Muck City

by Bryan Mealer

  By choosing Hester in the first round, Raiders owner Al Davis was hoping to fill a crucial gap in the receiver corps that had once sliced up secondaries and helped the Silver and Black to three Lombardi trophies. And it was a gap of legendary proportions. Jessie the Jet, with his 4.23 speed and thirty-eight-inch vertical leap, was being unveiled as the next Cliff Branch.

  Branch was the three-time Super Bowl champion and the league’s leading postseason receiver, a man of heart-stopping ninety-nine-yard-pass plays, who, in his thirteenth year in the same jersey, was still being described by his coach as “a feather … he just kind of flies over the ground.” He was also turning thirty-seven in August and breaking down. The legendary wideout had been injured most of the previous season and had caught no touchdowns, leaving the Raiders with just Dokie Williams and Malcolm Barnwell.

  Going into the draft, the Raiders had rated Hester higher than both Al Toon and Jerry Rice, who’d gone tenth and sixteenth to the Jets and 49ers, respectively. Head coach Tom Flores had said publicly that he expected the Florida burner to be more than the acrobatic highlight maker he’d been with the Seminoles.

  For the shy, twenty-two-year-old Jessie, the sudden pressure was incredible and, in his own mind, seemed to magnify his every move: from the first touches in training camp before an audience of All-Pro teammates Howie Long, Marcus Allen, and Lyle Alzado, to renting the ritzy Foxhill apartment for himself and Lena, who’d just learned she was pregnant with Jesse junior, to the party invitations from Dionne Warwick and Hollywood events where Magic Johnson and Janet Jackson knew him on sight.

  Look, there was Jessie Hester, the million-dollar man. The next Cliff Branch.

  • • •

  “I GOT THE Bonus Baby,” shouted Lester Hayes, the five-time Pro Bowl cornerback, as he lined up against Jessie the first week of camp.

  “Let’s see what you got, Bonus Baby. Let’s see if that money was worth it.”

  Hayes was six-two and 225 pounds, one of the greatest defensive backs to play the game, a man whose nickname was “the Judge.” Hester was accustomed to beating bigger guys off the ball with his quickness, but the orders from the sidelines were to go straight through Hayes. Employing his signature bump-and-run, Hayes made the rookie pay for every step, clawing at his eyes and nose and grabbing his throat, everything but throwing a blanket over his head and beating him.

  “Oh no!” shouted Hayes. “They done gave that money away!”

  Hester was humiliated.

  “I was never so frustrated,” he said. It wasn’t until he appealed directly to Davis, who appeared on the sidelines (“Let me get off the ball the way I know how”), that he was finally able to get open.

  Jessie had little time to let the hazing get to his head. Before the season opener, the Raiders had already sent Branch to injured reserve and traded Barnwell to Washington, leaving the young rookie to start opposite Williams in the number-two slot.

  For any rookie receiver thrust into such a fire, it was a fine season: thirty-two catches, 655 yards, and four touchdowns, some of them thrilling—like the impossible grab over the helmet of Kansas City cornerback Kevin Ross, or the catch-and-vanish between two Chargers that left them clanking skulls like Keystone Kops.

  Hester’s season performance set a franchise record for a first-year player, but it came with an asterisk. Hester had developed a tendency to drop passes. While the team listed only six official drops for the season, the rookie’s hands soon became the subject of weekly scrutiny in the sporting press.

  There were two drops in the exhibition loss to Miami, one in the end zone. The bobble against San Francisco. The potential game-winner in Cleveland that flew out of his hands at the goal line, and the one in Atlanta worth another six. The drop in Cleveland earned Hester a public lashing on the sideline from receivers coach Tom Walsh, his trusted corner man.

  “When the Los Angeles Raiders had the ball and the game safely in hand, rookie wide receiver Jessie Hester had no problem catching any number of elegant, exciting passes,” wrote the Miami Herald after the Raiders were eliminated by New England in the first round of the playoffs. “But when the game was on the line and passing yardage crucial, Hester’s supple hands quickly turned to stone.”

  Hester had “hyper nerves,” the story said. The receiver could not explain the drops, even to himself. They were like a curse, a virus ripping through his methodical, orderly nature.

