The Legend of Jesse Smoke

by Robert Bausch

  He looked at Jesse. Everyone was quiet for a moment. Then I said, “It would sure be something to see Jesse throw the ball to Darius Exley.”

  That did the trick. “Okay, then. You get me in to watch her there,” Andy said, “and I’ll help arrange it.”

  “I’d be glad to.”

  “Nobody needs to help arrange anything,” Jesse said.

  Andy reddened slightly. “No, I just meant I won’t stand in the way.”

  “That would be great,” I said, feeling good about where we were leaving it.

  As I was turning to leave, Andy touched my arm. “And maybe tickets? If you could spare a couple of tickets every now and then?”

  “Sure,” I said. I had an allotment every year, and no family to speak of. I could always give away a few tickets if I needed to.

  Three

  Coach Engram was in his office as usual when I finally reported back to Redskins Park, but I didn’t want to let him in on my little joke yet. I was pretty confident I could arrange the thing as long as I didn’t get into gender. He was on the phone when I stepped into the room, but he motioned for me to sit down. I glanced at the sports page a while, trying not to overhear the conversation, in case it was private, but then I realized he was talking to the Minnesota Vikings general manager about “upgrades” at various positions, including quarterback, but none of it seemed to go anywhere. When he was done, he hung up the phone and smiled. “Enjoy your vacation?”

  I told him I’d had a great time.

  “You go with anybody this time?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay,” he said, again with a smile. “So what’s with the shit-eating grin? What’s on your mind?”

  “I found a quarterback.”

  “Really.”

  “You’re not going to believe it.”

  “Try me.” He sat back and relaxed in the big black leather chair he almost never used. He looked just then like an owner, not a coach. He had put on weight since he quit playing—not enough that you’d call him fat, but he was definitely pushing the limits of his belt back then, and wasn’t near so lean as he is now. He had dark brown hair, slicked straight back off his forehead, and a wide, jutting jaw edged in short gray stubble. From the neck up he looked like a cross between Vince Lombardi and Don Shula. An imposing kind of thing sitting across from him, I gotta tell ya.

  “This particular player has no college experience.”

  “Where’d you see him?”

  Now I was about to cross into the realm of fiction. I had to lie a little, see, and leave out gender, but I told myself it was innocent enough—just a small lie of omission. “In Belize, first, on the beach.”

  He looked at me as though something had erupted from my forehead. Stumbling on a player when you’re not actively scouting and going through the considerable work and vigilance of the scouting department tends not to inspire a lot of confidence.

  “Trust me, Jon. This player throws the ball as well as you ever did. I’ve seen scrimmages with—I saw this player in action against others, okay? I saw the footwork, the mechanics. Mechanically, she’s perfect.” I felt my blood turn up in the creases of my neck as I let out that word. But he didn’t seem to notice.

  “You’ve talked to the kid?”

  “I did. And I extended an invitation to camp this summer.”

  “Why not get him in here in the spring? Or hell, next week?”

  “I was lucky to get a commitment for this summer.”

  “You believe in this guy?”

  “Absolutely. You got to see for yourself.”

  He shrugged. “All right. Go talk to Charley and get what you need from him. If it’s not going to break the bank to bring the kid in, I don’t see why not.”

  I got up to leave. “You won’t regret it, Coach,” I said.

  “What’s the kid’s name?”

  “Jesse,” I said. “Jesse Smoke.”

  He said nothing, but the name had to have gotten stuck in there under his scalp. It’s a pretty hard name to forget, ain’t it?

  So I went to Charley Duncan, our general manager. Charley doesn’t like to spend a lot of time talking to assistants until after draft day, but once he confirmed with Engram, he told me to go ahead. I could sign Jesse Smoke for the minimum NFL salary, which was over a half a million dollars a year back then. Charley even told me I could give the kid a signing bonus if I wanted. “No more than sixty-five or seventy K,” he said.

  “Absolutely.”

  “And I’ll pray your boy can throw the ball better than Corey Ambrose.”

  “Just has to throw it as well, right? Then we won’t worry if Ambrose gets a run in his hosiery or breaks a fingernail.”

  “Very funny.”

  He didn’t know how funny it was. Come to think of it, I didn’t either, until I was out the door.

  You might think I should have been a little worried about folks not taking my idea too kindly; I mean, I really did half believe it was only a pretty elaborate joke. I was famous for that kind of thing anyway. But once I had permission to actually sign somebody? I started believing it. Why not? I found myself thinking. Why can’t we do the unthinkable and sign the first woman to an NFL team? I knew folks would say it was against the rules, but I couldn’t remember seeing anything about that one.

  Well you know, I started doing a little research into the rules, and like everything else that is written down, the rules are subject to interpretation. They really are.

  Case in point: The first forward pass was thrown not by somebody who knew the rules, just by a man who thought it might work. And when nobody could find anything in the original rule book preventing it, they simply added a few rules to govern it.

