Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  Which suits Norman and Harry and Richie just fine. Winning solves all problems. Norman has weathered a spate of terrible publicity, ever since documents released during the players’ lawsuit revealed that the franchise was the league’s most profitable, and that he had paid himself $7 million out of the Eagles’ profits in ’91—this despite years of claiming that his team wasn’t a moneymaker, a claim used to justify hiking season ticket prices and playing hardball with salary demands. The documents did nothing to dent the growing and erroneous public perception (fragrant of anti-Semitism) that the owner was a lying cheapskate plundering the franchise. They showed that Norman spent less money on management, coaches, scouting, equipment, and other peripherals than any other team in the league, and that his player payroll was slightly above average but not at the top. Losing a Pro Bowl tight end and one of the team’s biggest offensive weapons just underscored the Shylock image. The stories during the lawsuit had neglected to note that expert testimony showed the most successful NFL franchises, at the till and on the field, were not those with the heftiest payrolls, but those that kept expenses to a minimum and paid players in the moderate range. In other words, victory wasn’t just something you could go out and buy. Teams with huge payrolls tended to be loaded with veterans and expensive free agents, and those at the bottom tended to be younger, rebuilding teams. The recipe for sustained success was a well-balanced roster that mixed savvy but injury-prone veterans with eager young talent. By an accountant’s reckoning, Norman was doing things right, for himself and the fans. Even the $7 million “salary” was more complicated than it seemed. News stories played it up as if the owner had been caught in a lie (he had fudged on how unprofitable the club supposedly was). But all the $7 million really amounted to was a tax maneuver familiar to most business owners. Corporate taxes being stiffer than personal income taxes at that point, it was beneficial to draw out as “salary” as much of the team earnings as the law allowed in order to take advantage of the lower rate. It made sense in another way. If Norman had not paid himself the profits as salary, the club’s $7 million would have been taxed twice, first as corporate earnings, and then as dividends, which are personal earnings. In fact, Norman had no intention of keeping the money for his personal use—he hardly needed it. He produced canceled checks showing he had churned the money right back into the club. But few of the Id-people and talk-show comedians followed the intricacies of the transaction. It was a lot easier and more fun just to hate Norm the cheap!-cheap!-cheap!-skate.

  Truth is, Norm wants to win so bad he can hardly sit still on game days. His pride is on the line, and that is at least a match for any profits the football club earns. After losing Jackson, after enduring the endless ignorant abuse of the Id-people and the press and those “goons,” as he called them, on WIP, every victory is an ounce of sweet revenge. He’s in Philadelphia days before the Big Game, as restless and nervous as any of his coaches or players.

  After Keith’s defection, the Pack turns out in full local and national force in the Eagles’ locker room to solicit what will surely be great blasts of vitriol, outrage, and anguish on the eve of the Game of the Century. They are surprised to find Keith’s buddies are far happier for their friend’s good fortune, and for what his court case and subsequent freedom mean for them down the road, than they are concerned about the setback for their team. Eric wears a Dolphins cap to the locker room as a jaunty symbol of solidarity.

  “A friend of mine has made a big move and a big statement,” he says to the microphones. “What he did has importance way beyond this team or even himself, it’s for the whole NFL, for everybody. In the next couple of years we’ll see a big change. Nothing is ever going to be the same. What he has done will help every player in this league and every player who comes into the league…. Twenty years from now the only people on this team that people are going to remember are Randall Cunningham and Reggie White and Jerome and Keith Jackson. They’ll remember them for different reasons. Keith, he’s going to be remembered as the one who started it.”

  THERE IS, however, one exception. If there is one player in the Eagles’ locker room with reason to be chagrined by Jackson’s defection, it’s the long-suffering Keith Byars.

  “I talked to him on the phone Monday night,” says Tank, his thick body curled up on a stool inside his locker, speaking softly, unable to disguise his disappointment. “It was a business decision. His words were saying one thing and his heart was saying another. I told him I thought he was making a mistake.”

  The two Keiths were the sliding trick components of Richie’s offense. Both big men could block and catch passes. Byars could also run with the ball. Other teams had to send different players out on the field for a pass than for a run, tipping their hand—but not the Eagles. Richie’s playbook contained little razzle-dazzle, but with both Keiths in the game, nobody could tell what was coming.

