by Mark Bowden
“Come on, Reggie! Tell us!”
“Going home to my wife and kids,” Reggie would say.
Long silence, as Jerome waited. “Aren’t you gonna ask me what I’m gonna do?”
“What are you gonna do, Jerome?”
At the top of his lungs: “Reggie, I’m gonna get me the best blow job of my whooole life!”
Reggie would roll with this stuff. They sometimes call him the Elephant Man, because he seems so much bigger than life, and Reggie just grins and shrugs. On this team he is not just respected, he’s loved.
Now, with thirty minutes left to keep the thing alive, it is hard for Reggie not to get emotional. He is the one who constantly reminds his teammates: This is it! No more next times! Looking around the locker room now, he doesn’t feel this is an ending. Despite the ten points, despite all the mistakes they made in the first half, he smells a win.
But he says nothing. His own thoughts are heavy, and he is wary now of emotion. To win now, he thinks, we need to be hopeful and filled with joy. We need to bring the heat.
When Reggie sees the official step in and wave the team back out to the field, he stands up and shouts, “Let’s go do it!”
ORDINARILY, Norman doesn’t like to sit in the owners’ box. Even though he and his wife, Irma, usually invite family and friends to the Vet for home games, and he enjoys entertaining before and after, during the game he sits off in a separate box, alone with team president Harry Gamble. There, playing with one of his big cigars, away from prying ears, he feels free to emote like the ordinary fan he is at heart.
Old-guard NFL owners are football men through and through. Most of the new owners are successful businessmen who bought teams as an investment. Norman is a little of both. There’s no doubt the Eagles are a terrific investment, but to a greater extent than most of the other newcomers, Norman bought his team for fun, as part of his philosophy of enjoying his wealth. He may just be the first true fanowner.
Imagine it. He’s like the diehard season-ticket holder who, after years of screaming advice at the field and listening to sports-talk radio and poring over newspapers, suddenly has control. Partly, of course, Norman knows he’s a dilettante, and that, for the good of his own investment, he ought to defer to the pros around him. But in his seven years of ownership, Norman has grown increasingly confident of his football judgment. Some might say dangerously confident. This new confidence, mixed with his natural volatility, can make him insufferable. Irma doesn’t like having him around during the game, which is why he secrets himself with Harry, who, while he’s too anxious even to eat on game days, is a study in professional cool alongside his boss.
“Why the hell is he doing that?” Norman will ask.
“Why aren’t they throwing the ball?”
“Who screwed that up?”
“Why aren’t they giving Herschel the ball?”
Harry knows which questions to answer and which to ignore. Who knows how many coaches and players would have been fired over the last seven years without his steadying presence?
But for this game in the Superdome, Norman is stuck in the box with Irma, family, and friends. His daughters and his Palm Beach buddy Irwin Levy are here, as are Jerome’s parents, Willie and Annie Bell, flown in from Brooksville as the team’s honored guests. So Norman is showing restraint, though he’s been at Harry’s side the whole first half, pouring a string of urgent complaint into the team president’s ear.
As the Eagles fall behind, and Norman’s commentary turns increasingly severe, Harry’s distress is evident. A gray pallor begins to show beneath the faded freckles on his wide face. During halftime, Harry has to take a break. He paces the carpeted hall outside the owners’ box. When he comes back in for the second half, as his players trot out to the field, he sees the boss has moved. Norman is now perched on a stool a few rows up, behind the front-row mezzanine where he had been sitting.
He waves Harry back down to the old seat.
Norman is going to ride out the second half alone.
3
BRAMANMAN
Just give me five dollars of high test, please,” says Norman Braman, who has pulled his new black Cadillac up to a gas station in Miami Beach.
It’s a noisy stop set on a median between the northbound and southbound lanes of Route A1A, just about a mile in real terms but more like a light-year removed from Norman’s home on Indian Creek Island, a lush, guarded tropical sanctuary set in the teal waters of Biscayne Bay.
“Just five dollars,” he repeats to the attendant.
The tawny young man in oily T-shirt and jeans looks confused.
“Fieeev dollars?” he repeats—the accent sounds Cuban.
“Five dollars’ worth, please,” says Norman.
