by Mark Bowden
He encouraged Wes to apply to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and when Wes was turned down for academic reasons, Jimmy put on a full-court press. He argued with the university about their admissions standards, and through a friend who was a major alumni supporter of SMU’s football program, he convinced Ron Meyer, the new coach, to take a look at his nephew. Jimmy brought Wes in to run some time trials, and Meyer wasn’t impressed. Too slow, too small. “Are you kidding me?” he asked Uncle Jimmy.
It’s a tribute to Jimmy’s persuasiveness that he worked a deal with SMU to enroll Wes in summer school, and if he could earn a C-plus average, he would be allowed to enter as a freshman. Meyer said the kid could try out for the team, but not as a running back. He said he would work with him as a defensive back, and if Wes could make it… well, then they would see about a scholarship. Wes moved to Dallas that summer and assumed a supervised regimen of schoolwork and physical training. Jimmy drove Wes to school in the morning and picked him up in the afternoons— You’ve got something to prove to these people, Wes. They don’t think you can make it. You’re going to have to become a student of the game … learn it, not like a player, but like a coach. Back home, Maggie borrowed from everyone she knew to pay Wes’s tuition until he earned the scholarship. She was betting on him.
Wes made it. He was awarded the scholarship that freshman fall. Maggie started paying people back. In his sophomore year, Wes started at free safety and shifted to strong safety in his junior and senior years. He wasn’t particularly fast, but he played smart, and when he hit somebody the player had a hard time getting up. He impressed pro scouts in his senior year when SMU beat Pitt in the Cotton Bowl, virtually shutting out highly regarded quarterback Dan Marino (Pitt scored just three points).
Maggie was working in the day-surgery clinic, catching glimpses of the NFL draft on TV, the day Wes was picked in the second round by the Eagles. With Uncle Jimmy handling the deal, he got a $175,000 bonus and a four-year contract with a starting salary of $120,000 and a final year salary of $200,000—the total package was for almost $800,000! He left school without collecting his degree (promising his mother he’d go back) and bought himself a condo and a Porsche, which Uncle Jimmy helped him drive up to Philly. Jimmy found it hard to leave him alone like that in the big city; the kid had come so far so fast … he seemed unformed.
Jimmy Lee had started to notice something about Wes and the other kids who played college football—even some who made the pros. They didn’t grow up. Through his recruiting work, and from his own background as a college basketball player, Jimmy Lee knew many athletes, but mostly basketball and football players. The football players were different, he thought, more vulnerable, particularly the black ones. Basketball players came from more diverse backgrounds. There were as many from big cities as there were from small towns, as many from middle-class backgrounds as from the projects. A higher proportion of the football players came from stark poverty, from the highschool football mills of the Deep South. A disproportionate number had been raised without fathers. Basketball teams were small, just five guys on the court at one time, so each man had a stronger individual identity. It was the more glamorous of the sports, attracting the best athletes and awarding them with a very high profile—so, in time, they tended to develop poise. Football players, on the other hand, were seen only from a distance, encased in helmets and pads; their identity was more team than individual. The appeal of football was as much belonging as doing. There was something in the nature of football, maybe it was the violence, that grouped players in herds. He had thrown corporate recruiting parties and invited young men who played both sports, and, for the most part, the basketball players blended well. No matter what their origins, they became more confident and articulate with each passing year. But not the football players. They arrived, stayed, and left as a herd. They’d be off in the corner joking with one another, enjoying themselves, but when you pulled one away from the group, he’d close up, turn awkward, sullen, and forlorn. The seniors were often as bad as the freshmen. They depended on one another. With fifty or more players on a roster, there were more football players than any other athletes in the athletic dorms, so even there they tended to form their own community … or, the more Jimmy thought about it, their own family. For some of these boys, Team was the only family they had known.
