by Mark Bowden
• • •
OUT ON THE FIELD at Sun Devil Stadium in Phoenix the following Sunday, Ron Heller can’t believe the heat. A big thermometer set up by TNT, which is televising the Eagles-Cardinals game nationally, reads more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit. No wonder Phoenix games are the most poorly attended in the NFL. Nobody sane leaves air conditioning unless there’s an emergency.
Ron knows what it’s like to play in heat, to play until you grow dizzy and you can’t focus your eyes, which sting like hell because you’re so dehydrated your sweat has turned mostly to salt. He was taken by Tampa Bay in the fourth round of the ’84 draft and was a starter down in that tropical climate for three seasons. He liked the heat. He had built his house down in Tampa and would gladly have stayed there for the rest of his career—if not for this little run-in he had with former Buccaneers head coach Ray Perkins.
Having played for Perkins, Ron understood better than most football players how ugly the Tyranny of Coach can get. Years later he remembered his experience with Perkins vividly, every escalating incident and slight, scenes he had played over in his head so often they came back to him word for word.
Ron had fallen in love with the deep-coral-and-salmon dusks over Tampa Bay, the chrome-blue waters, the fertile smell in the air after a spring shower, the year-round blossoms and balmy nights on that side of the state, which offered the same climate as Miami without the severe, sun-bleached flatness, and without the bigger city’s tumult and grime. Granted, the team was lousy, but Ron never even thought about leaving. The Bucs had drafted him, and he felt loyal to them. When he heard guys grumble that they’d rather play for a contender, Ron would challenge them, “Do you want to get traded the night before the championship game or do you want to earn it?”
When he cleared $100,000 of bonus money and started earning an $80,000 salary in his rookie year, he felt like he had a fortune. His four years at Penn State had been wild ones—living in a dorm or in hotel rooms on the road, wearing the same clothes sometimes for days, playing ball, partying, going to class, partying—at the center of rowdy good times on campus. College had been a blast. But now it was time to get serious, get to work. Ron bought himself a pair of sneakers and jeans, a condo, and a fishing rod, paid his father back the money he had borrowed to buy his Ford Bronco, kept enough pocket money to support a little barhopping, and sunk the rest of his earnings into treasury bonds. Ron liked things neat and regular.
In his second year he made $125,000 and met his wife, Heidi, a Bucs cheerleader who had blond hair, a dancer’s body, and the cool head of a finance major. He saw her at a bar in Tampa, recognized her from seeing her around the sidelines, couldn’t think of anything to say, so he just grabbed her—which, fortunately for Ron, was something Heidi didn’t mind. Seems she had noticed him around the ol’ gridiron, too. They hit it off. Ron and Heidi were planners. They’d postpone having kids until Ron was finished playing football. They’d invest their money, build a home, and lay a solid foundation for Life after Football. Ron was not one to waste time. Off-season, as he saw it, was opportunity. He got his real estate license after one season and an insurance license after another. He took a job with a beer distributor in the winter after Tampa’s abysmal ’86 season (they were 2-14, the worst record in football).
That was the off-season when Perkins was hired to turn things around. A lean, blue-eyed former wide receiver (Alabama and then the Baltimore Colts), Ray had the weathered, creased countenance of a tough Mississippi cracker and the personality to go with it. He had a dour and imperious manner that scared most people, including his players, but he had a history of getting results. As head coach with the Giants in the early eighties he’d turned a 6-10 team into a playoff contender in just three seasons, and at Alabama, where he had succeeded his beloved mentor Bear Bryant, he’d compiled a highly respectable winning record over three seasons (32—15—1). Ray had willed himself into an all-American at Alabama in the sixties after nearly dying in his freshman year of a blood clot to the brain. He was an authentic member of the Pigskin Priesthood, acolyte and successor to the Bear, one of the Game’s saints, with connections to such NFL blue bloods as Johnny Unitas (whose passes he caught) and Don Shula (who had coached him). His years coaching the Crimson Tide further burnished those credentials. He arrived in Tampa Bay as a savior to the NFL’s worst franchise. Owner Hugh Culverhouse made the obligatory nod to St. Vince, anointing Ray as “the next Vince Lombardi.” It would be hard to overstate the impact his arrival had on this sleepy franchise. Ray lent instant credibility to a team whose incandescent red, orange, and white uniforms and swishy symbol, a swashbuckling pirate with a Zorro mustache, a dashing feathered cap, and a dagger clenched in his teeth—en garde, big boy!—looked like they belonged more on a stage in nearby Disney World than mixing it up in the trenches on a football field. You didn’t mess with NFL graphics, so there wasn’t much Perkins could do about El Zorro, but he planned to toughen up the team’s fruity image fast.
Which Ron found out when he stopped by the club offices in January to introduce himself. He took a morning off his work for the beer distributor and was looking pretty sharp in his business suit, all fair-haired six-six, 280 taut pounds of him. Ron was trying to make a good impression, show the new coach what a straightforward, serious-minded kind of guy he was—he figured Perkins would be impressed that, just three weeks into the off-season, he was already at work, wasn’t just pissing his time away.
“What’re y’all dressed up for?” asked Ray.
