by Mark Bowden
Even God is a kind of celebrity best friend—top dog of the ultimate in exclusive clubs. In Randall’s book, he recounts how he was “saved” in ’87 at Spanish Trails, a posh golf course in Las Vegas. After Randall finished a round of eighteen holes with an old friend, as they were heading back out to the Benz, his friend asked, “Have you been saved?”
“What does being saved mean?” Randall asked.
His friend explained about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ the Lord. “Do you want to be saved?”
“How long will it take?”
The quarterback says that conversation kindled an interest in the Bible, where he found a never-ending source of parallels with his own situation. He began tithing 10 percent of his considerable earnings to his church, the fantastically fortunate St. John Baptist in Camden, New Jersey, where, needless to say, Randall became the ecclesiastic equivalent of an overnight sensation. He read that those who were saved, and led a righteous life, would enter the kingdom of heaven, where the streets are paved with gold—sure sounded like Randall’s kind of place.
The great thing about his celebrity best friends was, apart from sharing his status, they didn’t want anything from him. It was this precise quality, in fact, that first attracted Randall to South African dancer Felicity De Jager (pronounced “De-Yaga”). Well, actually, the first thing that attracted him to her was her beauty and celebrity. He met her after watching her perform as a featured dancer with the Dance Theatre of Harlem at a charity fund-raising banquet called “The Night of 100 Stars”—Randall’s kind of people. He was living with Rose and her boy at the time, but he asked to be introduced to Felicity backstage, and they began seeing each other whenever he was in New York City, according to the Scrambling One’s autobiography— “One of the first times we were together we went to the mall,” he says. “I’m a very generous person [got that?] and I like to buy my friends things—especially beautiful clothes. I saw this beautiful orange outfit and I asked Felicity to try it on. She looked so fine in it; she had it going ON!”
But Felicity refused to let him buy the dress. Thought Randall, “This is a very honest, beautiful, respectful person. She is a dancer, doing her own thing, and she doesn’t need me or my money.”
By the fall of ’92, as Randall’s quarterbacking is cooling off, his romance is heating up. Felicity has the thin, leggy look that Randall preferred (a reflection perhaps?) and shares his passion for high style. Most important, she has class, that is, she is, by virtue of her growing status in the chic dance world of New York City, a certified member in good standing of the Culture of Rich Black Celebrities. As for the Great Club of God and eventual residence in that city where the streets are paved with gold … well, Felicity had taken care of that. On her first visit to St. John Baptist with Randall this summer, she heard the preacher’s call and stepped lightly to the fore to pledge her soul. Leaving the church with her that day, hand in hand, with the congregation clapping for them, Randall says he decided to propose. All Felicity lacked was riches, and Randall could supply that. Late in the football season (Rose is back at work in the K-Mart beauty shop) he will announce his engagement to Felicity … where else? On Arsenio!
All this, the Cult of Self and Celebrity, has built a wall between him and his teammates higher than the one around his Fortress of Solitude. You can’t, for instance, get Randall on the phone. He is the only player on the Eagles’ roster who refuses to leave his home number with the team’s PR office. They get hold of him like everybody else, by leaving a message with his appointments secretary and waiting to see if he’ll call back—an iffy proposition at best. No one ever drops in on Randall; one is never quite sure where to find him. Randall, like royalty, awards petitioners audiences, so that even when you hung around with him “casually,” you felt like you were being indulged, and that you were on probation. Old teammates, childhood friends, even Randall’s brothers complained about this.
You could only approach him as an equal if you shared his celebrity status, or if you had as much money as he had—more money, of course, made you an object of his respect and genuine admiration. Randall conveyed his obsession with money and status in ways big and little. He would tease teammates about the kind of car they drove, the jackets they wore, their pants, sweaters, shoes—”Been shopping at K-Mart again, Andre?” When he teased his teammates he was just kidding, of course, but some of the guys took real offense. Each cute gibe was just another reminder—Hey, turkey, I’m richer than you are.
