by Mark Bowden
But the pros were a different story. Thrown right into the starting lineup, weighted down with franchise-sized expectations, the poor southern Georgia homeboy with the plaintive, quiet voice had gone through one of the most righteous, sixteen-game public stompings in NFL history. This season had only been slightly better. Antone looked and talked like a man desperate to be anywhere but on a football field, but his enormous size, potential, and paycheck ($1.09 million this year) had him trapped. He had adopted, in self-defense, a surly, diffident attitude toward the game, which infuriated his teammates (not the surliness, the diffidence). But he was improving. In this game, so far, he has only screwed up twice.
The white guys on the offensive line—Ron, Dave, Mike Schad, and backups Brian Baldinger, Daryle Smith, John Hudson, and Rob Selby—gave some of the credit for Antone’s slow improvement to new line coach Muir and also to Antone’s buddy Eric “Pink” Floyd, the flabby but immovable right guard the Eagles had picked up off the waiver wire that summer. His nickname, of course, came from the pop-music group, but it fit Eric in another way. There was a selfdeprecatory sweetness about Pink that was unusual among football players. Eric encouraged the nickname; his huge knee brace was painted that color. Pink wasn’t quite as big as Antone, but he dwarfed him in personality. Out on the field he was hilarious. It took every ounce of energy Pink possessed to play a football game, and he whined comically from kickoff to final whistle. This talent for turning reluctance into laughter (instead of scorn) helped Pink hit it off with Antone immediately. That, and being the only black guys on the offensive line. They had a lot in common. They were both from rural Georgia, and in a way, because of their size, both were captives of the game.
Between these offensive players and the defense’s side of the room there might as well have been a wall. Buddy had built this team to win with defense, and they remained loyal to his memory and ways. Reggie, Seth, Wes, Andre, Eric Allen, Clyde Simmons, the injured Ben Smith, Byron Evans, Mike Pitts, Mike Golic—these were the blackshoed wonders of the promised dynasty. Richie and Bud Carson had plugged a few holes, but the essence of Buddy’s Boys remained. To these players, Richie would always just be Buddy’s offensive coordinator (an inherently inferior post), an interloper—and a weak one at that.
Nurtured on the old man’s audacious paranoia, they suspected that in Richie’s heart of hearts he would really like to dismantle them, good as they were, just to purge Buddy’s memory and remake the team in his and the owner’s own image, an offense-driven squad with a polite, serviceable defense that would be a credit to corporate white America. Of course, they knew that sort of team would never win. A particularly terrible fate would be to finish out your career stranded on the roster of this bland vision, so everyone knew that with Reggie’s departure at the end of this season there was going to be a bottleneck of defensive players all trying to squeeze through at once—maybe Buddy would land another job!
But that wouldn’t start until this season ended. And this season has come down to this last half game. On this day, Buddy’s Boys have themselves to blame for the ten-point hole. They are playing one of the league’s weakest offenses, and, so far, they’ve been—as Buddy would put it—leaning back and spreading their legs.
Seth glowers on his side of Jerome’s locker. The linebacker is fired by an inner anger that no one—not his mother, his wife, his teammates, his agent, his girlfriend—can fathom. Seth has an oddly shaped frame: long, thickly muscled arms and a torso built up by weight lifting, balanced on legs so thin he looks like a man who has taken only half the Charles Atlas course. On these overburdened pins Seth combines speed with strength, being one of the few linebackers left in the league who plays full-time defense, on both running and passing downs. He is obsessive about preparations for a football game and has a reputation for rarely, if ever, making a mental mistake, which lends a certain moral authority to his intolerance. Seth has tried to be even more this season—vocal team leader, a role for which he is distinctly ill suited. He wants to play Jerome’s old role, but whereas Jerome was beloved, Seth is merely tolerated. In the halftime locker room or on the practice field, where Jerome’s flamboyant outbursts made people laugh, Seth’s angry eruptions breed resentment. His personality is a cudgel.
