by Mark Bowden
“Look, man, I wasn’t talking about quitting.”
Ray shrugged and walked off. On the plane home, Ron noticed that the coach’s hand was iced and bandaged. He had smashed two knuckles. He told the Pack that he hurt his hand when he slipped on the wet floor in the locker room.
Ron finished out the season, and Ray reluctantly agreed to trade him. Tampa dealt him to the Seattle Seahawks for defensive lineman Randy Edwards, who failed to make the Bucs, and a sixth-round draft pick in ’89—Ray chose South Carolina linebacker Derrick Little, who likewise failed to make the team. Ray himself got canned in ’90, after compiling a distinctly un-Lombardi-like 19-41 record with the Bucs.
Ron, on the other hand, prospered. This Cardinals game, five years later, would be his 117th pro start, his 60th as an Eagle. He would earn $660,000 this season, and he’d be a free agent when his contract came up at the end of the year (he’d make more than $1 million the next year, playing in Miami for Perkins’s old head coach Don Shula). He and Heidi built their house in Tampa, an elegant two-story stucco home with a spacious, airy interior, a thirty-foot central ceiling, pool room, state-of-the-art audio-video setup, pool, detached two-car garage with a personal exercise center on its second floor, and just a few blocks away was the marina where Ron kept his boat.
The heat—nah, the heat doesn’t bother Ron Heller.
BY GAME TIME, shadow has fallen across Sun Devil Stadium’s grass and the temperature has dipped to a merely stifling one hundred degrees. A Cardinals night game has a surreal quality. The modernistic stadium has been scooped out of the desert between two stark sienna buttes (one of which is tall enough for locals in beach chairs to perch on for a free view down at the action). The field, a patch of perfectly groomed, almost spongelike prescription grass on a layer of sand and dirt, is the greenest thing in five hundred miles—it’s so out of place it seems plastic. Phoenix citizens quickly lost enthusiasm for their fugitive franchise, which has played four losing seasons (and is embarking on its fifth) since fleeing here from St. Louis. The neat rows of silver benches rising high around the field are only about half-filled—just over forty thousand attend, and the majority of them are more watchers than screamers, still waiting for this franchise to show some fire. There’s just a fraction of the usual din. When the Eagles open the game with a long, pounding drive of fifteen consecutive plays, setting up a thirty-three-yard field goal, it silences whatever scattered enthusiasm exists. For the last five minutes of the drive, it feels like they’re playing with the volume turned off.
Ron checks the game clock overhead—6:25. He does some quick math to figure out how long they held the ball to open the game— eight minutes and thirty-five seconds! He is disappointed they didn’t push all the way in for the touchdown, that they had to settle for three points, but the drive was satisfying. They’ve sent a message. In each of the last two seasons, Phoenix, a lesser team by any measure, has beaten the Eagles in the season’s second game. The boys were starting to feel a little spooked about these guys with the funny cartoon redbird heads on the sides of their white helmets. But to open the game just hammering the ball at them downfield like that asserts control.
That’s the game plan. If you positioned all four of Phoenix’s linebackers on the line, the Cardinals would still be more than 100 pounds lighter than the Eagles’ offensive front, reinforced by two tight ends—Pat Beach outside Ron, and Keith Byars outside Antone. So that’s what Richie has decided to do. It’s steamrollerball. Time to give the revamped front line some confidence, especially the heavyweight right side, where pudgy 330-pound free agent Eric Floyd now lines up inside Antone. To further tip the scales, Richie inserts a third tight end, Rob Selby, a wide-bodied 286-pound lineman who ordinarily plays guard. The idea is just to keep ramming your way upfield, grinding out yards, eating up the clock—They can’t score if we don’t give ‘em the ball.
