by Mark Bowden
His associates note this growing aloofness about Richie, budding paranoia, perhaps, an unwillingness to confide in anyone other than Harry and Norman (and Matty), a tendency to become suspicious whenever he sees one of them talking informally to a Pack hound— Coach Uptight has issued orders, which everyone ignores, that no member of his staff is allowed to speak to reporters without his permission.
About the team and its prospects, though, he’s his usual upbeat self. Summer is the season of potential in football. The kid you drafted in the twelfth round really looks like he might be a find, or some free agent out of nowhere looks like he can really block, and every veteran is poised to have the season of his career—what could go wrong? Of course, the answer to that is everything, but at least not until the season starts. Richie enjoys the opportunity football affords to start fresh every summer, discard the guys who don’t fit in and plug the holes with new talent, fit the pieces back together just so, tinker with the offensive system, add a few wrinkles, play out the scenario for victory in his head.
First you have to believe …
IT’S NOT HARD to believe this year. When Richie and Harry met with Norman last winter down on Indian Creek Island, amid the Calders and Mirós and Lichtensteins, the owner was in a boisterous, commanding fettle, eager to shake the Curse of Buddy once and for all. Buddy was still pining away unhired on his Kentucky horse farm, and Richie had impressed all but the former coach’s most fervent backers by coaching the team to seven wins in their last eight games (even if that one loss was the big one to Dallas). Randall’s rehab was progressing nicely, so there was every reason to expect his return. The pain in Norman’s neck had eased. Some of that old BramanMan swagger was back.
“This is the year,” Norman would tell a visiting hound that month. “The philosophy that I’m approaching this season with is we’re not building for tomorrow anymore. Tomorrow is not the goal. Today is the goal. If we can pick up an older player who may have only a year or two left, we’re going to do it. And if he’s a high-priced player it doesn’t make a difference. So if there’s somebody out there on Plan B that can come in and help us now, we’re going to go after him as hard as we possibly can. Hopefully, we can obtain a quality running back….”
Norman had rarely talked like this publicly with Buddy around, but his take-charge tone didn’t bother Richie a bit. Hey, it was his team! You had to respect the guy. You don’t make gazillions in the business world without having some clue about things—things in general. Buddy had always scorned advice, anyone’s advice, but Norman’s in particular. This business about a running back being a case in point. Norman, the press, and the fans had been braying for years about how badly the Eagles needed a fancy-pants running back. To Buddy it just proved his point: none of these people had a clue how to win football games. With Randall running for 600 to 900 yards per season, why did you need a high-priced running back? With the scarcity of roster slots on a football team, you looked for multidimensional guys to free up positions elsewhere. If Randall was both a quarterback and the team’s top running back, what luck! One less running back needed. Richie had gone along with this philosophy as offensive coordinator, even defended it vigorously. It was Randall’s 962 yards that had made the Eagles the best ground gainers in the NFC that year. Without Randall in ’91, they had fallen to tenth among the division’s fourteen teams, but now Randall was back. Buddy would have just listened to Norman vent on the subject of a running back, and then tell Joe Woolley to go out there and find him another corner or linebacker— but Buddy was gone. Hallelujah! Norman loved the way Richie really listened, the way he nodded, the way he jumped on board. By God, if the owner thought this team needed a running back, then Richie was going to give him a running back.
And not just one!
On draft day, months prior to this training camp, Richie thought he’d hit the jackpot. Without a first-round draft pick (they’d dealt it away in ’91 to get Antone Davis), they’d nevertheless landed Siran Stacy and Tony Brooks. Siran had been the most exciting collegiate back in the country before blowing out his knee in his junior year. He’d played well in his senior year, but not well enough to dispel doubts about the knee, which was why he was still there in the second round— You should see the videotape on this guy! And then Brooks, what a windfall that this big, fast back was still there in the fourth round. And Buddy thought he was lucky. All through rookie camp, even though his backfield coach Richard Woods was less than impressed, Richie glowed with enthusiasm about his baby backs. One of these guys was going to start!
Except … Norman had this other idea.
“What do you think of Herschel Walker?” Harry asked the coach one morning that spring.
