Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  So on the first play of the second half, the Chiefs come out in triple formation, with a pair of tight ends joining Willie Davis on the right side. Before the snap, one of the tight ends pulls up and moves back to the left side, shifting into what is clearly a running formation, with maximum blocking power evenly distributed upfront. As soon as the tight end goes into motion, the Eagles’ coverage changes. Andre’s job is to stay with Davis coming off the line. Cornerback Otis Smith (who has been inserted to replace the toasted Izel) is supposed to help Andre if Davis goes deep.

  Only—shit, everybody knows they’re gonna run the ball—so when Krieg turns and fakes the handoff, and the Eagles dive, and the stadium tilts, both Andre and Otis abandon Davis and start toward the backfield. A split second later they realize, of course, that they’ve been had, but by then Davis is sprinting all alone about twenty yards behind them. Davis has time to slow down and circle under Krieg’s pass like an outfielder shagging a routine fly—a seventy-four-yard touchdown pass.

  Andre is left standing with his hands on his hips, talking vigorously to himself. How has this happened? (The CBS announcing team of Verne Lundquist and Dan Fouts inexplicably places the blame on Wes.)

  Randall gets his act together a little better in the second half, completing a long pass to Fred Barnett to set up one touchdown and steering the offense in for a second after Eric picks off a pass late in the game. But there’s too much ground to recover. The unbeaten, but clearly beatable, Eagles fall 24-17, undone by that newfangled invention, the forward pass.

  The precise margin of victory, as Andre sees it, was supplied by the Dré Master’s gaffe. The fact that Eric’s mistake and Izel’s mistake or any number of offensive breakdowns were all equally culpable means nothing to Andre. He figures he lost the game. He—or that Dré Master—traded victory for the promise of a big hit. How could he be so stupid!

  The next day he has to sit and watch it replayed on film, broken down from the overhead side shot and the end-zone shot, while Bud points out all the obvious adjustments that weren’t made—Andre can’t remember when he ever played so stupidly. And next Sunday they face the Redskins, always one of the toughest games in the schedule. Andre knows he can’t afford to play against those fabulous Redskins receivers Art Monk, Ricky Sanders, and Gary Clark, with his head up his ass the way it was in Kansas City. He worries that Bud will now think he’s the kind of player who easily suckers for play action. Remember, Andre is not out there because of his physical gifts; he’s out there because of his mind. After aggression, experience is his greatest asset. Getting suckered on play action is precisely the thing that should not happen to Andre Waters. Bud doesn’t rub it in. He knows Andre feels terrible.

  But Andre is tormented in ways Bud can only begin to imagine. The veteran knows what he did wrong on the field, but for him there is always the more mysterious and troubling metaphysical question: Why did he do it wrong? How many thousands of times has he seen right through play action, knowing by the formation, the situation, the feel, that the pass is coming? Why does all that knowledge and intuition abruptly fail? What causes the sudden fall from grace? Is this just a slip, or is this the beginning of a more serious slide?

  All week before the Redskins game Andre feels … stalked. He does everything he can. He writes his motivational slogan for the Skins game on all his playbooks, “We love you #99; bring it home for Jerome,” and he stays late studying film every day, not leaving the Vet until hours after dark. Working intently at his locker before the game, he uses a black marker to ink in on the white towel and forehead tape “Matt. 6—33” (But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.) It is both spiritual reminder and talisman: Andre wants to enter the battle with a pure and righteous heart, no doubt about that, but he’s also mindful that this particular chapter and verse was his slogan in the Redskins’ seasonender last year, and had produced a satisfying victory.

  Yet despite his diligence, Andre has a sense of foreboding. Meditating in the RFK Stadium locker room before the game, Andre has what he will later recognize (too late!) as a premonition. It’s a fleeting vision of the horrible (and hence oft replayed) videotape of former Skins quarterback Joe Thiesmann having his right leg cleanly snapped by a Lawrence Taylor tackle. The image doesn’t linger, and it doesn’t trouble him. Despite his caution, Andre doesn’t brood over his fate. The remainder of his verse from Matthew instructs Take therefore no thought for the morrow…. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

  As the team huddles before kickoff, it is Andre who first addresses his teammates, urging them to be mindful of the lessons learned last week. “We can’t give up anything deep. Hey, if they catch something short, come up and punish them. Let’s not give up big plays. This team can’t beat us if we don’t give up big plays. So let’s not give up big plays.”