Seth doesn’t see it. He is hurt by the way his efforts are received. All season he has struggled. And for what? To lose another lousy first-round play-off game? Now their season is dangling precariously, and whose fault is that? Seth hasn’t been screwing up in the first half. He sits brooding silently before his locker with a white towel draped over his head, trying to infect the room with angry purpose.
At the next locker, shaved head shining like a wet black stone, is the team’s long-armed, unsung middle linebacker and field captain, the amiable and always dapper Byron Evans. Byron is the silent man in the Eagles’ outspoken locker room. Not silent in the surly, selfimportant way of so many prima-donna athletes, but out of some careful inner calibration. Despite his literary name and his college English degree, Byron is simply and resolutely disposed not to speak. He understands better than any of his fellows that in the arena, action is all. Words? Words could only get you in trouble—he had his pal Seth as clear proof of that. One senses that Byron’s preferred forum for playing football would be his own field of dreams, a neatly lined patch of well-tended grass 360 feet long and 160 feet wide with goalposts at either end, laid out somewhere in the desert outside his Phoenix hometown, far from fans, TV cameras, dirigibles, and the pestilent press, where two teams could battle for preeminence before Joshua trees, towering cacti, and the silent watchful eye of God. Byron is fully in the moment, impervious to mood, undaunted by odds, open to opportunity. Thirty minutes left to play? All right! He taps his feet (Byron’s a terrific dancer), bobs his head, and bides his time until the whistle blows again and he can say whatever it is he has to say.
Clyde is another quiet one. The Eagles’ other Pro Bowl defensive end has grown up in the league playing on the same line with Jerome and Reggie, so he’s learned to go through the season like an extra on a crowded stage. It took the league about two seasons longer than it should have to notice that humble Clyde, a lowly ninth-round draft pick out of Western Carolina University, was making as many or more tackles and sacks than the superstar on the other side of the line. Clyde doesn’t seem to mind much. He has a kind of sidekick nature. In training camp he was Jerome’s shadow. They roomed together and were so inseparable that teammates made snickering jokes about them.
Jerome, of course, played this to the hilt. Once, as Clyde was leaving the field with a slight injury to his hand during one of Buddy’s brutal live-action drills, Jerome hopped up from the pile and, before players and coaches and the press and two thousand spectators gathered on the green slope alongside the field, bellowed, “That does it! Now you made me mad! You hurt ma bitch!”
Mike Pitts and Mike Golic make up the last two increments of the original Gang Green front line—Buddy’s famous 46 defense utilized four-down linemen, but he rotated Jerome and the two Mikes in regular shifts to keep the middle fresh, so the Eagles’ front four had always really been five. Pitts is a mild, sweet-natured veteran who has been battling creaking knees and a bad back for several years. Golic, whose older brother Bob is a perennial all-pro with the Raiders, is one of the team’s most comical players, a garrulous charmer. Being the only white guy on the D-line, Golic has anointed himself an Honorary Black Guy, when he isn’t introducing himself as “Bob’s betterlooking baby brother, the one Mom and Dad liked best.” Golic’s very sane perspective on the game, coupled with his self-deprecatory wit, have made him a popular TV personality in Philadelphia, which doesn’t always sit well with his coaches and teammates.
Eric Allen, the team’s smooth, urbane young Pro Bowl cornerback, has been burned for two touchdowns in this game. But you’d never know it. Nothing stirs the smooth surface of Eric’s confidence. His consistent excellence and careful preparation for games is legendary, and he is a big fa
vorite with his coaches.
Bud Carson and his assistant, backfield coach Peter Guinta, use a blackboard to illustrate first-half mistakes, offering correction without stressing blame. The last touchdown pass, for instance, the one for which Eric had been too far inside the receiver to prevent the floating pass to the end-zone corner: “That was our mistake,” says Guinta. “We put you in a bad spot, Eric. From now on, in the plus-fifteen, play smash corner,” a coverage that keeps the cornerback deeper, allowing a clearer view of the play and an opportunity to drive toward a thrown ball, perhaps even intercept. The coaches don’t dwell on Eric’s other mistake, getting beat down the left sideline by Early. “Hebert made a good throw” is Guinta’s gentle analysis. He also points out that free safety John Booty could have been in better position to help Eric deep.
