Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  But Bennie Joe’s rebirth as a lay preacher came as an unbearable shock to his teenage brood, who one by one left him to live with their mother. Ben left when his dad forced him to quit the junior-high-school football team because it was interfering with events at the church.

  Ben felt sorry for his dad. He explained that he intended to play high-school, then college, and then pro football.

  His father scoffed. “I hate to disappoint you, son, but you’re too little to play football.”

  But Ben had it all figured out. He had taken something from both his strong-willed parents. He looked just like his father, with his dark complexion, square jaw, and small features, but he had, at least outwardly, none of his father’s unbending and aggressive personality. People thought Ben’s personality, so outwardly easy and fun loving, resembled his mother’s. But beneath his ready smile and seemingly feckless ways, Ben at age fifteen was already as hard and focused as a diamond bit. He knew where he was going, and he was prepared to be stubborn about it if necessary. He was small. He stood only about five-five and weighed fewer than 130 pounds entering high school, but he was still growing, and he was agile, quick, and tough.

  Ben had made a study of football, mostly from watching it on TV. There was room for a small, fast, hard-hitting player, even in the pros, in the defensive backfield. Central Georgia even had a reputation for producing some of the finest defensive backs in the country.

  He also knew that his only chance of making it to the college game, at his size, was to become an excellent high-school cornerback. Macon was the best place to get noticed. It was a small city with old, well-publicized high-school rivalries that produced many of the ath letes who went on to play at Georgia State and the University of Georgia. His plan was to move in with his mother, not just to enjoy the looser atmosphere and the fun of city life (although that was appealing, too), but to play football—no, not just football, but corner-back—for prep-school powerhouse Northeast High.

  He moved in with his mother to finish out junior high and went out for the football team at Northeast in his freshman year. He was placed on the scout team, which was where most first-year players expected to go … except Ben. He watched the older boys in practice and felt sure he could outplay them if Coach would let him try. But there was a protocol to these things. Freshmen just didn’t shoulder established players aside, unless they had grown up in Macon and caught Coach’s eye playing on a junior-high team, or unless their older brothers had blazed a reputation. Ben felt unknown and unappreciated, and after a season on the bench, he told his mom he wanted to move back in with his dad, play for Northside High School in Warner Robins.

  He moved back to Flanders Drive and was MVP of the junior varsity team as a sophomore at Northside, where they used him at cornerback some, but mostly as quarterback and running back … which Ben didn’t like. He wanted to play cornerback. But Coach (as Coach will) had his own ideas. When he seemed insufficiently concerned about the fifteen-year-old’s playing preferences, Ben balked. Working out in preparation for the annual spring football game, an off-season exhibition designed to keep the team focused and in shape, Ben refused to participate in a rigorous one-on-one contact drill near the end of practice—he believed in saving his body for the game (or, from Coach’s-Eye View, he was too good to practice).

  “I’m all tired out from being asked to play so many positions,” he told Coach.

  So when the spring game was played, Ben was on the bench. Coach waited until the closing minutes before waving Ben out to the field.

  Ben declined.

  “You don’t have to worry about me playing for this team anymore,” he said.

  See, Ben wanted to play cornerback. Period. He had the whole thing scoped out. He wasn’t interested in school, and the only career option at that age that was marginally attractive to Ben was going to work in the numbers racket—he had lots of older relatives who got along fine doing that. But that kind of life seemed to teenage Ben so ordinary. Football was a far more attractive avenue. It was exciting and glamorous and you could get rich without looking over your shoulder for the law! His father and friends and coaches all told him his chances were next to none, but that didn’t deter him one bit. Just like Doris and Bennie Joe, once young Ben had his mind set on something, step on out of the way.

  If he couldn’t play where he wanted at Northside, maybe they would wise up at the south end of town, at Warner Robins High. The only problem was that to play on the south end he had to live on the south end. Bennie Joe and Doris agreed to drop their parental rights, and an uncle who lived on the south end adopted Ben.

  And at Warner Robins, they let Ben play cornerback. Northside High’s coaches mounted a brief legal effort to block the move, and Ben had to sit out the first few games of his junior year while the schools wrestled in court, but the maneuver worked. Ben wasn’t the best athlete at Warner Robins; he wasn’t the fastest boy on the track team or the most gifted player on the football team. But nobody could match his intensity. After an amazing game in which he picked off three passes in an overtime victory over Lyons County High, Ben was named the Atlanta Constitution’s high-school defensive player of the year in ’85. He spent a long, lonesome year at a junior college in Oklahoma getting his grades up enough to satisfy the NCAA rules, and then accepted a full scholarship to play for the University of Georgia Bulldogs—all according to plan.

  EVERYTHING ELSE had gone according to plan, too, including top collegiate football honors and a first-round draft selection by the Eagles. Georgia and then Buddy Ryan had tried to turn Ben into a free safety, but by mid-’91, halfway through his second season with the Eagles, Ben was what he had planned to be all along, a starting NFL cornerback.

  He was patrolling the left side of the Eagles’ number-one-ranked defensive secondary, opposite Pro Bowl cornerback Eric Allen.

