Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  First and ten on the Eagles’ twenty-eight: Denver lines up three wide receivers, which would ordinarily force Bud to deploy his nickel defense (five defensive backs). The nickel trades linebacker William Thomas for a smaller, faster defender, Otis Smith, so it improves pass coverage at the expense of muscle against the run. Only, Bud knows the Broncos like to run from this formation, especially deep in an opponent’s territory, so he gambles. The Eagles go with “regular people,” their normal four down linemen, three linebackers, two cornerbacks, and two safeties. And the Broncos, confirming Bud’s hunch, try to run. Seals fends off his blocker and wraps up the ballcarrier after a two-yard gain.

  Second and eight on the Eagles’ twenty-six: Now the Broncos have to pass. They line up three receivers, two split wide to Elway’s left, one wide right. The Eagles must also cover a tight end and the running back lined up in the backfield.

  The play demonstrates the complexity of pro schemes. Bud breaks down the defense into four parts, left-side pass coverage, right-side coverage, middle coverage, and the pass rush. In this case, leftside pass coverage consists of three defenders playing a combination of man-to-man and zone. Cornerbacks Eric and Otis each have a receiver man-to-man, with Andre playing farther upfield, defending the deep zone in case one of these two receivers breaks upfield. On the right side, Izel is all by himself; he has man-to-man coverage on his receiver all the way upfield. In the middle, coverage is man-to-man: safety Wes Hopkins will cover the tight end if he comes out on a pass route, and Byron Evans will pick up the running back. As for the rush, Bud has called a blitz. He’s going to send Seth after Elway on the right side. And the line, just to mix things up further, will try a stunt—instead of rushing straight at the quarterback, Reverend Reggie will swing around from his position on the end (Elway’s right) and attack up the middle.

  The play takes about five seconds to happen, but to the men in the thick of it, time slows. Much happens in five seconds. On the snap, Elway drops back and checks his receivers, all of whom are covered (two seconds). Seth’s rush from the right forces him to step up in the pocket, which is supposed to make the middle linebacker charge, leaving the running back, who has slipped out on a pass route, wide open. Only, Byron doesn’t bite. He wheels around and hangs back, so Elway still has no open receiver (two seconds). The tight end has stayed in to try to block Seth, so Wes is free and is now zeroing in to put the hammer on Elway. Clyde, who all afternoon has been beating the rookie tackle trying to block him, collapses the pocket to Elway’s left, so the bucktoothed one scoots right, only to confront Mike Golic, who has fought off his blocker. He dodges to his left, right into the arms of Reggie, who—remember?—has swung over to the middle (one second). The quarterback is sacked for a three-yard loss, which is actually a good thing for Elway, because if Reggie doesn’t grab him, Wes is about to arrive with a full running start from the front, and Seth, having shaken off the tight end, is about to unload from behind— Seth ends up having to hurdle Reggie to avoid hitting Elway late.

  Third and eleven on the Eagles’ twenty-nine: Bud sends in his dime squad, taking out Byron and substituting smaller, faster John Booty and substituting Andy Harmon for Mike Golic (Harmon is smaller and less experienced, but a better pass rusher). Again, there are complex pass-coverage assignments to the right, center, and left, mixtures of man-to-man coverage and zones. All week, Bud has stressed the importance of not allowing Elway to break away from the pass rush and scramble to his right and has stressed that if this does happen, defensive backs must bump their receivers and hang on tight.

  This time, desperate, Elway does break free and does scramble to his right, athletically slipping away from what appears to be certain tackles by Reggie and Andy Harmon, and scooting toward the sideline with Clyde in hot pursuit. And in one of the rare Eagles’ mistakes this game, Andre fails to stay with his receiver, Mark Jackson. Andre catches a glimpse of Elway breaking free, so he turns back to pursue, and Jackson races upfield, wide open, waving his arms in the air to catch Elway’s attention. Izel, who has a deep middle zone, spots the mistake and races after Jackson, arriving just a split second after the pass, which is caught on the one-yard line before Jackson’s momentum carries him out-of-bounds.