  Legend has it that Knute Rockne of Notre Dame was the first to try it when he was a player there, but that’s not really true. It was Pop Warner, coaching in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who started using it pretty regularly and was beating people with it in 1907, long before Rockne helped beat Army with it in 1913. The Carlisle team was made up of American Indians—among them, Jim Thorpe—and they perfected it, the forward pass. Eventually college football changed the rules to make it more acceptable as a strategy in a game. All of this was before pro football even got off the ground, so the forward pass did begin in the college game. Before Pop Warner used it, only a few teams tried one or two of them in a game every now and then, but it was considered a “sissy” move by just about everybody. Then Pop Warner started killing other teams with it.

  The new rules the leagues originally put in were pretty strict and forbidding. If you tried a forward pass and it fell incomplete, it was a fifteen-yard penalty. Also, one of your players had to touch the thing when you tried it. If you threw the ball over his head and he didn’t touch it, the defense could recover it and take it back the other way. Finally, you had to throw it over the middle only—a ten-yard space in the center—or you were penalized. For a long time that was all the rules said about it.

  When pro football got going, they pretty much adopted the college rules. By that time Warner had so popularized the forward pass, other teams, including Notre Dame, were also using it and the rules had changed to accommodate it. No more fifteen-yard penalty. An incomplete pass was just that. Nobody had to touch it and it didn’t go over to the other team. Of course the rule book says all kinds of things about throwing the ball now, and hundreds of rules developed over almost a hundred years of playing. But for sure the first time anybody did it, there was nothing in the rules about it one way or the other.

  There’s nothing to prevent a woman from playing in the NFL either, if you read the rules with the idea that all references to “man” or “men” are generic rather than specific. Like when somebody says, “The rights of man” or “All men are created equal,” they’re not talking about just men, right? I mean, that’s how they interpreted it in the beginning probably, way back there when the Frenchmen and Americans were writing all that stuff down. But nobody today would dare suggest that’s what
it actually means. Similarly, in football the rules make all kinds of references to eleven men to a side, man-to-man, when a man does this or a man does that, and so on. But there is no rule, specifically, that says only men can play in these games and that no women are allowed. None. Go ahead, look it up.

  You know, it’s funny now, but even way back then I was starting to believe in it. I’d remember what the ball looked like sailing off the tip of Jesse Smoke’s arm, and think, Why the hell not?

  Four

  A long time ago, quarterbacks called their own plays. They would take time as they played to set up certain strategies, or they’d go for it all right off the bat just to set the tone of a game. A lot of them practiced every day with the same receivers and learned speed, quickness, stopping ability, cuts at every angle, and just about anything else they could about a receiver’s movements. Most of the time they “looked” for a receiver running a planned route, and when they didn’t see him, they “looked” for another one running a different route. It was all done with sight; with what the quarterback could see. The great ones had terrific vision—from sideline to sideline. I’m talking about peripheral vision as well as twenty-twenty. They could pick a guy out when they weren’t actually looking his way, turn to him, and release the ball with a snap to get it to him. Since a receiver always knows where he is going and the quarterback has rehearsed the same play with him over and over in practice, it worked pretty well. Guys like Raymond Berry and Fred Biletnikoff who couldn’t outrun a tree sloth but who had great hands and could cut (change direction) on a dime caught enough balls to get to the Hall of Fame. The quarterback knew how to find them and hit them as they moved.

  Over the years, a lot of that changed. But those changes were not brought about simply by altering the rules; strategy, how the men played the game—that changed as well. Even so, here, very basically, is how the defense on a team lined up on the field back then:

  SS = strong safety, S = safety, LB = linebacker, CB = cornerback, DE = defensive end, DT = defensive tackle

  The defense above is called a “four-three” because there are four linemen and only three linebackers. Lots of teams played this defense, including Engram’s Redskins.

  Some play what is called a “three-four.” They look the same except they’ve got only three linemen and four linebackers, like this:

  The linemen and the linebackers concentrate mostly on stopping the run and getting to the quarterback before he can throw the ball. The cornerbacks and safeties are called “defensive backs,” and they try to “cover” the receivers to keep them from catching the ball. They either play “man-to-man,” which means they take on one of the receivers and go with him wherever he goes, or in what’s called a “zone” defense, in which they take an area of the field and cover that whenever anybody ventures into it. Sometimes if the offense is running plays with three, four, or even five receivers, defenses will take out linebackers and replace them with extra defensive backs. One extra defensive back is called a “nickle” defense. Two, is called a “dime.” Four extra defensive backs is called a “quarter defense.” (I’ll explain the offense in a bit.) Sometimes a defense will play zone on one side of the field and man-to-man on the other. All of the possible combinations of those defenses come into play with the sole purpose of confusing a quarterback. Defenses always try to disguise what they are doing.

  Over the years, combination zone defenses and man-to-man variations got pretty good at slowing down the receivers who could speed past a defensive back and break into the open, often by bumping the receiver and knocking him off his path while he passed through their zone.

