The Legend of Jesse Smoke

by Robert Bausch

  Our resident kicker—not a bad fellow, who the previous year had made 29 out of 34 attempts—injured his popliteus, the tiny sardine-size muscle between the tendons in the back of the knee, and was pretty much useless all through that camp. In two team scrimmages, with folks trying to block her kicks, Jesse went 4 for 4—including a 59-yarder that cleared the uprights by a half a yard. It could not have been more gratifying, watching the ball leave the spot where the holder set it down, sailing high and straight toward the uprights. Something in Jesse’s form did not allow for slicing or hooking, so the ball never curved right or left even a little bit; it shot straight down the middle between the goalposts. It didn’t matter if she was kicking from the left hash mark or the right one, she got it straight and true.

  After the second scrimmage, Coach Engram cut our regular kicker, which I thought meant the job was going to be Jesse’s. So did everybody else, and the media storm kicked up all over again.

  This time, however, we decided we’d let Jesse speak to the press. The first interview she granted was with Colin Roddy. I wasn’t allowed to sit in with her during the interview, but when it was done, she called me and we went across the street from Redskins Park to a coffee shop where we could talk.

  “How’d it go?” I wanted to know. We were sitting at a small table near the front window with coffees in front of us. She was stirring hers. Outside, the wind from a passing shower kicked up dust and small wet leaves. She stared out the window while she stirred her coffee, and I remember thinking again how really attractive she was from just about any angle. Not that she was glamorous or anything. If she was beautiful, it was because her face was so trusting, so open to the world, so ready to light up with her own certainty. And, of course, I’ve talked enough already about her eyes. Large and sparklingly blue, they were entirely unenhanced by any makeup. Makeup would have ruined it; like painting a huge pair of red lips on the Mona Lisa.

  “It went all right,” she said. “He’s really an interesting man.”

  “You sure talked a long time. Did he write a lot of it down?”

  But she wasn’t finished. “Charming in a craggy sort of way.”

  “Charming?”

  She gave a sort of half smile. “Yeah. Charming. I liked him.”

  “What’d he want to know?”

  “He wanted to know if I was really a man, for starters—if I’d had a sex change operation.”

  “Are you serious? I can’t believe you didn’t slap him.”

  “I don’t know. He seemed just … kinda sad to me,” she said. “I think he might have been slapped enough.”

  “He’s an asshole,” I said.

  She didn’t like my saying that. “He’s odd. I think he has Asperger’s or something.”

  “Then they must have used ‘perger’ at the end of the word to replace ‘hole.’”

  She frowned slightly, but then she said, “I told him I really want to play quarterback.”

  I winced. “Well, he’ll run with that, I can tell you.”

  “He also wanted to know how I could get so good at kicking the ball if I’d never kicked for another team.”

  “Good question,” I told her. “I’d like to know that myself.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Never thought about it. I did it with my dad, though, back in the day, as a way of getting mental control.”

  I wanted to know what she meant by “mental control.”

  “It’s something my dad believed in. He wanted me to visualize everything. Be able to place the ball right where I imagined it would go. So to help me visualize the ball’s path, he’d have me kick it, too. He used to say, ‘It’s harder with your foot, but if you can get it to go where you want that way, it will be easier when you can hold the damn thing in your hands.’”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard her use a curse word. I think she noticed that it registered with me, because she smiled a bit and said, “His words.”

  “But it’s amazing you never kicked for anybody?”

  “That’s exactly what Mr. Roddy said.”

  “Well it is fairly extraordinary.”

  “I never kicked a ball trying to score points,” she said. “But, now that I’m going to do it—not that I’m in for it—the whole idea’s kind of exciting.”

  “Doesn’t make you a bit nervous?”

  The question was completely opaque to her. “Nervous?”

  “About missing, you know, when it counts.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’ll do that.”

  “Yeah? I hope you’re right.”

  “They all count, anyway,” she said. “Every one of them counts.”

  God, it was easy to love her. “You are really something, Jess,” I said.

  She sipped her coffee and stared out the window again. I could have sat across from her and gazed at that face forever. Looking at Jesse, you kind of understood why art was such a great idea.

  Roddy wrote a feature on Jesse that went across the country, calling her a “grand experiment.” He’d gotten in touch with other players and coaches and was the first to report the players’ union’s resistance, the commissioner’s having to deal with pressure from just about every corner of the league, and our owner’s recalcitrant and continued rebellion against the powers that be. Many, he said, believed that “the Redskins were a laughingstock,” and some league sources were certain that the reign of Jonathon Engram had reached its lowest point; that the Redskins were destined to sink to the bottom of the standings once the season started. Some sources (who naturally wished to remain nameless) predicted that the team would not win a single game. “It will be extra incentive,” one source said, “for every team to beat the hell out of those guys.”

  USA Today had a long article about the legal battles sure to ensue. Folks talked about what it means to use the word “man” in the rule book. Some wondered why the commissioner didn’t just rule that Flores could not play a woman.

  This was all a response to the news that Jesse would be our kicker. I shuddered to think what might happen if we ever planned to play her at quarterback.