  But the play is called back. Bud is standing on the sidelines gesturing frantically at the scrimmage marker. Elway, fleeing Clyde, had stepped across the scrimmage line before throwing the ball. The pass comes back, so instead of taking over with a first down on the oneyard line, Elway loses the down and is penalized another five yards, which pushes the Broncos back to the Eagles’ thirty-four-yard line, and out of field-goal range.

  Denver is demoralized. Ever gracious in victory, the Eagles’ defense taunts the Broncos gleefully as the clock winds down. As the orange-jerseyed players break huddle and approach the line, they’re greeted by a chorus.

  “Come on, run at me!”

  “Hey, try that stupid slant play again, I like that one!”

  “Yo, Elway, that ain’t gonna work!”

  “Don’t bring that shit this way!”

  The Eagles score again on the next possession and then intercept Elway when the Broncos get the ball, and Randall throws another touchdown pass … the game turns into a rout. Denver coach Dan Reeves throws in the towel when the score reaches 30-0, sending in his second string.

  Bud waits until there is less than a minute in the game before he removes his headset, smiles, and congratulates his players on the bench. “We figured he wanted to wait until he was sure we had it,” jokes Golic. It is only the second time in Elway’s career that he has been shut out.

  “They’re known for their great defense, and they proved it today,” Elway calmly acknowledges afterward. “They just manhandled us.”

  The highly credible Bill Parcells, the former Giants two-time Super Bowl—winning coach who is now working as a commentator for NBC Sports, validates the emerging stature of this ’92 Eagles team, now 3-0 in the season.

  “This team is definitely capable of beating anybody in the National Football League,” he says. “In the past, once in a while, they would self-destruct and give games away and lose to people that they shouldn’t lose to, but I see a greater sense of purpose here with the Eagles this year.”

  Lying in wait for Bud as he emerges from the locker room is a TV reporter, determined to extract a rare mote of high praise from the defensive master. One can only imagine—nostalgically—what verbal excesses Buddy Ryan might have reached after a rout like this. The Broncos were not only shut out, they were held to eighty-two yards! Surely now, after this performance, Bud would be ready to acknowledge that this Eagles defense deserved to be considered with the very best that ever played the game.

  “This is truly amazing,” the reporter says, priming the moment for the home audience, diminutive Bud squinting up at the camera alongside him. “To hold a team like Denver, and a quarterback like Elway to just eighty-two yards, isn’t that a first?”

  Bud grimaces, the face of a man who knows too much. “Well, maybe it is here,” he says.

  There isn’t time to go into it on the air, see, but what about the time his ’79 Rams held the Seattle Seahawks to a grand total of minusseven yards? That’s the NFL record. Sure, today was pretty good, but, you know, it wasn’t perfect or anything. Andre had missed that tackle in the first series, and where was Otis on that second-and-ten play in the fourth quarter? And on that play when Elway scrambled, what was Jackson doing open down there on the one? Sure, it got called back, but mistakes like that can hurt you down the road. Bud still hasn’t figured out what happened there.

  He’s going to have to talk with these guys.

  8

  IS DADDY’S BRIDGE BROKE?

  Erika Hopkins knows what this is. The ultimate betrayal.

  In the private lounge for the Eagles’ wives, girlfriends, and family, she has just introduced herself to this luscious cookie as the wife of veteran free safety Wes Hopkins.

  “That’s strange,” says the
woman.

  After nine seasons in Philadelphia, Wes is one of the team’s bestknown players, and Erika, a chatty, stylish woman with a lively wit, is president of the Association of Eagles’ Wives. She makes a point of greeting newcomers to the wives’ lounge at the Vet before games. Outside on the street-level concourse thousands of fans are in motion, buying food and beer, meeting up with friends, getting ready to find their seats for the Eagles-Broncos game. This being only the second home game of the season, Erika hasn’t seen all the new faces yet.

  “What’s strange?” she asks.

  “Oh, it’s just that…” and the woman hesitates, sensing she might be stepping in something.

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s just silly. But I just saw a girl out in the food area and some guy was trying to hit on her, and she turned around and said, ‘Look, you don’t know who you’re talking to. I’m Wes Hopkins’s wife.’”