“Hokay.”
But the young man remains standing by the open window. Norman bends forward gingerly, leaning his curly white head out the window.
“Want the money now?”
“No,” the young man answers.
“Five dollars,” Norman repeats, enunciating carefully.
The attendant nods and repeats, “Fieeev dollars.”
Now Norman is getting irritated.
“What the …” He leans back out. “Plus! Plus!” he shouts.
He settles back into his seat, shaking his head. “That’s Miami for you,” he says, but before he can begin to lament unbridled immigration’s role in eroding the quality of urban life the station attendant bends down to peer in.
“Thee tank,” he says, gesturing back toward the locked flap over Norman’s fuel tank.
“Open the tank?” asks Norman.
“Thee tank,” repeats the young man eagerly, smiling. Cars are now backed up behind the Caddy. It’s still morning rush hour.
“It’s locked?” says Norman. “Oh, shit.”
He’s searching now, scanning the dash, bending over to inspect the levers under his seat. The man who has sold America so many cars, proud sovereign of a three-state empire of Braman Rolls-Royce, Braman BMW, Braman Mercedes, Braman Porsche, Braman Audi, Braman Maserati, Braman Mazda, Braman Acura, Braman Mitsubishi, Braman Honda, Braman Chrysler, and Braman Cadillac dealerships, is growing frantic, stranded, gasless, two miles from home, victim of an innocent antitheft device.
“Jesus Christ!” he says. “How do you open the goddamn tank?”
It’s January 20, 1992, and Norman’s tetchiness is forgivable. A little over a year ago he fired Buddy Ryan, and ever since it’s been as if there were this (dare we say it?) … this curse. Buddy always swore he was lucky. It was part of his mystique— Stick with me, kid, I’m goin’ all the way. If there was any hint of ethnicity about Buddy Ryan it was smothered under generations of Oklahoma barbecue, but somewhere deep inside that wide and weathered good ol’ boy hide Buddy insisted there was a Celtic chromosome. It explained, he said, any whopping windfall of good fortune, like an interception in the fourth quarter of a close game, or an opponent’s winning field goal try striking the upright and bouncing back on the field. Buddy believed his horses were winners and that fumbles tended to bounce his way. The flip side of that was, of course, you didn’t want to go a-messin’ with Buddy Ryan. That would be tempting the certain hand of some dark Druidic reckoning.
But Norman is not a superstitious man. You don’t get rich two and three times over without tempting fate or by being easily intimidated. Just check out who Buddy was dealing with here.
His mansion on Indian Creek Island is the real-world equivalent of a luxury skybox; it’s in Miami but not of Miami, separated from the noise and dirt and danger of city streets by a mile of the choppy Intracoastal Waterway, yet visually right smack in the center of it all, a bubble of sublime seclusion in the eye of the urban storm. At night the lights of the city rise up in the distance like Oz, glimmering on the tides. Most of the island is a private golf course, but it is rimmed by extravagant waterfront estates, each secluded behind high walls decked with exotic gardens—the Bramans’ features a dozen varieties of palm, citrus trees,
hibiscus, mango, avocado, banana, and even loquats and kiwis, tubs of gardenias, and scattered night-flowering cactus. Bay water laps against seawall on two sides of the property,and a polite fence separates it from the yard of a Saudi prince (with his small army of bodyguards). One lot over is the home of singer Julio Iglesias. Braman’s two-acre patch of this modern Eden showcases his enviable modern art collection, which is spread out in and around the pool and private helipad. The house is an aggregation of massive rectangular modules cast in scored white concrete that literally sparkles—the stone is blended with crushed white Georgia marble. In ’91, when Norman and Irma spent $4.5 million for this place, it was more than anyone had ever paid for a piece of property in South Florida, an act so ostentatious it took Madonna to top it. The house features cavernous, irregularly shaped rooms, a waterfall on the terrace, with sunlight flooding everything through window panels that reach twenty-eight feet to the ceiling, bathing in natural light the Bramans’ spectacular display of paintings and sculpture.
