Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  Actually, Reggie’s own motives are more complex.

  Jesus Christ is his first motivation. Fame and fortune offer Reggie a platform to broadcast his fundamentalist faith, a solemn responsibility to spread the Word and save souls. Family is Reggie’s second motivation. Born the bastard son of an itinerant semipro baseball player, raised in a well-kept Chattanooga housing project by his grandmother (and, when they were around, by a mother and an alcoholic stepfather), mindful of the crisis in black families and in family values in general, Reggie is devoted to his own wife and two children and determined to provide not only for them, but for “my children’s children’s children.” Pride is a third motivation—not blind Luciferian ego, but a determination to live up to his personal goals, to that God-given potential. With all the gifts he has been given, Reggie, in all the years he has been playing football, has yet to play on a championship team. He sees it as his one piece of unfinished business as an athlete and feels time running out for him. Love is the final motivation. Reggie has come to love his teammates, particularly Buddy’s Boys on defense. He has been around long enough to realize how unique is the bond that Buddy gave them, and how unlikely it is that any of them will find it again. Buddy’s firing, Jerome’s death, and the coming whirlwind of free agency will destroy all that. Beyond this season, ’92 (the number on his jersey—a coincidence or a sign?), Reggie knows that for this group, his Team, there will not be another chance.

  And he knows he bears some responsibility for its dissolution. Reggie doesn’t doubt that he has done the right thing, but in being the first to really challenge Norman, he helped stir the enmity most Eagles players feel toward the owner and management. In pursuing personal freedom in the football marketplace, he had played a key role in breaking down the gates. So this season, all of Reggie’s dreams are centered foursquare: Christian empire, family dynasty, career goal, and his love for Team. To all this, Jerome’s death has added a painful urgency, a reminder that chances run out. Reggie doesn’t just want to go to the Super Bowl this year; he needs to go; he intends to go.

  How can he express all these things? Reggie doesn’t really try. To the never-ending parade of newshounds looking for a quote or sound bite he nearly always utters the expected thing. “The only important thing is to win,” he’ll say, or “We just have to make it work some kind of way,” or “We all are just going to have to stay focused and play harder.” To his teammates he’ll invoke the name of Jerome, point out that they won’t be getting another chance to go all the way together, and he has even spoken once or twice this season about his personal ambition to get a championship ring. Once a week he leads a Bible study group, practicing his ministry, trying to educate his teammates to the larger issues and responsibilities that absorb him, and lead them down the path of righteousness. But few of those who play with Reggie or write about him or comment on him nearly every day in the local media fully grasp the broader outline of the man. Reggie works on keeping first things first. He knows the foundation of his own success and goals is football, and each week during the season, that’s where he keeps his focus. He knows that on the football field all that matters is hard work and divine favor. He delivers the former, week in and week out, and, for the latter … well, his whole life is a prayer.

  Reggie concedes his physical gifts are not his doing. “I did not make myself six-five and three hundred pounds,” he says. As a baby he was the size of a toddler, and as a grade-schooler, he looked like a teen. His mother, Thelma Collier, says she had to produce a birth certificate whenever she went to sign her second son up for sports, otherwise coaches wouldn’t believe his age. He was also clumsy. Other children made fun of his splayfooted gait. They called him Big Foot and Goofy, and Reggie responded with Goliathan fits of anger.

  With his mother and stepfather, Leonard Collier, with whom Reggie did not get along, he lived in the predominantly white, middleclass Chattanooga neighborhood of St. Elmo, but Reggie also lived much of the time with his grandmother Mildred Dodds (including an entire year when his mother moved with Leonard to Kansas and left her children behind). Asked to describe his childhood influences, Reggie will first name his grandmother. It was with Mildred that Reggie was exposed to Christianity. Mildred had two uncles of whom she was exceedingly proud who were Presbyterian ministers, and she faithfully attended a local Presbyterian church. The congregation was virtually all black, but the pastor was white. He ran programs for children, including hiking trips into the Appalachians. Reggie remembers the hikes, and talks with the minister, and his grandmother’s strong faith, but recalls no blinding moment of revelation and Christian conversion, just an early and growing conviction that God was close by, calling him to a Christian life. It was like a tune he started hearing faintly as a child, and the volume grew slowly and steadily as the years went by. Coming up to bat in a baseball game at about age ten, Reggie remembers “testing” God by praying for a home run, and then hitting one … and feeling the warm breath of the divine down his neck as he rounded the bases. He was thirteen when a group of young evangelists knocked on his door, and he began studying the Bible with them. It was 1974, a time when there was a surge in youthful Pentecostal fervor all over America, and young Reggie got saved.

