by Mark Bowden
They go into the locker room at halftime trailing 3—0. Dallas’s top-ranked offense has been able to muster only a thirty-five-yard field goal. Randall and the offense have been given the ball six times in the first half. They’ve managed just one first down, failed on every thirddown play, gained just twenty-eight yards running the ball and—get this— thirteen yards passing! Add in the stats from the second half of the Cardinals game the week before, and Richie’s offense has now played four full quarters without scoring a point, having gained a total of just twenty-four yards by air. It don’t take no Phi Beta Kappa to sense mutiny brewing in the locker room.
And, in fact, Richie has decided on a drastic remedy. After huddling briefly with his assistants, he summons both Randall and backup Jim McMahon into a side room. Randall can sense what’s coming. He stares glumly at the wall.
“Randall, look at me,” the coach says. “We’re going to go with Jim in the third quarter. Be ready to go back in the fourth quarter.”
Randall’s gaze returns to the wall. No expression.
“Randall, look at me,” says the coach.
“Fine,” says Randall. “Good luck, Jimmy, I’ll help you all I can.”
The switch has the desired effect. It shakes the team up. Word spreads through the locker room quickly before an announcement is made. “He’s goin’ with Jimbo” is whispered from locker to locker. Most welcome the news. They can see how much Randall is struggling. In the huddle, the quarterback seems lost, hurried, and confused. There was a time, not too long ago, when the whole team had an almost giddy sense of confidence in Randall. He had this aura. They really felt that with him on the field, anything could happen. But the aura is gone. There has been a detour on Randall’s path to greatness. In fact, most of these guys think Randall’s benching is overdue. Hell, if they’re not getting the job done, they expect to get yanked. It’s happened to almost all of them at one time or another. But Ran-doll has always been this special case, the designated franchise player, even though his mood swings are notorious. Just as there are days when it seems that nothing can stop him, there are days when it is obvious to everybody around him that he just doesn’t have it. If it is so plain to the players, why isn’t it plain to Coach? Playing him when he’s like this is like taking your hands off the wheel and letting the car roll over the cliff. Still, it’s as if there were this mandate from on high, from Norman himself, that no matter what happens, no matter how desperate the situation and how dismal his performance, Randall remains the Man. Look what happened to Buddy after yanking him for just three plays!
So Richie’s move earns instant approval on both sides of the locker room. His stock has never been so high with Buddy’s Boys. And when Jimbo comes out in the second half and drives the offense eighty yards in eight plays for a touchdown, giving them a 7-3 lead … well, shit, maybe this Richie Kotite has some balls after all!
Randall makes all the right moves. He’s the first guy out on the field to congratulate Jimbo as the battle-scarred veteran comes waddling off in his bulky flak jacket and two knee braces. But the expression on Randall’s face has found a new shade of blank.
This is his private hell.
WHEN THE EAGLES took Randall Cunningham in the second round of the draft in ’85, it was considered a gamble. Few doubted the kid’s raw talent. He had thrown for more than 2,500 yards in three straight seasons at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (only the third collegiate quarterback in history to do so—the others were Doug Flutie and that Elway), gained a mind-boggling 8,290 yards rushing, and was one of the premier college punters in the nation. Randall’s punts were legendary, Promethean—On top of everything else, he can kick!—great towering parabolas that hinted something about this kid went beyond any normal measure. His college coach, Harvey Hyde, told the story of how Randall had begged to be allowed to punt the ball in a game, and when Hyde finally relented, “The thing was launched like a satellite! The coaches in the press box were screaming in my headset, ‘Holy Cow! It’s above us!’ It drove the receiver to his knees.” The punts gave Randall a mythic quality, nudging him into Jim Thorpe—Paul Hornung territory. If most pro football players had not been the best players on their high school or college teams, Randall was the exception that buttressed the stereotype. He was the Natural, a living, breathing football version of Roy Hobbs. If his gangly but lithe twenty-two-year-old frame looked incomplete, it also hinted at unlimited promise. Already he had moves on the football field like no one else’s, and an arm that could launch a precise pass sixty or seventy yards, without even planting his feet. When he threw the ball, his body uncoiled like a rope, a loose, smooth, wave action that began at his heels and concluded with a whipping motion at the end of a long, rubber arm, the way a Disney cartoonist might draw it. The throwing style was so unique that hidebound scouts—their minds patterned to seek out Unitas, Namath, Marino—took one look at it and said, The kid’ll never make it. Throws like a fuckin’ windmill. Takes him too long to release the ball. Randall’s success, they said, could be chalked up to his playing for UNLV—It’s a basketball school.