  “Mentally, I was gone,” he remembered. “Marcus and these guys would try to talk to me, ‘Man, just play ball. Don’t listen to that. Play ball.’ But they didn’t know how deep it was.”

  After sitting out the first quarter of the ’86 season with a sore Achilles tendon, Hester returned off the bench in a game against San Diego, roping in a forty-yard shot from backup Marc Wilson to win the game. The next week against Kansas City, back in the starting lineup, Plunkett hit him for eighteen yards and another game winner.

  “The Jet is back,” wrote Mark Heisler of the Los Angeles Times.

  Heisler, the sharp-witted, now-venerated sportswriter, had given the first-rounder from Belle Glade a celebrity welcome upon his Hollywood arrival, then quickly shown him the ways of the wild kingdom. Hester’s unraveling, like Al Davis’s endless court struggles and team controversies, became the sweet pulp of Heisler’s L.A. stories. When Hester’s bad luck found him again, dropping three big-potential catches over three consecutive weeks, Heisler quipped, “Jessie Hester is once more putting the ball on the floor as often as Magic Johnson.”

  The next game, a demoralizing loss to the shoddy 3–9 Eagles, Heisler struck again: “The young Raider receivers dropped passes all over the lot, including one by Jessie Hester in the end zone. He caught two others for touchdowns, but in this league, .667 doesn’t get it.”

  “At this point, I thought it was personal,” Hester said. “I wanted to hurt the guy.”

  Hester spent the majority of the ’87 season on the bench, still haunted by the occasional drop and never safe from Heisler’s lens. Afraid to get open, he hid in the secondary and managed only one catch for thirty yards.

  “I didn’t want the ball thrown to me,” he said. “I did whatever I could not to be open. I didn’t want it thrown and have things said about me.”

  The next season the Raiders drafted first-round receiver Tim Brown from Notre Dame and traded to get wideout Willie Gault from Chicago. Brown had won the Heisman Trophy; Gault was a former Olympic qualifier in the 4×100 relay (unfortunately for him, the United States boycotted the 1980 games) and was considered one of the fastest receivers ever to have played in the league.

  The message was clear. In August, under new head coach Mike Shanahan, the Raiders finally traded Jet to Atlanta for a fifth-round pick. As Hester left Los Angeles, crushed and dejected, his nemesis, Heisler, didn’t miss the chance to chalk the outline of another fallen star.

  “Jessie Hester, the soft-spoken burner from Florida State,” Heisler wrote, “leaves with a 23.7 career yards-per-catch average, but only 56 receptions in three seasons. His teammates marveled at the way he could run routes, and the opposition never could cover him, but what did they have to worry about? He dropped too many passes to live up to his billing.”

  In Atlanta, playing for the lowly Falcons, Hester was hoping for a clean bill in a smaller, more forgiving southern market, to sort out his problems and prove the past no longer mattered. For a while the curse disappeared; then it found him in the worst possible places, like in the end zone of the L.A. Coliseum in a midseason game against the Raiders. The crowd broiled him from above.

  Hester finished the season with only twelve catches for 176 yards. When a Palm Beach Post reporter found him at the Falcons’ training camp the following summer, he appeared a lonely and desperate man.

  “I have to do something this year for myself, regardless of what anybody else thinks,” he said. “If I don’t do anything this year, I will be destroyed mentally.”

  Three weeks later, after he dislocated his toe in
an exhibition game in Philly, the Falcons released him. With his career in pieces, his mind and body a mess, Hester left Lena and Jessie junior in Atlanta and retreated to the only safe place he knew. He went home to Belle Glade.

  • • •

  FORMER DOLPHINS DEFENSIVE back Louis Oliver liked to tell the story of the day Jet first came home after the Raiders drafted him, a quintessential hero’s parade that left a vapor of stardust and wonder in its wake.

  “He’s driving that two-door red Mercedes down Avenue E and the town is going bananas,” said Oliver, who was fourteen at the time. “He sees me and blows the horn. I immediately go home, put on my workout clothes, and head to the field. Then I run till I can’t run anymore. Seeing that took my work ethic to a whole other level.”