Randall has erected quite an elaborate edifice on the cornerstone of self. This off-season alone, he had worked on a pilot for new syndicated TV game show called “Scrambler,” endorsed a candy bar and snack-food line now being regionally marketed in his name (proceeds to charity), produced and starred in an hour-long prime-time TV interview program called “Randall Cunningham’s Celebrity Rap” (which featured, among other things, one of the all-time truly great suck-up interviews with best friend Donald Trump), helped promote a new line of leisure apparel called the Quarterback Club, backed by himself and several other starting NFL passers, posed for several national magazine covers, and managed his self-promotional business, Scrambler, Inc., which booked moneymaking public appearances and designed and marketed T-shirts, caps, and trinkets featuring Randall’s name or likeness. He spent many hours in the offices of Scrambler, Inc., signing mountains of memorabilia, surrounded by boxes and boxes of color portraits of himself, helmets, footballs, T-shirts, and so on. The office walls were decorated with blown-up images of himself. Even Randall’s charitable work was in part self-promotional, from the new youth center in Camden he helped build in memory of Jerome (Randall pictured at a gala groundbreaking, turning over the first shovel of dirt), to the $100,000 he dropped in the collection basket one Sunday at his Baptist church—word of which found its way into the newspapers the next day. If he donated money to buy pads for a local Moorestown little league football team, the team was featured on his in-season TV show, “The Randall Cunningham Show.” He would make a point of telling reporters that there were lots of other charities he helped support, but then decline to elaborate, citing biblical injunctions against drawing attention to your good works (which, of course, he had just done). He existed at the center of a thriving commercial cult of self, wherein virtually every act he performed outside the high monotonous walls of the Fortress of Solitude was in some way self-promotional.
If ego is the root of embarrassment, imagine the redwood of shame Randall shoulders out to the field in Texas Stadium for the second half of the Cowboys’ game. In his I’M BACK SCRAMBLING cap ($17.95), arms folded, for the entire second half, he watches Jimbo steer the offense through a seesaw battle with the Cowboys.
Jimmy Mac is playing well, doing what he does best, reading defenses, hanging in the pocket forever, taking hit after hit, but always pulling himself back to his feet, always moving the team downfield. God, how Richie likes this guy! They speak the same language. Randall is outside looking in as the head coach, Jimbo, Zeke, and David Archer huddle between series, comparing notes, planning strategy. And Richie isn’t hectoring Jim, he’s listening, nodding, agreeing … it’s a rapport Randall can only envy.
The score is tied 10—10 late in the third quarter, with the Cowboys deep on their own side of the field, when Reverend Reggie makes the fatal mistake. The defensive front is supposed to be performing a stunt, with ends Reggie and Clyde swinging inside the tackles and charging up the middle. It’s the perfect call for what the Cowboys have planned, too, because Dallas’s play is a draw to Emmitt Smith. If the stunt works right, Smith gets smothered by the two premier defensive ends in football. But Reggie doesn’t get the call, or he forgets, or whatever, because instead of swinging around inside, Reggie charges out to his left, which opens up a airplane hangar—sized door for Smith, who dances around gimpy Wes ten yards downfield and races forty-one more before Eric can catch him from behind and push him out-of-bounds. This sets up a field goal to give Dallas a lead th
at they don’t lose.
The final score, after the Cowboys add another touchdown, is 20—10. The fortunes of early October are reversed. Now the Cowboys own the spotlight, and their path to postseason seems as wide open as that hole Reggie offered Emmitt.
Meeting with the Pack immediately after the game, Richie doesn’t even wait to be asked about his quarterback move.
“I just thought that to have only one first down in the first half is to have your defense out there for too long,” he says. “It took its toll in the second half. I felt that we had to make a change, try to get something clicking…. Randall is still the starter.”
But that would change the next day. On the flight home, Richie changes his mind. He calls in Randall first thing in the morning and tells him Jim will start the following week against the Raiders.
“I’m going to start you again the following week,” the coach says, explaining how the week’s layoff should do him good, get the pressure off his shoulders … just the thing to shake off the slump. Randall isn’t even listening. He isn’t going to start next week? He, Randall Cunningham, the Weapon of the Nineties, the Michael Jordan of the NFL—second string? He leaves the coach’s office without saying a word.
