by Mark Bowden
There is a fixed routine and protocol to covering a pro football team, which I did my level best to ignore. Game day was Sunday (unless the team was booked for a Monday-Night Football slot or a rare midweek game). The Pack watched the game from their perch high over the fifty-yard line and then raced down to the field and locker room at the game’s end to harvest quotes and reactions from players and coaches. Then they retreated back upstairs to write game stories and sidebars. Monday was the coach’s postgame press conference, where the Pack could grill the head man about yesterday’s action. Tuesday everyone had off. On Wednesday there were telephone interviews with the head coach and a player or two (selected by the Pack) from the team’s next opponent. Thursday and Friday there were daily stories to be written, looks ahead at the next opponent, updates on injuries, promotions, and demotions, and reports on whatever was the raging controversy of the minute. The Inquirer assigned a younger but more experienced sportswriter, David Caldwell, to cover most of these mandatory bases, which freed me to be creative … which sometimes got me in trouble.
Like when I decided to write a profile of the Eagles locker room. Access to the inner sanctum was a privilege I had that fans didn’t, so I set about observing the team’s antics in this sequestered space over several days, then writing a detailed account. There was plenty to write about, like the daily contest of miniature golf on the putting green William Frizzell had stretched out on the floor before his locker, or the rowdy games of Stuff the Tape, which involved balling up a big wad of adhesive tape, choosing a victim, and trying to slam the wad in over the metal bar at the top front of his locker. The idea was for the chosen victim to fend off the symbolic insult by keeping the invader away from his locker. It was a vivid reminder that most of these guys were just a few years removed from adolescence. There were running games of video football and baseball, occasional food fights and celebrity visits (I met O. J. Simpson in the Eagles’ locker room, years before he became the world’s most celebrated acquitted double murderer, wearing his network reporter’s blazer). Jerome would sometimes lean a trunk against the wall at one end of the long locker room, then test his arm by pitching fruit taken from the lunch table, leaving citric splatter all over the wall. The story made note in passing of the extensive pornography collection Jim McMahon kept at his locker, which happened to be the first one encountered on entering the room. Jim was in the habit of liberally draping and mounting featured selections from this pile around his space, so that entering the locker room often meant having to step around this titillating display. I noted it in my story, not objecting to it—it was his space—but pointing out that despite the stereotype of men’s locker rooms, McMahon’s was the only locker so bedecked.
Apparently this mention got Jim in hot water with Mrs. McMahon, and he duly complained to the Eagles’ public relations team about this bizarre and unwarranted intrusion. What’s he doing writing about the locker room anyway?
“Mark, I need to talk to you about your locker room story today,” said a scowling Ron Howard, the beleaguered Eagles chief flak. Ron was an extremely well-dressed young man who gave the impression of being worked to death. His boyish features were drawn down heavily with every pressure, slight, and duty of his station. He was an odd choice for the public relations job, for which charm would seem the first prerequisite. But he was earnest and, when the opportunity occasionally presented itself, helpful. The best flaks create a collegial relationship with reporters. Ron’s was more a You again? What now? demeanor that, come to think of it, may just have been his reaction to me. I never saw Ron explode, but he always seemed on the verge. Like on the day my locker room story ran.
“There are certain things that all the guys know you don’t write about,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like poking around inside guys’ lockers and writing about what’s in them.”
“Give me a break, Ron, you don’t have to ‘poke around’ Jim’s locker to see that stuff—he drapes it all over the place. You’d have to be blind to miss it!”
“Still, the locker room is a private area.”
“Every day there are at least two dozen reporters in that room with cameras. How can you call that private?”
“Jim’s wife was really pissed.”
“Whose fault is that? He’s the one with the tittie display.”
“It’s an unwritten rule,” Ron argued. “There are some things you see and hear in a locker room that you just don’t report.”
I thought about this for a minute.
“I’m sorry, Ron. I want you to know right now that I don’t intend to adhere to that rule. Anything I see or hear in the locker room I consider to be fair game. That’s why I’m here.”
“Well, then we’ll have to close the locker room.”
“It’s okay by me.”
And it was. Actually, I would have preferred that he didn’t. I liked having access to the locker room. But I figured the team certainly had the right to close it off if they wished. So long as all the other reporters weren’t given unfair advantage, I could live with it.
“Boy, do you have a lot to learn,” Ron told me and strode off angrily in a whisk of well-spun lamb’s wool.
The Eagles didn’t close the locker room. The NFL is, above all, a corporate culture, and it would take more than my one embarrassing item to alter such a long-standing tradition. The Pack would howl like a great wounded beast if it was denied access to the inner sanctum. There would be editorials, endless radio commentary, legal challenges at corporate headquarters from an enraged fourth estate. The porn disappeared from McMahon’s space.
Ron was right about my having a lot to learn. My original plan was to cover the team for one season and then write a book, but when that season ended with an Eagles loss in the first round of the playoffs, with the firing of Buddy Ryan and the promotion of Rich Kotite, I realized I had a long way to go before I knew the team well enough to write the kind of book I wanted to write. So I signed on for another season and spent the off-season traveling to visit some of the players at home.