  Teamed with Jackson, Byars was on the doorstep of leaguewide recognition. Because his talents were so versatile—he was used as a receiver as often as he was used as a back—his stats never made the top of the lists in either rushing yards or receiving, so he tended to get lost in the statistical shuffle. But people were beginning to notice him. In the four years he had teamed with Jackson, his total yardage had been close to or better than one thousand every season. He was on the verge of carving out a new kind of Pro Bowl slot—the all-purpose back. And with recognition, of course, came superdollars, the kind of contract money K-Jack had just landed down in the land of endless sun.

  Without Jackson, Byars, who weighs about twenty pounds less, has been pressed into service as a tight end. He doesn’t get to carry the ball, and he doesn’t get to go out for nearly as many passes. What he does mostly is block—which is like using a Mercedes to pull a plow. In the Phoenix game, he did not carry the football at all and was thrown one pass, which he caught, for a five-yard gain. So long as the other Keith’s return was on the horizon, Byars could endure. But news of the defection means he’s doomed.

  Again.

  Tank is arguably one of the unluckiest men alive (if you can use that term for anyone earning more than $1 million per year to play a game). This is the latest in a long series of setbacks. Son of a Dayton, Ohio, minister, Byars looked to be the second coming of Archie Griffin in his junior year at Ohio State in ’84. He had been fast enough to run one of the legs on his high school’s state championship 4-by-100 relay team, but was built extra-wide from head to toe. On the football field he was virtually unstoppable. Throwing his solid girth around with peculiar mincing footsteps, he was capable of the kind of performances normally seen only on grainy black-and-white film highlights from the anything-goes, leather-helmet days. Byars’s most famous game that year, against Illinois, was like something out of a Hollywood screenplay: with his team down 24-0, he almost single-handedly crafted a 45-38 comeback, running for 274 yards and five touchdowns, including one accomplished by reversing direction, losing a shoe, and racing 67 yards in cleat and sock. Big Ten MVP, the nation’s leading collegiate rusher with 1,764 yards rushing, another 677 yards receiving, and twenty-four touchdowns, not to mention a thoroughly decent Christian role model who devoted time off-field to do volunteer work in the Dayton community, Byars was a heavyweight contender for the Heisman Trophy that year. The trophy meant, of course, reams of adoring press coverage, two more winter months in the national sports spotlight as he “decided” whether or not to return for one more year at Ohio State (nobody in their right mind would), culminated by the mandatory million-dollar payday in April when some lucky NFL team made him their number-one pick.

  The scenario was perfectly predictable until Doug Flutie launched his famous Hail Mary pass, a sixty-four-yard prayer into the teeth of a strong wind to defeat defending national champ Miami (and that Jerome) in the Orange Bowl. It provided a storybook finish to Flutie’s storybook college career, and America (and the Heisman judges) fell madly in love with the little quarterback who could.

  No problem, Byar
s was a cinch for ’85—everybody agreed—until he broke his foot early in the season and spent the rest of the year on crutches. His value fell so dramatically that Buddy was considered a reckless gambler by many the following spring when he claimed him in the first round, the tenth player overall. Tank paid off the big gamble by breaking a bone in his other foot shortly before his second season.

  Now, seven years into his NFL career, he is stuck once more. His contract has $100,000 in incentives for rushing and receiving production. How is he going to accomplish that if they don’t give him the ball?

  Quietly, Byars had gone to Richie to complain after the Phoenix game. He had been given the ball more against Denver—he carried nine times for thirty-one yards and caught six passes for thirty-six yards. The Eagles were considering doing something about the contract incentives, and Richie has promised Tank that against Dallas he would be involved … somewhat.

  But Keith knows his hopes for a personal banner year are dead.

  DAVE ALEXANDER HAS his own reason for looking forward to a showdown with Dallas head coach Jimmy Johnson. It goes back eleven years, to when Dave was a big clumsy Oklahoma teenager snapping the ball for the Broken Arrow High School Tigers.

