by Mark Bowden
Seven times—six from the one-yard line—the Cardinals slam the ball straight into the Eagles’ line, trying to push into the end zone:
Play one (first and goal on the Eagles’ three): Computer and film studies of the Cardinals’ tendencies this close to the goal line show that Phoenix nearly always tries to run the ball in. Coach Joe Bugel had been an offensive line coach for years before being anointed with the headset, and an offensive line that can’t advance the ball three yards doesn’t belong on a pro football field. Once or twice in past years the Cardinals have run a surprise passing play, but not often. A coach facing the Eagles’ number-one ranked defense (the Gang has yet to allow a rushing touchdown this season) has two choices. He can concede the Eagles’ strength upfront and go for razzle-dazzle, or he can try to prove how tough his team is by going nose to nose, pushing them back. Bugel likes to call himself a tough guy.
Bud sets up to stop the run. He sends in his jumbo goal-line defense, six linemen (Reverend Reggie, Clyde, Pitts, Harmon, Tommy Jeter, and Mike Golic), four linebackers (Seth, Byron, “Willie T.” Thomas, and Britt Hager), and one safety (Miano), who sets up on the end of the front line and keeps a close eye on the tight end.
The Cards come out in their power I formation, eight men down in front and a fullback and tailback lined in single file behind quarterback Chris Chandler. They run into the left side of their line, away from Reggie and toward Clyde, Golic, and Pitts. The fullback tries to hit Willie T. and move him out of the way, and a pulling guard is supposed to lead tailback Johnny Bailey into the hole, banging Byron backward and clearing the path. The play works well. It’s stopped short of the end zone because Golic gets enough penetration with his surge off the ball that the pulling guard is delayed. Both Byron and Seth stop Bailey on the one-yard line.
“Too much! Too much!” shouts Seth angrily as the pile untangles.
“We got to tighten up!” pleads Byron.
Play two (second and goal on the Eagles’ one): Now the Eagles can’t afford to give an inch. Any backward movement on the front line will allow a ballcarrier to fall into the end zone or just reach the ball across the line. They shift to jumbo goal-line gap all-out, their last-ditch defensive formation, which calls for every man on the front line to plug a gap between blockers. The six linemen just drive low and hard at the snap, plugging their gaps and leaving the four linebackers to dive up and over the roiling mass of bigbodies and make contact with the runner.
Chandler keeps the ball himself, but the surge from below knocks his feet out from under him, and he can’t jump. Instead he tries to reach the ball forward, but in the process it is slapped away, and out of the green tangle of clutching Eagles in the end zone, Pitts emerges with a beatific grin, holding the ball.
The ref signals the fumble recovery, and Pitts and his teammates parade triumphantly toward the sidelines.
But the celebration is premature. Another official had thrown a flag before the fumble. Linebacker Hager, out on the far right side of the play, had jumped offside. The ball is inched a half yard closer to the end zone, and the Cards are back in business.
“It’s not just Us against Them, it’s Us against Them and the Referees!” growls Seth as the defense shakes off its disappointment and reassembles in the end zone.
Play three (second and goal from the Eagles’ .5 yard): The Cards come back to the same play they ran from the three-yard line. This time Willie T. slips the fullback’s block, and Clyde manages to push the tight end trying to block him into the backfield. So the pulling guard can’t get into place, and as Golic wraps up Bailey’s legs, Byron delivers a thrilling, concussive hit on the smaller running back, who winds up going three yards backward.
Byron extricates himself from the pile—his mouthpiece has popped to the turf; his bald black head is shining, his helmet is embedded down in the pile in Bailey’s abdomen—and begins a loose, gloating dance. The stadium is now roaring with pleasure.
“You don’t have to say a word, just turn up your hearing aids and listen to this!” enthuses CBS commentator Matt Millen, a former linebacker, as he replays the massive hit on screen. “If that doesn’t get you wanting to play football, nothing will!”
The hit fires up the defense to near frenzy. All the pride they feel in being number one, mixed with all of this season’s emotion, their grief for Jerome—they suddenly feel immovable. They are convinced the Cards are not going to score. They will not allow it to happen. When the officials spot the ball on the one-yard line, where Byron first made contact, instead of back at the three, where Bailey came to rest, even that’s okay. It just doesn’t matter anymore.