Ron loves it. What lineman wouldn’t? Their game isn’t the stuff of highlights films, the glorious diving catches, the dazzling Gale Sayers-like open-field dances, the splendid gravity’s rainbow of a football captured in slo-mo in the stadium lights, spiraling to its distant target. The lineman’s game is the loud smack when helmets and pads collide, the hammer, the sudden jolt of contact that stings flesh and bruises bone and sends a dull shock wave down the spine. If there is one thing that separates football players from normal human beings, it’s a bit of neurochemical confusion in some obscure hypothalamic juncture where the brain sorts out pleasure and pain. Asked to explain the sensation of a brutal hit, most pro players, even the most articulate, struggle for the right words, but it’s clear that they are groping for a way to describe pleasure. Most people recoil from violent contact, the hammer, the nanosecond of blackout as the wet sponge of your brain whacks the inside of your skull, and the subsequent aftershock vibrates down your spinal column to pelvis, femur, fibula, tibia, and toe. The best football players seek it out, dream about it, relish it. For linemen, this is practically the whole thing. A football game consists of sixty or seventy collisions, the initial crack of helmets and pads colliding hard enough to stand two huge men upright, and the brief and artful wrestling match that ensues. Their game is mud and mouthfuls of grass, poked eyes, scraped elbows, blood smears on tight silver pants, fingers crushed between two helmets, or some scrambling 250-pound linebacker landing with his cleats on your arm; it’s swearing and push ing and kicking—pulling out of a struggling heap and craning to see where the play has gone. And it’s here that Richie is determined to beat the Phoenix Cardinals. Mano a mano, brute force against brute force—Hammer Time! It’s a strategy designed (and this is part of what Coach is after here) to prove the mettle of his offensive line.
It’s Herschel into the right side for three yards, Herschel into the right side seven yards, a quick eight-yard pass out to Fred (keeping them honest), then Herschel into the left side for five yards, Herschel into the right side for two more…. Herschel carries the ball eight times on the opening drive and grinds out twenty-five yards. Randall gets thirty-four more on four short passes, the Cards chip in five on an offsides penalty, Ruzek boots the field goal, and the Eagles have a 3—0 lead with more than half of the first quarter gone. They have the upper hand.
The Cardinals had played in sweltering Tampa heat the week before (and lost), and in the game films you couldn’t help but notice how spent they were in the second half. Richie figures that if they force Phoenix to spend a second consecutive week playing hard football in a sauna, they will wilt and die. When the Cardinals fail to score on their first possession, the pounding resumes. Working mostly out of the same steamroller formation, again it’s Herschel for six, Herschel for three, Herschel for four … and just when the Cards figure out this could go on all night, Randall fakes the handoff to Herschel, drops back, and fires a gorgeous fifty-one-yard bomb to Fred. Three plays later, after two more runs, Fred catches a seventeen-yard touchdown pass.
“What a great sequencing of plays!” remarks Pat Haden, the color man for TNT’s evening broadcast.
For once on this team, it’s the offense that has seized control of a game, and the defense that is having troubles. Despite knocking Phoenix’s young starting quarterback, Timm Rosenbach, out of the game with a separated shoulder, the defense struggles in vain to stop backup Chris Chandler’s pinpoint passing. Showboat receiver Randal Hill catches a forty-four-yard pass, and then Chandler completes a pass to the end zone. They score again on a forty-six-yard Chandler pass, pulling ahead 14-10 near the end of the first half.
Mindful that hardly a game goes by without Buddy’s Boys reminding the offensive line of its inadequacy, particularly that Seth Joyner, Ron leans toward his buddy Dave Alexander on the bench as the kick sails through the uprights and jokes, “Well, I guess I’ll have to go down and take a walk by the defensive side of the bench and tell those guys they’re not tough enough.”
But the Eagles score again before halftime, and after that the game is never in doubt. Boosted by an IV injec
tion of fluids at halftime, Fred catches another touchdown pass in the third quarter, this one a seventy-one-yarder, racing the last fifteen yards into the end zone, holding off beaten cornerback Aeneas Williams with a humiliating straight-arm to his face mask.
“I love Fred Barnett,” enthuses Haden to the national TV audience. “I love Fred Barnett. He has some very strong hands. He just snatches the ball, and then he gave Aeneas Williams a straight-arm for the last fifteen yards. That’s seven catches tonight, 183 yards. And we’re still in the third quarter. Seventy-one yards and it’s in-your face!”