This family was a fraternity of cocky, isolated, indifferent young men whose strongest attachments were no longer to Mom or Uncle or brother or girlfriend or wife, but to one another. The herd was managed carefully by the school’s athletic department. In the dorm their rooms were picked up and their laundry cleaned; their meals were waiting in the cafeteria; for out-of-town games they were steered to buses and led to planes by handlers, then herded back on buses and assigned hotel rooms—there were players who, after tens of thousands of miles of air travel, hadn’t a clue how to get to the airport, check luggage, buy a ticket, find a gate, book a hotel room, and get to the hotel when the plane landed. Team handled these things, just as it arranged for study halls and tutors to coax players through the minimal academic load required by the NCAA and found them “jobs” (this was usually a laugh) donated by gung ho alumni as an excuse to give the boys walk-around money and a nice car. For the lucky few who went on to the pros, the pattern continued. The club helped them find an apartment, a car, handled all travel plans, set their work schedule, and even booked their public appearances. Consequently, many of these young men remained virtually helpless outside the herd. You couldn’t get close to football players who were in this mode, couldn’t interest them in thinking beyond next week. So there was no way to prepare them for the inevitable fall. Inevitable, because the football team—especially the pro team—was no conventional family. It was strictly an arrangement of convenience, ruled by Coach. There was nothing permanent about your status; in fact, your standing with Team could (and usually did) end abruptly, without warning, because of injury, a new coach, a younger player who was better, or just a change of Coach’s mind.
Any worries Uncle Jimmy had about Wes that day, when he dropped him off in the big city, evaporated fast, because Wes was an even bigger hit at the pro level than he had been in college. He became a starter after the second game of his rookie season, in his second season was voted first alternate NFC safety to the Pro Bowl, and in his third was the team’s MVP and went to Hawaii that winter to start for the NFC in the Pro Bowl. Wes was twenty-five years old and at the top of the game. His new contract with the Eagles would make him a millionaire.
Erika met him that winter on a blind date. She living in L.A., where she had just graduated from Loyola Marymount, and was dating Malcolm Barnwell, a former Raiders wide receiver, when her friend Simone called and asked if she would join her on a casual date with two pro players in town, Harvey Martin and Wes Hopkins— Hey, forget Malcolm, this guy Wes is starting in the Pro Bowl! Wes was in California to see the Super Bowl in Stanford. He and Erika were a couple instantly. Wes had a girlfriend back in Philadelphia, but it was Erika who went with him the following week to Honolulu for the Pro Bowl game. She was a handful. Pretty, funny, and brassy, Erika had the self-esteem to stand her ground with a big football star. She had a sarcastic wit that kept Wes slightly off balance, while at the same time attracting him. They talked on the phone every day that spring, commiserating over the problems he was having with his then girlfriend (of course, Erika was quickly becoming the main problem), the financial troubles brewing with Uncle Jimmy in Dallas, the inexplicable hostility of this new head coach they’d hired in Philadelphia … Erika listened and joked and advised, bucking up Wes’s spirits. Presently, Erika became his primary road squeeze—she flew around the country for a series of romantic rendezvous.
The new coach, of course, was Buddy Ryan, who promptly served notice on the batch of boobs, malingerers, and losers who had compiled the Eagles’ 7—9 season in ’85 that their days in green and silver were numbered.
At first, none of this bothered Wes. Of all the r
eturning Eagles, he felt the most secure. What team wouldn’t want Wes Hopkins on its roster? He had youth and proven talent. Aside from the Pro Bowl start, he had established himself as a serious student of the game, a player with strong work habits and a vicious game face that seemed to suit Buddy’s style perfectly. But the timing was bad. As Buddy came wading ashore in full St.-Vince-straight-from-the-Super-Bowl-kickass mode, Wes was loafing on the beach threatening to sit out the season, demanding a contract extension.
Buddy gave Wes the nickname “Wallets.”
When Wes secured the contract extension, giving him a $200,000 bonus for the ’86 season and a three-year $1.5 million deal beginning in ’87, he reported to summer training camp on time. But Buddy seemed set against him. The new coach told the Pack that Wes, the Pro Bowl starting free safety, wasn’t really suited to play that position.
