Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  “Mr. Brown, there’s been an accident,” the cop said. “It’s Jerome.”

  “No, that can’t be,” said Willie. “I just seen him, him and Gus.”

  Home Jerome hasn’t changed in the year since the accident. It was still busy with grown kids and grandkids coming and going, the big TV on constantly in the family room just off the kitchen; the walls still crowded with photos and portraits of Jerome, the shelves lined with his trophies. Willie said they hadn’t touched the wing of the house that was Jerome’s. They know they’ve eventually got to go in and pack it up, but they were accustomed to leaving it be, to living in their side of the house, managing their own lives while Jerome was away— football season, vacations, weekend trips to his teammates’ summer camps, golf tournaments. Somehow it still seems normal, just letting Jerome’s things alone until he gets back.

  “It’s still hard for us to believe,” said Willie.

  He and Annie Bell don’t want to talk about the legal tangle over Jerome’s estate.

  “We’re just one big happy family,” said Annie Bell.

  Have the lawsuits caused any strain?

  “No strain. Like I said, we’re just one big happy family. Always have been.”

  Willie said there’s no telling what will come of all the litigation. If he and Annie Bell wind up with any money, he said, “It’ll just give me an opportunity to spend more time getting acquainted with the Word.”

  That night, a cool evening in early spring, Willie drove out to Kennedy Park at the edge of town, just a few blocks from the accident site. His grandsons, Dunell and Willie Jerome IV, were both playing baseball. Dunell was on the Dodgers and Little G was on the Giants. Under the park’s bright lights, Willie positioned himself behind the steel fence backstop of the Little League baseball field. He was wearing a green Eagles windbreaker. This was the park where Willie once watched Jerome play his first games of baseball and football.

  Overhead, the Spanish moss in the trees glowed silver against the night sky, lit from below by the lights over the diamond. There was a verdant moisture in the air, smell of fern and grass and old wood. Out on the illuminated field a boy in glasses strode from the wooden bench on the first baseside toward the plate, pulling on a batting glove with the bat pinched against his side. He was a broadbeamed kid, about ten, black as midnight, and as he passed the fence he turned toward Willie and waved.

  “Hit one out,” the grandfather said.

  The boy flashed a suddenly familiar, wild, neon grin.

  Afterword for the

  Paperback Edition

  It has been seven years now since I covered the Philadelphia Eagles as a beat writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I am struck today more than ever by how fleeting are most pro football careers. Of the scores of athletes I got to know from 1990 through 1992, only a handful are still playing. Of the characters in this book, only five are still on NFL rosters. Quiet, cerebral Clyde Simmons is playing for the Chicago Bears after a long stint with the Jacksonville Jaguars and a year with the Cincinnati Bengals. Little cornerback Mark McMillian is now starting for San Francisco 49ers. Eric Allen is still playing first-rate cornerback, now for the Oakland Raiders. Randall Cunningham sat out for a year, learning what life was like as a small businessman in Las Vegas—darkly banished from the celebrity stage—and miraculously returned to the NFL a humble, eager and completely disciplined quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings. With his old coaches Rich Kotite and Zeke Bratkowski no doubt nodding with frustration over what might have been, Cunningham demonstrated what his coaches had been saying for years: If he would just play within the system, he would be the best quarterback in the league. In 1998, Randall did, and was. He had the highest quarterback rating in the NFL, and started for the NFC in the Pro Bowl game.

  William Thomas is the only Eagles player I knew who is still with the team. I knew Willie T. as an exuberant rookie, colliding with teammates and sometimes literally tripping over himself in his eagerness to make big plays. Today he is an accomplished veteran, a solid outside linebacker who has made several trips to the NFL Pro Bowl and who has survived three coaching changes. One of the things Willie T. evidently learned in those years sitting alongside the volcanic Seth Joyner’s locker was the virtue of keeping his mouth shut. When I visited an Eagles practice in the summer of 1997, Willie came bounding across the field to say hello. We chatted for a few minutes and then he grinned and said apologetically, “You know, I don’t talk to you guys anymore.”

