by Mark Bowden
It was embarrassing. Norman plucked the cigar from his mouth.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “I didn’t think you guys would be interested in hearing from me … I’ve never addressed the team before … but if you want me to say something, then I will.”
He stepped up to the lectern and improvised a little speech, about how proud he was of the team (they had played way over their heads that season), and whether they won or lost the big game tomorrow, he wanted them to know they had accomplished a lot. It was a dignified, off-the-cuff speech. Everybody was impressed.
Except Jerome.
“Hey, Norman! Cut through the bullshit. If we win tomorrow, are we gonna get more money?”
The owner drew back. He said, “Well … Jerome, as things go, I suppose the more you win, the better it will go at contract time for everybody….”
“All right then,” Jerome shouted back. “Now git your ass out of here!”
Norman exited to hilarious laughter.
The owner knew this clowning cheek was a cornerstone of team morale, but it was irksome. The laughter that had followed him out the door was like a boot to the backside. And Norman never forgets. The day after he canned Buddy Ryan, Norman had his revenge. He symbolically plucked Jerome out from under Buddy’s protective wing and spanked him hard in public. Norman mentioned flab, poor work habits, women, paternity suits, gambling debts, speeding tickets….
And Jerome had gotten the message. His agent (who knew some of what the owner had said was true) hired Jerome a personal trainer and dietitian. Jerome outfitted a corner of the garage at home with about fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art exercise equipment (and a complete drum set in the corner, for good measure). For the first time in his life, Jerome worked hard on his own to get in shape, dropping upward of thirty pounds, struggling through a regimen that made him positively miserable. He had come back in ’91 to something like his old, dominating, ferocious style of play.
Norman feels he knows dozens of players like Jerome Brown.
But this funeral is saying something else. Here’s a whole town wrestling with genuine grief. Here are teammates from every team Jerome had ever played for. Hundreds and hundreds of mourners spill right out the front doors of the church, down the steps and out into the streets … stricken.
What had he missed about Jerome?
He doesn’t go with the small group of family and close friends to the burial. His limo drops him at a small airport nearby, where he encounters a well-dressed businessman waiting to board his own private plane. He had seen the man at the funeral.
“Mr. Braman, my wife and I really enjoy the Eagles,” says the man, introducing himself as a childhood friend of Jerome’s.
“Tell me something,” asks Braman. “That church, is that a black church or a white church?”
“Oh, that’s an integrated church.”
“An integrated church?”
“Oh … see, that was Jerome. Jerome changed this town…. Brooksville will never be the same.”
• • •
AT THE GRAVE, set on one corner of a woebegone field by a backroad that Jerome used to race down to Tampa (avoiding the state cops on the interstate), Seth weeps inconsolably. His head is buried on Reverend Reggie’s broad shoulder. Tears and sweat glisten on Reggie’s face. Randall is solemn. One by one the whole Eagles crew, joined by a few of Jerome’s old college teammates, steps up silently to the two caskets to say a final good-bye.
One by one, each member of the team removes his colorful silk tie and drops it on Jerome’s coffin lid. (Team rule: ties on road trips. Only, Jerome never had one, see, so he was always running around at the last minute, mooching, except this one time, when the charter plane was waiting on the runway at Philadelphia International Airport, players and coaches and trainers inside ready to go, but no Jerome, and Buddy Ryan was fuming, telling them to close the goddamn doors and take off—when all at once, racing down the last five hundred yards of Island Avenue toward the gate, came Jerome’s black Bronco, doing … oh, a hundred or so. It screeched to a halt and unloaded the lineman, who came sprinting toward the steps, his teammates cheering loudly. He had a big greasy bag of fried chicken under one arm; was wearing a sports coat and… well, what do you know? Jerome was even wearing a tie! Only this time he was missing the shirt.)
With his sweat-soaked dress shirt clinging to his back, Reggie stretches over the brass rail around the coffins and taps Jerome’s once with his ring.
He says, “Don’t let his death be in vain.”
When the crowd of mourners moves away, the two caskets are smoothly lowered into the earth, the mound of colorful silk ties descending into darkness.
