Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  And he’s damned unlikely to check.

  THE EAGLES ARE ENTERING the pivotal months of the season. Winter is the endurance test, the gun lap, when just about every player on every roster is nursing some nagging injury, when cold hardens the plastic turf (“It’s like playing on concrete with a bedsheet pulled over it,” says Dave Alexander), and every game is a test of will and stamina.

  Richie’s squad has a respectable 6—4 record, even with Randall’s struggles, and is relatively healthy. Andre is back on his feet, limping around the locker room and predicting a return of the Dré Master in time for the play-offs, which is his way of urging his teammates to make the damn play-offs. Wes nurses his knee all week, then hobbles out to play and reinjures it every weekend. He plays until the pain gets bad. Each game the pain comes sooner. It needs surgery, but Wes knows what it’s like to be a ghost, and he isn’t going back if he can help it. At this point, he knows if he sits down, he may never get back in the game. Seth is playing with that brace on his left knee. Ron Heller is limping around on a very sore strained arch in his left foot. Antone Davis has what they call turf toe. “I don’t know what it is, it just hurts like hell,” he says. But compared with other teams, they’re in relatively good shape. They’ve only lost two starters.

  Nevertheless, they’re floundering. They are lost in Yo-yo-ville, up and down, up and down—a loss to Washington, a win against Phoenix, a loss to Dallas, a win against L.A., a loss to Green Bay…. If it continues, they could finish out of the running.

  They’ve squandered their early fortune by losing four of their last six, but in four of the remaining six games they’re favorites. The first of these supposed mismatches is in Giants Stadium, a concrete wind tunnel set out in the northern New Jersey swamp. It comes on a cold, gloomy afternoon, so socked in with fog and rain that you can’t even see the low-flying jets coming and going from Newark International Airport next door.

  The Giants have begun to self-destruct. Their head coach, Ray Handley, inherited the great team Bill Parcells had nursed to one last Super Bowl on the last legs of proud veterans. It’s now a mix of disgruntled old-timers and raw talent, with many of the former taking potshots at the coach on TV and in the papers, and the latter making mistakes on the field. All week the national Pack has billed this game the Battle of the Malcontents, flipping back and forth between clips of Lawrence Taylor calling his coaches and teammates quitters, Seth ripping Richie’s play calling, Pepper Johnson saying he’s going to ignore the game plan, Fred Barnett saying “If I were calling the plays, it’d be different.”

  With forty-seven men on the roster, the personality of any football team is far more diverse and multifaceted than any of the caricatures drawn by the Pack. All through this season, with its rabbitlike 4-0 start, then its rocky midterm, the most visible drama has been between its disgruntled defense and its struggling, mercurial offense, with Seth and Randall playing the lead roles. But not all the true leaders of this team are obvious. The undergirding of any team is its cadre of grunts. Most of these players, old-timers eking out one season at a time and youngsters hoping for a shot at a starting job, are herded into special teams, the men who take the field for kickoffs, punts, and extra points. On the Eagles, the king of special teams is Ken Rose, and it’s Ken, on this saturated Sunday in the New Jersey swamp, who will pick up this squabbling, uneven football team and point it back toward the play-offs.

  Ken took some grief when he reported for work in the Eagles’ locker room in November of ’90. Mostly it was the thick, black ponytail, which hangs a good foot or more down the center of his back.

  “Whooo-hoo! Who’s this?” shouted Jerome, as Ken paced across the room for the first time, carrying his gear to his locker.

  “Love the tail!”

  “Ain’t that sweet!”

  “Where’d they get this one?”

  But any who felt Ken Rose might be intimidated for one second had a lot to learn.

  He makes a striking appearance even without the ponytail. His skin is so black that in a certain light it has a bluish sheen, and his hair, instead of the tight black curls of African inheritance, is thick and wavy—freed of the ponytail, it hangs down past his shoulders. There is a hint of aboriginal Australian in Ken’s face, but his features are leaner and smaller. When he smiles, beneath his thick mustache the grin seems too large for the face, with a row of oversized teeth broken only by a gap between the top front incisors.