  I told him I thought it was a sensible policy.

  This will come as a surprise to many sportswriters, but there is no reason for NFL football players to answer their questions. None. This is one of the points that has become more clear to me in my years away from the game. Every team has its own Pack, and for the most part they are harmless. Buddy Ryan used to tell the Eagles’ Pack, “If I’m losing you can’t help me, and if I’m winning you can’t hurt me.” It’s the simple truth. There was a time when pro football did need sportswriters. This was back when the league was having trouble selling tickets to games and when players all had flat crooked noses because the face guard hadn’t been invented, back when Mike Ditka was in grade school scaring all the normal children. Nowadays, the only media that profits a pro athlete is TV, which is better anyway because TV guys rarely ask hard questions, generally aren’t looking for conversation or deep insights (which are hard to come by anyway standing naked and wet in a locker room), and actually show the athlete’s face on screen as he mouths the innocuous sound bites that get aired.

  This is good for two reasons. First, unless unscrupulous editing tricks are employed, what you say gets reported exactly as you said it. This can backfire, as when you spout off in ways you later regret. With writers you can always say you were misquoted and even be believed, given the general status of writers. With cameras the best you can plead is being taken out of context. For the most part, if you screw up in a TV interview you have only yourself to blame. With a writer there’s no telling how your words will be used. The second and more important reason TV interviews are good is that they lead to fame. Potentially millions of people actually see your face on the screen, which can lead to paid appearances at shopping malls and maybe even product endorsements, which means money. So doing TV interviews is in accord with the MEAT (Maximize Earnings at ALL Times) principle. Every athlete who has a chance to plant his mug in the crosshairs of a TV camera—local, cable, or network—ought to, and eagerly. The recent practice of demanding payment for doing TV interviews is shortsighted and self-defeating, and sure to catch on.

  We writers are a different story. We have nothing to offer. My old favorite, Jerome Brown, once asked me in a tone of voice that actually approached seriousness (something highly unusual for Jerome), “Why should I talk to you?”

  I was stumped.

  “Because I ask nicely?” I suggested.

  “Shit, you always ask nice. “Jerome here began prancing sideways with a wickedly obsequious grin, then spoke through those great white teeth. “You wait ‘til I turn around to stick it in my back.”

  Nevertheless, athletes continue to tolerate sportswriters out of the NFL’s sense of tradition and fairness, and partly because it’s hard not to feel sorry for guys who will spend hours sweating on the sidelines watching practice or waiting patiently outside locker room doors for the chance to lob two or three silly questions. Veteran athletes learn not to feel sorry for the schlubs after they find their hasty mumblings packaged in the layers of cynical wiseguy analysis or stand-up comedy that passes for sports literature today.

  At its worst, there is a deep well of envy in sportswriting. It’s one thing to be cynical about a coach’s rosy picture of his team’s chances or the likelihood that a rookie running back is really the next incarnation of Gale Sayers after one exciting preseason outing, and another to silently resent pro athletes for their youth, their talent, their money, and their celebrity. More than once I noted the swell of enjoyment in the Pack over so
me player’s declining fortunes, or experienced the thinly disguised glee with which reporters would descend with cameras, notebooks, and tape recorders on a player who made a critical mistake in an important game. Most of the athletes return the ill will in kind, treating sportswriters with bored disdain. Anyone who thinks covering a pro football team is like living a fan’s dream has never had to walk into a locker room day after day, week after week, month after month, to be treated like some lower order of humanity by a roomful of twenty-something jocks—all of them superstars at least in their own minds. It is a deeply humbling experience. I found myself wanting the players to appreciate that I was invading their space only because it was my job, that until the day the Inquirer started paying me to interview Eagles I had never felt the slightest inclination to approach one or to hang around outside the locker room waiting to catch a glimpse of one. The year after I stopped covering the Eagles and moved on to other things, I ran into Richie Kotite once and he complained, “You never come around anymore!” Indeed. The beat was challenging and sometimes fun—like when I could call my younger brother, who then was slaving as a young associate in a big law firm, from the press box at Cowboys Stadium a half hour before a game and tell him, “We’re just alike, Drew—we both have to work on a Sunday afternoon.” That said, hanging around on the fringes of a pro football team was always work.