Play four (third and goal at the Eagles’ one): the Cards go back to the same play again, only this time Miano is in perfect position to stop it. Before the snap of the ball, the tight end goes in motion, first right, and then back to the left. Miano mirrors his movements behind the line and sees the ball snapped just as he’s over the hole on the left side. He dives in to grab the runner’s legs as again the linebackers unload.
This ought to force the fourth-down play, only the Eagles have drawn another flag. Hager is called for jumping offside again. So the Cards get the play back, and the ball is once more inched up half the distance to the goal line.
Play five (third and goal from .5 yard): the Cards try another quarterback sneak, and this time they have even less success than the first time. Harmon and Golic drive their blockers straight backward, Miano wedges himself underneath, and Chandler doesn’t gain an inch … but there’s another flag! This time, way out on the left side, Willie T. had jumped.
Play six (third and goal from .25 yard): Pitts has to go looking for his helmet, which was torn off in the previous pileup. Seth and Byron are hopping up and down in the end zone, banging their helmets together, screaming incoherently.
The faces of the Cards’ linemen now show disgust as they line up over the ball. It’s hard to tell if they’re angrier with themselves or with their coach, who has grimly decided that they must move these Eagles players backward. Anyway, everybody on the defensive side can tell at a glance that the “tough guy” on the sidelines has called for another straight-ahead running play, and that his players are none too pleased.
“Run it at me!” screams Seth, straining to make himself heard over the savage roar from the stands.
Again the Cards try to lead with the fullback, left side, pull the guard, and slam in, only no one on the Eagles’ defensive front is pushed back an inch. The surge is now so powerful that, again, the guard can’t get around to make the block. Bailey anticipates Byron’s hit this time, so he dives back toward the center of the field, only to be met in midair—180 pounds meeting 240 pounds—and with a decisive smack is driven backward yet again.
No flags!
Bugel calls time out.
Play seven (fourth and goal from the one): Everybody knows he’s got to go for it. No field goal, no tricks. Six times in a row he’s lined his big boys up against the Eagles’ big boys, and six times in a row the Eagles have won the battle. Later, Bugel will explain, “This is the NFC East. If you can’t run it in from there, people will laugh at you.” The stadium is rocking. This is one of the great macho moments of football. One group of eleven men trying to move the oblong pigskin forward one yard; another group of eleven men straining to stop them. Bugel is trying to build some pride in his 1—5 squad. Pride turns on moments like this.
Bud warns Miano on the sidelines to be wary of the pass, but he’s the only one on the field even considering it.
“Joe Bugel says he’s a tough guy; he’s going to try to prove it right now,” says Millen up in the booth.
They try to run at Reggie this time, and the Reverend doesn’t budge. Two men arrive to block him before Bailey gets there. Reggie just hurls 266-pound tight end Walter Reeves backward. Reeves’s backside collides with Bailey, who is immediately crushed by Reggie and Hager and then a flood tide of green helmets and jerseys—short of the line.
“Eagl
es win the battle,” says Millen.
FEELING FORLORN, Andre watches all this on TV from a bed at Graduate Hospital, about a half mile away. Afterward, he phones his replacement, Rich Miano, to congratulate him. But it’s getting harder and harder for Andre even to think about football.
The broken bone in his left leg has turned from something routine and uncomfortable into something far worse.
After Dr. Vince had screwed the broken fibula back together four days earlier, Andre went home to heal. But three days later, he was in such pain he could hardly bear it. When he checked back with the doctor, he was told that blisters had formed around the fracture in his torn ankle ligaments, and they were slowly, painfully working their way up through the skin. Dr. Vince checked Andre back into the hospital, where he lay with his leg elevated, suffering the worst pain of his life. The hospital was concerned about controlling infection, which would threaten the limb, and Andre was no longer thinking about when he’d get to rejoin his teammates, about the Dré Master and big hits and biting on play action.
The throbbing was unbearable. The Eagles’ ferocious strong safety, the man with the Fu Manchu mustache and dark reputation, was reduced to begging the nurses for his regulated doses of painkilling injections. But the shots only took the edge off it. They wouldn’t shoot him up more than once every four hours, but the drug wore off after about one. Andre sometimes just laid in bed weeping.
Willie Ola flew up to be with him the next day. Together, in the hospital, they prayed for fortitude and deliverance.