  Then it’s “One, two, three, JB!”

  It is a cool, sunny afternoon, and the stadium is filled to capacity with loud, hungry Redskins fans. The defending Super Bowl champions have gotten off to a slow start, but a win here will boost their record to 4-2, and they will pass the Eagles in the standings—by virtue of the head-to-head win. An Eagles win will help bury Washington (three divisional defeats) and keep pace with Dallas, which hasn’t lost since Monday night. A defeat will completely dash the hopes of early October. They will go home trailing both Washington and Dallas.

  Stealing a page from Professor Schottenheimer, Randall and the offense come out shooting, attempting two long-range passes—Randall’s arm is truly a magnificent thing, these passes travel sixty yards or more—that skitter uncaught on the grass. The Skins then come out and do, successfully, what the Eagles waited in vain for the Chiefs to do all afternoon the week before. They run the ball right at them, pounding Earnest Byner up the middle in eight consecutive plays, scratching out gains of two, six, two, three, six, five, six, and one yards. Washington coach Joe Gibbs is advancing Professor Schottenheimer’s gag, anticipating that the chastened Gang Green will this week be back on their heels, paranoid about stopping the long pass (witness Andre’s pregame comments). Quarterback Mark Rypien finishes off the drive with a ten-yard touchdown pass to Gary Clark. On the sidelines, as the Skins add the extra point, Seth paces before his teammates, helmet in hand, “#99” carved into the back of his head, snarling at them to shape up. Seth is wearing a knee brace today—he aggravated the Dallas injury playing against the Chiefs—which slows him down on the field and seems to make him even grouchier than usual.

  After Randall leads the offense through three more unsuccessful plays, the Dré Master contributes a big blunder. He’s back in coverage six, a two-deep zone the Eagles prefer against the Redskins’ passing game, and when the Skins send two receivers wide left, Andre and cornerback John Booty (replacing Toast’s toasted replacement, the singed Otis) check off in what they call slide-switch coverage. This means Andre has the inside man and Booty the outside man, unless one of the receivers breaks across the middle. If that happens, Andre is supposed to pick him up—only, Andre finds himself peeking into the backfield again, the very thing he has promised himself all week he won’t do. So when Rypien fakes the handoff to Byner, the overeager safety involuntarily lurches forward—he can just feel the hit vibrating those subcortical synapses—at just about the time Monk, the NFL’s all-time leading receiver, goes flashing past across the middle (“I was in space at that particular moment,” Andre, with typical candor, will later explain). He catches Monk from behind thirty-four yards upfield.

  Seth jumps all over his teammate. “Andre, you can’t make that dumb mistake! You can’t do that to us, Andre. You looked at the film. You know you’ve got to read your key. Keep your eyes on the key!”

  Andre walks back to the huddle hanging his head, hands on his hips, muttering to himself— What is this? Why is this? Back in the huddle, he says to the furious linebacker, “Seth, I promise you, it won’t happen again.”

  They manage t
o stall this Skins drive on their own fourteen-yard line. Chip Lohmiller, the normally reliable Washington placekicker, misses the field goal, and Andre can breathe easily again. Still, there is something ominous about this run of bad luck. He’s got on his bluesleeved shirt; he’s wearing the towel, the slogan; the pregame stuff went well. What gives?

  But Andre starts to feel more like himself on the next drive. He crashes into the backfield on a third-down running play to tackle Ricky Ervins for a two-yard loss. He’s so happy he leaps up to do a victory dance, but can’t decide on which step, so he does this backpedaling improvisation, waving his hands like he’s discharging six-shooters. It looks pretty silly, and Andre knows he’s going to get teased about it tomorrow in the film room—such a sloppy display!—but this is the first time he’s felt right on the football field in two weeks.