The camera also loves Fred. After all those teenage nights of dreaming himself at work on the football field, Fred has all the moves choreographed. He doesn’t just play, he performs. After a touchdown catch he poses with feet together and both arms outstretched, holding the football high in one gloved hand, more like a lead dancer stage center at the Met than a receiver doing some personal variation of the touchdown boogie. His first touchdown catch as a rookie, in a Monday night contest against the Vikings, was unforgettable. Fred performed a kind of interpretive dance, later described as an “electric glide,” or a “moonwalk,” which involved dragging himself into the end zone in slow motion, like a mime stepping through an invisible window, holding the ball in one hand at arm’s length and, with a final flourish, dragging it artfully across the “plane of the goal,” which is what must officially happen for a touchdown to be scored. In tonight’s game, he pops up after one long catch and comically pats the rump of safety Tim McDonald, whom he has just beaten. McDonald responds with a distinctly uncivilized shove and a very rude remark. When cornerback Robert Massey manages to knock a potential third long touchdown pass from Fred’s hands in the end zone, the receiver bounces up and leads the scattered applause, clownishly clapping gloved hands together with both arms fully extended. Fred finally leaves the game with severe leg cramps in the middle of a nine-and-a-half-minute fourth-quarter drive, ending a career-best 193-yard, two-touchdown performance, which does a lot, on this national telecast, to spread his growing reputation.
Fred’s last touchdown catch and the extra point puts Phoenix down by ten points, so they need to score twice—but Richie’s steamroller approach won’t give them the ball. The stadium is sullen and the air feels like it’s on fire. This being Fan Appreciation Day at Sun Devil Stadium, the team handed out cardboard Cardinals fans on wooden sticks to everybody at the gate before the game. As it becomes apparent that the Cards just can’t stop this drive and aren’t going to get the ball back in time to catch up, the cardboard fans start flipping out onto the field, and the two-legged fans start heading for the gates.
This is football the way Richie most likes to play it, the Brooklyn Slouch translated into a football strategy, aggressive, fundamental, and demoralizing— Hey, here we come, whaddayagunnadoabowdit? By the final quarter of this game, the Cardinals are whipped. Ron can see it. He remembers the feeling from his years in Tampa, where losing was a way of life. The coaches down there would always say, These guys coming down here aren’t used to this heat, as if it would work to the Bucs’ advantage. Ron never bought it. He always figured, these bums just have to finish this game and they’re out of here, we’re back out practicing in this soup all week, playing in it all year. After losing in Tampa last week, now playing in this home scorcher, the Phoenix defense must feel as if it’s descending through the rings of hell.
The drive goes on and on. After the sun sets, the desert sky flashes with lightning like a strobe, but there is no thunder and no rain, which adds to the twilight zone feel. Out on this platform of grass under the lights, the sky flashing, the cardboard fans on sticks whirling down in slow motion like crippled Frisbees from the emptying stands … the grim Cardinals players have even given up yelling at each other.
For Ron, the game’s best moment comes at the beginning of this final drive. The play doesn’t even count; it gets called back on a holding penalty, but it’s still Ron’s favorite. The Eagles call it the counter OT (“Counter” means the back makes a fake and then runs in the opposite direction of the line’s blocking; and “OT” means the offside tackle and guard both pull up from their normal blocks, reverse direction, and race around to run interference for the back downfield.) It isn’t one of the Eagles’ regular plays, the ones they repeat over and over and over again in practice until they are hard-wired into their brains. They’ve run it only once or twice in the years Ron has played for Philadelphia.
“Man, I’m glad we repped this,” Ron quips to Mike Schad as they break huddle.
But it works like a charm (except for that flag). To Ron, this is football. For once he gets to pull out of the trenches, be an athlete instead of a stone. He and Schad churn around the right corner in front of Herschel like runaway earthmovers, Schad flattening a safety and Ron running downfield full speed, scoping the field for someone to hit, and finally unloading with enervating force on a mismatched linebacker, who goes flying. Herschel picks up eleven yards. It feels so good Ron doesn’t even care when the refs walk it back.
Then it’s back to grinding out the win. The heat, even with the sun down, is unrelenting. Poor big-bellied right guard Eric “Pink” Floyd, his jersey soaked with sweat from his collar to the thick round folds that spill out over the waist of his tight silver pants, feels like he’s going to pass out.
“Tone, you gotta help me, you gotta help me,” he gasps as they line up to run a sixth consecutive running play.
“You can do it!” Antone urges.