  Most sports reporting today is really just celebrity reporting. Fans like to see pictures, ideally moving pictures, of those who fascinate them, whether rock stars, actors, or athletes. After years of watching the Pack crash an athlete’s locker, thrusting microphones and cameras in his face, all just to record another dose of pablum—”I’m ready to play on Sunday if coach puts me in there, it’s his decision” or “Sure the 49ers have crushed us the last ten times we’ve played, but in this league on any given Sunday…”—I concluded that it really didn’t matter what the athlete said, it was just seeing him speak that was important. It’s the same instinct that sells fan magazines and that draws fans clutching pens and paper every time a big-time athlete shows his face in public. People just want to see the star in the flesh, perhaps stand close to him, get him to make his mark on some item that can be carried off as a totem of his existence, proof that the mere mortal fan once breathed the same air as the god.

  Don’t get me wrong. I admired the athletes I covered. They were remarkable young men at the very pinnacle of a difficult profession. I learned quickly that despite the stereotype of the dumb football player, very few young men made it to the NFL without possessing a great deal of poise and mother wit. Most of the Eagles I came to know I genuinely liked.

  My venture into the ranks of NFL reporting marked a radical departure from the normal order of things. In the good old days, sports reporters were a special sect at newspapers. There were reporters and then there were sports reporters. Reporters were geeky or cosmopolitan, the kind of guys who read books and argued among themselves about world affairs and struggled to write novels in their spare time. Sportswriters were just regular guys who had swung the best job in the world. Unpretentious, playful, and lighthearted, they were literate enough to write well without being literary—which the best of them sometimes were. They were guys who weren’t into changing the world; they were into having as good a time as possible while getting paid. Oscar Madison, the irascible middle-aged bachelor in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, was the quintessential sportswriter, feckless, playful, and somehow competent and successful at his profession. He was the envy of his regular-guy friends. Sports was something most men at least pretended to know a lot about, but sportswriters, they couldn’t pretend. What to the rest of the world was a hobby to them was a job. Stats, strategy, the inside dope … these guys lived and breathed this stuff. From a distance it looked like the fantasy job: you slept late, went to the ballpark, took in a game, chatted up the coaches and athletes, tapped out a few words of wisdom, and then retired for some late brewskies with the boys. In those days, no one was just handed such a plum job at a big-city newspaper. There was a clear pecking order. You started out covering high school sports for a small newspaper and maybe graduated to covering pro teams. If you proved capable, you might get a chance to write for the big paper, often heading back to the high school fields. Only after years of apprenticeship would you take over one of the sports page’s premier beats, covering one of the local pro franchises. Then you became the man younger and less fortunate sportswriters from the other papers envied or admired and, above all, wished to replace. It was not enough to write well to be a sportswriter worthy of the title, although it was a definite asset. It was more important for you to know your stuff. You brought years of hard-edged, hard-earned cynicism to the pronouncements of athletes, coaches, owners, and agents. You were expected to report and also to pontificate. To the exceedingly transient world of pro football, you brought experience, memory, and perspective.

