The Legend of Jesse Smoke

by Robert Bausch

  Now, you should know something about scrimmages. The two teams don’t play a game, as such, and no one keeps an official score. Each team runs seven to ten plays with its offense against the other team’s defense, then they switch and do it again for ten or eleven plays. Teams play hard, going at it full contact with full equipment, with referees and so on, but the ball is always placed on a particular part of the field that the coaches want to work on. You might run ten plays from your own 40 and no matter where you end up—even if you score ten times (nobody ever does)—the ball keeps going back to the 40. Then you might run a few plays from the 30, and then from what is called the “red zone,” which is anywhere inside your opponent’s 20-yard line. You play offense from those locations against the other team’s defense, then you play defense from the same place on the field against the other team’s offense.

  The teams really do go at it full-bore, except for one hard-and-fast rule: You never hit the quarterback in a scrimmage. If you get to him, you merely touch him and the play stops. A tap on the shoulder will do it. Even if the quarterback is in midmotion, the whistle blows and the play is dead as soon as he is touched. In fact, a defensive player can draw a very heavy fine if he flattens a quarterback in a scrimmage on purpose. Teams don’t like it if the quarterback gets so much as bumped. But accidents happen. Sometimes a player will get blocked into the quarterback, or he’ll stumble just as he’s rushing to touch him. To that extent, it’s part of the game.

  Jesse got knocked down several times in the scrimmage. Accidentally.

  “Is that supposed to happen?” Nate said.

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “They’re not blocking for her.”

  Nate winced every time he saw Jesse take a blow. She got hit pretty hard, too. Once our right guard backed into her and tramped on the front of her foot as she was falling backward. I thought it had to be broken.

  Nate hollered, “Hey!!” and started onto the field.

  I had to hold him back. “Don’t call attention to that now.”

  A few beat reporters saw us. Andy held on to Nate’s arm. “It’s football,” he said. “Jesse can take care of herself.”

  I looked around to see if any of the reporters heard him say “herself,” but it didn’t appear that anyone had.

  “What’s going on?” Andy said. He knew the rule, too.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  But of course, I did know. Or at least I thought I did, and it’s not a very pleasant thing to have to say. As I pointed out, a player is not fined for knocking down a quarterback when it is inadvertent. You can’t be held responsible for the motion of your body once it’s been accelerated to a particular point by somebody else. What the boys out there were doing was playing it that way on both sides of the ball. Our offensive linemen were letting themselves be pushed into her, or they would turn their man just right and with his cooperation, force him onto her in a way that would flatten her. At that point, I assumed it was out of the bag. The Steelers were helping it out, see, which meant they must have known. I’d seen them looking at each other the first time she barked out her signals. Later I discovered that the Steelers hadn’t really known, and just thought our guys wanted to get even with the fellow wearing number 17. Three of the greatest Redskins quarterbacks of all time, after all, had worn that number: Billy Kilmer, Doug Williams, and Jonathon Engram. So the Steelers maybe believed it was a kind of early pride that needed to be knocked down a peg.

  Jesse took it the way you might expect. She just got up, went back to the offensive huddle, and called another play. But I was furious. I kept my eye on Dan Wilber to see if he was a part of it, and I was glad to see that he did his job on every play, as he always did. It didn’t hit him as fast as it did me what was going on. But eventually he started to notice, and when it finally dawned on him what was happening he took action.

  And that was something to see.

  I know you’ve heard rumors about this and that the story’s been told in countless sports magazines and blogs, but now I’m going to tell you what really happened. No one was injured, and Dan didn’t pull anybody’s pants down or anything like that, although he may have threatened to. No, somebody’s pants got loosened a bit, but nobody pulled them off. Here’s what happened.

  When Dan figured out what was going on, he challenged Jesse to do something about it. Pittsburgh’s All-Pro defensive end Delbert Coleman had just twisted off the right tackle and, with his back to her, pretended to fall her way, knocking her down for the fifth time. I saw Coleman tap the right tackle on the back as he went back to his side of the line. They were in it together, our tackle and Coleman, no question, and they were having fun. Dan, I saw, picked Jesse up then leaned real close to her and whispered something through the earhole of her helmet. She looked at him, backing away a bit, and then he said quite audibly, “Do it.” She touched her face mask and seemed to nod.

  Now, you have to know, Coleman was always proud of his vision on the field, so he wore one of those old Schutt helmets with a low cage on the front of it. Though within regulation, it was really designed for a running back or a wide receiver, not a defensive end. Anyway, it had about a three-and-a-half- or four-inch opening between the top edge of the helmet at his forehead and the top bar of the face mask.

  On the next play, Dan cut behind the guard and flattened our own right tackle, whereupon Jesse took a five-step drop, planted herself, and fired the ball right into that opening in Delbert Coleman’s face mask. She threw that ball so hard it got stuck there, and made a bloody mess of the bridge of his nose. It was pretty scary, actually, when Coleman went down with the football sticking out of the front of his helmet like that. The medical staff had to deflate it just to get his helmet off, and they did loosen his pants a bit, so he could breathe. But nobody stripped him or anything. And he didn’t cry or beg anybody’s forgiveness. When the bleeding subsided, he got up and wandered over to the sideline—with no help—and downed a half gallon of Gatorade.