This was the first important step toward writing Bringing the Heat. While a truly unguarded conversation was still rare, it was amazing to witness the transformation of the NFL athlete away from the pressures of season, coaches, locker room, and teammates. At home they had crying kids, wives, girlfriends, mothers, brothers, sisters. They talked more openly about their aspirations, accomplishments, and disappointments. They told funny stories about the season and their teammates. They became real people. And I discovered that after you’ve sat across the kitchen table from a twenty-one-year-old athlete and his parents, it becomes impossible for him to revert completely into an NFL prima donna the next time you encounter him in a locker room. It was during that off-season, the first year of Richie Kotite’s tenure as head coach, that I started to make the kind of inroads I wanted to.
I was still getting into trouble, however. Richie ran a tight ship, and one of his stern rules was that no photographs could be taken of the team as it performed its walk-through drills, where the players rehearsed the plays they would run in the next game. This made sense. Giving an opponent even a glance at the playsheet in advance would afford them a distinct advantage. The walk-throughs were done in an empty Veterans Stadium, beneath the press box, where I liked to sit and work up my daily story. On one of these fall mornings, I was joined in the press box by an Inquirer photographer, who had been shooting pictures in the locker room that morning. It was early enough in the schedule that the Phillies were still playing out their season, so the Vet was set up for baseball. After the Eagles finished the walkthrough drills in the outfield, Byron Evans, Andre Waters, and a few other players raced over to pick up bats and balls and began an impromptu batting practice. The photographer remarked what a good picture it would make, these football players taking batting practice in the cavernous Vet.
“Why don’t you shoot it?” I asked.
“Kotite doesn’t allow pictures inside
the Vet.”
I considered this for a moment.
“He’s within his rights to ask us not to shoot the walk-throughs, but they’re finished with that. Veterans Stadium is a public space; you can shoot any pictures you want.”
So he did, until one of Richie’s functionaries spotted him in the empty stands and chased him off.
That afternoon, as I stood on the sidelines waiting for afternoon practice to begin, Richie came striding across the field toward me. His arms were waving and his mouth was going before he was even in complete earshot. In his full I’m the fucking coach here mode, Richie vented pure outrage, reiterating his rule against pictures being taken inside the Vet.
“The walk-through was over, Rich. They were playing baseball.”
“I don’t give a fuck! I make the rules around here! You tell that newspaper of yours that if they run one of those pictures, Rich Kotite will lock all of you guys out of practice for the rest of the season! You got that?”
“Richie, you don’t understand newspapers,” I said. “If I tell the Philadelphia Inquirer that you demand that they not run something … well, that will guarantee it will run.”
“You just tell them,” he said, poking a finger into my chest. “Got that?” And he huffed off.
So I did.
“What pictures?” Tucker asked when I called. Then, his hand cupped over the phone, shouting into the newsroom: “Somebody get me the pictures we shot at Eagles practice today!”
And, sure enough, there was Byron taking a huge cut at an Andre Waters fastball across four columns at the center of the front page the next day. Richie was as good as his word. That afternoon there was a heavy chain wrapped around the gate to the practice field. It created waves of outrage and indignation. The Philadelphia Daily News ran a front-page photo of the chain, and the nickname “Coach Uptight” was born. It made the national sports news wire and became the prime topic of reporting about the Eagles that week. My fellows in the Pack stewed for days, arguing somehow that Richie was not allowed to close practices.
As far as I was concerned, it was the best thing that ever happened on the beat. Watching practice was, in my opinion, a waste of time … and a bore. It took a big two-and-a-half-hour bite out of the afternoon, time that could have been spent writing. Once Richie closed practice, everybody started finishing their stories by late afternoon, instead of just getting started at that point. You could always catch players coming in after practice for follow-up questions to interviews done in the locker room that afternoon. If a player was injured during practice, it had to be reported anyway. Some of the veterans in the Pack came up with impressive arguments for why watching practice was vitally important: you could see which players were practicing with the first team and which with the second, an early sign of promotions (and demotions) on the squad; you could judge for yourself how well an injured player was running and hence gauge his likely availability for Sunday; and so on. For me the losses never outweighed the gains. I had more time to think and write. I actually started getting home in time to have dinner with my family during football season. The gates stayed locked for the remainder of Richie’s tenure. Some weeks later, after Richie had cooled off, I thanked him.