What little Richie knew, he didn’t like. Walker was a big, very fast back with no moves to speak of, hyped to high heaven by the media when coming out of college in ’82 (third in the Heisman balloting as a freshman, second as a sophomore, first as a junior), celebrated as MVP of the fledgling but doomed USFL, but, except for one outstanding season with the Cowboys seven years back, he had been nothing more than a mediocre running back in the NFL for the last five years. Dallas had traded him to Minnesota in return for about five years’ worth of top draft picks, and as a result the Cowboys were now a nascent dynasty and the Vikings a laughingstock. Richie never had liked the way Herschel ran, short mincing steps, no lateral movement, virtually upright. He was strictly a straight-ahead guy with speed. He couldn’t make a blind man miss. The vaunted Herschel had rushed for exactly three yards and fumbled twice the last time the Eagles played the Vikings. Then there were those stories about his kookiness,the supposed suicide try, bobsledding, and all that. Suffice it to say, Richie was deeply uninterested. “You are more likely to play for the Eagles than Herschel Walker,” he told one startled, asthmatic, middleaged hound that spring.
Of course, Richie didn’t know yet where the Herschel idea had originated.
Norman had looked up to few men in his life, but one of them in recent years was Al Davis, the colorful and controversial Raiders’ owner. Davis was a damn-their-eyes kind of guy who strode the public stage unafraid and who unabashedly managed his club with both hands. Of course, Al had the credentials. Long before he became owner of the team, Davis had been a Pigskin High Priest—nobody could accuse Al Davis of dilettantism. And Al, a dinner friend of the Bramans’, had told Norman that there really were only two veteran running backs worth buying who would be available this off-season. The Raiders had evaluated both Herschel, whom the Vikings were shopping around desperately, and Eric Dickerson, the petulant former Colts star. The Raiders had gone with Dickerson, but Al said it had been a tough choice; Herschel was neither a fluke nor a flake.
“I think he could really help us,” Norman told Harry.
Harry passed out tapes of Herschel in action to Joe Woolley and the coaching staff, and from the temple there arose an unequivocal chorus of naysaying.
“I don’t think he can run,” said Woolley.
“Neither do I,” said Harry.
Richard Woods, the running backs coach, who had his plate full with five returning veterans and Richie’s two baby backs, also gave a thumbs-down. What Herschel seemed to do best, and most, in recent years, was run up the backside of his own blockers and fall down— and fumble. The most damning description pro coaches ever apply to a running back was being used to describe Herschel. “He squats,” they said—in other words, Give ‘im the ball an’ he makes like a girl goin’ t’ pee.
Harry got the message.
“They don’t want to touch him,” Harry told Norman.
“Why?”
“Well, we looked at the film, and …,” Harry enumerated the objections.
“Look again,” Norman suggested.
Meanwhile, WIP, the Eagles-obsessed nonstop local sports-gab radio station, had mounted a crusade for the club to sign Herschel. It had people jamming the Eagles’ switchboard and driving around the Vet with their headlights on, honking for Herschel.
People were standing on the row-house rooftops during minicamp shouting down to Richie, “We want Herschel!” which annoyed the hell out of him— Wonder if we can get rid o’ those houses? As usual, announcers at the radio station, assuming a lot more than they could possibly know, had the story all wrong. They blamed Norman. Angelo Cataldi, the morning drive-time clown, had taken to chirping “Cheap! Cheap! Cheap!” in the background whenever the owner’s name came up, which was about every sixty seconds even during the off-season.
After his talk with Norman, Harry dropped the Herschel tapes back on Joe’s desk and said the owner wanted further scrutiny.
“Norman thinks we should sign this guy,” he said.