Ron told him about the job, and how he’d taken the day off and all.
“How the hell are you gonna work out if you’ve got a job?”
“When I start my workouts I plan to do them in the mornings and only work afternoons with the company.”
“When you start?”
Whatever Ron hoped to accomplish by introducing himself, he achieved the opposite. Ray was going to strike the fear of God into this pathetic football team. He ripped into Ron: You play for a windsucking, weak-backed team that goes 2—14, exactly when do you plan to start getting in shape? … You want to play football or do you want another job?
Ron had played for Joe Paterno at Penn State, and Paterno could be tough, but it was always an intelligent, even avuncular, toughness. You always felt no matter how hard Joe rode you, he had your best interests at heart. And Ron had had a terrific rapport with John McKay and Leeman Bennett, Tampa’s previous coaches. They had a losing team, sure, but Ron had been treated like a winner, someone the team could build on for a few years. Right from that first day, his impression of Perkins was sour. The new coach seemed neurotically combative, out to get him! You couldn’t get close to somebody who treated you like the enemy.
“Hey, Coach, how ya doin’?” he asked that summer when workouts started, showing he didn’t hold a grudge.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Well, I don’t want to know,” Ron said, peeved. “I was just trying to be nice.”
“Well, if you don’t want to know, why don’t you just mind your own business.”
Of course, ol’ Ray was just trying to send a message early to these candy asses. He wanted them to know that things had changed. That summer, in Florida’s stifling July heat, he started them on a spartan, pre—training camp regimen of three-a-day, full-pads, rock ‘em—sock ‘em practices. Ray knew the three-a-days were harsh, but harsh was what this team needed. Ron didn’t see it that way. What he saw were guys dropping with stupid practice injuries and wearing themselves down. Ron figured, Fuck this! It was hard enough surviving five weeks of training camp and a sixteen-week season intact; he wasn’t going to invite injury. He thought Perkins’s approach was foolish, self-destructive. (The team did, as it turned out, run out of gas before the season ended, winning four of their first seven games and then losing the last eight.) Shortly after camp started, he asked to be traded, all his happy long-term plans sweated and beaten right out of him.
“Why do you want to be traded?”<
br />
“Coach, I don’t think we’re going in the right direction with these three-a-day practices.”
But Ray wasn’t about to trade Ron Heller. Ron was the kind of player he needed. He saw him as a potential team leader. But it wasn’t Ray’s way to flatter a young man into playing hard. He applied the spurs. He told the lineman, in so many words, he was a lazy, overpaid, barhopping pussy who didn’t know what real football was.
Ron was miserable. Right on through that summer, and then on into the season, not a week went by without his asking to be traded.
By the thirteenth week of the season, having lost four straight and any chance of making the play-offs, Ray benched veteran quarterback Steve DeBerg, and started his first-round pick, the prize of the ’87 draft, Heisman Trophy-winning, collegiate powerhouse Miami’s superquarterback, Vinny Testaverde.
SuperVinny made his debut as a starter on December 6, appropriately in the Louisiana Superdome, against the Saints, who were playing to clinch their first-ever play-off berth. Vinny fumbled the ball away on Tampa’s first two possessions, setting up two New Orleans touchdowns in the opening minutes, but then gained his poise. The Bucs battled back to within four points of the Saints at halftime. It was a wild, emotional game. Vinny was on his way to the best passing debut in NFL history (369 yards on twenty-two completions). Saints fans were rocking the Dome, urging their team to hang on, hungry for that first-ever taste of postseason glory.
Ray was understandably wound up in the locker room at halftime. The Bucs still had a shot at a decent, turnaround kind of season at that point. A game like this, coming from behind against a play-off-caliber team with their new, franchise player at the helm—it was the kind of win you could build on. It was a turning point, a moment every fired-up cell in his body told him was pivotal, and he was throwing his whole weight onto the scales, working his Bear Bryant-Don Shula heritage for all it was worth, afire in full-throated philippic, when the ref peeked his head in to say, “Wrap it up, Coach, we need you.”
“All right,” Ray shouted. “Let’s go out there and kick their ass!”
And as the team jumped up, everybody yelling blood oaths and whatnot, Ron was moved by the heroic mood to shout, “Come on, guys, don’t quit!”
He was about to finish off with something banal like “We can do it!” when the coach wheeled around and punched him—bam!—flat in the mouth.
As he reeled from the initial shock, the big tackle’s arms went up, and the coach continued to flail at him.
Ray was shouting “Quit!? Quit!?”
Even though he’d just been punched in the mouth, when Ron realized he’d been misunderstood, he started to laugh.
Still fending Ray off, he said, “No, Coach, wait…,” trying to explain.
But Ray wasn’t about to listen. He was raining blows on Ron’s head and chest. Ron again pushed him off.
“I didn’t say ‘Quit,’” he shouted. “I said, Don’t quit’!”
“You can’t even mention that word in my locker room!” raged Ray.