“He’s too big a guy to stand back there.”
This, of course, made no sense, but Buddy was at that point a certified genius (it said so right in the New York Times). Wes hurt himself further when he pulled a hamstring and had to watch a week of practices. “All I’ve seen him do since he got here is kill grass,” the coach quipped. “I imagine carrying that big wallet around helped him pull it.”
None of Buddy’s barbs came to Wes directly. He got them, like everybody else, from the newspapers. Still, Wes was back at free safety when the Eagles started the ’86 season and probably would have won his way into Buddy’s graces if he hadn’t blown out his left knee in the fourth game, against the Rams. He set himself on his left foot before latching on to former SMU teammate Eric Dickerson, and as his body turned with the tackle his foot stayed planted on the plastic turf. Surgeons repaired the torn joint, but it would be two years before Wes could play again.
It was then he discovered the hard truth about the family of Team—when you can’t play, you don’t count. Every day Wes would hobble on crutches into the Vet for therapy. He faithfully attended team meetings and practices—what else was he going to do? And every day he was ignored. It was like he didn’t exist! From the time he was injured until the summer of ’88, when he was ready to resume playing, Buddy didn’t say more than three words to him. This kind of thing takes its toll. As the months go by, injured players start to get the silent message (intended or not) that they just ought to go away. Under the modern, less exploitative NFL employment regs, teams can’t simply drop an injured player, but they can sure make a guy feel like a malingerer. In time, it is easier to go than to stay. Sometimes the assistant coaches or a teammate would ask how Wes was doing, but they were clearly distracted, just being nice. It drove him crazy. He was a ghost, sentenced to haunt the locker rooms and meeting rooms unseen. He wanted to shake people by the shoulders— This is me! Wes! The Pro Bowl starter! I’m still here! At the end of the ’86 season, when the coaches asked team members to vote for the season’s MVP, the award Wes had won himself the year before, they didn’t even give him a ballot. The coach walked up and down the rows of desks dropping ballots on them, but when he came to Wes’s desk he just passed right by.
Becoming a ghost would have been bad enough, but at the same time Wes’s playing career hit bottom, so did his life. Uncle Jimmy had steered the bulk of Wes’s funds into a condo complex in Dallas—A great deal! A surefire moneymaker! A can’t-miss opportunity!—which went sour. It seemed every lawyer in Texas was looking for him. Uncle Jimmy filed for bankruptcy, and investors in the condo deal won a $225,000 judgment against Wes. Coinvestors scattered. He ended up holding twelve properties in his own name that he couldn’t afford to keep and, in the slumping Dallas economy, couldn’t sell. Wes owed the tax man and just about everybody else. It was a mess.
It was at this point, feeling like an outcast and a failure, that Wes asked Erika to marry him, and she did. Erika had been an honors student at Loyola and had a lot more patience and aptitude for Wes’s predicament than he did. She spurred him to sever his financial ties with Uncle Jimmy and worked closely with his new agent, a Philadelphia lawyer named Harry Himes, to sort through the mess. While Wes the Ghost concentrated on rehab, Erika was on a mission, writing letters, attending meetings, returning phone calls, balancing bank accounts, and insisting he save money. Their credit was destroyed, and when it was all worked out, Wes had virtually nothing to show for his spectacular success in pro ball; but they had each other, and their feet were on the ground. All Wes had to do was get back out on the field.
He returned in ’88 to discover he was way behind in his understanding of the 46 defense. The coaches all suspected he couldn’t play like his old self, and Buddy seemed wedded to Terry Hoage, the smart, rangy former Georgia safety who had stepped in after Wes’s injury.
Despite feeling less than fully healthy, despite a head coach who offered no encouragement, Wes started every game at free safety that season, matching or bettering his Pro Bowl-year stats. But Buddy refused to call him a starter, referring to him as a “platoon player” with Hoage. That’s what it said in the media guide that year, with its player-bio summaries shaped by the dictates of Coach. Wes was described as “part of a very productive free safety platoon” with Hoage. “Together,” the guide said, “they accounted for … 177 tackles.”