What’s there to say? It’s Richie’s call. But the decision to bench Randall isn’t just a simple personnel move, it pulls the plug on a ten-thousand-watt flashing beacon every bit as gaudy and grand as any marquee along the Strip. Who buys the second-string quarterback’s candy bar? T-shirt? Cap? Autographed portrait? Football card? Jersey? Sweater? Jacket? How many second-string quarterbacks sit across the couch from Arsenio? Interview Donald Trump? Dance with “Downtown” Julie Brown? Who watches the second-string quarterback’s weekly TV show?
For Randall, this is a crisis of soul.
HE MAY BE a hothouse flower that blooms only under the lights of money and fame, but Randall is also a revolutionary.
Pro football has become a conservative game. “You can’t reinvent the wheel” is a favorite coachly saying at the pro level—Richie says it all the time. “There are no geniuses in this game” is another—Richie says this a lot, too. Football attracts conservatives. Maybe it’s the martial parallel. The Game is chocked with Silverbacks, men for whom the old rules of Western culture work. Flamingly creative souls simply do not end up coaching football teams. And the Pigskin Priesthood turns already conservative men into overmentored, blindered traditionalists. Money and hype nurture this natural hidebound bent by investing every season, even every game, with such career significance for both player and coach that no one dares fail magnificently. With only one or two exceptions, the tenure of a High Priest is no longer charted in eras, it’s measured from year to year. And when the cost of failure is high, daring dies. There hasn’t been a dramatic offensive innovation in the game since Eddie Cochems introduced the forward pass at St. Louis University in 1906. Sure, the monks still tinker with the fundamental offensive scheme, a few teams have gone recently to a heavy passing strategy (the run and shoot, or what Buddy Ryan contemptuously calls the chuck-and-duck), and Marchibroda has the Bills hustling through a no-huddle attack, but the game is played week to week with offense and defense lining up in the same basic ways, running the same timeworn play sheet of twenty or so runs and passes, both teams armed with careful, computer-assisted analyses of tendencies and percentages. On the sidelines, Coach no longer thinks in terms of How can we fake these sumbitches out of their shoes? He thinks something more like Okay, it’s third and long, we have an 85 percent tendency to throw, 15 percent tendency to draw, they blitz 30 percent of the time in this situation, they didn’t blitz last time, we ran the draw last time, so they’ll most likely be coming after the quarterback expecting us to throw, so…. College football still offers Bobby Bowden’s trick plays, which he calls “Rooskies,” and foolhardy acts of derring-do, but the pros have become careful to excess. It’s almost a lock that each Super Bowl, the most heavily scripted contest of the year, will be dull as a commencement address at a college of podiatry. Caution has fashioned a straitjacket for the Game.
In this world, Randall is a subversive. Writers have dubbed him “Quarterback of the Future,” but Randall is really a throwback. With his flair for thinking and throwing on the run, he has more in common with Walter Camp’s college boys than today’s pros. The kneejerk, racist interpretation of Randall is that he is more athletic than strategic, but, in fact, his skills are both mental and physical. He has a genius for football. He is a scat singer busting out of a Gregorian chant. He is intuitive, not analytical; spontaneous, not programmed; inspired, not predictable—he’s right brain to the NFL’s left brain, in short, a breath of fresh air.
Philadelphia fans who caught their first glimpses of him in action in his rookie year, making atrocious blunders and amazing moves, couldn’t get enough of him. His presence on the field meant something unexpected and, hence, exciting was going to happen. In his pro debut, a preseason game against the Jets, Randall threw six passes and completed three and took off with the ball five times, gaining eightysix yards. Teammate John Spagnola, a veteran tight end, saw right off that this kid had a different way of doing quarterback—”He took a very sophisticated position and narrowed it down. … If the receiver is covered, he just takes off and runs fifty yards. Maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about strong and weak zones and everything else.”