Not that Eric needs to be coddled. From the first day of training camp five years ago, when he arrived as the Eagles’ number-two draft pick, the kid from San Diego has had a dream career. He has Hollywood-idol good looks, dreamy amber eyes, and when cameras and microphones approach, he shines. Eric has a degree in broadcasting from Arizona State, and everyone expects he will segue smoothly from the field to the broadcast booth when his playing days are done. A student of the game, Eric has the perfect temperament for cornerback, a lonely position where mistakes are highly visible and very often punishable by touchdown. With two trips to the Pro Bowl and a third pending, Eric can afford the ease with which he acknowledges his mistakes.
“Yeah,” he’ll say, with a disarming smile. “I let myself get out of position….” as if to say, It happens to the best of us, which, of course, it just did.
Not so Mark McMillian, whose back-to-back blunders set up the Saints’ opening touchdown drive and got the whole game off on the wrong foot. When you’re that much smaller than the other guys, and you’re a rookie, you have to play better than Eric to earn respect. But Mark’s buoyant confidence seems impervious to assault. He receives the halftime analysis ardently and resolves to redeem himself in the second half.
Bud assures this bunch that despite the ten-point deficit, they are not overmatched. The Saints have sprung no surprises.
“Execute,” the white-haired professor tells his frustrated students for the ten millionth time.
Then Andre stands up.
Wes and Andre are the center backfield of Buddy’s Boys, and both are in street clothes for this game. Hopkins, the senior member of the Eagles and one of its most storied veterans, injured his knee in the second game of the season and has been sorely missed ever since. Waters is the team’s on-field mascot, a fiery, undersized, intensely superstitious veteran who plays in an almost trancelike state. He had broken his ankle in Washington during the sixth game of the season, and while he writhed in the hospital fighting a painful infection that set in after surgery, he had read of the Cowboys’ running back Emmitt Smith, who told reporters, in so many words, that Andre deserved whatever ill fate befell him. The prospect of meeting this mean-spirited man again in the play-offs, this man who had applauded Andre’s pain, had spurred the hotheaded safety through much of the drudgery of healing and therapy.
“You can’t do this to me!” Andre now shouts at his teammates. “You can’t deprive me of the chance to meet Emmitt Smith!”
The Eagles know that a victory over the Saints today will mean a showdown in Dallas the following Sunday in the second round for a crack at the NFC Championship the following weekend, and then the Super Bowl.
“You can’t lose this football game!” Andre pleads. “I’ve worked so hard.”
Speaking in his thick South Florida accent, getting worked up to a full-throated rant, Andre is off on a verbal tear, invoking Jerome, the pain and hardship he had suffered recovering from his broken ankle, fealty to Buddy, what that Emmitt Smith said, how they all knew they could beat New Orleans and Dallas, for that matter, and, besides, nobody deserved to get injured, and even though he was a Christian and didn’t hold a grudge against anybody, far from it, and how piss-poor the New Orleans offense was and how good they could play if they just all got on the same page and how … how … they owed it to him, dammit, if they didn’t owe it to themselves … all they had been through together … and the greater glory of Jesus … and … can you believe that that Emmitt Smith would say those things?
In general, it’s a first-rate, righteous oration, even if it wanders a bit. Some of the guys have a hard time following Andre’s eccentric Everglades inflections.
“What’s he saying?” a rookie leans over and asks Golic.
“Wants us to win,” Golic whispers back.
Compressed into the dank confines of the Superdome locker room, with just twelve minutes to recoup and regroup, they are a colorful mosaic. They come from all over America and beyond—Mike Schad from Canada, return man Vai Sikahema from the Pacific island of Tonga, Andre from tiny Pahokee, Florida—players from upscale suburban childhoods and players who grew up in the mud-stained shacks that pass for public housing in the Deep South. There are perfectionists and wild men, quiet achievers and grand egotists. Fifty young men whose goals and skills have coalesced into this team, this moment, this last chance at … the Next Level.