So Joe looked, and Harry looked, and Richard Woods looked, and they all looked again with Richie, and lo! A miracle gradually began to take place. It didn’t happen all of a sudden, like Paul being struck from his mount on the road to Damascus, but if you looked real hard at those tapes of Herschel Walker… well, by God, gradually, ol’ Herschel started looking not so bad after all. Sure, he wasn’t a shifty runner, but damn if he didn’t seem to grind out those yards. It wasn’t fancy, but the sticks moved. And that move that looked like a squat? Well, you know what? It turned out to be this determined little jukelike thing, Herschel dropping down low to evade and squeeze out an extra yard or two. Even in his worst years as a flop in Minnesota, Herschel maintained a steady four-yards-per-carry average, which was pretty damn good, once you thought about it twice. Woolley was still a lot more impressed with the potential of the draft picks Stacy and Brooks, but as the coaches looked harder, he began to hear them talk about ways they might be able to use a running back like that Herschel Walker.
“Well, if y’all have a way you think you can use him, and you have in your mind a plan, and you know his limitations … well, then, that’s up to you” was the personnel director’s halfhearted verdict (Joe did have this vaguely troubling way, Richie and Harry noted, of not exactly coming on board).
But Richie, even with Norman behind it and all, still wasn’t completely sold himself. He just couldn’t get past those bizarre things he had read and heard about Herschel. It was hard to put his finger on it exactly, but it sounded to Richie, like … well, “He doesn’t sound like he really wants to play football,” he told Harry.
So Richie and Harry resolved to see for themselves. They ducked out of the offices on Tuesday, June 9, and met Herschel at his in-laws’ house on a wooded lot in Verona, New Jersey. With Herschel was his wife, Cindy, and her sisters and her parents. They all sat around in the living room and had a nice long chat. Herschel was smaller than they expected. Out from under his giant shoulder pads and helmet, he was built like a gymnast, a compact, solid, well-proportioned young man with a thick, muscular neck, clean-cut, soft-spoken, intelligent, and exceedingly deferential (Herschel certainly had learned, in his twenty-year journey from tiny Wrightsville, Georgia, how to woo Coach). “Don’t believe everything you read,” he assured them. He had always pursued a variety of athletic venues in his off-season, from martial arts to dance training to, more recently, bobsledding. It had never detracted from his game. He admitted his frustrations in Minnesota, where he had never fit in. He said some of his casting around for challenges outside football resulted because the Vikings had used him so little he had this excess of competitive energy to deal with. He was about to explode with the desire to play football again. All he wanted was another chance. He’d do whatever they wanted him to do, even play on special teams. He wanted to play on special teams. He was good at it.
As they got up to leave, Herschel’s mother-in-law asked if Richie and Harry would pose for a snapshot with the family star. Harry put his arm up around Herschel’s shoulder, and he was stunned.
“I mean, my golly! It was like steel,” he told Richie back out in the car.
The coach, too, had been impressed. “Hey, this guy can play!” he said.
They drove back to Philly, working themselves into a righteous coachly froth over their coup and phoned Norman with the happy news. Imagine how pleased Norman was—his bit of intelligence had panned out. They worked out the details and signed Herschel two weeks later to a two-year, $3 million deal.
Richie had done a complete about-face. It wasn’t an act, either. He didn’t feel like Herschel was being foisted on him. Not for a Staten Island minute! Back when the Vikings sold the store to get Herschel and then dumped him on Jerry Burns, there wasn’t much Burns could do but grumble and press on, making it clear to everyone (especially Herschel) that it hadn’t been his idea. But Richie wasn’t the least bit disgruntled. He was genuinely excited about signing the back Norman had wanted—and he hadn’t. That was one of the good things about the modern, corporate NFL head coach. He was flexible. He didn’t just go along with what the owner wanted—why, he was capable of adjusting his attitude if necessary.
“I’m thrilled to have him; we all are,” Kotite told reporters (some of the same ones to whom he had disparaged Herschel privately just weeks before). He predicted that with the addition of Herschel and the second coming of Randall the team would field the best offense since he had signed on in ’90. “He’s going to help us make a run for it,” Richie said. “Once you get Herschel through the line of scrimmage and he sees an opening, nobody can catch him. He just screams into the secondary. He runs … what? A sub-4.3-[second] 40-yard dash? You know how fast that is? I drop you down a mine shaft and you don’t do 4.3….”
Hallelujah!