Indeed! If Randall is a round peg, then fix the square hole! Why not scrap your traditional offensive schemes and come up with something wild and different, something that exploits Randall’s strengths and protects his weaknesses, something on the order of Marchibroda’s no-huddle system but even more drastic? Why not breathe real inspiration into the well-ordered recipe of the game? Why not a new offense that would be maddeningly difficult for the crusty defenses of the NFL to dissect, anticipate, and stop? Send Randall in on fourth and long and let defenses figure out what to do against a player who can kick the ball sixty yards, throw it sixty or longer, or just take off running that far? Confuse them! Tie them in knots! Randallize them! How many times does a player with this mix of talents come along? The traditionalists are always asking How many different ways can you use eleven men to advance a football against eleven other men? Well, who the hell knew? Try something different! What’s the worst that can happen?
Of course, the worst that can happen is you lose a whole peck of football games and get fired. Not just you, but the whole coaching staff, maybe even the front office. To attempt something bold and new demands trial and error, maybe several seasons’ worth. Even the forward pass had a hard time breaking into the repertory of pro football. Despite the immediate success it brought Cochems’s St. Louis squad, which trounced all comers, including much higher-ranked teams, it was received the way brilliant new ideas have been down through the ages—established coaches ignored it for years. Most monks in the pro temple sniffed at Randall’s college numbers. Maybe he could play the game that way in college, but not in the pros.
The other way was to try to make the round peg square.
The Eagles hired Sid Gillman, the most famous of NFL quarterback gurus, to tutor the wunderkind in his rookie season, and Gillman got fed up. Randall would listen intently in the classroom, ask questions, argue fine points of strategy, and then, on the field, the moment the ball was snapped—presto—the plan went out the window. Failure didn’t seem to bother Randall at all. He seemed to have been born with a gift for the that’s in the past mantra. No matter how lopsided the score, no matter how deep the hole, young Randall never lost heart. With him it was always The next play, I’ll make something happen.
“I don’t believe this guy studies,” Gillman complained one day to Harry. “I give him film to study. I tell him, do that, do this … and he doesn’t do it.”
Harry said that was a pretty serious allegation, maybe the young quarterback was just a slow learner. Maybe he had a hard time remembering things. Gillman said, no, Randall is as intelligent as they come. It wasn’t that he coul
dn’t learn the material, he wouldn’t. It just didn’t seem important enough to him. And Gillman set out to prove his charge. He inserted a torn slip of paper inside a roll of game film and gave it to Randall to take home and study overnight. If Randall played the film, the slip would drop out. When the quarterback returned the film, the old coach unrolled it at his desk, and out floated the slip.
Gillman was gone with the rest of Marion Campbell’s coaching staff at the end of Randall’s rookie season, when Buddy took over. And Buddy was, more by default than design, the perfect head coach for Randall. As a defensive coach, Buddy saw Randall’s combination of skills for what they were, a defense’s nightmare. The kid had the damnedest talent Buddy had ever seen. There was no telling what he was going to do when he got hold of the ball. Buddy brought in Doug Scovil, a laid-back, rangy old quarterback who had been Buddy’s boss years before at the University of the Pacific. Scovil worked with Randall on his throwing motion, helping him to quicken his release of the ball, but he deemphasized all the classroom work on reading defenses and bought heavily into the revolutionary aspects of the kid’s game. Buddy’s plan was to assemble the best defense the NFL had ever seen and give Randall the ball on offense. It didn’t bother Buddy if Randall fell on his face nine out of ten times, so long as the quarterback gave him “five big plays a game.” Buddy wasn’t that concerned about developing a powerful offensive line, because the way Randall could move around with the ball, defenses didn’t dare risk the temporary mayhem of an all-out rush. Buddy used the draft to acquire Keith Jackson, Keith Byars, and Anthony Toney, big men who could throw a block when Randall took off, but who were also skilled pass catchers, giving Randall additional targets. Ted Plumb developed the game plan, which served as a kind of rough outline, the chord changes over which Randall extemporized. Scovil’s job was to pat Randall’s ego, especially when things went awry. “Don’t worry about it,” Doug would say. “You’re the best. You’re the man.”