  People pretty much respected the “no-hit” rule for the rest of the scrimmage. And that, I think, is when Jesse won over the rest of the offensive line. I’ve seen the movie about Jesse, and I know the writers give her much credit for her uncanny aim—for putting the ball in the exact spot between the top of the face mask and the edge of the helmet—but to tell the truth, and I don’t think she’d mind if I let this out of the bag now, when I tried to compliment her on her accuracy, she laughed. Told me it was a complete accident.

  “An accident?”

  “I was trying to hit him in the throat. Under his face mask.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s what Dan told me to do. Said it would settle everybody.”

  I laughed. “Well, it worked.” We were strolling off the field after the scrimmage. Nate walked in front of us but said nothing. “You got Coleman’s attention,” I said. “That’s for damn sure.”

  Jesse was not laughing, though. “I was afraid I killed him. I don’t ever want to hurt anybody.”

  “It certainly looked like they were trying to hurt you,” I told her.

  “Really?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought it was just the game, you know. You get knocked down in football.”

  “Not in practice, you don’t. And definitely not the quarterback.”

  Jesse looked off in the distance. The freckles on her nose always made her look a little bit like a teenager. You’d have thought sometimes, when her eyes got this pensive look, that she was hoping for a prom date or something.

  A few reporters had seen what happened and started hanging around to watch Jesse play. By the end of practice that day, all hell broke loose. We still don’t know who told on us. I guessed it was the guy who interviewed her. But within twenty-four hours Jesse’s face was on every newscast in the country. Not just sports news either. The national news. Those guys at practice never saw her with her helmet off, but some researcher got a high school picture of her (from Guam, no less) and that
ended up on the web, and then the news itself. Everywhere you looked, there she was with her bright, innocent expression, beaming out from under a curly swirl of dark hair and that splash of brown freckles. Of course there were also a lot of pictures of Coleman lying on the ground with the football jutting out of his face; of Jesse throwing the ball; of Coleman’s mangled nose, broken just under the eyebrows in three places.

  Interviews with Coleman and the few players willing to talk about it filled every talk show and sports panel. Columnists and pundits wondered at the audacity of the Redskins; at the curious need of our owner to get himself in the news. “This is just Flores making a big splash before the coming battles over NFL Europe,” one commentator said. “He’s always doing something to thumb his nose at the commissioner.” Sportswriters wrote about Jesse’s background—whatever they could find, that is. They argued over the rules and whether she would ever be allowed to step onto the field in an actual game. They raved about her success in the women’s league. Soon they were interviewing Andy Swilling, who grinned like a real estate salesman and announced that the Redskins had stolen Jesse from his team. God bless him, he also talked about the championship, about her coolness under fire.

  I myself refused to grant an interview, and on my advice, Jesse did the same. Reporters got as close to her as they could, but while she was polite and all, she would not talk to them. Was she married? They wanted to know. Did she have a boyfriend? Could she play any other sports? That sort of thing. Everybody wanted to know who this sensational woman was. Some sportscasters actually talked about her skill with the ball. “The passes I saw her throw,” one said, “looked as good as any thrown that day by the starters or the backups. Say what you will, the woman’s got an arm.”

  Jesse had thrown all of two dozen balls in practice thus far, and because of her sex, she was already a sports legend. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she put Delbert Coleman on his ass. That got some attention, too. But this was just the beginning of one hell of a ride. And we had yet to even discover her other great talent with a football, and it was that talent that got her on the field: She could kick the son of a bitch almost as far as she could throw it.

  Fourteen

  People talk about the improbability of the coaches and players letting a woman on an NFL team, but to tell the truth, once Mr. Flores saw her kick the ball, it might have been impossible to keep Jesse off the team. She didn’t like to punt and wasn’t very good at it, but if you put it on a tee, or got somebody to hold it, she could kick it 50 to 55 yards as accurately as any kicker I’ve ever seen.

  We discovered it by accident. She just happened to get to the field early one day, and after doing a few stretches, she opened a bag of footballs and started kicking them around. This was after the first few practices and the scrimmage against the Steelers. In spite of her spectacular “coming out,” she hadn’t been used a lot. She got a few reps every day, but she was officially the fourth-string quarterback, and even in training camp, they don’t get a lot of work with the first team. Not in Engram’s camps anyway. Besides, Coach was so frustrated with all the attention he closed practices and workouts to the media and the fans. The league went along with this because, as the commissioner said in an interview on ESPN, most of the reporting was biased and hurtful. “You guys don’t let up and it’s become pretty humiliating for the players, frankly—Ms. Smoke especially.” (That comment got about as much play as a presidential declaration of war. The funny thing was, everybody knew that Commissioner Bennet and Edgar Flores were enemies. They agreed on nothing. If Flores could smite Bennet, he would. So the sudden show of generosity looked suspicious. My own interpretation was that Bennet, who had three daughters who played lacrosse, simply felt sorry for Jesse.)