MAKING IT WAS the real drama of training camp. For high-priced superstars like Herschel and the Eagles’ veteran starters, camp was just a time to tune up and focus in. But for the rookies, every day of practice was a chance to make the dream come true. Your chances diminished according to the round you were drafted and just about vanished as you dropped past the seventh or eighth round and on into the virtually hopeless region of the free agents. Most training camps ended by adding only five or six new players to the active roster, and Coach was predisposed to keep players he selected in the draft— the club had already paid them hefty bonuses to sign, so cutting them not only made his judgment suspect, it was costly. Nevertheless, almost every summer, some blazingly talented bottom-rung draft pick or free agent (all but overlooked completely by the guardians of the Sluice) would make the miracle shot, overcome all of these odds, and o’erleap the system, prove the whole hired juggernaut of scouting expertise blind.
One of the best recent examples concerned a forthright, fasttalking charmer from Willingboro, New Jersey, named Marvin Hargrove.
On Tuesday, June 12, 1990, Marvin borrowed his brother’s Ford Mustang and drove across the Betsy Ross Bridge and down 1-95 to Philly’s sports complex. Buddy was opening the Eagles’ voluntary camp that morning, the first day of informal practice for the upcoming season. Marvin planned to just watch, stand on the track inside old JFK Stadium along with the several hundred other fans that typically showed up for these early practice sessions. That was the idea, anyway. Marvin wanted to see what a pro practice looked like. Tossing his cleats onto the backseat was an afterthought.
Eventually, see, Marvin planned to play pro football himself. He’d been a star receiver at Willingboro High School and had attended the University of Richmond on a football scholarship. He had played well in college, but he was one of the tens of thousands who washed out of the Sluice on draft day. Richmond was a small school that played ho-hum against just mediocre competition, so Marvin’s receiving stats were suspect. What’s more, the school’s offense had collapsed in his senior year, and Marvin had pulled his hamstring, so his numbers tailed off badly, eroding any slight interest out there. Marvin was small for the pros, just five-ten and about 175 pounds, and when he had run the forty-yard dash on the injured hamstring for visiting pro scouts, his time of 4.7 was subpar. Still, he’d gotten himself an agent, who was downright sanguine about his prospects. Even though none of the scouting guides listing the top one hundred or so players at each position in the country even men
tioned his name, Marvin had heard from somebody inaposition to know that he might go as high as the sixth or seventh round.
On its face, this expectation might seem highly fanciful, but such is the nature of kids who make it; they believe in themselves beyond reason. After having been a big star for roughly half of his twentytwo years, it was harder for Marvin to believe his status would abruptly end than it would somehow, against the odds, continue. Come draft day, he was ready, positioned by the phone, watching the early rounds on ESPN, just waiting for the call. And waiting. And waiting.
Through all twelve rounds of the draft, a two-day process, the phone was silent.
That was two months ago. By now the other seniors who graduated with Marvin were shopping around with résumés in the real world, but he wasn’t ready just yet to put his criminal justice major to work. The way Marvin saw it, the NFL had made a huge mistake. Why, there were guys drafted high up whom Marvin knew well, guys whom he knew he could outplay! What was this system they used, anyway? So what if he ran a forty-yard dash a few tenths of a second slower, as long as he knew how to maneuver in the violent chaos on a football field, and had terrific hands and heart, and, with a football in his hands, had never been caught from behind by anyone, ever?
Marvin’s dad, a Greyhound bus driver, had owned Eagles season tickets in the three-hundred level of the Vet for years. It was the team Marvin had grown up watching on TV and from the stands. He had called the team’s personnel office to see about a tryout, and Tom Gamble (Harry’s son and the team’s assistant personnel director) had tried to discourage him. Tom was trying to be nice—and realistic. After all, the team had drafted three wide receivers in April: the highly touted Mike Bellamy from Illinois in the second round, Fred Barnett from Arkansas State in the third round, and Calvin Williams from Purdue in the fifth. They already had Pro Bowl receiver Mike Quick, expected back from a leg injury, and Cris Carter, who had finished third in the NFL in touchdown catches last season. Anthony Edwards was a solid backup who also returned punts. And, supplementing these riches, they had invited several other collegiate wide receivers with promise to training camp. Most teams only kept four, five at most.