After the play, Pink is down on one knee, breathing hard, gulping the molten air. Dave Alexander urges him back into the huddle.
“You okay?”
“I can make it. I can make it,” says the big man, trying to convince himself.
Pink’s predicament strikes the other guys as hilarious, mostly because they’re winning, which always lightens things up. But it’s partly because Pink is always poking fun at himself, at his fatness and slowness and overall seeming unfitness for the role he’s being paid so well to play. Pink had proved to be the perfect antidote for Antone’s overpaid ennui. Physically, he’s like a caricature of the Megapick, carrying the same bulk, but with his distributed mostly in an ample, soft midsection, rather than a million-dollar butt. Unlike Antone, who had been handed big money and a starting job at the gate, Pink had battled every step of the way. He wasn’t even drafted coming out of Auburn, and he got cut when he tried out for San Diego in ’88. The following year he impressed coaches only enough to be carried on their development squad (translation: he made a good blocking dummy in practice). But Pink persevered. He made the Chargers in ’90 and ’91, and even played a little. He wasn’t taken seriously enough for the team to “protect” him at the end of the ’91 season. His size attracted the Eagles’ attention early this year when they were shopping around for offensive linemen. When Pink started the Eagles’ training camp in summer, a job was by no means assured. But he had made it. After Antone and Pink started four preseason games, coaches liked the way 660 pounds looked together on the right side of the line. And the chemistry worked. For as bored and disheartened as Antone could be, Pink was thrilled just to be around. Nothing bothered him. If he screwed up and the coaches jumped all over him, he’d grin and shrug and work like hell to do better. “Doesn’t that bother you when they chew you out like that?” Antone would ask, and Pink would look astonished, “Shit, Tone, they’re paying me this kind of money [he made $371,000 in ’92]! They can call me any damn thing they like.”
Pink was the kind of guy you rooted for, so his struggles in the heat at the tail end of a winning game … well, in a way they warmed your heart.
“Antone, you gotta keep me goin’,” he pleads, as they line up again.
“Okay, Pink, you can make it,” Antone says, wondering what good saying so could possibly do.
They crash ahead for the next play—Herschel runs right behind the two big men, pushing the ball into the Cardinals’ territory again.
; “Can you make it?” Antone asks Pink, herding him back toward the huddle.
“I can make it,” he says, but then, in the next breath, he turns to Alexander and blurts, “I can’t make it!”
“Okay, Pink, man, go on out,” says Dave, but before he can even finish the sentence the big guard is sprinting for the sidelines like an elephant galloping downhill—the fastest he’s moved all evening. They can all identify.
Except Herschel. Herschel seems inhuman. He’s on his way to gaining one hundred yards for the second week in a row—for only the second time in his NFL career, and nothing, not the Cardinals, not the heat, nothing is going to stop him. During training camp some of the guys made fun of Herschel’s excessive work habits. Two grueling practices a day weren’t enough for this guy; he was up at 6:00 a.m. every morning to run two miles by himself before breakfast, and in his room, seemingly on the hour, day and night, he would drop to do a hundred sit-ups and a hundred push-ups, accumulating thousands of each over the course of every day. Tonight, they see those efforts paying off. Herschel seems as fresh and eager in the fourth quarter as he was in the first. The Eagles will give him the ball twenty-eight times tonight, and he plays like he wouldn’t mind if they gave it to him twenty-eight more. During the clock-eating drive, he carries the ball at one point on seven consecutive plays.
Even some of the guys most skeptical of Herschel when Richie and Harry signed him this summer now find him an inspiration. The Cardinals’ linebackers, who outweigh him by fifty pounds, are hitting him for all they’re worth, taking out frustrations, piling on, trying to shake the ball loose. Herschel just pops up with a little smirk and says, “Let’s go fellas, isn’t this fun?” His eyes widen in the huddle as Randall conveys Richie’s next play call, to Herschel again.
There is an air of greatness about him on the field. He looks bigger, more formidable, in his uniform, more like the figure who once graced the covers of all those sports magazines. Boundlessly energetic, eager, unfailingly polite—on one of his slams up the middle, he runs full speed into Alexander’s backside, knocking the center forward, but keeping his footing and pressing on, and as he churns past to pick up another four yards, he finds time to say, “Sorry, Dave.”