  That’s when he realized his life was set apart. He began carrying a Bible with him everywhere and confronting his classmates with the Word. He would preach his first sermon at age seventeen, before a congregation of ministers at St. John Baptist Church, and his family. His mother, who had never especially encouraged her son’s evangelical calling, had to wonder at the young giant behind the lectern, wonder where he came from, and what had shaped him. It was hard not to see the hand of God in it. Indeed, Thelma believes she saw him at that moment bathed in an unearthly light. At school, he was regarded as a square and a freak, Bible-thumping Big Foot trying to save souls on the playground. He tried marijuana once, he says, and claims (not the first by any means) to have heard the voice of God. Only Reggie’s voice warned him that if he continued to use drugs, he would die. His lapse into vice merely redoubled his fervor … and the ridicule by his classmates.

  Sports became not just an outlet for Reggie’s exuberant athleticism, but an avenue toward acceptance. His size and strength made him intimidating, but his conversion had mellowed him. Reggie prided himself on his self-control, on his ability to keep his once-furious temper in check. To his coaches, he seemed like a big ol’ nice Sundayschool boy, more interested in making a good impression on his opponents than leaving his cleat prints on their backs. Robert Pulliam, the high-school football coach and a former high-school all-American football player himself, set about trying to toughen up his potential superstar.

  Playing pickup basketball with Reggie and some other boys after school, the coach says, he went out of his way to rough the kid up: “I elbowed him, pushed him around, abused him.” At first, his tactics did nothing but alienate Reggie. The school’s athletic director complained to Pulliam about it, afraid it might accomplish nothing but chase the kid away from sports. Pulliam kept throwing elbows—”I was going to rile that kid up if it was the last thing I ever did.” During a break in one session, the coach recalls, “Reggie looked over at me with big teary eyes, a real pitiful look.”

  “If you expect me to apologize to you, you had better get ready for your next whipping.”

  Reggie remembers rising to the occasion in a student-faculty basketball game, a different sort of conversion experience.

  “I was determined I was going to rough him up more than he roughed me up,” Reggie later told an interviewer. “I remember I knocked him on the floor a few times.”

  “From that day on,” says Pulliam, “he was a holy terror.”

  Reggie had arrived at his own muscular brand of Christianity. “Christ is no wimp,” he says. Reggie found that the respect he earned from his peers on the football field and basketball court carried over to the classroom and campus. People didn’t necessarily line up to follow him, he still had a lot to lear
n about preaching, but the ridicule stopped. Reggie was like some mammoth, unstoppable force of nature. His convictions enhanced his stature. Years later, Reggie would perfect this synthesis of sports stardom and religious faith when he learned how much strength it took for someone rich and famous to lead a godly life. In his preaching now, at age thirty-one, he would exhort his listeners, “It takes a man to be a Christian and it takes a woman to be a Christian.” He would shout it out like a challenge.

  It was the PR department at the University of Tennessee who dubbed him “the Minister of Defense,” and where he laid the foundation for his future wealth and stardom. But Reggie remembers his college years as a time when he was led astray. In violation of NCAA rules, he accepted gifts from sports-program boosters and sold his allotments of season tickets to raise spending money, and then later lied about it in an affidavit when the association investigated. He neglected his studies, failed to get his degree, and failed to make the most of his considerable intellect. Reggie says he got caught up in a syndrome he calls the Self-Proclaimed Athlete, by which he means he misplaced his Pentecostal perspective; he lost his humility, giving himself credit for his amazing feats on the football field instead of using his God-given stature to shout the name of the Lord. He began to doubt his own calling, recognizing in his youthful fervor a desire to draw attention to himself, to earn praise and recognition for himself. Now he had more praise and recognition than he could have ever dreamed. He didn’t have to work at it especially. He was Reggie White, the football star.

