again on a frozen, windswept field, the Giants lost to the Philadelphia Eagles 16 to 14. We were 9 and 4 and the Giants 10 and 3. We trailed them by only one game. I was beginning to think this was going to be our year.

  Only on Monday morning after Thanksgiving, this happened: In New York, the league office announced that the Third Circuit Court of New York had issued a temporary restraining order against the Washington Redskins prohibiting us from playing a woman in the National Football League. Jesse would be allowed neither to practice with the team nor to participate in any team meetings or coaching sessions. We were, according to this lawsuit, destroying the “integrity” of the game.

  The day the news broke you’d have thought the U.S. had declared war on Canada. We didn’t find out about it until around one in the afternoon on Monday. Edgar Flores sent for Coach Engram and the entire coaching staff. I didn’t hear anything until it dropped out of Flores’s mouth, but Engram heard it on the radio on the way to Redskins Park. It was the most incredible thing I ever saw, the media frenzy at Redskins Park. I mean, I only wish I could describe the confusion and anger that day.

  Flores had a sheaf of blue papers in his hand when I walked into the meeting. The room was full. Mostly with guys wearing suits and dark ties. Engram and the rest of the coaching staff and I were in our practice sweats. It was a cold, bright, sunny day, and light cut through the windows in sharp angles. I saw Engram sitting at the end of the table and sat down next to him, still wondering what was going on. The way he looked at me, I thought Flores had sold the team or something.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I said to Engram.

  Then Flores sprang the news on us.

  That business about the “integrity of the game,” in particular, got me really sore. “She improves the integrity of the game,” I said. “She improves it every time she steps on that field.” Engram put his hand on my arm. I must have gotten pretty loud about it.

  “The players claim they cannot go all out against her,” Flores said.

  “Who claims that? Which players?” Engram said.

  “It’s part of the restraining order. They don’t name names.”

  “Well, who fil
ed the suit?”

  “The players’ union and the league,” Charley Duncan said

  “The league is in on it?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I know I must have cursed pretty loudly right then. Not that it would have bothered anyone. The room never really quieted down for anybody. We were like a band of nitwits discussing our procedures for making coffee on a sinking ship. There was a lot of yelling. Meanwhile, the press was collecting outside. They’d be all over Jesse, too, I knew.

  “What does the suit say, exactly?” Engram asked.

  Flores sat at the head of a long table, but Engram and I were only a few seats away from him. He looked down at the blue papers in front of him and waited for it to quiet down. “The suit asks that she be prohibited from playing any more games for the Redskins.”

  “Even as a kicker?” Somebody said.

  “No playing of any kind.”

  It got really noisy again, but Engram raised his hand to quiet everybody. “Why?” he said. “What do they mean they can’t go all out against her?”

  “Players will testify that they have been forced to compromise their game because of her,” Flores said. “They say they will produce film of men pulling up before they collide with her, and they will claim this is for fear of hurting her. They also claim the referees give her an unfair advantage. When they do hit her, they get penalized for it.”

  I couldn’t believe it. In all the films of our games that we’d studied, I never noticed anything like that. And as far as I could see, the referees had made good calls when they penalized teams for roughing the passer. “That’s a lot of horseshit,” I said.

  “They will further claim,” Flores went on, “that having her on the field, directing our offense, is a distraction from the intricacies of the game because players are so intent on watching her perform.”