  Ken is one of the few intellectuals in the locker room, with eclectic reading habits that range from comic books to serious nonfiction— just now he’s lugging A History of the Moors on road trips. Ken is the team’s liberal conscience. He spent a good part of this season trying, without much success, to persuade his teammates to vote for Bill Clinton. But given that the Democratic presidential candidate was talking about soaking the wealthy, that is, those earning more than $200,000 a year, it’s a little bit like trying to sell speed bumps at a NASCAR convention.

  “Who are you going to vote for, Mike?” a hound asks polite, sweet defensive lineman Mike Pitts one morning, within earshot of Ken.

  “I’m votin’ for Jesse,” says Pitts.

  “Jesse Jackson?”

  “He’s my man.”

  “Mike,” says Ken, looking up at the giant, “Jesse Jackson isn’t running for president this year.”

  “I knew that.”

  “Don’t you want to make your vote count?”

  “Yeah. Well, I guess I’ll be voting for George Bush then.”

  “George Bush!” says Ken, half-agitated and half-amused. “Now you tell me how in hell a man can have Jesse Jackson as his first choice and George Bush as his second choice? That doesn’t make any sense at all, Mike!”

  Pitts gives a pained little frown, as if to say Jesus, how did I get into this?

  “I just don’t feel like I can trust Clinton,” the lineman says, apologetically.

  “You can’t trust Clinton? Hell, Bush and Reagan have been running this country now for almost twelve years, you know what the people can expect from them!”

  Ken’s secular humanism polices Reverend Reggie’s fundamentalism by pouncing whenever it strays too far from provable fact. For instance, when Reggie confidently asserts that federally funded abortions are a government plot to eliminate the black poor, Ken will jump in with the fact that most abortions performed in America are performed on women from the middle and upper classes and that black women are not using the procedure disproportionate to their numbers in the general population. “If anything, poor black women are the ones more inclined to have their babies!” he says. This kind of exchange, of course, prompts a heated round of sociological and theological posturing, which sends both Ken and Reggie home vowing to produce indisputable data to back up their assertions. It makes their teammates giggle.

  Ken played on the same team at UNLV as Randall, whom he remembers arriving as a stripling—”He was obviously gifted, but so immature he was clumsy.” The door to the pros opened for Ken only after five years of determined effort. He played for one season on the wide fields of the Canadian Football League with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, another for the USFL’s Tampa Bay Bandits, and he tried and tried, without success, at NFL camps. He was cut five times by NFL teams. He never once considered giving up.

  The door opened for him at long last when the NFL players went on strike. Ken got a hurried call from New York the night the players walked, and he jumped. He had knocked his helmet up against the unfairness of the system for so long that he had no sympathy whatsoever for the striking regulars—they were just guys who’d gotten a break he hadn’t. Playing with a ragtag crew of wanna-bes, before disinterested and surly fans, Ken Rose finally played a pro football game, in Giants Stadium, on October 4, 1987. The Jets’ scab team lost, lost again the following week, and then beat the Dolphins’ irregulars in an exciting game (quarterback Pat Ryan threw four touchdown passes). Bud Carson, then the Jets’ defensive coordinator, and Larry Pasquale, the spe
cial teams coach, finally got a chance to see that Ken, who was considered too short at six feet, and too small at two hundred pounds, played like a Tasmanian devil, hard and fast. He was the star on defense for the replacement team. When the Jets invited about a dozen scab players to stay on when the regular players returned, Ken was among them.

  Scorned by the regular roster players, Ken and the other remnants of the scab team were ejected from the Jets’ regular locker room and assigned space in a racquetball court at the Jets’ training center in Hempstead, New York. With no lockers, they hung their clothes on rolling metal coat racks and deposited their gear in a heap on the wooden floor. The coach had promised to give them a shot at making the team in earnest, but for Ken and the others, it felt as if they were marking time, satisfying some club need to proffer at least a display of loyalty toward the players who had crossed those ugly picket lines and upheld the NFL banner. A bond developed among the guys in that room, and Ken, a hardened veteran of exclusion, became a leader. His undying faith in himself was infectious. Just having him around made the other guys feel like … well, maybe it was possible, despite everything. When defensive lineman Scott Mersereau became the first of their number to be invited to join the regular squad, there were handshakes and backslaps all around, and Scott moved his gear out of the racquetball court and into the locker room. Ken was invited next, only he refused to move. He kept his gear right there on the wooden floor, in a heap.