It isn’t your typical rich burgher’s art collection either, a hodgepodge of expensive and unrelated acquisitions. Norman and Irma’s collection mirrors their personalities and interests, combining whimsy and romance with, here and there, glimpses of a darker side. The most dominant pieces are Alexander Calder’s playful mobiles, Claes Oldenburg’s giant Typewriter Eraser, Red Grooms’s gaudy 3-D assemblies, and George Segal’s startlingly realistic life-sized human figures (which more than one houseguest has inadvertently greeted on entering), but there is also Jean Arp’s graceful Resting Leaf. On the walls, the giant colorful comic-book panels of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and the eccentric sketches of satirist Saul Steinberg share ample wall space with Willem de Kooning’s classic Bolton Landing, Jasper Johns’s arresting Two Flags, and his dreamy, sensuous Diver (for which the Bramans paid $4.18 million, the highest price ever for the work of a living artist). To this cheerful mix, Norman has recently introduced (as befits his position with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council) a typically discordant note, a haunting collection of works by German artist Anselm Keifer, whose brutal, explosive images on canvas and in sculpture and collage reflect the blasted legacy of Nazism and World War II. Of course, the primary theme uniting all these works is money. Norman and Irma are not out there stomping around obscure garrets and shops, buying the works of undiscovered artists. They choose what they like from within the relatively narrow range of the recognized— artists whose work has been anointed by the high priests of art criticism and, hence, carries a price tag that puts it well beyond the reach of any pedestrian buyer. The collection boasts both wealth and good taste, but wealth first. And the Bramans don’t just own this stuff, they live with it. They surround themselves with these striking images—a visitor once spotted Oldenburg’s six-foot-high soft sculpture Good Humor Bar II (with an estimated value of $400,000) gracing the corner of a nursery (for one of the couple’s grandchildren), stuck behind a crib surrounded by a chaos of Fisher-Price toys.
The house, the view, the lavish gardens, the art, the extensive Braman wine collection—all are evidence of Norman’s desire to enjoy his money. It’s what he works at hardest. He stopped enlarging and began drinking his wine collection a decade ago, popping the dusty corks on bottles worth thousands of dollars at casual dinner gatherings. Norman chastened one oenophile, horrified at his lack of reverence before a particularly rare vintage burgundy, with the explanation, “Wine, unlike art, is not forever.”
Nothing intimidates Norman. The desk in his high-rise Miami office is wide and mostly bare, the desk of a man no longer troubled with the details of his business empire. An army of people do for Norman, right down to Irma, who finds, buys, and packs away the books that her husband will read on their annual summer retreat to Provence. Norman in his seniority presides, mostly via telephone, fielding only the most important questions raised by his far-flung empire, stepping in grumpily (but, in truth, not unhappily) to throw his weight around when needed. From behind his bare desk, if the phone isn’t already lit up, Norman will shout to his assistant in the outer office, “Susan, would you get me Harry Gamble on the phone?” or “Susan, find out if Howard is going to be in New York at that meeting next week” or “Susan, where are we going to be staying in Los Angeles?”
This is the man who added the Philadelphia Eagles to his collections in ’85 (for $65 million). Norman’s idea isn’t to sit up in his skybox and admire his new possession from a distance. No way! The idea is to enjoy it, fold it into his life, have some fun.
But it was not to be. Norman’s first major act as owner was to hire Buddy, whose first major act as coach was to finesse the car dealer out of his way. It was as though a little painted goon in one of Norman’s elaborate Red Grooms constructions had ordered him out of his own living room. Whom did Buddy think he was dealing with? But Norman checked his wrath. For five long and often infuriating years he hung on to Buddy for one reason, because the irritating head coach kept winning—Buddy pitted the owner’s tolerance for insubordination against his desire for victory. It was a precarious balance, bound to shift against Buddy eventually. After years of tolerating the coach like a sharp rock in a tight shoe, Norman took genuine pleasure in letting the feisty little bastard go.
Rid of Buddy, Norman was at last behind the wheel. The way he saw it, all the pieces were in place. That off-season, Norman made plans to spend four days of every week during football season in Philadelphia—not that he was going to be telling Richie Kotite and Harry Gamble what to do, see, but the better to oversee his toy. Norman had learned in his six years of ownership. He had confidence in his stewardship, and he planned to be front and center to savor the impending year of triumph.