  When Hester returned to Belle Glade four years later, it was nothing inspiring, and the lesson it provided was old. The world chewed up men and their dreams. And when that happened, they came home to hide.

  “I was sulking and feeling sorry for myself,” Hester said. “I came and stayed with my mom. I didn’t want to deal with football again. I was here trying to figure out my life. I wasn’t even working out. I was just in the dumps.”

  Depressed and restless, Hester spent the ’89 season drifting. He would stay in Atlanta with his family as long as he could, but the atmosphere of football season was impossible to stand.

  It was no better in Belle Glade. People talked, the way they do:

  “The boy done lost his hands.”

  “He scared of the ball.”

  “I knew he’d be back.”

  Down at the Alabama-Georgia Grocery Store, they might slap him on the shoulder and smile, but behind his back, he knew what they were saying.

  “Let’s just say they was glad to see me back in town.”

  The only solace he found was at his mother’s house, or sitting with Willie watching television. He visited friends, helped Zara with work. He even filed for unemployment.

  That spring, Cletus Jones, his old roommate at FSU, got married in Miami and Jessie went to the wedding. Also in attendance was Hassan Jones, another of Jessie’s teammates at FSU, who was now with the Minnesota Vikings. Sitting around after the ceremony, Cletus and Hassan pulled an intervention.

  “Jessie, you’re making a big mistake to not go back and play,” Hassan told him. “You’re too good a player, man. You just lost your confidence, that’s all. Besides, you don’t wanna go out a loser.”

  When he returned to Belle Glade, his older brother, Roger, staged an intervention of his own.

  “I’d been hearing it all,” Roger said. “People sayin how he couldn’t make the pros, wasn’t good enough, this and that. Jessie felt like a failure in our community. He was my brother, and it hurt me to see him like that.”

  Over the years, whenever possible, Roger had recorded every one of his brother’s games. Now, seeing him in such a state, he went back and compiled every electrifying catch to remind Jessie of the athlete that lived inside, the one now lost out in the void.

  “I’ve seen you catch some remarkable balls,” he said. “Just take these tapes and go look at ’em. This is something you been doin all your life. Go look at the proof yourself.”

  Hester took the tapes back home to Atlanta, but instead of watching the highlights as his brother had intended, he focused on the rest. Sitting in a dark room by himself, Hester went back and watched every dropped pass, every missed block, every glaring contradiction to the athlete he thought he had been. After he could stomach seeing them a first time, he watched them over again.

  “The good times were easy to relive,” he said. “Mentally, I had to deal with the bad and accept those things that had happened. I had to ask myself, ‘Could I have really made that play?’ and then answer with the truth. That was the only way I was gonna move on. I had to accept myself as a person who made mistakes and learn how to be better.”

  But it wasn’t until a few weeks later, back in Belle Glade, that he finally came around. Jessie was at his grandparents’ house with some cousins, who were trying to perk him up, when Willie, who was sitting in his recliner watching Gunsmoke, had finally heard enough. Willie told everyone in the room to shut up, then turned and looked at Jessie.

  “Son, nobody forgets how to catch a football,” he said.

  “This man never said nothin,” said Hester. “I mean nothin. And just like that. All that noise and talk was gone. The way he said it—he was right. It was then I knew I had to go back and play.”

  • • •

  HESTER RETURNED TO Atlanta and spent the next six weeks in heavy training. He hadn’t worked out in almost a year since his toe injury, so he started slow: first jogging around his sprawling apartment complex, then speed work. Pretty soon he was clocking forties and picking up time. It felt good, like being in his old skin. His agent placed him back on the market, and soon he was getting calls to try out for the Patriots, Eagles, and Colts.

  The quarterbacks coach from the Raiders, Larry Kennan, was now offensive coordinator with Indianapolis, which Jessie saw as a plus. And other than Andre Rison, who was the Colts’ number-one receiver, the roster was mostly guys Hester didn’t recognize. The smaller midwestern market looked to be a genial and welcoming place for a man aiming to start again.

  “I thought I could prove myself easier on that team,” he said.