  I brought none of it. I was chosen because the Inquirer sports editor, David Tucker, liked my writing and wanted some of it in his section. On the first day of Eagles training camp in 1990, my first day on the beat, the team’s star tight end, Keith Jackson, failed to show up. It would turn out to be the biggest continuing story of the year. I missed it. I think I wrote some attempt at humor about the big men trying to finish Buddy Ryan’s mandatory mile run. I didn’t know enough about pro football at that point to realize the significance of Jackson’s absence. For all I knew, maybe he was home with the flu. The season was still more than a month away, right? My editors were indulgent. They knew, after all, what they were getting when they recruited me. But to the rest of the Pack, the collection of scribes from all the area newspapers assigned to the beat, I premiered as a prime dunce. I never quite shook the image, I’m afraid, although all of the guys were quite nice and tolerant of me. I was regarded, I think, at best as an experiment, at worst a sure sign of modern journalism’s final demise.

  Writing this book was in my mind the first day I took the job. I figured I’d cover the team for the newspaper for one season, which would be fun, and then I would collect all my notes and observations and try to capture what the circus of a pro sports team was really like. From time to time my plan to write a book would come up in conversation with the other writers, and their reaction was always, “What are you going to do if they don’t make it to the Super Bowl?”—the assumption being that there was no point in writing about a team that didn’t win the big one. This reflected their value system. They were there as the eyes, ears, and (most importantly) mouth of Philadelphia’s fans. Their job was to demand and monitor progress. Their fortunes rose and fell with the team’s. A winning team sold newspapers and grew to dominate the airwaves locally, turning writers, sports pundits, and broadcasters into stars. The chronicle of a Super Bowl season was one of the staples of football reporting, it was out there like a plum for the most literary of the beat writers. So why would anybody plan to write about a team that would be lucky just to make the playoffs?

  I couldn’t have cared less about the Eagles’ prospects. I was more interested in the players, coaches, front office people, and owner. I wanted to understand what motivated them, learn where they came from, and how they made it to the NFL. What happened to the life of a twenty-one-year-old kid who grew up dirt poor in southern Georgia when he signed a contract for millions of dollars? How did players maintain normal relationships with wives, families, and friends when they were caught up in the excitement and money of pro ball? Why would a multimillionaire art collector/car dealer want to own a football team? The Eagles provided me with a cast of characters second to none, from Norman Braman to the late great Jerome Brown. The truth about pro football is that it is mostly about falling short. Every year, every team except one either falls short of the playoffs or ends its season with a loss. The best way to capture the reality of life in the NFL was to write about one of the twenty-seven teams that didn’t win the Super Bowl. From my first day on the beat, with the encouragement of David and other editors
at the newspaper, I set out to do things differently.

  The first thing I noticed about sportswriting was that, unlike the fantasy, there exists no closeness between the writers and the athletes. The team did its best to protect players from the prying eyes of the press, allowing access only at certain prescribed moments during the day, and the players themselves (for understandable reasons) wanted nothing to do with the press. They were right to be wary. For one thing, there are so many reporters vying for time with the team’s stars that it would be easy to get picked and probed to death. Buddy Ryan used to warn his players about reporters, “You let them in your yard and you’ll find them in your living room; you let them in your living room and you’ll find them up your ass.” Pro football players lead pretty circumscribed lives during the six or seven months they are owned by the team, so the last thing they want to do with their precious spare time is spend it chatting with reporters. Besides, the wrong unguarded comment can land a player in hot water with the coach. So the image of sportswriters moving in the same circles as players and coaches is a myth. Reporters don’t travel on team planes anymore. For the most part, they don’t even stay at the same hotels when the team is on the road. Popular magazines often feature stories about the athlete at home or out on the town for an evening, with the writer right there alongside like the star’s best buddy, drinking, yukking, talking phi losophy, winking at the same girls. This almost never happens. With very few exceptions, any interview I ever had with an athlete was a hurried, awkward affair, with him trying to get it over with as quickly as possible and me trying to get anything that penetrated the wall of celebrity. There is an art to making these clumsy interactions seem natural, chummy, and intimate, but it’s nearly always an illusion. For my part, I always found the interview overrated as a reporting technique in this environment. I learned to rely more on observation.