There was this other (deeper) current of skepticism. See, Randall is black.
The racism was, of course, smothered in generations of horseshit. Football had its own subtle code words and rationalizations. It was anecdotal wisdom run amuck, self-perpetuating and blind to itself. Blacks made great running backs and receivers and defensive players (the dim brutes theory) because … well, even if you weren’t prepared to buy the speculative observations of armchair physiologists and theoretical geneticists (thicker haunches, better animal reflexes), and even if you scorned the Grand Dragon logic that placed dark-skinned races closer to monkeys on the evolutionary scale— Shit, man, all you got to do is open yer eyes! Just look at how many of them are playing those positions in the college and the pros! And how many o’ them darkies do you see playing quarterback? In truth, the Great American Cult of the Pigskin was set up to steer black players into so-called athletic roles and preserve for white players the so-called strategic roles: safety, quarterback, center, middle linebacker, not to mention head coach. In ’84, Randall’s senior year, three decades after the desegregation of schools and twenty-one years after Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, there were no black head coaches in the NFL, and only one starting black quarterback (Warren Moon). While black players were making inroads at safety and middle linebacker, the unwritten racial code remained. Never mind that the complexity of the game in the pros demanded a high level of strategic thinking at almost every position—how could Eric Allen’s mastery of cornerback be considered purely an athletic accomplishment? There wasn’t a responsible person in any consequential position in the NFL who would think of defending these racist distinctions, but the Pigskin Sluice itself kept racism alive long after most overt traces of it were gone from the upper echelons of the Game. As with most aspects of American society, racism was hardwired into the system. The pattern was still set back on the hometown playing fields, where Coach (usually white) tended to choose for field generals those kids he knew best and felt the most comfortable with (also usually white). By the time players made it to the college level, they brought with them years of schooling at their specialty, and by the time they were being picked by pro teams, they had become accomplished specialists. The pattern set back at the mouth end of the Sluice was still visibly in place throughout football the year Randall’s name came up in the draft, completing the circular logic—how many o’ them do you see quarterbacking in the pros? There wasn’t an overt racist in the room when the Eagles were considering Randall in the draft that year, but the question, of course, came up: Is he intelligent enough to play quarterback in the NFL?
Add to that the unorthodoxy of Randall’s style, and the flip side of Randall’s Promethean promise was risk. The subtext of the concern for Randall’s throwing motion, powerful but loose and undisciplined, was the old athletic versus strategic bugaboo (he was black, not white). All that runn
ing around he did? That was athletic ability, not the disciplined, cerebral, strategic skill of a pro caliber quarterback (he was black, not white). To their credit, the Eagles’ scouts put at least one of these concerns to the test. They broke down films of Randall’s remarkable throwing motion frame by frame and discovered that despite how it looked, he actually took no longer to release the ball than most NFL quarterbacks. Besides, here was a guy you had to catch before you could sack. As for his running ability … well, that could be a plus if channeled the right way. Ted Marchibroda, then the Eagles’ offensive coordinator, was known as an innovator (he would later introduce Buffalo’s no-huddle system), and Marchibroda was the kind of coach who got excited about a player who was different. Backed strongly by his assistant, Lynn Stiles convinced head coach Marion Campbell to ignore the naysayers.
Randall quickly disproved all the doubters. He was intelligent, all right, and he could play the position like few others. Which is not to say he didn’t pose the Eagles some problems— unusual problems. They had little to do with his race, and everything to do with his singular personality. To understand Randall’s problems meant trying to understand Randall.