  Erika wants to laugh—you know, Isn’t that just rich! She actually gets out, “You’ve got to be joking!” But she knows the rest of the women—her friends—standing around watching now aren’t fooled. They sense the anguish; they catch the flush in her cheeks. They know.

  That’s what’s so excruciating about this, see? They all know!

  “Who?” Erika asks. “I mean, what did she look like?”

  “Blond white girl.”

  Erika exits, a short, buxom beauty with big brown eyes and smooth skin the color of cappuccino. Erika looks fabulous, copper colored hair, subtle makeup, gold earrings and bracelets, ivory lace vest, and gold-tassled pinstripe blazer over black stirrup pants and black ankle boots. But, hey, they all look fabulous. All the female ornaments of the young gods about to do battle, assembled here on the green-and-silver furnishings in the wives’ lounge, all of them are stunning—drop-dead slender in tights or designer jeans, colorful sweaters or leather jackets, glittering jewelry, stylish ankle boots or sleek gator-skin cowgirl boots (the white girls lean toward Western chic), their exquisite features perfectly painted, framed by a nova of hair that’s been teased, sculpted, tinted, and set with all the cunning of modern hairdressing arts. These are the women who share the dream, the cover-girl lovelies who share the family portraits in the glossy NFL GameDay magazine, life partners of these men who own the top rung of the chaw-chomping, testosterone ladder of red-blooded American manhood. These women are the real thing, not the symbolic trophies down there jumping around on the sidelines in skimpy outfits with pom-poms and titties bouncing, not the camp-following Sis-Boom-Bimbos, these are the she-gods impressive enough to tame and bridle these men’s men and lead them to the altar, bear their robust children, share their suburban tract mansions, their luxurious foreign cars, public appearances … their whole glorified, charmed lives.

  Holding on to these boys, however, has its price.

  Erika goes straight to the will-call ticket window next door.

  “Hi, Erika!” says the girl behind the counter—everybody around here knows and likes Erika.

  “Wes and I have some friends coming in for the game today, and I didn’t write the ticket numbers down. Could you look them up for me?”

  Armed with section and row, Erika strides out into the busy concourse and locates the section. It’s about a half hour before kickoff now; Wes is out on the field with his teammates, stretching, running perfunctory drills—There he is, number 48!—only Erika is not watching the field.

  She walks up the ramp, and standing on tiptoe, counting down the rows, she locates her husband’s complimentary seats. Blond white girl and guy. The girl is … she’s terrific, early twenties, perfect petite Anglo features. How many times has she heard Wes say it about white girls? If you gotta have it, it better be gorgeous. So Erika knows who this is.

  She walks down the steps and stops right in front of the young white couple.

  “Excuse me, is your name Amy?” she asks.

  The blond smiles. “Yes, it is.”

  AMY.

  It’s been three months since Erika found the envelope lying on the passenger seat of Wes’s car. On the outside, in loopy, hyperfeminine script, was written “Wesley.” Erika opened it.

  “I’m so looking forward to our trip away”—Wes was leaving to do a weekend football camp for a friend in Indianapolis in two days— “… I’m going to love you morning, noon and night… I’m sorry I’ve been fussing at you lately, but my mother told me that you need to make a decision. …” A decision?

  Erika had to drive her mother home before meeting Wes. It gave her time to think before she confronted him. As she would remember it, she pounced as he stepped into the car.

  “Okay, what the hell is this!” brandishing the note. “Who is this person? What the hell are you doing?”

  Wes didn’t lie. Cool Wes. Cold Wes.

  “It’s nobody.”

  “Oh, so nobody is writing this!” She waved the note at him. “Nobody is going with you to Indianapolis?”

  There was silence for a moment as they drove. Then Wes said, calmly, “Her name is Amy.”

  “Amy what?”

  The last name sounded German, or Norwegian.

  “She’s white?” Erika was shouting.

  “Yeah, she’s white.”