  Jesse, in any event, took all of it in stride.

  She and I went to dinner often during the weeks after her position was announced, and plenty of folks went out of their way to be kind to us. A few of the fans who recognized her wanted her autograph, and after a while she was getting all kinds of offers from local schools to come and talk to their students. She was gradually becoming a symbol—of a number of things, actually. To some, she was the embodiment of the “new equality” between men and women. To others, she represented the end of civilization—an interloper destined to ruin the last bastion of male power. Through all of it, though, she was just Jesse and behaved exactly as she always had, as though some part of her mind did not even grasp the notion of her own celebrity.

  “I’m pretty happy,” she said one night over a salmon fillet. “Although I’d be happier if I got to play quarterback.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Jess,” I said. “You know what has to happen for you to get in? Three people have to get hurt.”

  She nodded slightly. “Assuming he keeps three.”

  “No, he’ll keep all three of them,” I said. “Still … you never know. Ambrose is always getting hurt, and Spivey’s erratic.”

  “He doesn’t know the playbook either.”

  I nodded. “And then Kelso doesn’t have the arm.”

  “I like him, though,” Jesse said. “He’s smart. Accurate too.” She looked at me then, with this mischievous grin. “He’d be great for the Divas.”

  I laughed a little too hard.

  “Now that was mean,” she said. “I shouldn’t make fun of Jimmy. He’s one of the good guys.”

  “He sure admires the way you throw a football,” I said, which was true. When he first saw her do it, not knowing he was watching a woman, he must have seen the end of his playing days every time she dropped back and sent a ball arching through the air like an elect
ric current.

  “I don’t want anybody to get hurt,” Jesse said. “I do want to play, though. Maybe if I have a good year kicking the ball I’ll get a chance next year?”

  “Maybe,” I said. But I didn’t believe it. I wasn’t even sure she’d get into a game as a kicker.

  We had our first exhibition game coming up in a week—against the Oakland Raiders—and I was worried about getting her into that game. Jesse was the only kicker in camp for a while, so everybody assumed it was her job. Then I found out Charley Duncan was scouring the waiver wire looking for another kicker. “Just as insurance,” he told me.

  Still, I didn’t like it much.

  “You won’t find a kicker better than Jesse,” I said to Charley.

  “It’s not my job to decide who competes. I just do what I’m told.”

  “Right.”

  “Look, Engram wants insurance. I go get it for him.”

  I knew this wasn’t true because I’d talked about it with Coach Engram only a few hours before. I wasn’t going to call Charley a liar, though. “So you’re just following orders,” was all I said.

  “You got it.”

  “No wonder Roddy calls you a ‘general manager in name only.’”

  “Fuck you, Granger,” he said.

  “She’ll get on the field,” I said. “I hope you know that. No matter what you do here.”

  “Really?”

  “And she’ll win the job, too.”

  “We’ll see.”

  With the Raiders just two days away now, we were done planning what we’d do on the offensive side of the ball. I figured, even if we brought in another kicker, it would be silly not to let Jesse kick at least one field goal. Or an extra point. Why not?

  It was a game that didn’t count.

  Fifteen

  You’d have thought it was a championship game. The goddamn stadium was completely packed. Standing room only. Everybody wanted to see Jesse play, even if she was only going to kick off.

  But she didn’t kick off. She sat on the bench and watched as our newly acquired prospect, a slightly balding ex–Canadian Football League kicker named Justin Dever, handled all the kicking duties. Dever had a strong leg and got it high and deep enough on the opening kickoff that the Raiders barely got the ball out to the 25-yard line. But that opening kick was the only time we needed a kicker in the game. The Raiders shut us out 44 to 0. Except for every single player on the Raiders, nobody played particularly well.

  Corey Ambrose completed 4 out of 10 passes, unable to stay on his feet long enough to look for secondary receivers. Walter Mickens had 3 carries for 8 yards. Darius Exley and Rob Anders did not catch a ball. The Raiders played their starters for the first two offensive series, and we did the same thing. The rookies and scrubs went the rest of the way. But while our rookies and scrubs played like it, theirs played like starters.

  We were being booed more loudly than I’d ever heard, in any stadium, anywhere in the league. Ninety-four thousand booing fans can make a lot of noise. Nobody was happy.

  The thing is, most of them started hollering near the end, “We want Jesse! We want Jesse!” as though she might be able to change the way things were going. This infuriated Coach Engram. “Bunch of boobs only came out to see if we’d put her on the field,” he said as we were walking off at the end. Then he looked at me. “It’s a goddamn distraction, Granger. And I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t put this on her,” I said. “She’s not why we lost.”

  “She’s a distraction, all right? You hear what they were all yelling at the end there?”

  “I heard it.”

  “I’m not going to let this year get away from me.”

  “So let her play, then, and they’ll shut up.”

  Engram shook his head and trotted ahead of me so he could get away from the reporters who would have a field day with him anyway in the postgame press conference.