Out of the nearby woods steps a boy wearing nothing but shorts. He is just twelve, but he has the build of an athlete. His name is Reggie Fagan. He picks two white roses out of a floral display and drops them into the graves, one on each casket.
“Gus was my friend,” he says. “Jerome, he was my hero.”
2
THE NEXT LEVEL
Everybody knows what Richie Kotite is going to say. They always know.
It’s halftime in the New Orleans Superdome, January 3, 1993. After eleven regular season wins and just five losses, the Philadelphia Eagles are stalled in a familiar place, losing (17—7) in the first round of the NFL’s post-’92 season play-offs. Four times in the last five seasons this team has made it to the doorstep of the NFL’s championship series. Three times it has been eliminated in the first round— by the Bears, the Rams, the Redskins—and now, it seems, its fourth attempt will be stopped by the Saints.
Bloodied and a little stunned, the team collects itself quietly in the Superdome’s visiting-team locker room, a humid cave with a worn carpet ringed with wood-framed dressing stalls, bathed in soft yellow light, where the odors of menthol and stale sweat have been battling for almost two decades. Right now it is crowded with big men wearing heavy, soggy pads and uniforms of white, silver, and kelly green. Green helmets with silver wings are at their feet. The ceiling rocks with the mirth of nearly sixty-nine thousand New Orleans fans who’ve been waiting a quarter century for their gaudy Saints’ first play-off win.
Today looks like the day.
Before this game began, the Eagles had crowded around a small TV to watch the Buffalo Bills surmount the seemingly insurmountable, overcoming a thirty-two-point deficit (more than four touchdowns and a field goal) to beat the Houston Oilers and advance to round two of postseason play.
There are nods and winks exchanged when Richie, the head coach, launches into the inevitable.
“Ten points! That’s nothing! … You all saw what Buffalo did this afternoon….”
The Eagles’ special teams captain, Ken Rose, just ducks his head. The thirty-year-old, ponytailed surfer has played eight seasons in pro football, six with the NFL, one with the Canadian Football League, and one with the long-gone USFL. Add in Pop Warner, high school, and college, and Ken, like everyone else in the room, has heard every permutation possible of the motivational halftime plea. There were coaches who ranted, spit, begged, cursed with black fury, cried, laughed, and prayed, coaches who punched lockers and picked fights, coaches who told jokes and coaches who preached sermons, there were even coaches who did all of these things in the same gusty peroration. Ken’s never heard one that made a difference. Still, the rituals of sport will be honored.
Equally futile, for that matter, is Norman Braman’s thoughtful gesture. In the corner, between the lockers being used by Reggie White and Seth Joyner, the team’s equipment men have assembled the JeromeShrine, Jerome Brown’s locker, complete with the lineman’s old collection of goofy hats—his olive-green pillbox number, a rumpled khaki fishing hat, a telephone company hard hat—piles of shoes, Jerome’s gigantic pads and helmet, the green jersey wide enough to be a tent, with its retired white number 99, the cigar safety William Frizzell placed in there when his second daughter was born earlier in the season, the fram
ed tributes, photos, and caricatures, the unopened mail. All of it now stares like an unblinking eye.
It’s five exhibitions and sixteen and a half games now, six months and three days, since Jerome’s death. Season ’92 is down to what could be its last half hour of play.
Back in Philly last summer, Reverend Reggie and the boys had asked that the locker be kept exactly as Jerome left it. In that flood tide of grief it had seemed appropriate, but, as time went by, it started to haunt more than inspire. It gives some of the guys the creeps. Fred Barnett, the team’s splendid young pass catcher, thinks the whole Cult of Jerome has gone too far. He tries not to look over at the locker. He isn’t the only one. Even Reggie now sees the futility of sustaining momentum on sorrow. But to Clyde and the increasingly insufferable Seth, the locker remains a potent reminder. Their whole season is a JeromeQuest, a tribute to JB, whose initials the team wears on a patch over their hearts. Ol’ Freight Train’s memory is invoked after every huddle—”One! Two! Three! JB!!” Whenever Seth made a big play in Veterans Stadium, in Philadelphia, he would snap to attention and salute a giant Jerome banner (the one depicting Archangel Jerome cupping his teammates in his hands). They had promised Big G a Super Bowl ring. Now, here they are, three wins shy of the Show, Super Bowl XXVII, on the brink of the abyss.