  This was trouble. This was different than the other times. Erika knows Wes has had women before. Since they were married, back in February of ’87 out in L.A., there has been a string. It has torn her up. But what could she do? He was Wes Hopkins of the Philadelphia Eagles, number 48, Pro Bowl free safety, handsome, successful, smart, well-to-do (actually not, but more on that later).

  And the Sis-Boom-Bimbos were everywhere, in the bars where Wes liked to hang out one night a week with his teammates—Erika allowed that; she was no tyrant—in the hotel lobbies when they traveled, at the public appearances where Wes signed autographs. It was part of the life. The athletes expected it, the way they expected their gear to be laid in their lockers on game day. Wes and Erika had never fully worked through the issue of other women before they married. It hadn’t seemed necessary. Their wedding had come after Wes’s injury, when his career was in jeopardy and his finances in ruins, when he had temporarily fallen off the golden chariot.

  WES HOPKINS HAD two faces. If you met him out of uniform at a bar or at one of his public appearances or even in the locker room, he had a ready smile and charming sense of humor. He had thick eyebrows over intelligent eyes, a mustache, a distinctive widow’s peak that came to a point at the center of his forehead. Wes wasn’t a giant, and his body wasn’t especially well built. He had bandy legs, particularly his surgically repaired left knee, which looked as if it had been reset at the wrong angle. His warmth and social ease stood out in a group that was distant, surly, and self-important. The Pack loved Wes. You could hold an easy conversation with him. In a pinch you could call him at home. He made eye contact. He was generous with his time and insights; he treated the hounds like people. And, God, were they grateful. They bestowed their annual Good Guy Award on him in ’91.

  But on the field and to those closest to him, Wes was also something else. On the field he was feared, a vicious hitter who seemed to take a lifetime’s anger out on anybody who entered his space. His teammates, even players who prided themselves on the violence of their play, would describe him as “mean”—and not just in the admiring way football players do, but earnestly, touching on something deeper than professional toughness. “Understand me,” one confided, “Wes is truly a mean man.” Oddly, this was the side of his personality that Wes would sometimes show those closest to him, his family, his wife. They used the words “silent” and “cold” mixed in with the softer “shy” and “private.” “He’ll never have a big phone bill,” says his mother, Maggie. “He never stays on the line for more than about fifty seconds.” It was as though Wes, who could be so jovial with strangers, resented intimacy and guarded his inner self as jealously as he guarded the passing lanes in the Eagles’ secondary.

  Like so many of his black teammates
—Byron, Seth, Andre, and Clyde—Wes was raised by a devoted, strong, willful single mother. Maggie worked as a practical nurse and sent her three children to Catholic schools in Birmingham, Alabama. Maggie says that she never sought or received a cent of support for her children—she would have considered it demeaning. She worked double shifts to pay the bills, leaving the children with her parents. She made it on her own.

  Wes was her baby. She saved pictures of him in thick albums, as a toddler, wearing a dress, sitting on a potty, in his altar boy cassock and surplice, in his football uniform, and in the pink leisure suit and giant Afro, posing with his date at John Carroll High School’s senior prom. He was, she says, a silent boy who loved just one thing, playing football.

  He was a good football player in high school, but not great. He owed his career to his uncle, Maggie’s brother, Jimmy Lee. Jimmy is a tall, dapper smoothy, a former executive with IBM and Xerox with an entrepreneurial soul. Uncle Jimmy would visit several times a year and, at Maggie’s urging, took an interest in his fatherless nephew. Jimmy seized upon Wes’s love of football as common ground and, seeing a spark of talent and desire in the boy, blew it into real fire. He watched Wes play running back for the high-school team and told his nephew he thought he could play college ball, maybe even pro. On one trip to Birmingham, Uncle Jimmy bought the boy jogging shoes and a sweat suit and helped him map out a daily routine of running and lifting.

  Jimmy had credibility in this area, because while living in Dallas as a recruiter for Xerox, he had gotten to know some of the town’s pro athletes. He introduced Wes, then a high-school freshman, to Cowboys receiver Drew Pearson. Just being able to meet someone like Pearson brought the dream more within reach. It made a big difference. And when no recruiters came to Wes during his senior year, sweet-talking Jimmy set out to promote the boy.