  Both teams manage field goals before the half is over, so the Eagles come out for the second half trailing by seven points. Randall is having a terrible day, worse than the week before. He hasn’t com pleted a pass for more than eleven yards. Even when the defense intercepts a Rypien pass—Byron picks it off and then pitches it back to Eric, who runs it out to midfield—the offense can’t get going. Tank fumbles the ball right back to the Skins.

  So Andre and the defense trot back out on the field, Seth grumbling about the goddamn offense and how many goddamn chances do they goddamn need. The Skins open up another long march. The crowd at RFK is growing wilder and wilder—a touchdown here will almost seal victory—and Andre can feel the dark shadow closing in … only, he thinks it’s just the possibility of defeat.

  Ervins carries the ball off right tackle on a second-down play and scoots untouched into the secondary—into the zone of the Dré Master. Andre lowers his helmet and launches himself at the running back headfirst, delivering a satisfying blow, driving Ervins backward, but then someone else slams into Andre from the side, turning his fall so that when he tumbles backward with Ervins on top his left leg stays planted on the grass. As their combined weight hits the grass, Andre feels and hears a sudden pop in his lower left leg, down around the ankle. He reaches down and feels the foot at an awkward angle.

  “Eric, I broke it,” Andre says, as his friend leans into the pile.

  “Don’t move,” says Eric. “Don’t move.”

  “It’s broke.”

  So far he feels no pain. Otho Davis and Dave Price sprint out to the field. They reach for the foot as Andre tries to straighten it—now he feels a jolt. Otho and Dave don’t say much.

  “It’s broke, Otho,” says Andre.

  The old trainer nods. He and Dave scoop Andre up and carry him from the field, setting him gingerly on the bench, and already Andre is calculating the damage. Broken ankle, does that mean the whole season? Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it’ll just be a few weeks. How long does it take the bone to heal? Pain is starting to mount. The ankle is starting to swell already, which is a bad sign. Andre can’t move his toes. He’s loaded on a small truck, which motors toward the ramp at the far end of the field that leads back under the stands.

  As the Skins kick another field goal, the truck steers toward the gaping exit, and Andre, helmet off, foot elevated, prostrate and in pain, is swallowed by the cavernous darkness.

  AFTER THE GAME, he sits in his wool parka and black cap on a folding chair at the center of the visiting team’s locker room. His left leg, shot full of painkillers, is propped on a second chair. A dripping bag of ice is balanced on his lower leg. The X rays, taken on the premises, show he snapped his left fibula, the more slender, outer bone of the lower leg. The break is near his ankle. After the swelling goes down, in a day or two, team physician, Dr. Vincent J. DiStefano, will fasten together the broken bone with a metal screw. His most optimistic prognosis? Six to eight weeks, depending on how fast Andre’s bone heals. Andre has never had a serious football injury before, so he doesn’t know what to expect. He’s dazed and depressed, deep in the belly of the whale.

  He hasn’t even bothered to watch much of the remainder of the game, which has played out on a small color TV screen in the corner. The Eagles’ offense had come alive at last in the fourth quarter, scoring nine points to pull within four of the Skins. But it was too little, too late, just as it had been the week before.

  His teammates file in glumly. Having risen to such dramatic heights two weeks before with the Monday night win, the Eagles’ fortunes have plummeted. The Cowboys have won again, defeating the Chiefs. The Eagles have gone from being the undefeated leaders of the NFC East, and every reputable prognosticator’s pick for Super Bowl victory—Hell, let’s just skip the next twelve weeks—to a lowly third place in their own division.

  The locker room after a loss is a study in gloom. Even those players who don’t especially feel it, like the guys who didn’t even play and who might, in their heart of hearts, actually be rejoicing at the failure of the players who started in their stead, wrap themselves in a funereal funk. Steam rises from the showers and gradually fills the crowded windowless room. Balls of white tape cut from ankles and wrists adhere to shoe soles. Wet towels and discarded gear litter the floor and chairs. The Pack enters wearing matching long faces—it’s important not to let the boys think you enjoyed their humiliation, that you might relish tomorrow’s sprinkling of acid prose into the open wound.