They half listen to Richie’s familiar exhortations— This team has no business being up on us! We’ve got to take care of the ball. The Bills came back from 35—3; we’re down two scores. Let’s not go out of this thing by a long shot… execute … eliminate mental errors! —waiting for the whistle and for the contest to resume.
Nobody feels the weight of this moment like Reverend Reggie.
He’s haunted by more than the ghost of his friend Jerome, who, frankly, they could really use right now in the flesh. Reggie is plunked down heavily on one side of the JeromeShrine. He had learned of his friend’s death just minutes before he was scheduled to address a throng at Veterans Stadium as part of evangelist Billy Graham’s Christian crusade. He had gone out and delivered an emotional sermon, and afterward, just hours after his teammate’s car had crashed, the big defensive end made what he now sees as a mistake: he had tearfully vowed to reporters and fans that this coming season the Eagles were going to win it all for Jerome.
The emotion of that commitment had carried them, Reggie figures, for about four games, and petered out.
Reggie himself had opened the door for the Saints’ first touch down. But he isn’t one to dwell on a mistake— Praise Jesus and watch yer ass on the next play! What with the intensity of the competition, the ever-present opportunity for serious injury, and the authoritarian grip of coaches, it is the rarest of football players who manages to achieve a strong sense of security about his talent and career. Reggie is one. He and everyone else knows that no matter what the outcome of this game, or season, or the fate of this team, there is going to be a bronze bust of that low forehead, broad neck, goatee, and wide grin on prominent display in Canton.
Reggie is a man of wide-ranging and complex ambition. His dimensions spill outside the frame of football. In ways that his coaches and teammates can hardly imagine, Reggie has already laid the foundation, with his ideas and his millions, for an important and controversial public career beyond football, while at the same time his formidable will and conscience are still profoundly reshaping the NFL. He is the man the NFL Players Association sought out in November to be the lead plaintiff in their lawsuit against the owners, the one that struck down the league’s antiquated and unfair restrictions on free agency. In the past, pro football players had been bound by a clearly iniquitous club owners’ agreement that effectively shackled them (Reggie always uses slave terminology when he talks about it) to one team—usually the team that drafted them out of college. A player could withhold his talents, he could refuse to sign a contract and sit at home Sundays and watch his buddies bang heads, but if he wanted to use his skills and prove himself on the football field, in other words, if he wanted to have a career, he ultimately had to settle for what the club that owned him was offering. Reggie’s lawsuit, joine
d by hundreds of other NFL stars, had shattered that comfy club arrangement. And the first big-name player to take advantage of the new freedom after this season would be Reggie himself (Keith Jackson had sneaked out a back window to Miami; Reggie was going to drive right through the front gate). Come the end of this season, the Minister of Defense is going to take the definition of “overpaid athlete” to a whole new realm.
But first there is this unfinished business of the Eagles and all those championship rings. For eight seasons, Reggie has been the bedrock of this team. And he has played brilliantly, season after allpro season. He has thoroughly embraced Buddy’s notion of Team. He has developed pastoral feelings for his teammates, whom he tries to lead by quiet example rather than by sermonizing. He watches their petty adulteries and drinking and wild bachelor ways patiently (he, too, had strayed once or twice from the path), confident that Jesus will bring them around. He leads Bible-study classes that attract dozens every Thursday night, players, wives, girlfriends, ex-wives, ex-girl friends, friends of friends of friends, the circle ever widening. He believes that Jerome’s life was snatched away by Satan, because he knew that converting Jerome—he had been so close—would have been the key to connecting with Seth and Clyde and Wes and Eric and the rest.
Through all this, his teammates tease him unmercifully.
Ol’ Freight Train was the worst. “Reggie, you so full o’ sheee-it!” Jerome would say.
After a hard-fought victory, Jerome would taunt his locker mate at the top of his voice, “Whatja gonna do to celebrate, Reggie? Go to church?”
Reggie, stooped, removing the tape from his ankles, would ignore him solemnly.