If thinking is a problem with the Scrambling One, it’s that he thinks too much, and always about the same thing—himself. Randall is a prisoner of self. He’s like a man serving a life sentence in solitary, who counts his breaths and takes his pulse every few minutes, forever watching himself watching himself watching himself. … It explains the ever-shifting ground of his conversation, which doubles back in on itself again and again, as Randall assesses what he is saying while he’s saying it and then corrects himself in midstream, modifying his statement, then remodifying it, until he sometimes ends by directly contradicting himself—Being confused has a lot to do with my personality.
In one of his better inadvertent witticisms, Buddy once said, “Whatever Randall said, he didn’t mean it.” The phrase should someday be chiseled on the quarterback’s tombstone.
“Randall to me is like a catfish in a pond,” says Andre Waters, who has played with him now for seven seasons. “I reach in to grab him and he slips right out of my hand. I could not begin to explain Randall because he is so moody, so indifferent. One minute he’s this way, the next minute he’s the next way. He means well, I know that. In his heart, he means well, but the way he comes out with things, it doesn’t seem right.”
Whereas other players, after arriving at the big payday, buy the fancy foreign car and then DHM, Randall, who has no mom, signed his five-year, $20-million-plus deal in midseason ’89, bought himself a white Mercedes coupe, and set about building a DHS (Dream Home for Self). It rose on a collection of flat lots in Moorestown, New Jersey, after more than a year of planning, a $1.4-million, twenty-six-room, ten-thousand-foot Fortress of Solitude, surrounded by high fences and adjacent to a quarter-million-dollar empty field that Randall bought and had bulldozed, grassed, and lined into his very own private football field. And what better portrait of the superstar could there be? It’s an austere study in monotone, all white, gray, and black, surrounded by a tall cast-iron fence. It has a gigantic posh white leather sofa that no one is allowed to crease with their buttocks, a white kitchen crammed with every utensil, dish, goblet, pot, pan, and mechanical and electric cooking convenience you would need to feed a football team three meals a day, a room filled with wires and keyboards and speakers for Randall to compose synthesized music (perhaps when his friend Michael Jackson drops by), a room filled with pinball and video games, a viewing and listening room with a fifty-inch TV screen and a retractable wall-sized mirror to cover a small mountain of electronic apparatuses, a billiards room with a sleek modern table designed by Gucci, a twenty-foot-long bedroom closet and dressing room chockfull of full-length mirrors, where Randall can indulge his fetish for “dressing up” (in his extensive collection of military uniforms, for instance—note the Michael Jackson cum Sgt. Pepper influence).
Up through the designing and building of the house, Randall had been living in a more modest Cherry Hill home with his girlfriend Rose, a light-skinned, slender woman who had worked as a beautician and dyed her hair red and wore contact lenses that turned her brown eyes green. Randall liked his women skinny, so Rose threw herself wholeheartedly into a diet that reduced her to a skeletal shadow of her former self. Living with them was Rose’s son, Bruce, whom Randall insisted call him Daddy, and whom for a season or two, he introduced as the most important person in his life. Randall had other women friends on the road, of course, although he was not one to travel the Sis-Boom-Bimbo trail—his requirements were more strict. When the Fortress of Solitude was finished, Randall—to Rose’s shock— announced he would be putting her and Bruce up in an apartment. They continued seeing each other for a time, Rose and Bruce in the apartment and Randall up in the Fortress of Solitude. The house was for Randall and Randall alone, although he did have guest bedrooms fully furnished awaiting visits from his very good friends. It was significant that these special friends, special enough to have their names tacked on the door of their own bedrooms, were not teammates or old high-school or college buddies, but peers in Randall’s special fantasy celebrity kingdom—there was the Eric Dickerson room, the Whitney Houston room, the Michael Jackson room….
Las Vegas was where Randall built his second house, for his Aunt Nettie. Nettie, his mother’s sister, was a kind of adopted mom, and Las Vegas was Randall’s adopted hometown, and a perfect one it was for him, too. Tinsel City, the Money-Obsessed, Something-for-Nothing Capital of the Free World, it beckoned the quarterback from his peripatetic existence in the off-season, a neon-painted glitter palace at night that in the cold light of dawn was revealed to be nothing more than the largest contiguous strip mall on the planet.