  And, as Ben quickly learned, Eric was something else. A poised, articulate young man with a deep golden complexion and ambercolored eyes, Eric was as a San Diego high-school superstar whose trajectory through college and into the pros was as clean and untroubled as a play on a blackboard. Excellent Allen, or EA as his teammates knew him, was Buddy’s second pick in ’88, the player he took right after Keith Jackson. He started at right cornerback the first game of his rookie season, was named to the NFL’s all-rookie squad, earned his first trip to Honolulu after his second season, and had gone every year since. Eric was married to his sweetheart from Point Loma High School—you could look up their picture in the yearbook, Eric with an Afro the size of a bowling ball. He was the image of grace and ease, whether intercepting a pass on the field or pointing his Hollywood smile at a camera and offering commentary like a seasoned network veteran. Eric was golden. He made it look easy.

  But what Ben discovered about Eric was, beneath that unruffled exterior, the man was a devoted craftsman … a grind! Eric was one of a handful of NFL cornerbacks who were so good at what they did that they were redefining the position in the pros. He and the Steelers’ Rod Woodson, the Redskins’ Darrell Green, the Falcons’ Deion Sanders, and a few others formed an elite corps within the community of NFL cornerbacks, players who weren’t just cornerbacks, but Cover Guys. It wasn’t just a matter of prestige either, although that was important. These players, Eric included, commanded salaries comparable to the league’s top receivers, more than $1 million a year. And they were worth every penny. Teams without an excellent Cover Guy had to resort to conservative zone coverages. Their corners needed deep help and assistance in the middle of the field, which would tie up both safeties in pass coverage and give opposing quarterbacks a set-piece defense to play around with, dropping short passes or running the ball when the zone set deep, and then lobbing over the top of it when defensive backs pulled in closer. But a team with a great Cover Guy had a lot more flexibility and punch. If you had a guy with the speed, quickness, and savvy to play one-on-one with a receiver like Jerry Rice all afternoon without getting fried, it freed up a safety to rove t
he secondary looking for trouble, or blitz the quarterback, or move up with the linebackers to stuff the run. A team like the Eagles, with two excellent Cover Guys, Eric and Ben … well, it helped explain why the Eagles in ’91 were far and away the best defense in the league.

  A Cover Guy was a single-combat warrior, out there on the corner all by himself, dueling play after play, mano a mano with the league’s best receivers, with the stakes very public and very high—failure more often than not meant a touchdown. And we’re talking more here than having your mistake witnessed by a packed stadium of sixty thousand or seventy thousand, or even the millions more watching at home. When a cornerback got beat, it produced one of the most exciting plays in all of football, the long touchdown pass, which made the highlights reel for tens of millions of viewers the night and week after the game and then went on to have an NFL Films life of its own, replayed on videotapes and football anthology programs … it was a fair bet that your great-grandchildren would be watching it someday.

  It took a special kind of person, someone with the assurance of an Eric Allen, to handle the job with aplomb. First, you had to have the physical skills not just to keep up with the league’s top receivers, but to stay with them running backward part of the time, keeping one eye on them and one eye on the quarterback, and then be able to leap with them and wrestle with them, if need be, to keep them from catching the ball. Second, if you had the physical skills, you had to know more about receivers, pass patterns, tendencies, and opposing quarterbacks than they knew about themselves. Eric and most of the others, Ben discovered, kept their own little books on receivers and quarterbacks, gleaned from experience on the field and hours and hours of film study. You had to know all the little moves receivers liked to make (they were all different), which foot they liked to jump off on, how they used their hands, and what opposing teams tended to do out of certain formations. Third, you had to fit all these skills and insights into a reliable set of techniques. Eric approached the line on a given play aware not only of the person he was covering and the quarterback who might throw him the ball, but of down and distance and offensive formation, which dictated how much room he could give a receiver coming off the line and what the man was likely to do with that space. Eric had eight different specific coverage techniques, roughly falling into the categories of playing off the man or playing bump-and-run. “Off” coverages relied on savvy, eye, and the quickness to close on the ball once it was in the air, getting to it before it reached the target. “Bump” coverages meant slamming the man coming off the line, trying to throw him off balance and interfere with the timing of his route, while maintaining your own balance and position.

  Ben went to school on this stuff at the end of the ’90 season and then into his second year. He learned the delicate art of jamming a receiver and getting his arms up inside to gain leverage. If you did it right, the receiver couldn’t break off the jam, and you’d have taken him out of the play. If you did it wrong, you drew a holding flag and gave the other team free yards. He was learning all the subtle ways veteran receivers have of pushing off a cornerback; a gentle shove at precisely the right moment was all it took to get enough separation for the catch. Ben learned countermoves, how, when the push came, to latch onto the inside of the man’s jersey, away from the referee’s line of sight, so that the receiver couldn’t pull away. Most of the time, though, staying with a man was just timing and technique, getting in that bump, keeping your balance, reading the route, closing on the ball … it was like a dance, and Ben was getting good at it.