  It was during this period when he met Sara, at church. She was a student at East Tennessee State and filled with the evangelical spirit that had long been Reggie’s spur. She was a slight woman of uncommon beauty and poise, and to Reggie, who had grown up seeing himself as an oversized oaf, she was such a prize that for nearly two years he couldn’t bring himself to mention his feelings. Instead, he volunteered to help with her Christian work. During that time they exchanged letters and saw each other as coworkers in the Campus Crusade for Christ. It wasn’t until Reggie’s senior year, when he was one of the most sought-after college players in the country, that they acknowledged romance. When the USFL offered Reggie a $3 million contract to play five years for their Memphis Showboats, Sara transferred to Memphis State to be with him. They were married in January of ’85.

  Reggie played two seasons for the Showboats, including eighteen games in ’85 before he jumped the sinking USFL ship and signed with the Eagles. He played thirteen more games that year with the NFL. His arrival in the higher-profile league, along with his new $1.6 million, four-year contract with the Eagles (who had paid an additional $1 million to the Showboats to buy out the remainder of Reggie’s contract), immediately placed him with Wes Hopkins and other Eagles stars at the top of the pro game. But at the same time Reggie reached this peak in his career, he was embroiled in crisis in his personal life and faith. Part of the Self-Proclaimed Athlete syndrome involved, of course, the Sis-Boom-Bimbos, to whose attractions even the Minister of Defense was not immune. He refers to the experience now only as “a dark time, a hard time.”

  “In the same way I had to learn about marijuana, I had to learn that if I wasn’t careful about women, they would destroy me,” he says. “I didn’t know nothin’ about AIDS then, but I knew that if I wasn’t careful about women, I was going to die. If I wasn’t a born-again Christian, I’d probably right now be divorced, I’d have left my children … I’d have gotten involved in all kind of mess.”

  At roughly the same time, there were revelations about his role in NCAA rules violations back at Tennessee. Reggie came clean publicly. His revelations, along with others, landed his alma mater’s football program on probation.

  He grew through these ordeals. He salvaged his marriage and felt he had rediscovered the deeper source and purpose of his success. It made his coming battle with the Philadelphia Eagles, and eventually the whole NFL, something akin to a personal crusade.

  “Everything with Reggie is personal,” says his agent, Jim Sexton. “It’s not just business. It’s personal.”

  Reggie’s feud with Norman started two years after the defensive end joined the team, during the strike. Reggie was in the front ranks of the strikers, a veritable symbol of what a joke the scab games were— reminding the fans that what they were paying to see in the NFL was, after all, not just football, but the best. And just as Norman, the relatively novice owner, took the players’ strike and fans’ support (along with the tacit endorsement of city police) as a personal affront, Reggie saw the matter through his own rigid religious and moral prism. What the owners were trying to do, in Reggie’s eyes, was akin to perpetuating slavery. What you had was an all-white, wealthy club of owners exploiting the God-given talents of their players, who were mostly black. The League as slave plantation was a hard sell publicly, given the $600,000 or so Reggie himself would make that year, but it made sense to the players, who could see in the escalating salaries of unrestricted baseball players something like their true worth. They were, after all, the attraction. Reggie lent a moral righteousness to the picket line that rubbed Norman the wrong way. What the owner saw was a rabble of overpaid, egomaniacal young athletes who owed their wealth and fame to the marketing genius and capital of men like himself. In any showdown of who needed each other more, the League had the clear upper hand. The strike was a failure, but it crystallized Reggie’s understanding of his own value and ambition. What he and the other players had failed to accomplish collectively, Reggie set out to accomplish for himself.