Now, there’s no denying Hoage had one hell of a season playing free safety in the nickel that year. He had eight interceptions. But fair is fair. One hundred and forty-six of those 177 tackles were made by Wes Hopkins.
At home, Erika called Hoage “Prince Free Safety.”
Wes asked to be traded. If he couldn’t prove himself to Buddy on the field, he should be allowed to make his way somewhere else. But the team wouldn’t hear of it. With rapidly escalating players’ salaries, the $450,000 they were paying Wes in ’89 was a bargain.
Through the following season, Wes once more posted numbers comparable to his Pro Bowl year. He felt he had finally mastered Ryan’s defense. He had intercepted no passes, but, overall, Wes’s teammates and coaches were impressed. Near the end of that season, Erika gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Montana.
Jerome Brown on the sidelines of a night game in 1991, his last season
Richie Kotite earning his nickname “Horn” (short for “Bullhorn”) as Buddy Ryan’s offensive coordinator at a winter practice in 1990
Club president Harry Gamble (left) and Norman Braman immersed in the mandatory post-loss lockerroom gloom after a 1988 game
Buddy Ryan and Norman Braman passing like ships in the night in the locker room after Buddy’s last game as head coach, a play-off loss to the Redskins, January 5, 1991
Buddy Ryan cheerfully serving a daily helping of Buddyisms to the Pack after a 1990 summer practice
Bud Carson in his obsessive quest for perfection on the sidelines of a 1991 game
Ballet and jazz enthusiast Fred Barnett, the gifted receiver from rural Mississippi who emerged as an NFL star in 1992
Marvin “One-for-One-for-One” Hargrove, the charming walk-on from Willingboro, New Jersey, who talked Buddy Ryan into letting him try out for the team in 1990. He made it in the NFL long enough to have one pass thrown his way, which he caught, for a touchdown.
The smiling Andre Waters, as opposed to his evil game-day alter ego, the Dre Master
Reggie White arrives for the first day of training camp at West Chester in August 1992. He’s moving his gear into Gertrude Schmidt dormitory.
Antone Davis feeling the heat before his locker after a practice session in 1992
Ron Heller (73), Dave Alexander (72), and Mike Golic (90) on the practice field in 1992
Locker-room rat and training-camp joker Jim McMahon mugs for the camera during a practice in 1992.
Jerome Brown (99), Randall Cunningham, and Keith Byars (41) douse Reggie White at practice.
Wes Hopkins cooling off during a practice session
Seth Joyner being Seth on the sidelines before an early-season workout in the summer of 1991
Keith “Tank” Byars offring typical encouragement and mo
ral support to Randall Cunningham during a 1992 contest
Ben Smith writhing on the grass after blowing out his knee against the Cleveland Browns on November 10, 1991
Randall Cunningham at home in his Fortress of Solitude. In the foreground is one of the suits of armor from his collection.
Randall Cunningham bites his lip and sheds a tear on the sidelines of the Monday night Eagles-Vikings game, October 15, 1990, as home fans boo his first-half performance and chant “We want Jim!”
Reggie White clowning on the practice field
Keith Jackson hams it up on the practice field in 1991, his last year as an Eagle.
Andre Waters being carted off the field after breaking his left ankle during the October 18, 1992, Redskins game at RFK Stadium. Trainer Otho Davis (right) and assistant trainer David Price give a hand.
Reggie White (foreground) and Seth Joyner show their disgust with the performance of the Eagles’ offense during the punchless 16-12 loss to the Redskins at RFK Stadium, October 18, 1992.
The ordinarily sedate Herschel Walker (34) celebrates in the end zone after running for one of his two touchdowns against the Cowboys in the big Monday night showdown on October 5, 1992, won by the Eagles 31-7 at Veterans Stadium.