Not again whispers behind every veteran’s ear. Three times the thrill of making the play-offs had fizzled in the first round. This is their last chance to go, finally, to the Next Level, which was the expression Norman had used in early ’91 when he fired Buddy Ryan and promoted Richie, Buddy’s offensive coordinator, to the top job. Buddy had shocked everyone but himself by getting them into the play-offs in just the third season of his tenure, ’88, and had taken them back in ’89 and ’90. Each time they had stumbled. Buddy had failed. Now Richie was charged with doing better. They had fallen out of contention in ’91 after Randall blew out his knee in game one, and then backup Jim “Ming Vase” McMahon quickly crumbled. Still, Richie and the boys managed to win ten games that year on the backs of the NFL’s top-ranked defense— Buddy’s defense. This year, Randall was back, and the defense was in its prime. This was going to be the year for it all. The Eagles had been picked to win the Super Bowl by many of the press prognosticators (never mind that they were virtually always wrong). More important, they believed it themselves. They believed it was their due.
And why not? In terms of just wins and losses (52-28), the Eagles had been one of pro football’s most successful teams over the last five years. They had two blue-chip quarterbacks. They had picked up a used but certified superstar running back in Herschel Walker. Their offensive line was expected to improve with the maturing of right tackle Antone (An-tone) Davis, “the Megapick,” a mammoth blocker from Tennessee. Ballet-enthusiast Fred, the wide receiver, was poised for greatness, heir apparent to the team’s tradition of lanky all-pro receivers Harold Carmichael and Mike Quick. Vicious hitters Andre Waters and Wes Hopkins lent the defensive backfield an enviably ugly reputation—but only if you got past Seth, who played linebacker with a purposeful violence that bordered on pure evil. In front of Seth, of course, was Reverend Reggie, “the Minister of Defense,” arguably the finest defensive end in the history of football, and Clyde Simmons, who led the league in crunching quarterbacks. Patrolling the deep secondary was Eric Allen, another perennial Pro Bowl selection, one of the smartest and most consistent cornerbacks in the league. The Eagles were no longer Buddy’s talented upstarts; they were older, wiser, shored up by a stronger bench, and desperately overdue. Jerome’s loss diminished their front four, but it had hardly destroyed it. It had bequeathed an urgency and emotional purpose often lacking at the pro level.
But lose this game, and the team is done. If this incarnation of Eagles doesn’t achieve the Next Level this year—now!—they never will. Forever unfulfilled will be the championship destiny Buddy confidently forecast back in ’86, when he set to work. Buddy was good at many things, but he was best at assembling a disparate bunch of young men into a Team. Not the mercenary NFL notion of team, a loose confederation of bruisers newly acquired each season. No, Buddy’s notion of Team was more primitive, a brotherhood of warriors, a social unit more basic than even family. To those on this kind of Team, money and celebrity were secondary. Buddy connected with the reckless prideful core of a young athlete, with his playful soul. Beneath all the hype and megabucks, the soul was still there. On the field, before that screaming crowd, before the cameras, caught up in the thrilling moment, who thought about lawyers and incentives and paydays? Young men still played to fulfill their destiny. Buddy sang a song that reached them there, where only they could hear it. He saw their real potential; he believed in the inevitability of their greatness; he would lead them to the highest heights. These Eagles believed Buddy when he told them they were the baddest and best. And Buddy hadn’t just foreseen a Super Bowl, he had talked about winning a whole slew of them. They were going to be the Best There Ever Was! Why, there would be a whole wing devoted to them at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton—Buddy’s Boys! Gang Green!
And every year they fell short. When Norman dumped Buddy, no matter. They were going to carry on. Like Moses, Buddy would miss the promised land, but his boys were going there for him. Then, in the wild swirl of triumph, when the crowds and cameras spilled out onto the field, they would thumb their noses at their despised owner and instead salute the man who really made it happen, who would be watching in exile, still unemployed back home in his den at the Ryan horse farm in Kentucky, not misty-eyed—not Buddy—but chortling with vindication.