  Dave has a guileless way about him; his personality is as plain and straightforward as his crew cut. To match his double-wide body he has a flat, friendly pan of a face with double-small features and a playful spark in his eye. Dave has never been a star player, even in high school; he lacks the size and strength to be a dominating lineman. But he has the durability and quick mind that coaches look for in a center, the kind of man you need to anchor an offense, the only man on the squad besides the quarterback who handles the ball on every offensive play.

  Growing up in Broken Arrow, a Tulsa suburb, Dave and his brother and sister were part of a generation for whom college and a successful white-collar career were expectations, not dreams. Dave’s father owned a metal-fabricating company that made drills for oil wells. It boomed with the prosperity of that industry through his childhood and would later fizzle with its decline, but out in the vast flatlands of the tame near West, the Alexanders lived worlds away from the desperate poverty so many of Dave’s teammates had known as children. Football wasn’t a gate to a better life for the boys who tried out at Broken Arrow High School; it was fun, a chance to emulate the heroics of the athletes who performed on TV. Without a pro team within two hundred miles (Dallas had the closest franchise), the heroes in this football-crazy part of the country performed on college teams, and the top of the line, as far as David and many other tall-grass Tulsa men were concerned, was Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, home of the fightin’ Cowboys and their dynamic head coach, Jimmy Johnson.

  Johnson had taken over the program in ’79 when it was under severe NCAA sanctions for recruiting violations (Them ‘Boys take their football serious) and had turned them back into a powerhouse in just two seasons. When college recruiters from several regional schools came courting after Dave’s senior season in ’81, they were wasting their time. Dave knew exactly where he wanted to play.

  A recruiting weekend in Stillwater clinched it. Dave was wowed. The school flew him in on a private plane, showed him the facilities, the stadium, locker room, dorms. He was waiting around the coach’s office there for the plane to take him home, when Coach Johnson called him into his office for a chat. Johnson was a nervous, pudgyfaced man with a small helmet of fair hair, every strand perfectly in place. He seemed to have the metabolism of a bumblebee, moving around the room quickly, taking small, short breaths, his body taut, radiating energy. As Dave remembered it, here’s how the session went:

  “We really want you at Oklahoma State and I want you to commit,” Johnson told the strapping seventeen-year-old.

  “Well, I’m going to catch the plane, and it’s only a half-hour flight, so I’ll be home in an hour and I’ll talk to my parents and call you back.”

  “No,” said the coach. “I need to know now.”

  “Okay,” said the always affable Dave. “Then just let me give my parents a call and tell them what I’m going to do.”

  “No. I need to know from you, right now. If you’re not going to commit to Oklahoma State, then we’re going to offer your scholarship to somebody else.”

  Staring at him across the desk, Dave capitulated.

  But it bugged him. Maybe it was the blocker in him; Dave hated to be pushed around. It ruined the weekend. All the way home on the plane he kept getting madder and madder about it. The son of a bitch wouldn’t even let me call my folks? And then, What will it be like to play for this guy?

  When he got home he said screw Jimmy Superman and called the coach at the University of Tulsa to accept a scholarship there.

  It isn’t like Dave to hold a grudge. Dave had played four happy years at Tulsa and met his wife, Kathy, there (they now had a twenty-one-month-old boy). During Johnson’s Dallas tenure, his teams had met the Eagles, with Dave playing center, six times, and had lost five. So Dave never had a reason to regret his college decision. Still, something about Johnson rubs him the wrong way.

  Old helmet-hair’s zeal clashes with Dave’s placid, amiable person ality, which was one of Dave’s strengths as an offensive lineman. Defensive linemen are attackers. They tend to be egotists and hotheads. It is more fun to play on the defensive line—Dave knows this because he had played some in high school. When you made the tackle your name was announced over the loudspeaker. On the offensive line, your name is never announced. You are a wall, a blocker, a nameless bigbody who absorbs blows, who stands in the way. Being an offensive lineman requires humility and tolerance. If you lose your temper, act impulsively, you can more easily be thrown off balance and pushed aside. The ideal is to be impervious, to become, as Ron Heller put it, “a blocking stone.” Over the years, the job begins to define a lineman’s temperament. Linemen can joke about the game. Writers love them because they observe all the strutting peacocks around them with knowing little smiles. Blockers get blamed when the team loses and almost never get credit when the team wins. Their faces are almost never on the covers of magazines. They aren’t paid to endorse candy bars and sweatshirts, and their talents are nearly always poorly understood and ill appreciated, even by the most ardent and knowledgeable of fans. Yet they are literally in the thick of things; their view is from the crowded center of the action. They know exactly what is going on. A sturdy veteran like Dave has credibility to match his size. He possesses an almost bovine serenity—it is as hard to rile him up as it is to move him out of the way.