  Jesse was being used so little, to tell the truth, that I was about to say something to Coach Engram about it. But when I got to the field that day, there she was, standing at the 40-yard line with six footballs lined up in front of her about 10 yards apart, each one on a tee. She took two steps and kicked the first one through the uprights. Then she stepped back and over to where she could kick the next one and did that. She kicked each ball through the uprights. It was 50 yards. Then she lined them up on the 30-yard line and did the same thing. Then the 20. I stood there watching this, without her knowing, for more than an hour. She kicked balls from the left hash mark across the middle of the field to the right hash mark. Six balls each time. When she’d kicked the last one and had to go retrieve them, I walked over and started helping her.

  “Why the hell didn’t you kick for the Divas?” I asked.

  “They had a kicker.”

  “Yeah, and she missed half the time.”

  “So? We only lost one game,” she said, stooping down to put the balls back in a sack. “And it wasn’t for lack of a kicker.”

  “But you’re so good at it.”

  She stood up and faced me now, her look almost petulant, like that of a child resisting a chore. “I don’t want to, okay?”

  I went to Coach Engram and told him what Jesse could do, aware that I had to approach him gently. Already, he was saying things like “Our Lady of the Footballs is getting to be a huge distraction.” He listened with a little less irritation, though, when I told him about the repetitions and how smoothly she made each of those kicks.

  “Let’s see if she can kick like that when somebody’s trying to kill her,” he said.

  Until that day, I’d never seen her kick at all, but I knew she’d be able to do it. “Trust me, Coach. Jesse’s not the nervous type.”

  But when we approached her with the idea, as I expected, she said no. Oh, she was nice about it, with that fresh-faced kid’s smile. “Aww, Coach,” she said. “I don’t want to be a kicker. But thanks for asking.”

  Then Coach Engram said, “It may be the only way you can make this roster.”

  “You let me play more in practice,” she responded, “and I think I’ll make the roster.” She was still smiling—it really was absolutely disarming, that rare mingling of innocence, expectation, confidence, and world-weary hope.

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We were just outside the locker room and I was getting ready to drive Jesse home so she could shower and clean up for the team dinner. Coach was standing there with his hands on his hips, a whistle around his neck and a baseball cap tilted back off his head. He looked down at his black shoes and shook his head slowly. Then he faced her and said, in a low, soft voice, “The league’s going to try and block you, Jesse. You do know that, don’t you?”

  She cast her eyes down a bit, the smile flagging some, but said nothing.

  “The players’ union’s already filing to keep it from happening. The men don’t want you out there.”

  “Really,” I said.

  He looked at me. “It’s something going on between the commissioner and Flores. You knew the NFL would stop this if they could, Skip—but if they can get the players’ union to do it, then it’s not so much the commissioner picking on Flores again.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  Jesse was no longer smiling. You wouldn’t say she was disappointed, exactly—at least I couldn’t read it in her face. She looked more or less the way she might have looked if somebody had told her she had to wait in another line to make a deposit. But she was looking at me, as though she expected me to say something. Then she said, “Who are they filing with?”

  “Pardon?” Engram said.

  “Who are the players filing with? A court? The league?” She really wanted to know.

  “The league, I guess,” said Engram.

  “Yeah, they wouldn’t go to a court,” I said. “That’s the last place the league or the players want to be.”

  “It could end up in a court, though,” Engram said, “They just don’t want to risk having you on the field in a game, Jesse. They wouldn’t feel they could play their hardest; they’d be afraid of really hurting you. They believe the integrity o
f the game would be damaged.”

  “Integrity?” I said. “What integrity? Those guys don’t hesitate a second when they find a way around the rules and the refs don’t see it.”

  Engram looked hard at me.

  “It’s true, Jon,” I said, “and you know it. It’s not integrity they worry about.”

  “Call it purity, then. But they think it would affect the way they compete on the field—that it would create an unfair advantage for us, for the Redskins.”

  Jesse shook her head slowly, then looked up. “But if I kick? They won’t complain if I’m a kicker?”

  “Jesse,” Engram said, “You’re a fan, too, right? Have you ever seen some of the men who have been kickers in this league? You’re bigger than a lot of them, and in a lot better shape.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “I really think if we can work you out as a kicker, the league and the players will back down on it,” I said. “They don’t want lawsuits and they’ve all seen what happens when they go up against Mr. Smite.”

  She didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “Our owner,” I said.

  So Jesse accepted the deal about kicking and ended up practicing almost exclusively with the special teams unit. In drills she’d make 20 out of 20. That’s when Flores saw her kicking. I’d never seen him so excited, though he never said anything to Engram or me directly. It was our team to put on the field as it always had been. He was one of the best owners that way.

  When Jesse finished working with the special teams she’d do stretches and work out to strengthen her legs. But I could tell that determined as she was, she didn’t like not throwing the ball. She’d be on the ground, pulling her leg up past her ear, stretching her hamstring, and I’d see her watching the passing drills on the other side of the field.