Randall came here after high school to play quarterback, because most of the big schools wouldn’t let him play that position at the college level— See, what the boy has, that’s what we call athletic ability. Randall wasn’t ready for the way his blackness would play in the rest of America. He says the first time he confronted overt racism was as a student in Las Vegas, when a stranger shouted “Get out of the street, nigger!” at him from a passing car. He was every bit as much shocked as insulted.
Santa Barbara, where he grew up, had such an easy blend of Hispanic, Asian, Anglo, and black that Randall never developed any special sense of race. His neighborhood was a pleasant, tree-lined suburb of single-family, low-roofed ranch houses with attached garages and fenced-in backyards. His father, Sam, had been a railroad porter until ill health kept him from working. He was a huge man, tall and thick, weighing more than three hundred pounds. People called him Heavy. Randall’s mother, Mabel, worked as a practical nurse at Goleta Valley Community Hospital. The house was a gift from Randall’s half brother Sam, who had starred at Santa Barbara High School in several sports before playing football at the University of Southern California and then for the Patriots. The house was not fancy, but its location on the city’s oceanfront mesa was idyllic, bordered to the west by the Pacific Ocean and to the east by the redbrown cliffs of the Santa Ynez Mountains, where hang gliders take daring leaps into the hazy California sky and coast down like Day-Glo butterflies. It was just a short walk for Randall to the Arroyo Burro Beach, where he learned to surf. He spent long summer days on the beach, greasing down his board with Sex Wax and slathering his long, skinny limbs with Coppertone just like the white boys.
He would say things sometimes that confused the hounds, not knowing where he came from. He said, for instance, on first arriving in Philadelphia, that one of the things that was hardest for him to get used to was “being around so many black people all the time.” And there was the time he remarked, without the slightest outward irony, that after spending many hours studying game films seated between his receivers, Calvin and Fred, he “felt just like an Oreo cookie”— Whoaa, partner, ain’t the filling white?
Randall doesn’t see himself so much as a black man (if he sees himself as being black a
t all) as a celebrity. He has been a celebrity all his life. As a grade-schooler, he was Sam “Bam” Cunningham’s little brother, Sam being the best young athlete the city had produced. Randall and his other two older brothers would visit the USC Trojans’ locker room after Sam’s games, soaking up the atmosphere and collecting autographs and keepsakes from their collegiate heroes. Randall played Pop Warner football wearing an elbow pad signed by USC stars. By the time he was in junior high, living in the house Sam bought, he was the younger brother of a famous pro football player, and an emerging talent in his own right. As a senior, Randall quarterbacked the high-school football team to a 13—1 record, losing only in the finals of the regional championships. Grainy black-and-white films show a wiry boy lost in helmet and pads doing the same tricks that would later make him famous in the pros.
Within two years after that senior season, both of Randall’s parents would be dead (Mabel of cancer, Sam of a heart attack a year later). His older brothers had all moved on. Randall was swept up at this vulnerable point in his life by a tide of personal celebrity that he has been riding ever since. He was named starting quarterback at UNLV in his sophomore year, which made him an instant twenty-year-old celebrity in Glittertown, which loves its ramblin’ Rebels. The place suited him. There are two ways of earning status in Las Vegas— money and celebrity. And, it turns out, the kid from Santa Barbara is an exotic flower that only blooms under just those lights. Before he was out of school, he received a $3-million offer from the USFL (and was awarded a $650,000 breach-of-contract penalty when that fell through) before signing with the NFL for a somewhat smaller but still multimillion-dollar sum. He had been a celebrity all his life, and now he was a rich celebrity. If Randall belonged to a subculture, that was it—the Culture of Rich Celebrities, more particularly (in this still racially divided society) the Culture of Rich Black Celebrities. Hence the special Eric Dickerson, Michael Jackson, and Whitney Houston bedrooms in his house, the appearances on Arsenio Hall, his chummy ties with Boyz II Men, Jaleel White (TV’s Urkel), MTV’s and HBO’s “Downtown” Julie Brown, and an assortment of other best friends Randall collects like sequins on a tacky dinner jacket.