  Eventually defenses got so quick and so complex that the coaches themselves started calling the plays instead of the quarterback. This didn’t start until the early to mid-eighties or so, but it caught on and now we haven’t seen a quarterback who calls his own plays since Peyton Manning with Indianapolis and later the Broncos.

  But that does not mean the quarterback doesn’t have real hard things to do. He’s got to be sure of himself without being cocky; he’s got to think fast and make decisions in a fraction of a second; he’s got to read what defensive players are up to—both recognizing alignments (how men are placed on the field, how they are moving when his own men move) and also characteristics of individual players he’s studied on film. (He might know something about a middle linebacker that the middle linebacker himself doesn’t know.) He has to know when a defensive player is feigning a blitz—that is, rushing the passer—and when he’s really coming.

  Now I don’t want to bore everybody with a lot of football terms or strategies. But this much is important to know if you’re going to appreciate what Jesse Smoke accomplished in her short career: A quarterback has got to see the whole field as if it was vertical in front of him instead of horizontal; as if he was looking down on it from above. Now, he’s got what’s called a “passing tree” for each receiver in his head and in front of him. A receiver has a wide variety of moves he can make and patterns he can run. But all of them come off his position on the field and the initial path he might take, and when you draw it all up on a board it looks like a tree. It really does. Here’s a partial map of some of the moves a wide receiver on the left side of the line might be asked to make. Bear in mind, these are “routes” he would run as fast as he can immediately after the ball is snapped by the center to the quarterback.

  A “quick out” goes only five to seven yards. Same thing with a “quick in.” A “deep out” can be the same move but much deeper down the field—fifteen or twenty yards or more. There’s a wide variety of other moves—the “come back,” the “curl-and-go,” the “in-and-out,” which combines a “slant in” with a “corner” route. If it’s an angle in geometry, football’s got a name for it and you can draw it on a board. Now each player who is eligible to run a pattern and catch a pass is assigned one of the above moves on any given passing play. Put all of the possibilities for one receiver together, and they look like this:

  That’s a passing tree for just one wide receiver. In the playbook, each one of those little arrows has a number or a name. When the quarterback calls a play, like “66, yellow 40, 22Xgo,” each one of the receivers has a designated path to follow (one of the little arrows above). So as you can see, everything is done as precisely as possible. Each receiver has his own passing tree, the quarterback calls plays based on the pattern from the tree that he wants from each receiver, and each one knows where he’s supposed to be on every play. That’s his responsibility. He must cut left or right at precise angles, all of them identified on paper and practiced over and over again in drills on the field. The quarterback, then, has to know where every one of them is supposed to be, and he has to do this with as many as five different players at once.

  So now here’s how an offense lines up on the field:

  WR = wide receiver, TE = tight end, LT = left tackle, LG = left guard, C = center, RG = right guard, RT = right tackle, FB = fullback, HB = halfback or running back, QB = quarterback

  The quarterback takes the ball directly from the center in this formation. That side of the line where the tight end lines up is called the “strong side.” The tight end can be an extra blocker on running plays or a receiver who runs one of the patterns on the passing tree. The dotted line is the scrimmage line. The center lines up directly over the ball at the beginning of every play and play begins when he “hikes” (snaps) it to the quarterback. There must be seven men on this line at all times before a play—you can have more than seven, but not less. The rule says, “Eligible receivers must be on both ends of the line, and all of the players on the line between them must be ineligible receivers,” that is, they cannot catch a pass or take a hand off from the quarterback. There are a wide variety of variations on this rule, however. Some teams will use what is called a “slot receiver” and replace the fullback with another wide receiver and place him just behind the line of scrimmage but split wide between the tackle and the wide receiver on a gi
ven side. Sometimes they’ll use four wide receivers, no tight end, and one running back; or even five wide receivers. Here’s an example of a three-wide-receiver formation. In this set, a running back is replaced with another wide receiver and he lines up in the slot, between the right tackle and the wide receiver on the right side. So on this one play, the quarterback would have this kind of set up, and expectation.

  On most plays there are five men on offense the quarterback can throw to: two wide receivers, two running backs, and a tight end. With the above play, there is only one running back and three wide receivers, the two on the outside lined up on the line of scrimmage and the slot receiver.

  In four-wide-receiver sets, there is no running back, but an extra slot receiver who would line up on the left and parallel to the slot receiver on the other side. In a five-wide-receiver set, teams take out the tight end and split a wide receiver out five yards or so from the line like this:

  What you see here are individual plays, with one of the moves on the passing tree assigned to each player. When the quarterback calls a play like this, he knows each of these paths or routes that his receivers will run. And when there are four or five wide receivers, the defense puts in extra defensive backs and takes out linebackers.

  That is, very simply, how it works. Now remember, each of these is one play, and there are hundreds of plays, all predicated on the single moves possible in each receiver’s passing tree. Each of the receivers in the plays above, according to the design of each particular play, must make one of the moves on the passing tree. It just depends on which play the quarterback has called.