  “I’m stayin’ with my boys,” he told Pasquale.

  Ken stuck. In ’88, when injuries felled one defensive end after another, at the end of the season Bud placed Ken—the man considered too small to play linebacker—at one end of the Jets’ defensive line. In just two games, Ken, looking like a hyperkinetic midget alongside the behemoths lined up to block him, sacked the quarterback five times—three times in a December 12 game against the Giants. But even a performance like that wasn’t enough to break down the rigid job specs of today’s highly specialized NFL. As soon as a less productive but larger, more appropriately sized player was healthy enough to play again, Ken went back to his role on special teams.

  And there he stayed, with the Jets (’87-’90), Browns (with Bud for the first six games of ’90), and then the Eagles. Ken has never lost his conviction that he can play linebacker (or defensive end) with the best of them, but he’s a realist. At age thirty, after all this time in the league, he knows he’s pigeonholed but good. So Ken has applied his remarkable will and intelligence to mastering special teams.

  He never laments his backup status. Ken radiates a serene joy, the pleasure of someone who made his life’s dream come true. It makes him steady as a structural pile. Over these five and a half seasons, he’s become one of the best special teams players in the league. He jokes about being a blue-collar guy, and it’s true in a sense—compared with veterans of comparable experience on the roster he’s making a lot less. But $257,000 is hardly a blue-collar wage. Ken and his wife have built themselves a spacious, sunny hillside home in Thousand Oaks, and among the relatively small circle of game cognoscenti who appreciate the subtleties and importance of special teams, he’s a legitimate star. He is one of a handful of kicking-team specialists in the running for the Pro Bowl every year. He hasn’t made it yet, but once Ken sets a goal …

  Through all the high drama of the Eagles’ up-and-down ’92 season, the running-back controversies, quarterback controversies, coaching controversies, Ken Rose just quietly goes about his work. Just last week, Reverend Reggie lamented to a TV reporter, “Since I’ve been in Philadelphia, it’s the most negative atmosphere I’ve ever been around.” But none of that touches Ken. The Pack hardly ever bothers with him, though he’s one of the most intelligent and friendly voices on the team. Ken is looking forward to this week’s contest in New York because he still gets excited about big games, and he still has fond, fond memories of Giants Stadium—showing that broad, gap-toothed grin, remembering his breakthrough games with the Jets, his three sacks of Phil Simms, he says, “Good things always happen to me there.”

  Only, on this monsoonlike day, it doesn’t start off that way. Veteran kick returner Vai Sikahema, the Eagles’ sage little return man, springs a forty-one-yard punt return late in the first quarter that sets up the team’s first touchdown of the game, but Roger Ruzek, the kicker, boots the extra point wide right. It’s an important point, because the Giants had jumped out to a 10-0 lead. Without the extra point, ordinarily a routine thing, the Eagles can’t catch up with a field goal. Ruzek comes off the field muttering to himself, “How can I miss that?”

  But that setback is nothing compared with what happens next. Ruzek kicks off to the Giants’ return man Dave Meggett, and Meggett races ninety-two yards for a touchdown, water splashing up from the heels of his flying cleats. Ninety-two yards! This is the worst, the worst. With that one stroke, the Giants are up 17—6, and special teams, which have played so well all season for the Eagles, are suddenly guilty of the worst kind of incompetence.

  “My God!” screams Larry Pasquale, Richie’s former associate with the Jets who now coaches special teams for the Eagles. He’s pacing the sidelines shouting to himself, “How could he possibly run through eleven guys? How can this happen? This can’t happen! Eleven guys?”