I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, … out of the belly of hell cried I. … One week after surgery, Andre’s blisters have healed sufficiently for him to go home, but he’s still in terrific pain. Lying on his back with his foot elevated, Andre is getting only about one hour of sleep a night. Willie Ola cooks and takes care of the house, feeding him in his upstairs bedroom. Otis Smith, who shares Andre’s condo, keeps him up on the day-to-day developments with the team. As the Eagles prepare for game eight, their rematch with the Cowboys in Dallas, it’s Otis who brings news of the comment Emmitt Smith made to reporters there about Andre’s injury.
“He’s hurt,” said Emmitt to a clutch of newshounds around his Dallas locker. “Keep doin’ bad, and bad things will happen to you. I guess bad things finally caught up to him.”
As if Andre deserved what he’s going through! Emmitt Smith becomes the focus of his recovery. If the Eagles make the play-offs, which they almost certainly will, then it seems increasingly likely that they will face the Cowboys a third time in January. So while Andre sends his supplications to the Lord, the Dré Master chews on a vision of the Cowboys’ all-pro running back. It’s hard to say which inspires him more.
The worst of his ordeal is over after three weeks— And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land. Willie Ola flies home, and Andre resumes daily trips to Veterans Stadium to speed his rehab.
During those lost weeks, it was as though Andre had dropped off the earth. He sees Otis because they share the same condo, but other than that, Andre hears not a word from coaches or teammates.
There is one exception. He hears from Ben Smith.
12
WHERE’S BEN?
Ben Smith had been a ghost now for more than a year. His fall had come late in the second quarter of a November 10, 1991, game in venerable, gusty Cleveland Stadium. He knew the instant his knee gave way that the injury was serious. Nobody had even touched him. The twenty-four-year-old cornerback’s leg just buckled, and down he went, alone at the bottom of the arena with eighty-thousand-plus local fans cheering wildly for Webster Slaughter’s seventeen-yard gain. Ben didn’t try to get up. He just lay clutching the knee.
He started to cry.
One day you’re at the top of the world, playing on TV, reading your name in the newspapers, driving your fancy foreign car, signing autographs, and then—poof—you’re gone. More than in any other pro sport, football players roll the dice with their entire career every time they step on the field. Years of single-minded devotion to the game, all the off-season workouts, summer training camps, high-school and college glory, the chance to become a great pro, to win financial security for yourself and your family for a lifetime … all of it is on the line every weekend, every play.
A limp is one of the distinctive features of an old football player. A quick injury tour of the Eagles’ locker room confirms that the game hasn’t grown gentler: Jim McMahon, football’s equivalent of a crash dummy, has already willed (in his ’86 book, McMahon) his battered remains to the Smithsonian Institution as the world’s foremost collection of scar tissue; Randall Cunningham is coming off knee reconstruction, the second of his career (and he’ll miss most of ’93 with a broken leg); Dave Archer, a veteran of multiple shoulder surgeries; Fred Barnett, knee surgery in college (and he’ll go back under the knife in ’93 with a blown knee); Calvin Williams, who missed four games in ’91 with a separated shoulder; Andre Waters, veteran of multiple minor knee surgeries; Wes Hopkins, totally reconstructed knee joint; Rich Miano, total knee reconstruction; Seth Joyner, multiple knee surgeries; Britt Hager, neck surgery and a hip condition called necrosis encouraged by taking so many painkilling injections as a high-school player; Reggie White, knee surgery; Mike Golic, knee and ankle surgery; Mike Pitts, knee surgery and nagging back problems; Keith Byars, multiple bone breaks in his feet, one so severe he required a bone graft from a piece of his hip; Ron Heller, broken hand, severe eye injury (after being poked in the left eye by Viking Al Baker, whom Ron sued), knee surgery, foot problems; Dave Alexander, knee surgery and foot problems; Eric “Pink” Floyd, ankle break in college (and knee reconstruction coming in ’93). These are just the starters, and one of the reasons they are starters is because they are particularly durable.
Usually it’s a knee. The joint is a marvel of anatomical engineering, a complex interface of muscle, cartilage, and bone, an elegant organic hinge with both strength needed to support the full frame of the body in motion and sufficient pliability to enable flexion, extension, and even a few degrees of rotation. Unflexed, the knee allows an accomplished athlete to seemingly defy gravity with sudden, fluid, powerful motion up or down, sideways, backward, and forward. Flexed, the joint performs a small screwing action that locks the upper and lower parts of the leg so tightly it assumes the stability of solid bone. Surrounding the ball and socket of the femur and tibia are wrapped layers of muscle, cartilage, tendon, and ligament, superbly capable of absorbing a lifetime’s worth of walking, running, climbing, leaping—but woefully incapable of absorbing the sudden and violent twists, whacks, and tortuous hyperextensions of football.