  It didn’t take long. Just before the season opener, the Colts traded Rison to Atlanta, while number-two wideout Clarence Verdin sat out with an injury. After five games, Hester became rookie quarterback Jeff George’s go-to utility receiver, having caught fifteen passes, including a career-high eight receptions in a loss against Denver.

  “It’s like I’ve been reborn,” he told the Sporting News.

  • • •

  THE TRANSFORMATION WAS nothing miraculous. Rather, it came about as the result of two small changes. Little things. For one, Hester simply became a better student of the game. In his short time in Atlanta, he’d worked with a receivers coach named Jimmy Raye, who’d introduced a more fundamental approach to seeing the position. It was a revelation.

  “Jimmy Raye taught me to pay closer attention,” he said. “He was real hands-on. Before, it was guys telling me to look for the ball at ninety degrees, and meet the ball at forty-five degrees. Jimmy’s putting it on the board and showing me on the field. He’s showing me that one subtle move that otherwise I might have missed or forgotten. I put those in my notes. I started watching for that move in other guys and taking notes on them. My career took off after that.”

  Hester’s note taking would become so meticulous and ritualistic that later in his career his teammates would dub him “the Professor.”

  Also, while he was still in Los Angeles, Hester discovered that he had trouble with his vision. He had requested to see an optometrist and confirmed one of his fears. It turned out he had amblyopia, or “lazy eye.” In his case, his right eye was weaker than the left.

  “I started remembering old basketball games, football games, seeing the ball coming, then suddenly turning back and it was gone,” he said. “I guess I somehow compensated for it in high school and college, but in the pros, the competition was just too much that it didn’t work anymore.”

  He’d told few people aside from the team trainer, fearing it would be seen as an excuse. Instead, he’d sit in his apartment—a more modest affair in Inglewood that he’d traded down for after his struggles began—and perform eye exercises: looking left to right, focusing on two objects and making them one. He began doing this daily. By the time he reached Indianapolis, his vision had greatly improved.

  “The combination of me maturing mentally and being able to see the ball more clearly gave me more confidence. For once, I was able to be me.”

  Unfortunately, the early nineties were lean years for the Colts, who won a total of five games in Hester’s first two seasons. But Indy proved to be the ideal for redemption. At the end of his first season, his numbers nearly equaled those of h
is entire career so far.

  By Hester’s third year with the Colts the dreaded curse had not only lifted but reversed its cruel order. Hester could not stop catching the ball. By the time he left the Colts in 1994, he’d caught passes in sixty-two consecutive games, a franchise record that dated back to the days of Johnny Unitas. Acquired by the Rams, Hester returned to the West Coast not as a disgraced superstar but as a man on a streak—one the reporters were calling one of the longest in the NFL.

  The Jet was back.

  The fairy-tale comeback of Jessie the Jet was a story known by few, if any, players on the Glades Central squad. The coach was such a guarded man that he did not provide the story to KB as a cautionary tale of hubris and human fallibility, and not to the quarterback struggling with his own “hyper nerves” and a doubt about his own potential. Just like Jet, they would be forced to learn these lessons the hard way, to gut them out alone.

  For Mario, the next test was a game against rival Clewiston, the home of U.S. Sugar, located fifteen miles up the west side of the lake. It was the forty-fourth meeting between the two towns, this time at Cane Field, where the stands and sidelines were mostly white, and the first place all season where country music blasted from the press-box speakers during warm-ups. A narrow canal ran behind the field, which was framed by high sugarcane, sending up billions of gnats and mosquitoes.

  As Benjamin had predicted, Clewiston provided the stat game for the ages. The Raiders won 55–0 and scored on nearly every possession, including a ninety-yard punt return by KB that even the Tiger crowd had to applaud for its beauty. Benjamin, Jaime, and Davonte would end the night with two touchdowns apiece.

  Clewiston’s offense never showed any sign of life against the Raider defense. Robert Way, after recording two sacks the previous week, rolled off the weak Tiger line all night like a slippery fish and dropped the quarterback three times. Even Joshua Knabb, a kicker for the Raiders and the only white player on the team, managed a vicious tackle on the offensive line.