  His salary was $352,000 in ’92, about a third of Eric’s. But Ben had made the NFL’s all-rookie team in his first year, just like Eric, and midway through his second year the Pro Bowl didn’t seem out of reach. The Pack still speculated from time to time that Ben would eventually play free safety. But Ben had seen the light. He wasn’t just interested in being a cornerback anymore, he was going to be a Cover Guy. He couldn’t wait for Sundays.

  But now it was over. It was as though he had been struck by lightning. He was done, certainly for this season and part of the next, maybe for good. One second it’s you and Webster Slaughter, precisely the kind of receiver only a true Cover Guy can handle one-on-one, the next minute they’re rolling you off the field on a little cart.

  TEAM DOCTOR Vincent DiStefano called it “the worst knee injury we’ve seen around here in many, many years.”

  Which is saying something. Dr. Vince, as the players knew him, had been the Eagles’ team doctor for twenty-one seasons, and as such had seen as many orthopedic injuries as a battlefield surgeon sees trauma. A Philadelphia native, graduate of Temple University and Hahnemann College Medical School (both in Philadelphia), chairman of the orthopedic department at Philadelphia’s Graduate Hospital, and a well-known authority in the growing field of sports medicine, the short, precise, curly-mopped, sensationally tanned Dr. Vince, father of eight, was by any measure a fine surgeon. Dr. Vince told Ben his anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments were badly torn, that he had severely sprained the posterior cruciate ligament and torn both the lateral meniscus and medial meniscus cartilages—in other words, the equivalent of a small bomb had gone off in the joint.

  Ben tried not to imagine the mess inside his throbbing, swollen, discolored knee. Twenty years or even a decade earlier, Ben’s career would have been over. Maybe Joe Namath could extend his career limping around inside a pocket of blockers with braces on both knees, but a cornerback’s livelihood depended on peak speed and agility. With the advances in surgical knee reconstruction over the years, there was at least a fair chance he’d fully regain use of the knee, said Dr. Vince, who was prepared and capable of opening the joint up and piecing the shreds back together. But, as Ben well knew, even a slight diminution of strength or flexibility would kill his Cover Guy plans. If he went under the knife immediately, with hard work and good luck, he could be back on the field in eleven months, midway through the ’92 season. But there were no guarantees.

  The world of pro football had changed dramatically in the twenty-one years since Dr. Vince started haunting the Eagles’ sidelines, har vesting injuries. As players’ salaries mounted, and as agents became a bigger and bigger part of players’ lives, the concept of team doctor had gradually grown suspect. Whose doctor was he, Team’s or the player’s? Their interests weren’t always the same.

  Injury is a central part of the culture of football. In the old days it was simple: you played with pain, through injuries, and proved your mettle as a man by sucking it up, doing what it takes. Sacrificing your body was expected, encouraged, and, with a growing arsenal of alluring painkillers, ably assisted. In the old days, a football club’s medical staff had one purpose: Keep the show going, patch ‘em up, pat their rumps, and get ‘em back out on the field. A player who insisted on healing properly was quickly branded a malcontent or, worse, a sissy. Boys learned this from the first day they donned a helmet and started crashing into people. You proved yourself worthy by hopping right up, tearless and fearless, after a bone-crunching tackle. The other boys would crowd around you when you were gasping or bleeding on the field, dozens of little-boy eyes peering intently down, pushing and shoving to get a better view, staring—not with concern, but to see if you cried. Every schoolboy athlete in America knew legends were made by popping dislocated fingers back in place and stepping right back into the huddle, or spitting out a tooth and calling the next play. In the beginning, in a sense, this was why men played football. Absent the heroic myth of the battlefield to test the strongest and ablest, America took a perfectly elegant and ageless sport and turned it into a brawl. In the good old days, pro football was just the meanest, biggest, grandest brawl of them all. Go back and check how bitterly the old pros resisted wearing helmets, then face masks and other protective gear; it was an affront to the awful dignity of the game!

  The modern NFL has, of course, come a long way from the old standard, at least on the surface. For one thing, a club’s multimillion-dollar
investment in a star athlete would be ill served by heedlessly exposing him to injury. A decent argument could be made (and often was) that it was in the enlightened best interests of both player and club to make sure a player was well cared for and fully healed before plugging him back into the lineup. But, medical opinions differed. Why go to the doctor who represents the Team when you can go to a doctor who represents you, and only you?

  For Dr. Vince, being team doctor was a lot easier back when he started. It was a no-lose deal, especially for a football fan—which the good doctor was. Ministering to pro football players was not only interesting and lucrative work (Lord knows he had a guaranteed steady supply of patients who all could pay their bills), it gave Dr. Vince a high profile and considerable prestige—Hell, if the Eagles go to him, he’s the guy for me! Dr. Vince attended all the Eagles’ games, even those on the road, watched from the sidelines, and repaired the mounting damage as the season unfolded. What a deal! After more than two decades of this, he had written scores of papers and articles on sports-related injuries in medical journals and served as officer or consultant in several prominent sports-medicine centers.