This is the remarkable but fragile vessel on which players hazard all.
With Ben, the trip to that painful moment on the grass at Cleveland Stadium began when he was just eight years old, throwing the football up in the air as high as he could and then racing down Flanders Drive in front of his father’s tiny house in Warner Robins, Georgia, trying to catch it before it hit the ground. He’d do it for hours, all by himself. He’d been a solitary boy ever since his mother, Doris Louise Bailey, had left five years earlier, moving off to the “fast life” of Macon, about a half hour’s drive north.
Doris couldn’t cope with the increasingly strict and stubborn ways of Ben’s father, Bennie Joe, an illiterate but proud, ambitious, and colorful man who frightened people with his intensity. Bennie Joe was the oldest of twenty-two children (his second cousin is Antone Davis’s father, Milton Trice, which makes the teammates fourth cousins, al though they hadn’t met until they were both playing for the Eagles), and he had assumed a patriarchal role in his enormous family at an early age, after his father, drunk, had managed to flip over a piece of heavy farming equipment on himself and die in a horrendous ball of flame. Bennie Joe helped raise his younger brothers and sisters and earned a license for operating heavy road-construction equipment.
He and Doris had five children, and Ben, th
e last, was only three when his mother accused Bennie Joe of seeing another woman, and went to live with her mother. The children stayed with their mother for a short time, but then Doris took up with a man from Macon and left all her children with their father. Looking back on it, she says she was just fed up with the rural life, with Bennie Joe, and with raising children. If he was so determined to hang on to his children, she thought, she’d let him have them. All five of them. She felt her husband was better suited to raising them anyway, with his strictly sober ways and steady wages. A frank woman with few pretensions, she would recall years later with a trace of a smile that at that point in her life she “went a little wild,” falling in with a bootlegging ring in Macon, spending her days and nights “out and around.”
Growing up a Smith meant being poor in worldly goods but rich in family. Bennie Joe built his house at the north end of Warner Robins, a splash of suburbia adjacent to Robins Air Force Base, a bustling modern oasis on a landscape of sprawling cotton, soy, and peanut land. A multitude of Smiths populate Houston, Bibb, and Peach Counties in Central Georgia, and as a motherless boy, Ben remembers being passed from aunt to aunt to aunt while his father was away, sleeping on blankets or on a mattress tossed on the floor alongside his brothers and sisters and cousins. The first time he remembers sleeping in a bed was when he was fourteen years old, when his older brother Lorenzo got fed up with his father and went north to live with Doris in Macon.
Ben remembers his father as a “wild man,” feared in the neighborhood and in the family for his strong opinions and fiery temper, but also admired for his stern competence and character. Angered after being robbed at gunpoint when he stopped for a hitchhiker on one of his long road trips, Bennie Joe brought himself a nickel-plated .38 Smith and Wesson, got a license for it, strapped it to his belt, and carried it with him everywhere except to church. It got so nearly everybody in town knew who he was, the intense, compactly built black man in work clothes and bandanna with the nickel-plated pistol on his hip. When one of his younger brothers was stabbed to death in a fight by a man named Earl, Bennie Joe swore revenge on the man, and it was common knowledge in the town’s black quarters that it was only a matter of time before Bennie Joe—who was known as a man who did not make idle threats—would follow through, plant Mr. Earl deep in the Georgia clay, and land himself behind bars. Bennie Joe thought so himself, although he worried about what would happen to his children. His conversion to a strict and evangelical Baptist Christianity showed him another way. Forced by his pastor to assist with door-to-door missionary work at the south end of town, in the very neighborhood of his intended victim, Bennie Joe arrived one afternoon at Mr. Earl’s door, with a Bible in his hand and the pistol on his hip. He heard a scornful voice, he says— Now look at you. How can you go and witness to somebody when you’re carrying around this grudge like a dead weight? And in that moment he saw the light. He had to chase down Mr. Earl, who fled out the back door at his approach, but Bennie Joe held out his hand and apologized once he caught up. Not long afterward, he stopped carrying the gun.