  Pasquale is one of the league’s premier special teams gurus; his squads have routinely led the league in statistical measures, with the Jets, Chargers, and now with the Eagles. He hasn’t had anyone return a kickoff against one of his teams for a touchdown in more than ten years. It is almost a rule of faith among special teams experts that such things just don’t happen to a well-coached squad. They happen precisely because many teams fail to adequately coach their kicking teams, because there are still those among the twenty-eight NFL head coaches—yea, the very High Priests of the Game—who prefer to wing it on kickoffs and punts. It’s people like Larry, and his field captain Ken, who are busy proving the importance of coaching in this neglected aspect of the game. Now this! It isn’t just a serious blow to the Eagles’ chances in this game, it is a blow to everything Larry and Ken stand for.

  Ken knows how it happened. The way Larry has designed the runback defense, the team sprints downfield when the ball is kicked, fanning out toward the sidelines and then converging toward the return man when he catches the ball. Roger’s kick this time was higher and shorter than usual, and it hung up in the air for a long time. So the timing was off. The tackling wedge converged too deep, so when Meggett caught the ball, they were all racing to a point just behind him. With Meggett’s quickness, all he had to do was dodge one or two lunging tacklers and sprint the rest of the way downfield.

  When Ken comes off the field, he’s the focus of the team’s discontent. Larry is staring glumly at the ground.

  “Kenny, you’ve got to get special teams going!” pleads Richie.

  Ken feels personally responsible. He’d been one of the first to overrun Meggett. He knows why it happened, and he also knows there’s no excuse.

  Seth, Clyde, and some of the other defensive players come over now to vent their anger.

  “Come on, Kenny, play some fuckin’ football!”

  “What went on?”

  “What happened?”

  When Ken first joined the Eagles, this was one of the things he liked about the team. Every other team he had ever played for relied exclusively on Coach for motivation. The players were like children, in a sense, and Coach was the father. When players screwed up, they would huddle together on the bench muttering to one another, waiting for Coach to come over and blow his stack. But on this team, players blew their stack at each other! It was a way of doing things that had started under Buddy, and it was one of the things the Eagles’ players meant when they said they appreciated how Buddy had treated them like men. Buddy had created an atmosphere in which every player expected the most out of his teammates and had every right to criticize anyone on the team who wasn’t shouldering his load. Seth was, of course, the world’s foremost disciple
of this approach and had taken it to such bitter lengths that some of the guys were starting to question its wisdom. Ken still thinks it’s a healthy thing, although being on the receiving end of it now isn’t too pleasant.

  He calls together some of his teammates after comparing notes with Larry and gives them a pep talk.

  “Look, screw those guys,” says Ken, referring to the offensive and defensive starters (although a few of them are also part of the special teams squad). Ken notes that Seth and the others never come over to congratulate them when they do well. “Fuck them … Who the fuck do they think they are?”

  Seth helps turn things around a few minutes later, pouncing on a short pass to Meggett, catching it and outracing everyone (knee brace and all) forty-three yards for a touchdown. Randall then leads a nifty eight-play, fifty-two-yard drive for a second touchdown, and the score is tied when the halftime gun sounds.

  Randall comes into the locker room complaining because Richie had instructed him to toss up a Hail Mary pass toward the end zone in the closing seconds of the half, which was intercepted. Such things put dents in a quarterback’s stats.

  “Man, I’m sick to death of hearing about your stats,” shouts Fred. “We’re not out there playing for you! This is a team, Randall … a team!”

  In his corner of the room, huddled with Ken and the other special teams guys, Larry says, “They got the big one. We’ve got to get a big one of our own.”

  And, indeed, Vai opens the second half with a thirty-eight-yard kickoff return, setting up another Eagles touchdown. That return, along with two other nifty runbacks by Vai in the first half, starts Larry thinking. Veteran backup safety William Frizzell had come off the field after a Giants punt late in the second half with a small piece of intelligence.

  “They’re not blocking that long,” he said.

  Punt blocks are one of the rarest of big plays in football, almost as rare as a kickoff or punt return for a touchdown. The kicker stands so far back from the line of scrimmage, and the penalty for bumping him is so severe, that most teams on most punts make only a token effort to block the kick. What Frizzell’s intelligence tells Larry is that the Giants’ punt team has grown so wary of Vai’s returns, they are becoming complacent. They are hurrying their blocks in order to get a fast break downfield to corral Vai.