  He established himself quickly as the premier defensive player in the league. He had twenty-one quarterback sacks in the strike season, the second-highest total in league history, and he’d done it in just twelve games. He started in the Pro Bowl for the second time (he’d been the game’s MVP in ’86). And yet Reggie’s contract, to which he was bound for another full season, didn’t even place his salary among the top-thirty defensive linemen in the game. The Eagles, to their credit, recognized the disparity and sat down in January of ’88 to renegotiate. But when Reggie reviewed the old contract with his agent, he was shocked to discover how little of it he had properly understood. He learned that the $1 million insurance policy the team had taken out on him at the signing didn’t name Sara and his son as beneficiaries, it named the team! And he discovered that the four-year contract gave the Eagles an option (Norman was always good with options on the back end) for a fifth year at just 10 percent salary increase.

  Of course, Reggie had signed the thing. He bore ultimate responsibility for what he had failed to recognize or understand. But on this count, Reggie had another beef. Back in ’85, he had been represented by a stylish former corporate public relations man named Patrick Forté, who, just months after the deal was done, was hired by Norman as an assistant to club president Harry Gamble. Put together the insurance policy, the fifth-year option, and the hire, and Reggie smelled conspiracy. He remembered, he said, a point in the negotiations at which the owner had told Forté, “When this is over, there’s a job for you here.”

  Harry was mortified at the suggestion that he and the club had misled Reggie. He had been completely candid about the $1 million insurance policy, he argued. The Eagles had coughed up $1 million to buy out the Memphis Showboats’ contract, a rare and unusual expenditure. None of the Eagles’ player contracts was guaranteed, so if Reggie was seriously hurt, killed, or otherwise incapacitated in something other than a football-related event, the contract was over. Reggie’s $1.6 million was something he would earn over four seasons, game by game. Not so the $1 million buyout. Reggie could die in a plane crash the next day, and the Eagles would be out a cool mil. So Harry had done the prudent thing; he’d insured the club’s investment in the athlete. Was it his fault that Reggie hadn’t understood? As for hiring Forté, he was a talented and experienced black executive, and everybody in corporate America knew how sought after a man like that was. Norman, to his credit, was conscious of the disgraceful lack of minori
ty representation in the corporate ranks of the League and had done something about it, for God’s sake! Was he now going to be taken to task for it?

  So instead of a friendly contract extension acknowledging Reggie’s remarkable contribution, the club found itself mired in a rancorous dispute with its star player that dragged on through the ’88 season and on into the summer of ’89. Reggie began publicly calling Norman a liar, portraying him as nothing more than a shrewd merchant bent on milking the franchise, not winning championships—a Pharisee in the temple of the Game. From the lips of the fundamentalist minister, few could miss the anti-Semitic flavor of his characterization—Norman sure as hell didn’t miss it. The irony of it was that Reggie began questioning Norman’s commitment to fielding a winning football team at precisely the moment when Norman began fielding a winning football team. But coupled with Buddy’s contempt for the dilettante car dealer, the Guy in France, Norman found himself stereotyped, vilified, and effectively ostracized from his own goddamn football team!

  Norman underestimated Reggie. He thought the defensive end was a dumb athlete and a hypocrite. If he’d gotten to know Reggie personally, he would have had a harder time dismissing the Reverend’s very public evangelical role as a pose (it clearly was not), and he most certainly would not have found Reggie stupid. The truth is that Norman and Reggie had much in common. They were both driven, highly successful family men with broad interests and ambitions that spilled way outside the original dimensions of their success. Just as young Norman had seen the millions he made with Bargaintown USA, PP&C, and eventually the Florida car dealerships as a means of building a personal financial empire and even a political career, Reggie saw the millions he could make playing football, and the fame, as a means of fulfilling his larger religious and social agenda. Out there in Life after Football, Reggie hadn’t ruled out the idea of entering politics. And, in keeping with his stern fundamentalist convictions, Reggie was politically conservative. A Republican even. The modern politician he most admired happened to be Norman’s very own good friend and political grantee, Jack Kemp, President Bush’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development.