What he hadn’t counted on was the tribal wrath of Erin.
First off, Norman traded a figurative pain in the neck for a real one. While vacationing in Grasse, just months after canning Buddy, Norman sat down on a couch in a shoe store, reached out lazily to drape one long arm over the back, and felt something slip in his neck. He grew dizzy. He couldn’t move without pain. Used to running miles on the beach and vigorous workouts in the pool, he suddenly found his arms hung limp. He couldn’t even lift his newborn granddaughter. His toes were numb, and his fingers could no longer differentiate hot from cold.
Surgeons told him he had calcium spurs on his upper vertebrae, squeezing the spinal cord. They shaved away bone to relieve the pressure, but there was no guarantee it would take away the pain or restore full strength and sensation. One slip of the knife could have paralyzed him from the neck down.
So instead of savoring a championship, Norman spent the ’91 season waiting to see therapists, surrounded by the bent and broken, and being put through a demanding and often painful regimen. Accustomed to keeping others waiting, and giving orders, Norman was at the mercy of health professionals, in whose eyes the Baron of Biscayne Boulevard was just another patient with a pain in the neck. The surgery made his feet supersensitive, so now he ached at both ends. When he managed to get to Philly on a game day, flying up in his private jet, he’d arrive walking stooped and slow on tender toes, his lean, athletic frame suddenly less Astaire than Ichabod, looking, despite his rich golden tan, curly white locks, and handsomely tailored suits, not at all like the vital leader he knew himself to be, but like someone pathetic, infirm, and irrelevant. The neck pain forced him to keep his head cocked at a slight forward angle, accentuating his gaunt profile. In short, he looked like an old man, not the vigorous fifty-nine-year-old he had been, but some caricature of gnarled old age drawn by Daumier or described by Dickens—an image encouraged by the constant whining of his players and their agents, who accused him of being miserly and cold. When Sports Illustrated profiled him briefly with other major players in the sports biz, they reported his age as seventy-one. It was deeply humiliating.
And the curse didn’t stop there. In the first half of the first game that season, Randall’s knee was popped by a lunging Packer linebacker (the aptly named Bryce Paup). No
rman’s team emerged with its own limp, lurching through the year of high hopes like a world-class miler trying to finish a race on only one good leg. Buddy’s marauding defense, fine-tuned and cleverly orchestrated by that maestro Bud Carson, was the best the league had seen in more than a decade, while the Eagles’ offense collapsed. It toppled from a Randall-led league ranking of third to twenty-fifth, captained by a succession of quarterbacks—McMahon (who, true to his pattern, couldn’t stay off the injured list), followed by a disastrous procession of stand-ins. They went from first to last in the league in rushing yards. There was one fourgame midseason losing streak during which the offense scored only one touchdown. The Pro Bowl game in Hawaii after that season resembled an Eagles’ defensive convention, with Reverend Reggie, Clyde, Seth, Eric Allen, and, of course, Jerome. Despite the limp, the club won ten games, only to have their postseason hopes dashed by—who else?—the Dallas Cowboys.
It could have been scripted by an evil leprechaun.
Because Buddy, see, hated Dallas. Not that Buddy Ryan needed a reason to despise a rival football club, or anybody else for that matter, but the Cowboys were a special case. In ’87, after Dallas had run up the score during one of the godawful strike games (they had nine regular roster scabs on the field against the Eagles’ hopeless and reviled “replacement players”), Buddy swore an oath that the Cowboys would never again beat his team. This was, of course, ridiculous. Dallas was going through hard times, but they weren’t that bad, and, at the time, Buddy’s team had yet to post a winning season. But he backed it up. Seven times the two teams met over the next four years, and the Eagles won every game. They won an eighth in Dallas early in ’91, after Buddy was gone, crushing the Cowboys 24—0. But during the make-or-break game on a gloomy Sunday in December, Buddy’s ghost was in the mist. The Eagles not only blew it, they blew it against Dallas.
Diehard Buddy fans, the boys in the cheap seats (well, cheaper; in the modern NFL there is no such thing as a cheap seat) are convinced that Norman blew it when he fired the coach. The curse is on and it would stick.