  Richie is subdued and says what losing coaches say.

  “We had some missed opportunities,” he says. “We’re all disappointed that we came here and played the way we played … put ourselves in a hole … just didn’t get the job done … it’s going to be a close race … our destiny is still in our own hands … this team has always bounced back. …”

  The ever forthright center, Dave Alexander, his broad square face still flushed, stands naked, a crush of reporters pinning him at his locker.

  “We’ve had two tough games in two weeks at away stadiums against two good defenses. It’s not time to jump off the bandwagon. We’re still the same group. We had our chances, but we just got started a little bit too late.”

  Any nastiness is well under wraps. All the mandatory postgame mea culpas are general and restrained, but on the defense’s side of the room a familiar theme begins to emerge: these guys are tired of playing their asses off and then watching Richie and Randall’s offense fall short. In the Chiefs game the defensive breakdowns had temporarily eroded the ground under Buddy’s Boys’ soapbox, but in this game they had allowed the Redskins only one touchdown. They intercepted a pass and set up the offense with excellent field position again and again.

  “Anytime you’re forced to play defense all day, that’s not a good sign,” says Byron, who rarely speaks, much less complains. “It either means the offense is doing great or it isn’t doin’ nothin’. I think it’s pretty obvious which it was today.”

  There are comments of a similar, vague tenor coming from Wes and Clyde and Reverend Reggie and Eric, enough to flavor the steam with the general drift, so that in short order every camera, notebook, and microphone in the room are assembled around Seth, who doesn’t have a vague bone in his body.

  He scowls up at the crowd.

  “I don’t want to point no fingers at anybody, because I know everybody comes to me for the controversy,” he says. “But I’ve made up my mind this year that I’m going to try to stay as positive as I can. Whatever gripes I have, we’re gonna keep it between us as a team.

  “But …”

  And Seth proceeds to break his personal vow. First in line to take it on the chin is Richie Kotite.

  “It just seems to me that whichever team wins is the one who can better outsmart the other. Quite often in that department we come up on the short end of the stick.”

  But Seth has venom enough to go around. Special teams?

  “Special teams looked like garbage.”

  Defense?

  “We gave up too many plays.”

  But, of course, the prime beneficiary of the linebacker’s blame is the offense, and, in particular�
�who else? Ran-doll. See, in one of the quarterback’s regular meandering exercises with the Pack the week before, Randall as much as admitted that it had been four seasons since he had mounted a good game against the Redskins, and that Washington, more than any team in the league, seemed to “have our number.”

  Well, they sure as hell didn’t have Seth’s number.

  “You can’t expect to play well if you don’t challenge people. You can’t go into a game thinking, or being afraid to challenge somebody! I don’t care who it is! … Offensively, it just seems like when you say ‘Washington Redskins,’ we just fall to pieces.”

  It would be unkind, and probably a little unfair, to point out that the sum total of Seth the Scourge’s contribution to today’s battle had been one tackle.

  No one does.

  THE PROBLEM worsens the following week, back at the Vet, when the Eagles squeak out a 7-3 victory over the Cardinals. But what a paltry victory! Randall completes fewer than half of his passes, and while Herschel again pounds out 112 yards on the ground, the best the offense can muster is one touchdown. They are playing the weakest team in their division, one of the weakest teams in the league (with a 1-5 record), a team ranked third from the bottom in defense, a team that the Eagles beat handily just weeks before, and this is all they can do? The defense holds the Cardinals to one fourth-quarter field goal, and the thing goes right down to the wire?

  For Seth and the rest of the defense (John Booty is now playing for Wes, and Rich Miano for Andre), the whole game comes down to one series near the end of the first half.

  After picking off one of Randall’s passes, the Cardinals get the ball on the Eagles’ three-yard line. Seth and the gang trot out sullenly past their offensive colleagues.

  Then with their back to the end zone, framed by the giant flag of Archangel Jerome, the defense draws the line. They put on the most amazing goal-line stand any of them have ever seen. The Pack will dub it “the One-Yard War.” Even jaded Bud will later concede it’s the best he’s ever seen.