I got along pretty well with the players and coaches during the years I covered the team. I think they appreciated that, unlike many of my fellows in the Pack, I didn’t pretend to be an expert on the game. This was the thing that annoyed players most about the Pack. Some rumpled scribe who had never played a down of football became, on the day he was assigned the football beat, a critic. He would begin confidently analyzing games and teams, assigning praise and blame without anything like the average pro player’s understanding. These were young men who had arrived in the NFL after one of the most rigorous vetting processes anywhere. They stood at the pinnacle of their profession. Imagine an expert in any other field who had to contend with a gallery of rubbernecking amateurs offering commentary and analysis of his every move. To do research for this book, I asked coaches Zeke Bratkowski and Peter Guinta if they would review game film with me, teach me about what actually happened in all those 1992 games I’d seen. Watching from the press box, each play was a violent scramble of twenty-two men. They resulted in losses or gains, but the internal dynamics remained a mystery. Watching the game films, slowing the action down or rolling it back for second, third, and fourth looks, you began to see exactly why a play worked, or broke down. Rarely was the answer obvious. Zeke told me that in his thirty-some years of pro football he had never known a sportswriter who asked to study the tape. I would ask players to explain terminology, and when they looked at me surprised, I’d say, “Look, you’re the one who has devoted the last decade or more of your life to playing the game.” Looking for ways to cover the beat differently, David and I came up with a weekly story during the season called “Inside the Game.” Instead of attending the Monday press conference with the rest of the Pack, I made arrangements each week to interview one player in depth about his experiences during the previous game. The Sunday before the meeting, I would watch that player intently during the game, on the field and off, noting plays that seemed particularly interesting, arguments with opposing players, referees, or coaches, whatever happened to my main character. Then, either in the locker room or on the phone, I would get the player to talk in detail about it. Many of the players came to enjoy working with me on these stories, in part because they enjoyed being featured so extensively in the paper but mostly, I think, because the story was not so much a critique of their performance as a report. It offered readers a specific take on the game from someone in the thick of it and illustrated the multitude of personal assignments, goals, successes, and failures that make up the varied choreography of a football game—the game viewed through the eyes of a center is vastly different than the same game as seen by a wide receiver. The series was a hit with Inquirer readers, and the stories it produced became the backbone of Bringing the Heat.
There are some things about football writing I miss. I miss the excitement and anticipation in the air at a stadium in the hours before kickoff, and the feeling of not just watching the game but covering it, taking notes, checking stats, kicking around observations with my colleagues in the press box. I don’t miss being away from home every weekend, or walking into the locker room late in December to face the same group of fifty guys I’d seen every day since mid-July, trying to figure out something new and interesting to write about them.
Clyde Simmons once eyeballed me balefully after I asked him a particularly useless question and said, “Mark, man, you are really reaching today.”
“Clyde,” I told him. “You have no idea. I’m reaching every day.”
I have rediscovered the joys of watching a football game on TV on a Sunday afternoon with a bowl of popcorn and a cold beer, with no stories and sidebars to write afterward. I miss knowing a team well enough that I know the faces and personalities under each helmet, rooting quietly for them not out of team loyalty but because I have come to care about the players and coaches as people and wish them well. Having never been a rabid fan of any particular team, I suspect I will never care as much again about who wins a game.
Once in a while I catch a glimpse of the Pack gathered around an Eagles player or coach on TV, and I see some of the same faces (a few a little chubbier or balder) who were there before and during the years I covered the team. At first my heart goes out to them. I think, Just imagine still doing that after all these years. But then it occurs to me that they, most of them, are doing exactly what they always wanted to do, and that I was the one who was different, who all along knew he was just passing through, taking notes, preparing to write this book.
The Eagles I knew fell apart quickly after the 1992 season. Norman Braman has gone back to throwing his weight around in Miami politics and building his art collection, now rated among the finest in America. Mention of his name still draws an instinctive boo from any Philadelphia crowd. Buddy Ryan is back raising horses a
fter leading the Arizona Cardinals nowhere. Given the opportunity to be both coach and general manager, Buddy failed to work his magic and now appears to have left football for good. He made a return visit to Veterans Stadium during a 1999 preseason game as a guest of one of his sons, who helps coach the Baltimore Ravens. Buddy, no doubt pointedly, wore a Ravens shirt as he prowled the sidelines across the field from his old team. Rich Kotite had two losing seasons before being fired by the Eagles and being hired immediately by the New York Jets. He presided over two seasons so terrible that he was fired by the late owner Leon Hess, a close friend, and has not even been picked up as an assistant coach in the NFL. He reportedly helps out with the Pop Warner program on Staten Island and played a basketball coach in a movie starring Kelsey Grammer that has not yet been released. It must have been hard for Richie to watch Bill Parcells take the same abysmal Jets franchise and turn it into a top contender in just two seasons.
After being branded “a declining football player” by Braman, Reggie White went on to play six more Pro Bowl seasons and to win two Super Bowl championship rings with the Green Bay Packers. He announced his retirement in 1998, then returned to play another year, and finally hung up his spikes in 1999. He has become a highly visible and controversial spokesman for Fundamentalist Christian causes, speaking out against the creeping menace of homosexuality and denouncing abortion in TV advertising campaigns. He presides over a flourishing Baptist ministry in Tennessee, and he’s rumored to be considering a career in politics.
The delightfully schizoid Andre Waters is coaching football at the University of South Florida. Fred Barnett injured his knee and played several years for the Miami Dolphins without ever regaining his Pro Bowl form. He and his wife, Jackie, have opened a small chain of Planet Smoothie franchises in Broward County, Florida. Fred is still thinking like a football player. Talking about his new business venture, he told a Miami Herald reporter, “I’m studying my play; it’s going to take six months to catch the ball, and hopefully after a year I’ll make a touchdown.”