  What we didn’t know at the time was that, in the fourth quarter of that game, Jimmy Kelso had fractured the hamate bone in his wrist. He didn’t know it either, right away. He just had pain there. But after the third game of the regular season, he would have an MRI and discover the fracture. He would miss most of the season.

  Right about this time the press was reporting that Coach Engram and I were feuding about Jesse Smoke. She was already being talked about as a “distraction” in the media, which cannot have gotten to them by way of my friend Mr. Engram. That’s not how he operated. The word is frequently used whenever somebody thinks that a team is not playing together—it’s either “dissension” or “distraction.” The two horrible d’s. Nobody wants dissension, because there’s little that can be done when teammates begin to hate each other.

  As I’ve said before, a team is a human community, with the defense and offense being individual communities within it. The special teams, because many of their players come from both offense and defense, operate as a kind of bridge between the two. There never has been a really great football team—I mean a truly cohesive unit—where the special teams were not up to par. That’s just how it works. Psychologically, that is. We had one of the best special teams units in the league, and the guys on both offense and defense really did respect each other. But Jesse put a strain on it. The defense didn’t like it one bit, and when we practiced they gave her a hard time. Oh, they knew better than to knock her down by now—which showed that she had earned at least a modicum of respect—but because of her they got really intense, playing like it mattered even in intrateam scrimmages. And that, to Coach Engram, was a distraction. A distraction that could very well lead to dissension. He would not have it. He didn’t care what kind of player Jesse was. All he saw was her sex, and that’s all the media saw, too. It had become, just as I worried it might, a joke that she was on the team at all.

  So I was not surprised when Coach Engram called me into his office the Friday before our second exhibition game. We were going to play the Mexico City Aztecs—or as they used to be called, the Houston Texans. (Houston just couldn’t support an NFL team, and they’d had two chances.)

  This meeting has been characterized as a knock-down, drag-out battle, two old allies in the football wars nearly coming to blows. But even accounts back then tended to exaggerate things. All the books talk about our battle over Jesse, and some of them even have me as the one bent against putting her in a game. And of course that’s not at all how it happened. We raised our voices a little bit, sure, but it was only to be emphatic about a point or two. I don’t think either one of us was ever truly angry.

  “Collect Jesse’s playbook,” Coach Engram said with a slight wave of his hand. I didn’t even get a chance to sit down. “I’m cutting her today.”

  “Without even giving her a chance to play?”

  He sat down behind the desk but said nothing.

  “Seems like a rotten deal to me. I mean not even to let her kick the ball. Why cut her now?”

  “She’s going to be a source of trouble on this team, that’s why.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “It’s already a problem. I sense it, okay? Don’t argue with me.”

  “Well, I’m not going to ask her for her playbook. She doesn’t need it, anyway. She’s got it memorized.”

  “Really?”

  “She knows it better than Kelso, Spivey, or Ambrose. Maybe better than you do.”

  “Get the playbook anyway. I won’t say it again.”

  “Have you at least put her on the waiver wire?”

  He looked at me. “You think anybody else wants her?”

  I thought for a moment. “What’s Flores say about this?”

  “Haven’t said anything to him about it. It’s none of his business.”

  “Does he know it’s none of his business?”

  He looked away.

  “Have you told him it’s none of his business?” I persisted. “It’s his team. He approved of that contract. I expect he took some satisfaction in seeing ninety-fou
r thousand fans in the seats for an exhibition game.”

  “He won’t interfere, Skip, and you know it.”

  “You got to at least see her kick in a game,” I said. “At least do that.”

  “Goddamn it, Skip,” he said, standing up, and this is where he got slightly loud. “This is my ass on the line. Not yours.”

  “You think so? Because if you go, I go. And that’s not loyalty, either; it’s just a fact.”

  He shook his head.

  “You think Flores would keep me around if he fired you? Come on, Jon—what’s really bothering you?”

  He sat down again and stared at his desk pad for a bit. Then he said, “I can’t believe any of this. I feel like we’re letting something go here—some element of the game we’re not even thinking about.”

  “You don’t want her here because she’s a woman.”

  He said nothing.

  “That’s it, then, isn’t it? It’s got nothing to do with distractions or her ability or anything, really, but the fact that you can’t stand the idea of a woman playing this game alongside the big boys.”

  “She can’t play this game. That’s what I know.”

  “Look, I’m not trying to force Jesse on anyone,” I said, half believing it. “I mean, I know she probably won’t ever throw a ball in a real game. But she can kick it. We’ve had kickers that were five feet eight and weighed less than a buck and a half. One of the greatest ever, Garo Yepremian, he couldn’t have been five and a half feet tall. She’s six feet two. A hundred seventy pounds of solid bone, muscle, and sinew.”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “If she was a man, you’d be licking your chops, Jon, and you know it. And you wouldn’t have gone out and signed that Canadian castoff either.”

  “Dever was just insurance.”

  “Well,” I said. “Keep him, then. But let her kick. Give her that chance.”

  Now he actually smiled, shaking his head. “This is almost comical. Of all the things to happen this year—this has got to be—”