Still another year had gone by. The dream was something that could no longer be deferred. Each year the original roster further eroded; old players were waived or retired; newcomers assumed key spots. Buddy’s Boys had cohered well since they gelled in ’88, but age and injury are relentless, and this year the dawn of true free agency stood poised to disassemble them. They were becoming creaking oldtimers, battling bad knees and tricky backs, wrestling with midlife crises, failed marriages, premature arthritis, and facing that prospect most dreaded and dark: Life after Football. They had enjoyed such moments together, moments sweetened by promise. There were games in which they just caught fire, when offense, defense, and special teams were all clicking at once, when they were capable of crushing anyone. It was when they achieved this synchronicity, with the crowd roaring and every one of them motoring on love, adrenaline, and conviction, when they were riding a mounting spiral of their own momentum,when they were bringing the heat, that the Game became something timeless, pure, and beautiful, something linked to the earliest amateur contests on college greens, something that connected each player with the thrill he felt when he first played as a child, before he knew about playing with pressure and pain. This wasn’t just a fantasy either. You could point to the games in which it happened, like when they scored twenty-one fourth-quarter points back in ’89 to upset the Redskins, or when they humiliated the Cowboys in Texas Stadium in ’91, sacking quarterback Troy Aikman eleven times, allowing no points and fewer than one hundred yards of total offense, or this year, when they crushed that John Elway and the Broncos, shutting them out and allowing them only eighty-two yards of offense. It was always only a matter of time, they had always thought, just one more season together, maybe two, before they could achieve that perfection consistently, play a whole season in that holy zone, sustain it on through the play-offs to a Super Bowl … and then another, and another.
Eventually, of course, it would end. But to win a Super Bowl, even just once, meant that no matter what else happened they would always be together. For that season they would be the best of the best— for all time. Jerome’s memory would be forever green. There would be the mandatory White House trip, award ceremonies, parties, and then reunions, Hall of Fame enshrinements; their obituaries would read “Member of the ’93 NFL Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles.” Win and they would be family forever. Lose, and they would scatter to the winds.
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br /> For all this, Jerome’s locker is totem. Now, trailing by ten points, unable to stop the Saints or stir themselves, it might as well be Jerome in the flesh, glaring in spooky, decidedly un-Jeromelike silence, daring these blowhards to deliver.
And they’re blowing it.
THEY HAD STARTED BADLY.
Weak-armed Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert had come right after them on the first play from scrimmage, launching a wobbly bomb down the right sideline toward receiver Quinn Early.
It was scary, because Early was open. Rookie cornerback Mark McMillian, easily the smallest and least experienced player on the field, was close to the veteran, but not close enough. Only Hebert’s imprecision spared the Eagles a touchdown. Up in the TV broadcast booth, CBS game analyst John Madden primed the nationwide audience for a wild one: “They were saying that the Saints have a conservative offense, so Jim Mora [the Saints’ coach] says, ‘Conservative? We’ll show you conservative!’”
Although a failure, the bomb ignites the capacity hometown crowd, living walls of noise rising up on all sides to the Superdome’s concrete roof. Football crowds lean toward the bizarre anyway, but nowhere more so than here, the only city in America where cross-dressing is an expression of civic pride. Like the Eagles, the Saints are an aging team of defense-powered underachievers. They’re also threetime losers in first-round play-off games (over the last five years). The team that goes down today earns the distinction of being the league’s biggest modern disappointment. So the fans, a multitude decked in gold and black sequins and greasepaint, are fired up, lusting for Eagles blood. Homemade signs announcing Saints pride and allegiance to the black and gold hang over every available surface around the field. One of the signs really has Buddy’s Boys pissed off. Ornamented with a crude but elaborate painting, it reads JEROME WAS AN EAGLE/NOW HE’S A SAINT. A few of the boys in green were going to tear it down before the game, but cooler heads prevailed—which shows just how serious they are about winning this game.