  The blocker’s mind-set had been illustrated perfectly for Dave in a little scene he remembered from training camp a few years back, involving his old friend and mentor, former Eagles center Dave Rimington, and, as so many of the Eagles players’ stories did, Jerome.

  The most competitive drill for offensive linemen during training camp is one-on-one pass blocking. The veterans like working against each other in these drills, because none of them has anything to prove—the idea isn’t to hurt or humiliate your opponent, but to work on your timing, footwork, and mechanics. Of course, that’s not how Jerome saw it. Any opportunity to compete became, for Jerome, a test of self-worth. Boy, how he hated to lose. To let some big-butt Bessie of a flat-footed offensive lineman show him up was enough to ruin Jerome’s whole week. Rimington, on the other hand, was a wily veteran, a towheaded Nebraskan weight lifter with, as Dave saw it, the ideal blocker’s personality. Nothing bothered Rim. He had been banged up so bad during nine years in the NFL that it was hard for him to raise his thick arms over his shoulders; there were days when he needed help just to knot his necktie. Rim was trying to hang with the Eagles and draw the big paycheck for one last season.

  And on this afternoon, he showed he could still handle Jerome.

  “Let’s go again!” Jerome shouted after getting beat—a personal challenge in front of all the other linemen, offensive and defensive, standing around awaiting their turn.

  So Rim shr
ugged and resumed his stance, and as Jerome recklessly bull-rushed his own full 330-pound frame, the veteran pulled one of his favorite tricks. He met Jerome’s charge with a loud smack of pads, and then, as the big tackle continued to churn full forward, Rim took a sudden giant step backward, throwing Jerome so off balance from his own heedless momentum that, with a gentle finishing tug, he planted the flailing tackle’s face in the grass.

  Jerome hopped up looking for a fight, screaming, “Rim, you holding asshole motherfucker, you ever do that to me again and I’ll kick your fuckin ass!”

  “Okay,” said Rim pleasantly, with another little shrug and a smile, refusing to get riled. He turned and walked away.

  Chuckles of appreciation arose from the offensive linemen watching, Dave among them.

  “All right! You motherfuckers think it’s so funny? I’ll kick all yer asses!”

  “Jerome, it’s over, man, relax,” said Dave.

  Offensive linemen were used to small victories and defeats. Dave had been playing football now for more than fifteen years and had never scored a touchdown, caught a pass, thrown a pass, or taken a handoff. He had run with the ball, though, once. It happened in his first pro game, September 7, 1987, at Washington, D.C.’s RFK Stadium, in a loss to the Redskins. Dave was lined up deep in the blocking wedge for a kickoff return, back on his own twenty-yard line, when the Skins kicker shanked one that came dribbling down the grass to his feet. He scooped it up and rumbled eight yards before he was buried. Kathy cut the game story out of the newspaper the next day, with the evidence at the bottom, in agate type:

  PUNT/KICK RETURNS: Alexander, 8yds.

  As a joke, they highlighted the notice with yellow marker, framed the story, and hung it on their family-room wall.

  Now he’s a gnarled veteran, playing in his sixth season. His knee has been surgically reassembled. His hands have been smashed and broken so many times he’s lost count. His left ring finger, which has been hurting him since, oh, midseason ’90, is so lumpy and misshapen than he had to take his wedding ring back to the jeweler to have a tiny hinge put in it—it now clasps around the base of his finger. And in all that time, exactly eighty-two football games, other than beginning each play with the snap, he’s never touched the ball.