It was like a superstition with him, that word, but there was nothing spooky or mystical about it. The point was—to the extent that there had to be a point—it was not permissible for the concept “quit” to flash even briefly through the gray matter of a true champion. It was hard as hell to win at this level. The difference between the best and worst teams in the league wasn’t that great. And every coach knew you could field the best team, enter a game with the best game plan, and still get stomped. It was, of course, one of the things that made the game so great. You never knew how the ball would bounce. So you assembled the best team you could, prepared them as best you could, and then … well, some coaches had lucky hats or pregame rituals or special prayers they said, but with Ray, the secret was to shift to a whole new level of effort, willing yourself (and the team) into a winning frame of mind, and for that you had to banish all negativity, beam the light on every little shadow, chase the very seed of defeat from your mind.
So it didn’t matter what Ron meant. That was beside the point. He had uttered the word! He had, even indirectly, introduced the concept. Punched a pinhole of doubt into the brilliant, blinding vision of victory.
There was, of course, no time to explain any of this—not to say it worked on a logical plane anyway. Ray had reacted instinctively. He would beat the shadow away. It wasn’t even Ron Heller he was attacking; it was the idea, the word. He was trying to make a point.
By now, the team had responded the way you would expect football players to respond to a seriously interesting halftime lockerroom brawl between player and Coach; they were standing on benches and crowding around, elbowing one another and leaning in to get a better view.
“We need you! We need you!” came the voice of the ref, trying to get the team back on the field.
SuperVinny stepped up and tried to restore order. He grabbed Ray by the back of his sports coat and started dragging him toward the door.
“Jeez, what was that all about?” one of Ron’s teammates leaned in to ask.
“I don’t know,” said Ron, shaking his head and still chuckling a little about the misunderstanding, when he heard someone shout, “Heads up!”
Ron looked up in time to catch the coach, having wriggled out of the sports coat, charging back for more.
Bam! He popped Ron again, right in the face. This time, the lineman slipped and fell, and as he tried to get up on one knee the coach was pummeling him, so—pissed now—Ron wrapped one ham hand around Ray’s throat and held him at the length of his very long and thickly muscled arm, digging his fingers into the coach’s neck. Ray was still swinging—no give in this guy—but Ron’s reach was so long the blows just glanced off his shoulder pads.
“You want to fight? Let’s fight,” said Ron, the former state heavyweight wrestling champion of New York, releasing his grip on Ray and balling his fists.
The ref was still shouting.
Ray seemed to snap out of it. He took a step back, eyed the two very large padded fists, collected himself, and turned away.
“Let’s go,” he told the team.
Ron stayed in the locker room. He was confused. One part of him said to hell with this, but the other part said, You don’t go out there now, it’s going to hurt your career bad. Ron had been around the league long enough to know that a fistfight with the head coach—grappling with a High Priest of the Pigskin right inside the temple—could not only get you fired, it would likely get you blacklisted. So would refusing to finish a football game. But the way he was feeling—how could he ever play another down for this asshole? He was still debating with himself when he walked back out. The Saints had already fielded the second-half kickoff and the Bucs’ defense was playing. Ron stood with his teammates, holding his helmet, arguing with himself about what he should do, when Ray walked up.
“Hey, man,” he said. “Are you all right?”
Ron glared at him.
“I just want you to go out and have a good second half now, all right?” the coach said.
“Don’t worry about me, you asshole.”
“What’s the matter? What’s the problem?”
“Fuck you,” said Ron, and started to walk away.
Ray grabbed his arm. “Are you all right? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“Hurt me?” said Ron, trying to laugh. “You didn’t hurt me, but I could tell you were trying.”
Ron played the rest of the game. What else could he do? The Bucs lost, 34-44. As they filed off the field, Ron thought maybe Ray would apologize. The team had a few private postgame minutes with the coach before the Pack descended. He figured Ray would say something like “Sorry guys, I lost my mind there for a minute.” But the coach said nothing, just “All right, hit the showers, let’s go.”
Ron wasn’t about to leave it at that. He stood up and addressed the team, imploring them to keep the halftime altercation to themselves. He was worried about how it would look for him, about getting a reputation for fightin
g with his coach.
“What happened stays here with the team, okay? We’re trying to accomplish something here. If the media gets hold of this, it could only be a negative.”
Ron was the last one in the shower room when Ray walked in, fully clothed.
“Hey, I ought to tell you why I did what I did,” the coach said, getting thoroughly soaked.
“Yeah, Coach, why’s that?” the tackle said.
“You mentioned quitting, and I’ve never put up with quitters. I hate that word, and when I heard it, I went off. I just won’t have it.”
Ray was trying to apologize (not an easy thing for a head coach to do to a young player). He felt like he was apologizing anyway, trying to explain that he hadn’t meant to attack or insult Ron personally— it was the word, see—but Ron wasn’t on the same wavelength. The player felt insulted and unfairly accused. Ron, a highly rational young man, wasn’t sure how to cope with such an irrational charge. Everybody knew he hadn’t suggested that the team quit—the charge was ridiculous! What kind of damn fool would do a thing like that, even if he did feel that way?
“Wait a minute,” Ron said. “Is this an apology?”
Now the coach had his back up again. If Ron didn’t recognize an apology he wasn’t going to beg.
“Look, I’m just telling you why I did what I did. You seemed to be confused.”